Peeler Man, HN Salesmanship Hero, Passes - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/03ades.html?hp

<comment><USER2> It was the strangest thing. I was walking by union square a few years ago when I saw him going into his pitch. It really was a site to see. His booming voice drew me and about 20+ other people in, where we stood around watching him peel carrots for at least 5 minutes. Not sure why, but I felt like I had to buy one. It was a dance really. The way he used the peeler was mesmerizing.

I still have my peeler.

<comment><USER3> On the good news side, if your peeler ever breaks, it's also sold in most supermarkets in Europe and Asia - and most of the ones you can buy here aren't made of scrap metal, but of ergonomic, comfortable plastic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Its interesting to me on an intellectual level to compare your way of describing the peeler to his way of describing the peeler. You describe breakage as an intrinsic feature of peelers, much like 1970s Ford might describe defects as an intrinsic feature of cars.

He describes his peelers as being remarkable accomplishments of Swiss engineering that do not break, period, and repeatedly contrasts it with the peelers you can buy in most supermarkets in Europe and Asia. I can just about quote it from memory: "This isn't a cheap peeler. If you want a cheap peeler you can buy one at any dollar store. This peeler was made in Switzerland and nothing from Switzerland was ever cheap. You don't buy this peeler because it is cheap and you can replace it when it wears out, you buy it because it will be the last peeler you ever buy."

Now it might be the case that you and he are still talking about the same peeler. I think that this demonstrates one little technique which makes him a really good salesman for the peeler. I think that this technique is a useful one to stick in the quiver -- it works with positioning software, too. He is so consummately good at selling that I think we could learn a lot from him, including this one little technique, which is why I consider him noteworthy to HN.

On being the Last X You Will Every Buy: I use a variation of the same to position my software. Most software in my vertical is licensed in such a way that it requires repurchase every year. There are a bunch of reasons for this -- suffice it to say that most IP in my vertical is treated that way, software is largely produced by the existing IP makers, and they ported their license terms from their existing businesses without much regard to how software changes the game. I think my customers hate that business model with a burning passion, largely because my customers tell me they hate that business model with a burning passion. I licensed my software perpetually and position it, very explicitly, as The Last X You Will Ever Buy. I think this is one reason why I can get away with charging more than almost any of my competitors, announce a price increase, and have customers send me mail telling me how cheap I am.

<comment><USER3> I'm from Switzerland. Those peelers are available in all supermarkets here - both the plain metal ones and more advanced ones with moulded plastic handles. Typically the plastic ones are more reliable.

I was not suggesting that it will necessarily break, but there are many ways to find yourself needing a new peeler. You could lose it. You could lend it to someone who doesn't give it back. Your girlfriend could borrow it and then break up with you before having given it back (though hopefully it won't be because of the peeler). Or it could just break - the handle won't break, of course, but the blade might eventually get dull, or the joint between the blade and the handle might get loose.

I agree that this guy was a good salesman, by the way, and that we can learn from that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> See the guy in action at <http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=HCUct4NlxE0>

A really fantastic pitchman, great to watch and made an absolute craft out of his work.

<comment><USER5> Sold.

I want one of those peelers.

<comment><USER6> Buy one:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0019VOPU0?ie=UTF8&tag=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0019VOPU0?ie=UTF8&tag=prsboos&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0019VOPU0)

<comment><USER5> From him :).

<comment><USER7> too late :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For people like me, who missed the previous discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378852>

Considering there were only 14 posts on this article, I don't think "HN Salesmanship hero" is in any way accurate... Perhaps he's the posters hero, or some subset of HN, but I don't think it's useful to assume all of HN thinks a certain way.

He certainly has a very good technique though, and I imagine was great to watch.

</comment><comment><USER9> Sad, I just saw him in Union Square on Saturday.

<comment><USER10> It is. I was looking forward to seeing him and the crowds around him in the Spring when it got warmer out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow, I just saw him this past Saturday; it's going to be strange to walk into that market and _not_ see him any more.

</comment><comment><USER12> The peeler man is autonomy personified. Clearly he could have not sold peelers, and clearly he could have not worked on the street. But he did, seemingly not driven by money alone, but by a fascination for exchanging his story for your attention.

It's hard to properly mourn such an inspiring and humble performance. This is not willy loman. The peeler man's craft was an art form in a city where hyper capitalism and over commodification enslave most of its residents.

</comment><comment><USER13> I had relatives in the city over the last weekend. They had a checklist of stuff they wanted to see, and they managed to see everything but the Peeler Guy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Can't read this without logging in, but a related article:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/03ades.html?partn...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/nyregion/03ades.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

Is it the same? It appears to be ...

<comment><USER15> It is the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh man, I will miss him. I used to walk past him almost every day around Court St selling those peelers.

</comment><comment><USER3> HN salesmanship hero? Do you want a bit more exaggeration in your hyperbole sandwich?

<comment><AUTHOR> See: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=378852>

As an understatement: most of us will not have our demoing skills celebrated on the front page of the NYT on the day we die.

<comment><USER3> Then maybe you should have called him a NY Times salesmanship hero - if you think that the NY Times, as an aggregate organisation, thinks he's a salesmanship hero.

I'm not saying that there wasn't some discussion of his salesmanship, but it's a long way, imho, from being a "salesman who's been discussed" (an achievement in and of itself) to being a "salesmanship hero".

I think a more appropriate headline for this article would have been "Peeler man, previously discussed on HN, passes"

<comment><USER17> When someone dies, people usually add a little warmth to any description of them. And that's the way it should be. Respect.

<comment><USER3> Respect where it's due. I have no more respect for a guy who sold potato peelers than for anyone else, whether or not he had good street sales skills. The fact that he was mentioned on HN and his sales skill was discussed doesn't make him a hero - and certainly not my hero. It's a sad thing when anyone dies, but I feel no need to put dead people on a pedestal. Do you?

I maintain that the title of this thread is unnecessary hyperbole, and if we're talking about respect, I'd appreciate it if the hordes of people who are downmodding me in some sort of sheeple momentum voting would take a second and consider whether my comments really deserve that kind of downvoting (which should only be reserved for things that are truly offensive, trolling, or spammy).

<comment><USER5> I upvoted you, but it's probably because you're insulting them. For better or worse, deaths tend to make people particularly on edge.

The word "hero", like the words "unique" and "expert" do not really mean anything anymore because they're so overused. And while I would not consider him a hero, it's always cool to see stories about people who are flat out really good at what they do.

<comment><USER3> _For better or worse, deaths tend to make people particularly on edge._

I know what you mean, and to an extent these posts are a little testing, a little spiteful, to see how knee-jerk people's reactions are really going to be. You might say I'm daring the HN community to behave better than it seems to be behaving. It might cost a little karma. Oh well.

I have little respect for taboo subjects, I'm afraid. In fact, the opposite: I believe that everything should be discussable in a civil manner. I feel that taboos don't help society, and that sheeple responses to taboo subjects is one of the more despicable aspects of human nature. I have not made any statements in this thread that I believe should be considered offensive by a civilised person, and I stand behind those statements as I would if anyone else had made them.

<comment><USER18> _"to an extent these posts are a little testing, a little spiteful, to see how knee-jerk people's reactions are really going to be"_

Isn't that kind of the definition of trolling? It seems like you're kind of bringing it on yourself if what you're saying here is true.

<comment><USER3> No, I don't think it qualifies as trolling if you're defending your beliefs. Trolling is when you make a statement that you know to be wrong for the purpose of eliciting excited responses.

