I was going to say: surely the US military maintains a manufacturing core?

I’m a metal fabricator by trade, and one thing you quickly notice is: with a machine shop and a fabrication shop you are tooled up to build the machines to manufacture almost anything.

Folks, military physician here, operating at the national level on the analysis that informs these projects. The recent post on HN about the MIT $100 ventilator is one of the things that got this rolling.

Manufacturing is spinning up. What I really need is developers on this project:

https://github.com/joshua-s/coronavirus-diary

Josh you should put a call to action on the repo. There are no issues listed. I don't see links to anywhere that would let me help listed on the readme.

How can I contact you?

There is an app already in use in the Netherlands. They are field testing at scale and releasing better versions twice a day. Next monday it will be distributed to all hospitals and most citizens. Dutch PBS prime time news had a 5 minute documentary on the app yesterday March 18th.

From the README file on the coronavirus-diary:

Coronavirus Diary is a mobile application that allows users to record their medical status, location, and activities to an encrypted vault on their device. If the user experiences symptoms in line with the disease, they will be prompted to contact their physician.

In the case that a user contracts the disease, they can release their historical data to a physician to aid in treatment, research, and containment effort.

There are a lot of software projects spinning up -- how do we know that this one is going to see active use?

As an example for my concern -- I've had a consistently-updated pull-request[1] outstanding for the JHU data repository for more than a week. It is their prerogative not to pull, but it means my contribution is largely wasted.

The coronavirus-diary project has one contributor, no issues, and no pull requests.

[1]https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/pull/296

OP here (and no, I'm not josh). We need the project to get from 1 to 2 to 10 to N. That 1 to 2 bit is hard. Please, push a bit.

JHU is bandwidth-constrained. Put your effort where it can have effect.

What help do you need? - testers? - docs? - code reviews?

Need more developers:

* security engineer

* iOS engineer

* Android developer

* Dart engineers

* Flutter developers

* Engineers with health industry experience

* backend infrastructure

* backend security

Goal: 1-2 months to MVP deployment. Maybe sooner if people pile on.

Wow...really? A MIT project with HN post is what kicked this off. As in...no one thought of this until then?

welcome to the information age, where even the top brass can't make sense of it all and consequences will never be the same

Machine shops are Turing complete. You can use a machine to fabricate the machine you are using.

Very few are. Making ball bearings, for example, requires very special machines that no regular shop has.

...but you can make machines in machine shops, as pointed out above. or machines to make machines, if needed.

or in the simpler case you might fall back to scraped and oiled ways and bushings

'Their Optical Section performs optical alignment on shafting, masts, and other equipment.'

That's me! Norfolk Naval Station is just one shipyard in the area. There are similar yards with all of the same equipment. BAE/Colanna/NASSCO/NNSY/Lyons/ECSR. It's the same story in San Diego, Pascagula, Jacksonville, Hawaii.

Cool!

That's the cleanest link I came across to illustrate the point. I think people forget how much end-to-end manufacturing capability the military retains (especially the Navy), even in these days of outsourced procurement pressure.

Required to buy from USA manufacturers for nearly every thing. There are a substantial number of small shops supporting the US Navy.