How the ARM ecosystem is addressing two key areas of automotive, IVI and ADAS - <AUTHOR> https://community.arm.com/processors/b/blog/posts/the-future-of-automotive-is-coming-faster-than-you-think <comment><USER2> How large is ARM market share in automotive? From outsider perspective, it looks to be concentrated in entertainment subsystems, the real time control still seems to be dominated by 16/32 bit non-ARM microcontrollers (Renesas, Toshiba, NXP).

Source: the very few automotive parts I've repaired or reverse-engineered, mostly designed in early 2000s.

<comment><USER3> You are right, but ARM is getting stronger. In IVI you mostly have no other choice (only Intel), since the main contenders (SH4, top-end PowerPC) are now discontinued. Which I personally thought was a good thing, because in IVI you want to reuse lots of existing software from outside of automotive, which often has only support for Intel and ARM.

For other domains other architectures .e.g from Renesas) are still going strong. 16bit is however nearly dead, since most standardized software (Autosar) requires 32bit. However I also see ARM cores getting traction there. But even if they are coming in it will take some time until you see them in real cars. Keep in mind that development cycles are >= 3 years, which means even if someone decides to use an ARM core in a ECU which is designed now you won't see it before 2020 on the streets.

<comment><USER4> Also from what I've seen, the typical peripherals around a automotive uC differ greatly from a ARM "entertainment" SoC and that's whats the bigger difference. e.g. Infineon TC29xx [http://www.infineon.com/export/sites/default/media/products/...](http://www.infineon.com/export/sites/default/media/products/Microcontrollers/32bit/TC29xT_Block_Diagram.JPG) vs Snapdragon 820 [http://files.linuxgizmos.com/einfochips_eragon820_com_block....](http://files.linuxgizmos.com/einfochips_eragon820_com_block.jpg) Block Diagrams

In both of those chips the CPUs themselfes are the smallest part but the on chip peripherals differ greatly by usecase. The automotive has a great plethora of different busses and i/o (digital, analog, complex PWM, CAN, LIN, FlexRay) while the typical ARM core has less but higher bandwith IOs.

The other big step is backwards compatibility. Going to a completely different architecture is a bigger step than going from one iteration to the next one.

So probably even the "new" designs for 2020 may use the successor of the current generation of uC or SoC chips.

<comment><USER3> Yes, peripherals differ. But that's not related to ARM vs sth. else but generally for automotive-specific vs other domain. Automotive specific ARM SoCs will contain the same peripherals than their RH850, PPC, etc. counterparts if required. Smartphone specific SoCs will of course favor other peripherals. But these won't be directly used in automotive anyway, because they are lacking the required certifications (temperature range, etc...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That was one article void of content. The question in the title is certainly not answered in the article...

<comment><USER6> Article summary:

Q. How is ARM changing the automotive industry?

A. Here is a fancy sales brochure, enjoy...</comment></comment>


Command Line Accounting With Ledger and Reckon - <AUTHOR> http://blog.andrewcantino.com/blog/2013/02/16/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon/ <comment><USER3> Looks like a nice set of programs, especially since being able to run your accounting software over SSH has certain advantages. Does anyone here have experience with using Ledger with multiple currencies? My current FOSS accounting tool of choice, GnuCash [1], I chose in large part because of for how well it works with multiple currencies.

[1] <http://www.gnucash.org/>

<comment><USER4> Another happy gnucash user!

I have a few reports that I keep open (last month's expenses, this month's expenses, etc), so my usage is generally 1) download transaction history in OFX from Natwest, 2) import into gnucash, 3) put the unrecognized transactions in the correct accounts (rarely if ever have to do that these days - <USER2> bayesian matching works rather well) 4) inspect the reports.

I couldn't be happier!

<comment><USER5> Gnucash can download the transaction history from my bank directly, so I guess steps 1 and 2 could be folded together into one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ledger is beautiful. I actually wrote a web frontend (Django) for our company. It downloads the transaction history using aqbanking which implements the HBCI protocol (a german standard for accessing banks). My colleague then assigns accounts to each transaction.

It's given us a much better and more current view of where we are financially. We can actually display our runway on our Geckoboard dashboard in the office!

Next step: use D3.js to create monthly reports you can really drill down through.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you consider open sourcing the frontend?

<comment><USER6> Hadn't thought about it yet, since it's pretty tied to our workflow. The web interface itself is pretty basic CRUD.

Thinking about it now, it does tie together some interesting parts. I'll clean it up a little and put it out there as soon as I have some time. If anyone's interested in it at the state it's in now, just give me a shout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I use hledger for the nice web ui: <http://demo.hledger.org/register>

I use ledger for all of my personal finances and it works great. However, maintaing the config files for csv2ledger is a pain so I will check this out.

<comment><USER8> I can second that hledger i great. As a bonus, hledger-web makes it possible to also modify data, making it usable alternative to command line tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> About 2 years ago I spent quite a bit of time wrestling with Ledger. I really wanted to work out a command line based system for financial tracking. The one part that totally tripped me up was trying to split up my accounts into individual files. I could never get Ledger to properly handle transfers between accounts, even after some lengthy discussions on the mailing list.

But this post has piqued my interest... Maybe worth another look.

<comment><USER10> I had the same problem. My solution:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ledger- cli/K7EgJQuEQ_M...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/ledger- cli/K7EgJQuEQ_M/WGzdFhtuqwIJ)

Basically, make a 3rd account, name it transfer, and have it be the "staging area" that should always cancel out to zero. Works great for ledger files generated from an outside source.

<comment><USER9> That seems to be the only way to handle it. I did try something like that, but I think my approach was a little clunkier. I like the idea of a "Transfers" top level category that can go to zero...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Reckon is pretty nice, if you want your hand held in the interactive way it works. Unfortunately, it (and nearly all other CSV to ledger converters) can't generate multiple entries per transaction, which is the only way to break out tax, fees, etc.

To this end, I wrote and use a generic ruby CSV -> .erb template program that is quite short and simple, keyed off of the header row:

<https://github.com/zdw/rubycsv>

Examples are given of bank/paypal/square/etc.

Ledger is awesome stuff - it's basically a multi-variable tree structured calculator. I'm (ab)using it right now to calculate specs for a network rack.

<comment><USER7> The network rack stuff sounds interesting. Have an example? I am sure the ledger google groups would be interested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> For my home accounts I wrote some python SQLite mash up that tracks different bank accounts (no Bayesian analysis that is nice). Produces reports, google pie charts etc.

For my business I use an online tool freeagnet. It is awkward to use and I have not successfully downloaded my own data, but it took no training g to use, takes a few minutes a week to keep up and it auto calcs taxes and so on

If you are running a business and have time to learn text file based double entry program's that have limited tech support, you should be in the accountancy industry.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been using ledger for quite a long time too and have written quite a bit, both prose and code, around it.

<http://bugsplat.info/ledger.html>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if you have any questions about using reckon.

</comment><comment><USER13> I use a simple well-known SaaS accounting tool, but this is neat. I am particularly impressed that ledger makes sure to follow double-entry principles.

(Accountants of my acquaintance would quibble that this is book-keeping, not accounting, but let's just leave them outside with this year's tax handbooks).

Does ledger allow you to annotate things such as stock accounting method?

<comment><USER12> > Does ledger allow you to annotate things such as stock accounting method?

You can make annotations on transactions in various ways, but handling LIFO or FIFO or whatever is kind of out of scope. It's been discussed at length on the mailing list and the conclusion was that it would best be handled by an external system that loads your ledger data.

<comment><USER13> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is interesting, are there command lie tools for tracking your investments and savings? I'm being a bit lazy here as I haven't looked for them myself, but I've never been happy with the GUI applications for such tasks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ledger can do investment tracking too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Pretty cool. I use ledger for doing the accounting for a youth organization. I've used awk to create ledger entries from csv downloads, but will take a look at reckon.

</comment><comment><USER16> Also see <https://launchpad.net/fin>

</comment><comment><USER17> OMG Just have seen Ledger comes also with an emacs mode! Sold.

