How to Quit Your Job - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/03/10/how-to-quit-your-job/ <comment><USER2> Good advice. I just had to do this recently and morale is pretty low where I'm at. Everyone was saying "so did you complain about <random issue from a laundry list>?". All were shocked when I said "no, I had nothing but good about the place. I side stepped every negative point".

The thing is, trashing a company as you leave never does anything positive. Maybe you can brag about it to your friends, but chances are they will be laughing _at_ you, not with you. Most of the time the things you would complain about are something your boss knows about is trying to fix, so it just makes you look like a whiner.

They will also tend to take it personal. You're leaving, chances are they will to at some point. How would you like to sell yourself to that same guy 3 contracts down the road after dropping a turd on his desk?

</comment><comment><USER3> "Job hoppers NEVER make good employees."

I don't agree with this. I think the author can make the case that job hoppers aren't good employees in his experience. And maybe he can even say that job hoppers are _generally_ bad. But human beings are quirky animals. Any statement about human behavior that contains the word "always" or "never" is almost certainly wrong.

<comment><USER4> This criticism is a pet peeve of mine. People use "never" and "always" all the time and everyone knows (ok, almost everyone) that they don't literally mean "never" and "always". For example, in this case he means, "Don't make the mistake of hiring a job hopper because you somehow think this time it'll be different. You're _almost certainly_ wrong, and there's no way to tell in advance besides, so don't bother taking the risk. There are other similar candidates without that risk."

<comment><USER3> 'People use "never" and "always" all the time and everyone knows (ok, almost everyone) that they don't literally mean "never" and "always".'

I think it still makes a difference though. I mean consider the following two sentences:

"Job hoppers NEVER make good employees."

"Job hoppers ALMOST NEVER make good employees."

The former is much more strongly worded to the point of requiring overwhelming evidence that I feel you won't be able to find when dealing with human behavior.

<comment><USER5> In your criticism you've missed an important factor. The former sentence is better writing.

I also struggle with this when I write, but I try to catch myself and avoid going down that slippery slope. You can spend the time trying to make each of your statements precise so that no one can challenge it like you've challenged this one. Alternatively, you could choose to put something strongly, trusting your audience to see your point and find your readers are more engaged and eager to discuss your ideas.

<comment><USER3> "The former sentence is better writing."

That's highly debateable. And even if it's true, it's very much situational.

I think it depends a lot on the purposes behind your writing. Are you writing to persuade people? Then perhaps you should consider the more strongly worded phrase. Are you writing to inform people (as this author does)? Then you're likely better off prioritizing accuracy. Like Einstein said: "If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor."

Mixing persuasive and informative writing is generally a bad idea (although informing people of what your opinion is is a bit of a grey area). At best, it convinces your reader that you're trying to persuade rather than inform and makes you lose credibility. At worst, it's unethical because it's stating opinion as fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really don't like the idea of a new boss micromanaging my exit. It's none of his business.

If we've agreed on a start date and he doesn't trust me to show up on time, that means he doesn't trust me to live up to my commitments. What other trust issues might we have in the future?

I've given notices anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 weeks. In the longer ones, when I've explained my outstanding commitments and the consequences to my customers and colleagues, new employers have always understood. Taking care of people when you have little financial incentive to do so is a sign of an ethical person.

<comment><USER7> I'm sure it's more of an attempt to be sure you're going to be fine with leaving. If you sound like someone who is confident and will get this all done in a reasonable time frame, I doubt you'd get much push.

The important part is making sure the person has thought about their exit. If you know what you are going to do and are confident in your decision, great. Lots of people haven't really given it much thought and just try to muddle through and stay nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Especially relevant, as I have to tell my boss exactly this today!

<comment><USER9> Godspeed, jonnycowboy, godspeed!

<comment><USER8> the deed is done ;) I think I maybe have had too big of a smile walking into my boss' office though!!

<comment><USER10> How'd it go down then?

<comment><USER8> Very well, told him I was dissatisfied with the way employees were treated, with the way management was going and apparently the big smile was a dead giveaway that I had already made my decision and that he wouldn't be able to sway me. So I guess my advice related to this article would be, if you're hiring somebody and he has to tell his boss that he's quitting, make sure he looks as enthusiastic as possible about the new job, to make sure the boss rolls over right away ;)

<comment><USER11> Hmm... it sounds like you didn't follow any of the advice in the article. Shows that there's more than one way to quit a job. What was his reaction when you said that you didn't like the way employees are treated?

<comment><USER8> Definately two ways to skin a cat!

I think he knew we were being treated unfairly, but yet he couldn't do anything about it. One of the problems of a large company like that is that there are so many layers of 'management' that nobody is left with any responsibility or autority (like treating employees better).

<comment><USER11> Ahh, yes. I know exactly what you mean. I felt that at BigCo. also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if this advice is informed by the author's experience in the UK. In the Northern California software/tech industry, 2 weeks notice is the standard courtesy. It's also, I've found, widely accepted that having someone who doesn't want to be there can be corrosive to team dynamics so both employer and employee have an interest in aiming for the minimum time needed for an orderly hand-off. That tends to be two weeks or less.

<comment><USER13> So long as your relationship with the company is pleasant, the "proper" notice to give depends on the specifics of the position and could be longer than 2 weeks. It's polite to give enough time so that you can transition your responsibilities to whomever will be taking them over. In senior positions I've often given 4 weeks notice, but I know some people who commonly give 6 or more.

Continuing to be a productive part of the team during that period of time is simply a matter of professionalism. It's true that occasionally one party or the other is incapable of continuing to work together, but that's pretty rare in my experience.

<comment><USER14> Assuming the employer/employee relationship is healthy, I give the customary 2 weeks, but always allow for up to 4 additional weeks of off-site 1099 consulting and communication.

This can be especially helpful when transitioning a large codebase, or really any suitably complex project, where some of the undocumented "lore" isn't readily apparent to either party until after the formal transition effort is already well underway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it's really sad to change jobs without a period of a few months doing nothing in between.

<comment><USER16> Not everyone can afford that luxury.

<comment><USER17> Sure they can. By definition, if you have a job, it is paying you money. Anybody can choose to save some of that money every month with the intention of taking a good long vacation in the future. It doesn't matter how little you make, you can always adjust your lifestyle to allow for savings.

So while it's entirely possible that _you_ can't afford that luxury right this minute, that's entirely something you've chosen for yourself. And the interesting part is that you can do something about it.

With a few basic changes to your life today, you can afford to take 3 months off next year.

<comment><USER18> No, not anybody can. What if you have a family and are barely making ends meet as it is? It's very difficult to convince a wife that you'd like for the family to spend a little less so you can have a few months off next year between jobs.

<comment><USER17> Assuming you have a job in IT, how does one get to the point where he's only making ends meet, even with a family in the mix?

Assuming a low-end IT salary, you're still bringing in 5k+/month. Minus $2000 for tax, zero for your 10 year old cheap car, $1000 for rent, and another $500 for food, that leaves $1500 for conspicuous consumption or savings.

If you've chosen to use up that excess by upgrading apartments, leasing a car, buying a flatscreen on the Visa card, etc., that's what is eating up your ability to save money.

There's no reason to be living month to month on $60k+ a year. Unless that's what you've chosen to do.

<comment><USER19> You're missing a lot of stuff like gas, parking, car insurance, phone bills, internet connection, electricity, heat, water, diapers, kid insurance, kid clothes, kid medicine, kid entertainment (toys, books, etc), babysitter, day care, etc, etc. Your food budget is assuming the family is living on beans and rice.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. Budget it out however you like, but if you can _exactly_ make ends meet each month, chances are you can make ends meet and have one dollar left over to save. Look a bit harder and you might find $50 left.

Start thinking that way, and keep at it for a while and suddenly you'll find you're not living month-to-month anymore.

<comment><USER20> Here's a recipe for living on one 'median' income:

      * Pay your cars off.
      * Get down to < $300 / month on food.
      * Stop eating out except on special occasions.
      * Turn the thermostat up / down in summer / winter.
      * Cap mortgage or rent at $1000 / month.
      * Live close to work
      * Stop buying lots of crap you don't need.
      * Build some savings

The key thing is, if you can manage on one income, a LOT of expenditure just melts away. Day care, gas for commuting to two jobs, much easier to eat at home, etc. etc.

<comment><USER18> Those things would be easy if it's just you. However, imposing those policies on the wife is another matter. It just devolves into fighting over money all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've never needed to lie about how soon I've been asked to start working. I've never needed to be that evasive about why I'm leaving, though it could happen. I'd have second thoughts about working for this poster after getting all this micromanaging advice slanted his way.

</comment><comment><USER22> This reminded me of Rands' piece at <http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/01/04/wanted.html>, which is also an interesting read about getting people to actually show up.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you're really good, your boss is going to do everything they can to get you to stay. This is great advice on how to leave as quickly and painlessly as possible.

