Stanford Dropout Says Blood Startup Won't Be Another Theranos - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-28/no-turtlenecks-this-time-stanford-dropout-pitches-blood-startup <comment><USER2> Re: "My business manager would be upset because we can't charge the patient for that visit."

I appreciate the honesty, but here's the problem with the US medical system in a nutshell. Saving patients a trip to the doctor is not trivial. (Particularly people who need frequent visits or have trouble getting around.)

<comment><USER3> Replace "patient" with "government" in that quote and I don't see how the rationale changes or the problem is specific to the US.

<comment><USER2> It's not entirely US specific, but incentives do vary depending on how the system works. In some, doctors are on salary so there isn't any particular incentive to increase office visits.

Incentives are tricky though; systems can break down in other ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a very narrow use case. Theranos was trying to be an all purpose replacement for blood sample. The problem with Theranos is that a pin prick sample is too small to account for the heterogeneity in blood for many use cases. Only a larger draw gives you a large enough sample. It should be fairly simple to determine how much heterogeneity is present for this use case. With Sequoia behind this I'd be pretty confident that they consulted the necessary experts.

<comment><USER5> CBC is not a narrow use case. The CBC encompasses a huge variety of issues. The hematology bench is one of the larger chunks of any lab, and hematopathology (the things that can go wrong) is the largest chunk of my library, by a wide margin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> one of the founders (Tanay) here - happy to answer any questions. we also put out a new trove of data here: [https://athelas.com/publications](https://athelas.com/publications)

<comment><USER5> Hi, pathologist here.

* How do you account for interstitial fluid expressed into the droplet?

* Do you use the same flags as a CBC analyzer?

* Have you tested blasts?

* Have you tested leukostatic samples (very high white count: over 100k)?

* Have you validated against platelet clumping?

* Have you validated for basic sources of interference (lipemia, hemolysis, icterus).

* Have you engaged Cerner? Epic? DrChrono? AllScripts? Other EMR providers?

* Have you engaged a pathologist?

<comment><USER6> Great questions

-The first line of defense against interstitial fluid is wiping away the first drop (commonly used protocol in most drop test). The inevitable remaining interstitial fluid chunk is then classified out by our image processing models, which have been trained to recognize differences in images based on debris/cell concentration.

-We currently report the WBC, WBC Differential, Platelets, and RBC indices. The flags we're missing are secondary RBC metrics like MCH and RDW estimates but we have plans to roll these out soon as well.

-Yes, we've run both bench and clinical testing on patients with north of 100k white blood cells - the image processing can segment out cell chunks in these crowded samples better than traditional flow cytometry. Not in the currently published studies, but some good data coming out about this soon.

-We've run basic initial tests on platelet clumping (artificially induced in certain diluted samples), and present in clinical samples. Since our model looks at the boundaries of these platelet cells, we have a lot less trouble with this than flow cytometry/beckman and even human pathologists. Still, we're working to find more samples with clumping to define the limits of detection on this front.

-We've done interference studies with Hemolysis, EDTA, not with lipemia and icetrus. These are on our list of clinical samples to source as well.

-We've begun working with some of these EMR providers, the good thing is many of them have sandboxes to get setup in relatively quickly. The larger ones do have long, long-term engagement timelines.

-We work with dozens of pathologists to help review results, train the system further, and in general go over good morphology practice. Has definitely been a core part of our strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is pretty interesting and sounds promising. I found it kind of odd the emphasis on "dropping out" of Stanford and USC respectively. These guys have clearly been busting their tails to get things done, why even mention that? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER8> It's the "Entrepreneur drops out of expensive university to change world" trope. It's what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur didn't ya know?

<comment><USER7> I kind of thought that, but then second guessed myself thinking that is such an old and tired trope that there is no way that could be what they were aiming for. I guess some tropes never die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _> can run a complete blood-cell count_

I'm not a biologist but getting a "count" seems way easier and more realistic than Theranos' claims of reliably detecting diabetes, heart disease, cancer from a single prick of blood. Therefore, I'm not surprised that Sequoia backed them even though Theranos may have poisoned the well for other bio-tech startups.

<comment><USER10> And perhaps already accomplished? (with FDA approval)

[https://www.medonic.se/products/](https://www.medonic.se/products/)

Don't know if they're going beyond the capabilities there, I'd have to assume they are.

<comment><USER11> "Not available for sales in the USA"

And these are point-of-care devices, not DTC devices. There are a lot of POC diagnostics devices out there and very few DTC diagnostic devices.

<comment><USER10> Huh. Well, my company performs cancer diagnostics using blood samples and we use a Medonic to get a WBC count prior to processing and image analysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They will probably have a hard time with marketing to consumers , because of the alternatives, and the fact that this is limited to a single diagnostic type:

1\. Walmart is working with Quest on offering blood testing services on site.

2\. This Australian site:[https://www.myhealthtest.com](https://www.myhealthtest.com) is offering mail-order testing services, for some things(for many you need a phlebotomist to draw blood, but maybe that will change[a])

[a]Startups are working on lab-on-test diagnostics, which require small volume, but there's still scientific debate whether sampling blood via finger- prick is pure enough for testing.

