Live data from Hacker News

The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

sfmayor.org

271–280 of 893 posts

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#271

I'm lucky enough to have remote work. And I'm sure many HNers have a nice buffer of savings from their tech jobs to weather the storm or are getting paid time off. But can anyone share what it's like to not be in either of these situations? How are your rent lords handling things? I live abroad in a cheap country so I can handle zero income, but I wouldn't be able to last long if rent was $2000+/mo instead of the Yet…

Get off reddit, you won't regret it or miss it at all tbh.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So when do you lift the stay in place? When there's 0 cases? If so, what if that never happens?

When someone comes up with a sane, sensible and actionable plan. Waiting it out for a vaccine. Even/odd days. Provisioning of masks for everybody. Enough toilet paper to ensure basic sanitation. Enough COVID tests to effectively gauge progress or regress. Rationing. Put all unemployed Americans on the military payroll and make them take turns delivering supplies. We could look at what any other country who has made e…

So much this. Mine is a trite comment, but I can't put it any better than you have.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#273
post #165

I'm lucky enough to have remote work. And I'm sure many HNers have a nice buffer of savings from their tech jobs to weather the storm or are getting paid time off. But can anyone share what it's like to not be in either of these situations? How are your rent lords handling things? I live abroad in a cheap country so I can handle zero income, but I wouldn't be able to last long if rent was $2000+/mo instead of the Yet…

It's a class divide, unfortunately. The people who are getting hit hardest are the people who were already getting hit hardest. Most of those don't frequent the same internet forums we do.

Some politicians have pointed out that some lower income people are getting paid more to _not_ work now, due to unemployment benefits and the CARES Act.

I'm not saying that I agree with those politicians.

It seems like the concern for lower income people runs the gamut from them not being able to make it to them living high on the benefits hog.

Edit: It's not just politicians-- similar stories are on CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/she-got-a-paycheck-protectio...

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#274

I'm surprised we're not seeing plans for some businesses to reopen with restrictions. I think it will be a while before we allow haircuts and manicures again, but I see no reason why we can't increase the types of businesses allowed open. Limiting occupancy, requiring PPE, and enforcing social distancing appear to be reasonable requirements. I hope the politicians and government workers are busy trying to find a midd…

why haircuts and manicures? Its a low population setting (1:1). If there is proper hand washing between clients, each new client gets a squirt of sanitizer, and both clients and stylists wear a mask? Require every haircut to start with a shampoo for mechanical disinfection.

That's a decision for those in government, but personally I see it as a balance of risk vs reward. There is a high risk of infection and relatively little benefit. It is probably better, for society as a whole, to pay the unemployment payments and have long hair for a while.

Shampoo doesn't remove the virus from one's lungs or exhalations. I'm not sure what benefit shampoo would have over, say, gloves. PPE is good but hairstylists aren't usually trained in its proper use.

I would hope dentists' offices reopen before hairstylists. Dentists are presumably more able to properly use PPE and disinfectants.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I require San Francisco to spell out what their goals are! I fundamentally reject the idea that it's our duty as citizens to shut up and do whatever London Breed thinks is best. If she's not willing to explain why these emergency restrictions are necessary and how we'll know when they aren't necessary, we shouldn't comply.

Is there a statute somewhere that requires London Breed to spell anything out to your satisfaction? I don't know what California's emergency management laws look like; maybe you're right.

Does there have to be a statute to advocate for a rational, numerical based approach to public policy?

You're a super smart, analytical guy. You don't see any problem with imposing extremely restrictive rules on a population of millions without even a basic attempt to quantify what your desired outcome is?

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#276
post #221

The reddit hive mind has become terrifying. It has seriously had a tangible effect on my faith in humanity. I never got onto Twitter but I assume it's about the same.

I intentionally moved from reddit to HN after this same specific realization. After a few years it seemed like reddit would be a good place for hyper local info on covid, but I quickly saw the same effect— misanthropy in the face of so many people trying to do the best they could for others during hard times. It’s off topic here, but I seriously wonder what specifically caused reddit to adopt the largely toxic cultur…

There were three huge changes to Reddit culture that I noticed. I might have these out of chronological order, but that's not material to the changes themselves.

The first was when posts started showing thumbnails. This made image content much more viable. Unfortunately, while there's plenty of awesome image content, it's also one of the lowest-effort routes for "shitposts" (the definition of which is left to the reader).

The second was the growth of subreddits. This allowed the community to split and silo itself. As a clichéd example, you can pick your left-wing politics subreddit or your right-wing politics subreddit, and you never have to mix with the other, bad one!