I usually thought that if someone is interviewing with you they probably made up their mind on quitting their job, so I didn't push it at all. But I've seen this happen, where it ends up taking 3 or 4 weeks because they're finishing up a project. I'm glad they finish what they started, but its true, I probably could have used them yesterday.

</comment><comment><USER24> Unfortunately, in the United States the number one reason people do not retire early is that they are not yet 65 and qualify for Medicare coverage. Even well-off individuals are hesitant because of the potential for adverse personal medical events depleting their nest egg.

Yes, early retirement is not the same as quitting your job when young and presumably good health - however the fact that in the U.S. medical care is tied to the company you work for is a major burden on those who want to quit.

<comment><USER25> > however the fact that in the U.S. medical care is tied to the company you > work for

That's not a "fact". One can buy health insurance and there are other ways to get it. (For young people, it's often reasonable to "go bare" or just buy catastropic coverage.)

Employer-paid health insurance isn't free - it's just (mostly) paid for with money that you don't see.

Would you argue that food/shelter/energy is an obstacle to quitting that someone should do something about? If not, what makes health care, which is arguably under more personal control, different?

If you can't afford your lifestyle without an income ....

<comment><USER26> It's _never_ reasonable to "go bare" in the US, no matter how young and/or healthy you are. You never know when your gall bladder or appendix will decide to turn on you, or when a hernia will pop up (or pop out, as it were), or when an unexpected pregnancy will occur- to say nothing of bike accidents or other misc. injuries. One day you're feeling fine, the next day you're in the hospital with a ruptured appendix and end up with a $20,000 bill. Oh, you had a bad reaction to the anesthetic they used, and needed an extra day in the hospital? Make that a $25,000 bill. Thank you, come again!

Also, besides the immediate proximal financial impact of having to deal with any of those situations while uninsured, remember the pre-existing condition trap: while you're in the hospital getting that appendix out, you'd darn well better hope that your CT scan doesn't turn up anything else of interest (cancers, hernias, etc.), as anything they discover while you're uninsured will be most likely be excluded from whatever future health coverage you might end up with. Oh, wait-- that'll probably be a moot point, since insurance companies usually refuse to sell individual policies to people with pre- existing conditions (even to otherwise-healthy young people with minor conditions).

Catastrophic coverage is an absolute bare minimum to have, and, even then, make sure you really read the fine print. A lot of catastrophic or other low- premium plans have pretty major strings attached in terms of what they will and won't cover.

<comment><USER27> Another important point: simply by virtue of having insurance of _some_ description, you will get different pricing than if you're billed directly as an individual. That's because insurers pay the claim and then settle it with the policyholder, so the healthcare providers don't factor in the same delinquency / nonpayment risk that they apply to people who just walk in off the street and presumably pay in cash. You may get invoiced 2-2.5x more for the same procedure than you would if the billing were going through some kind of policy, which is in itself significant, never mind the limits, deductible or possibility of rescission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I had one month's notice in my contract, knew I was leaving three months in advance and gave six weeks. Figured that was a good balance between giving a generous amount of time, and the risk of things turning sour or being asked to serve out one month only.

I found it quite a hard thing to do, not dissimilar to breaking up with someone. There was a lot of "it's not you, it's me"...

</comment><comment><USER28> I just told my boss last week I was leaving so that I could join a startup! I unfortunately gave a longer notice than I would have liked to because I have my hands in a lot of the details around. I have the open door here at my current (for the time being) employer, so if it hits the fan (god forbid), I do have a job. I wish I had read this last week!! At least I start my new job in a couple weeks!

</comment><comment><USER29> If the new employer is getting involved trying to make this as easily as possible, why not just give the present employer a call and work it out? The employee has their part in it already, why also make them into an emotional middleman?

<comment><USER30> Because they're not the middleman, they're the principal actor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very informative article. Seems a lot of startup advice sites will gladly tell you to quit your job, but this is a great explanation of how exactly that works out.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish I'd read this before I gave my notice to my boss this morning! Who knew what chaos could be caused by one simple email.

<comment><USER28> You gave notice via email?? I talked to my boss face to face a week ago. His reaction was priceless "Oh no.....Really?"

<comment><USER32> My boss is 3000 miles away. I wish I was able to talk to him face to face :p

<comment><USER28> Ah, that explains alot</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why do we have an IMG element? - <AUTHOR> http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/11/02/why-do-we-have-an-img-element <comment><USER2> Reading the full thread gives me an appreciation for how well some people can aggressively but politely have a mail thread discussion.

Marc's final diplomatic reply:

"So, we're probably going to go with  (not ICON, since not all inlined images can be meaningfully called icons). For the time being, inlined images won't be explicitly content-type'd; down the road, we plan to support that (along with the general adaptation of MIME). Actually, the image reading routines we're currently using figure out the image format on the fly, so the filename extension won't even be significant."

[http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0182.ht...](http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www- talk.1993q1/0182.html)

<comment><USER3> I still think the ... was a better solution...

<comment><USER4> But it makes it harder to have an image link to something else

<comment><USER3> You could always put a  pair around the image, just like we do with  tags.

<comment><USER4> Not really, you can't nest  tags in html (you can in SVG, though)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"That's not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, Andrew and Intermedia and HyTime shipped code too. Code is necessary but not sufficient for success."_

That's a good lesson to recognize and appreciate.

<comment><USER6> This is so very true. That's why dynamic delivery of Javascript has enabled so much cool innovation.

Rather than focus on stuffing new tags into HTML, we should focus on pushing the abstraction level lower. I'd really like to see something along the lines of a secure/safe


Now that News.Yc has grown: Hackers in SoCal? - <AUTHOR>

Hey all,
This community has definitely expanded greatly, comprised now of users from all over the globe. I was wondering if now there are any who are hackers that reside in SoCal. That's LA/OC/SD area. If so, drop me an email firstname.lastname@example.com.
Take care. <comment><USER2> I've emailed you.</comment>


What are the advantages of the Hurd over Linux/BSD? (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/faq/still_useful.html <comment><USER2> > These were just examples, Linux is trying to catch up in ugly ways indeed > ... In the Hurd, it's that way from the ground and there is no limitation > like having to be root or ask for root to add magic lines, etc.

HURD might have user filesystem servers, but they're nowhere near Plan9's "each process gets a mount table, and then things like environment variables are just exposed process-local mounted filesystems."

Interestingly, given all the cgroups work put into the Linux kernel, you can almost achieve this postmodern "every process gets its own VFS, and uses it as scratch-space" effect with the one-two punch of:

        fusermount ... /mnt/env/1
        docker run -v "/mnt/env/1:/env" ubuntu

This, admittedly, still takes root-esque privileges somewhere along the line (either fusermount is SUID and run on the host, or the container must be run -privileged so you can mount inside it), but this isn't a fundamental restriction, just a historical artifact of Docker being designed before user- namespaces were finished. It's perfectly possible with raw unshare(2) to spawn a process as an unprivileged user, in which the process is acting with alternate-namespace UID0 privileges, and can mount whatever filesystems it likes in its alternate-namespace VFS.

<comment><USER3> The need for privilege escalation to create the namespace is basically the rub for this sort of thing.

It seems like the main thing that makes true plan9-style namespacing unrealistic is the security implications, since the filesystem is used extensively to control privilege escalation. Whether it's through setuid flags or through /etc/sudoers or /etc/groups, at some point a privileged program (su or sudo) might be running in an unknown or untrusted namespace where the facts visible to that program make a solid case for allowing the escalation.

I'm not sure this tension can ever really be resolved without also adopting a plan9-style out-of-process escalation mechanism. Which is a huge departure from POSIX in and of itself, as far as I know.

I'm really not sure how HURD deals with this, to be honest, or if it does at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > These were just examples, Linux is trying to catch up in ugly ways indeed > ... In the Hurd, it's that way from the ground and there is no limitation > like having to be root or ask for root to add magic lines, etc.

Catching up to what? A 24 year old kernel with no userbase and uses IRC logs as the majority of documentation? Is Hurd useful as anything other than a research project? I would be interested to see what people here who have used Hurd have to say.

<comment><USER5> > Is Hurd useful as anything other than a research project?

Bear in mind that a research project can be interesting in its own right, not everything has to be about large scale use.

Now if HURD is an interesting research, that's an entirely different subject...

<comment><USER6> Even if it's not, not being interesting after so many years is, itself, interesting. I find the psychology of the attachment to software platforms fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> At this point? None. It's a silly exercise on not going anywhere.

HURD uses Mach, which is a mid-90s academic microkernel that's not so good in practice. Particularly, it's so slow at IPC (which is critical to performance in a pure microkernel system) that those using it (Darwin/OSX/IOS, HURD) had to compromise and use a hybrid architecture: Running drivers and some other components of the system with kernel privileges; A popular design choice in the 90s (also BeOS, Windows NT) due to the immaturity of microkernels.

In late 90s/early 2000s, L4 happened. It went to great lengths to actually make achieving performance with a pure microkernel architecture possible. Afterwards, there were a lot of followup microkernels implementing the L4 interface, so these days when we say L4 we generally mean the interface, or any microkernel that implements it.

