Current estimates about the Covid-19 fatality rate may be too high - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464 <comment><USER3> A few thoughts:

1) Extrapolating from the infection rates of very specific groups (for example, evacuees) to the entire population without taking into account transmission dynamics and the time between infection and detection does not make very much sense. The authors naively multiply the infection rate among evacuees by the population of Wuhan to conclude that Wuhan must have had 178,000 infections at the end of January. By comparison, epidemiological models have estimated there were around ~20,000 infections at that time [1][2][3]. What conclusion should we draw here? If you use sloppy, back of the napkin math to over-inflate the infection count by 10x then you can correspondingly deflate the mortality rate?

2) Speculating about the mortality rate of Covid-19 based on several gigantic assumptions ("If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that's a mortality rate of 0.01%") seems borderline irresponsible. Numerous researchers have been modeling this virus and have generally arrived at numbers in the range of 0.5% to 1.6% [4][5][6][7][8][9]. The authors don't present any compelling reason why we should doubt those numbers.

3) Ultimately the mortality rate is not as important a number as the hospitalization rate. The authors would have you believe this virus is no worse than the flu, but this is not congruent with the number of reports coming out of places like Italy and New York saying they're about to run out of ICU beds, or China rushing to build temporary hospitals to house all of the patients that need critical care. What the mortality rate might be under ideal circumstances where every patient receives adequate medical care might be significantly different compared to a scenario where you've run out of ICU beds and have to start rationing ventilators.

[1] [https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/419/htm](https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/419/htm)

[2] [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.20018549v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.23.20018549v2.full.pdf)

[3] [https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/523/htm](https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/523/htm)

[4] [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/s...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College- COVID19-severity-10-02-2020.pdf)

[5] [https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV- public/an...](https://institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV- public/analyses/first_adjusted_mortality_estimates_and_risk_assessment/2019-nCoV- preliminary_age_and_time_adjusted_mortality_rates_and_pandemic_risk_assessment.html)

[6] [https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_crui...](https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/diamond_cruise_cfr_estimates.html)

[7] [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.04.20031104v1.full.pdf)

[8] [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.09.20033357v1.full.pdf)

[9] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7)

<comment><USER4> one important element is a behavioral pattern

A person with flu and fever would probably stay home and just rough it out, a person with fever fearing the coronavirus will probably rush to the hospital.

If everyone having a fever in a flu season would go to the hospital and would demand medical attention we would be running out of hospital beds in normal scenarios as well.

<comment><USER5> Well at least in the Netherlands your claim is false.

They don't want you at the hospital unless it is absolutely necessary. Got a fever and still able te breath: stay at home.

<comment><USER6> It's the same in the US. They won't even test you here unless you're having trouble breathing.

<comment><USER7> That's not even true. I've had pain breathing for weeks, they still won't test. They prescibed corticosteroids, antibiotics and bed rest. They won't test until you're nearly dead. the CFR here is _wildly overestimated_.

<comment><USER8> While that is clearly true, it doesn't change the fact that every population to encounter this virus so far has overwhelmed the available medical provisions. There are people in Italy choosing to drown in their own bodily fluids rather than face the dying the same way in isolation.

It doesn't really matter whether the odds are more like winning a bottle of wine in a charity raffle or losing a game of Russian roulette.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They have a good point about missing data, but they're glossing over the fact the fatality rate goes up drastically if the medical system fails.

I 100% agree that we should be running antibody tests to see how many people have caught COVID-19 and recovered. All of our testing until recently was based on RNA tests, which may only be positive during a relatively short window. (I saw a case study claiming that even some hospitalized patients are testing negative inside 7 days.) We _need_ to know how many people catch this and beat it quickly.

That said, even in populations that have been RNA-tested early and extensively (such as the Diamond Princess and South Korea), the number of completely asymptomatic cases is less than 50%. Using the most optimistic data, I personally have less than a 0.5% chance of dying _assuming I get all the medical care I need._

And that's the problem. This virus hospitalizes about 20% of identified cases. They require some supplemental oxygen, and maybe an IV. With good care, probably less than 1% die.

So there are really _two_ key fatality rates:

1\. How many people die if they get all the care they need, and

2\. How many people die if 30+% of the population catches this at the same time?

Even if we're overestimating (1) by a factor of 10, that's still enough to make (2) catastrophic. What happened in Wuhan and Lombardy can happen here, and there's absolutely no reason that it couldn't get 10x worse. Even if we're overestimating the disease.

So let's start testing aggressively for antibodies. Until we get that number, I'm all for extreme caution.

<comment><USER10> > the fact the fatality rate goes up drastically if the medical system fails

We all assume that this is so (and I hope it is), but this is not completely clear. It might be that for covid-19, help from the medical system doesn't matter much, given our current state of medical knowledge and care. And iatrogenic harm cannot be discounted. Certainly we cannot ethically run the experiment.

As a single anecdatum, there was a (BBC?) piece on a hospital in the worst Italian region, showing a number of people on ventilators. The narrator explained that the staff was demoralized by the fact that everyone they had put on a ventilator died anyway.

<comment><USER11> At the very least the fatality rate for non-coronavirus emergencies goes vastly up if the beds are filled with coronavirus sufferers.

<comment><USER10> It's complicated. I vaguely recall a study that indicated that fatalities for some condition that might normally indicate surgery fell when the doctors needed were out of town for their annual conference. Don't recall the details.

And also, we should hope that proper triage will mean that the non-coronavirus emergencies that matter will indeed be allocated a bed, etc.

I have little doubt that this will be awful, but the counterfactual scenarios are difficult to evaluate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > So if 100 million Americans ultimately get the disease, two million to four > million could die.

Seems to miss any mention that people who get sick - but _don 't_ die - <USER2> to be having pretty severe (sometimes permanent looking) damage.

Aka, they're only counting "deaths", when they should also be including other very serious negative consequences too. :(

<comment><USER13> At this point "severe permanent damage" is pure speculation.

<comment><USER10> I don't have the link, but there was a study of the SARS outbreak that indicated that something like 20% of the victims were unable to return to their prior professions.

It's a different, though related virus, but there is some reason to believe that at least some victims will have lasting effects.

<comment><USER14> [https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2010/09/02/sars...](https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2010/09/02/sars_survivors_struggle_with_symptoms_years_later.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > the real fatality rate could in fact be closer to 0.06%

If you take a look at Diamond Princess.

~ 4000 on board

* 712 cases

* 10 deaths

Gives a case fatality rate of 1.4%.

The average age onboard was ~60 years (don't know if it includes staff) which is definitely higher than average. However, the two numbers (1.4% and 0.06%) sounds very far apart.

<comment><USER16> US population median age is 39. Fatality rate for people under 40 is <0.2%. Fatality rate of people aged 60+ is >3.6% [1]

So, no, 1.4% and 0.06% sound about right given the age difference.

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus)

<comment><USER17> Except that the US isn't composed of 327 million 39 year olds, it's composed of a fairly even mix of people of various ages. If you multiply the case fatality rates from your link [1] by the population in each age bracket [2], you come up with a projected CFR of about 1.8% in the US, assuming that a similar fraction of people in each age range are infected.

           Age  | US Pop |  CFR  | Est Deaths if
                |        |       | 100% infected
        </comment></comment></comment><comment>--+</comment><comment>--+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment>--
         0 -  9 | 40.01M |  0.0% | 0.00M
        10 - 19 | 41.97M |  0.2% | 0.08M
        20 - 29 | 45.43M |  0.2% | 0.09M
        30 - 39 | 43.63M |  0.2% | 0.09M
        40 - 49 | 40.46M |  0.4% | 0.16M
        50 - 59 | 42.83M |  1.3% | 0.56M
        60 - 69 | 37.41M |  3.6% | 1.35M
        70 - 79 | 22.66M |  8.0% | 1.81M
        80+     | 12.68M | 14.8% | 1.88M
        </comment><comment>--+</comment><comment>--+</comment><comment>-+</comment><comment></comment><comment>--
          Total |327.08M |  1.8% | 6.02M

1.4% is believable with those numbers. 0.06% is not plausible at all in the context of those numbers.

[1] [https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus) [2] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of- the...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the-us-by- sex-and-age/)

</comment><comment><USER18> FTA "But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million."

Meanwhile, [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) shows Deaths: 19,603

I'm not an epidemiologist but how can we barely at the mid-point of the spread and say things like the above, while the hard facts already show we're at 20k deaths?

While I agree the actual rates are hard to know until we have robust antibody assay in larger populations, it seems a bit hand-wavy to say "oh it's just not that bad, here look at these random samples we looked at it and it'll be ok."

<comment><USER19> Let's compare apples to apples and stick to the US for a minute, which is what I believe the WSJ was doing. The winter of 2017-2018 was a bad flu year, and there were about 61,000 deaths from it in the US (uncertainty interval: 46K to 95K) [0]. According to the worldometers site, there are 785 deaths so far in the US from corona virus [1].

It's probably a poor estimate, but if we could extrapolate from the US population to the world population, 1.28 million died from the flu that year (61e3*7.8e9/372e6).

[0] [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html)

[1] [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/)

EDIT: I found another link with a better estimate for world deaths from the flu. According to the World Health Organization, between 290,000 and 650,000 die from the flu each year [2]. So my estimate above was off by a factor of two.

[2] [https://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/influenza-(...](https://www.who.int/news-room/fact- sheets/detail/influenza-\(seasonal\))

<comment><USER20> The death rate in the US is doubling every 3 days. (A bit less than 3 days.) What will it look like in 21 days?