The New Hacker's Dictionary defines trolling as:

 _[From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it._

 _Some people claim that the troll is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial._

(from <http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_35.html#SEC42> )

I don't think I'm doing that.

<comment><USER19> Yep, you're definitely doing it. You're resorting to the definition of the word, you've admitted it, you're now denying it only to gain more of a reaction.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Many Voices of Sweden, via Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/world/europe/many-voices-of-sweden-via-twitter.html?ref=technology <comment><USER2> It's nice that Sweden doesn't take itself so seriously that it can't do this.</comment>


Sex Differences in Visual Motion Processing - <AUTHOR> https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)30776-0 <comment><USER2> It's improtant to remember that this study isn't being done just to prove that men and women have different brains. It's primarly designed to help understand neurological phenomena like Autism which are sex differentiated.

Also, this study seemed to do a good job avoiding sexist stereotyping. This is an example of the _right_ way to do research about neurological differences between men and women.

<comment><USER3> It's critically important to admit that there ARE differences in the first place. Something that inexplicably has become taboo to many on the left.

<comment><USER4> There definitely _are_ differences. A lot of them.

In what way do you see this as taboo on the left? Among U.S. progressives, the complexity of sex differences seems to be very important; whereas my experience with U.S. conservatives is the opposite.

For example, given the following two statements:

"If you have a penis, you are male. If you do not, you are female."

"If someone has a female brain but male genitalia, that person should be free to align their gender appropriately."

Is your experience really that conservatives are more likely to agree with the second statement? If so, I'd be curious to know where, from a sociological perspective.

<comment><USER3> You can look up countless instances of Social Science professors and students saying unironically that for instance superior Male performance in sports is entirely due to social upbringing. These people are overwhelmingly on the left politically. James Damore was fired from Google for publishing a relatively straightforward reading of sexual difference research. So yes it is a taboo.

I don't think your example demonstrates my point at all. Accepting that there are sex differences has little to do with acceptance of Trans people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does this have implications for user interfaces in any way? I would guess that for women it could be harder to find fast moving objects (mouse cursor) or make sense of quick transitions on a screen.

<comment><USER6> Interfaces should probably avoid working on the threshold of human perception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This stuff matters for VR technology and the "uncanny valley". Early versions of the technology that crossed the uncanny valley for men did not necessarily cross it for women, and so women still get motion sick.

Some people have tried to study this with transgendered people who are undergoing hormone replacement therapy. There is enough of a difference to warrent further study.

<comment><USER8> I didn't know the uncanny valley had anything to do with motion sickness. Interesting.

<comment><USER7> Yeah. Found the article about it: [https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift- designed-to-be-sexi...](https://qz.com/192874/is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to- be-sexist/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This studie should be added to [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_cognition)

</comment><comment><USER10> For most of human history, men were pretty much forced to be the warriors and primary defenders of a village. Thus, there was strong genetic pressure to react quick (or die). But women seem better at "find Waldo" kind of tasks, so perhaps there's a tradeoff. We are tuned for different specialties.

<comment><USER11> It's worth mentioning that the cognitive science community generally shuns evolutionary arguments, as they tend to be "just so" assertions.

It's not that it's necessarily wrong, but rather unfalsifiable as such.

<comment><USER12> Who is "the cognitive community", and does it include the evolutionary psychologists?

<comment><USER13> The way you do evolutionary psychology scientifically is that you think about which physiological traits ought to have been produced by selective pressure and then check your predictions. Coming up with a _post hoc_ justification after the evidence is in just isn't science.

<comment><USER12> So the distinction is post hoc reasoning, not evolutionary explanations? I interpreted the OP's comment as condemning the latter.

<comment><USER13> The vast majority of people making evolutionary psychology arguments in Hacker News threads or newspaper op-eds or such are also doing the later so the bad associations are understandable, even if they're not really the fault of evolutionary psychology the academic field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Could this lower motion perception threshold explain male dominance in e-sports?

<comment><USER15> That's the first thing I thought of, granted, there must be so many factors involved in that one ... FYI it wouldn't just be 'e-sports' \- it would be 'all sports'. Everything from football to downhill skiing requires that kind of hyper aware processing.

<comment><USER14> I agree, there will be many other factors, like fine motor reaction time, and the most important is probably being able to outguess one's opponent. But a small gender-specific edge could well be sufficient to make the top ranks homogeneous.

I don't know that it would apply to all sports. For soccer, more inertia and bigger muscles at play might mean that that edge is insignificant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I can't tell much from only reading the summary, but I would think that any differences might be environmental, rather than genetic.

My general take is that there has been so much bad science throughout history around sex differences, I need very hard evidence that something is not environmental before I will buy into it.

<comment><USER3> Yeah the sexes are exactly identical. Males lack ovaries because of environmental effects... /s

<comment><USER17> If you won't stop trolling we'll ban the account.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why all the wasteful discussion about gender politics? Read the last sentence of the abstract —

"Overall, these results show how sex differences can manifest unexpectedly, highlighting the importance of sex as a factor in the design and analysis of perceptual and cognitive studies."

...which implies that some studies in the past may be in error because they didn't take into account otherwise innocuous differences in behavior between the sexes.

This is cool and interesting, right? Good, then take the gender politics chat back to reddit where it belongs.

<comment><USER19> This line of thinking leads for example to studies on differences in risk- taking behavior between genders, which then leads to people saying "of course most companies are run by man, because men being more risk-taking start more companies". This kind of sexist thinking has no place in academia.

<comment><USER20> It leads to that only if your agenda is to go there. If your agenda is to figure out how to make life better for people generally, it can lead to discussions of "Given that women tend to have this trait or circumstance that hinders their performance in our current cultural paradigms, what might work better to help them accomplish X, Y or Z should they so desire it?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting. I'd like to know why I can't remember people's names but can/have identified faces reverse aligned with path of travel with a glimpse (anecdotally; the brother of a roommate).</comment>


Distant languages have similar sounds for common words - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21707183-researchers-uncover-ancient-links-between-majority-worlds <comment><USER2> It is a curious fact, and one to which no one knows quite how much importance to attach, that something like 85% of all known worlds in the Galaxy, be they primitive or highly advanced, have invented a drink called jynnan tonnyx, or gee-N'N-T'N-ix, or jinond-o-nicks, or any one of a thousand or more variations on the same phonetic theme. The drinks themselves are not the same, and vary between the Sivolvian 'chinanto/mnigs' which is ordinary water served at slightly above room temperature, and the Gagrakackan 'tzjin-anthony-ks' which kill cows at a hundred paces; and in fact the one common factor between all of them, beyond the fact that the names sound the same, is that they were all invented and named before the worlds concerned made contact with any other worlds.

What can be made of this fact? It exists in total isolation. As far as any theory of structural linguistics is concerned it is right off the graph, and yet it persists. Old structural linguists get very angry when young structural linguists go on about it. Young structural linguists get deeply excited about it and stay up late at night convinced that they are very close to something of profound importance, and end up becoming old structural linguists before their time, getting very angry with the young ones. Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy discipline, and a large number of its practitioners spend too many nights drowning their problems in Ouisghian Zodahs.

<comment><USER3> There's a visceral gratification in the pronunciation "ginin taw nick" it rolls off the tongue, perhaps that is the root. My favorite word for this reason is pumpernickel.

<comment><USER4> Pumpernickel. A very woody word. [1]

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

<comment><USER3> That made my day, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't really a new discovery. It has been common knowledge in linguistics at least since the '70s that there is a universal tendency to use /i/-like sounds in words that designate smallness and /o/ or /a/-like sounds in words for the opposite. (Note: Tendency. There are plenty of counter-examples, but the tendency is still there.) This is possibly linked to sound symbolism and has to do with how you position your tongue when you say those vowels. Possibly.