The HURD was watching, and sometime early 2000s they realized that the hybrid architecture was dead and they needed to move on if they wanted to stay relevant. There was a serious attempt at porting HURD to L4. It was already working, but the people behind it became disillusioned with the HURD, after realizing flaws on the architecture. I recommend reading the papers the L4 port people wrote on this. Back then, there were some ten to twenty HURD developers active.

After that, the HURD should have rethought its architecture and moved on with L4. Instead, they didn't continue the L4 effort nor fix the architecture. What they did was abandon it and start an entirely new port to a different microkernel, Coyotos, which didn't bear fruit, either. Throughout all this, the HURD was losing developers as they became disinterested.

Fast forward to 2005, Andrew Tanenbaum and his students released the first version (a mere skeleton, without even virtual memory support) of Minix3, and continued working from there [http://wiki.minix3.org/MinixReleases](http://wiki.minix3.org/MinixReleases) , going a long way and bringing us to its current state. Right now, Minix3 has 20-30 active developers any given day, a few of which are working on it full- time, supported by funds coming from European Union research programs, as the reliability aspect [http://www.minix3.org/other/reliability.html](http://www.minix3.org/other/reliability.html) to Minix3 has been deemed important.

Meanwhile, the HURD has 0-3 active developers depending on the day, none of which working full time, and with no roadmap or organization whatsoever. Last I've heard, they introduced userspace driver support, which is a step in the right direction, but a bit silly as the real problem (they're still using Mach) is yet to be solved.

Minix3 next version, 3.3.0, is weeks away. Here's some insider info: It breaks ABI to adopt NetBSD types, skyrocketing compatibility with pkgsrc software. The system will for the first time be built dynamic, as mmap() is finally working and the dynamic library support has been adapted to actually do shared libraries using it.

As lack of proper dynamic library support was holding back X (which already ran, but with barely any software for it), I expect we'll have a lot of WMs, DEs and GUI programs from here on, and interest will pick up.

If you ask me about the HURD, I'd say it's not worth continuing. Just take along whatever salvageable ideas and concepts and move on. Working on a system that isn't at a dead end is one suggestion. Escape [https://github.com/Nils- TUD/Escape](https://github.com/Nils-TUD/Escape) , HelenOS and Minix3 are three such systems. Genode is not exactly a system but it is interesting in its own way, and Plan9Front [http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/](http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/) is very interesting even though it is not currently a pure microkernel system (it can be made so without breaking anything thanks to the awesome design). All these systems I suggested are _Free Software_ , interesting, promising and actually active.

<comment><USER8> Another intersting microkernel might be seL4, which is an L4 implementation (as you might have guesses from the name) focussed on security that will be released as open source (code _and_ correctness proofs, as all good security software should be in an ideal world) at the end of July: [http://sel4.systems/](http://sel4.systems/)

<comment><USER9> Didn't know seL4 was going to be open source. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> With hardware support for virtualization I see the OS landscape going a different direction, it seems the Holy Grail of "everything is userspace" will be effectively side-stepped by "everything is sandboxed".

<comment><USER11> Here's something that's even more "out there": an experimental OS and programming environment where all protection is done statically, at compile time. You can do things as crazy as run all "user" processes and the kernel in the same (kernel-mode) address space safely, because the system compiler enforces type-safety and memory-safety. It's pretty cool! (my memory is a bit weak on this paper so some of the details might be off, but it's well worth the read)

[http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=69431](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/?id=69431)

<comment><USER6> Sounds interesting if you have very constrained hardware, but you'd have to trust the compilers or you wouldn't ever install 3rd party binaries.

And I think gaius is right. Burroughs did it before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Presenting services in user space has always been a benefit of microkernels, which is welcomed considering that I frequently make use of FUSE or OpenVPN.

The only concern for me is performance. Though I believe the service server provided by the Hurd would outperform FUSE, I'm not sure that it is worth the overhead of all other parts in the entire system. If the performance decrease is negligible, I'll be happy to use the kernel.

<comment><USER13> In general, a kernel that requires a five transitions (user->kernel->user->kernel->user) for system service calls, will be less performant than one which requires only three (user->kernel->user) The impact is magnified with multiple services being involved. So if you naively design your disk driver as a user level process, your file system as a user level process, then something like read() from a user's applications goes: read -> kernel -> user(fs) -> kernel -> user(disk) -> kernel -> user(fs) -> kernel -> read(app). It was really really slow when things had different page mappings but it gets better if you have an alloc area where everyone shares the same virtual address space (keeps TLB thrashing down).

Per another comment on this thread the Docker as P9 process is pretty close. But it doesn't share services per se across users in the space. Spring (Sun's research OS) looked at cutting the penalties down for moving kernel/user with some nice 'doors' kinds of things. At the time there was discussion that with enough address space (so that you're VM system got the benefit of warm caches and no page remapping) you could really do some interesting things. Were I retired I would probably spend some time playing with that stuff on a modern 64 bit architecture :-)

<comment><USER14>
      five transitions (user->kernel->user->kernel->user)
      three (user->kernel->user)

Aren't these 4 vs. 2 transitions?

<comment><USER13> You are correct 5 contexts, four transitions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Or with libguestfs (no root needed):

        guestfish -N test1.img=fs
        guestmount -a test1.img -m /dev/sda1 /tmp/mnt

</comment><comment><USER16> Here's a more interesting list of potential file system translators:

[https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/translator/wishlist.h...](https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/translator/wishlist.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> the best part of hurd is that systemd does not support it :)</comment>


Api.snapchat.com redirects to Google.com - <AUTHOR> http://api.snapchat.com

<comment><USER2> Perhaps a way to say, "Nothing to see here."</comment>


Three authors retract study on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelancet.com/lancet/article/s0140673620313246 <comment><USER2> A lot of the controversy surrounding this Lancet paper was about the data being used, which was provided by a firm named Surgisphere [1]. One of the co- authors of the Lancet paper is Sapan Desai, he is incidentally also the chief executive of this firm.

The lone one who chose not to retract the paper was him.

I recommend this twitter thread that explains the thrust of the issue: [https://twitter.com/reverendofdoubt/status/12669029690454630...](https://twitter.com/reverendofdoubt/status/1266902969045463041)

Essentially, doubt began swirling around when this company claimed to acquire in a very short time massive amounts of EHR (Electronic Health Record, basically large datasets showing how patients are doing, how they're responding to medication, etc.). When Sapan Desai was pressed on by the other three authors of this very paper, he refused to cooperate, invoking a somewhat shoddy defense of not being at liberty to reveal sensitive information. Surgisphere refuses to say which hospitals chose to give it the EHR.

The thing is, this EHR data is a big deal. Pharma companies give _big_ money to hospitals for this data. One of the key questions has been how this newcomer company managed to acquire these EHR deals with such a large number of hospitals. Since the scrutiny, NEJM has also chosen to retract a Covid-19-related paper which sourced data from this company: [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007621](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2007621)

[1]: The company is choosing to stand behind the data: [https://surgisphere.com/2020/05/29/response-to-widespread- re...](https://surgisphere.com/2020/05/29/response-to-widespread-reaction-to- recent-lancet-article-on-hydroxychloroquine/)

<comment><USER3> It feels like a large part of the value of a journal like the Lancet is that they DON'T do stuff like this. That one of the authors is ceo of the company that owns the data behind the study should be a glaring red flag. What value does the Lancet still have?

Note - I edited this post because it was much more crass and reactionary, and realized its not at all my domain, so I rephrased.

<comment><USER4> The value is that even given this, they're much more reliable than preprints, and _much much_ more reliable than sensational Twitter threads or public forums. They manage to filter out a tremendous amount of crap, but a sufficiently crafty and dishonest author can still sometimes slip past -- as is possible in any system.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but lots of high profile papers in top end journals like Nature fail to replicate: [https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/8/27/17761466/ps...](https://www.vox.com/science-and- health/2018/8/27/17761466/psychology-replication-crisis-nature-social-science)

If we are to learn anything from the last 10 years of the replication crisis, it has to be that a single paper is a data point, not a conclusion.

<comment><USER6> Scientists, especially in biology (possibly psychology too but i don't know), do look at papers as data points and not conclusions. The "conclusion-minded" treatment of papers is a sad artefact of the publish-or-perish system (have to add a ton of spin to your results to make them publishable) and of pop science journalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> How about thanking or crediting the many independent doctors and scientists ([https://zenodo.org/record/3873178](https://zenodo.org/record/3873178)) who identified the issues in Lancet's publication? Even Apple credits/pays independent researchers for finding weaknesses in Apple code.

Will countries now revert national health policy changes that were based on this questionable study? What about the families of patients who were denied _early_ HCQ treatment based on this study? Who is liable for their denial of treatment?