       0      785
       3     1570
       6     3140
       9     6280
      12    12560
      15    25120
      18    50240
      21   100480

<comment><USER19> Yes, exponential curves are scary. So are logistics curves.

We should know in 21 days if your prediction is right.

<comment><USER21> Five days later it doesn't look far off: 3,178 deaths in the USA according to worldometer.

<comment><USER19> Not sure if you're still checking back, but at day 15 the US deaths are at 16k where his prediction says 25k.

<comment><USER20> That's good.

The cumulative deaths are now doubling at a slower rate (something like 5.5 days?), partly because stronger social distancing measures have been put in place.

But also, let's see what the CDC says next week, because those figures are laggier but more accurate.

[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm)

<comment><USER19> And how long do you predict a 5.5 day doubling period to continue?

<comment><USER20> For clarity, I'm not predicting.

15 days ago was just after New York and California implemented shelter-in- place orders, so we'd expect to see levelling in the numbers of daily new infections starting about two weeks after (now), with levelling in daily new deaths about 10 days after that (about 20th April).

Here's what other people are predicting - a peak on April 12th with over 2000 deaths in one day, and total cumulative deaths just over 23000 . [https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of- america](https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america)

<comment><USER19> > For clarity, I'm not predicting.

Why are you stating this now, and not when you wrote the 100,000 number above? If that wasn't a prediction, what was it?

<comment><USER20> I was reminding you that 785 deaths so far to covid-19 is nothing because the US was at the beginning of the exponential growth in deaths.

What were you doing when you said "there are 785 deaths so far in the US from corona virus" and compared that to a figure of 61k flu deaths?

(Leaving aside the fact that you're counting covid and flu deaths differently in your comparison -- over counting flu and under counting covid)

<comment><USER19> I've looked at your other posts, and you seem like a reasonable enough person. I don't have a horrible beef with you, but in general I really despise it when people do the chicken-little doom and gloom thing and project gazillions of deaths on every latest horrible thing. Yes, awful things happen, but it's like a disgusting yearly sport for arm chair experts to exercise their righteous indignation at all of us while preaching how we're all going to die from Africanized bees, Zika, H1N1, whatever. Usually it's mixed with some other two-faced political agenda. You didn't really do that, but maybe you'll forgive me for thinking your exercise in exponential growth fell into the same category.

These predictions are always shown to be exaggerated after the fact, and then the doomsayer gets to say something like, "Yeah, if it weren't for all of us telling you" or "You're ungrateful for disregarding all the hard work of everyone who came together to blah blah". There's no accountability for, or end to, the bullshit.

Moreover, while it's a morbid task, rational adults should be able to ask whether the costs we've paid dealing with this corona virus are worth it. At 758 deaths, and even 21 days later at 26,300 deaths, we've wrecked the lives of millions of people in the US. It's hard to find stats, but tens of millions of people are now unemployed, and many of their lives suck because of it. Doing arithmetic on suffering and death is distasteful, but there is some point where you wouldn't ruin N people's lives to save just 1 person from dying. Particularly when some of those N people are going to commit suicide in response etc... I won't be making any predictions, but other really bad things can happen when you've got a huge number of people who can't afford food or rent.

Two years ago, approximately 61,000 people died from the flu in the US and we didn't do anything more than make flu shots more available. As for over vs under counting, I hope you're not doing that pedantic "pneumonia isn't the flu" thing. The point is that 150,000 people around the world die every DAY from something, and 10,000 - 100,000 people in the US die every year from something with symptoms close to corona virus.

<comment><USER20> > Two years ago, approximately 61,000

If you're going to mention flu deaths please at least count covid-19 deaths using the same method.

> people died from the flu in the US and we didn't do anything more than make > flu shots more available.

We have internationally coordinated campaigns of surveillance and data gathering. We have rapid vaccine development. We have global, regional, and local flu strategies. We have pandemic preparedness programmes. We put in place public health measures -- you may not have seen those but they're there.

> Moreover, while it's a morbid task, rational adults should be able to ask > whether the costs we've paid dealing with this corona virus are worth it. At > 758 deaths, and even 21 days later at 26,300 deaths

Do you know that you're undercounting covid-19 deaths? The number you quote is deaths in US hospitals. Many people die with covid-19 outside hospitals, mostly in care homes. This is partly because hospitals in some places are overwhelmed and they're triaging elderly frail people onto palliative pathways. And yet we still have people like you denying the reality by quoting statistics that you do not understand: covid-19 is causing massive excess mortality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Related pieces by John PA Ioannidis:

\- Coronavirus disease 2019: the harms of exaggerated information and non‐evidence‐based measures[1]

\- A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data[2]

There are two ways of getting the answer to the question: get relevant data to make reliable predictions (e.g. test for prevalence in the population) or run the experiment (which some governments seem prepared to do)

1- [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/eci.13222](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/eci.13222)

2- [https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the- making-a...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as- the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable- data/)

<comment><USER23> One problem with this is that in the early stages of the spread you would have to run hundreds of thousands of tests daily in order to get statistically significant results. This is clearly impossible with the available lab infrastructure. And this is ignoring the possibility of getting false positives. Maybe it will be possible to get quantitative results with fast antibody tests in later stages, but at that point it is probably much too late to act.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Everything feels "deadly" in the hyper connected world.

The hyperconnected world is like a baby's brain which is more connected than an adult. As learning happens connections are culled [1]. To the baby every new piece of info is mesmerizing or frightening. The brain hasn't yet understood how to process things, what to filter out, what to focus on etc

With this new networked world/hive mind, reactions to every new event are much like the reactions of a Baby as it blunders about discovering a new world.

[https://www.edge.org/conversation/alison_gopnik-a- separate-k...](https://www.edge.org/conversation/alison_gopnik-a-separate- kind-of-intelligence)

<comment><USER25> Are you just ignoring the basic fact that this thing can potentially compound on a daily basis with population being the only upper limit? Because that seems pretty easy to understand.

</comment></comment><comment> jerome-jh Knowing the fatality rate requires knowing the number of people infected: we all know the figures we currently have are mostly a low estimate for a number of reasons already discussed at length.

We must also know the number of fatalities, and this will only be known _after_ the epidemic once we calculate the over-mortality compared to a normal year. So the current numbers are a low estimate too.

In the end we can tell nothing about the fatality rate which is the _ratio_ of those values.

Hence governments make a guess and act accordingly. Only those who test large scale and isolate only positive people act rationally.

</comment><comment><USER26> > _Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will > need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need > to improve._

If we'd let this thing run its course, wouldn't almost all corona patients have to be refused in hospitals and instead die at home? Normal "triage" doesn't cut it. You'd basically paralyze normal health care for months, which would come with an additional death toll. This is already happening even with the lockdowns.

<comment><USER27> Isn't normal triage designed to optimize the number of patients cured or some similar metric? How does that not "cut it"?

<comment><USER28> I believe he's saying that "improving triage" is like tuning the engine of your Civic before you run a quarter mile against a top fuel dragster.

Technically speaking, it will help, a little. But to actually measure up to the challenge you'd need to completely replace the entire thing with something vastly more capable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Something I'm wondering about all this, if you look at the current and unprecedented almost worldwide policy of self isolation and distancing through the prism of unintended consequences, cobra effect, natural selection, and Spanish flu with deadly second wave (and corresponding deadlier strain), I'm wondering: aren't we creating a perfect ground to selecting the most durable and transmissible strain of the sars-cov2?

<comment><USER30> Yes, in the same sense that sterilizing with bleach selects for microbes which can survive bleach. But it's so hard to survive bleach that it's not a real concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Spain just recorded 738 deaths in a single day. We will certain know within a week of monitoring Spain and Italy as to who was right and who was wrong. It isn't something I would gamble on personally. I also don't see the act of a complete shut down as being more economically-damaging then a drawn out partial shutdown.

Also, the other side of the equation is said to be perfect, but as was shown the other day, a lot of elderly people are left for dead in their homes or retirement villages and not reported. Also, I don't know if all deaths in hospitals are checked for coronavirus.

<comment><USER32> they just wanted to delay action until we are locked on the preferred course and they got it with testing screwups. more reaction time we burn in indecision easier it is to say its too late to do much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Both the authors of this piece are not infectious disease epidemiologists. One ([https://profiles.stanford.edu/eran- bendavid](https://profiles.stanford.edu/eran-bendavid)) is an infectious disease doctor who focuses on the effects of economics, politics, and the environment on health.

The second ([https://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/people/jay_bhattachary...](https://healthpolicy.fsi.stanford.edu/people/jay_bhattacharya)) focuses on "the constraints that vulnerable populations face in making decisions that affect their health status, as well as the effects of government policies and programs designed to benefit vulnerable populations. "

This is not the time for folks to hit the pages of the WSJ to start developing their viral infectious disease modeling muscles. Imagine if you asked a compiler writer to start developing a commercial OS.

These folks fundamentally do not understand viral growth models. Their article demonstrates their lack of understanding and they keep falling back to the normal models (pun intended) of epidemiology based on the usual statistical machinery. This is a common problem in this analysis. I made a more detailed comment further down that demonstrates the pitfalls of this thinking.

(edits: grammar)

</comment><comment><USER34> Hello, just an info, in my hometown, Bucharest, population approx 3mil,they just announced they will test everyone. Some good data will come out if this.

<comment><USER35> That's good to hear (that 100% testing will take place). Where can we follow up on the testing results and subsequent fatality statistics?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The conclusion of the article isn't controversial but the logic is incomplete.

