Underground Hansa Market taken over and shut down - <AUTHOR> https://www.politie.nl/en/news/2017/july/20/underground-hansa-market-taken-over-and-shut-down.html <comment><USER2> I like how they try and color the site by associating it with sites that sell weapons and child porn.

> It is Hansa Market, currently the most popular dark market in the > 'anonymous' part of the internet, the so-called darknet.

> ...

> The darknet markets enable large-scale trading in chiefly illegal goods, > such as drugs, weapons, child pornography, and ransom software. ... No > weapons or child pornography were sold on Hansa Market.

<comment><USER3> Seems fair to lump in with the rest since it was in fact an illegal market place.

<comment><USER4> Not everything that is illegal is wrong. E.g. being gay is illegal in many places.

<comment><USER5> There's a big discussion about what's bad about drugs. But I wonder if we can rationally work out what's bad about child porn.

My understanding is that possessing it means you obtained it from someone, who probably wanted some kind of payment, who abused children to produce the material so he could get that payment.

There are quite a few gaps there. What if it was published for free? What if children weren't physically abused but were secretly and anonymously photographed? Shouldn't there be exceptions for victimless child porn?

Of course the dominant factor is people are horrified by deviant sexualities. We're barely managing to accept homosexuality which is probably more common than peadophilia.

<comment><USER6> While I believe that western sexual norms are a bit puritanical, the premise behind protecting children with zealous laws is that it is extremely difficult to judge whether child pornography is truely victimless, even if you believe that harm from childhood sexuality is overstated in modern society. Because of the power imbalance between adults and children, and the permanent effects that abuse can have on children, it is reasonable to err on the side of caution and keep all child/adult sexual interactions illegal, and reduce demand for such interactions by keeping pornography illegal.

As an aside, I am curious as to the reason you are being down voted, besides your audacity of expressing an unpopular opinion.

<comment><USER7> That's not expressing an "unpopular opinion". They're being ignorant about the harm being done to the victims of child pornography and (it seems) trying legitimize that harm by drawing a dotted line to homosexuality.

It has no place on HN. I would downvote if I could.

<comment><USER8> Depends.

Teenagers sexting each other?

Someone drawing or 3d modelling fictional underage character?

In many jurisdictions thats the same thing as genuine child abuse base child porn. In my jurisdiction, Harry Potter fanfiction with sex counts as child porn - and as one with extended penalty because it is "delivered through very efficient means like computer network".

Not all things are all the same, even with the same label.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would love to know how they got caught. There is probably something to learn about opsec from this.

The paranoid side of me says Tor is unsafe (due to whatever - the authorities having backdoors on most hosting services, on your PC, due to the encryption being cracked by some unknown breakthrough or due to 90% of entry nodes being controlled by NSA). And NSA and FBI and co just have hundreds of people working on "parallel construction" of evidence.

Of course, a blunder by the operators is much more likely...

<comment><USER10> Every time a market has been taken down it's been due to OPSEC failure and other information leaks (e.g. Silk Road captcha IP leak, DPR's advertising of market being linked to his personal email address). AlphaBay Which got taken down first in this operation was due to a personal email being included in the header of the welcome email sent out to new users 3 years ago [1]

[1] [https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/downlo...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/press- release/file/982821/download) (pdf)

<comment><USER11> > Every time a market has been taken down it's been due to OPSEC failure and > other information leaks (

This is true, but it dangerously misses the point. Every time someone gets taken down, the know-it-alls on various fora sneer and go "Ha! What terrible opsec! _I_ wouldn't have made that mistake!" No, you would've made some other mistake.

To run a darknet market and not get caught, your opsec has to be _perfect_. Every second, every minute, every day, every person involved, forever. That is simply not possible once an operation exceeds a certain size. Like the IRA once said: "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time". This is the "defender's dilemma" that guarantees you will be caught as t goes to infinity: sooner or later, you'll make some mistake that burns you.

Focusing on the specific mistakes made by bust-ees only boosts your confidence and ignores that you, in their situation, would've leaked information somewhere else.

<comment><USER12> I'm sorry to nitpick and I mostly agree with you, but similar to a casino game that favors the house, if you are lucky and quit while you're ahead, you can avoid capture. Your statement is only true in the long run. Of course criminals usually become addicted to their risky behaviors just like gamblers... It's a frequent trope in crime movies: one last job before the criminal retires, but that last job is the one where he makes a key mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The clever thing is that they took it over and for one month monitored it without the users knowing.

Everyone on obfuscating their persona with Tor and bitcoins, still had to enter their postal addresses on the website, to receive the goodies.

That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.

<comment><USER14> > That database must be a wet dream for law enforcement.

Because obviously people buying a few pills of ecstasy or a tab of LSD are a serious danger to society and should be taken of the streets. /s

<comment><USER15> Because the police will totally arrest every single user and not focus on the high-volume buyers / sellers. /s

<comment><USER16> I do not think it's really that clear.

Sometimes the state apparatus is precisely the one committing the most heinous crimes. (with impunity!)

> > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_traffi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking)

> > [http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/index.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Some 10,000 foreign addresses of Hansa Market buyers were passed on to > Europol.

That's really bad, because not all countries are Holland, which is famous for its 'relaxed' attitude towards drugs in general, so some users might have their lives turned around by this - followed, arrested, jailed, extorted, etc.

<comment><USER15> To be fair... If you commit a crime, you have to expect there's a risk of being caught and punished. So how is this "really bad", except from the POV of the users who may face repercussions?

<comment><USER18> When laws are bad, its bad when people face the repercussions of those laws.

<comment><USER15> Yeah but debating whether the law itself is bad is a separate discussion. Until the laws change people can't be outraged or surprised when they got caught up in them...

Besides, it's possible that many of the users live in countries where _buying_ drugs isn't a crime, or where circumstantial evidence like this isn't enough to warrant opening an investigation. So it's possible that most of these users won't even face those repercussions.

<comment><USER19> Surprised, yes, but why can't people be outraged at people suffering from bad laws? That makes no sense.

<comment><USER15> Not outraged at the laws, outraged at being persecuted.

If you know something is illegal, and it carries a fine of $1,000 and you do it, you get caught, and they fine you $1,000 you can't be like "What?! How DARE you catch me and fine me like the law says?! ARRRGH!"

<comment><USER20> Part of the issue with this line of reasoning is selective enforcement. If the law is unjust and commonly broken, it is fair to be outraged if they choose to target you for punishment. Drug laws are broken every day, and in some cities LEOs are even working with the dealers. Unjust laws allow them to pick on people they don't like and people that threaten their business. Given these circumstances, I think it's still fair to be outraged at the enforcement of unjust laws.

<comment><USER15> Fair point. Sometimes I think the police state that America has become was in large part facilitated by this kind of thing. Almost everyone is in violation of _something_ these days. If the police or the state don't like you then surprise surprise... you're getting arrested for that thing you've been doing for the past decade that half your neighbours do too...

<comment><USER21> That's exactly the definition of police state. I remember it being used to describe China, can't quite the source though. Sorry

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Services like these give Tor and related projects a bad name. Taking down illegal market places is part of the police's job and this is definitely a success story. The article is lacking in details a bit, but it seems they've taken it down using regular old police work as they mention an "undercover operation". This proves once more that the weakening of security for everybody is not needed to catch criminals.

<comment><USER23> You mean they used parallel construction to make it seem like they used "regular old police work"

<comment> Paul-ish It may be parallel construction, but in a kind of cynical way we can publicly praise it as good traditional police work. It takes credibility away from demands for special or clandestine access.