<comment><USER13> It's crazy to me that these products are going to be marketed while there is still debate to be had. This is medicine not software development, and efficacy should be the first thing on the table, then safety and reproducibility. Without that what exactly is being invested in here?

<comment><USER12> I don't think that without serious research proving to doctors that this works in this case, they'll have a chance.

The diagnosis they are going after is cancer, so people do what their doctors tell them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can tech VC put their hubris aside for a minute and stop thinking that other well-established industries are filled with idiots who are easily disrupted by 20 year olds?

<comment><USER15> Sorry that's terrible advice. If everyone had that attitude, nothing would ever get disrupted.

<comment><USER14> There's a pretty clear realm in which tech VC has been successful over the past couple decades: utilizing large digital networks (which is the new object that SV understands how to work with) to either improve existing businesses (reservation booking, media viewing) or create new ones (social networks, ride sharing). And when they do break out of that mold, it's with very experienced entrepreneurs that have a thorough understanding of what the industry is, and how it can be improved.

The model of hurling "20 year old dropouts" at industries with well- established practices like medicine is a bad model. That doesn't mean that there isn't room for very knowledgeable and experienced entrepreneurs to disrupt medicine, but it'll probably be thanks to someone with two PhDs, an MD, and a decade of research experience. It's not the same thing as some kids molding a new industry from scratch with few prior entrants (e.g. Gates/Jobs/Zuck).

<comment><USER16> In this particular case, they are applying a very digital solution (machine learning and vision processing) to an old industry (medicine). So it makes a lot of sense.

And also, there are plenty of cases in the past of 20-somethings disrupting established industries. Einstein developed his first disruptive theories in his 20s, for example.

<comment><USER17> Einstein was already highly knowledgeable in physics and part of the broader physics community, though. Certainly young people can disrupt established industries, but young outsiders doing so with little knowledge of the industry in question is a lot less common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Aside from the snub about dropping out and comparing them to Theranos, the quotes from Brawley showed a greater problem of potential adoption as most folks wouldn't buy this without their doctor ok'ing/recommending it. The lack of enthusiasm for this product makes it seem that even if Athelas makes it through the FDA approval and insurance hurdles, it won't hit that critical mass necessary for it to be successful.

Personally I'd like to see this succeed but I'm skeptical about how hospitals and insurance companies will react to it.

</comment><comment><USER19> After "Uber for..." startups, we now get "Not-Theranos for..." startups :D

<comment><USER20> Thank you all for being part of the tech community, Sequoia, Google, Amazon, Dropbox, Not-Theranos, Airbnb!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> To avoid being another Theranos they simply have to be able to publicly demonstrate their products work and do what they claim. When they start making excuses and withholding that, run.

<comment><USER22> I think we will see something like that. Theranos was blatant fraud by an individual who came from a family of money, and felt the need to protect the "fragile, young vulnerable women of tech".

Even as Theranos, there were lot of people defending Holmes, and attacking people who were calling her a scammer.

I definitely don't think we are going to see any of that this time.

<comment><USER23> > felt the need to protect the "fragile, young vulnerable women of tech".

I've seen plenty of men with similar frauds in the healthcare space. Theranos just got a lot more attention because it was a young female CEO. So, lots of attention on the upswing, which led to a huge fall. Reading Adam Feuerstein will show you plenty of white men in their 50's pushing similar BS while leading publicly traded companies. And the reporters exposing the BS get attacked constantly by duped investors on Twitter.

<comment><USER22> It got a lot of attention because of the size of the scam and she came from a place of money which she used to further her goals.

Imagine if this was a non-white male CEO, could you imagine how different public opinions would've been? She got some sort of soft landing because she was white, gender and her family wealth.

<comment><USER23> > Imagine if this was a non-white male CEO

Sure, I can imagine. Look at the "Bridge" detox device which is being pushed by a Filipino American male. No randomized, blind clinical trials showing it works, but it is being used all over America in clinics where it is not covered by insurance. I'm guessing you've never heard of this scam, so I would say that public opinion about it is indifference rather than outrage.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, but public attitudes toward substance abuse treatment vs. "real" medicine are substantially different, in part because the former is widely seen as only needed by moral reprobates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From the article:

"Beyond the matter of convenience, if Athelas doesn't integrate seamlessly into existing electronic medical-record systems, most doctors would reject it because they don't want to deal with separate software[...]"

Devices, FDA, and insurance reimbursement aside, is $3.7MM enough capital to try to start addressing even this task?

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty sure that's in "definitely not" territory. I would expect that initial funding to go towards productizing the actual blood tests -- I'm assuming they're at more or less proof-of-concept level at this point. That would be enough to get some sales to individual offices without large records systems and maybe even some overseas and doctors-without-borders types. I would expect larger rounds of follow-on funding to enable those larger integrations, which would then open up the large practices and hospitals.

Also, more pessimistically, I don't think less than $4m is even enough to start courting all the admins that would need to be greased to get large hospital sales, even if all the tech existed...

<comment><USER25> Thanks--I actually posted to try to verify or reject my own biases: as software lead for a startup focusing on LDTs, I've been ruthless about shooting down any suggestion to veer towards EMR/EHR integration as very likely lethal to a fledgling business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I was about to colour the company all sorts of sceptical until I read about these two founders. A lot of work + very young.