There are also plenty of older studies using made-up words that show that people link /i/ sounds to sharpness and /o/~/a/ sounds to roundness. (E.g. show a group of subjects a triangle and a hexagon and ask them which one they think the word 'pirl' refers to. Then show another group the same shapes but use the word 'porl' instead.)

Sound symbolism is super interesting. The Jabberwocky is a great example of how certain phonemes/syllables can affect our interpretation despite not being connected to each other in any immediately meaningful way.

<comment><USER6> My interpretation of the significance of the study this article is about was that it is a very longitudinal study, demonstrating the patterns you mention across thousands of languages.

Anecdotally speaking as a multilingual person, I've noticed some of the same patterns - but untested, anecdotal comments aren't worth much; I find it significant and interesting that (at least some of) these trends seem to hold across thousands of languages. This isn't my field, though - is my impression of the significance here correct?

A second question: isn't it the currently held theory in linguistics that there is more or less a single "super parent" language - which my memory of my intro to linguistics class from ten years ago identifies as Proto-Indo European - and wouldn't that common linguistic ancestor provide a plausible alternative explanation for this common sound symbolism?

A question tangentially related to the above: the sounds you mention are all vowels, which are easier for infants to make and which infants tend to learn to make first; it seems to stand to reason that sound symbolism tied to sounds made earliest by infants would be more likely to be unchanged over time. Is there anything that rules out this perspective? Building on this, I know that there are some patterns to the development of abstract reasoning in children; has there any work been done on correlating abstract reasoning development timescales with the development of phonetic production skills? Perhaps this sound symbolism has to do a parallel in the developmental timelines of these two?

<comment><USER7> There was something called "Nostratic" hypothesized by some Russian linguists, I think. But broad though its spread is, I don't think that Proto-Indo European accounts even for all European languages--Hungarian, Basque, and Finnish being outliers. However, I am not a linguist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The words for "nose", for instance, often involve either an "n" sound or an > "oo" sound, no matter the language in question.

The wording here is almost painful. You can't play "often" as a minimizer against "no matter the X in question" like that. It is terribly confusing and the mark of someone who wants to sound sure, isn't sure, and isn't capable of making a more nuanced statement.

<comment><USER9> In Japanese, it's "Hana", and in Mandarin it's "Bizi". Seems like they're only talking about IE languages, and those influenced by them.

<comment><USER10> This isn't true--the study considered 4,000 languages from all the world's major language families: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/09/06/1605782113.abst...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2016/09/06/1605782113.abstract)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism#Relationship_w...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism#Relationship_with_neuroscience)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's not much too information in the article, to be honest. However, it's an interesting notion to me because I've recently become very interested in etymologies, specifically Proto-Indo-European. Since all people come from the same place and have roughly the same features, it's not hard to imagine that there was once a common shared tongue. After all, in the grand scheme of things, these migrations didn't happen all too long ago. I wonder if this will eventually lead to a new reconstructed language, something to tie together the Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, etc. Very exciting.

<comment><USER13> Checkout my post. I researched the timelines of when mammals appeared, when primates appeared, and when the continents first separated. One conclusion is that language existed WAY before even primates did.

On language: There is much to be learned from dolphins. They were just last week reported to have been seen having an actual back and forth complex conversation. Two dolphins were given a technical task to solve, and were discussing how best to do it. Pretty amazing.

<comment><USER14> Considering our nearest ancestors don't have complex language I'd say convergent/parallel evolution is a much more reasonable conclusion.

<comment><USER13> Dolphins have complex language using sound, and they are very distant cousins. The fact that chimps don't talk is likely to be 50% because of inadequate throat construction, and 50% lack of intelligence. Past extinct lifeforms could have easily had vocal cords and intelligence. We just don't know. That's the point of my post. The possibility exists that language first evolved billions of years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 175 million years ago all continents were merged into one, and about 65 million years ago primates appeared. If there is an actual historical link to this language pattern, one possible explanation is that animals were able to make sounds with vocal cords well before (like 100 million years before) we actually were primates. This is not far fetched at all. Recently dolphins were found to be having actual conversations. I mean mammals had been around 20 million years BEFORE the continents broke apart so perhaps there has always been a "segment" of mammals that had the right brain nodules to control speech and the requisite vocal cords also. Possibly the dino killing asteroid killed off most of the 'talking mammals' and only left one group of mammals that had these verbalizations, which were for some reason only transferred down one evolutionary branch of the tree that ended up at humans. It makes sense that it would always follow the branch of the volutionary tree that represents the highest intelligence. Language and intelligence reinforce each other in an evolutionary sense, so perhaps the value of speech just died out because it had little value in most animals because they had no intelligence to develop it further.

<comment><USER15> This is a completely unnecessary hypothesis. At some point early on all humankind was geographically co-located. If there are somewhat universal features to language that were transmitted memetically, it's a much more reasonable hypothesis that these are choices that were made before humanity spread too widely.

<comment><USER13> The thing that makes this a mystery is that we think the continents separated 175 million years ago, but primates didn't evolve until only 50 million years ago. I guess if there were still land-bridges between the continents 50 million years ago, then it makes sense that all humans are from the same small tribe that spoke the same "original" language. Problem solved. But my point was that language could have existed long before primates, and no one knows if that's right or wrong. The fact that monkeys don't talk is moot, because they are already 98% identical to humans so you can't make any argument based on similarity. Based on genetics there is no analysis that would have predicted monkeys wouldn't be able to speak, or for that matter be as intelligent as man.

<comment><USER16> > I guess if there were still land-bridges between the continents 50 million > years ago

There are land connections between two groups (of 3 and 2) of the inhabited continents _today_ , and as recently as _11,000_ years ago five of the six human-inhabited continents were mutually connected by land.

<comment><USER13> Yeah the simplest explanation is the conventional one, which is that all humans came from a common tribe that migrated out of africa long after the continents had separated mostly, and the way they got to some of the continents had to have been by boat. My initial post was merely saying how interesting it would be that language could have evolved well before primates, and we would have no way of knowing it. All you have to do is look at the fact that dolphins have language, and are very intelligent. Intelligence and language is far from being specific to human brains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Any non-Asian languages use onomatopoeia as the basis for animal nouns? In Vietnamese, the words for some common animals are basically the sound associated with said animal, like referring to a cat as a _" meow"_:

[https://translate.google.com/?um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw-...](https://translate.google.com/?um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&client=tw- ob#en/vi/cat%0Adog%0Acow%0Abird)

<comment><USER18> The funny thing is that "bo" means cow not only in Vietnamese but also in Irish, as well as in some Italian dialects (though Irish and Italian share the Indo-European roots). Does anybody know if the Vietnamese is in any way connected?

<comment><USER19> 'bo*' is pretty common for cows in european languages - they are the genus 'bos' after all (see: english 'bovine').

As for the Vietnamese roots, I thought it might have been a French loanword but it looks like it came from a proto-vietnamese language: [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%B2#Etymology_1](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%B2#Etymology_1)

<comment><USER20> The Google etymology viewer is pretty good for this: [https://www.google.com.au/search?q=etymology%20cow](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=etymology%20cow)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ramachandran touches on this in his TED talk (starts around 21:20 )about 'kiki' vs 'babu'.

[https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_min...](https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind)

</comment><comment><USER22> The similarities among mother/mom (English), mádre (Spanish), ma (Chinese, sorry if the intonation is wrong), ma/mata (Hindi) has perplexed me.