When we call it parallel construction we buy into the surveillance communities marketing... that surveillance it is effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The darknet they took down is approximately 2,850 times smaller than Europe's cocaine market, or 12,000 times smaller than the general drug market. The Netherlands is also the main drug production and trafficking route to Europe.

So, basically, they took down a minor competitor to the bigger drug trafficking businesses.

</comment><comment><USER25> I visited Hansa a few days ago and the first thing I noticed was a banner that read something like:-

"New registrations are disabled because of high demand caused by the exodus from AlphaBay"

<comment><USER26> >This involved taking covert control of Hansa under Dutch judicial authority a month ago, which allowed Dutch police to monitor the activity of users without their knowledge, and then shutting down AlphaBay during the same period. It meant the Dutch police could identify and disrupt the regular criminal activity on Hansa but then also sweep up all those new users displaced from AlphaBay who were looking for a new trading platform. In fact they flocked to Hansa in their droves, with an eight-fold increase in the number of new members of Hansa recorded immediately following the shutdown of AlphaBay.

[https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow- to-...](https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-criminal- dark-web-activities-after-globally-coordinated-operation)

<comment><USER25> So the banner must have been placed there after the server was seized. Keeping the server running long enough to gather evidence of the actions of their high-value targets was probably a higher priority than sweeping-up as many customers as possible.

<comment><USER18> Possibly there are laws related to entrapment? Allowing new user signups on a police controlled website might cross the line, where allowing existing users to finish their deals might not?

<comment><USER27> That's not how entrapment works.

Entrapment requires the cops to push someone into doing something they wouldn't otherwise have done.

Cops buying drugs from a dealer isn't entrapment, but repeatedly begging someone to sell you some drugs after they initially say no would be.

<comment><USER28> If the police operates the server, I'm pretty sure they would be reluctant to accept new users as it might be illegal. The law in Europe is not as in US and although I'm not certain here, it's generally much more strict in regards to entrapment in most countries.

<comment><USER27> I'd imagine sting operations are permitted in Europe, and that's all this would've been.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It's just a matter of time until the store fronts are developed open source on Github and hosted decentralized on a network like MaidSafe. People love to get high and are willing to pay. Innovation will follow to meet demand.

<comment><USER30> > It's just a matter of time until the store fronts are developed open source > on Github

Given that Richard Bates faced prosecution for working on the code of the original Silk Road, this could result in very, very bad repercussions.

GitHub would very likely be raided, and anyone who committed to or forked the repo could be prosecuted. I don't think anyone wants that to happen. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if GitHub will update their TOS to ban this kind of software before anyone gets prosecuted in order to prevent themselves from being raided.

<comment><USER31> I think it would be much more difficult to prosecute someone for working on a generic storefront application that COULD be used as a darknet market vs. someone who was directly building a darknet market.

There's obviously gradient, because on one side you have Richard Bates and on the other side you have the people who work on Tor. I think that writing a generic "white label anonymous storefront" is much closer to the Tor side than the Silk Road side.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> >This was made possible by the arrest of the two administrators of Hansa Market in Germany, aged 30 and 31. Since their arrest, the two men, from Siegen, NorthRhine-Westphalia, have been kept in pre-trial detention, and are only allowed to have contact with their lawyers.

So admins of the other markets: always have a dead-mans switch.

<comment><USER33> I'm curious how you would construct a switch that couldnt be bypassed by the police once they have full access to the servers.

<comment><USER34> Even if the primary service itself was compromised, it would be possible to have an automated dead man's switch running on an alternative service that would alert the world that you were being held incommunicado.

Of course, failing to disclose the switch to the authorities and thus allowing it to trigger could be considered a violation of a court order and lead to punishment.

<comment><USER35> Also, it doesn't look good when you're arrested on suspicion of running Hansa and next morning Hansa has a big banner saying "the admin hasn't checked in, we think something is wrong".

<comment><USER36> The best point of them all.

<comment><USER15> "the alleged admin hasn't checked in"

X'D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Dream Market is still up since Nov 2013. (1 year older than even AlphaBay) Perhaps they're the ones that are _actually_ based in Russia ;P

You seriously have to be a moron to host your DNM in Canada or NL though, NL LE especially has many years of experience and millions worth of equipment for these investigations. Pick a place where they're less likely to have advanced DMA equipment handy! Even better though, is to choose a place where the FBI won't be able to fly a team with advanced DMA equipment.

In fact, I wouldn't be too shocked if the rather sophisticated wiretap gear the Dutch police have at AMS-IX was capable of identifying hidden sites with timing attacks.

Supposedly this was posted on Hansa forums by the staff in the middle of the takedown [http://i.imgur.com/yowD1Vr.png](http://i.imgur.com/yowD1Vr.png)

<comment><USER38> It leads one to wonder... what _is_ the "best" place to host servers if you're going to run a darkweb market? Seems like you'd want a place where the government/police/spooks aren't as tech savvy and sophisticated, and perhaps somewhere where the government isn't on the best terms with traditional Western powers.

Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers?

Maybe some smaller African nations? Botswana? Mali? Burkina Faso? Togo? But what's the state of 'net connectivity there? Is sufficient bandwidth available? Are there colo centers or hosting providers there? I honestly don't know...

Other possibilities?

<comment><USER39> > Venezuela? But do they even have electricity for running servers?

Venezuela isn't a third world country. Yes, they have electricity (and it is very cheap, hence a lot of BTC mining there).

<comment><USER38> OK, maybe I was being a little glib. But still, the news reports I hear from that area haven't been very positive as of late, and I do wonder if the country is fundamentally stable enough to rely on hosting anything there.

<comment><USER40> You may want to consider how where you're getting news from is related to what they're saying.

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Are you suggesting that Venezuela hasn't been undergoing a recent period of extreme economic and political turmoil and uncertainty?

<comment><USER40> No, something else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > More than 500 Dutch delivery addresses were reported to couriers and postal > services with the intention of stopping the deliveries

Does this mean that the goal of the LEO was to only stop the deliveries without actually arresting the recipients? If that's true then it seems the way law enforcement works in the EU is very different than that in the US.

<comment><USER42> unless they can link your computer to entering that address, isn't there some plausible deniability that someone else entered your address. Having drugs delivered to your house isn't illegal if someone else sent them there right? (Asking about in the US, but also interested in hearing if it's different or the same in EU)

<comment><USER43> Whether your denial is plausible is a matter for a judge or jury. Your credibility might be stretched if, say, the drugs were worth a lot of money, you didn't report it when they turned up at your house, you had drugs in your house when the police searched it under a warrant, and you bought cryptocurrency which you can't account for a few days earlier. You might choose to take a plea rather than rolling the dice at that point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> How many lessons do people need before they learn? Prohibition doesn't work. It creates more violence than it solves.

<comment><USER45> You're assuming that the goal of drug prohibition is to reduce violence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wished I knew about these underground markets before they get shut down!

</comment><comment><USER47> I wonder why vendors and buyers aren't using distributed markets like OpenBazaar or the like. Are those not anonymous?

<comment><USER48> The current version of OpenBazaar doesn't use Tor. The upcoming 2.0 version does work with Tor, but it wasn't built as a darknet market so it might not work well for that use case.

</comment></comment><comment> blubb-fish interestingly during the past two weeks the second largest market (dream market) was unusually unresponsive and at times not reachable ... maybe they were testing and deploying their fork of the market ...

</comment><comment><USER49> What are soft drugs now? Interesting new neologism.

<comment><USER50> It's a distinction under The Opium Act in the Netherlands, apparently [0]

It's generally used to distinguish psychological dependence and physical addiction. [1]

[0] [https://www.government.nl/topics/drugs/difference-between- ha...](https://www.government.nl/topics/drugs/difference-between-hard-and- soft-drugs)

[1] [http://www.drugwise.org.uk/soft-drugs/](http://www.drugwise.org.uk/soft- drugs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Thugs will be a thugs. This will only drive innovation.