<comment><USER12> The emacs mode is under pretty active development right now. I would suggest joining the mailing list if you're interested in following along.

[https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/ledger- cl...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/ledger-cli)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> +1 for "Small" plan on github :)</comment>


Standard JS: npm install funding - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381 <comment><USER3> > The sponsorship pays directly for maintainer time. That is, writing new > features, fixing bugs, answering user questions, and improving > documentation.

As far as I can tell, this project is literally just a 200 line configuration file for a linter. Not even editor integrations for the linter, just a configuration file for it.

Is it truly something that requires funding to 'add new features'? How much time does it take out of your day to add a new line of JSON to a configuration file, or is the sponsorship there to pay for all the bikeshedding that's probably happening in the issues and comments on the project?

What sort of bugs are there in a linter configuration file?

I'm really confused by all of this.

> The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for Feross's time to release > Standard 14 which has taken around five days.

Five days to do what? Five full 8 hour days? Does it take 5 days to cut a GitHub release and push it to NPM? What about the other contributors that give up their time for free, are their contributions worthless?

Rather than feeling like a way to support FOSS developers or FOSS projects, it feels like a rather backhanded attempt at monetization by the maintainer where Standard was picked out because it was the his most popular project, and therefore would return the greatest advertising revenue.

Do JavaScript developers, or people that use this project, have a more nuanced opinion than me? I do zero web development, is this type of stuff normal?

<comment><USER4> Here's the changes between the last 13.x tag and the latest (at the moment) 14.x tag (14.0.2): [https://github.com/standard/standard/compare/v13.1.0...v14.0...](https://github.com/standard/standard/compare/v13.1.0...v14.0.2)

Analyzing the changes I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Regardless of the effort etc. and whether or not these changes were primarily functional or related to marketing, I personally support FOS maintainers doing whatever they want with the software they offer for free. It would be trivial to make a fork of Standard without the adware if you wanted, and the MIT license explicitly allows it. So more power to feross for his free offerings! And complainers: put your fork where your mouth is.

<comment><USER5> For a more complete look at the changes, this should also include the diffs of the project-internal dependencies that were bumped.

[https://github.com/standard/eslint-config- standard/compare/v...](https://github.com/standard/eslint-config- standard/compare/v13.0.1...v14.0.1)

[https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-standard- jsx/compa...](https://github.com/standard/eslint-config-standard- jsx/compare/v7.0.0...v8.0.1)

[https://github.com/standard/standard- engine/compare/v11.0.1....](https://github.com/standard/standard- engine/compare/v11.0.1...v12.0.0)

<comment> duncan-donuts This honestly makes it worse. I'm not even sure how you could call this stuff major version bumps.

<comment><USER6> The main repo has a testing script to make sure changes that cause previously- passing code to fail lint checks only happen in new major versions. Like SemVer, but for linter configuration files.

This would be an admirable commitment to stability if the project wasn't on its fourteenth major version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting to think about the different motivations people have for contributing to open source. You've got ideologues like Stallman who believe that source code ought to be free and are working to achieve that belief by writing software and giving away its source code.

You've got people (and companies) who are essentially making a deal with the community: "I wrote this because it was useful to me. Maybe it'll be useful to you too. If I share the code with you and you contribute a change back, we'll both benefit."

You've got the ones who do it for marketing reasons. Either companies trying to sell "Enterprise Edition" or support/hosting services, or developers trying to build their personal brand to get hired.

You've got products that begrudgingly throw tarballs over the wall to satisfy licensing obligations, like the Nintendo Switch web browser and most of opensource.apple.com.

...And then there's this guy, who is seeking rent on a linter configuration file.

<comment><USER7> To put this as civily as I can, if you don't find any value in this tool, then don't use it. If you think it's trivial enough to not deserve funding, don't fund it.

If you really think it's just a config file and nothing more, then just ignore it and move on. It doesn't hurt you with it's existence.

There are no network effects here, this is about as far from a zero sum game as you can get.

Some of us do get value out of this "config file", quite a lot. This project handles edge cases, enforces backwards compatable changes and improvements, fixes bugs and config issues, and works on documentation to help it work with other tools and systems.

That has value, and it makes my blood boil that many people are completely disregarding the work that goes into making this project run smoothly for as many people as possible in an area that is saturated with an insane number of choices and a cost to switching which is about as close to zero as possible.

Please just go look at the repo, look at the changelog, look at the insane number of downloads, issues, PRs, look at the care taken with breaking changes, and look at how much time and effort it looks like feross puts into this.

Please look at it, because I can't possibly imagine someone seeing all the effort, time, and care that goes into this project and concluding that it's just rent seeking...

<comment><USER6> > [...] many people are completely disregarding the work that goes into making > this project run smoothly for as many people as possible in an area that is > saturated with an insane number of choices and a cost to switching which is > about as close to zero as possible.

It seems like you're simultaneously arguing that this project is important and valuable and a lot of work, but also there are a million other options for what it does and it's trivial to create new ones.

And even if I don't personally use this linter configuration file, it can hurt me in two ways:

1\. If it's a transitive dependency of some other project I use

2\. By normalizing rent-seeking behaviors like putting advertisements in a package's installation output

<comment><USER7> I'm not saying it's trivial, but that it's one of many options.

I can't make a TV myself, and I find the ability to make a TV valuable enough that I'm willing to pay good money for one, but there are literally thousands of options to choose from if I went to buy a TV.

As for the other parts, this is a linter, it offers no value as a transitive dependency and it's existence in one is a mistake in the vast majority of cases.

And I don't actually like how they are funding this. I don't like the idea of polluting the CLI output with this stuff, especially at install time. But the idea that the package is somehow undeserving of funding because it's trivial or because you personally don't see the value in it is infuriating to me.

<comment><USER6> > this is a linter

ESLint is a linter. This is a configuration file for ESLint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the issue the author uses the words "I" "me" and "we" 13 times, but refers to himself in the third person exactly once in this sentence:

"The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for Feross's time to release Standard 14 which has taken around five days."

Without the third person stuff that's

"The funds raised so far ($2,000) have paid for my time to release Standard 14 which has taken around five days."

I use dozens of development tools every day. Counting something as small as a transitive dependency on a configuration for another tool wrapped up as a package, it's probably hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I would feel embarrassed to take $2000 for a single update to put third party advertising banners in to the channels those tools use to report their operational and diagnostic status.

<comment><USER9> How much of that money will ESLint developers get, seeing as how heavily standard relies on it? Any guesses?

<comment><USER10> That question seriously resonated with me when I saw it raised in the GitHub thread. ([https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecommen...](https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecomment-524577750))

Any package which transitively includes `standard/standard` also inherits the advertisement. That would seem to suggest a kind of logic like "if people are going to use my work to help make their thing successful, it's only fair that I'm rewarded too." And that _really does_ make sense. I could totally nerd out over the idea of a graph-based incentive structure, maybe implemented with a new crypto token for extra gee-whiz spiciness. If his prototype `feross/funding` package had been launched with a built-in technical mechanism for transitive profit-sharing I think the idea might just have been intriguing enough to distract from some of the appalling terribleness of embedding ads in package post-install messages.

<comment><USER11> > Any package which transitively includes `standard/standard` also inherits > the advertisement.

Fortunately there should not be too many of those. If you're using `standard/standard` to format your code, it _should_ be in your devDependencies, so if your project relies on it, and I rely on your project, I will never see this ad.

If this model were to take off, and, say, `lodash` included an ad, that would be a different story. You'd probably see the same ad a few times over in your `npm install` because you probably have more than one version of lodash in your dependency tree.

But, I can tell you right now, if you put an ad in your package, I'm going to work pretty hard to remove your package from my dependency tree, and hopefully there are enough people like me to stop this from taking off. :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _Essentially, we have a public good which is consumed by huge numbers of users, but which almost no one pays for. Fortunately, there exists a funding model that usually works for public goods like this – ads._

I like how advertisements, which are inherently unethical, are now being billed as ethical because they lack the awful things piled on top of an already awful thing. I anticipate this going about as bad as it possibly can, and I'm going to find it amusing if and when it does.