Of course policy-makers should continuously evaluate whether or not shutting down a whole economy is worth it. Definitely we need better testing to understand the true number of infections.

But you can't completely disregard current human responses when a) the condition can be fatal (game over, there's no retry) and b) the virus can leave behind long-lasting damage.

In this case a purely quantitative argument based on fatality statistics feels myopic.

For sure agreed we need to find ways of gathering more and accurate information.

</comment><comment><USER37> Re-posting the most informative visualization I have found on this topic so far: [https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus- testi...](https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testing-by- state-chart-of-new-cases/)

See dramatic ramp-up in testing, and where the number of tests administered is significant, a reasonable approximation of the infection rate can be established. So the recent blow-out in NY was actually a good thing and it does not reflect the true daily infection rate: they just didn't know how many cases they had. They still don't in fact, asymptomatic cases don't get tests, and those who had the virus and now have immunity (of which Cuomo's advisors suspect there's at least 100K) can't be tested without the new serological test currently under development.

The only reliable metric of severity remains the number of deaths, and until that gets into tens of thousands (i.e. exceeds that of flu), any panic is premature. We're not Italy. We're not Spain. The current level of response to this is unprecedented.

<comment><USER38> "The only reliable metric of severity remains the number of deaths"

Completely agree.

"until that gets into tens of thousands (i.e. exceeds that of flu), any panic is premature"

I completely and totally disagree with this statement. By the time you get to >10s of thousands of deaths (e.g., about 20 days ahead of the actual infection rate) before you implement severe social distancing and Wuhan-style lockdown, you are set up for a guaranteed million deaths by the time it's over. 10's of thousands of deaths is too damn late. The time to act was a month ago. We are already chasing the dragon, and a number of miracles will need to happen to get this thing under control without 100,000 deaths.

<comment><USER37> You're ignoring the economic damage. That has non-zero fatality rate as well. As cynical as that sounds, you have to balance the two. You can't shut down the economy for more than a few weeks before supply chains fall apart and you start running out of food and necessities, not to mention anything more complicated. Any given widget typically relies on hundreds, if not thousands of suppliers upstream, to manufacture, and if you shut down some of those suppliers, you lose the ability to make the widget, or at least do so quickly. That "global economy" everyone was so proud of a few months back? It got a swift kick to the nuts in all this. Moreover, Europe will have to restart production also, for the same reasons, within no more than a month.

Also, you're making decisions based on pure panic in the absence of reliable information, and you're making them country-wide even though the country is not uniformly affected. The reality on the ground is some parts of the country need to remain more operational than others for us to pull through this, and aiming for sub-flu levels of fatalities is an unrealistic goal, no matter how much fear mongering you see from the press. It's simply not going to happen, even if COVID19 is cured entirely, if for no other reason that we can't cure the flu. 60K people die every winter, nobody gives a shit. 1K people die of coronavirus - everyone loses their mind.

Now granted, it could get much worse very fast, but that's why we're ramping up testing so massively: to be able to offer a more adaptive, more localized response that doesn't shut everything down.

<comment><USER38> "You're ignoring the economic damage." No i am not.

"You can't shut down the economy for more than a few weeks before supply chains fall apart and you start running out of food and necessities, not to mention anything more complicated. "

The California shut down has no affect on food and consumer necessity supply chains.

"Also, you're making decisions based on pure panic in the absence of reliable information"

This is not pure panic and there is information, and we know EXACTLY how to model in the uncertainties and confidence intervals surrounding best estimates of CFR, R0, etc. We have very good numbers from S. Korea. We have very good numbers from Diamond Princess and we can stratify based on age and prior health status and cross-check with Korea. WE are not in a blind panic. The press is not fear mongering. We are running out/ have run out of ventilators in NY. It has already TODAY gotten much worse very fast, and it should be no surprise to anyone who was paying attention to Italy two weeks ago. 1K deaths today, following an exponential growth pattern makes the numbers VERY scary in two weeks and that's assuming our healthcare system is not overwhelmed.

"but that's why we're ramping up testing so massively"

Are we? Not yet? And why not? Because Trump didn't want his numbers to look bad so he ordered the CDC to insist all tests were run through them. Now our country is scrambling to catch up. We will ramp up testing, I am sure. It is in the works, but we still haven't actually done it on the scale we really need. NY is getting sort of close, but not really. Even they have to at least double. EVERYWHERE else in the U.S. is laughably behind.

<comment><USER37> > The California shut down has no affect on food and consumer necessity supply > chains.

Citation needed. If it has "no effect" then we should just get rid of whatever they shut down, since it's clearly not necessary.

> We have very good numbers from Diamond Princess

We don't. All the people who died there were in their 70s and 80s and had pre- existing conditions as well. And it was a single digit number. One would have to be totally statistically illiterate to extrapolate that to a country the size of United States.

> 1K deaths today

Yes, the slope can get pretty scary in the middle of a sigmoid. But there weren't "1K deaths today", and they are seeing gradual reduction in the number of daily new cases. This is especially encouraging given that they're doing a ton of tests now.

> Are we?

Yes: [https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus- testi...](https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testing-by- state-chart-of-new-cases/). With half a million tests given so far, best I can tell we have the highest testing throughput in the world, and it keeps on increasing. It's very impressive actually. I wish we didn't fumble it so badly out of the gate, NY could be much better now if they had more reliable info earlier.

What we need is serologic test to determine approximately how many people had asymptomatic COVID19. Some studies suggest there could be a ton of those, which would explain why Wuhan did not experience a second round of epidemic after lifting most of the restrictions and putting people back to work. Assuming, of course, we're not getting fake news from there.

<comment><USER38> "then we should just get rid of whatever they shut down, since it's clearly not necessary."

That is pure nonsense. Do you suggest an economy that only includes what is "necessary?"

"> We have very good numbers from Diamond Princess

"We don't. All the people who died there were in their 70s and 80s and had pre-existing conditions as well. And it was a single digit number. One would have to be totally statistically illiterate to extrapolate that to a country the size of United States."

Straw man much? I see you elided my whole point about using the VERY GOOD and comprehensive S. Korea numbers and also using them to extract the signal from the Diamond Princess numbers? What is your agenda here? To just confuse everyone?

"gradual reduction in the number of daily new cases" What are you talking about? This is flat out wrong. We had 13K NEW cases TODAY, an all time high for the U.S. and we are certainly only getting started. The numbers have been rising every day for the past week.

"With half a million tests given so far, best I can tell we have the highest testing throughput in the world" That is again, JUST PLAIN WRONG. That's .5M tests since JANUARY. Now, if we continue increasing at the rate we did this week, then we will have adequate testing in place in about two weeks. I hope that happens, but it's doubtful. Every increase has met with a new bottleneck somewhere in the chain.

"which would explain why Wuhan did not experience a second round of epidemic after lifting most of the restrictions and putting people back to work"

Again, what nonsense is this? Wuhan is not lifting "most" of the restrictions until April 8. They loosened a number of restrictions a few DAYS ago. The virus has an incubation time of 14 days. Are you that mathematically illiterate to see the uselessness of your already incorrect "fact?"

<comment><USER37> > We had 13K NEW cases

I've misread, sorry. I thought you were talking about Italy, which is seeing a reduction in the number of daily cases. So will New York, a week or so from now.

> nonsense

You need to choose your words better if you expect me to discuss this with you. At the moment you seem too frightened to have a rational conversation.

<comment><USER38> "so will new york, a week or so from now"

Again, that is completely contrary to any reasonable interpretation of the data we have. In other words nonsense.

I'll check back in a week and see if you are capable of having a rational, fact-based, conversation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> [https://archive.md/j8FFk](https://archive.md/j8FFk)

</comment><comment><USER40> Somethng else I wonder about all this: Let's look at Germany and say we have about 10000 new cases per day with the current measures, including unknown infections and some handwaving. That's a lot of days until you reach a significant portion of the polulation (~80 million).

<comment><USER41> The calculation for Germany is as follows (from [1]):

\- There are about 28k ICU beds in German

\- Usual occupancy is 80%, expectation is that 50% can be reserved for Covid-19 patients by delaying elective medical actions

\- This gives us 14k ICU beds to treat Covid-19 patients

\- Estimate is that about 5% of all infected will require about 7 days of ICU treatment

\- This tells us, we can at most have 2k new patients requiring ICU treatment per day

\- Knowing that the 2k are only 5% of total cases, the number of infected the health care system can take care of is 40k/day.

Obviously this calculation will change with more precise information about the estimated numbers.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx11Y4xjDwA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx11Y4xjDwA) (sorry, German only)

<comment><USER40> Well we would need 2000 days of those 2k days to even reach 50% infection of the total population. That is simply not possible to sustain with these extreme measures.

<comment><USER42> That's exactly right. On the other side of the shutdown, you need to do proactive screening and quarantining people who came in contact with sick people to create the conditions where you can safely ease the shutdown.

Absent that, there's not much point of the shutdown. I guess it buys time for medical professionals to retrain and gather supplies, which is crucial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's insufficient data to say whether the death rate is actually low or not. But this will be interesting to see play out politically, if the Republicans agree to open up and there is mass deaths as a result this could sink the party for decades.