James Todaro, May 29th, [https://www.medicineuncensored.com/a-study-out-of- thin-air](https://www.medicineuncensored.com/a-study-out-of-thin-air)

 _> Misinformation is bad. Misinformation in medicine is worse. Misinformation from a prestigious medical journal is the worst. Herein is a detailed look at the controversial Lancet study that resulted in the World Health Organization ending worldwide clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine in order to focus on patented therapeutics._

Guardian, June 3rd, [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgi...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere- who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine)

 _> The very serious concerns being raised about the validity of the papers by Mehra et al need to be recognised and actioned urgently, and ought to bring about serious reflection on whether the quality of editorial and peer review during the pandemic has been adequate. Scientific publication must above all be rigorous and honest. In an emergency, these values are needed more than ever._

James Todaro helped to bring this questionable study to light—his website ([https://www.medicineuncensored.com/](https://www.medicineuncensored.com/)) and compilation of HCQ studies ([https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O6Cls- Oz2ZAgJuyDbnICEGjM...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1O6Cls- Oz2ZAgJuyDbnICEGjMvQPEyM-aaXARUomR9Ww/)) may be of interest.

<comment><USER8> The university of Minnesota has a clinical trial out showing no early benefit of HCQ treatment.

<comment><USER9> > The university of Minnesota has a clinical trial out showing no early > benefit of HCQ treatment.

They have yet to publish the results on whether it benefits patients during the early onset of symptoms. [1]

Is hydroxychloroquine paired with zinc in the two studies? That has been the central claim of people supporting hydroxychloroquine this entire time and so far I've yet to see them used together in an early treatment / preventative study in the US (perhaps they've done so in Europe or China?).

[1] "A separate U trial is examining whether it benefits patients after early onset of symptoms, but results haven't been published."

[https://www.startribune.com/anti-malaria-drug-in-u-of-m- tria...](https://www.startribune.com/anti-malaria-drug-in-u-of-m-trial-does- little-to-stop-covid-19/570989342/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here is a great example of why I keep pointing out how difficult it is to be a critical thinker. There isn't a single source to go to that gives the current status of HCQ + COVID, and there are dozens of links to journals in this thread that are making my head spin. So when people ask my opinion on HCQ, my answer is now: "I don't know, we don't have enough data that has been studied and approved by multiple peer-reviewed journals, because one isn't enough."

This doesn't shake my attitude toward science in the slightest, but it does leave me feeling very uninformed. But maybe, just maybe, that is the correct phase-state to be in given the data? Or have I been zone-flooded?

<comment><USER11> My answer is "we don't know but there seems to be little harm in trying it." This is what's happening right now. Sure, it's a bit of a shotgun approach, but again, if Drs want to used an already fda approved drug and try various approaches to see if it helps, I see no issue. Honestly, I don't get all the politics around this.

<comment><USER12> > ... _there seems to be little harm in trying it [...] if Drs want to used an > already fda approved drug_ ...

All drugs have side effects, for example [https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-5482/hydroxychloroquine-o...](https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-5482/hydroxychloroquine- oral/details) So each drug is a (small) risk for the patient. The idea of testing the drugs in RCT before using in the patients in the wild is that you can be quite sure that the benefits are greater than the risks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Well done to the three authors who launched an independent peer review of the dataset, and when those reviewers couldn't verify it, asked for the paper to be withdrawn. I'm sure they will always regret they didn't ask more questions earlier, but once discrepancies emerged, they seem to have acted with integrity.

<comment><USER14> However, it reminds me how many believe in scientific studies - i.e. _individual_ scientific studies - almost like a religion - holding up one study and result like it's the bible. Instead, we need to attach our primal emotions to the _scientific process_. Work should be done in the media and popular science to educate the public to make them learn to latch on to the process...and much less abuse of science may take place.

Would anyone else agree?

<comment><USER13> I would definitely agree; even when we're trying our absolute best to get to the bottom of a phenomenon (and from some people's publication counts, it's clear not everyone does that), it's still possible to delude ourselves and often then also the reviewers. Over time consensus is achieved, but it's rare any scientist trusts a single study or paper. A problem then arises when you really need results fast, as with COVID-19, because good science isn't fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Influential Lancet hydroxychloroquine study retracted by 3 authors ([https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/hydroxychloroquine-covid- lanc...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/hydroxychloroquine-covid- lancet-1.5598761))

> Three of the authors of an influential article that found hydroxychloroquine > increased the risk of death in COVID-19 patients retracted the study on > concerns about the quality of the data....

> Results of a [different] high-quality randomized, placebo-control trial also > published yesterday in the New England Journal of Medicine from U.S. and > Canadian researchers showed hydroxychloroquine was no better than placebo > pills at preventing illness from the coronavirus.

</comment><comment><USER16> > "can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources."

It's a little understatement when the accusations are they made up the data.

<comment><USER17> You're conflating many "they" here.

The retraction is by the study authors. The data is from a company that's entirely different, and that company claims their data is "proprietary" and they can't share it.

There's strong suspicion that that proprietary data is in fact made up, but the study authors cannot prove it. And you really don't want to retract a study by making unproven allegations.

"We can't vouch for the veracity" is all they can truthfully say.

For the full statement: ""Our independent peer reviewers informed us that Surgisphere would not transfer the full dataset, client contracts, and the full ISO audit report to their servers for analysis as such transfer would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements. As such, our reviewers were not able to conduct an independent and private peer review and therefore notified us of their withdrawal from the peer-review process."[1]

The authors tried for an independent audit. Surgisphere failed to cooperate. Given the history of its principal, not a surprise.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lance...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lancet- retracts-paper-that-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials)

<comment><USER18> The CEO of said company is one of the authors.

In any case, even if he wasn't, the other three dunces should never have trusted such dubious data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the best scenario, this whole story is an illustration of incompetence, in the worst case, this is a sign of corruption. In both, more scrutiny is needed.

</comment><comment><USER20> Back in 1998 Andrew Wakefield duped Lancet with a concocted MMR autism study and the consequence of that study still haunt us to this day.

Now it appears this has happened again.

<comment><USER4> The MMR study took 12 years from publication to retraction. This one took 12 days.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's certainly an improvement, but even if health authorities and researchers quickly adapt their knowledge to reflect the retraction of this paper, the wide media circulation of "HCQ will kill you" has permanently poisoned the well of test patients for future research.

Even though the retraction was quick, the damage to future research is permanent. If this was in fact a propaganda operation rather than just incompetence, pride and an unethical career gambit, it was an incredibly successful one.

When someone fakes data to this degree, in a case that has this level of immediate real-world impact, one has to question the motivation behind it. Hope this gets illuminated during the investigation, but I'm not holding my breath.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What did the retracted study say about hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine? Did it claim they were efficacious versus COVID-19, or that they weren't? Or was it something else?

<comment><USER22> If you want real scientific studies, have a look here:

[https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance- article/doi/10.1093/aje...](https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance- article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586?fbclid=IwAR1uM2zcTs_UpRT4hKcf2Vm4gHDHI8wWflHEArys- Dax4vRPcTYoZCgLi9Q)

<comment><USER23> One of these "studies" is a 2-page Google Doc with no real data. Another is the discredited Raoult study, which is under investigation by the journal [1]. Another study cited is also by Raoult's team. The Brazil study (ref. 29) doesn't seem to have passed peer review (yet?) and has severe methodological flaws. Like the Raoult studies, the Brazil study was not randomized, but makes no attempt to control for confounding by indication or self-selection, such as with propensity score matching or similar methods commonly used in observational studies. The last study cited isn't a study, but an article from a local news station.

[1] [https://retractionwatch.com/2020/04/06/hydroxychlorine- covid...](https://retractionwatch.com/2020/04/06/hydroxychlorine- covid-19-study-did-not-meet-publishing-societys-expected-standard/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The media really went to town on this one, the reports that you might die using it lacked some real common sense, all of a sudden a drug that was approved in 1955, considered extremely safe (listed as an essential medicine by WHO) , and used on millions of people... is suddenly not safe.

<comment><USER25> Isn't the problem that it was so far used in a quite different dosis? The covid applications seems to increase the limit 14x. That's reason enough not to carry over the established safety status.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The medical profession needs to have a serious discussion about whether or not the Lancet should still be treated as a top journal.

In addition to this retraction, 3 of the top 10 most cited retracted papers of all time were published in the Lancet. [0] This includes the infamous Wakefield "vaccines cause autism" paper which is probably the most damaging scientific fraud of the last several decades.

On the editorial side, they've become quite outspoken on political matters [1], publishing one piece calling for the ban of tobacco, a letter expressing strong opinions on the Israel/Palestine conflict, and a piece just a couple weeks ago calling for Americans to vote Trump out of office. The also published a rather controversial study that provided very high estimates of the civilian death toll of the Iraq War. I'm inclined to agree with their position on some issues and disagree with it on others, but either way they seem to court controversy.