It's always these JavaScript projects I see doing this stupid shit. It's amusing to see these people, many of whom participate in shoving advertisements on others, not care for the same treatment.

I write Free Software libraries and the only thing I'm currently asking for is that people share the work they base on my own, which is why it's under the GNU Affero General Public License version three.

These JavaScript projects use a great deal of Free Software, but they act as if they're important or significant enough to warrant such things. I use GNU Emacs, GCC, various other compilers, various servers, and many other things, but these code artisans put advertisements in their drivel because they don't think they're making enough money from it, and this is an attitude many of these JavaScript people share. I intend to try to make money off my future projects by either selling documentation or being paid for writing the project to start with.

I could go on a much longer rant, but why bother?

</comment><comment><USER13> I appreciate the struggle Feross has trying to get paid for his work. simple- peer and webtorrent are both pretty nice libraries and it is a real contribution to the world that he wrote them.

But, I don't think this is going to work. npm install ads are like popup ads; they appear when you don't want to see them and annoy your customers. Like popups, I think they will prove to be ineffective. Does Linode even _want_ this ad? I think respectable companies would rather not annoy their customers like this.

I also think npm will ban this practice if it becomes widespread enough for them to bother - by my reading of npm's rules they ban it already because they ban "adware". If console.log becomes full of ads and useless during an npm install, it is pretty simple to disallow packages from displaying messages at install time. (Many or most package managers for other languages already do this.)

While it is possible to get paid for open source work, I think this project is just not quite valuable enough to get paid for maintaining it. If you maintain something like Vue it's a different story.

</comment><comment><USER9> Fun fact: adware is one of the listed types of content that is considered unacceptable by npm's Terms of Service.

[https://www.npmjs.com/policies/open-source- terms#acceptable-...](https://www.npmjs.com/policies/open-source- terms#acceptable-content)

<comment><USER14> Actual language:

      Content containing malicious computer code,
      such as computer viruses, computer worms,
      rootkits, back doors, adware, or spyware.
      This includes content submitted for
      research purposes unless agreed to in
      advance by npm. Tools designed and documented
      explicitly to assist in security research are
      acceptable, but proof-of-concept exploits are
      not.

I'm not sure this form of advertising qualifies as the kind of adware which is associated with rootkits and spyware.

<comment><USER15> Definition of adware: "software that automatically displays or downloads advertising material (often unwanted) when a user is online."

Sounds like adware to me. The messages are certainly unwanted. The messages are automatically displayed be default. It meets all the criteria.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "This command barely outputs any text; if we display a sponsorship message here it'll get noticed - great idea! Can't believe no one thought of this before."

"The city park has tons of grass, but no one is having their cattle eat it. Missed opportunity! I'm bringing my herd over to get some sweet public grazing in."

</comment><comment><USER17> There's a response from Linode copied to the issue now saying "This ad was not paid for or solicited by Linode"

[https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecommen...](https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381#issuecomment-524578926)

> I just recieved this response.

> Hello,

> We definitely understand your objection to an advertisement of this nature. > This ad was not paid for or solicited by Linode. There is an open > issue/thread regarding this advertisement on the package's Github > repository.

> We appreciate you voicing your concerns about this ad, and I've passed along > your feedback to our team who will be investigating this matter. If you have > any other questions or concerns please let us know.

> Best Regards,

> ### #.

> Linode Senior Support

<comment><USER18> Linode paid for the ad. I have the email thread, an invoice, and $1,000 sitting in my bank account to prove it. I expect this email was written by a support agent who wasn't aware of all the details of the situation.

<comment><USER19> Or, more probably: Linode paid for the ad, saw the backlash, and said please remove the ad and keep the money.

In which case you're not making them any happier by disclosing this.

But I guess we'll see whether the ad comes back when the higher-ups have realized the mistake the supporter made, right?

<comment><USER18> I'm not denying that they asked for their ad to be removed. I'm just refuting the claim that they never agreed to it in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> off-topic:

Does anyone else hate the naming of this package, which is essentially a coding style? It's made to sound authoritative, like it's drafted by a standards committee and ratified by a large proportion of the programming population, but nope. It's yet another opinionated eslint config with some controversial parts (eg. no semicolons). Call it Feross' standard or something, don't try to make it sound like it's _the_ standard style.

<comment><USER21> "Standard" was a joke.

The better you know Feross, the funnier it is.

<comment><USER22> What a tragedy that the package has far more users than it's possible for a human to know well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Friends, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. The amount of people second guessing whether a "configuration file" is worth $2,000 is exactly why even the most popular open source packages rely on corporate buy in to justify development time.

Where do we set the fence posts? "It's just a CSS file" for Bootstrap? "It's just a packaging system" for Webpack?

Who cares? If it saves you hundreds of hours of development time, then it's a net benefit for you, and you should pay it back. The fact that nobody has asked you to do so until now _does not_ mean you weren't supposed to do it before. You should, but you didn't, so now OSS maintainers have to put ads in your donation's place.

If you do already donate to open source - great! Set the OPEN_SOURCE_CONTRIBUTOR flag to true and be on with your day.

If we ignore `standard` and the controversy behind its "simplicity" \- would you be mad if Vue came out with this model? Bootstrap? What about Webpack or ESLint itself?

Would you trade ads in the CLI in exchange for no corporate chokehold on your favorite packages? How about funding many thousands of solo developers who don't have corporate backing but can theoretically justify working on their useful packages if they were able to afford monthly expenses from it?

<comment><USER24> Perhaps people should stop making open source b2b tools, and focus on things that they actually want to make for their own use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like the idea of funding an open source project so it's maintained. However, I don't like the choice that feross made here, which is ads. It's very intrusive to get shown ads while I'm working and focusing on a task, even if it's just installing a package. Output and errors are already hard to read in the terminal, and having ads contribute to it makes it even harder.

I believe the correct way to solve the problem of open source funding is through sponsors and their names shown through the README or through a patreon or similar platform.

<comment><USER26> from what I hear, it's not simple to get a sponsor or enough money from patreons, even for somewhat popular projects. Open source funding is still an unsolved problem, even if a ton of people have tried.

I don't particularly like the idea of ads in terminal either, but people can decide not to use this, I suppose.

<comment><USER21> Last I attempted a systematic survey of open source developers on Patreon, I could only find seven or so reported to be making >$1k USD per month.

Of those, many of the most successful weren't simply taking donations. It's common to see substantial additional products of services as perks, like access to security alerts, work prioritization, personal time, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I made an ad blocker for this: [https://github.com/kethinov/no-cli- ads](https://github.com/kethinov/no-cli-ads)

<comment><USER28> `funding` added support for suppressing the message if the env var `OPEN_SOURCE_CONTRIBUTOR` is set - these should help quiet down a variety of postinstall ads in CI envs and the like (the last two are used by core-js and opencollective-postinstall)

        export OPEN_SOURCE_CONTRIBUTOR=true
        export ADBLOCK=true
        export DISABLE_OPENCOLLECTIVE=true

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is pretty scummy. If it becomes acceptable to display ads in the terminal, through popularization by usage in heavily relied upon packages like Standard, I imagine this will balloon fairly quickly into a common practice.

Thankfully this is all open source and standard doesn't add much on top of eslint outside of rapid setup and a preset config, so I expect that the community will just make an ad-free version.

<comment><USER30> I think the trend was started by Babel around a year ago. Thankfully it hasn't picked up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Of ads in documentation and installation messages, I have the same opinion as ads in websites: performance, resource usage (network, computing, memory) and tracking are what bother me; subtle, non-misleading, generic ads don't.

I'm more concerned about overeager telemetry in software. If these ads don't come with performance/network/privacy baggage, I'm OK with them.

That leaves open the chance of libraries implementing some third party library to display ads, which then starts tracking users, etc. as happened with ads on the web, but that's another debate.

And from looking at donation pages for many well-known projects, outrage outweighs donation volume.