<comment><USER44> Even if opening up leads to massive deaths it can still be the correct thing to do. Here in the UK the NHS uses a system called QALYs which is approximately years of life saved to evaluate the effectiveness of NHS interventions. The NHS generally will only introduce new interventions if they $s per a QALY is low enough. The spectrum of options for dealing with the pandemic are a trade off and if the damage to the economy is high enough then even a high death rate might not justify a strong intervention. During the NHS's normal operations there are a bunch of interventions that NHS is not pursuing because the cost is higher than the marginal cost they are willing to spend for a QALY. The NHS is killing large numbers of people right now by not pursuing these interventions but everything is a tradeoff and stopping death is not an absolute.

<comment><USER45> The case fatality rate for 20 to 30 year olds is somewhere between 1 and 200 and 1 in 400. This population is one of the the least susceptible and the chance of death is roughly the same as doing 5 to 10 BASE jumps.

The economic harm arguments assume that the economic harm of the pandemic is confined to government imposed restrictions. When going to the movies carries the same risk as the most extreme sports it is reasonable to expect that most people are going to self isolate.

Of course given the lag it is possible given the growth curve that people could blindly find themselves jumping off a metaphorical cliff. At the same time I'd suggest that the significant amount of trauma the survivors would face would have significant repercussions for the economy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Case fatality rate (CFR) is meaningless for the general public. A case is basically any person that went to the doctor and received the permission to get tested and eventually became a patient. Knowing the CFR for a disease is therefore very valuable for doctors because they know that x% of their patients may die. However, it is very possible that the vast majority of Covid-19 cases never become patients.

This doesn't mean that the quarantine is pointless. Even if covid19 is as "harmless" as influenza, having two influenza type diseases is still worse than only having one.

</comment><comment><USER47> Q: how accurate are the covid19 reported deaths? My guess is that they measure immune cells from blood (cytokine storm), but they can't know for sure if covid19 was they cause of death. It means we have an upper bound of deaths.

<comment><USER48> Not necessary. People who die before being tested are not tested in many places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the > current lockdowns.

I think there's not enough data available to evaluate if these lockdowns are justified. Especially the cost of the lockdowns are hard to assess. We won't know until it's over.

But even if the mortality rate is vastly over-estimated, it will be hard for a leader to justify that their country has twice the mortality rate as the neighbor country (even this rate is low, and even it a lockdown was avoided).

Besides, most countries are imposing a lockdown anyway, so "do like everybody else" is a safe bet for our leaders. Plus, the population asks for it.

</comment><comment><USER33> There are people who build and grok models (A) and people who build epidemiological models (B) and then people who built epidemiological models of infectious diseases (C).

It is a common error for folks in set A to believe that they can understand models built by folks in set C. It is a subtle but serious error for folks in set B to believe they can understand models by set C e.g. John Katz of Yale who is a doctor focusing on diets and wrote a woefully misguided article in the NY Times.

Roughly, I find the confounding factors about models about the current epidemic seem to the following:

1- 1% of the population severely affected etc. (see: Diamond Princess). What they fail to appreciate is that the Diamond Princess was an enclosed environment and the outbreak was controlled and _limited_ to the population on board. In the general population, a virus with an R0 of 3 will infect 50,000+ people in 10 infection steps.

2- What most people miss is the collision of the 1% severity with the capacity of the medical system. This second-order effect is something hard to understand. 1% of the US is 3.6 million. Even if 10% of those cases turn up at the ER in the same year and occupy the beds for 2 weeks each it will be a disaster.

3- #1 and #2 interacts with life as usual demands on the health care system – accidents, heart attacks, strokes, etc. to create third order effects – more deaths as there are no beds and no personnel to deal with them.

4- PPE running short and causing infections amongst medical personnel leading to their quarantine, hospitalization or death (Wuhan, Italy, Spain) decimates their ranks and accentuates the stress on the health care system……. 20% of lost capacity translates to some fraction more deaths and more stress on the rest of the medical population.

I am sure there are factors I have missed.

We have seen many contrarian viewpoints. None of these contrarian thinkers make any concrete suggestions (Ionnadis, Katz, Friedman, Gillespie, Hanson) except making ominous predictions to how wrong we are and we need more data. Meanwhile ER doctors say this is the worst they have ever seen and bodies keep piling up. These contrarian thinkers provide no simulations of how saving the economy will lead to lesser deaths. Just hand waving and finger jabbing.

The contrarians seem to think that the playbook to deal with the epidemic has been improvised. Or that this is something modelers are thinking up on the fly. These playbooks have existed for decades with very good understanding of the dynamics and were used during SARs, Ebola and heck even back during the Spanish Flu. What seems to be lacking was parameters specific to Covid-19. Its R0, CFR, co-morbidities, etc.

The reason Taiwan, Korea and Singapore were able to act so decisively and fast was that they just dusted of the SARs playbook and knew almost exactly what to do. Taiwan enforced the first measures in early Jan.

I will take the word of the viral epidemiologists over the contrarian's armchair speculations and continue to overreact. I recommend you should too.

<comment><USER38> Well put. And conservatively stated. Re: point 2, your "in the same year" is what we likely face with high levels of social distancing. What's even more alarming is what happens if we stop the shut downs and "go back to work." That's a guaranteed disaster. You mention 50,000 people in ten steps. That number grows to millions in just a few additional steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> for the last time it's not the death toll it's the _massive_ numbers of immunologically naive people of all ages who need advanced medical care all at once.

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the biggest reasons the rate may be too high is the method of attribution. For example, in Italy, post-mortem testing of people who were origially presumed dead of other illnesses accounted for a large portion of testing. When it turned out they had COVID-19 at the time of death, the _cause_ was attributed to COVID-19 regardless of comorbidities: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of- tho...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who- died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says)

In other words, many of those who died today _would have died_ within the year. Many were already in and out of hospitals for serious diseases.

So, not only is the IFR wildly unknown without serology tests. The CFR itself is also severely biased.

Currently in the U.S. you cannot get tested unless you have severe, life- threatening illnesses.

The fact that the U.S. has such a low CFR speaks very well of healthcare in the U.S.... considering the majority of those tested have severe symptoms.

</comment><comment><USER51> It has been horribly fascinating watching the (coordinated?) campaign to downplay either the fatality rate or just write off a percentage off the population dying as the "cost of doing business".

<comment><USER52> People should care about the facts, whatever they may be. If the fatality rate really is lower than what was previously reported, it's a disservice to the public to not report that. These are objective data and statistics, if they're accurate and put in the proper context (e.g. grouped by ages and pre-existing conditions).

The exchanging deaths vs. economic health thing is a subjective policy position, which is different, and doesn't necessarily change even if the fatality rate is lower than reported. If it still appears to be more contagious and more fatal than the flu, I think most people will continue to support the lockdowns.

<comment><USER38> "If it still appears to be more contagious and more fatal than the flu"

If? The amount of magical thinking required to still have some doubt about this is undefinable. Spain is converting ice-rinks into morgues to store the freaking bodies. NYC has run out of ventilators and the federal response is something like: NY could have had some at a good price in 2015.

<comment><USER52> I'm just speaking in a neutral way. As in "if it remains the case that...". Of course, I do think it is the case, and am not doubtful at all. It seems to be incontrovertible. I'm talking about how I expect the population to react based on their perception of the situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Without paywall: [http://archive.vn/cgCff](http://archive.vn/cgCff)

</comment><comment><USER54> at this point who cares? we know that older people are at risk and do we really want to risk our parents/grandparents/neighbours health? it's not worth it. isolate yourself, clean your hands and face, and help fellow humans.

</comment><comment><USER55> Not quite, but within a margin of error as described.

Are you a glass half empty or half full person?

</comment><comment><USER56> TLDR; the article argues that the actual fatality rate is possibly 0.06% as opposed to 1-6% touted in media.

The reasoning is based on estimating actual cases given confirmed cases. For example, in Italian town Vò, the entire population was tested to find a prevalence rate of 2.7%. Apply this to the whole province to estimate actual cases and then divide that by confirmed deaths. So assuming that unconfirmed cases mostly recovered without an event, the actual fatality rate goes down to 0.06%.

Arguably, the author doesn't have a lot of other strong data to back this up. Also, this would imply that a large part of the infected population simply recovered without needing to possibly sick treatment.

If this is true, however, it would mean we just had a 2 trillion dollar party :).

<comment><USER57> 0.06% is hard to reconcile with 10 out of 712 cases on the Diamond Princess liner proving fatal.

<comment><USER56> The cruise ship with a higher level of density and socialization than New York City is not really comparable with regular townships. Also, the cruise ship population is very biased towards the old population.

<comment><USER58> Density only affects the speed of spread. It largely[1] doesn't affect how many people will die. Over time everyone will get infected unless the virus is wiped out.

[1] there is speculation that greater exposure to the virus may make some people sicker

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> tl;dr The case fatality rate is usually much higher than the real mortality rate.

People and health professionals have pointed that out from the start and it should be hard to find anyone who doesn't know that by now.

> _A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the > economy, community and individual mental and physical health._

Sure, you can use expected utility theory to calculate that. What result you get depends a lot on the monetary value you attribute to a human live, or, if you think that's better, on the value of quality-adjusted life years (QUALYs).

If you're particularly sociopathic you can also reverse-engineer the simple models used in order to find the value judgments that will give you the decision result you want. Just tweak the values for QUALYs, lower the estimates here and there, and the result is that it's better to save the economy (or vice versa, depending on what you want). Call me cynic, but I'm sure plenty of people around the world are doing that right now.

<comment><USER59> People should understand that, but the media reporting has been absolutely atrocious. CNN even ran an article arguing that the reason not testing as widely was correlated with a higher reported fatality rate (as a percentage of cases) was because widespread testing reduced the fatality rate by simply reducing the number of people who got it, which is... not exactly the right conclusion, shall we say.