<comment><USER23> The earliest sounds that babies make tend to be "ma/muh" sounds, as they're smacking their lips to signal for food. Seems likely for language then to develop that sound into the word for "mother", the nearest object (food source as the case may be).

<comment><USER24> This pretty much explains away the entire article.

The progression of sounds that a baby learns is well understood, especially the physiological aspects of language development and acquisition.

If we accept as a premise that cultures would tend to assign words most relevant to babies according to their physiological capability, then it becomes obvious why words for mother, father, and even facial features would be strongly similar across cultures. And why the similarity will slowly diminish as the meaning of words becomes less important, functionally, for communication with a child.

And especially for simple words the phonetics would have very little to do with cognitive development (and evolutionarily-dictated language models), but be controlled almost entirely by a baby's physical constraints--e.g. huge tongue in a tiny mouth, poor motor control, etc.

<comment><USER25> It does explain similarity of words for familial relations, but not for things like "nose". Babies don't randomly say "nose", or something that sounds similar, while pointing at their nose.

<comment><USER26> Yeah, for a very, very, very small subset of words, the very first and most immediate things babies care about, this theory makes some sense.

For everything else, not so much.

<comment><USER24> 100 basic words (the corpus of the study) is such a small subset, especially if you posit very strong correlations among subsets of those 100 words most likely to be used in the first year of life.

And especially considering that the researchers "reduced all sounds to 34 distinct consonants and 7 vowels." (Consider that the more we reduce and simplify the vocalizations the more likely we should expect correlations. For example, if we simplified all sounds to grunts we should expect tremendous overlap.)

The correlation of the corpus of 100 words isn't particularly surprising given what we already know about language development. The null hypothesis was that there'd be no correlation whatsoever (i.e. the sounds would be completely random), which I don't think anybody could reasonably expect.

<comment><USER27> Indeed. Especially when the article gives us this: "...the team found a lot more consistency across languages than they had expected." What does that mean? Were their originally expectations reasonable, or did they merely re- discover the birthday paradox?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Link seems to be dead? Redirects me to front page of economist.com.

<comment><USER29> Try this:

[http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2170718...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21707183-researchers-uncover-ancient-links-between-majority-worlds)

<comment><USER30> Thank you! We updated the submission.</comment></comment></comment>


WHO launches global megatrial of the four most promising coronavirus treatments - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/who-launches-global-megatrial-four-most-promising-coronavirus-treatments <comment><USER2> I am missing Fujifilm's Avigan/Favipiravir here - Chinese reported success using it:

"On 17 March 2020, Chinese officials suggested that Favipiravir seemed to be effective in treating COVID-19 in Wuhan and Shenzhen.[31][32][33]

A study on 80 patients comparing it to lopinavir/ritonavir found that it significantly reduced viral clearance time to 4 days, compared to 11 for the control group, and that 91.43% of patients had improved CT scans with few side effects."

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

<comment><USER3> The four drugs they are testing seem to be already developed/approved in humans for other uses so expanding the label is easy, while avigan is still experimental (some limited approval in Japan, but worldwide acceptance not there yet) and would have to go through much more testing before being unleashed at coronavirus scale.

<comment><USER4> Surely if it's already being used in Japan it's been tested enough to use globally in an emergency.

<comment><USER3> It's very limited approval, it's not something that's just approved and available to be prescribed to anyone. According to the wiki it's only approved in an emergency (presumably meaning individual, not societal, emergency) because of concerns with toxicity and alll. And countries don't automatically trust other countries to approve drugs correctly - Europe did not buy what the FDA was saying about opioids for chronic pain which saved a lot of lives on Europe. The damage that would come from releasing a half baked drug into the world with terrible side effects would vastly outweigh the benefits of mitigating coronavirus, and that's a mistake you only get to make once.

I'm sure they'll test the drug in the future though, there are likely plans to test it as we speak, and if it works really well there are lots of ways to get expedited approval, especially in a state of emergency

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stage of disease also is important. In the first symptomatic stage, makes sense to try antivirals and HCQ to reduce or eliminate the virus, and prevent a cascade into the next stage. The problematic second stage - ARDS, a subset of patients who really go critical, seems to call for different approach because at that time, it's the cytokine storm and our own immune reaction killing us.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a source for the last part?

<comment><USER5> A good synopsis of current understanding (as of last Friday) was a UCSF Medicine Grand Rounds broadcast. I've bookmarked the most relevant slide to our discussion in particular: [https://youtu.be/bt- BzEve46Y?t=2349](https://youtu.be/bt-BzEve46Y?t=2349)

Significant lung and myocardial injury and papers have honed in on ARDS as a real problem.

<comment><USER7> This is a wonderful resource. Thank you for pointing it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The drugs on trial are:

1\. Remdesivir (Ebola drug).

2\. Chroloquine and Hydroxychroloquine (Malaria drug).

3\. Ritonavir/lopinavir (AIDS drug).

4\. Ritonavir/lopinavir + interferon beta (virus signaling protein).

<comment><USER9> Interesting to see interferon on here. I remember it being hailed as some sort of wonder drug back in the 80s, but then sort of fell off the radar.

[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=interferon](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=interferon)

<comment><USER10> Covid disables the innate immune response by preventing the expression of interferon alpha & beta.

This allows it to engage in uncontrolled replication for up to two weeks before the adaptive response brings it under control.

This massive viral load greatly contributes to transmission.

(Or at least SARS does this.)

[https://cmr.asm.org/content/20/4/660.long](https://cmr.asm.org/content/20/4/660.long)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone comment about the worldwide production capacity and possible lower price limits for these drugs?

It should be possible to supply a large part of the worlds population with (hydroxy)chloroquinine _if_ that is deemed a solution, but the others seem less ideal candidates for that, or am I wrong?

<comment><USER12> What I can personally comment on is that if people go on with hoarding on quinine derivatives, we're gonna have a massive problem whether it's found effective or not.

The hoarding is even happening among my lesser scientifically-reasonable md colleagues. This has to stop. Now.

<comment><USER13> Norwegian doctors have also been hoarding this for themselves lately. Enough that the Norwegian government had to step in and put it on a list so those that actually need it day-to-day can get hold of it.

I hope when this is over, someone will look into this behaviour from the MDs. It's eroding trust in the system when they claim potentially vital resources for themselves.

<comment><USER14> I don't know what the situation is like in Norway, but I 100% don't blame MDs in the US for trying to find their own treatments, because they're generally being left high and dry by the extreme rationing of the PPE. Doctors themselves have taken to personally reaching out to the communities near me so that they can find masks.

Obviously I don't want anyone with lupus / malaria / etc to be adversely affected, but I think the people being forced to work the front lines _do_ deserve to be somehow prioritized just from a "how do we keep the system operating efficiently" standpoint, and it doesn't really seem like the people who could manage supplies to make sure both parties needs are balanced, e.g. hospital administrations and regional governments, are going to take much responsibility for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> nil-sec Anyone knows why serum is not sufficient to completely solve all our issues? I applaud this trial but this confuses me. It seems like we already have the capacity to do this on large scale, it's considered very safe and as far as I understand is highly effective. There was an article about it here a few days back, but besides that I don't hear much about it in the general discussion, why?

<comment><USER15> One thing I couldn't find a source for is how many donors could potentially help how many people. Is it 1 to 1? 1 donor can help multiple people? Or one patient needs the amount of multiple donors?

<comment><USER16> That's exactly it. If the virus is exploding exponentially the number of recovered cases is a tiny, tiny fraction of the active ones. This treatment doesn't work until things are under control, basically.