Very well done indeed.

<comment><USER28> I don't understand.

Why is being young a good reason not to be sceptical?

Wouldn't being young in a healthcare startup be all the more reason to be sceptical?

Assuming that there is a distribution wherein some industries and products are simply better tackled by founders with substantial experience, e.g. by conducting research in the area, practising medicine, consulting on healthcare, ..

That is not to say you cannot successful being young in healthcare, I just don't see any prior reason why being young would be an advantage here, unlike in e.g. social media.

<comment><USER29> See Tom Nichols' "The Death of Expertise"[1] (now also a book) for more on your sentiment.

1\. [http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of- expertise/](http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When the article starts with "blah dropout says blah...." sigh

</comment><comment><USER31> Technische Universität München dropout says new zeppelin "won't be another Hindenburg"

Well, yes, I'd certainly hope this startup won't be another Theranos, one of the most high-profile disasters in recent memory. Best of luck to the founders in clearing that rather ignominious bar, and here's hoping at some point another biotech startup can once again craft a public image other than "we're not a complete trainwreck".</comment>


Gillette's Ad Proves the Definition of a Good Man Has Changed - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/gillette-we-believe-ad-men-backlash/ <comment><USER2> It's been kind of shocking to discover that despite decades of strong support for women, lesbians included, I've suddenly been deemed the enemy, by mere dint of being a man.

For me it's bewildering and demoralizing. But watching young men, I think the future cost will be great.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand why you appear to believe that objecting to the toxic and harmful behavior sometimes encouraged and reinforced by masculine culture is an attack on all men, or even on masculinity as a whole, but fair enough. Frankly, I found the ad inspiring.

I suppose given the nature of the men's rights movement and the modern anti-pc / anti-feminist backlash in modern culture, it's just not possible to have an objective cultural conversation about the nature of male identity expressions of masculinity in modern society, pro and con, without it getting wrapped up in the persecution complex that seems to form the core of modern male identity. Maybe in a generation or two, though.

Have fun on that cross of yours.

<comment><USER2> I believe in addressing bad behavior on an individual basis, regardless of the offender's demographics. I'll wager that I'm far less tolerant of such behavior than you are.

If you want to change the world, name calling and gaslighting such as this is not the way to do it.

<comment><USER3> >I believe in addressing bad behavior on an individual basis, regardless of the offender's demographics

I mean...

>> _It 's been kind of shocking to discover that despite decades of strong support for women, lesbians included, I've suddenly been deemed the enemy, by mere dint of being a man._

...clearly you have no issue with labeling bad behavior by women and/or feminists as a group, unless your earlier comment was in reference to some unnamed individual woman, which would be a really weird non-sequitur, so I don't see why you can't do the same for men.

Culture exists. Group dynamics exist. Men, like women, are individuals as well as members of a complex and interconnected set of social, political and cultural identities. One can recognize bad behavior in an individual while also accepting that behavior can be systemic, and that men have been facing something of a crisis of identity and purpose in the face of feminism. I don't think it's incorrect to suggest that this crisis of identity has manifested some harmful traits, such as an unnecessary defensiveness in the face of criticism.

After all, there was nothing in the posted commercial that was an attack on all men or on you personally, yet your response to it was to express how women have apparently betrayed your trust and deemed you an enemy for your gender.

That seems an awful lot like a persecution complex to me.

>I'll wager that I'm far less tolerant of such behavior than you are.

I don't know why you would, but ok.

<comment><USER2> > That seems an awful lot like a persecution complex to me.

I seem to be in good company.

> I don't know why you would

When I describe my ideas on what should happen to men (and women) who commit physical violence, virtually everyone thinks my approach is too harsh.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What cheap PaaS do you use to host nodejs/Meteor applications? - <AUTHOR>

-dotCloud -nodejitsu are the cheapest services I found <comment><USER2> What is the context? Is this for production? Is there a ton of bandwidth to be used?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's just a side project (a realtime chat application built with Meteor) I'm not sure how much traffic I will get, but certainly not enough to stress out one worker. It's just for fun

<comment><USER3> If it's just a side project, why not host it on Meteor? All you have to do is set up a CNAME record to point at origin.meteor.com: [http://docs.meteor.com/#deploying](http://docs.meteor.com/#deploying)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point, didn't even know about this option. Nevermind though, since I got my opensource drone on nodejitsu! Thanks</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Book review: The Limits of Mathematics by Gregory Chaitin - <AUTHOR> http://shebang.ws/the-limits-of-mathematics.html <comment><USER2> Chaitin's website about the book, which seems to include the full contents (in HMTL format): <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~chaitin/lm.html>

A PDF draft from 1994 at Arxiv: <http://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9407009>

Some other links about the book (putting these here to save people scrolling through many pages of search results & running into journal paywalls):

The only review at Amazon (2 stars): <http://www.amazon.com/review/R1ZJVJX57T6YVA/>

[http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/reviews/reviews...](http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/reviews/reviews_16_4_vallee.pdf)