</comment><comment><USER52> I think this is brilliant. A very efficient way of policing and removing a lot of drugs from the market without spending a lot of public money and wasting time on the streets.

Also the darknet is great as it reduces the violence associated with drug crime, by taking the drugs off the streets and into the legitimate courier business. You have to love technology sometimes.

<comment><USER53> How does that reduce the violence? Now the buyers have to go to the streets to get their drugs.

Prohibition doesn't work. It creates much more violence than it solves.

<comment><USER52> I agree that prohibition doesn't work, but the police needs to do their bit as well. And if a darknet marketplace is taken offline, I don't think its users will have to go on the streets, there are many other marketplaces out there; just in the same way as when a street dealer is arrested, people will just end using a different one.

It seems that you are actually agains policing it, which is not the way forward, as there is a large amount of the population which is against drugs, and their needs need to be accounted for by the Government. So by catering for both parties (users/dealers and police), the darknet is a viable solution that helps everybody in the end (efficient purchase, efficient policing, less violence, less waste).</comment></comment></comment>


EEOC Sues Doherty Enterprises Over Mandatory Arbitration Agreement - <AUTHOR> http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/9-2-15.cfm <comment><USER2> Apparently the district court judge didn't like the article about the prevalence of mandatory arbitration in the Sunday New York Times.</comment>


How to explain to traditional people why they should upgrade their WinXP device? - <AUTHOR> https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/221348/how-to-explain-to-traditional-people-why-they-should-upgrade-their-old-windows-x <comment><USER2> I greatly enjoy that the top response starts off with the heading "Forget talking about security." but lists lack of antivirus as one of the 2 things to bring up.

I 100% agree with the other point being the main thing to say. Really by now most should have noticed it without asking. Even using a specially compiled version of a fork of FF meant to extend support for XP ~ a year ago when messing around with VMs I found a decent amount of the web to be breaking and many apps had trouble opening newer files.</comment>


With This Device You Can Connect Anonymously to Wi-Fi 2.5 Miles Away - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/with-this-device-you-can-connect-anonymously-to-wi-fi-25-miles-away

<comment><USER2> _For the future, Caudill and his colleagues are also working to fit Proxyham into other objects, such as a book, to make it easier to hide.

If you throw this in a library it would take you years to be able to identify it," he said'_

-

Aside from the fact it'll be trailing a wire plugged into a power outlet.</comment>


Just Ship It - <AUTHOR> http://brainpad.org/Talks/2012/10/03/just-ship-it/

<comment><USER2> The caveat to this is if your software will be in an App Store, initial bad reviews can effectively kill the product.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the real only enemy and this case, and one that I myself fear. That is why you must back yourself up with a good blog with announcements and an goal descriptive product page (showing the user/client which way we're heading and what's the vision).

A good vision description (sales pitch) can sell almost anything.

Thanks for reading by the way!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Name of site for software/IT dev funny/horror stories? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a site that had hundreds of funny and/or terrifying stories from software engineers managing out-of-date technology with incompetent managers or coworkers. Kinda like Clients From Hell, but in long form. I recall a story about servers being hosted in an office without any air conditioning, etc. and it had actual breakdowns of the code involved.<p>Does anyone know what site I'm talking about? <comment><USER2> Do you mean [http://thedailywtf.com](http://thedailywtf.com)?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's it!! Thank you. I spent 10 minutes googling and couldn't find it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3>
      alt.sysadmin.recovery

:-)</comment>


Show HN: Bubblehunt – curated web search - <AUTHOR> http://bubblehunt.com <comment><USER2> Wasn't Yahoo! something along similar lines when they started? With hand curated links and resources available for search? It is interesting to see that a 20 year old idea is still found viable by many today while it was largely considered obsolete when Google came into picture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, today there are many curated catalogs) We strive to ensure that each user can create their own search engine, own intranet, on which he and suitable on request people to obtain results from the sites selected by the people.

We want to build a search on the Favorite Web)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello friends!

Bubblehunt lets people find & share quality resources. We are creating curated web search, where people can choose best results and help others to find it.

Considering extremely high growth of the web, it is becoming harder to find new & quality resources. This is where Bubblehunt comes in. Finding interesting results becomes much easier as they are recommended by people, not dumb machines.

Every user can create a bubble with his favorite resources and provide best results for search queries based on their opinion. We've combined search and human opinions to let people cut through the noise of the web and share the best resources.

Get feedback please)

<comment><USER3> This will never scale. Too much human work.

Also how is it different than Google or Bing, which capture people's surfing/clicking habits to find the best sites ?

Another way to reach similar result - is a use the curation people already done , i.e. forums, and particularly , forums with voting mechanisms. If you'll build a good forum search engine - that would be useful.

<comment><USER4> I remember how poor Wikipedia was in its early days. It has scaled largely based on human work to make it better.

There's a lot of scale between a "Show HN" and Bing, never mind Google. And a lot of room for better search results at least some time, and a lot of room for a better search experience pretty much a lot of the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree! Wikipedia in the beginning there was very little information, but it did not stop them and now we are using it for more information.

Our users can also contribute to the improvement of the search. We all have favorites bookmarks, that we use, and each of us knows what resources we like. And this is enough to help others discover new and useful information.

Because we will be able to index user-specified resources quickly, as soon as something new and useful.

And in the search results will be dynamic results. For example, we introduce the "design", and obtain search results from designers, introduce the "php" \- we get the results from the developers.

And there may be the most popular and useful resources, latest news, tools and other work, what kind of people) use

This will allow us to get a whole lot of responses to a search query)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Choose best results by clicking upvote button_

The upvote button does not seem to appear on Firefox.

<comment><USER6> Nor in Chrome on iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did a couple searches, but shouldn't the result be sorted by upvotes?

<comment><AUTHOR> We made simple algorithms is at the top should be results primarily based on upvoting. We fix this, and we will improve in the future)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is difference between this and google search?

<comment><AUTHOR> In google running as PageRank. We use PeopleRank)

We do not index the entire Internet. We only index the Intranets users.

We look not at the PageRank (ie number of links). We look at the opinions of people.

And our algorithms try to select the most best intranets of experts, opinion leaders and others. That is the most relevant people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's worth giving this idea a try.

1\. I wish there was a different way to sign up, without needing Facebook or Twitter.

2\. Can I add resources, to see how it works, without signing up? Like try it out for a week (with cookies), and if I like it then I can sign up?

3\. Will this approach let you do something Google can't? Why/how?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi!)

1\. We will soon connect authorization via Google +

2\. To add the resources is needed profile. However, each user can use the search without authorization. This is necessary to minimize spam.

3\. Yes, we will be able to search among the selected resources. We can thus see a variety of search results offered by the people. And get a lot of opinions on request.

Google rarely changes the results. You enter the "Design" and get the same sites today / tomorrow / next day. It popular resources become only more popular. We offer much more dynamic search, where people form the search results with the best resources)</comment></comment>


The best way to learn how to code, look at others code. - <AUTHOR>

As I understand it the best way to learn how to code is to code, and look at other hackers code. I've coded a bit and am now looking for some quality PHP code that I can glean some knowledge from.<p>Do you know of any open sources PHP web applications that are coded in a quality manor which I can look over to learn more from? <comment><USER2> Study source code from open source projects like mediawiki (which is what wikipedia runs on) or wordpress (the blogging engine) or Drupal (the CMS) etc. etc.