<comment><USER17> But if the death rate is "only" 1 in 10 (approximately) then doesn't that mean there are ~9 survivors for every terminally ill patient? It doesn't seem like the number of survivors would be the limiting factor here.

<comment><USER16> No, because the virus takes time. Survivors aren't "survivors" until they've recovered, so they reflect the people who "would have been" critical cases maybe 10-15 days ago. But 10-15 days ago the number of cases was (depending on which doubling statistic you use) 4x-32x _smaller_ than what it is today.

Exponential growth messes everything up, basically. All our intuition about how things work tends to be wrong in subtle ways.

<comment> nil-sec e^(c _t) /e^(c_(t - 14days)) = e^(c*14days) = k = constant, with c the growth rate. While you are right that, in an exponential growth scenario, the number of recovered cases is smaller than the number of currently active cases, the factor is proportional to the growth rate which is worst case constant, but likely going down over time due to quarantine measures. As such we have theoretically enough recovered cases if n_infected/n_critical > k. For the most critical age group an estimated 10% of infected require ICU care [1]. Thus we need k < 10\. With a 1:2 ratio for serum we get k < 20\. Likely not everyone will donate though and constant factors in this equation will end up mattering but the exponential nature does not kill the idea in the manner you indicate. However, it still requires scaling production exponentially. This is true for all other drugs as well though.

[1] [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-NPI- modelling-16-03-2020.pdf)

<comment><USER18> You don't need 80-year-old serum to treat an 80-year-old patient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Its interesting to note they did not mention antibiotics as something that was being tested. I know for a fact that a major bay area hospital is treating covid-19 patients with a course of antibiotics(unsure which type), which is strange as its a virus. The nurse I know said they are seeing good results, the antibiotics are administered right away(they didn't say if anything else is administered) and 5 of 6 patients are being sent home with none coming back with worse symptoms. The sample size is small, maybe 30-40 and I wonder if these patients are already healthy enough that the virus is not affecting them greatly. It looks like other countries are looking into it as well:

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/19/french-study-finds-anti- ma...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/19/french-study-finds-anti-malarial-and- antibiotic-combo-could-reduce-covid-19-duration/)

<comment><USER20> One theory I've heard is that it is not the virus itself that kills you, but your immune system overreaction causing secondary damage which leads to infections. So the antibiotic might be aimed at that part? Just a guess.

<comment><USER21> If that is true (it is theorised that was how the 1918 flu killed people) it would primarily kill people with strong immune systems, not people with weak immune systems. I saw an epidemiology specialist (Michael T. osterholm maybe?) say that luckily this isn't how COVID-19 behaves or we would see millions dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> this information might become relevant if anybody dear to you is hospitalized with Corona virus related symptoms: The WHO is running a randomized trial to check the effect of existing medications:

"Enrolling subjects in SOLIDARITY will be easy. When a person with a confirmed case of COVID-19 is deemed eligible, the physician can enter the patient's data into a WHO website, including any underlying condition that could change the course of the disease, such as diabetes or HIV infection. The participant has to sign an informed consent form that is scanned and sent to WHO electronically. After the physician states which drugs are available at his or her hospital, the website will randomize the patient to one of the drugs available or to the local standard care for COVID-19."

</comment><comment><USER22> I find it curious that favipiravir isn't in the list. Are they just leaving it for Japan to test, so it wasn't mentioned?

<comment><USER23> Most likely, yes. It's not generally available outside of Japan (and China where it has also been tested) so not much point in adding it to a global trial.

<comment><USER24> Is that due to licensing issues or manufacturing capacity?

<comment> dis-sys more to do with the side effect. it causes birth defects in pretty alarming rate.

Japanese government only allows it to be used as a backup, Chinese licensed the design but the government only allows it to be used when all other avenues are exhausted.

<comment><USER25> Aren't most severe patients elderly? Why would birth defects be a problem at this point?

<comment><USER26> That isn't the issue; it's that this drug is not available at all outside of those two countries. Side effects are the reason it isn't. The WHO is prioritizing drugs with worldwide availability.

<comment><USER27> If it's effective, I'd hope it would become widely available for future pandemics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> UCSF had a great video conference call with several of their experts essentially covering these drugs and the two different stages of the disease. I highly recommend watching the first half at least. [https://youtu.be/bt- BzEve46Y](https://youtu.be/bt-BzEve46Y)

<comment><USER29> thanks man, very informative and without doubt well condensed and explained info on the presentation of the disease and treatment options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm wondering what took so long? Shouldn't we be ready to do something like this almost immediately?

Still seems chloroquine is required to meet a higher bar than the others which continues to be odd.

<comment><USER31> The fact that this particular treatment has a booster club is odder still. People are acting like they have a personal stake in which treatment wins.

I mean...it seems likely that some of the boosters who have been astroturfing it do actually have a stake.

<comment><USER32> Look at this thread: everyone has their "one weird trick" (substance) which they believe is the silver bullet. Including garlic.

I doubt that these people have financial stake in any of these products. Sometimes, the substance might be relevant to some opinion they hold dear. The guy recommending garlic might consider all modern medicine a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical industry. A significant number of people on HN and reddit have also been really into cytokines for the last few years, the reason for which eludes me (maybe it's the one bit of biology they heard of at some point and they are still enamored by their smartitude and want everyone to take notice).

Quinine and similar might have just been popular for the funny Gin&Tonic tie- in. Then, the US president read about, called it "the biggest discovery in medicine" or similar on Twitter, and now the alt-right has a stake in its success.

<comment><USER33> Now people are dying from taking that stuff:

[http://bannerhealth.mediaroom.com/trending-now-at- banner?ite...](http://bannerhealth.mediaroom.com/trending-now-at- banner?item=122999)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kinda makes you wonder why they aren't using methods from the multi armed bandit literature.

<comment><USER34> Multi armed bandit methods work best with immediate success-fail metrics. This one has time delays.

An example of how machine learning goes wrong is if a treatment slows down the progression but increases the death rate. Given exponential ramp up in the incoming cases, it will look good until the final horrifying numbers are in. You need to slice and dice the numbers by cohort to detect/react to this.

<comment><USER35> "Multi armed bandit methods work best with immediate success-fail metrics. This one has time delays."

Well, sure, but _everything_ works best with immediate success-fail metrics. That's one of the most basic results from learning theory is that the longer the latency between stimulus and response the slower the learning rate can be. I'm not sure how multi-armed bandit is special in this regard in any particular dimension. All learning techniques are going to be susceptible to the problem you outline in your second paragraph.

This is one of those "there is no perfect solution" situations. It's really easy to say that out loud. It's quite difficult to internalize it.

(Also, just as a note to your other post, bear in mind that our hard-core "social distancing" efforts in the US are just about to reach approx. 1 incubation period. It is only just this week that we're going to start seeing the results of that, and it'll phase in as slowly as our efforts 1-2 weeks ago did. My state just went to full lockdown today, though we've been on a looser lockdown for a week before that.)

<comment><USER34> Everything works better with immediate success/fail metrics. However the simplest approach is easiest to analyze, and is easiest to analyze after the fact in as many ways as you want. The more complex the decision making, the less we should be willing to put it under the control of a computer program. (Unless that program has been well-studied for our exact problem so that we trust it more.)

Which medicine looks effective? Which medicine gets people out of the hospital faster? What underlying conditions interacted badly with given medicines? These questions do not have to be asked up front. But they can be answered afterwards. And knowing the answers, matters.