<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/siam.html>

A couple reviews whose "official" URLs are journal-paywalled: <http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/bookrev/30-1.pdf> <http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~svozil/publ/greg.htm>

Math Trek: <http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_03_06_06.html>

* * *

Everything2 page about Chaitin: <http://everything2.com/title/Gregory+Chaitin>

Several interesting looking papers in this book: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/20445762/Randomness-and- Complexity...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/20445762/Randomness-and-Complexity- From-Leibniz-to-Chaitin)

Slashdot review/discussion of another Chaitin book, _Metamath! The Quest for Omega_ : <http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/10/1947247>

The page about that book (full text also available, apparently): <http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/omega.html> and Arxiv: <http://arxiv.org/abs/math.HO/0404335>

[http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/two- philosoph...](http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/two-philosophies- of-mathematical-weirdness)

<comment><USER3> The Limits of Mathematics---Tutorial Version

<http://arxiv.org/abs/chao-dyn/9509010v1>

 _Previously in this LISP code only one-character identifiers were allowed, and arithmetic had to be programmed out. Now identifiers can be many characters long, and arithmetic with arbitrarily large unsigned decimal integers is built in. This and many other changes in the software have made this material much easier to understand and to use._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When i hear something along the lines of "limits of mathematics", a picture of Leibnitz tiresomely counting tortoise and Achilles steps comes to mind. Fortunately, instead of dwelling on, Leibnitz and the other bright minds were able to transcend the limits of the mathematics of the time.

Chaitin is a great mathematician, and there is no doubts about the limits he and others great ones have unquestionably proved. These works are great masterpieces. What looks strange is that it seems that modern human civilization has passively accepted the limits as the ultimate truth instead of trying to transcend them.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wrote a review of Chaitin's _Algorithmic Information Theory_ a couple of years ago. I talk briefly about his approach in using Lisp. [http://blog.fogus.me/2008/12/19/bookpr0n-0-gregory- chaitins-...](http://blog.fogus.me/2008/12/19/bookpr0n-0-gregory-chaitins- algorithmic-information-theory/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I always found Chaitin's books very enjoyable. The guy does not exactly curb his enthusiasm for algorithmic information theory, often with erotic allusions - it's porn for discrete mathematicians :)</comment>


Snappy-start: Tool for launching a Linux process from a snapshot - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/google/snappy-start <comment><USER2> Condor [1] has done this since sometime in the 90's. This [2] paper contains references to a paper about it from at least 97. An interesting part about the Condor approach is that it can proxy file and network access, so the file- descriptors etc. can remain open (of course this may not always be what you want).

[1] [http://www.sysproject.info/condor.php](http://www.sysproject.info/condor.php)

[2] [http://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/doc/condor- practice.pdf](http://research.cs.wisc.edu/htcondor/doc/condor-practice.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This goes way back, to 1960s and 1970s transaction systems such as CICS and Univac's TIP. The idea is that you have a copy of an initialized transaction program in a ready to run state, and when a transaction comes in, it's attached to a copy of the program and executed.

This approach comes in two flavors - in one, each transaction gets a fresh copy of the program. In the other, the program is used over and over unless it aborts, in which case a new clean copy is loaded and used. This corresponds to CGI and FCGI under Apache.

Programs which run as transactions have to be prepared for some unusual events. Time, for example, suddenly jumps forward when a stored transaction program starts. File and network connections have to be connected to the right things. Stateful connections, as with databases, may not play well with this approach. This can work well when the program doesn't have that much live state when the transaction program is frozen. A program that has a lot of startup overhead related to getting external resources may not be a good candidate. Unfortunately, those are the ones for which this is the biggest win.

If the main program is program loading overhead, as in Python and Java, maybe the solution is to go hard-compiled. C, C++, Go, and Rust are hard-compiled, and you can even hard-compile Java with GCC. Python and Javascript don't have that option.

(Nightmare of the future - precompiled Javascript snapshot blobs loaded into browsers.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Fascinating. Imagine being able to (re)start Java, Ruby and Python processes nearly instantly... No more interpreter startup overhead, just right into the process. There's some interesting implications for deployment as well; snapshot a containerized process on one machine, reproduce the disk elsewhere, and restart the already partitioned process.

I would think you'd need rather robust error handling in the program being snapshotted: there would be several machine states which would change from run to run.

<comment><USER5> What Smalltalk did to enable all of the above you mention: Certain facilities like networking had to be quiesced just prior to pickling, and then specially revived on return from snapshot. There were also special hooks for return from snapshot. (IIRC, there is a Smalltalk method of that name.)

Snapshots becomes much more powerful when combined with a transactional log of all changes. This gets around certain problems with de-synchronization of source files with the image. Smalltalks that abandoned the change-log and returned to conventional source files suffered for it. (Enfin/ObjectStudio)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Getting this error while running ./make.sh:

       Hello, world!
       Hello, world!
       * Running test: ./out/example_loader
       Traceback (most recent call last):
       File "tests/run_tests.py", line 57, in <module>
        Main()
       File "tests/run_tests.py", line 40, in Main
        RunTest(['./out/example_loader'], -1, use_elf_loader=False)
       File "tests/run_tests.py", line 34, in RunTest
        subprocess.check_call(['./out/restore'])
       File "/usr/lib64/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 540, in check_call
        raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd)
       subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['./out/restore']' returned non-zero exit status -11

Interestingly the project has Github issues disabled.