</comment><comment><USER32> In my own view, as an open source maintainer, aiming to gain revenue from open-source is kind of a fool's errand, as it's not really compatible with FOSS. It's just not.

At the end of the day, the best way for a single developer to extract revenue from a software project is to sell licenses, which is nothing new.

Obviously, it's just my two cents, but I've long realized that I will probably never see a dime from my open source work, and that's fine by me. That's not my goal in producing free software, to begin with, and I don't know of many cases where that's worked out without starting a complementary company/foundation (RedHat, MongoDB, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER33> While I agree that ads are not a good way to fund foss development, what I find disgusting is the hate directed towards the maintainer for trying out this experiment and towards the project itself. This sort of hate is what pushes good people away from foss projects and I've seen this play out many times over the years. Please let your disagreement known to the authour with good reasoning, do not hate on his project or make personal attacks on the author.

</comment><comment><USER4> Previously on CLI ads: [https://github.com/zloirock/core- js/issues/548](https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/548)

</comment><comment><USER34> On one hand it sounds as a totally crappy move, but on the other hand if we don't like it we're free to fork it and try to maintain our own ads free version - which most of us will not do ever, because frankly we're all lazy bastards used to someone else do that shit for us...

<comment><USER10> To me that's one of the icky aspects of this. He's parked on the very nice `standard/standard` repo, with a project named "JavaScript Standard Style," emblazoned on the iconic JavaScript yellow... If you take the time to read the readme it does say clearly about halfway down that the project isn't really a standard at all, just one guy's idea of a helpful linter configuration. But if you don't scroll down past all the company logos, it would be pretty easy to get the wrong idea.

I'm not saying that a lot of work didn't go into it, or that the repo name alone is a slam dunk for tricking tons of people. It's not like domain squatting - this is a real project. But I do wonder if a fork would be able to compete on equal footing without the advantage of the name. We like to think that the availability of at least the _possibility_ of forking provides a sort of guarantee that projects which make enough bad decisions will always be leapfrogged by competitors and great software will rise to the top. I guess I'm not surprised that it's raising eyebrows that this maintainer at least seems to be deliberately pressing a marketing advantage which is just inaccessible to potential forks.

I'm not sure what to suggest as the solution to the underlying problem of coveted or potentially confusing package names. Namespacing library names under user/project names was supposed to be the solution to this! Just repeating the same word twice is a clever way around it. Maybe npm should step in and eliminate this loophole.

<comment><USER34> If the ads are a real world problem and there's alternative we would know about it, marketing or not. It's not a shower gel or mascara, it's a lib used by a lot of people to do their work, so people will eventually converge into using the one that does the job best (or the one that pisses them off the least)

<comment><USER10> I'm not as convinced as you are that people will simply converge to the better alternative. Sheer inertia from npm activity and accumulated GitHub stars can disadvantage new, better options from gaining traction because it's not easy for developers to take a risk on a new project that could be abandoned at any time, and because they have to be pretty comfortable with the technology to confidently decide that the current crowd wisdom is wrong - something that may not be the case if the developer is working outside of their area of expertise. standard/standard is particularly interesting because someone who's not completely in their element could easily see

      "devDependencies": {
        "standard": "*"
      }

in a package.json or

      npm install standard

in a script, either online or in another project at work, and copy it into a new project along with the rest of the boilerplate common packages they need, not realizing what they've signed up for. This would create the appearance of continuing growth and support for the package even though these users are totally oblivious. It's not clear to me that, with that kind of tailwind, an objectively inferior package couldn't continue to be ubiquitous and never be "converged" out of relevance.

Still, I have to agree that the view you describe is a plausible one. If Feross does indeed think that way - which I have no reason to doubt - <USER2> that means that he's acting at least in _better_ faith than some are giving him credit for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I noticed this the other day. I think, at least to me it's pretty simple; open source should be funded but the terminal is not the place to display ads.

</comment><comment> why-oh-why Regardless of Feross' choice, it's hard to believe how bullish are many of the commenters there. It's saddening. Manners are dead and people feel entitled.

</comment><comment><USER36> from memory GNU parallel has been advertising on the command line for ages, specifically:

" This helps funding further development; AND IT WON'T COST YOU A CENT. If you pay 10000 EUR you should feel free to use GNU Parallel without citing."

Or words to that effect.

I haven't really been bothered about that, but I could see myself joining a riot if everyone decided that was a good idea. This guy is just bringing that closer.

<comment><USER37> If it is as easy to silence as GNU Parallel and tells you how to do it (like GNU Parallel also does), I do not see a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The GitHub issue is now limited to contributors only, and perhaps rightly so as they tend to turn into total shitshows, won by the "clever" one-liner and emoji counts. This was a good reminder to send Feross $50 as a token of my appreciation for his work. Which I just did!

But please, please, Feross: NPM package installs are noisy enough as it is as every package seems to think it has VERY IMPORTANT things to say which are actually noise I could live without. Please do not add to the number of steamers that are being shat onto my terminal any time I do npm install/yarn. :( I understand that you should be rewarded for your work, but this isn't at all the way to go. And given that even on one of my own tiny personal projects, when you factor in the dependencies, there are like five hundred packages this just will not scale :/

</comment><comment><USER39> I think the biggest issue for me, if I saw this, is that it isn't entirely clear where it is coming from... A final line with maybe a different bgcolor (dark gray or black, with light gray test) "[Ad] Thank you (sponser) for supporting standard development." Or similar.

</comment><comment><USER40> I try to adapt to the style of the code I'm contributing to. While I do have arbitrary style preferences of my own, I think its mostly a waste of time to argue about and formatting your code like changing " to ' and vice versa. So I both hate and love these tools.

</comment><comment><USER41> I seriously don't want this to, well, become the standard. Shoving ads/sponsorships on my face will not make me more enthusiastic about the product that the advertiser is selling, but rather will make me more reluctant to install standard.

</comment><comment><USER40> When developing for Windows we paid for windows, windows server, msaccess, mssql, and when we needed a third party component/module we paid for that too, even when all it did was to put an email in the pickup folder. Developing for Linux and with the Node.JS ecosystem is quite a different experience.

</comment><comment><USER42> That's a lot of downvotes :X

Agreed with the other comments that npm install will become a CLI version of annoying popups and banners that are EVERYWHERE on sites now.

Plus - who controls it? The core package author? Can the dependencies log their own messages to?

</comment><comment><USER40> Another idea is a business model where you pay depending on your company's earning, like with taxes.

</comment><comment><USER43> strange to see so many people say that this doesn't look like a lot of work, that it's just a linter...

Feross created webtorrent so maybe let's show some respect for the skills and commitment

</comment><comment><USER44> I guess we all know to avoid Linode and LogRocket now

<comment><USER17> Linode is now saying they had nothing to do with it, which makes this seem even fishier

<comment><USER18> Linode paid for this ad. I have the email thread, an invoice, and $1,000 sitting in my bank account to prove it. I expect this email was written by a support agent who wasn't aware of all the details of the situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The balls on this guy!

</comment><comment><USER46> I love this. While there is model for funding web and mobile apps there is nothing comparable for software libraries. I like the spirit of experimentation of this project.

People who disagree with this should propose alternatives that address their issues rather than shooting this down.

</comment><comment><USER47> What's the deal with these people acting like their terminals are some sacred advertising-free spaces?

<comment><USER48> I would rather not have to have my terminal go down the route that the web did. Next thing you know, we'll be installing TTY adblockers to block fingerprinting using the terminal window size…

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Not sure where to begin. I'd love to see RMS weigh in on this.

1.) Ads. If you choose to fund/compensate via selling ad space you are lazy (or lack the talent/skills to innovate); period. Can you generate income/revenue, sure. Selling ad space as a primary means of revenue is where innovation and alternative options go to die; you believe you are out of options (unless a rev kicker).

2.) If you are having second thoughts about the time and/or contributions you (maintainer(s)) have been making to a F/OSS project then do exactly that...rethink what YOU (as a maintainer/project founder) want and do not want. If you need to step away..do it; I do not blame you. If you want to go "for profit"...go for it and good luck.