Here is an example. Suppose that we find one medication that gets people out of bed faster but kills some. In areas with overwhelmed hospitals, cycling people through the bed may save net lives. If your hospital is not overwhelmed, you wouldn't want to give that medicine. Now I'm not saying that any of these medicines will come to a conclusion like that. But they _could_. And if one did, I _definitely_ want human judgement to be applied about when to use it

<comment><USER35> I don't think anyone is proposing actually removing all humans from the loop, so I think that's an argument against a strawman.

Even if they were proposing it, there's no realistic chance of it happening.

I don't want people blindly copying "standard" scientific procedures either, where we run high-stastistical-power studies for months with double-blind scenarios then carefully peer-review it and come up with some result somewhere in 2022.

<comment><USER36> So, hopefully there will be blinded researchers who analyse the data.

They'll probably use sequential stopping rules to take samples of incoming data.

If one of the treatments works much much better, then they'll almost certainly recommend that (but doctors will probably figure this out first, anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is the expectation that SARS-CoV-2 will become a seasonal virus, permanently with us, like the other 4 coronaviridae (which we don't have a vaccine for)?

[https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general- information.html](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/general-information.html)

It seems that those keep coming back each year either because they mutate, or the antibodies produced by our bodies are no longer produced/effective after a year or so.

So even if we had a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, would it lose its' potency after a year, and people need annual booster shots? Or would the virus mutate so that the specific vaccine no longer works?

Also, is the expectation that the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 will reduce over time because of evolutionary pressure? Is that really the case, given that much of the spreading happens in the first 1-2 weeks, before the host is potentially dead?

<comment><USER38> There is research going into their more fundamental structure to try and defeat their whole family at once

<comment><USER39> So out of this mess, we might end up with a cure for the common cold?

<comment><USER40> Not really. The majority of cases of the common cold are caused by rhinoviruses, not coronaviruses. Then again I would gladly take a 10% cut in the common cold...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> When are the results expected?

<comment><USER42> From what i've heard in the news about this trial, not until 6 weeks minimum

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Combinations need to be tested.

</comment><comment><USER44> Seems strange that they're not going to use a control group that receives a placebo.

</comment><comment><USER45> Would this new global mechanism be useful for other diseases like cancer or AIDS?

</comment><comment><USER46> Forbes: Coronavirus Patient Dodged A Bullet With Hydroxychloroquine.

Mar 22, 2020,01:43pm EDT

"Two scientists at major university centers reviewed the French trial for me. They agreed, separately, that while the study is preliminary, small, and not without flaws, its findings were strong enough, given the drugs' known safety records, to guide treatment decisions in a crisis.

"Despite the limitations of this study, in the absence of any effective treatment, in this urgent situation, this Plaquenil and Azithromycin combination therapy should be given to patients with COVID-19 as a treatment option," Ying Zhang, a professor of microbiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote in an email. "For now, there is no time to wait."

Brian Fallon, a research scientist and clinical trials investigator at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, agreed on the study's overall merit despite the patients who dropped out. After analyzing the data and counting all six dropouts as treatment failures, he said the overall rate of improvement was still statistically significant for the entire group, though not for the hydroxychloroquine group alone."

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/marybethpfeiffer/2020/03/22/one...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/marybethpfeiffer/2020/03/22/one- patient-dodges-a-covid-bullet-is-she-a-harbinger-or-outlier/)

<comment><USER47> It's not just hydroxychlroquine, the best results in the (albeit small) study were when it was paired with a Z-pack. A WSJ editorial had also talked about the same thing, but the Forbes article you posted has more details:

"The just-released French study reported that 70 percent of hydroxychloroquine-treated patients, or 14 of 20, were negative for the virus at day 6, as were all six patients who were treated with hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin (which Novins also received). But the study was small – 20 treated patients and 16 controls – and had other serious limitations."

<comment><USER48> Agree. This is interesting.

Covid-19: India Recommends Hydroxychloroquine As Prophylaxis For Healthcare Providers, Patient Family Members

[https://swarajyamag.com/insta/covid-19-india-recommends- hydr...](https://swarajyamag.com/insta/covid-19-india-recommends- hydroxychloroquine-as-prophylaxis-for-healthcare-providers-patient-family- members)</comment></comment></comment>


Security experts have cloned all seven TSA master keys - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/27/security-experts-have-cloned-all-seven-tsa-master-keys/ <comment><USER3> Luggage locks are basically only a deterrence against casual crime-of- opportunity thieves or pickpockets. I've found it's much simpler to just use a zip tie on my zipper. Very easy to put on, easy to take off again once you get to your destination (nail clippers work well), and provides roughly the same security as a TSA lock. And it has the added benefit that you can tell if the TSA opened your suitcase because the zip tie will have been removed (whereas with the lock the TSA can look through your suitcase without leaving any indication).

<comment><USER4> I don't think the TSA are going around opening bags in secret. There's a note that they leave conspicuously inside your bag explaining it was opened for security reasons.

When I travel with a large snowboard bag I used to get one of these every single time. Presumably it was too big to fit in the security scanners so they were required to open it.

<comment><USER5> Someone has definitely been through my bag when I have been travelling in the US without anyone leaving a note. I can of course not tell if it was TSA or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's no point using a lock on a zipper. You can just shove a ball point pen in between the zipper teeth and open the zipper itself. Then when you're done just rezip it with the still locked zipper pulls.

<comment><USER7> That trick does not work with paired zippers that are also locked in parallel with the luggage handle.

[http://thewirecutter5.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/upl...](http://thewirecutter5.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2015/11/04-zippers-1-carry-on-luggage-630.jpg)

[https://www.amazon.com/Travel-Accessories-Lockdown-Triple- Se...](https://www.amazon.com/Travel-Accessories-Lockdown-Triple- Security/dp/B003EM3D6E/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1469665343&sr=8-2&keywords=tsa+lock+cable)

<comment><USER8> Please dont post affiliate/tracker links here. Its bad practice. Here is a non cookied Amazon link:

[https://www.amazon.com/Travel-Accessories-Lockdown-Triple- Se...](https://www.amazon.com/Travel-Accessories-Lockdown-Triple- Security/dp/B003EM3D6E)

<comment><USER9> Did _j4kp07_ edit his link? There's no affiliate tag in there.

<comment><USER10> People get concerned about the stuff like "ref=sr_1_2" in Amazon urls (but it's just some internal thing they use to track searches or something).

It's also the case that making noise about occasional, topical referrers is going to be less useful than the occasional, topical link. Of course it shouldn't be okay to make work out of posting them, but who cares if someone adds one to a link that is worth posting otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _These consumer products are 'peace of mind' devices, not part of TSA's > aviation security regime._ \--TSA

In my opinion, the TSA itself is nothing more than a "peace of mind" device.

<comment><USER11> They give me no piece of mind. In fact I hate flying in the United States because out of the 20 countries I've flow in and out of, the US is the only when where I still get molested.

Even as late as 2015, on returning to America after not having hands stuffed down my pants in any other airport in the world, America still doesn't disappoint.

Fuck the TSA. Airport security should be handed back over to the airlines and airports.

<comment><USER12> The TSA was created for legit safety/security purposes. The organization itself is assuredly a clusterfuck, but airlines and airports doing their own security again isn't the answer.

A lot of it is about training. Many, if not most, of TSA's airport employees are the same poorly trained security staff that were laid off (and subsequently rehired) after the TSA's creation.

The answer is a better security organization, perhaps modelled after a functioning organization, like Israel's (I've studied the country's security practices, and it readily comes to mind). The answer is not regressing to poorly trained and poorly organized DIY security operations.

<comment><USER13> >>The TSA was created for legit safety/security purposes.

No

>> The answer is not regressing to poorly trained and poorly organized DIY security operations.