<comment><USER7> > Interestingly the project has Github issues disabled.

This is pretty weird. Certainly goes against the spirit of free software in my book. It's not like they _have_ to answer any issues.

(Oh right it's Google. Well that explains that.)

<comment><USER8> Actually there is nothing in the definition of free software that requires a bug tracker, even by gnu.org and rms standards and they're pretty high.

<comment><USER9> gboudrias said "spirit", not "definition".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is also sometimes called 'checkpointing', and has been a long-studied feature necessary for distributed processing systems. There's a lot of ways to skin this cat. Kernel modules, application libraries, userland tools, and features to support various kinds of applications (single-threaded, multi- threaded, preserving TCP connections, etc). Find the one that fits your use best.

Descriptions of how checkpointing works: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_checkpointing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_checkpointing) [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.117.4869&rep=rep1&type=pdf) [http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2013/02/overview-of- checkpoint...](http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2013/02/overview-of-checkpoint- and-restore-live-migrating-processes-on-a-linux-system/) [https://lwn.net/Articles/478111/](https://lwn.net/Articles/478111/) [https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix01/freenix01/full_...](https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix01/freenix01/full_papers/dieter/dieter_html/paper.html)

Individual solutions: [https://ckpt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page](https://ckpt.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Main_Page) [https://code.google.com/p/cryopid/](https://code.google.com/p/cryopid/) [http://criu.org/Main_Page](http://criu.org/Main_Page) [http://crd.lbl.gov/departments/computer- science/CLaSS/resear...](http://crd.lbl.gov/departments/computer- science/CLaSS/research/BLCR/)

An almost-full list of solutions here: [http://checkpointing.org/](http://checkpointing.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I've always wanted the ability to take a snapshot of a running process, say a ruby repl, that's thrown an unhandled exception, waiting for user input. Send that snapshot to a friend, who can debug the issue, send back, etc. Collaboration on a live system over the internet.

Yes, exactly like smalltalk. sigh.

</comment><comment><USER12> I used [http://criu.org/](http://criu.org/) a while ago to do this for Clojure REPLs

<comment><USER6> Looks really nice except having to compile custom Kernels I guess.

<comment><USER13> but it is in user space, why the need for compile kernel?

<comment><USER14> Some distros (e.g Arch) don't have CONFIG_CHECKPOINT_RESTORE enabled by default.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very cool. Would be even nicer if the snapshotting process created a self- contained ELF executable, rather than a snapshot file that needs a separate executable to start it back up. Seems like it should be feasible.

Since the README mentions kentonv, I wonder if this would be useful within Sandstorm.

<comment><USER16> Sandstorm is the motivating use case. :)

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord This is a nice PoC tool, but as a checkpointing solution the idea of using ptrace(2) just reeks of being a huge hack.

If you want to do syscall replaying, check out the Approximate Replay-Trace Compiler (ARTC).

For a full checkpointing suite on modern Linux, see CRIU or DMTCP.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sounds like an ideal tool for debugging.

Trace while running, take a snapshot when there's something wrong

<comment><USER18> If you want a debugging tool, try [http://rr-project.org/](http://rr- project.org/)

<comment><USER19> I'd imagine that it has some overhead. So running it on production all the time would not make much sense. Because sometimes restarting a process makes it very hard to reproduce the bug. But snasphost / restore would handle that case. The problem is - what to do with file / network descriptors?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is really great tool! I wonder if it could work with Java programs... Can't wait to try it...

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm personally excited to see if I can get this to allow me to persist tmux sessions over a reboot.

Thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER22> how does this compare to digitalocean's loading from snapshot? It takes 30 seconds or more to load your snapshot. Is this any different? I'd love to not rely on DO because this is one of the key selling point of DO, saving a snapshot and loading it.

<comment><USER23> This is about snapshots of a single program. What you are describing at DO is for an entire virtualized computer.

<comment><USER22> if I wanted something like DO, what can I use?

if this works on a single program, what sort of use cases would this come in handy? Perhaps a java program that has a bit of startup time?

<comment><USER24> VirtualBox has snapshots. Here's a page with an image: [http://ehikioya.com/moving-virtualbox-vm- snapshots/](http://ehikioya.com/moving-virtualbox-vm-snapshots/) The page is talking about cloning, but you can save/restore snapshots within the same VM too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Covid-19 timeline prediction with Gaussian curve - <AUTHOR> https://covid-gauss.site/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there! A few days ago I launched the COVID-19 timeline application: [https://covid-gauss.site](https://covid-gauss.site). I was curious about the actual timeline structure and a little annoyed by people in the media saying that the whole thing would last for months without any grounds for this kind of thesis.

I am not a scientist. This is a simple approximation to the Gaussian curve (so one of the possible mathematical models) and for now - nothing more. But for many countries such as Italy, Spain, Germany, the US, etc, the curve seems to be more accurate as the days go by.