Remember, one of the 4 Freedoms of Free software is the Freedom to study it and learn from it.</comment>


Why Samsung Abandoned Its Galaxy Note 7 Flagship Phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/business/international/samsung-galaxy-note7-terminated.html?_r=0 <comment><USER2> This is completely not a technical decision, it's a branding and marketing decision.

Even though the percentage is vanishingly small, Samsung cannot be associated with exploding phones.

Even airlines warn against Samsung Note 7s specifically during preflight briefings. They're amputating part of their business to stop contagion to the rest of their brand.

<comment><USER3> > Even though the percentage is vanishingly small

I thought so too. I meant it's just been three explosions, or so I heard. However this article claims 97 incidents with breakdowns on overheating vs burning. It seems pretty significant. I mean, not statically against devices in the wild, but it takes a relatively few amount of safety incidents to question an entire product line.

<comment><USER4> > _I thought so too. I meant it 's just been three explosions, or so I heard._

Far more than 3. It's already more than 3 on the "replacement" "fixed" 7s -- it's dozens for the first version, including in planes, while driving, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love the image that is conveyed of 'feature overload' being the cause of explosive devices. As though we may have reached some sort of technological wall against which all increases in device or feature richness lead to explosions

<comment><USER6> Well it's can be called an overload when you have components interacting with each other in a tiny space and add to that not giving people enough time to test the design. Obviously (imho) more time for testing and QA would have solved the issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article was interesting and provided some information (on the battery suppliers, not being able to reproduce the problem) and perspective that I wasn't aware of before.

But the headline seemed inaccurate though. I read this article twice, and I still finished with the feeling that it didn't really answer the question in the headline. None of the interviews with identified or unidentified sources answered this particular question with any details. So it's a management decision because even the replacement phones had the same issue. Anybody following the news could've guessed that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Have any of the phones actually exploded as in gone bang and ejected stuff outwards quickly. All the examples I've seen seem to have overheated and caught fire. I'm guessing exploded just sounds more dramatic in reporting?

</comment><comment><USER9> If it's ultimately code that prevents the battery from overheating, in some architectures, what's to prevent a Stuxnet for batteries?

<comment><USER10> Dedicated ICs for LiPo batteries are supposed to prevent that

<comment><USER9> Attacks on the ICs are probably possible if corners are being cut. Purely speculation but if this was the case I would be glad it was called out so fast.

<comment><USER11> How? I really doubt it as these ICs have no CPU, flash or anything else that could be programmed externally. Here's a random example of how one look like: [http://www.ti.com/product/bq24232ha/datasheet](http://www.ti.com/product/bq24232ha/datasheet)

<comment><USER12> PSP was hacked through the battery. Basically Sony had a "magic" battery that would report certain ID, that they could use to flash any firmware they wanted. Well, someone figured this out, and as it turns out, you could use a hacked PSP(hacked through one of the existing exploits) to flash a different ID to the battery - from that point onward it would act as a "magic" battery and could be used to flash any PSP.

So yeah, the IC in the battery was nothing more than a tiny bit of memory containing the ID, but ultimately, that was the downfall of the whole PSP ecosystem, as you could use a hacked battery to reflash any PSP, regardless of its firmware, so sony had no way of patching this.

<comment><USER11> I' not aware of this particular case, but over-the-shelf charging IC is definitely not enough to accomplish that. That sounds like a wider, system problem. Anyway, that's an interesting story, I'll check it - thanks.

<comment><USER12> There are some links with explanations if you want to read up on it :-)

[http://www.krizka.net/2008/02/10/what-is-pandoras- battery/](http://www.krizka.net/2008/02/10/what-is-pandoras-battery/)

[http://www.instructables.com/id/PSP-Hacking- Guide/step2/Pand...](http://www.instructables.com/id/PSP-Hacking- Guide/step2/Pandora-battery/)

[https://geekindisguise.wordpress.com/tag/psp-pandora- battery...](https://geekindisguise.wordpress.com/tag/psp-pandora-battery/)

"This is a battery with its serial changed to 0xFFFFFFFF. When a PSP battery serial number is changed to 0xFFFFFFFF, or unreadable, the PSP boots the IPL from sector 16 on the physical drive (the Magic Memory Stick). This unlocks the service mode of the PSP and launches the IPL from the Memory Stick (instead of from flash0). A regular battery can be made into a JigKick via hardware or software methods."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Though I despise some of Samsung's shameless tactics in the design copying department, I feel bad for the company and the employees who worked on this device. With the pressure of all the media coverage around, not knowing the reason for the failures would've been a terrible blow to morale and motivation. Hope the middle and lower level employees don't face the brunt for what could (still) be an impossible problem to figure out and solve.

</comment><comment><USER13> > When several Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones spontaneously exploded in > August, the South Korean company went into overdrive. It urged hundreds of > employees to quickly diagnose the problem.

> None were able to get a phone to explode.

What exactly does that process look like? I'm imagining a bunch of QA techs in a warehouse hoping for failure.

<comment><USER14> Maybe lots of extreme cases, like wrapping up the phone to try to overheat it, lots of testing of wireless charging (which seems to be a link between known cases), tests with various cables/chargers, maybe trying to get the phone wet...

<comment><USER15> I would imagine also writing code to execute on the phone designed to max out the CPU/GPU for an extended period of time?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They didn't explain why Samsung went to this crazy step.

First of all, it's a sign of poor Korean management leadership. Their testing and engineering departments still couldn't reproduce the errors, but pressure from upper management was so high that they went berserk, completely distrusting their engineers.

First of all, you cannot take such a dramatic step, losing face, when you have no idea what went wrong, and what caused the problems. Apparently it wasn't the battery supplier. So it's more likely the battery controller. Which would be trivial to fix once identified and analyzed. Call back, yes. But burn it, crazy. Typical Korean drama. Managers shouting and going crazy.

<comment><USER17> > First of all, you cannot take such a dramatic step, losing face, when you > have no idea what went wrong, and what caused the problems.

They already lost face with a bit mismanaged and not so customer friendly replacement procedure and then again delivering dangerously faulty items. It's reasonable from a marketing perspective to end the disaster once and for all. "Oh you own a Note 7? Are you sure it's the really really really not exploding one?"

> So it's more likely the battery controller. Which would be trivial to fix > once identified and analyzed.

And if it's not? Is e.g. the possibility of the too dense packaging damaging the battery completely ruled out?

<comment><USER16> Without knowing the problem, you cannot take such a step killing off your whole product.

How long does a normal non-korean company need, to take the next step? Longer. How long did Toyota need to announce the next step for its recall crisis? Did Toyota kill their flagship products for the floor mat, accelerator pedal or hybrid anti-lock brake software problems, which killed people?

Dense packaging is also possible. CPU temp. or cooling also. Many possible reasons. That's why you analyze it first, and then announce a plan to fix it. Almost everybody had such a phone.

<comment><USER17> > Without knowing the problem, you cannot take such a step killing off your > whole product.

Maybe they really only killed the name and plan reuse most components in a specification wise very similar soon to come successor model. If it's not a software problem but dense packaging or cooling they have to redesign a lot of things anyways.

> How long did Toyota need to announce the next step for its recall crisis? > Did Toyota kill their flagship products for the floor mat, accelerator pedal > or hybrid anti-lock brake software problems, which killed people?

A car is also completely different kind of product, you can change a lot of things without completely taking it into bits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's a conundrum: I would absolutely buy a Galaxy Note 7 when it's been out a while (given that Europe is considered a second class market, this happens automatically), but I would not want to buy it as an early adopter at the moment.

However, this mindset now also extends to a potential successor, so I don't think Samsung's strategy will play out quite as they think. The successor will have to be rushed even more.

<comment><USER19> Given the amount of Samsung products I've had fail, as well as colleagues who have had similar experiences, I consider them to be a sub-par brand.