The answer lies in not giving up essential liberty for promises of safety

The goal of Terrorism is to scare people so badly they give up their own way of life "voluntarily" because they are scared, in that the terrorist have won

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> matt-attack I've never locked a checked suitcase in my life. And I've traveled all over the world.

Of course it goes without saying that I only carry laundry in my checked luggage. Laptop, chargers, camera, etc goes in a carry on backpack.

<comment><USER14> I would second this. The only time I have had anything stolen from luggage was from my briefcase at a TSA checkpoint at JFK between foreign and domestic terminals, where a couple of checks were lifted from my bag. Fortunately I noticed shortly afterward and was able to get the checks stopped before boarding my flight. Don't check anything pocketable and expensive. Locks do nothing.

<comment><USER15> I have a similar opinion with my car. "The inside of your car is a public place". By all means lock the car, but don't keep anything valuable in it.

And if you have a valuable thing in sight, then even with the fanciest locks, you're running the risk of broken windows. Just easier to keep nice stuff out of that 'public place'.

<comment><USER16> I've seen lots of stickers on cars saying "the car is unlocked, and there's nothing valuable inside".

The unlocking in the hopes of preventing a window smash.

<comment><USER17> To some people the unlocked car is the valuable item and not the crap inside it. Not that door locks would stop them anyway.

Reminds me of a joke.

I leave my car with a sign hanging from the mirror that clearly states that no valuables are inside.

One day I go to my car with a broken window and a new sign that says "just checking".

<comment><USER16> You can get into the unlocked car without a key, but you can't start it. At least not without shenanigans. Yes, the door wouldn't really stop someone from taking your whole car.

What I would be worried about when leaving my car open is eg other people sleeping in it. (I wouldn't mind too much, as long as they are clean. But that's too much to ask for.)

Fortunately, I do not own a car in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you want to ensure no one can open your luggage, travel with a firearm. It doesn't have to be a real firearm, but if you declare the firearm you are required by the airlines to have a lock on your luggage that can't be opened by TSA.

<comment><USER19> Is there a penalty for declaring a "fake" firearm?

<comment><USER20> A lot of people who don't want to lie (which may not be illegal, but I wouldn't recommend it personally) will get a starter pistol. They're cheap, small, safe (don't fire rounds, just blanks) and legally have to be declared as a firearm to fly. So you buy a starter pistol and stick it with your nice camera when you fly. It will be locked with something only you can open and will probably be handled more carefully in transit

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21>
        These consumer products are 'peace of mind' devices, not part
        of TSA's aviation security regime.

A bump key could open the majority of locks and yet we still put such locks into new doors? These flawed locks just serve the purpose of forcing whomever wants to enter to cross a psychological boundary from legal into illegal. And that is still a good reason to use flawed locks.

        In other words, you might as well not use locks at all.

Simply not true

</comment><comment><USER22> The only reason I bother with a lock on my (zippered) luggage is to keep the double-zipper ends together and keep it from working itself open as it bounces around the baggage handling equipment.

Like most things concerning security in general and airport security in particular, it's a sham, meant for appearances only.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow...will this not pretty much screw hotel room security ? An employee can go and open your lock in 30 seconds and relock your luggage after stealing. How do you prove that someone from the hotel stole it ("sir we obviously can't open locks that only the TSA can")

<comment><USER6> No point...you disclaim liability for valuables left in the room.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Seems like the plastic wrap they do at intl airports is a much more effective measure than tsa locks.

<comment><USER25> Only if you leave a unique indicator of that particular wrapping or take a photo. Otherwise they could easily slice through it, look at your shit, and wrap it back up. They probably have a machine for this.

</comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano Can anyone think of any ways where it would be possible to have the benefits the TSA was hoping for (cheap locks that can be opened by TSA and the owner but no one else)? Because I can't seem to think of any.

<comment><USER26> They prevent casual theft and tampering, and do so well.

Everyone loves to bust on the TSA, but small controls can add up. If you live in a home without barred windows and a reinforced door and locks, anyone can enter your home in seconds. Yet we still lock our doors, and they are still effective.

The only purpose of the TSA key is to facilitate searches without damaging the lock or bag. That's it.

<comment><USER27> My position on this has always been that, if somebody wants badly enough to steal my shit, they are going to. The only thing that locking doors is going to do is ensure that, not only is all of my shit stolen, but I have a kicked- in, busted, door to fix to boot.

<comment><USER28> I never really understood this position. Are you saying you don't lock anything? A vast majority of break-ins are thwarted by simply having a locked door and being home. You don't want to prevent even those?

Security systems, chained doors, automatic lights and deadbolts are also a huge deterrent that prevent plenty of break-ins. Yes all of those combined will NOT stop someone who wants to get into your home really badly but at that point I can't imagine they want to simply steal something. That's a lot of effort to go through and would seem far more personal to me.

<comment><USER27> My gun cabinet is the only thing that I lock.

To be honest, I don't own anything very valuable, and I value my convenience more highly than the remote chance that somebody is going to clean out my house. Particularly since the criminal element is almost nonexistent hereabouts, and what there is tends to center on small-scale marijuana growing and dealing - although maybe that will become a problem if the heroin epidemic continues.

Locking and unlocking a door two or three times a day adds up to a considerable amount of wasted time over the course of years. Not to mention insanity like I've seen in Germany, where people lock the outer gate, lock the outer door, deadbolt the door, lock the inner door, and then roll down huge armored shutters over the windows - in an upper-middle class gated community...

<comment><USER29> My parents don't lock their house doors or cars - but they live in a rural area, where the odds of a crime-of-opportunity are basically nil.

Cruising house-to-house checking for unlocked cars and doors would take a prohibitive amount of time; easier to do that in suburbia, where you can cover a dozen houses on foot in five minutes.

But in NYC, I've always locked my apartment door, because it's trivially simple to follow someone into an apartment building, and not much challenge to go door to door, listen for signs of habitation, and try the door handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just cut them off, that's what the TSA does anyway. I stopped buying those because apparently the TSA just cuts them off when they don't happen to have one of their own keys handy. They threw the cut locks right back into my bags along with the note declaring they had searched them.

</comment><comment><USER31> I read a while ago that a good method of understanding whether something had been tampered with or opened was to use glittery nail polish on the edges and take a close up, photo on your phone. Even if someone repainted it they wouldn't achieve the same pattern

</comment><comment><USER32> Isn't it better to use a cheap non-TSA lock on your luggage? If they open it, the lock is destroyed, and you know for sure someone has opened it - <USER2> personel or someone with criminal intentions. Or will this result in more trouble?

</comment><comment><USER33> i just thought about this yesterday.. would there be a market for a logging device for travel baggage? like a small camera and a mcu that activates when sensors (probably magnets between the halves) indicate the baggage is opened? preferably discrete. not to deter but to identify who opened it. logs time also to know the rough position of the breach.

<comment><USER34> There'd certainly be a market for the stolen logging devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> At first glance I thought this was referring to the TLS master key certs.

</comment><comment><USER36> You can watch the talk where they announced it at HOPE here: [http://livestream.com/internetsociety/hopeconf/videos/130717...](http://livestream.com/internetsociety/hopeconf/videos/130717705) I saw it live and it was a pretty fun talk (also helped that it was midnight and the alcohol was flowing freely). Definitely check it out!

<comment><USER37> I was in the room for this talk; it was pretty electric. Some of the other talks I liked were the Social Engineering talk, and Cory Doctorow's keynote.