I know the app is not perfect, updates will come. I surely need to make the model more stable.

Two days ago I heard in the media that in Germany couple hundred people died and more than 4000 got infected. That's bad. But if you look at the curve, you will see that for the day that was the exact estimate, 20000 more infections will come (resulting in 140000 total cases) and the whole party will end in 4 weeks. And that's a slightly different perspective.

Estimates are made for each country separately.

What do you think?

[https://covid-gauss.site/](https://covid-gauss.site/)

~ etp.

PS. The code is open sourced and can be found here: [https://github.com/eatthatpie/covid- gauss](https://github.com/eatthatpie/covid-gauss). Please keep in mind that some parts of the code are still a bit messy. ;)

</comment><comment><USER2> People complain, but a Gaussian is good enough for a rough approximation. The real curve is something like the derivative of a logistic, convoluted with something like a 15 day interval[1], and some noise, a lot of noise. Take a look at the SIR models and similar [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology) , that are betters models. They are close enough to a Gaussian, but the Gaussian has a faster decay, so a Gaussian approximation underestimate the length of the tail.

I don't want to be mean, but the curve for Argentina is fucking inaccurate. [Hi from Argentina!] [https://covid- gauss.site/country/argentina](https://covid-gauss.site/country/argentina) The expected peak is in the middle of May, the epidemy is not reducing here :(. Moreover, we made a huge mistake that effectively broke the quarantine last week, so I expect the peak to be earlier and higher.

Perhaps your fit is good enough for post-peak countries, but not for pre-peak countries.

[1] The important part is not how many people is diagnosed, but how many people is in the hospital. So it is necessary to model that the bad cases will need something like 2 weeks / 1 month of hospitalization.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for sharing the link about SIR :) So far I was thinking about changing the model for a given country if the Gaussian approach would cause unacceptable inaccuracy.

If the data for confirmed cases is not that accurate, can you recommend a more valuable data source?

Best wishes for people there in Argentina :)

<comment><USER2> The Gaussian is good enough for a graphic, but I'm not sure how much systematic error adds when it is used to fit the data. I don't have a good intuition or theoretical knowledge about that. I use the phrase "Everything is a Gaussian" all the time in the sense of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem) but I'm not sure if it produce a good fit when you have only the left tail.

The problem with Argentina is that we had the usual exponential grow, and then we started a quarantine so the grow changed to a slower exponential. The automatic fit confuses the change in the shape with the region near the top of the Gaussian, so it produces a bad result. Sometimes it is tricky to fit a function [1]

Looking at the data, they look weird. I expected something like this image: [https://imgur.com/a/eO8VyQ3](https://imgur.com/a/eO8VyQ3) But it doesn't look like the data at all. In particular I don't remember the big peaks and the zeros that are in the data, but perhaps I was not paying attention.

Best wishes for you too.

[1] Have you ever fit a oscillating function? It is a mess. I only got good results if I pick the initial point by hand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is really cool! I wonder how it fares with semi-reliable data, like where I live, in Belarus:

[https://covid-gauss.site/country/belarus](https://covid- gauss.site/country/belarus)

Last I heard we were only testing people who had traveled and first-order contacts of those people, so the true numbers (and conversely the asymptomatic cases) could be much higher. That was over a month ago and perhaps we're testing more people now, given community spread.

Still, can we assume the Gaussian curve is even in the right ball park? It'd be great to visualize an end date for all this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately, the current model is not able to consume data such as for Belarus.

It may now be possible to make an estimate as the numbers are growing, but still the calculations are based on officially confirmed cases.</comment></comment>


Dances of the Planets - <AUTHOR> http://ensign.editme.com/t43dances <comment><USER2> I think a better alternative to using a small number of orbits is tweaking the numbers to the ratio between the days of the orbits of the two planets is a rational number (and probably make both a integer multiple of the interval used to draw the lines).

Assuming that the ratio is rational is not so crazy as it looks. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance)</comment>


Ask HN: iPhone app like BB messenger? - <AUTHOR>

I am looking for a great group messaging service that me and my coworkers can use for group messaging. <comment><USER2> I've been searching for something like this for a long time and haven't found anything similar to BBM. I do use an app called WhatsApp (<http://www.whatsapp.com/>) which gives you free text messaging capabilities via your 3G connection; so I can text to groups of my friends, and those over in the UK without being hit by texting fees, especially the pricey international ones. But there's still much to be desired, and seeing as BBM is a major point of attraction for users to choose BB over the iPhone, Apple should follow suit with a similar system. Ideally, we'd have a BBM type system accessible to all phones.</comment>


Key Biscayne Third Florida City to Report Data Breach - <AUTHOR> https://miami.cbslocal.com/2019/06/26/key-biscayne-third-city-data-breach-florida-cities-paid-hackers/ <comment><AUTHOR> Paying the ransom is an extremely bad idea.</comment>


Rails XSS vulnerability in number formatting (CVE-2014-0081) - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rubyonrails-security/tfp6gZCtzr4

<comment><AUTHOR> Also just wanted to mention: if you run a Rails app it's worth subscribing to the rubyonrails-security google group. Low traffic except for blasts like these to alert you to urgent patches.