It's not like there's been a shortage of folks who happily multiply the CFR figures by 60, 70, 80% of the entire population and present this as the inevitable death toll of, generally, the actions of the political party they oppose.

<comment><USER38> "CNN even ran an article arguing that the reason not testing as widely was correlated with a higher reported fatality rate (as a percentage of cases) was because widespread testing reduced the fatality rate by simply reducing the number of people who got it, which is... not exactly the right conclusion, shall we say."

It is a factor though, and not a minor one. You test widely enough and you can track, trace, and quarantine your way to containment or at least massively flatten the curve and thereby avoid overwhelming the medical system and spiking CFR. That is exactly what S. Korea did. You didn't link to the article, so it's hard to tell if you are just a troll or not. If the article stated that as a factor, it is not wrong at all. IF the article stated that as THE reason, well it's pretty misleading. Did the media mess up here? We shall never know I guess unless you can produce a link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Is there any explanation as to why this thread is "flagged"? It seems like the original article and the discussion here are of good quality even if some of the ultimate conclusions maybe flawed.

<comment><USER61> Usually when there's an ongoing divisive story, follow-up posts get flagged by a coalition of (1) users who don't like the article because they favor the opposing view, and (2) users who are just fatigued by all the articles on the topic. In most cases the first group alone isn't enough to win the tug-of-war with upvotes.

Moderators sometimes override flags when an article is good and the discussion seems able to be substantive (enough). That's arguably the case here, so we'll try overriding the flags. (This is not an endorsement of the article.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Let's prove it. Go, go, go! Let's beat Iceland! We can do it. [https://www.cloverpop.com/blog/we-need-a-covid-19-testing- mo...](https://www.cloverpop.com/blog/we-need-a-covid-19-testing-moonshot)

<comment><USER62> Or if we're really dreaming big, let's beat the Faeroe Islands.

In the whole world, there are only two places that can reasonably claim to be taking a scientific approach to those aspects of this virus at this point: Iceland and the Faeroe Islands. Both have tested about 3% of their populations (that's about 6X better than South Korea, 12X better than Italy, and 100X better than the US). Iceland is trying to test a representative population, although their testing is still skewed towards ill and exposed people. The Danes of the Faeroe Islands are tracing almost 100% of cases.

We should still do testing of sick people to support healthcare decisions as we are today. We should do more testing of exposed people for containment like in South Korea and Germany. But that doesn't help much with the broader governmental and societal decisions we need to make. We must do more. Embrace the "and." No more "or."

Since everything is moving so fast, just keep it bold and simple: Race For COVID-19 Truth -- Test 30 Million People In 30 Days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> The WSJ has a history of climate change denial too. They are 100% not a publication that follows science at all.

You may also not be surprised to know they're owned by News Corp.

<comment><USER64> In particular, this is in their Opinion section. WSJ News still has a great deal of credibility and integrity, though maybe center-right pro-business. The Opinion section, however, has long been divorced from reality; the joke is that it's simply wishful thinking salve to corporate executives.

<comment><USER65> > WSJ News still has a great deal of credibility and integrity, though maybe > center-right pro-business. The Opinion section, however, has long been > divorced from reality; the joke is that it's simply wishful thinking salve > to corporate executives.

I'm soon to be a non-subscriber, but I might have kept my subscription longer if the WSJ app had a setting to suppress the opinion section. It's not even interesting, and I'm far from a doctrinaire left-liberal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Why is this flagged?

Can anyone or a mod enlighten me?

dang?

<comment><USER61> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22688861](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22688861)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> if its really so low then why are they scrambling to pass a 2T bailout package. just let it rip through the population because 'its just a flu bro' and it will be over in a month and a half.

/s

as I see it this is BS propaganda from WSJ to normalize whats coming next, push to open businesses.

<comment><USER67> earnest answer: because even if it had a 0% fatality rate, the sheer number of people who would be out sick for a week at the same time would decimate the economy. The bailout package is probably not going to be enough.

<comment><USER58> That is a reach. Although people stop spending the delayed demand will return once the danger has gone. People will want holidays and cars that they put off buying. Demand will produce jobs. Even businesses that failed will be replaced by new ones that satisfy new demand.

This is different to something like 2008 where people no longer trusted financial and other institutions.

<comment><USER68> I was thinking that too. We've normalized bad responses to finance driven recessions. Where trying to make the finance sector whole results in a half decade of lost ground for the real economy.

This is more like pre-1970's recessions where the central banks squeeze the money supply for a couple of months. Or WWII mobilization. In each of those cases the economy came roaring right back due to pent up demand.

We will get the worst of both worlds if our response to this is to either a) let it 'run it's course' or b) try to make the finance sector whole. The US is looking at both those options and the result will be catastrophic of they come to pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> There are some credible voices skeptical of the current doomsday predictions from Dr. Fauci et al, vis-a-vis the national quarantine.

Unfortunately, this too has become a partisan political issue with dems for shutdown/quarantine, and republicans for opening up.

<comment><USER70> It's funny that the Republican plan involves the manslaughter of their voter base prior to the next election.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism)

<comment><USER61> Please don't take HN threads further into political or ideological flamewar. It leads to predictable, bad places.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER70> I genuinely disagree that this is a flamewar topic. I posted about a political party's actions the same way I would post about any other organizations actions.

<comment><USER61> I believe you, but what makes it a flamewar topic is how other people are going to react. The results will be predictably dismal. Actually you combined two flamewar topics there: a partisan one and an ideological one.

This is a moderation issue because such flamewars aren't only off topic, but destroy the intellectual curiosity that HN exists for.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Views on Ali Damo's CT scan Covid-19 diagnostic AI with claimed accuracy of 96% - <AUTHOR> https://www.covid19readings.com/articles/2020/02/23/How-To-View-Ali-Damo-AI-COVID-19-CT-Technology <comment><AUTHOR> The top two answers from Zhihu (Quora style question-answer site from China)represented the views from a doctor on the COVID-19 frontline and a medical imaging + AI researcher. Super interesting!</comment>


Codestre.am: streaming your code to the masses - <AUTHOR> http://codestre.am/ <comment><USER2> Here is a quick-and-hackish way to stream / broadcast your terminal (<http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/6788/>):

        script -qf | tee >(nc -l -p 5000) >(nc -l -p 5001) >(nc -l -p 5002)

The client can then run `nc your_ip port` to watch your terminal live.

Also, I once wrote a node.js script that broadcasts recorded terminal sessions. To see a demo:

        nc wei23.net 5000

Code is on Github: <https://github.com/clvv/scriptbroadcast>

<comment><USER3> Netcat continually astounds me. The amount of functionality that that little tool provides is just short of incredible.

<comment><USER4> It's actually not so much netcat, but the Unix system that has such flexibility.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really amazing, I haven't seen something this interesting on Hacker News in a long time. Pair programming and mentorship are only a couple of low-hanging fruits this could be used for. Awesome to see socket.io at work and kudos to the team at LearnBoost.

</comment><comment><USER6> Have been hoping for someone to do this for so long - kind of like casting Star Craft, but codecasting instead. Rock on!

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm enjoying it. One thought I have is, maybe time compression tools for playback. The pressure to keep interesting makes it harder to work.

<comment><USER8> Definitely. I guess this became obvious as people started using it, but I'll add this really soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, 'masses' might be overstating the market of people willing to sit through streaming terminal sessions.

<comment><USER10> Yeah. I think this might be interesting for tutelage and education, though. It makes live-programming more viable for long-distance learning and helps globalize programming.

<comment><USER9> Something like "Code Streaming for Mere Mortals", or "Code Streaming Made Simple" might seem like a less peculiar choice of words. I just envision the reactions of horror should the masses subversively be exposed to streaming code.

<comment><USER10> They'll think their computer is getting hacked, yeah. Don't want to be on the other end of that support call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like the design of the site. Clean, minimal, but still unique with lots of personality.

</comment><comment><USER12> In case you're curious, yes, codestre.am even passes the inception test: <http://codestre.am/s>

</comment><comment><USER13> I like it a lot. Very polished (although the server is getting a bit hammered right now).

The only thing missing seems to be 256-color support.

</comment><comment><USER14> This is great. Pair programming quickly and easily over the web isn't exactly trivial right now. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER13> Since node is still a little finicky, some installation hints:

\- Be sure to have latest node version (0.6.14).

\- Don't use -g, just 'node install codestream' instead (-g requires root and should not be used)

\- The binary will then be in ~/.npm/codestream/0.1.0/package/bin/codestream - just symlink that to somewhere convenient[1]

\- If you get an error try: npm install pty.js (pty.js was a missing dependency for me)

[1] The npm-dev is sadly not very unix-savvy, hence these extra-hoops

<comment><USER8> I just pushed a new version that should sort out the dependency problems (0.1.1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Looking forward to this. Registration doesn't seem to work yet.

Please add 'monospace' to the font-family declaration. The site looks terrible in Ubuntu.

<comment><USER16> 'monospace' fallback added. Thanks!

<comment><USER15> This is so cool. I only wish the screen were a little bigger and could show all the colors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Very cool. Crashes in Chrome 19.0.1084.1 dev on OSX Lion after a few minutes though.

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds me of when the creator of minecraft was streaming a coding session via Justin.tv while he was pumping out a game for a contest.