All of this has been under the same editor, Richard Horton (who is himself quite outspoken.) Put it all together, and the picture that emerges is a publication that values making a splash (whether by publishing shocking results or by taking a position on political issues) over getting things correct. That's irritating behavior in a tabloid. In a prestigious journal, it's horrifyingly irresponsible.

[0] [https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch- leaderboard...](https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch- leaderboard/top-10-most-highly-cited-retracted-papers/)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet#Controversies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lancet#Controversies)

</comment><comment><USER27> As I understand it, the WHO changed policy on HCQ because of this study. So, if you had posted a YouTube video criticizing this study and the WHO decision, Google may have taken that video down in accordance with their policy to delete videos the are counter to WHO policy. That didn't actually happen, to my knowledge. But it would have been Google policy if it did.

 _That_ is what is wrong with platforms like Google and Facebook adopting the role of fact-checkers.

<comment><USER28> > Google may have taken that video down in accordance with their policy to > delete videos the are counter to WHO policy.

Good grief. Why are urban legends so hard to kill? There is no such policy. There never was.

The source of that bit of ginned-up outrage was an informal interview (when I looked this up earlier, there wasn't even video or a transcript available anywhere!) where someone senior was asked about what Youtube's criteria were for vetting advice in the face of the pandemic. And the answer was a hand-wavy thing about how anything that was clearly wrong, or clearly dangerous, and one of the examples given was about medical advice that clearly runs counter to existing health care bodies like the WHO.

And that's as far as it went. There never was a policy about the WHO. To my knowledge no video was ever removed because of a conflict with the WHO.

The whole point wasn't to nitpick about exactly what the WHO said, it was to reference the fact that Youtube would adhere to expert consensus where possible.

> That is what is wrong with platforms like Google and Facebook adopting the > role of fact-checkers.

The irony there is that, had Google or Facebook or _someone_ taken on that role, you wouldn't have internalized this fake fact because whoever it was that spun it to you wouldn't have had an audience. But they didn't. So you got lied to.

Which is better?

<comment><USER29> > There never was a policy about the WHO.

"Anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations would be a violation of our policy." \- YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki

> To my knowledge no video was ever removed because of a conflict with the > WHO.

"Sharyl Attkisson, host of the nationally syndicated news magazine TV show "Full Measure" had her story about "politicizing COVID-19 medicine" pulled by YouTube, because the video service deemed it 'dangerous.' The issue was that one doctor said that hydroxychloroquine still needed to be studied."

[https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/youtube-reinstates- hyd...](https://abc3340.com/news/nation-world/youtube-reinstates- hydroxychloroquine-story-after-deeming-it-dangerous)

<comment><USER28> That's the quote from the interview I mentioned. Now find me the _policy_ you claim exists. Hell, even find me a transcript of that interview. This is literally one story written about one out of context quote with no external verification by any of the parties involved. It's the very definition of manufactured outrage.

As far as the video you linked: it was reinstated. That's right there in the headline of the article you linked. They messed up, and put it back. Isn't that saying that their actual policy is the _opposite_ of what you claim?

<comment><USER27> Here is the policy: [https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891785?hl=en)

<comment><USER30> That policy is completely absurd on its face.

>YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities' medical information about COVID-19

What if local health authorities contradict WHO medical information?

Google's mission used to be to organize the world's information. Now they seem to be want to go way beyond that.

<comment><USER31> >>YouTube doesn't allow content that spreads medical misinformation that contradicts the World Health Organization (WHO) or local health authorities' medical information about COVID-19

>What if local health authorities contradict WHO medical information?

Simple: then you're not allowed to upload videos on those topics at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So then should we also retract the continuous media message that we've heard for days, claiming that chloroquine kills people? It was on the front page of every media outlet.

<comment><USER28> No, we should cover the retraction. And we are, that's what the linked article is. I genuinely don't understand the need on some people's part to impart an "agenda" here.

The president of the united states _made_ this front page news by boosting the drug in a context where there was minimal evidence that it helped. That's newsworthy. It just is. The same principle that gets his statements on the front page gets refutations there too. It's news if he's right. It's news if he's wrong.

I mean... what would your preferred action be? Not cover newsworthy science? Not cover the statements of the president? Or do you just not want them to cover stuff you personally disagree with?

In reality: they covered the president, they covered the result, and they covered the retraction. All with pretty solid reach, frankly. We're literally yelling about it right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Such a poop-show. This is going to hurt the public trust in science, let's hope this is short term because what is the alternative?

</comment><comment><USER34> Another study that was using the same data was retracted from NE Journal of Medicine:

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2021225](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2021225)

</comment><comment><USER22> Regarding HCQ safety:

This is from the CDC web site: safe for young, old and pregnant:

[https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/drugs/hydroxyc...](https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/resources/pdf/fsp/drugs/hydroxychloroquine.pdf)

<comment><USER25> Is this the same as what is applied for covid patients? Elsewhere it was stated that for covid, the dosis is increased 14x.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The lancet is a good journal, but how did this study as well as that retracted study on vaccines and autism end up in this journal and not JAMA or NEJM? At this point, I'm a little suspicious of their peer review process if these contrarian papers that turn out to be wrong in the end aren't being properly scrutinized at the peer review level, and will spend much more time in methods sections of striking lancet papers.

</comment><comment><USER36> See also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23420774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23420774)

<comment><USER37> And the original: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23272222)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hope this will lead to more public scrutiny about the practices of the leading scientific journals.

</comment><comment><USER38> _The study 's three authors retracted their study on June 4th, "because independent peer reviewers could not access the data used for the analysis," reports The Hill. "The source of the data was Surgisphere Corporation, which told peer reviewers it would not transfer the full dataset used for the study because it would violate client agreements and confidentiality requirements."_

 _However, the same day the New England Journal of Medicine published results from a new double-blind randomized, placebo-controlled trial which found hydroxychloroquine didn 't help prevent people exposed to others with Covid-19 from developing the disease. One of the study's co-authors said that as a preventative agent, "It doesn't seem to work."_

[https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/05/23/0140202/study- of...](https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/05/23/0140202/study- of-96000-covid-19-patients-finds-hydroxychloroquine-increased-their-risk-of- dying)

<comment><USER39> This should terrify any researcher working with a private company's data. I think top journals need to change their policy here ably data availability, especially when private companies get involved.

<comment><USER40> > private companies

Government entities hardly exempt from self-serving bias and manipulation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Headline is wrong. Lancet didn't retract the study, three of the four authors did.

<comment><USER36> Ok, we've put three authors in the HN title to reflect that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> now will there be a next step ? This looks like fraud, and my hope now is that there is a police investigation, because it may very well be guided by economical interest.

No conspiracy theory here, there's nothing sure, but we can't rule it out completely either.

<comment><USER43> What's the economic interest of claiming the medication _doesn 't_ work?

<comment><USER44> The company that provided the data, Surgisphere, might have been trying to raise their profile by getting a big publication. They're a bit shady.

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/02/su...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/02/surgisphere- and-their-data)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Five studies show effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine for outpatients

[https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance- article/doi/10.1093/aje...](https://academic.oup.com/aje/advance- article/doi/10.1093/aje/kwaa093/5847586?fbclid=IwAR2x3eEIuV9EbOmtAN7U35eZsmMNsohWXrh- RIwxTIei5KhHa5iKsk2YE2o)

<comment><USER45> Since this is being repeated multiple times, quoting benmaraschino:

One of these "studies" is a 2-page Google Doc with no real data. Another is the discredited Raoult study, which is under investigation by the journal [1]. Another study cited is also by Raoult's team. The Brazil study (ref. 29) doesn't seem to have passed peer review (yet?) and has severe methodological flaws. Like the Raoult studies, the Brazil study was not randomized, but makes no attempt to control for confounding by indication or self-selection, such as with propensity score matching or similar methods commonly used in observational studies. The last study cited isn't a study, but an article from a local news station.</comment></comment>


How to use auto-generated tags? - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/07/13/tagging-tools/ 1. For a suggest feature in search? 2. For tags display of content? 3. Improving the auto-generated tag system through validation, in an attempt to not completely rely on user generated tags? <comment><AUTHOR> 1\. For a suggest feature in search?

2\. For tags display of content?

3\. Improving the auto-generated tag system through validation, in an attempt to not completely rely on user generated tags?

</comment><comment><USER2> There is a good thread to read on flickr about _machine-tags_ that you can read here ~ <http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/>

Using rdf you can represent tags as _"foo:bar=foobar"_. So your use is really only limited by the limitations of the format itself.</comment>


LLC vs. C-Corporation: Which Is Right For Startups? - <AUTHOR> http://learn.onemonth.com/llc-vs-corporation-for-startups

<comment><USER2> There is approximately zero content here. Only a call to action to sign up for a program.

<comment><AUTHOR> @corysama, the videos are designed to be 1 minute long for super-beginners. So they're short intentionally. It's part of a series of 1-minute intro videos for people getting started with coding + startups.