</comment><comment> grey-area So looking at this CVE, it probably won't affect many apps.

You have to be using number_to_currency (common), but also passing in user input to the parameters format, negative_format or units which would not be a good idea anyway and is unlikely to have been done. I can't think why you would do that without verifying the unit and matching against a small set of acceptable currency units.

You'd have to be doing this:

        <%= number_to_currency(number, format: unknown_user_text) %>

</comment><comment><USER2> Looks like some rarely used view helpers. I doubt many of these are used in production apps.

Hopefully no Bitcoin apps use the currency helper. But I imagine in the context of an exchange the numbers come from the blockchain or a wallet, and aren't user controlled in the way that could be exploited.

<comment><USER3> Why would they be rarely used? That's a _very_ common task. A quick search on GitHub shows lots of likely uses:

[https://github.com/search?q=number_to_currency+in%3Afile+lan...](https://github.com/search?q=number_to_currency+in%3Afile+language%3Aruby&type=Code&ref=searchresults)

[https://github.com/search?q=number_to_human+in%3Afile+langua...](https://github.com/search?q=number_to_human+in%3Afile+language%3Aruby&type=Code&ref=searchresults)

[https://github.com/search?q=number_to_percentage+in%3Afile+l...](https://github.com/search?q=number_to_percentage+in%3Afile+language%3Aruby&type=Code&ref=searchresults)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure I understand this. Are the number helpers now escaping for a HTML context? Isn't it best practice to escape user input just before outputting it (so you know the context) rather than in every helper function?

Disclaimer: not a RoR developer.

<comment><USER5> some helpers produce escaped output, some don't. Think: "link_to(name, url)" must produce html that must not be escaped again while "strip(text)" can produce unescaped text.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't really affect this case though. Why does the numbers_to_ family need to produce HTML?

<comment><USER7> As far as I know, it doesn't emit HTML. The Rails view layer uses a string subclass called SafeBuffer ([http://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/01/safebuffers-and- rails-3-0/](http://yehudakatz.com/2010/02/01/safebuffers-and-rails-3-0/)) to manage implicit escaping.

I can't look at the diff for some reason (too many redirects), but I'd guess this issue was the result of some logic that was implemented before SafeBuffers were added.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> off topic, but is it just me who cringes every time I see a google groups url? I know I am in for a 10 seconds wait to see any content.

</comment><comment><USER9> I am not sure if I should feel happy or sad that we wrote internal javascript versions of these helper functions.

</comment><comment><USER10> the part that isn't being escaped seems to be things like the extra arguments, ie: if you want to format a param as a user defined format, the number would be properly escaped but the format wouldn't be

</comment><comment><USER11> cool helper functions, now that I want to use them, I'll need to update.

</comment><comment><USER12> Seriously - at what point to the stockholm syndrome fans of this trainwreck of a web framework stop making apologies for the appallingly consistent flow of security woes.

<comment><USER13> Actually, we are seeing a large number of new projects move off Rails to Erlang, Scala, Node and other platforms due to performance and security concerns. Less magic, more security.

<comment><USER14> If those projects have prospered enough that rewriting in a high-performance language has become a necessity, then I would say Rails fulfilled its function brilliantly.

Rails is a good, probably the best, general purpose web framework, and no-one claims otherwise.

<comment><USER15> This comment is good, probably the best, general purpose comment, and no-one claims otherwise.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steve Jobs on Paul Rand and the NeXT logo [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xb8idEf-Iak

<comment><USER2> I think the best part is:

3:10 to 3:29

Steve:

I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And Rand said:

« No. I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. And you don't have to use the solution.

If you want different options, go and talk to other people.

But I'll solve your problem the best I know how. And you'll use it or not, that's up to you. You're the client.

But you'll pay me. »

Steve Jobs (NeXT Inc.) paid Paul Rand $100,000 in 1986 to create the NeXT brand identity.</comment>


Ev Williams: Platform for everyone to speak freely doesn't make world better - mark-ruwt https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/technology/evan-williams-medium-twitter-internet.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0&referer=https://t.co/qWkEgTMz8z <comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree with how he thinks, but as for the execution... I think Medium is the epitome of people creating provocative content just for the sake of attention seeking.

It's almost like the whole site is the mix of self-promoters and activist wannabes.

I don't think a business model change will fix that.

</comment><comment> mark-ruwt Condensing the quote into the title was hard--here it is in full:

"I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place," Mr. Williams says. "I was wrong about that."</comment>


Sonnets From the Prison of Moabit (1944-45) - <AUTHOR> https://www.prosperosisle.org/spip.php?article954 <comment><USER2> haunting in German, stale in this translation

<comment><USER3> _Traduttore, traditore_ and never so much as with verse.</comment></comment>


Instagram Designer Tim Van Damme Is Leaving Facebook For Dropbox - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/07/16/instagram-designer-tim-van-damme-is-leaving-facebook-for-dropbox/

<comment><USER2> I can't help thinking that these sort of articles remind me of the "entertainment" industry's gossip headlines. I would much rather read about the acquisitions and business decisions being made by the tech giants, then the gossip about the career decisions of the "celebrities" in the tech world

<comment><USER3> That's funny, I was just thinking, "I would love to be well-known enough one day that my switching employers would make the front page of HN."