3.) There is no shortage of historic precedence for projects that decided, after some time, to adopt/create a business/profit model. If the project was important enough, to the community, it forked and others took it the rest of the way.

4.) Now, do I believe PEOPLE should be compensated, to a degree, for time they have donated to F/OSS; sure. People NOT project(s). The demarcation point should be very clear here. Do not drag the project/software into what is a people problem.

Incentivize project consumers to "invest" in a contributor/maintainer/founder and they should be held to a contribution count and or release/feature schedule; these are not high fives and gifts, although I am happy to give high fives. If you want to be compensated you have to be held to some deliverable; we are not "bros".

I love F/OSS and incredibly appreciate the efforts of the community. I do think it is unfortunate that contributors time is not "more valuable" (yet) in this world and am happy to support within a supplied innovative solution. I would continue to, and do currently, contribute to a number of F/OSS contributors via patreon. These maintainers are producing great libs and are VERY responsive to questions/issues/feature requests and release schedules.

<comment><USER21> How many of the developers you support on Patreon take in meaningful money, overall?

<comment><USER49> Is their contribution to an F/OSS project a "job" or guarantee of income? If you do not want to "donate" your time anymore...stop; this isn't a difficult concept. I contribute $500/year to 4 projects that are integral to implementations I support. And I am not attempting to sound like a hero or what I contribute is important...but I can assure you its MUCH more than most.

<comment><USER21> Last time I looked into it, I could count all the open software developers making more than $1k per person per month on donation platforms like Patreon, Liberapay, and Open Collective on less than two hands. Most of those weren't actually just taking donations, but using the perks system as a store for add- on products and services like ads, access to security alerts, and work prioritization.

I don't know you and I don't have anything to say about you. My point is on the funding mechanism. The evidence I've seen shows that donation-based funding a la Patreon produces a few highly funded, highly visible outliers, many of which would be far better off doing large-dollar deals with their larger supporters off the platform. So far, I don't think the evidence supports recommending the donation-platform approach as a general solution to enabling more valuable contribution from developers, even those with substantial online reputations. Supporter counts and supporter amounts don't bear donations alone out as a meaningful support for individuals.

<comment><USER49> I think you are making my point and we would support the same things. I never said I have the solution but I did say selling ad space is not it. And I am sorry that patreon works for some and not others and that the "curve" is not fair. My only point was that contributors should not make their issues the communities or the projects; it's developer specific not project unless all agree to make it project based; then go for profit. All things are not equal and each project has its own lifecycle/ecosystem. We are both in agreement that we would like a method of rewarding efforts of contributors.

<comment><USER21> I don't know what you'd support, only what you oppose.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Worries grow over a K-shaped economic recovery that favors the wealthy - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/04/worries-grow-over-a-k-shaped-economic-recovery-that-favors-the-wealthy.html <comment><USER2> One of the factors here besides ability to work at home is disposable income that is not being disposed. Bad for the companies that aren't getting it, and leaving some of us with more savings than we normally would have.

I'm trying to sort out better plans for patronizing businesses, donations and generally investing more locally. Not much else I can do about it.

<comment><USER3> The marginal propensity to consume is significantly lower for the wealthy who tend to hoard their wealth.

Much of the lower-middle class lives paycheck to paycheck. They have significantly less disposable income currently because they're likely to be unemployed. They aren't shopping because they fucking can't afford to, and because social distancing is important right now - in that order.

So yeah, the pandemic is partially why people aren't spending as much. But it's also just a core problem that existed pre-pandemic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now here's an article that CNBC should have published 11 years ago. The way that the CARES Act was basically a rerun of 2008's corporate looting, but with almost none of the same uproar and outrage, is one of the most depressing developments of 2020.

</comment><comment><USER5> How the hell can a graph be K shaped, however one rotates the K?!

<comment><USER6> The idea is that the outcome bifurcates into rich getting richer and everyone else getting poorer.

<comment><USER7> My job is stable and my portfolio is up for the year. This is a pretty common situation among most of the STEM people I know.

So does that mean we're all rich?

I mean, objectively we are in most senses of the word.

But that's generally not what people mean when they say "the rich"

<comment><USER8> Yeah, what people mean when they say "the rich" is "richer than me".

<comment><USER9> Not at all there is definitely a wealth point. There are classes of wealth its extremely disingenuous to pretend everyone is simply complaining some people have more than others.

<comment><USER5> You are right, but there is also a sad history of people trying to exclude themselves with e.g. euphemisms like "upper middle class".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's almost like forcing businesses not to do business causes them to go out of business..

Shocking.

<comment><USER10> It's not guaranteed that keeping businesses operating would stop them going out of business either. It's possible that a better strategy is to force everyone to shut down and get it over with quickly, so that customers can feel comfortable going out and spending money again.

<comment><USER7> The economic devastation here in Iowa seems objectively less severe than in states that locked down more completely.

People shit on Iowa at every turn for our pandemic response, but we've got a functioning economy and a whopping 3% of our population has tested positive for the virus so far.

<comment><USER11> When your economy does not have as far to fall before it becomes tragic I guess the drop doesn't feel too bad. Iowa's pandemic response has been pathetic and between Covid Kim pushing for opening things up while the state continues to see increased growth of covid cases and a senator who claims there have only been 10K covid deaths I think Iowa has absolutely nothing to feel good about. I keep calling back to parents who are rightfully afraid to go out with the large number of maskless morons walking around town while oblivious neices and nephews enjoy house parties in Ames and Iowa City for the first week of classes.

You are less than two weeks from a peak of covid cases being diagnosed, schools are being pushed to open, and at this point it is no longer a question of whether you will see new covid diagnosis peaks by the end of the month but rather how high it will jump.

There are states that have had good responses to the pandemic, Iowa is not one of them.

<comment><USER7> > There are states that have had good responses to the pandemic, Iowa is not > one of them.

I work in Ames and live in the next town over.

As I said before, and as I will repeat any time it comes up, for a place that is supposedly doing "everything wrong", there is very little impact on daily life.

As in, literally zero.

You wear a mask to the store. Other than that, life continues mostly as before.

People are in my opinion making a serious mistake holding Iowa up as the picture of failure because Coronavirus is literally a non-event in most people's lives here.

I've been told for months now that we're on the cusp of everything going wrong.

It's been one big nothing after another.

<comment><USER12> We're just looking at the data and making comparisons to similar situations that have played out elsewhere in the country. That it doesn't affect you right now is irrelevant to the public health concerns. The whole point is to make sure it doesn't affect you.

<comment><USER7> And all I'm saying is whatever models you are looking at are blatantly wrong.

I've been told every time it comes up since April that Iowa is on the cusp of being the next New York given how terribly we're handling everything.

It hasn't happened.

It's not going to happen.

<comment><USER13> You sound like an anti-vaxxer.

Maybe you're right, but you're missing the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why does CNBC's website always break for me like no other news website. I have a bunch of ad/flashblockers on -- their site must be filled with junk in a very badly integrated way.

</comment><comment><USER15> In related news, water is wet.

</comment><comment><USER16> Many facets here. We need better education.

The wealthy have very good schools.

Democrats protect wealthy schools from undesirables by preventing people from choosing which school their kids can go to. Unions slow societal progress (Police and Teacher's unions for example)

<comment><USER17> Charter and "school choice" just move problems around. Nothing is solved, while a few corporate school owners get rich.

Stop acting like you know the field - you clearly have only a basic (and wrong) view of the situation.

<comment><USER16> The fallacy is assuming a given school can be fixed in less than 10 years. There are public schools in Detroit exposing kids to enough lead to cause measured behavioral changes.

It seems reasonable to hand those families a check to help them to escape than to keep perpetuating the injustice.</comment></comment></comment>


Latexlab: web based LaTeX editor - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/latex-lab/

<comment><USER2> Good idea! The preview pane only worked the second time I compiled though. Exporting to pdf gave me a broken link however.