Also, appreciate the feedback.</comment></comment>


Samsung's Smart Helmets Will Make Life Easier for Specially Abled People - <AUTHOR> http://www.whatafuture.com/2016/12/03/samsung-smart-helmets-life-easier-differently-abled/ <comment><USER2> >>Specially Abled People

Jeezus!—even the most politically correct yogurt knitter in the world would want to punch someone, after reading that phrase!

</comment><comment><USER3> The fantasy mutants in the X-Men movies are "specially abled". Real people with actual disabilities are not.</comment>


Show HN: Quid – try micropayments instead of ads or subscriptions - <AUTHOR> https://quid.works <comment><USER2> Good luck. We've spent 6 figures investigating all this over 2 years. The problem isn't payment, it's human behavior and the lack of value associated with content.

<comment><USER3> That seems to imply that the products people are selling aren't products people are willing to buy. Spending millions trying to figure out how to get people to buy things they don't want can only go so far.

<comment><USER4> I think it has to do with the human perception between "free" and "any amount", no matter how small.

<comment><USER5> This very much depends on the humans in question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure upfront per-article micropayment is really that great. Comparing to traditional newspapers, the difference is that with the newspaper, you pay for a collection of articles, perhaps because you trust the paper to be interesting because of its reputation, perhaps because a headline caught your attention. Having paid, you also get added value from any number of articles you wouldn't have paid for on their own, and might not have even read if they were presented to you by themselves, for free. And yet you'd often find some of these articles the most interesting.

This doesn't happen if you're paying per article, based on a preview.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think one of the main challenges here is subscription-overload. Once you have a subscription to, say, the NY times, and the Washington Post, you're unlikely to get a third subscription to read an article on the Economist.

Charging, say, 10¢ for the article can help them generate revenue from those that don't want to shell out for another subscription.

<comment><USER7> _I think one of the main challenges here is subscription-overload._

Bingo! I had been using Patreon as a "poor man's micropayments." I was implementing the "spend what you would on a cable subscription" idea and spreading mostly $1 payments across nearly 40 YouTubers. I would love a system that just makes micropayments as I browse/watch.

<comment><USER8> Exactly!

Just don't fall into the trap of many others that wants to take an amount from my account every month. I'm quite fed up with that.

Instead allow me to pay per view. I'll happy pay a sum in up front to reduce friction.

<comment><USER9> I think Flattr now has a system that is close to what you describe for YouTube. Micropayments are hard and Patreon is the 1st company to produce serious results experiments like Steem are interesting but siloed in the cryptosphere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone who promotes micropayments studied behavioral economics? If so I'd think they'd play a different tune. Pain of paying is a real effect.

It's basic stuff around loss aversion that's real and documented in real humans as opposed to homo economicus

<comment><USER11> Yeah but the whole idea is that if Quid is seamlessly integrated (e.g., paypal integration is often quite nice and 'painless') -- then more people would pay.

FWIW i have no problem installing a micropayment plugin in Chrome that is connected to my credit card, and paying $.05 or something if I find an article I enjoy. I say this -- but I'm terrified of what future that will bring to the internet. Where now everything is behind a micro-paywall.

<comment><USER12> It's still not even worth it to ask for it as a writer. I've written a few long-form articles (hour plus reads) that have 25k+ reads on Medium. If I was able to get that readership as an author, I'd be a best-seller -- potentially making $100k or more from my writing.

Mind you, this is insanely successful for a writer.

Even still, if on Medium, 3% of people who read my articles are willing to pay $0.25 for them -- I'd make about about $600.

TBH, I'd rather not bug my readers for that little bit of money.

<comment><USER13> How does Medium track reads?

<comment><USER12> AFAIK, time on page and how far down the article you scroll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There's a lot of naysayers here: it's been tried, it can't be done, etc. But I have a hard time believing all that. They said the same thing about the music industry. The cable TV industry is going through a huge change now. I think someone can figure this out, and I wish anyone taking this on the best of luck! I think it's something we really need to counter the constant barrage of ads, privacy invasions, etc. that we have to deal with today.

Personally, I'd be happy to have some sort of pay-per-article "account" I could use as-needed. But it's really hard to decide whether something is worth reading up-front. And after-the-fact I'm guessing most folks will just not bother. So I'm not sure how you address that. But again, best of luck to anyone taking this on. I'm rooting for you.

<comment><USER15> It's good to look at previous experiences that failed, but conditions are ever-changing. Ad clickthrough is down, ad-blockers are up, more media outlets closing. Eventually, it will be advertorial content or subscription. Or some other awful end-state like that. Maybe on the way there there is a point where an alternative model that failed in the past, or a new one, is possible. I like the pay upfront, free returns model, block only abusers. It works for stuff where returns have so much friction, it should work for content.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks -- co-founder Mo here. Happy to answer any questions about this.

We've spent the last year building this platform, and done a ton of surveys and studies to support the thesis behind the product -- users are fatigued by subscriptions, and ads are annoying.

The platform is also technically very interesting, and I'm happy to talk about that too.

<comment><USER16> There's no explanation on your site anywhere (at least without signing up) but as a content creator what would my readers expect to experience with your service? Am I basically counting on people to go to your site, set up a new account, and load up their "wallets" with USD that can be semi-automatically siphoned off when they visit a Quid-enabled site?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good question. There are no wallets, and users don't have to go to QUID to signup beforehand.

One integrated, the payment flow is smooth -- they click pay on your site, it pops up a credit-card entry form, with an e-mail textbox for signup. Once verified, the goods are paid for and you get a signed receipt to deliver your content. (User's cards are charged after they hit a payment threshold.)

More about it on our knowledge base: [https://how.quid.works](https://how.quid.works)

(Also good point, we'll make that clearer on our site.)

<comment><USER17> Does Quid take risk on shoppers who never hit a payment threshold?

<comment><AUTHOR> Partly -- we payout only captured fees, but carry chargeback and fraud risk. We're trying to find a balance between practicality and utility, and all this will evolve as we learn more.

<comment><USER17> Seems ripe for fraud, seller delivers and never gets paid due to threshold (one time shoppers). Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't this Flattr all over again?

</comment><comment><USER19> Handily I just recently wrote up my standard list of problems/concerns with micropayments and microfraud: [https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/micropa...](https://github.com/pjc50/pjc50.github.io/blob/master/micropayments- microfraud.md)

</comment><comment><USER20> Blockchain is a game changer in that regard. Micropayments we just not economically feasible to this point because of the high fixed costs to settle and process payments. I.e if I want to sell an article for 50cts with PayPal, PayPal would take 30 cts. Blockchain enables much cheaper processing. We at Satoshipay ([https://satoshipay.io/](https://satoshipay.io/)) have built such a solution for Publishers and just announced our first big partnership with Europe's leading digital publisher, Axel Springer ([https://medium.com/@SatoshiPay/satoshipay-and-axel- springer-...](https://medium.com/@SatoshiPay/satoshipay-and-axel-springer- cooperate-on-blockchain-technology-usage-7bde7f2d34c8))

<comment><USER21> You know, PayPal has a micropayment offering. 50¢ would only cost you 8¢

[http://pressbin.com/tools/paypal_micropayments/](http://pressbin.com/tools/paypal_micropayments/)

<comment><USER22> which is a 16% fee :DDD

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Some friends of mine built a micropayments platform.

[https://tapview.com/](https://tapview.com/)

Conclusion: micropayments are hard.

</comment><comment><USER24> Awesome, I'm glad someone is solving this problem. Micropayments are an ideal route to solving surveillance capitalism and breaking the ad-supported internet.

This looks like it aggregates credit card payments. [1] Charging you on a biweekly basis or when your balance hits 10$. Since it is built off of credit card infrastructure that means it is saving money on the fixed per-transaction fee. Unfortunately, this model can never get below a credit card fee (2.9%).

If you instead made a wallet based app (funded via ACH) you could start pushing 1% transaction fees.

1\. [https://how.quid.works/buying-with-quid/how-do-i-get- billed](https://how.quid.works/buying-with-quid/how-do-i-get-billed)

</comment><comment><USER25> I signed up but I see they're using credit card payment...can this work?

</comment><comment><USER26> Very cool. Are there any sites already using this platform?

</comment><comment><USER27> I can only hope for a decentralized alternative using the Lightning Network instead of this model where everybody has to sign up for Quid.</comment>


Store your bounced email notifications from AWS SES in an S3 bucket - <AUTHOR> Hello.
We recently setup AWS SES at Inato and I had issues getting information about bounced emails. As i figured out how to do it, I ended up writing a complete guide on how to store the notifications provided by AWS (for bounced, complaint and delivery notifications) in an S3 bucket, using SNS and lambda. You can follow this guide to store the notifications anywhere you need, only the lambda's code has to be updated.
Find the article here: https://medium.com/inato/store-your-bounced-email-notifications-from-aws-simple-email-service-ses-in-an-s3-bucket-c47c1b05ed93
Hope it helps! <comment><USER2> Great, thank you. We use SES to send some mails but didn't have any bounces yet, but that is only a matter of time. It is a b2b app where users have to enter the recipient manually. Not sure how hard Amazon penalises bounces, but the low amount of mails we send can destroy the statistic if we have just one or a few more bounces.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that as long as you tell AWS that you have a process to handle the bounces, it's not a big issue. This is where my guide is handful. Getting information on the bounces is part of the way to handle them correctly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great article, thx!</comment>


If the moon were only 1 pixel - <AUTHOR> http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html <comment><USER2> I am very grateful that I have a mouse that can unlock the scroll wheel so it just keeps on spinning :)

<comment><AUTHOR> In the bottom right corner there is a small icon making you scroll with the speed of light away from the sun by the way.