Think Chineseium, but a bit further south.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2016/09/29...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the- switch/wp/2016/09/29/samsungs-exploding-washers-raise-serious-questions-about- its-quality-control/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Does this ever happen before?

<comment><USER21> Ayds (pronounced AIDS) appetite suppressant candy. After the renaming of GRIDS to AIDS.

<comment><USER22> In 2014, Isis, the mobile-payment service built by AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, changed its name to Softcard for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER23> Isis Pharmaceuticals also changed its name recently: [http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/18/investing/isis- pharmaceutica...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/18/investing/isis- pharmaceuticals-name-change/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks like Samsung has to foot the 5+billion dollar bill to come up with a solution.

Are these known to just affect the snapdragon US version from whatever samples Samsung has been able to obtain? I'm reading that some cases are refusing to allow Samsung to investigate the phone.

My opinion is that putting the radio in the SoC is a big mistake. Qualcomm kraits are one of the main points Samsung has no control over, and it is not hard to imagine a scenario that could cause issues if they can't test it.

</comment><comment><USER25> This sounds like a good strategy for an unethical competitor. <100 devices and only a few uncorroborated reports but drastic images are enough to trigger this?

There are presumably plenty of ways to make a LiIon fail dramatically if you just know where to push or apply some directed heat. Ifixit has that covered I think.

<comment><USER26> There were less then that many shark attacks last year. People are still terrified of sharks.

Not a perfect analogy but people are terrified of things that are incredibly unlikely. It's legitimately hard for a phone manufacturer. 0.00001% is too many explosions if you sell a couple million phones.

<comment><USER27> There have been roughly a hundred incidents so far. The phone was out for about a month. Assuming first year sales would have been quadruple first month sales and the same rate of burnouts over the year, that's 100 * 4 * 12 = 4,800 incidents in a year.

One of these incidents happened in a car on the road and another happened on a plane. One happened while a child was holding it and another while the owner was asleep causing smoke inhalation injuries. Taking those as 'aggravated circumstances' we could expect to see 4 * 4 * 12 = roughly 200 cases in aggravated circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if this will in the end be a combo of fast charge, USB-C and after- market cables/chargers...

<comment><USER29> Wouldn't surprise me a bit.

I remember testing a wireless charging kit for my S4 while in China. The charger itself was rated 5V 500mA, but when I put my phone on it, the Ampere app reported 1900mA charging current and the screen started showing strong, wave-like distortions. I'm only glad the phone survived the experience.</comment></comment>


Should IT unionize? - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/09/04/36NF-union-for-tech-workers_1.html

<comment><USER2> Cartlization / collusion of labor makes sense when the differential between the best and worst performers is relatively small. The best coal miner might swing his pick 50% or 75% faster than the worst. The best janitor might do a 40% better job of emptying trash cans.

Given that it's the conventional wisdom around here that some engineers are 10x as productive as others, why would any good techie want to join a union?

If one ever did form (and this is far from the first call for it, and they've never come anywhere close to success), you're going to get adverse selection - only the weakest techies (those who worry that they can't cut the mustard and will be fired without a union) will join.

In that way, a union - if membership was optional - would be a great thing: it would let us identify the bottom 50% of the labor pool in seconds.

<comment><USER3> Cartelisation also takes other forms, not just unions, but also professional organizations.

The best doctor is 100s of times better than the worst (incalculably better since you may be avoiding catastrophic outcomes), and yet doctors have a professional cartel that regulates who can get in and what you have to know to be considered a doctor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So the idiots can leech of me? Fuck that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Unions in the US appear to be pretty screwed up.

I see a union as a way of obtaining a balance of power between powerful corporations and individual employees.

The reason US unions are bad are \- you can't generally choose between competing unions \- unions monopolize industries and/or professions

In other first world countries you generally have a choice about which union you join and there aren't any jobs which require union membership.

Unions can be useful to \- have qualified people on your side in case of a problem with your employer \- influence political decisions to protect and improve employees rights

I'm pretty sure the lack of functioning unions is the reason the US is the only 1st world country that doesn't guarantee health care for it's workers, and that wages have stagnated over the last 35 years or so.

Of course the system is so entrenched it seems very unlikely anything will change in the foreseeable future.

</comment><comment><USER6> Historically, the most successful 'unions' have been the professional medical, legal, and engineering associations, since they've been delegated the right under law to control the number of practitioners. For IT unionization to work, you'd need to persuade government to treat it as an engineering profession and require licensure. Personally, I think the window of opportunity to professionalize IT has long since closed.

</comment><comment><USER7> No.

</comment><comment><USER8> Unionizing would be like saying that programmers/IT is a commodity. I think we would all agree that this isn't the case.

<comment><USER9> If you produce labor for your employer and you are paid wages according to labor rendered, you are a commodity. Well, not "you" specifically, but the labor time you sell to the employer.

<comment><USER8> Not entirely true. A commodity is basically saying that every unit (e.g. a programmer) is the same, in the same way that every piece of rice is the same or every steel worker is the same. With programmers there is a wide range of different skills and experiences which deserve different levels of pay. A union would be a good thing to have if there were not a lot of differences between them.

<comment><USER9> "A commodity is basically saying that every unit (e.g. a programmer) is the same, in the same way that every piece of rice is the same or every steel worker is the same."

So what about, say a car. Some cars are affordable, some extremely expensive. They are all still commodities. Why then is there such a price disparity? Some cars are more complex, and thus require a greater degree of skill during construction. Others may be composed of exotic or rare materials, which take more manpower and a larger amount of capital to produce than a cheaper material.

The same applies to IT. Some jobs in IT are relatively simple, such as a Help desk attendant, while others are more demanding in terms of knowledge and application. Each worker, though is paid in proportion to the degree of skill he/she exhibits.

Your skill and ability to work for a wage, although unique to living individuals, is still a commodity, regardless of whether you want to consider it as such.

<comment><USER5> See below definitions of commodity from <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/commodity>

None of them correspond with turkishrevenge's idea of what the word means.

\- Anything movable (a good) that is bought and sold. \- Something useful or valuable. Example: "It really makes me sad that football club chairmen and boards seem to have lost that most precious commodity - patience. "Sam's sacking at Newcastle had, I suppose, been on the cards for a while, but it is really ridiculous to fire a manager after such a short time. Somerset County Gazette on Jan. 14th, 2008.

(economics) Raw materials, agricultural products and other primary products as objects of large scale trading in specialized exchanges.

(marketing) Undifferentiated goods characterized by a low profit margin, as distinguished from branded products.

<comment><USER9> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value> <http://www.halfsigma.com/2006/11/labor_and_commo.html>

<comment><USER10> How about you guys use a made-up word like "awdha" and agree upon a definition for it instead of using the loaded word "commodity".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> god no!</comment>


Ask HN: Best US startup towns and cities outside Boston - <AUTHOR> Specifically regarding attracting SaaS software tech talent, what are the best places to headquarter a startup outside of Boston?
Boston is nice, but expensive, and a bit stressful to get around. We don't have to worry about VC money at this point, so I'd like to find a town or suburb where we could attract talent.
I'm considered as far north as Portland, Maine. Manchester, NH. Salem, MA. <comment><USER2> If you are thinking East Coast NYC and DC are very viable esp if you are B2B. Engineers are expensive in both places but you are asking about HQ location. I recruit engineers away from the coasts or from E.Europe.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, technically Cambridge is not Boston, but that's probably not what you were looking for :)

I've heard about a lot of startups in Waltham. Also, since you mentioned Portland, Providence, RI is also an option.

</comment><comment><USER4> Portland, Or.