</comment><comment><USER3> Excellent! I was just wishing someone made something like this the other day after feeling that using Latex on Windows 7 was a subpar experience to what I was used to on Ubuntu.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand on what you thought was subpar about using Latex on Windows 7? I use Latex almost exclusively and for such an obscure (compared to Office) document publishing system, Latex has some pretty amazing tools available for Windows.

If you go the full IDE path you have TeXnicCenter, WinEdt, and LEd.

If you go text editor path you have your favorite editor to write the source and latexmk to automatically build when the source file changes.

Combine your favorite way of writing with MiKTex for the core program and package management and you have a bulletproof way of using Latex in Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice. I also recommend the Watexy bot for Google Wave if you want to try some form of collaborative mathematics.

<comment><USER6> to try this add email@example.com to your wave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Dammit Google, why didn't you have this out when I was trying to take notes in Google Docs during a bazillion math classes?

<comment><USER8> It's been my experience that taking notes on a computer in math classes is generally a bad idea. Even if you're able to capture all the necessary equations, there's _no_ way you can embed diagrams on the fly, even with a good, dedicated editor. Though using the computer to take notes could certainly work in, say, a history course, I find that paper and pencil are still the best tools for the job of taking notes in math class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Great idea, would be useful at uni for me because for some reason a lot of the time they have seemed to installed a latex specific editor, recommended latex, but not installed the compiler.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was kind of hoping for something along the lines of LyX. Where you always see and edit a rough approximation of the document (jsMath might be useful for math display).

</comment><comment><USER11> I love this idea. But it looks like for the moment, their 'compile' feature (set to 'default compiler') on ec2 is overloaded.

</comment><comment><USER12> Awesome project. I wish had the real time collaboration like google docs though.

</comment><comment><USER13> super neat. i tried to access it earlier and it was down, but i'm glad it's working now.</comment>


Notes from the Intelpocalypse - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/742702/880beb3349156b09/ <comment><AUTHOR> LWN is a great resource. Please consider a subscription if you like great content like this.</comment>


Inside NASA's Curiosity: It's an Apple Airport Extreme… with wheels  - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/134041-inside-nasas-curiosity-its-an-apple-airport-extreme-with-wheels <comment><USER2> I wonder if Extreme Tech is getting paid to give Apple publicity. I can't think of any other reason (well, besides fanboyism) for gratuituossly using the brand and model name for what is just a common board/CPU combination.

Hey, you know what we should call any device built around an x86 core? A Windows machine with a chassis!

</comment><comment><USER3> Inside BlueGene/Q: It's a TiVo. . . with drawers</comment>


ECMO pumps blood out of the body, oxygenates it and returns it to the body - <AUTHOR> https://khn.org/news/miracle-machine-makes-heroic-rescues-and-leaves-patients-in-limbo/ <comment><USER2> I'm alive now because of this machine/technology (well, maybe the truth more lies in the fact that I was geographically close to where an ECMO machine was available when I fell ill).

I fall in the more rare category of ECMO patients as one machine wasn't able to process/oxygenate enough volume safely to keep me alive and so I had two running in parallel - making my situation even more privileged by being at a hospital (Alfred Hospital - Melbourne, Australia) that had that availability.

I spent 7 days hooked up to the ECMO machines after my lungs failed due to Pneumonia > ARDS - and complicated by other organ failures. 19 days in total unconscious in ICU. You can read about my experience here - [https://www.seriocomic.com/rhetoric/fragility](https://www.seriocomic.com/rhetoric/fragility)

Clearly, the choice of this treatment/intervention should only be used in the most extreme cases and when there are few other options. But I'm all for having this type of life-saving medical treatment more widely available so that people less fortunate than I can continue to receive the gift of life.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for sharing. I am glad you made it through that.

When you mentioned that you needed two machines, I thought perhaps you were especially obese, but that does not appear to be the case from the pictures you shared.

Edit: Why am I being downvoted? I was curious about why two machines were needed? From the link he shared, he seems a normal sized male.

<comment><USER4> From his's wife's diary, it was necessary because the insertion site for the original was not working as expected:

"Wednesday, 27th of August 2015 – Day 9

The nurse explained to me that they put another line in your neck, just to get extra line of blood to the lung machine as you need more oxygen to keep other organs working well. Your lung still is quite sick, the tube into your lung wasn't working much comparing to the one from the lung machine."

A little more context:

"Monday, 25th August 2015 – Day 7

Your oxygen level requirement is 100% now, in case during night time at 3am, you need more oxygen, and there is no way they can feed you more here in Knox. So they need to cut a hole in your leg to put a man-made lung to pump extra oxygen in your body (as your lung is too inflamed), which can only be done in Alfred hospital."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My mom is alive thanks to this machine!

A few years ago she got Legionella pneumophila and had to go in pharmacological coma for more than a month in order to survive, we were very lucky because my dad decided to not trust our GD and bring her to the biggest hospital in the city (only one of two with an ECMO in the whole country at the time).

I thank the amazing people working in medical research for this amazing device, had she got ill a few years before she would've surely died, instead thanks to human ingenuity she is still here, was able to see her son graduate and I hope we will be able to share many more years together. Seriously, if you work on these machines, thanks from the bottom of my heart and keep up the good work!

P.s.: What the actual fuck is up with the US and its medical costs? 4 million dollars for a stay hooked to this machine? We paid a grand total of 0€ for the whole stay, and after being in the ICU for close to two months my mom spent at least another three in the hospital. This is crazy, even if you add up a life time of taxes paid into the system by all our family members you wouldn't even begin to get close to that kind of number. I am truly convinced socialized healthcare is the only way forward, thinking that my mom could've been dead because we didn't have enough money in the bank sound so fucking dystopian

<comment><USER6> >This is crazy, even if you add up a life time of taxes paid into the system by all our family members you wouldn't even begin to get close to that kind of number. I am truly convinced socialized healthcare is the only way forward, thinking that my mom could've been dead because we didn't have enough money in the bank sound so fucking dystopian

If you didn't pay for it, somebody did.

Why should a stranger be forced to pay for your medical care?

<comment><USER5> >Why should a stranger be forced to pay for your medical care?

It's always nice to know that there are human beings around that would prefer not to pay a very small sum of money into the system in order to save the life of another human being because apparently taxation is theft. What kind of fucked-up world view is that? Do you really believe that the life of someone with a fat bank account has more intrinsic value than that of someone who is poor? Law and Healthcare should be the two things where everyone is completely equal and deserving of the same respect and care, the money you make should never dictate whether you live or die.

I really, truly hope you will never find yourself in the situation where a loved one's life is hanging by a thread, and that thread might be cut just because you ran out of money. If you can't emphasize with someone in that situation, or worse it, you can imagine yourself not caring or rationalizing the outcome, then I feel very sorry for you and hope you'll be able to find peace within yourself and learn to love other human beings a bit more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Full disclosure- I design medical devices like these, including many blood pumps and an ecmo device or two.

Ecmo is just now becoming (semi) widely adopted. Until recently hospitals had to cobble together their own systems from a collection of pumps, oxygenators, tubing and monitoring equipment. Only in the last few years have integrated systems and platforms come to market. These devices are in their first iterations, it's still early times. The hardware tech and medicine are both evolving rapidly and thus so is the standard of care. As is my experience with similar devices in the next ten years the ~50% survival rate will steadily creap up to above 80%, and the adoption will follow.

My experience in another, related space makes me very confident. LVADs, left ventricular assist devices awere once a sci fi dream and are now common, and extremely effective. People with what once was end stage heart failure are able to live for a decade or more having their heart supported by a tiny implanted pump the size of a F battery that spins at thousands of RPMs all day, every day. In many cases it's a better option than a heart transplant. It's so mainstream now that as of a few years ago the two most successful LVAD companies are now divisions of Medtronic and Abbott after large acquisitions.

Next up is ECMO and artificial hearts.

Anyone interested in whats next in this space should check out Ventriflo www.ventriflo.com, Bivavor www.bivacor.com and for some great history read "Ticker" by wired author Mimi Swartz.