<comment><USER2> Speed of light takes too long :)</comment></comment></comment>


Facebook "Messenger Day" is the chat app's new Snapchat Stories clone - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/30/messenger-day/ <comment><USER2> Seems like facebook is really under pressure from snapchat. It seems like for the young people fb have very little cool factor now</comment>


A form of mass spectrometry to detect traces of substances within a fingerprint - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-41525517 <comment><USER2> Mass spectrometry has been around for decades now. I remember seeing old (before even my time) manual plots on graph paper from the '60s. Without wishing to detract from the researchers accomplishments, why hasn't this been done before? What special thing are they doing that wasn't possible before?

<comment><USER3> MS as a concept has been around, but new and more sensitive detector designs are developed every so often. new ionization techniques come along as well, which can generate ions from smaller and smaller sample quantities with less and less preparation.

that article is devoid of useful information, but i'd guess this is the result of one of the new ionization techniques, and it took some years after its commercial introduction to be validated for forensic use.

<comment><USER2> Ah interesting, thanks. Googling a bit more for ionization techniques suggests you might be right, and it might be: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix- assisted_laser_desorpti...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix- assisted_laser_desorption/ionization) (based on a reference in [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/fingerprint-test-criminal-lifestyle-profile-drugs-blood-courts- trials-maldi-mass-spectrometry-a7992621.html))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I feel like I may be missing something....are they performing MS analysis on the powdered COPY of the fingerprint or are they analysing the actual fingerprint (and presumably the actual item that was touched and has the invisible fingerprint physically on it)?

If the former, then I'm not sure how they're getting accurate results.....if the latter....that could be complicated if it's a piece of furniture or something larger than the chamber used in the MS analysis.....</comment>


Responsive Websites - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/design-ux/2b407f03704b

<comment><USER2> Android's web browser downloads images that are not displayed? Isn't that a bug?</comment>


The Schilovski Gyrocar: Turn-Of-the-Century Segway-Fighter - <AUTHOR> http://jalopnik.com/5499332/the-schilovski-gyrocar-turn-of-the-century-segway-fighter <comment><USER2> From the article it is not clear what the motivation for the design was. Some efficiency might have been gained from having two wheels but the heavy gyro would surely have negated this.

A modern take on this is Lit Motors C-1 which aims to provide efficiency of a motorcycle with the safety and comfort of a car. [http://litmotors.com/c1/](http://litmotors.com/c1/)

<comment><USER3> I wondered what the driver was for this as well. I can see 2 main reasons- 1) narrow pedestrian streets and unpaved paths were probably easier to navigate with two wheels and 2) BECAUSE GYROSCOPES!</comment></comment>


The Time I Accidentally Destroyed a Production Server - <AUTHOR> http://projectb14ck.org/how-to-not-be-lean

<comment><USER2> The way I read it, you didn't destroy anything. You had a moment of panic, and could have created real problems.

Regardless, same lessons learned right? :) Whether the server is gone or not, it could have been, and the way we work changes drastically after a real world scare like this.

Did you ever tell the boss, or did you just let it ride? There's nothing like going to the boss in a cold sweat and the old "I f __*ed up" look on your face.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just let it ride at the time. When I joined the company there wasn't any other tech guy around except me (our tech guy was on a vacation). So I was left alone for a while, and had to sort out of lot of craziness :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Never log into your production servers via shell? This seems a tad over the top.. especially if you are planning on writing a script to perform operations and need to discover dependencies / etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, the idea is that instead of logging into production, you log into your development environment, do the testing there--then you write a script that replicates what you just did. Lastly, you run the script on staging, and if that seems to work, then run it on production.

There's a pretty handy tool I use now (fabric: docs.fabfile.org) that makes it pretty simple.

<comment><USER3> How do you know that production environment and development environment are exact mirrors? I recognize you could image the production environment, but when setting up new applications I will make a variety of changes, especially during testing, which may require testing on the production server also.. especially since the production server is active and may not tolerate the changes the same way the development server will.

My point is, your method of "never logging into a production server" is extreme. You could have easily written a script for this and then by accident, executed it on the production server instead of on a testing server. Same problem manifests itself in a different manner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "If you join a project with no version control, don't convince yourself that everything will be ok. Refuse to do any work until you version control it." Embargo on.

</comment><comment><USER5> cd /tmp. Unzip some file with some system image - usr, etc, lib, the usual - that should be unpacked in /. Do what needs to be done. rm -fr /usr. WAIT, NO! ^C. "Backup, could you be so kind as to restore the ABC server /usr tree? I think I made a huge mistake. Thank you."

Good times. Learned a lot about why I need a VM with an image of a given system.</comment>


Ask HN: What were you doing when 9/11 happened? - <AUTHOR>

Another 9/11 anniversary is coming up. Would love to read what any of the HN guys were doing when it happened... <comment><USER2> I've got a story for you, though it is not mine: I went to Japan to study abroad in 2002, and was told this on the first anniversary of the attacks by the professor who was in charge of the program (and who had been the same on 9/11).

The first plane struck the World Trade Center in the late evening, Japan time. The American embassy contacted the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs approximately one hour later, asking for all possible assistance in securing Americans. (There are somewhere on the order of 100,000 Americans in Japan at any given time.)

Prior to word arriving from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the Ministry of Justice to the various local bodies in Japan which handle civil defense, someone in the Kyoto Prefectural Police heard about the attacks on television and immediately ordered a full mobilization. Cops were called back in in the dead of night, and went down a list of every hotel in Kyoto asking whether they currently or habitually had American guests. Simultaneously, someone woke the Foreigner Registration clerks at Kyoto's several ward offices and pulled the addresses of every registered American in the city. Including some four dozen students of my study abroad program.

My professor was awakened at the first ray of dawn by a police lieutenant, who explained that there had been an attack on America the previous night. He explained that putting a watcher on every American in the city had strained their resources, and apologized that they had only time to scrape together _two dozen police in full tactical gear_ to discourage the, quote, dishonorable no-account bastards from trying to continue the fight at a small American school half a world away.

I have had many, many occasions to grind my teeth due to interactions with Japanese cops, but I always tell myself that, in the balance, we still owe them one.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. I was actually living in Tokyo at the time and never heard about the police notifying Americans of the attack. (I am an American citizen.)

I first heard of the attack when a friend called my roommate and told us to turn on the TV. It was right after the first plane had just hit and they were still trying to figure out if it was some kind of accident. Shortly after, the 2nd plane hit and it became very apparent that it was no accident...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was in NYC at a breakfast meeting midtown (just south of Central Park). The restaurant manager interrupted our meeting to tell us that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. Two of the people at the meeting worked at Sun, which had an office in the towers. They left immediately, and the meeting broke up a while later.

Walking to the subway, we could see smoke from the towers (and we were around 55th street). There was some confusion among pedestrians.

Back at my office, there was a TV and we saw what had happened. I tried to call home, but the phones and my cell weren't working. I emailed my family, and managed to catch a train back home to CT. The train was full; people were standing in the aisles.

Edit: A friend had a breakfast meeting scheduled at the Twin Towers that day, but it had been moved uptown and he was nowhere near when it happened.

</comment><comment><USER5> I was just entering the newsroom of the paper where I was a photojournalist. I walked in and saw the first building burning on one of the TV's mounted around the room, the second plane had not yet hit. At that point it still seemed like a horrible, one-off accident. Then the second plane flew in and it got very quiet in the normally loud room. A brief moment of shocked silence and then the newsroom erupted as reporters and editors started reacting.

I started with some local reaction coverage and by that evening was in a car on my way to New York City. Drove all night taking turns with our reporter and was within site of the smoking southern end of Manhattan by dawn. It was horrible to see the thousands of family members wandering around like zombies, many carrying pictures, still hoping for a miracle.

One side note from that day, my then 3 year old son asked my wife who was watching the news coverage, "Mom, why do you keep watching that show? You've already seen it."

</comment><comment><USER6> In Islamabad. Got back to the hotel to flick on CNN, just moments after the second plane had hit. Al Qaeda were already being suggested as the perpetrators. Was flying back to London on BA the next morning (was evening- time in Pakistan) and had to get up at 4am. Popped out to the bazaar to buy an alarm clock - there was quite an eerie atmosphere in the city. The next morning at the airport everyone was glued to TVs watching footage of the planes hit in a repeating loop. By this point Afghanistan and Pakistan were also in the frame. There was a flight to Kabul so a lot of afghans about too - everyone seemed genuinely appalled/shocked.