</comment><comment><USER5> Austin, Texas</comment>


How to Immediately Start Closing More Freelancing Deals - <AUTHOR> https://joshrichards.wordpress.com/2017/04/11/how-to-immediately-start-closing-more-freelancing-deals/ <comment><USER2> I love this and it's not really as dangerous as it might sound.

If the project goes badly, you are going to have a bad time regardless of if you offered a guarantee, and you might end up just refunding them anyway if it really went that badly.

Being upfront about offering this reduces their risk and in the vast majority of cases people will never ask for a refund.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like your way of thinking about it and how you worded it.

Regardless of whether a guarantee is offered upfront, there is going to be a mess if the client isn't satisfied. The way I think about it is: I might as well use it to everyone's advantage and be clear about it upfront.

And there's a substantive difference between all parties knowing things could go wrong versus one boldly stating upfront that one will try to do the right thing. This will close more deals and offers additional value upfront to the client.

Of course, it helps if one addresses other issues like filtering out likely to be problematic prospective clients, but that's another post / series of posts for another day. ;-)</comment></comment>


Cheap and simple medical devices have to overcome deeply rooted biases - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/reverse-innovation-could-save-lives-why-isnt-western-medicine-embracing-it <comment><USER2> Years ago, a friend of mine was in med school, and headed off for a semester in the rainforest of Ecuador, performing basic medicine and stuff for people who rarely got to the city to see a doctor. He called me up, on a Sunday afternoon, with this question:

"Our dentist in the group just realized she doesn't have a source of suction, you know, like the vacuum that slurps saliva out of the way during a procedure. We're in Houston and our flight leaves in 6 hours. Any solution needs to work off-grid for a month. Got any ideas?"

I thought for a moment, and said "Hit an auto parts store. Get a brake-bleeder kit. This has a hand-pump vacuum with a clear collection jar. Aim for one with a glass jar if possible, since it'll be easier to clean. Should set you back about thirty bucks."

And we didn't speak again for a few months. When he was stateside again, he said the brake bleeder kit had worked so well and was so simple to operate, they'd often just hand it to the patient. Not only did this free up a physician, it also gave the patient something to do during what's often a nervous and fidgety time, and may have thus decreased the need for sedation in some procedures.

Sometimes it really is that simple. He had numerous stories of doctors in hospitals picking the brains of janitors -- they called it a "facilities consult" \-- to see if they could MacGuyver a solution to a problem that the medical industry hadn't packaged yet. PTFE plumber's tape apparently comes in a medical grade too, but sometimes you need to toss around ideas with some other hands-on maker-fixer sort of people before you figure out how to apply it.

<comment><USER3> In a pinch, I've seen third world doctors use super glue to seal cuts.

American culture doesn't allow for anything better than the best outcome in medicine.

<comment><USER4> American culture allows for exactly two possible types of medical care:

1\. The best

2\. None at all

Often the choice between the two is financial.

<comment><USER5> Just as true of housing, transportation, education, etc.

<comment><USER6> This sounds really good to the ear, but it's just not true is it? Americans have a lot of choice when it comes to these things, at least compared to healthcare.

<comment><USER7> It's a byproduct of regulation. When you start telling people they can't consume this substance, or buy a car with fewer than this number of airbags, or without traction control, or you can't sell an apartment with a size smaller than this, you create consequences. Maybe people buy used cars instead of new cars. Maybe they live in illegal units that skirt the regulations not just on sizing, but on fire safety. And so on. You create black markets.

This is absolutely not to say that regulation is bad! It is just to point out that it creates unintended consequences you have to be aware of, and place the slider of regulation in the appropriate place.

After all, we all intuitively know that a minimum wage of $500/hr and a minimum allowable housing size of 7000sqft won't work! But we also know that telling a surgeon "just use whatever you find lying around" may not be the best approach either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I spent the weekend dissassembling a hematology analyzer capable of measuring 17 parameters of the immune system from a large drop of blood. Nabbed it on ebay for cheap.

Was able to unclog a few of the lines and get it running, learning how it works by shooting cells past a laserbeam and looking at scatter. Overall, the complexity of the machine is far simpler than that of a simple laser printer, but its retail value is $10k as a veterinary instrument. Machines for human patients are way more expensive.

My dissappointment however was discovering that it refuses to run unless its barcode scanner can see manufacturer-validated reagent bottles. The chemicals needed to make it run are simple salt-waters that can be easily made for $10 of various powders, but the manufacturer sells reagent sets for $1000k each. Now its clear that getting any useful data out of it will require hacking the ARM embedded system onboard.

Why am I doing this? Certainly not for any kind of regulated medical treatment, but I personally want to know how my immune system changes on a day to day basis. Datasets like this dont exist on such a high frequency sampling rate. What I find however, is that the decades-old tech that powers this relatively simple machine is being held back by an overly restrictive regulatory environment and price gouging of chemical reagents.

Why the artificial construction of a $100 lab test, when the actual value to perform such a test is much much lower? Why can't we live in a world where such self-experimentation is allowed outside of the strict guidelines of diagnostics?

<comment><USER9> That's a pretty awesome project. Instead of hacking the ARM, could you just call up a vet to ask if you can have some of their empty reagent bottles, and fill those with your homemade reagents? (As a bonus, if you can get it to work, the vet would probably be interested in knowing the reagent recipe as well.)

There's a movement towards open-source designs for relatively simple biological instrumentation- perhaps this sort of machine will be in range of those efforts someday soon.

<comment><USER8> The one neat thing about hacking the ARM (its an at91 system if anyone knows details) is that I can get access to the raw data underneath. IE, the real- time cell counting events. I can envisage some neat deep learning on something like that, if only the dataset existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The answer to the headline is astoundingly obvious yet the article doesn't mention it once. The reason is regulation: you can't use a medical device that you've hacked together unless it has been cleared by the relevant authorities as being safe. Sometimes it's a matter of simply getting a cheaper alternative through regulatory approval, but other times its just not worth the cost to prove a cheaper alternative is as safe as the more expensive one. Very annoying article about an interesting subject.

<comment><USER11> Yep.

And then you have to breach a very ugly topic most people don't like to discuss.

When does regulation kill more people by not having the $thing versus having the $thing? And how many people would suffer complication/dying with the $thing?

It's a very delicate balance, especially when you consider capitalist forces that encourage "move fast and break ~things~ people". The FDA is the chopping block for that... But also FDA overaction also kills people.

<comment><USER12> "Though FDA can trace its origins back to the creation of the Agricultural Division in the Patent Office in 1848, its origins as a federal consumer protection agency began with the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act. This law was the culmination of about 100 bills over a quarter-century that aimed to rein in long-standing, serious abuses in the consumer product marketplace."

I have no personal doubt that the FDA has saved millions of lives in the US and internationally, and the balance of harm/good they have caused would would make the harm side look infinitesimally small.

Also... I be interested in what cases you know that the FDA caused the deaths of people by overaction. There are people out there with axes to grind who thought they were going to get rich with some drug or device, who couldn't subsequently prove the safety and/or efficacy of their product.

<comment><USER13> So, the food regulation side of the FDA's activities have certainly saved millions of lives and probably swamp what the FDA does in terms of drug regulations. But generally new drugs tend to be rolled out gradually, doctors hear about disasters, and I'd be surprised if the FDA saved more than a thousand lives a year at most. On the other hand a bad call in disallowing new medicines can have very bad consequences. The FDA only allowed the use of beta blockers in the US about a decade after they came into use in Europe which probably cost something on the order of 100,000 excess deaths. Those early beta blockers did have serious problems and the FDA's decision also probably saved 1,000 people from liver failure after taking those drugs but I don't think that justified withholding the category until a liver-safe version was made. These days the FDA is less strict than it was in the 1960s and has certainly improved. But we can still do better to move more in the direction of European style regulation where they have a dozen competing EpiPen equivalents.