The thing that crystallizes what HOPE is about, for me, was that their closing ceremonies opened with a fifteen-minute talk about the network situation -- the cabling they had to run, the 1.5Gbps DDOS they withstanded, and then chastised us for not using _enough_ bandwith, saying the ISP that donated a 10 gig line threatened to downgrade it next time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Put your luggage in a Pelican-case and use some relatively hard to pick, but easy to cut locks. Should they want to open it they will just cut the locks. Alternatively you can use a TSA approved lock and some zip ties as a simple tamper evident seal.

<comment><USER39> Alternatively, you can put your luggage entirely in a Pelican case, stick a firearm or equivalent (starter pistol, flare gun, AR-15 lower, etc.) in there, declare it, have the luggage inspected, and then use ASSA Abloy locks and fly with absolutely zero worries that someone will pilfer your valuables.

<comment><USER40> As an Australian I find it slightly amusing that people are suggesting packing guns in their luggage in order to prevent (what are meant to be) "the good guys" from stealing stuff from it.

"For security", we need more guns flying round everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I thought this happened a while back and hadn't realized it didn't yet. Very cool.

Not a big deal with the TSA because honestly these tiny, flimsy locks were never about security but to ensure the casual encounter with someone unknown doesn't get into your bag and possibly steal something (anyone who really wants something from your bag can cut these with the tiniest of bolt cutters). Also they can be handy with keeping annoying zippers together.

</comment><comment><USER41> "These consumer products are 'peace of mind' devices, not part of TSA's aviation security regime," England wrote.

"peace of mind" devices, that pretty much sums up the "security theater" charade that is the TSA. If its not important why do they have master keys at all?

Similar to how they randomly select people sometimes to use the pre-screen lines.

</comment><comment><USER42> The TSA were stupid but to be fair anyone with an access to a few suitcases can build the key, not to mention that suitcase manufacturers and luggage lock designers had access to the specs.

</comment><comment><USER43> Previous discussion from last September: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10196197](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10196197)

<comment><USER44> In this case, they didn't use the pictures of the keys, they gathered a set of locks and worked out what the master key would look like based on those samples.

<comment><USER43> Oh great, thanks for pointing that out; I missed that distinction and jumped to a conclusion after seeing the old story and new story reference the same GitHub repo.

I guess this is the relevant commit: [https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel- Sentry-master-keys/commi...](https://github.com/Xyl2k/TSA-Travel-Sentry- master-keys/commit/5635ddb98c095a9ab36ff9548d87d5397d46cacd)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Even a shitty bolt cutter would work on these locks right?

<comment><USER46> The purpose of most locks of this size is to make it visible if somebody broke it, and conspicuous to perform the act of breaking the lock. Sort of like a bike lock: the purpose is not to make it impossible to steal; that's impossible to do with anything lightweight. The purpose is to make it impossible _with anything less noisy than an angle grinder_.

In this case, the greatest threat is still the TSA agent or hotel maid entering your room, since you shouldn't be leaving your bag unattended with anyone else.

<comment><USER47> Except that with a TSA lock you can probably just replace it after you break it, most of them are very similar and brands are fairly obvious.

<comment><USER48> The victim's key wouldn't work on the new lock.

<comment><USER47> Sure they would, just give them a key pinned to open with any key :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> So, the news is about the eights key being cloned, in addition to the seven keys that were cloned before. The title is a bit misleading.

</comment><comment><USER50> seven for the Dwarves, done. 10 to go. And the master of them all.

<comment><USER51> Er, 12 or 13 to go, depending on whether you count the one ring.

You probably forgot the elves. If I had a nickle for every time I forgot the godamn elves...</comment></comment>


1,000 workers at Apple's keyboard suppler in Shenzhen walk out in protest - <AUTHOR> http://www.cultofmac.com/131797/1000-workers-at-apples-keyboard-suppler-in-shenzhen-walk-out-in-protest/

<comment><USER2> Apple, and LG, and IBM, and... (Why are factories often attributed solely to Apple? I think we should hold all companies using the products from factories responsible for who they supply from; the article even claims only 1/10th of the factory is for Apple.)

<comment><USER3> The article is published on Cult of Mac. The blogs audience is most likely only interested in Apple related news and events. For its target audience it is perfectly acceptable to present Apples role, even being a minor player.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Good for them! Organizing is a good way to fight these abusive labor practices.

</comment><comment><USER5> For those of you not familiar with Chinese manufacturing this is essentially bullshit. If you walked in to the factory tomorrow offered way better working conditions and no overtime everyone would quit. This is purely about money, and most likely fueled by the Foxconn/apple publicity from last year. I worked at a Chinese contract manufacturer for six months on site and our biggest cause of workers quitting was lack of OT. The most interesting part of this article is which factory it is though, I am not sure of the percent of keyboards they make but I believe this is the fabled factory I was told about while in SE China that makes the majority of the keyboards in the world.

Just remember what happened at Foxconn before power to the people starts rolling off your tongue; they had the best working conditions in any Chinese factory(arguably), a number of suicides that was below the national average for the number of people working at the factory, but because they where Taiwanese owned the Chinese gov't let the media run with the Apple suicide link. Foxconn raised salaries and it all disappeared. This isn't a human rights situation, this is all about money on both sides.

</comment><comment><USER6> well, I believe outsourcing in general, which is the reason why this problem exists, should be controlled and better regulated

It causes unemployment (at least short term) in the country outsourcing its work, and created bad working conditions and unfair working environment in the country receiving the outsourced work

There is obviously something wrong, and the poor are being exploited.

One could argue that those poor exploited people would have been even poorer, without the outsourcing model, and my answer to that, is that I don't mind or see a problem in them being paid less, being paid less is for sure better than not being paid at all.

But these stories are really more about greed and exploitation, which we should definitely stand against by asking for more regulations, monitoring and rules for outsourcing

<comment><USER7> I can't see the situation improving. Governments are in a weak position due to globalisation. If they increase regulation and improve conditions then those businesses (especially the ones with poor ethical standards) will just move on to a more desperate country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> We're likely to hear more and more of this over the next few decades as workers in China retrace the steps of the labour movement in the west. Here's hoping them speedy success.

</comment><comment><USER9> The work hours are weird. 7-11:30 then 6-12pm? Why not have a full days work like 8-5 with one hour break ? What does splitting the day like that offer?

<comment><USER10> Their regular hours ar 7-11:30 and 1-5. The 6-12 shift is added as overtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why do the articles say Apple or IBM supplier? It's a Chinese company that treats its employees like shit and makes money by doing business with Apple. It's the Chinese govt. that needs to intervene.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think robots will completely replace humans on these kind of factories.

<comment><USER13> I don't know anything about fabrication, but my spidey sense tells me that this won't happen for a while. It isn't a capability issue, it's a cost issue. There's obviously a tipping point, but cheap human labour has to be way ahead.

For robots, beyond the cost of powering and maintenance, repurposing has got to be a killer. Changes in material (plastics, to aluminum to composite...) has got to wreck havoc with automated assembly lines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> And yet their keyboards are still 70 dollars.

<comment><USER15> People complaining about high prices and factory working conditions at the same time always baffles me.

You do realize that the cheaper some product is, the less these people are going to be paid, right?

Of course the reverse is not a given, but at least it gives more wiggle room to everybody.

<comment><USER16> _You do realize that the cheaper some product is, the less these people are going to be paid, right?_

They'll be paid the minimum amount possible anyway, and the rest just goes to company profits.</comment></comment></comment>


Handmade at Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://services.amazon.com/handmade/handmade.htm <comment><USER2> Can software be considered handmade?

<comment><USER3> Everything in the world is handmade. It's all about the tooling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So Amazon takes on Etsy?</comment>