</comment><comment><USER19> Also, there is Playterm [1], which does the same thing for shell recordings made with the 'script' command. 'script' and the player 'scriptreplay' are shipping with most modern distributions, e.g. they come in the package bsdutils on Ubuntu.

[1] <http://www.playterm.org>

<comment><USER20> Actually they use ttyrec. And also you should always remember size of your terminal and fit it to one of two allowed sizes. <http://shelr.tv/> automatically saves term size and allows records with free dimensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They must be really being hit hard, my connections keep timing out. :(

</comment><comment><USER20> Installation instructions for shelr: <http://shelr.tv/records/4f7adf9ae9f6190001000001> :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Just signed up, tried to create a new stream and there was no text box under "Topics". I clicked "Next" anyway and got a "Forbidden" page. Clicked back, reloaded, there was a text box there, and I was able to create a stream.

I see that I have to install node and your package, but I don't want to. I would prefer just to upload a script(1) file, since it may have been captured on a remote system at another time, or I may want to edit it to remove sensitive information. I don't know what your node script is going to send, so I'm not going to run it while I'm connected to a live system.

</comment><comment><USER20> Also. Take a look at <http://shelr.tv/>

</comment><comment><USER23> Very cool. I can see me using it for all things I need to remember in the future..

</comment><comment><USER24> No nonsense asciicasting for serious hackers: <http://ascii.io/>

<comment><USER25> Nice. gonna show some git tricks to my colleagues using it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Yes, crashes Chrome, and on top of it - signups don't really work. Very unexpected low quality from LearnBoost!

<comment><USER26> Keep downvoting, but this won't change the fact that LearnBoost released something that was not ready for prime time. Also learn to read carefully before downvoting as the key word is "unexpected", i.e. I obviously like LearnBoost.

<comment><USER27> You're getting downvotes because you're complaining about an innovative, cool thing on hacker news that couldn't deal with the traffic. Just try it later.

Edit: I didn't downvote your comment.

<comment><USER26> I am pretty used to many sites not being able to sustain the HN traffic and I never commented on those, but my main point was that I did not expect a service from LearnBoost to be like that as I respect those guys.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cobrowse.io – Add screen sharing to any iOS or Android mobile app - <AUTHOR> https://cobrowse.io <comment><AUTHOR> Super easy to try it out right from your browser: [https://cobrowse.io](https://cobrowse.io), Or to try on your iOS device download our sample app at [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/listr-create-your- wish-list/...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/listr-create-your-wish- list/id1339272176?ls=1&mt=8) and then open up [https://cobrowse.io/trial](https://cobrowse.io/trial).

We are two developers who are launching today on Hacker News. We'd love to hear what you guys think!

Our stack: We're using AWS (ECS + Fargate) deployed with terraform, MongoDB, Redis, NodeJS, React (via create-react-app), Redux, and SocketIO.

How it works: Frames and agent annotations are streamed in real time between user devices and an agent web dashboard via geographically distributed socket servers.

Business model: Simple pricing per agent, month to month, no contracts. Also can do private and enterprise deployments through any cloud provider.

We'd love any feedback from this community, and we'll be sure to reply to any comments.

<comment><USER2> Awesome, can I recommend integrations with ticketing systems like Zendesk & Freshdesk or even non-traditional systems like Frontapp.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a great idea, we'll definitely look into it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very cool, nice to be able to annotate at the same time. I'll be adding this in to our upcoming apps because mobile support is pretty hard

</comment><comment><USER4> Very cool! Seems like the solution for so many app only services now.

</comment><comment><USER5> can this capture the screen outside an app?

Need to do remote iphone tech support for my parents.

<comment><AUTHOR> Check out something called TeamViewer for iOS. It's a separate app and requires "Screen Recording" to be enabled in system settings, etc. Give it a shot!

Cobrowse is meant to integrate screen sharing functionality directly into a specific app, and the experience is a lot smoother and more seamless for things like customer support.</comment></comment>


Hyperloop: Elon Musk's New Idea Could Revolutionize Travel Forever - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/25/hyperloop_n_1913683.html

<comment><USER2> When are the specifics of this being announced?</comment>


Learning to Survive Without WeChat - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/20/opinion/learning-to-survive-without-wechat-in-china.html <comment><USER2> It's always interesting to me to see posts like this. While I certainly agree with the author's sentiment and concerns, I feel like I _never_ hear about Chinese people actually complain about these concerns in China. Sure I hear occasional and minor complaints about Facebook/Instagram being blocked.

If you told me to guess what percent of Chinese people actually have concerns about the heavy monitoring by their government, I'd say <1%. Most aren't even aware of the extent of the monitoring/restrictions.

I do wish more people were aware. But there really aren't many good ways to go about bringing awareness. If you try anything, you'll be squashed or jailed. Me as a foreigner would also not attempt anything as it would likely mean losing my visa which means I couldn't visit my family, etc. Quite a complex situation.

<comment><USER3> I had sort of come to peace with China having such heavy surveillance. Not because I approved of it but really there's only so much you can judge when your tax dollars go towards harming children overseas.

I recently learned about the Uighur situation though and it made me wonder if the average Chinese citizen even knows about that either and would they even care if they did. It's really a tricky state of affairs.

<comment><USER2> Certainly. I try not to take too high of a moral high ground for many similar reasons. US's constant wars/conflict, our ridiculous murder/violence/crime rates, the fact that China likely needed a very strong handed government to unify China and push it forward.

I'm just mainly sour about having crappy and extremely restricted internet, and wish more Chinese cared and could do anything about it. :)</comment></comment></comment>


What Is a Bitcoin, Really? - <AUTHOR> http://preshing.com/20140127/what-is-a-bitcoin-really/ <comment><USER2> One of the most fun parts about Bitcoin for me is that there are actually infinite public ledgers available. You and your counterparty have to agree in advance on which one you're using. Bitcoiners have solved this coordination problem by saying "We mutually agree to use the public ledger which a) adheres to all the rules in the Satoshi client and b) is longest of all ledgers satisfying that constraint."

From this follows several consequences, like there being an infinite supply of cryptocurrencies which share every advantage of Bitcoin, the Satoshi client being really freaking important relative to the "protocol" (whose only authoritative description is the Satoshi client, since in the case of disagreement with the Satoshi client the network will reject you no matter how "correct" your decisions are), and the fact that the ledger which is anointed as consensus at T1 is not necessarily the same ledger which will be consensus at some future T2 when looking back at history.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am kind of embarrassed to admit that after all these years, I still don't understand Bitcoin. Not the underlying software and algorithms - but the concept, the system.

I can maybe see where it'd be useful in minimizing electronic transaction costs. But, most transaction costs (credit card fees) that I pay are already rolled into the price of things, so I don't benefit by purchasing them with Bitcoin. And, I guess I can see that it'd be useful to maintain anonymity, but I don't have that use case. Isn't it just easier to buy things with Dollars?

I also don't understand the dynamics of it. Doesn't it require increasingly more capital to mine coins and to maintain the ledger? What happens when the value of a coin is less than the mining costs or ledger maintenance? Or, does the coin just keep continuing to increase in value? And, if so, what's to stop people from just using another crypto-currency?

And, what is the 'value' of a coin? The article implies that the value is created by the users' trust in the value. But, is that how currencies generally work? I had assumed that currencies either have tangible value, like precious metals, or that they are abstract derivatives of another's debt (government or people).

<comment><USER4> > _But, most transaction costs (credit card fees) that I pay are already > rolled into the price of things, so I don 't benefit by purchasing them with > Bitcoin._

It's not common yet, but I have in fact saved money by buying with bitcoins, because the merchant passed on some of the savings.

> _Isn 't it just easier to buy things with Dollars?_

Sure, if you're allowed to, and you have that preference, why not? Bitcoin can facilitate the circumvention of censorship (a la Wikileaks). And once you have bitcoins, sending them is faster than paying with a credit card online.

> _Doesn 't it require increasingly more capital to mine coins and to maintain > the ledger?_

Yes, if you ignore hardware advances. It might even be true if you don't ignore that.

> _What happens when the value of a coin is less than the mining costs or > ledger maintenance?_

There are transaction fees that go to the block miner.

> _Or, does the coin just keep continuing to increase in value?_

Hopefully not too quickly!

> _what 's to stop people from just using another crypto-currency?_

Network effects. People _do_ use other crypto-currencies. Just not as much. For now.

> _And, what is the 'value' of a coin? The article implies that the value is > created by the users' trust in the value. But, is that how currencies > generally work? I had assumed that currencies either have tangible value, > like precious metals, or that they are abstract derivatives of another's > debt (government or people)._

Ah, yes. This is classic. The orthodox economists might tell you that Bitcoin shouldn't have any value at all. Yet, I can sell 1 BTC and pay for months of gas. I'd rather have a running car than an economist's opinion.

There are historical examples of currency which was neither a debt derivative nor an intrinsically useful object being used as currency.

Ultimately, anything sellable is "worth" what _other people_ will pay for it. Bitcoin provides a means of transferring information in a cryptographically signed manner. We happen to use that fact to transfer information about value. Other people are willing to buy bitcoins. The price is capped by the fact that there is a finite number of bitcoins and a finite number of people. Beyond that, it's pretty much new ground we're breaking here.

Bitcoin is not perfect. I don't know the future. But if you have other questions, I'm happy to answer them from the perspective of a bitcoin holder.

<comment><USER5> > Ah, yes. This is classic. The orthodox economists might tell you that > Bitcoin shouldn't have any value at all. Yet, I can sell 1 BTC and pay for > months of gas. I'd rather have a running car than an economist's opinion.