And the third was the death of Digg, which sent a huge influx of people Reddit's way. That one's got a lot of folk mythology behind it and little hard data, so I'll say no more.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, his argument has very little logic. He's just using numbers to tell the story that he wants to hear. "Correlation doesn't imply causation"

What is the logic behind restricting driving? (See my other comment here as well).

That (1) driving is a pre-cursor to contact with others and (2) driving requires contact with others (gassing up, toll booths, parking attendants, snacks, LE and so on) and (3) driving could lead to accidents which might in turn lead to you ending up in the ER or requiring ambulance transport.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is untrue. We may have plateaued but we haven't yet seen a significant drop from the peak yet. 4 days ago there were 115 deaths, then 93 the next day, then 89 the next, that's as high as the peak you're referring to. Source - daily department of health releases https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/OPA/Pages/New-Release-2020.... The drop you are inferring from your graph appears to be a be a reflection of a noisy dat…

Yeah that's definitely a day-of-week/reporting dump effect making that spike. The 7 day rolling data for deaths shows CA is only 6% below the most recent peak: https://www.deptofnumbers.com/covid19/california/#deaths nb: that's my site

Not to mention that death lags infection by 1-2 weeks, your site shows that pretty nicely (the lull in new infections several weeks ago mirrors the lull in new deaths).

We haven't crested the peak in death until a few weeks after we crest new infections, and it doesn't look like we've done that yet.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#279
post #221

The reddit hive mind has become terrifying. It has seriously had a tangible effect on my faith in humanity. I never got onto Twitter but I assume it's about the same.

I intentionally moved from reddit to HN after this same specific realization. After a few years it seemed like reddit would be a good place for hyper local info on covid, but I quickly saw the same effect— misanthropy in the face of so many people trying to do the best they could for others during hard times. It’s off topic here, but I seriously wonder what specifically caused reddit to adopt the largely toxic cultur…

My guess for the main reason Reddit feels so toxic would be younger demographic whose primary concern is demonstrating how much "smarter" they are than an average person. The commenting guidelines are also super lax, and the topics covered are very diverse.

Which is mostly the opposite of HN, which skews older and actually more educated, comment guidelines are much stricter, and the topics covered are much more technical and narrow. Even non-tech topics covered on HN (e.g., in-depth discussions of particular judicial rulings) aren't really of much interest to an average teenager or a person in general. Which leads to a few different potential effects:

a) Older and more educated people have much less reason to "flex" how smart they are. The also have fewer occurrences of delusions of grandeur/Dunning-Krueger effect.

b) Niche technical topics have a barrier to entry, which already eliminates a gigantic portion of the toxic audience. The topics themselves are also largely uninteresting to an average person.

c) Stricter comment moderation eliminates a lot of potential toxic material, like every other comment devolving into a shitty attempt at a joke or a personal attack.

And for me, personally, the biggest difference seems to be that on HN, there is a way higher prevalence of people trying to figure out what is right, instead of who is right. I am glad to be proven wrong in an argument here, because it gets me one step closer to finding the "most correct" answer. And the arguments themselves (usually) tend to be very polite. While on reddit, it seems like the vast majority (outside of some specialized and fairly niche subreddits) is just obsessed with proving that their answer is the "most correct" one, so they go all out on the means to reach that goal, which tends to any sort of arguments to become very uncivil very fast.

Re: The San Francisco Bay Area shelter-in-place order is being extended through May

#280
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting having no metrics, I'm talking about hard targets. Acknowledging that there are things we don't know about the problem and that we're not overcommitting to a course of action based on some specific target is reasonable. At the same time, to your point, I would like to see clear explanations of "these are the aspects of the disease we are trying to understand (virality, mortality, etc)," these are t…

I think that the government agency in charge of the shutdown should be able to answer each of three basic questions with clarity and some kind of numerical response: 1) What are you hoping this policy will accomplish? 2) What sequence of events, if any, would cause you to accelerate your timetable for easing restrictions? 3) What sequence of events, if any, would cause you to delay your timetable for easing restricti…

Your questions are all reasonable. I'm not personally opposed to quantitative decision-making, but I'm also painfully aware of the limitations of quantitative methods, especially when applied under pressure. I would argue that a blind faith in mathematics is just as wrongheaded as the magical thinking you're describing.

To give a clear example of why I'm skeptical, look at the use of quantitative methods to conduct governance in the banking industry. It's not that we shouldn't have used numerical methods, it's just that they ended up being woefully insufficient because of how they were applied. There's no reason we couldn't make the same mistake here in a premature bid for some kind of certainty.

Post reply on HN