<comment><USER12> You had to go back 60 years. You didn't even mention Fast Track. You are ignoring device, test, and implant categories.

<comment><USER13> I didn't mentioned Fast Track specifically but it was one of the things I was thinking of when I said the FDA had "certainly improved." A large part of the credit for that should go to AIDS activists but Reaganite Republicans also deserve a lot of credit.

I'm not sure the FDA of the 1960s/70s was a net positive in its drug regulating role on human health. I'm almost certain the FDA of the 2010s is a good thing on net but I'm pretty sure it's bad on the margin, compared to the EMA which I think gets things more or less right.

I'm not particularly conversant in how FDA regulatory behavior is different across product categories but it sure looks like it's the FDA's role as a device regulator that causes the differences in the market for epinephrine injectors in the US versus EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hmm, why would an industry based on profiting from high margin expensive medical technology not sufficiently promote low margin inexpensive technology? It's a mystery.

<comment><USER15> A related mystery: what's stopping greedy practitioners from using the cheap device but still charging the old price increasing their margins even more?

<comment><USER14> > But cpap machines, the standard device in a country like the U.S., are > expensive and require uninterrupted electricity. In many countries, Burke > says, doctors resort to using a makeshift solution: a Coke bottle filled > with water and attached to some tubing

There's a limit to what you can charge for a coke bottle attached to some tubing that's much lower than for a machine that blinks and beeps and goes whirrr with lots of knobs and buttons. Sometimes the solution is to hide the bottle and tubing in a complicated looking box. Of course not _all_ of it is theater.

<comment><USER16> Um, please, finish the quote:

> "In many countries, Burke says, doctors resort to using a makeshift > solution: a Coke bottle filled with water and attached to some tubing. The > D.I.Y. approach can save an infant's life but risks causing blindness."

That _NOT_ a better solution, thanks.

The entire article is rife with this.

Ketamine _isn 't_ a better anesthetic--it's acceptable if you don't have enough anesthesiologists.

The condom with a catherer isn't better, but it is acceptable if you don't have a real UBT.

It's disappointing to see the fact that the ethics really aren't clear until the whole way at the end rather than acknowledging it in a much more important manner earlier in the article.

> "Kass, the bioethicist, is trying to puzzle out the ethics of what might be > seen as lower-quality solutions."

Doctors are also more likely to use these solutions with lower-socioeconomic groups--that is the whole point of them being cheaper, after all. And that opens an even bigger issue in places like the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Because people don't keep track of all the buzzwords.

FTA: > "reverse innovation": taking a technology or solution born of the resource constraints in developing countries and adopting it in wealthier ones.

Nothing "reverse" about it; the question is why rich countries don't import low-cost low-tech solutions from poor countries.

I presume the answer is profit motive.

The classic example that has been hiding in plain sight for decades is "so many expensive drugs that are about as good as cannabis, and cannabis still illegal."

<comment><USER18> Presumably because wealthier nations are cost insensitive. They don't feel the need to reduce wastes in their healthcare system when they can 'afford' it.

<comment><USER19> They may also feel that it's not actually lower-cost for them. For example: say your doctor uses a somewhat lower-tech, kitbashed uterine balloon on your wife during postpartum bleeding. And say she dies anyway (as someone surely will).

There is going to be a real temptation to sue the pants off the hospital and say, "Look, they used some jury-rigged contraption instead of the gold-plated device that would have cost 10x." And, I mean, that's a bad look for the hospital in front of a jury, "Yes, well, this might be a little worse, but it might not, and it cost less money!" Everyone wants healthcare to cost less until it starts to look like hospitals or doctors are prioritizing "profits" versus people's lives.

<comment><USER3> This is why we pay the most of any other country... we try for best outcomes.

If something cheap is used in the UK with a 97% good outcomes, we will spend 3 million to ensure we get closer to 98% outcome.

<comment><USER20> Depending on the amount of patients, even a 1 percent point increase for $3M could be a baragin. If, e.g., everyone undergoes such procedure once in their lifetime, 1% times the population of UK is 660K people that could be saved for $3M, roughly $4.5 per life saved, which is a no-brainer.

<comment><USER3> Yes, but we spend on better outcomes for things that aren't remotely critical.

Women in the US have a C-Section rate of 26% compared to the 10 to 15% average just because doctors want better outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I just want to say the title on yc is so much better than the original. Making something cheaper and simple is innovation. Reverse innovation is ambiguous and confusing.

</comment><comment><USER22> Like Theranos'? Medical science is slow but steady for a reason.

</comment><comment><USER23> "People are not necessarily comfortable with the price of medicine dropping?" Sorry, which planet are you from? Earth, you say? The US even? People in your country would do anything (and have) for affordable medicine.

<comment><USER24> No, they won't. As comments above pointed out, Americans will sue when something goes wrong and it's found that the medical provider didn't use the most expensive option available. And Americans do NOT do what they can to obtain affordable medicine: if they wanted this, they'd be demanding laws to rein in costs, to provide socialized medicine, etc., just like most other developed nations have already done. Instead, we got ObamaCare, and half our population wants it to be repealed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why would Americans physicians stand for this when they can make loads of profit off of backroom deals with device manufacturers and their expensive doctors?

</comment><comment><USER26> Entrenched interests, innovator's dilemma. Orgs and people get addicted to their revenue stream.

</comment><comment><USER27> I've come across the ORT (ORS in other countries) problem in the US. They're often hard to find, and incredibly overpriced. In the past, many pharmacies simply did not carry them. I was sometimes told to buy Gatorade instead.

<comment><USER28> Buy them online and keep them on hand just in case?

[https://www.amazon.com/Rehydration-Organization-Poisoning- El...](https://www.amazon.com/Rehydration-Organization-Poisoning-Electrolyte- Replacement/dp/B00OG8G9U2/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=oral%2Brehydration&qid=1549915449&s=gateway&sr=8-5&th=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> As per my understanding- sophisticated and expensive medical devices have sophisticated algorithms for processing raw data. I would love it if cheap devices just exposed raw data and I could use my own algorithms, arguably newer and better, to process them.

I don't know if cheap devices are much worse as far as raw data is concerned.

</comment><comment><USER30> > "People in emergency medicine often joke "that you can figure out a solution > with a couple of popsicle sticks."

But that wouldn't be covered by insurance without a going through a bunch of red tape. But the approved $1000 alternative is.

</comment><comment><USER31> Just don't call it a medical device. Call it a "dietary supplement"

<comment><USER13> To be used inside a hospital an innovation needs official blessing. There are a lots of examples of everyday things like fish oil being rebranded and put through FDA trials so that they can be used by doctors.

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by- prescripti...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/15/fish-now-by- prescription/)

Something called a dietary supplement just isn't going to be used. Both because they sound sketchy and because nobody is going to use expensive food to bribe doctors to sit through a 2 hour training course in some cheap dietary supplement.

<comment><USER31> >Something called a dietary supplement just isn't going to be used.

I have more faith in humanity

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This reminds me of Victor Papanek's Design for the Real World.

</comment><comment><USER33> Root cause analysis:

1\. Developed world: Profit motive(i.e. greed).

2\. Developing world: Profit motive(i.e. greed) and Bureaucracy(greed, but oft times incompetence).

Greed and incompetence are deeply rooted creations of concentrations of economic incentives in the hands of a few. Capitalism and Socialism are just two ways creating those things, just by slightly different routes. One needs true democratization of technology and its distribution to succeed. Its the only reason why the internet is so powerful and empowering.