I still don't understand how economists can say that BTC has no "intrinsic value," so should be worthless, but the fiat currencies around the world are just dandy.

The whole concept of "intrinsic value" is nonsense. If you can make a Bitcoin transaction faster, cheaper, and with fewer people knowing about it (if you value anonymity), then BTC has value. You can send Bitcoin to someone overseas without anyone else knowing. How powerful is that?

> Ultimately, anything sellable is "worth" what other people will pay for it.

Precisely. I wish we could teach people this before they dismiss Bitcoin for unfounded reasons.

<comment><USER6> Fiat currencies have intrinsic value due to taxation.

<comment><USER7> It's not just the taxation (which is true), it's the fact that they are backed by a particular entity. In the case of USD, it's the United States government. Dollars may not be "backed" by anything tangible, but they are accepted because the US is (largely) a trusted entity. That's what makes USD useful to people internationally.

Bitcoin doesn't have the advantages of having a government backing it, but some would probably argue that that _is_ an advantage.

<comment><USER8> Considering how many trillion definitions people may mean when they say a currency is "backed by" something, I don't think your explanation is an improvement.

For that reason, I recommend listing the specific things that make the USD valued: in this case, the need to pay USD in taxes, and a very wealthy entity (US government) prefers to trade in that currency, or whatever specific thing you mean with "backed by" in that statement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good article. It's clear, covers the important points, describes the basic technology reasonably well to a non-expert, debunks some common myths, and, thankfully, steers clear of "mining".

Mining is really a terrible term for the layperson that evokes thoughts of real mines that produce resources at a continuous rate. It should be called "Distributed transaction verification. And, oh yeah, by the way, verifiers have a chance to win a prize, lottery-style."

</comment><comment><USER10> Useful description, but some not 100% accurate statements:

"A private key is nothing but a large pseudorandom number roughly between 1 and 2^256"

Not sure how the "pseudorandom" came in there - the private key might be random, or pseudo-random, or entirely deterministic - it's essential property is that it's just a 256 bit sequence that is unknown to others.

"It's perfectly safe to give your Bitcoin addresses to other people, but extremely important to keep your private keys secret. "

The essential point trying to be made here is that the Bitcoin Address won't allow people to determine your private key. but there are a lot of reasons why you would _not_ want to give your Bitcoin address to other people - the key reason being that it allows to track you. There is one philosophy that suggests you should change your Bitcoin address on every transaction.

Overall, though, a nice introductory article to Bitcoin - I'd recommend it to others.

<comment><USER11> Just for nitpicking, a number is neither pseudorandom or random. It could be randomly generated though.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, it should be something like: "A private key is nothing but a number roughly between 1 and 2^256, that is only known by you. This number is usually pseudorandomly generated by your bitcoin client, but it could be generated in any way. The important thing is that it is an uncommon large number, that others will not be able to easily guess."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For me, this was the best intro to BitCoin - [http://gendal.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/how-i-explain- bitcoin...](http://gendal.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/how-i-explain-bitcoin-and- cryptocurrencies-to-new-audiences/) It doesn't focus on tech - it explains why BitCoin as a platform is so important and what are the killer apps that can be build with that platform.

</comment><comment><USER14> A bitcoin is a commodity. A small piece of a complicated crypto system you can buy or decipher or even trade for goods (in very few and restricted cases) and has practically no use apart from storing it in the hope to get a benefit in the near future by selling it at a higher price. Have you got an old VCR? Well, a bitcoin is just like that, or it will be soon (Only you can't burn a bitcoin in the hope to get some heat when your bitcoin acquires absolutely no value whatsoever but, then again, you may not want to burn a VCR due to toxic fumes and such...)

Some talk about decentralized currency, anonymous payments, money laundry... Shenanigans. All shenanigans.

<comment><USER15> Besides ease of international transactions, consider that only 41% of adults in developing nations have bank accounts and only 7% of adults in developing nations have credit cards. With Bitcoin and perhaps technology built around it, they can now have access to banking-like features, but without the credit profile which they probably lack, and importantly they can join the digital age and conduct transactions online without the need for credit cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought the old NPR podcasts were pretty good introductions: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/13/137795648/the- tues...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/13/137795648/the-tuesday- podcast-bitcoin) [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/04/09/176688096/episode-450-bitcoin- goes-to-the-moon)

</comment><comment><USER17> They forgot the other, key attribute of a dollar that makes it useful for 'distributing wealth': it has a relatively stable value. Economies rise and fall because of the struggle to control the price of their currencies. The notion that a medium of exchange with no such stability should replace the dollar is bonkers.

<comment><USER4> If by stable, you mean "decreasing steadily," then sure.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I'll take a fairly predictable rate of inflation over an inherently deflationary currency with absolutely no controls on its motion. I guess we're supposed to be excited about currency being able to flit around like a panicking moth?

<comment><USER18> I'll take the deflationary one, ty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I became familiar with what Bitcoin actually was via an article posted here about 7 or 8 months ago. It was a very long article, but it started from zero assumptions and worked through designing a crypto currency, bringing up each problem and then explaining how Bitcoin solves that problem.

I wish I could supply a link to it - maybe someone else has the article?

<comment><USER20> Possibly you're thinking of my article "How the Bitcoin Protocol Actually Works": [http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin- protocol-a...](http://www.michaelnielsen.org/ddi/how-the-bitcoin-protocol- actually-works/) It was on the HN front page 7 months ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> An excellent series of introductory Bitcoin lectures are available on Coursmos: [https://coursmos.com/course/dive-deep-into-a-bitcoin- bitcoin...](https://coursmos.com/course/dive-deep-into-a-bitcoin-bitcoin-term)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is the FIRST article I have ever read that gave me a no bs explanation on what bitcoins really are. It was a great read. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://multibit.org/faq.html](https://multibit.org/faq.html)</comment>


Fool's gold: what fish oil is doing to our health and the planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jul/25/fish-oil-hype-health-planet-supplements-study-no-benefit <comment><USER2> It's brain medicine, and autoimmune medicine. Nobody is taking it for their heart.</comment>


How I learned to Code in Under 10 Months - <AUTHOR> http://rileyh.com/how-i-learned-to-code-in-under-10-months

<comment><USER2> Man, every time I see this I feel like I somehowed failed in my self-learning. I went through "beginning programming for dummies" back in middle school (checked out at my local library), running around in the win95 version of QBASIC. Then I looked at C++, through "C++ for dummies" (could barely understand pointers), and spent so much time trying to figure out how anything worked.

I remember coming up with state machines to run little critters in a game I was trying to make, as well as writing up a UI library(with click listeners) in the beginning of high school, before people introduced me to those concepts. It was really fun to write the first time. Now I feel a bit stupid not putting these things into google, but I was on an old computer without internet access.

I spent a lot of time in high school goofing off in Actionscript too, looking around and copy-pasting code from the Newgrounds forums.

In the end, after 5 years of doing this I was still pretty worthless. Granted this was very much a part time hobby, but seeing people roll up so quickly is neat.

<comment><AUTHOR> So much is starting to change now with there actually being great quality online education options if you are able to learn on your own. I am definitely not the 'learn out of a book' kind of person, so I really attribute my success in learning to the online courses I was able to take.</comment></comment>


Facetmobile FMX-4 Research Airplane (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://www.wainfan.com/facet.htm <comment><USER2> Trying to make it stay on the front page until the aviators and aircraft mechanics wake up and come online ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> which is when?

<comment><USER2> A couple of days ago. Either they are fewer than I thought or they didn't find it very interesting or something else :-)

At least we got some information: "There is a long list of excellent aircraft like the Long EZ and the Facetmobile that..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've loved the facetmobile since I first read about it several years ago. If I ever get to the part of my bucket list that says "build experimental airplane", I'll model it after this.

Could be complete coincidence, but I like how it resembles a nighthawk from the side view (oshkosh pic). The tail designation N117WD makes me think I'm not alone in that observation :)

</comment><comment><USER4> It's cheap, stable, and spacious. So why hasn't this taken off?

<comment><USER5> I suspect it has much to do with people being slow to accept big changes in some systems.

Boeing (and surely other airplane manufacturers) has investigated and considered lifting body designs - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_wing_body](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_wing_body) \- but chose to move forward with traditional designs. I don't see the news item now, but I read that Boeing felt it was just too radical for passengers to accept (despite the significant advantages).

It will probably take some wealthy "renegade" type to start a new airplane company that offers new designs like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I saw Lee Majors crash one of those at the beginning of each episode of the "Six Million Dollar Man" [1] in the early to mid '70s. Lifting bodies are a cool idea but with inflation, can we afford to rebuild the people that crash them?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLs0V8T5AA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoLs0V8T5AA)

</comment><comment><USER7> Wonderfully reminiscent of something out of Elite or Frontier. Really want to see one of these floating towards a spinning space station before hitting the side and exploding spectacularly.</comment>


Refined NeoVim Experience for MacOS - <AUTHOR> http://vimr.org <comment><AUTHOR> As of June 2016, VimR moved from using a MacVim backend to a NeoVim backend. I've been using it for a while now, and the combination of VimR and NeoVim has been great.</comment>


U.S. "looking at" banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-pompeo-united-states-weighing-ban-chinese-social-media-apps/ <comment><USER2> I'm having a hard time imagining what a ban on an app would look like.

Would they impose sanctions on the corporation, and go after any US-based app storefronts that carry the app for breaking a trade embargo? Maybe do the same for any US-based advertising networks that TikTok uses?