There is so much more...

</comment><comment><USER8> $0.02 from a doctor who has cared for ECMO patients in the ICU, and delivered anesthesia for multiple open heart surgeries and heart +/\- lung transplants. Generally speaking, patients on ECMO tend to do well if (and only if) they need ECMO due to a reversible cause. Examples include prematurity (kids will grow up), a particularly virulent strain of the flu in a child or young adult (I believe the OP falls into this camp), and open heart surgery. There's also some evidence to support the use of ECMO for a very short period of time in the setting of some acute strokes.

It's important to note that ECMO will NOT reverse disease in and of itself. This explains why some doctors believe that ECMO has no role in the treatment of patients with end-stage disease of any kind. Some even argue that ECMO amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. While I don't personally agree with the latter view, I do believe that we (doctors, patients, and their loved ones) must recognize ECMO for what it is: a means to an end.

While it's exciting to learn about technologies like ECMO, it would be a fool's errand to try to make it more portable, cheaper, etc. I strongly encourage the HN community to keep their eyes on the prize by applying their talent to discovering new ways to predict, prevent, and treat the conditions that land people on ECMO in the first place: \- Heart disease \- Diabetes \- Cancer \- Liver disease \- Infectious Disease \- Prematurity \- Aging

P.S. - love to see medical stuff make it to the front page

<comment><USER9> It's not clear to me why it would be a fool's errand to make it more portable, cheaper, etc.

Was the iron lung[0] only useful as a bridge?

Was there no reason to invent implantable pacemakers?

If you can enable a person to live a normal enough life outside of a hospital, I think this is a worthwhile goal. There are disabilities that make life more difficult to live than needing to carry around your heart/lungs outside of your body.

[0] [https://amhistory.si.edu/polio/howpolio/ironlung.htm](https://amhistory.si.edu/polio/howpolio/ironlung.htm)

<comment><USER10> ECMO is not sustainable for long. The extra mechanical stress on the platelets and all the precautions you have to take against blood clots forming on any off the artificial surfaces are rather damaging. And since it is an expensive, short-term-only intervention there is no need for it to be particularly mobile. For the few days to weeks you are on ECMO while quite seriously ill, the ICU is the best place for you.

Ventilation on the other hand doesn't interact with your blood, but only has to handle air, which doesn't get damaged by the vent. So it is not impossible to be on a vent for decades. Being locked in the ICU for decades would not be good and luckily is not necessary.

<comment><USER9> Are you saying those details cannot be resolved or are you just talking about ECMO as it exists today?

<comment><USER10> Most of those problems have been considered unsolvable for a long time. Recent advanced in artificial hearts and heart assist devices (LVADs) have shown that at least a small fraction of the problems can be solved. For the rest? I'm not even sure if we know if they are solvable or not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I can understand the disquiet about loading patients onto this device when it's a bridge to nowhere, in terms of treatment and recovery, wouldn't it better to look at this in a more positive way: As providing the necessary (and astonishing, technologically speaking) first step in being able to treat previously untreatable conditions.

I'll bet that over time the technology will improve and require less intensive management, and for every patient who ends up in an unpleasant twilight between life and death, there's going to be one whose short-term survival inspires doctors to find a way to get them off ECMO. Long-term survival and recovery rates will improve as the years and decades go by, and eventually technology like this will be a regular and uncontroversial part of medicine. Doctors will look back on these early days like we look back on early surgery: as the hardest part of a learning curve that eventually pays off handsomely.

<comment><USER12> From a layman's perspective, what I often hear ECMO being used for is to allow the heart/lungs recover for a while from the sheer trauma of a heart attack or surgery while not bearing any critical load.

<comment><USER13> I'm told it's also used in cases of very severe asthma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Fascinating, if somewhat depressing[1] read.

What struck me was that the ICU is required for ECMO patients because they are at risk for other complications like blood clots. At what point do we have mobile wheel chairs of the 'Captain Pike'[2] variety where the wheel chair provides most of the organ functions for a person? And then where does that put us on the life/death scale? I can't help but think that practicing medicine is going to be even more complex ethically in the coming decades.

[1] The whole choosing when to turn off grandpa vibe is super depressing to me.

[2] Captain Pike - a character in the Star Trek pilot episode who was confined to a wheel chair that provided all functions, his only communication was a light that blinked once for yes and twice for no.

<comment><USER15> I can guarantee, if you can provide the entire body's function in a wheelchair, you can slap arms on that had have them movable by a person. We're talking at current level of tech.

<comment><USER14> Absolutely, and have them move by brainwaves. It was one of the more amusing things that Star Trek didn't go far enough to be the future (like they can't cure male pattern baldness but give someone a pill and they grow a new kidney) but science continuity aside. Where does that leave us with an ethical obligation to people who are alive but not alive. Imagine if Pike got Alzheimers, when would Starfleet pull the plug on him? It is an ethically challenging place.

<comment><USER16> > _At a press conference about Star Trek: The Next Generation, a reporter > asked Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry about casting Patrick Stewart, > commenting that "Surely by the 24th century, they would have found a cure > for male pattern baldness." Gene Roddenberry had the perfect response._

> _" No, by the 24th century, no one will care."_

[https://boingboing.net/2015/07/08/star-trek-creators- perfect...](https://boingboing.net/2015/07/08/star-trek-creators- perfect-c.html)

<comment><USER15> Funnily enough, I think either Rick Berman or Patrick Stewart actually had to talk Gene Rodenberry into that realization.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My wife is a perfusionist (specialist who runs these pumps and similar ones while the heart is being operated on).

ECMO's really an incredible feat of medicine that can bring people back from the edge where they would otherwise die.

<comment><USER17> My son spent 10 of his first 15 days of life plugged to an ECMO (he's 5 years old now!). Through the pain, fear and despair of 3 failed attempts to get him out of it, one of the thoughts that my head clung to for sanity was exactly what you describe, that awe of what the machine's power, and awe at the amazing people who, like your wife, tended to it and to my son.

<comment><USER18> My daughter spent her first 10 days of life on ECMO. She had severe Meconium Aspiration Syndrome (MAS) and mild Patent Ductus Arteriosus (PDA). She's a happy and healthy 6 y/o now. It was terrifying to watch them try to keep her alive for 4 hours in NICU2 the hospital where she was born. They eventually gave up and medevaced her to a hospital with a NICU3. Once she went on ECMO we had hope she might actually survive. ECMO is amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My son, born two weeks late needed ECMO and was on it for a span of a week in 2005. He was septic due to a severe case of Meconium aspiration and unable to breathe even with the most aggressive ventilator (and as the doctors informed me, it would likely damage his lungs pretty badly as the pressure required to get him to proper levels of oxygen in the bloodstream were pretty rough) Today he is perfectly fine (in fact a cross country runner), and I of course thank that machine. It is an amazing machine. Which reminds me, it's probably time to give blood!

<comment><USER20> Same story here.

My daughter was born in 2006 with meconium aspiration. Nurses hand-bagged her for 8 hours before taking her in ambulance to the nearest ECMO facility.

She was on ECMO for a few days, and miraculously recovered.

We took her to followup clinics every few months, expecting some sort of learning disabilities or lung damage. Turns out there were zero complications.

Today she is completely fine!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The stories in this piece really highlight the importance of having these tough conversations with family members about what you want to happen for your own medical care if the worst happened.

I really enjoyed Being Mortal by Atul Gawande (author of The Checklist Manifesto), that tells intensely personal stories about, well, the process of dying, and the increasingly prolonged tug of war between medicine and death.

One thing that may be a bit of a challenge is how quickly things change in the technology world. "Code Status" is medical lingo for the descriptor of what the patient expresses they want to have happen if their heart or breathing were to stop. Most people are full code - CPR, mechanical ventilation, etc. But patients can choose to be DNR/DNI, meaning "Do Not Resuscitate, Do Not Intubate", meaning very limited interventions would be performed.

As the tech gets better, I wonder if a more sophisticated decision tree might be needed in the future -- if XYZ happens where 30% of patients make a recovery, begin ECMO, but if ABC happens in which only 5% of patients recover, do not start ECMO.