</comment><comment><USER34> What an awful headline.</comment>


More Twitter Fueled Social TV Coming to the Big Screen - <AUTHOR> http://www.appmarket.tv/news/160-breaking-news/714-more-twitter-fueled-social-tv-coming-to-the-big-screen.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Crowdsourced programing a new trend in TV? I am wondering how they can integrate Twitter and other social network input even closer. What are your thoughts?</comment>


Spammers Choose GMail - <AUTHOR> http://www.allspammedup.com/2008/07/spammers-choose-gmail/

<comment><USER2> 'Experts say this huge rise in spam is thanks to the cracking of Google's CAPTCHA system. Spammers came up with an OCR scanner that was smart enough to read it'

...well, they're one up on me. It took me at least 4 attempts to get a CAPTCHA I could read when I created a gmail account recently.

<comment><USER3> Really? I've always thought that Google's had the easiest-to-read CAPTCHA of all the ones I came across.</comment></comment>


Trolls (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/trolls.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, thanks. I'd forgotten about that one.

HN has had many ups and downs with this issue. While I think PG's statement "so far the experiment seems to be working" still holds up, I've also been noticing many ill-spirited and nitpicking comments lately. It's a constant problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> (2008)

Massive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353593](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3353593)

Discussion there is closed, of course, being so long ago, so if there's anything new to add, this would be a good place.

<comment><USER4> "8000 uniques a day"</comment></comment>


Ancient ritual bundle contained multiple psychotropic plants - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-05-ancient-ritual-bundle-multiple-psychotropic.html <comment><USER2> Regarding the objects, a triple fox-snout pouch stash bag[0] is quite an item. Why the snout? Implications of sensitivity and a conveniently pre-angled form? Why the fox? According to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxes_in_popular_culture#Ameri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxes_in_popular_culture#Americas) at least one South American society _believed the fox to be a warrior that would use his mind to fight. The fox would not ever use physical attack, only mental._ Potentially a sort of a professional deity of a shamanic class, then.

Lovely iconography on the wooden utensil[1] with a pair of people in comfortable looking robes and differing posture. Could this be suggestive of paired consumption or a guided experience? Could the void-like gap for face indicate ideas associated with possession or channeling, eg. a symbolic "not- self" or implication of self-departure? In the absence of additional finds, I suppose surviving modern shamanistic rites of the region might only provide minimal evidence toward a tenuous interpretation.

[0] [https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hire...](https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hires/2019/1-ancientritua.jpg) [1] [https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hire...](https://3c1703fe8d.site.internapcdn.net/newman/gfx/news/hires/2019/2-ancientritua.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Lots of weird fox lore around the world. In Chinese folklore, they can pass for human (often as attractive women) and ensnare people in various wiles.

<comment><USER4> One of the segments in Kurosawa's "Dreams" is about "the fox's wedding" (kitsune no yomeiri).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_(1990_film)#Sunshine_Th...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_\(1990_film\)#Sunshine_Through_The_Rain)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's an interesting find, probably confirms what I think would be a default theory: the ritual use of psychoactives in modern south america is a continuation from ancient times.

What they found is: (1) Cocaine & benzoylecgonine (also from coca) (2) harmine & dimethyltryptamine (DMT), which are combined to make ayahuasca, still commonly used ritually in SA even by some catholic communities. (3) bufotenin (frog smoking stuff), which still exists ritually to an extent and (4) possibly psilocin (magic mushrooms).

So basically, if you were to find a bag of ritual psychodelics in SA today, it would have all these same things in it. The only thing missing is tobacco. Maybe the snuff kit is for tobacco, or maybe the article omitted it. Also, I don't think these are all found in the same regions, so it's also probably evidence of trade. Drugs can be major trade goods.

Most of how we see the ancient world is dictated by monuments, tools and other stuff that survives well. Bits of perishable culture like this give us a whole different layer.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure on its academic validity, but _Hallucinogens and Culture_ by Peter T. Furst is an interesting look into the use of hallucinogens by different peoples around the world and the role of these plants in forming our religions and cultures.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link. This is a topic I've always loved mainly because it seems so plainly obvious to me that there is a link between either accidental or unwitting consumption of psychotropic substances and the birth of religion(s) specifically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder how this chemical compounds have survived for 1000 years without disintegrating. Are those molecules so stable to survive 1000 years against microorganisn activity?

A simpler explanation would be that this skin was recycled and used in much more recent times. The ritual skin bag can be old, but the substances around can be more modern.

<comment><USER9> Interesting follow-up: What _IS_ the natural decay rate of those substances? I tried finding some data, but wasn't really able to find any.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What do people here think Soma was? Had a major role in at least two civilisations.

<comment><USER11> There are a couple of candidates [0], the one i've seen the most speculation about is peganum harmala.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanical_identity_of_soma%E...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botanical_identity_of_soma%E2%80%93haoma#Candidates_for_the_identity_of_soma)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > The researchers identified the presence of multiple psychoactive > compounds—cocaine, benzoylecgonine (the primary metabolite of cocaine), > harmine, bufotenin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and possibly psilocin (a > compound found in some mushrooms)

So basically your average burning man tent.

<comment><USER13> Sounds like a fun time.

>So basically your average burning man tent

Maybe. But did the user of this have to deal with similar levels of noise and of density of people (never been to Burning Man btw)?

My "experience" has mostly been around quiet areas or with a friend in a room/home. The heart already gets a race just doing nothing, being in a dense communal environment sounds hellish on such substances.</comment></comment>


Fundable ideas – Which ideas are worth pursuing and which are just a gimmick - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@robbdimitrov/fundable-ideas-4aa630ba97ba <comment><USER2> consumer side of AR/VR I can see that but maybe I'm wrong but being able to design in 3d whether its buildings, parts or possibly software could be game changing.

Also, a screen on any wall or desktop seems pretty useful.

AR/VR as a teaching platform transformative.

IOT again consumer side sure. but how do you enable "farm-tech" and/or automation without IOT?</comment>


JFK: declassified documents reveal a cunning and cagey president - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/07/jfk-kennedy-declassified-documents-reveal-a-cunning-and-cagey-president <comment><USER3> I recently saw a picture of first ladies Jackie Kennedy and Mamie Eisenhower together, and was thinking what a massive generational change JFK was and what a comparative lightweight. Think of his predecessors going back almost 30 years:

* FDR was of course a giant, leading the nation through the Great Depression and most of WWII, and through 4 terms.

* Truman finished WWII, ordered the atomic bombing, led the transition to peace, established the great post-war institutions both nationally (CIA, etc.), and internationally (UN, etc.), laid the foundations of the Cold War, including the containtment strategy, and started the Korean War.

* Eisenhower was supreme uniformed commander of European (and Pacific?) allied forces in WWII, leading them to victory and defeat of the Nazis in the largest war in history.

JFK commanded a patrol boat (about 15 sailors), was 28 years old when WWII ended, and was a 1.5 term Senator. What was Mamie thinking, seeing these comparative children take over the nation and the world? What did the Soviet leadership think?

(I don't say that to denigrate JFK; thankfully there were no such calmaties after WWII for him and the world to experience, and eventually the next generation had to take over.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Stewart Lee has a good line about wishing he - like 'dead' Bill Hicks - <USER2> be judged on two hour of material, instead of needing to create new material each year, 'gradually decreasing the quality of your own obituary'.

<comment><USER5> I watched that show (and Lee's commentary on it) quite recently. There's so much depth to everything in that performance (Carpet Remnant World). He said he wrote the show that he wanted to write, which was a show about him not being able to write what he wanted to write.

There's so much self-referential depth in his shows, which he then talks about in the performance and mocks the audience for not understanding. It's brilliant, and unlike anything I've ever seen before.</comment></comment>