Or is a "ban" going to look like an order for government employees to stay off TikTok?

<comment><USER3> They'd probably just ban Apple and Google from having TikTok available on their App Stores.

Personally, I can't see how TikTok is any different from FaceBook. They both extract data from their users, they both hand over that data to governments who want it.

Ban TikTok, maybe. But to be consistent, you should ban FaceBook too.

<comment><USER2> I'm not aware of any US law that allows the federal government to order a corporation to cease publication of an app. In fact, that would probably be a First Amendment violation.</comment></comment></comment>


12 Ridiculously effective techniques to mastering productivity as a founder - <AUTHOR> http://fitfrnd.com/blog/2014/11/15/12-ridiculously-effective-techniques-mastering-productivity-startup-founder/

<comment><USER2> I don't think I could code first thing in the morning. I am still booting then, perhaps related to option 2 too. I do like the concept thou, just can't see how to make it reality for myself

</comment><comment><USER3> Very thoughtful and provocative. Particularly 1-5. One line of code is a neat idea. I have a problem with procrastination in general. Will try it.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks. it's really effective. another friend of mine was having trouble studying for medical exams and I told him to try it. he hated the rote memorization and just couldn't get himself to read all the stuff and memorize it. Which was making him really irritable and frustrated.

He started starting the day with one question in the morning. He cleared his Step 1 within 6 months. It was his 3rd try..</comment></comment>


Top global IT firms have more staff in India than home nations - <AUTHOR> http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/ites/top-global-it-firms-have-more-staff-in-india-than-home-nations/articleshow/25282762.cms <comment><USER4> Companies like IBM are "American" only in the sense that (1) legally they are domiciled in a US state such as, say, Delaware; (2) physically they are headquartered in or near a major US airport; and (3) their shares are listed in a US stock exchange.

In most other ways, these companies transcend national boundaries. For example, many of them book a substantial portion of revenues through complex networks of "offshore" subsidiaries to avoid paying corporate taxes in any jurisdiction.[1]

\--

[1] For example, see [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Doubl...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/28/business/Double- Irish-With-A-Dutch-Sandwich.html)

\--

Edit: deleted reference to "Accenture," which is apparently legally domiciled in Ireland (thanks mschaef).

<comment><USER5> Accenture is technically "Irish". It used to be "Bermudan". In either case, they have so many employees in so many countries, it's hard to imagine pinning them down to a single home country.

<comment><USER6> Us old timers remember them as "Andersen Consulting", the folks that got paid by our C-levels to drive the company into the ground...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >> "There is a surplus at the entry level and salaries at this level have stabilized."

That's a nice euphemism for "there are a lot of fresh graduates whom we really don't have to pay much".

Considering that, the initial statement

 _" It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries."_

really isn't something to be very proud of.

<comment><USER8> Can't agree more

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is the Indian mindset to solve every problem by hiring more people. Thanks to the shitload of cheap, unskilled engineers, this dream is economical. A friend had contracted one such company to overhaul his website. He has been co-ordinating with 4 - 5 people in the company, and it's been over a month, and these people can't write a simple 301 redirection without breaking his whole site. My friend happens to be a non-technical guy, so he can't see their shit. Sad.

<comment><USER10> seeing this from an onshore perspective of an IT company - it's really not about "solving every problem by hiring people being an Indian mentality" \- it's actually a caveat of the way the IT Services industry works. IT companies are at the end of the day more or less commodity traders. what is the commodity? Skilled (arguably) labour. The more you sell - the more you make - I've seen companies sell x+50% heads for a project that required realistically maybe even less than x. But if you're making 20% margin on each head - and the company buying the effort is still saving a few million over doing the same work onshore - everyone is happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just for your reference:

1 lakh (or lac) = 100,000

1 crore = 10,000,000

</comment><comment><USER12> How this is a big surprise?

If the man you're looking for is one in a million, we've probably got a thousand of them for you to pick from.

But I think there needs to be a defense made about cheap indian labour & why it works for american firms (more than the french or germans).

I'm sitting in Bangalore right now and I can see why this happened. We all speak English, we grew up watching Simpsons and can quote Friends episodes by events. We're immersed in the culture so deep that visiting your parents is a culture shock.

And the vast numbers are because there are a lot of bad engineers. There are a lot of good engineers - but a far lower fraction than in most other parts of the world.

But if you are an employer who's hiring locally instead of contracting work to a cheap contractor, you can spend some time culling the bad ones and then the good ones were truly great value for money.

My first job paid 250$ a month - for that pittance I was debugging ARM microkernels on an Ericsson phone. And that did pay the bills because of a few other advantages I had growing up - I had a cheap tax-payer funded education, but it was truly remarkable one beyond the textbooks.

My CS grad education cost approx 500$ for 4 years, had good teachers. The tenured professors were great, particularly graph theory & compilers - <USER2> COBOL teacher, whose lessons are why I'm finding hadoop to be very interesting to work on today. The labs were good with mostly SunOS/Netware boxes & a few Xilinx boards donated by alumni. I even had to do 8086 assembly by hand in hex for my lab exams.

My classmates included children of cab drivers, college professors, household help and of the filthy rich - we weren't equal outside college, but in class we were on the same level. Social class got scrubbed out of our egos and talent showed no correlation. And the EE course had 17 boys for approx 160 girls.

But that said all of us were the top ~1% of the state educational system after the math-heavy entrance tests (I had to get a double digit rank in approx 5-6 million people, to qualify).

Most of us spoke English as a first language (at least as good as one), nearly all of us bilingual (and not in the same languages) who were used to our English being misunderstood. This was something we all learnt to realize & work on our communication.

On top of that my college had an FSF chapter ([http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1...](http://www.cetafi.net/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=147)), I volunteered there for 2 months after college and even spent 2 years on an open-source project.

I might have been good engineer material to begin with. But that cheap and rather real-life education I got made me competitive on factors beyond economics.

And I assume there are at least a few like me around for the employers who want to dig through the chaff.

<comment><USER13> > Most of us spoke English as a first language (at least as good as one), > nearly all of us bilingual (and not in the same languages) who were used to > our English being misunderstood.

I have to disagree I find that a lot of people from India do not pronounce the syllables in the way that a native speaker does.

<comment><USER14> > in the way that a native speaker does

You are aware that native speakers can have (sometimes wildly) varying accents, right?

There are inarguably millions upon millions L1 English speakers in India. The fact that the English they speak isn't identical to the one you speak doesn't really change that fact.

<comment><USER13> Well I dont have trouble communicating with the majority of people in the US no matter where they are from or even the UK and Europe. But I do have a problem understanding the Indians that I am talking to 10+ hours a week.

I am not trying to bash people from India here its just that I have more trouble communicating with so called "English as first language too" speakers than other groups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sample set is biased , and upon that it's quality which matters not quantity. While considering top firms like Google, Facebook,Linkedin, Twitter etc. , it turns out to be other way round. There is lot of scope of improvements , especially to boost start-up culture here in India.

</comment><comment><USER15> Well, there is nothing surprising in it at the same time it is clearly not what that article is suggesting.

\-- It's a measure of India's strength in software services and the number of engineers it produces that some of the world's largest IT companies have more employees in India now than in their home countries. \--

</comment><comment><USER16> What is the # of "good" developers in India? What is the # of "bad" developers in India?

What is the # of "good" developers in the US? What is the # of "bad" developers in the US?

This is a lot more of an interesting question.

<comment><USER17> In terms of sheer numbers India may very well be ahead in both categories...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How about as a percent of the country's total population? India's certainly a larger country population-wise.

</comment><comment><USER19> I bet even in the home nation, there are more Indian staff than native ones.

</comment><comment><USER20> Now China has taken manufacturing jobs, and India is taking IT jobs.

</comment><comment><USER21> Absolute advantage as work here.

</comment><comment><USER22> India would have the talent and the headcount to be anything it wanted to be, if it were not for the one missing ingredient: the ability to leave people's freedom alone. Many of factories in China would now be in India. Larry Page is in the market for another location. Mark Zuckerberg undoubtedly too. If India painstakingly managed to develop the ability to rein in their paperwork kingdom, the so-called "license Raj", Silicon Valley would have moved there a long time ago already. Until now, India just can't. It is simply impossible to reduce the incessant harassments of their bureaucracy. They will terrorize everybody. At the same time nobody else will ever agree to put up with them and be terrorized. They will not move there. They will keep flying out the Indians instead.

<comment><USER23> The bureaucracy has indeed scared away a lot of foreign interest in the country.

<comment><USER24> Which is just fine because globalism would rape their country otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wow, another 'China' is going to steal more jobs. lol

<comment><USER10> this is not new - china has maybe been more in the spotlight - IT has been outsourced to India atleast for 2 decades now - those jobs are already "stolen" if you will. The real story if you care to put aside your bias though - is that a bulk of what these guys are doing is IT grunt work - stuff thats in IT terms "menial" \- solving simple tickets, implementing basic CRUD stuff etc. Stuff that a good programmer in the West - wouldn't want to do - <USER3> would honestly be too expensive to do. Until you figure out how to automate it - you do it where it's cheap and labour is ready. Econ 101.

<comment><USER26> You're missing the second order effects. In the old days the route into the industry for non-traditional candidates was to start on the helpdesk or in QA and work hard and then get the nod to move across to engineering if you were good. One of the best managers I ever worked for got her start that way. But if this "menial" work is outsourced, where does that leave us in the West? Without one stream of high quality talent.</comment></comment></comment>