That flight was the last out before BA cancelled all flights for like 2 months out of Pakistan. Was a bit nerve-wracking.

</comment><comment><USER7> That was the last day I ever used my old pager. I'd had that pager since 1996, and I hadn't actually used it for anything for a good few months. That morning, I listened to my instincts and put it on.

I was at a New Age store buying incense and charcoal blocks for the burner when the pager went off. It was almost 15:00. It had taken till then for the news to come through.

The pager went off just three further times: when the second plane hit, and when each of the towers fell, in turn.

That was the last time I ever received anything on that pager service.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was in a high school chemistry class. Something was clearly happening since teachers kept leaving their classrooms and talking in hallways. Us students didn't know what was up.

By the time that class ended and I moved on to a history class, people were talking and everyone knew something happened with a plane flying into a building. The history teacher pulled a TV cart into her room, announced that what was happening would be in history books in the future, and had us watch CNN for the class period.

<comment><USER9> I was in my high school health class. The principal informed all the teachers over the intercom to turn off all radios and televisions.

Our teacher told us that today was going to be an important day to remember and that he wasn't going to be the one to shield us from it. He rolled in a television and we watched the news until the period ended.

<comment><USER10> What the HELL was the principle thinking?! I detest people, especially those in authority, whose first instinct is to hide or withhold information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We'd concluded a management buy-out deal the day before, the letters of intent and term sheets were all signed and I was reading CNN when the first plane struck.

I switched on the office TV and called everybody upstairs to my room and we watched dumbstruck as the second plane hit.

After that I told my partners that the deal was likely off, no way the investors would fund a deal like that in a time of uncertainty, we got the call 15 minutes later.

We felt extremely connected with America in every way that that is possible from halfway across the world, one of us had a friend working in one of the towers and spent a day to make sure she was ok. Half the company was on the other side of the Atlantic at the time and it took quite some time before I was able to go there again.

The images of the smoking towers and then later the collapse will never fade, that's for sure.

</comment><comment><USER12> I was at home here in Italy, around 3pm or something like that. I was making websites back then and I used to work from home a couple of days a week, with my boss constantly on the phone.

After some talking he went like 'Have you seen that plane in NY? With all the possible places, the pilot manged to crash it into the tallest tower. It's on TV now, they even interrupted the programs'

So I switched on the TV to check it out, and then we quickly recovered our discussion and kept talking for another few minutes.

Then, all of a sudden, he went '..shit' in the middle of a sentence, and then silence for the next 10-20 seconds. The second plane had crashed into the other tower, with the whole fireball on live TV. I was watching it too. All I heard then was 'I call you later' and he hung up.

That night I was really expecting serious troubles.

</comment><comment><USER13> I was playing video games. It was the afternoon in France. When I switched off the PS2, it took me a few minutes to realize I wasn't watching a movie. I kept watching TV until late that night…

</comment><comment><USER14> I was in 7th grade at the time in the middle of an English test on Greek Mythology. My professor, Prof. Sigñore turned on the TV to watch the news coverage, however, he forced us to finish our test.

I vividly remember a bunch of my friends' parents coming to pick them up at school as if their sons' lives were in danger. My mom called me to ask if I wanted to go home, I said no as I had practice that afternoon at school. Practice ended up being cancelled. There's my story.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm kind of skeptical to these type of memories, called flashbulb memories, since most of the time subjects give vivid details and are confident when in fact it's just made up details they believed they experienced. So AFAIK I don't remember anything particular about 9/11.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flashbulb_memory>

<comment><USER6> Interesting link. Didn't read the whole thing, but the first few paragraphs seem to suggest the opposite of what you're saying: flashbulb memories are valid (i.e. not made up, although not necessarily complete) and are remembered so well as a result of the event triggering surprise or emotional arousal.

<comment><USER15> I guess it's just my bias/skepticism because against flashbulb memories but this sums up my position: "Flashbulb memories are not special in their accuracy, as previously claimed, but only in their perceived accuracy."

<http://pss.sagepub.com/content/14/5/455.abstract>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was in 3rd grade. Sometime in the middle of the day, a lot of kids started leaving, but I wasn't sure why. My teacher didn't say anything. I think I thought it was a birthday party for a kid who had their birthday that day.

I was waiting after school for a carpool to a Hebrew School I went to. Instead, my mom came to pick me up. I was somewhat confused. My mom eventually explained, in not very much detail, that people had flown planes into buildings in New York. I didn't really grok the significance of it then--I was too young to understand.

It wasn't until later, I think in 9th grade, that I saw a video of the planes crashing into the building, and then started to grok what had happened. I also later learned that a relative who worked in the Pentagon would have had a meeting in the wing of the Pentagon that was destroyed, but it was canceled so she was in her office when the plane hit. Thank God for that.

</comment><comment><USER17> Driving to work outside of Boston, listening to the Howard Stern program, then on WBCN. He reported on a small plane hitting the WTC, but mostly was doing his usual schtick. Then the second plane hit and he concluded that it was a terrorist attack. He was a better source of news in those first minutes than the local NPR station or anything else I could find on my car radio.

Once I got to work, we watched TV for the rest of the day. It was the strangest, most surreal work day I've ever experienced. There were lots of rumors going around, with great uncertainty over how many planes were taken over.

<comment><USER18> I was working at home, listening to a local "shock jock" morning radio show when they mentioned the first crash. I flipped on CNN on my computer's tv tuner but mostly listened to the radio. When the second plane hit, it took a minute for everyone to clarify that it was a second plane. One of the guys on the radio show said, within 30 seconds, 'this is the work of Osama bin Laden'.

Everyone in our office, near our airport, was told to go home about 10 minutes after the second plane hit. We were weeks from filing for an IPO, but that never happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> At the time I was going to sleep at 4AM every day and waking up at around 1PM or later.

That day I awoke up 5-10 minutes before CNN broadcast the news of the first plane hitting. This still freaks me out just a little, since I never woke up this early.

I only switched on CNN to bore myself back to sleep. I sat up in bed when they announced that the first plane hit. I remember them speculating about whether the plane was a passenger jet or a small plane. I didn't leave the TV for the next 12+ hours.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was in NYC, less than 5 miles away. I have never seen so many people running because there was simply nothing else to do with rush of unknown surging inside you.....

</comment><comment><USER21> It was the start of the day at work, I was loading the truck to go install a videoconferencing system. My boss was watching CNN on his computer, and a few of my co-workers had stopped to watch over his shoulder. I noticed people gathering & stopped to see what was going on. As soon as I saw, I called a friend in Queens, she had overslept and was late to work. Her office was close by, that was her subway stop there at the towers.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was in my apartment in Tokyo. The phone rings and suddenly my roommate is yelling to turn on the TV. I was working for Nikko Salomon Smith Barney at the time and the next day they started ID and bag checks on entry into the building. It was a rather eerie feeling to see processes failing trying to pick up files from NY that, for the foreseeable future, we knew would not be arriving.

</comment><comment><USER23> Running down Wall Street to avoid chunks of falling building and a dust cloud I imagined must be coming (I was right)

</comment><comment><USER24> I was getting ready for bed when I caught the headlines and news clip that the plane hit the tower. My first thought was "How did the pilot had an accident like that?" I saw like the second plane hit and I was like " __ __, these are not accidents!"

</comment><comment><USER25> I was sleeping. It was in the dead of the night. A phone call in the house. I woke up, my father was talking on the phone. He rushed downstairs and turned on the TV. I followed him down. Seconds later the screen was full of dust and smoke...

</comment><comment><USER26> I was asleep, because I worked the night shift at the time. My wife came home to wake me up, tell me about everything, and kiss me. We watched the news reports together and she cried, telling me she was so glad I had changed careers...

</comment><comment><USER27> Just got back from school and switched my TV on out of boredom, and there it was.</comment>


VC wants to see zombie startups shut down - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconbeat.com/2009/09/21/dixon-dolls-wants-more-start-ups-shut-down/

<comment><USER2> He wants to see other VCs wind down their living dead companies because it's bad for the asset class? Sell your stake to the founders for a dollar. You still write off the whole damn thing, and the founders get to continue on if they want to.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ah, the sunk cost fallacy meets the dot-com bubble - decisions to invest more (both in money and, more often if I read this correctly, in time and expertise) are being made based on previous investment, not future return.

As such, these living-dead companies are preventing the release of cash and expertise into other businesses. I would add to this VC concern that many (of course, not all) of those businesses are probably also preventing the release of founder expertise and energy into better projects.

</comment><comment><USER4> First thought when I saw the title here on HN: _Great, as if "rockstar" and "ninja" weren't bad enough, now we're doing moving on to "zombies"? Whats next, vampires?_

<http://jsvampire.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> I want to shut zombite VCs and redistribute the money to YC like incubators in different industries.</comment>