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow, so a person could really be as extremely lucid and awake as you are now, but hooked up to an ECMO, knowing that there's no hope and with one flick of the switch it's all over?

<comment><USER23> If it happened to someone like Bill Gates, maybe they'd decide to stay on it until somebody invented a portable version. Another interesting thought is that if the price of this thing falls a bit, there might be a few high-power professionals and executives who make more in an hour than the future ECMO costs to run. It doesn't look that big, maybe before long there will be a billionaire that travels around with a personal perfusionist wheeling an ECMO unit behind them. After that millionaires will start doing it, and in the end there will be affordable and entirely artificial respiratory systems.

<comment><USER24> You think someone on ECMO is going to work?

Go take a look at an ICU ward, conscious or not these people are seriously unwell and as close to death as humanly possible.

Even the rich ones.

<comment><USER25> Yeah, except the kid mentioned in the parent article which divided clinicians as to whether or not their quality of life allowed for their decision to pull the plug.

He was 'seriously sick', but he had a certain quality of life that was unusual for ECMO patients.

 _...The boy was fully conscious, doing homework, texting friends and visiting with family. But after two months of living in the ICU, he was diagnosed with untreatable cancer that made him ineligible to receive new lungs.

Clinicians were deeply divided over what to do next, Truog said. Some wanted to stop ECMO immediately because its original goal — a bridge to transplantation — was no longer possible.

Others argued that even though he couldn't survive outside the ICU, the boy seemed to have a good quality of life on ECMO, and his family and friends "derived benefits from his continued survival," Truog wrote. They argued that the family should have the right to continue this form of life support, just as with dialysis, ventilation or an artificial heart.

A third argument arose, Truog said: If leaving this patient on ECMO was appropriate, then in fairness "why don't we put everyone with respiratory failure on ECMO?"

For the parents, Truog said, it was "unbearable" to choose a day or moment to turn off ECMO, because they knew their child would immediately die.

Clinicians devised an alternative the family would agree to: They decided not to replace the ECMO oxygenator, a part that needs to be changed every week or two when it develops blood clots. After about a week, the oxygenator gradually failed and the patient lost consciousness and died, Truog said.

The solution "allowed him to die in a way where we didn't feel like we were choosing the moment of his death," he said...._

<comment><USER26> > A third argument arose, Truog said: If leaving this patient on ECMO was > appropriate, then in fairness "why don't we put everyone with respiratory > failure on ECMO?"

That's not an argument against, that's an argument _for_. Why _don 't_ we? The only reason not to would be cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A couple of years ago such a machine was transported between two hospitals in Trondheim and Bodø (450km), using a F-16 fighter jet. It all started with a phone call from a doctor at St. Olavs Hospital with what he described as an unusual request for assistance.

A fighter squadron was just about to take off from Ørland going to Rygge for training, and by chance one of the fighter jets was fitted with a cargo bay. They held that fighter jet back and re-routed it to Bodø, where machine was needed. A medical helicopter transported the machine from Trondheim to Ørland. From the helicopter landed at Ørland to the fighter jet delivered the machine at Bodø it took 40 minutes, a trip that usually takes 35 minutes alone. The machine arrived just before the trauma team.

The patient survived.

</comment><comment> pcj-github As a former vascular surgeon and having worked with this directly, ECMO is definitely an amazing lifesaving medical technology if used appropriately. Unfortunately there is a perverse incentive to have more ECMO patients as they can generate huge insurance bills. So, the hospital loves it if the patient attached to it has insurance (and hates it otherwise).

</comment><comment><USER28> Has anyone who is conscious and going to get the plug pulled tried to kidnap a nurse and sneak out with the ECMO yet?

Was also wondering how long it will be before the tech is safe enough for healthy people. Is what you need for hi-G air and spacecraft if you don't want to be breathing liquid.

edit - your lungs would still be full of liquid, but apparently breathing liquid is not that great a plan, even though it is technically possible.

</comment><comment><USER29> You can always build more ECMOs. I imagine the technology will get more advanced too, eventually portable. Turning it off for lucid users doesn't seem like an appropriate choice.

</comment><comment><USER30> What's not explained is the difference between this _latest miracle machine_ called ECMO and the plain old heart–lung machines (aka cardiopulmonary bypass or CPB) which I'm confident that most people have heard of. Note that heart–lung machines oxygenate blood just like ECMO. As far as I can tell, heart–lung machines are used only during surgery whereas ECMO seems to serve exactly the same function but comes in self-contained packaging so it can be used longer term outside of surgery.

Could someone with more domain knowledge tell us if ECMO really is _an entirely new paradigm_ like the article claims?

</comment><comment><USER31> Reminded me of this excellent read, [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Mortal](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Mortal)

</comment><comment><USER32> This combined with the recent BrainEx paper[1] makes me wonder how far away we are from "Brain in a box" style immortality.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01216-4)

</comment><comment><USER33> A billionaire could use this to remain alive for decades after they would otherwise have died - long enough for cloned organs to be grown to replace the ones that are failing.

<comment><USER18> Every day on ECMO is a roll of dice. There is a severe risk of clots. They could cause arterial blockages and strokes. They have to put you on blood thinners to combat the clots. The blood thinners could cause brain bleeds. There's also the risk of infections and the constant feed of antibiotics to combat that. ECMO, at least as it is right now, isn't meant to be a long term solution. As they said in the article, it's merely meant to be a bridge.

Edit: that's roughly $1800/hr for the stay I think

<comment><USER33> Sure, but over time that bridge can be improved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> In the future there'll be giant pipes of blood routed around the world that are transparent and glow bright red or dark crimson, the arteries and veins of the planet's Humanity Support System

farms of blob babies that we extract blood from in order to ensure our eternal life

feeder bodies and then brains hooked up to the system, nobody will have a body, bodies will be like cars, or absent entirely

there'll be a transition phase where people still live in their bodies and are just doing blood changes like oil-changes, nightly while sleeping.

<comment><USER35> You might be interested in Greg Egan's book Diaspora, which shows a view of a possible future in which we are able to upload our brains to computers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> well yea it sucks right now but thats true for your body. literally if someone turns the switch to your heart off your fucked. its just harder to carry around an ecmo machine ;-). I hope we get artificial hearts some day. but oh well.

</comment><comment><USER37> > hospital charged $4.2 million for a 60-day ECMO

Almost $3,000 an hour!

<comment><USER38> Not only is it a bed in one of the most expensive units in a hospital, typically at a level 1 trauma center, but it's also incredibly labor intensive. Round the clock personal care by at least one nurse.

<comment><USER37> The nurse's salary is probably less than $50/hour[1]. It's a small fraction of the cost for operating this machine.

[1] [https://nurse.org/articles/highest-paying-states-for- registe...](https://nurse.org/articles/highest-paying-states-for-registered- nurses/)

<comment><USER39> I would expect that a lot of the nurses in these sort of units are the higher paid grades.

<comment><USER40> Even if the nurse is billed out at $500 an hour you're still only 1/6th of the way to that price.

<comment><USER39> A senior nurse plus all the supporting staff there will also be the on duty doctors.

I have been in higher risk renal wards and there are lot of people about even at night and that is a much lower risk ward.

I have also been in an ICU which has a lot more staff and I suspect that the USA probably has a higher staff to patient ration than the NHS

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This seems like a future Black Mirror episode.

</comment><comment><USER42> How many years until I can swim in the sea/ocean without a mask?

<comment><USER43> The solubility of oxygen in water just isn't high enough to make it practical to extract enough oxygen for breathing. You would need something like 50 gallons per minute just to satisfy your basic resting metabolism, which in turn would require a ton of power and/or surface area for gas exchange. (Multiply that by a factor of 3 or 4 if you intend to actually do any swimming.)

So you would have to bring a supply of oxygen gas with you, and at that point you might as well get it into your body the old-fashioned way instead of relying on a dangerous and fiddly ECMO machine.</comment></comment>