I hear you, though. To me, it matters a lot what I think about the "celebrity." Christopher Hitchen's becoming an American citizen, for example, felt like news to me because he's a thoughtful, worldly person who presumably considered his decision. If Russell Brand became a citizen, though, I wouldn't care and would just presume it was for tax reasons, or a joke, or whatever.

Considering that I haven't heard of Tim Van Damme before, I'm inclined to agree with you and consider this gossip.

<comment><USER4> Apropos of not too much that's healthy for discourse, but I'm inclined to give Russell Brand a token amount of redemption: he is, at the very least, articulate to a very finely sharpened "t" \- that's the impression I've gotten from his writing in the Grauniad [1]; and while I'm not wading into the debate on whether he's simply just looking deeper into the usual tropes it indicates a broader awareness than a vox no-so-pop.

[1] Here's his version of the bog-standard "Thatcher's dead: this is what I remember of her years" sketch - he raises it from the dead by tossing the tread-lightlies around The Classes and makes it about what Thatcherite individualism meant for him as a prime target. [http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell- brand...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand- margaret-thatcher)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dropbox is quickly unseating Facebook, who unseated Google before it, as the premier bigco employer.

These kinds of talent shifts tend to accelerate as the company becomes more successful. Remember when google was giving $1m offers to keep engineers from going to Facebook pre-IPO?

Anecdotally, it looks like this is true for top college grads as well.

<comment><USER6> Of all the internet companies Dropbox looks the most precarious to me.

The fact is that the core product kind of sucks. It is slow to upload, very CPU intensive and incredibly slow to receive new features. And its focus on API data syncing as a growth area seems fraught with danger given iCloud and likely similar services from Microsoft, Ubuntu, Google etc.

It also has no stickiness associated to it. I could easily transition to a competitor's product with no loss of data or productivity. And if it wasn't the best of a pretty sad bunch then I would have years ago.

<comment><USER7> Dropbox seems to have two major value propositions: ease of use, and multiplatform. If you just use it on desktops, there are already several far superior options. "Ease of use" isn't sticky.

The big challenge is mobile. Dropbox's main stickiness is when developers adopt the Dropbox API, particularly on mobile. If you just use Apple for mobile, iCloud is in some ways superior (although has Dropbox's same horrible security). There's no one doing a better job than Dropbox of crossplatform on lame devices like iOS and Android in addition to desktops (and game systems, etc.).

(I admit I'm pretty biased against Dropbox because they both lied blatantly and horribly about security for a long time, and then, when caught, did a minimal job of just handwaving and continuing as before. They make file security markedly worse for users than it was before Dropbox.)

I don't think "dropbox for teams" is much stickiness; I don't know of anyone using it in serious deployments, and in a serious deployment, switching wouldn't be that hard, either.

<comment><USER8> "(I admit I'm pretty biased against Dropbox because they both lied blatantly and horribly about security for a long time, and then, when caught, did a minimal job of just handwaving and continuing as before. They make file security markedly worse for users than it was before Dropbox.)"

Don't forget they were implicated as "coming soon" in the whole PRISM/NSA saga. No thanks.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech- giants-n...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa- data)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> David Cramer has also left DISQUS for Dropbox. ([http://justcramer.com/2013/07/16/dropbox/](http://justcramer.com/2013/07/16/dropbox/))

<comment><USER10> He was actually at tenexer in between the two.

<comment><USER11> tenXer _

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The billion dollar instagram acquisition is becoming the insane-valuation- punchline du jour and will eventually supersede all previous punchlines from the first bubble.

<comment><USER13> Has Instagram's usage plummeted or does it remain one of the most popular photo-sharing social networks in the world? Does photo-sharing remain one of the most popular activities on Facebook? Is it become less apparent, instead of more apparent, that a Facebook competitor could have leveraged Instagram as a threat?

<comment><USER14> I know you're asking these questions rhetorically, but for those who don't know, Instagram usage _exploded_ after the acquisition and the consensus in the Valley is that it sold to Facebook for incredibly cheap.

<comment><USER15> Well, they launched on Android right before being acquired too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If viewed on a "Purchase price/employees" ratio, this is an expensive move. The PR of a hire like this is also VERY valuable.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra Should be awarded with Medal of Brownian movement.</comment>


Ask HN: What is your favorite work of art, if any? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm leaving a lot out, but these are the first that come to mind... Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor), Skyspace (James Turrell), anything by Andy Goldsworthy

</comment><comment><USER3> Stanley Kubrick movies.</comment>


PHP Frameworks: Hall of Fame - <AUTHOR> http://ddi-dev.com/company/blog/15-php-frameworks-hall-fame/

<comment><USER2> I picked up laravel a few months months back. I have been doing PHP for years, so the only hurdle I had was getting use to the framework. It is great for rapid prototyping. Originally I was going to do everything in Mojolicious, but I wanted some batteries already included.</comment>


The ultimate WordPress extension for Visual Studio Code - <AUTHOR> https://www.wordpresstoolbox.io/vscode/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here. So I've created what I think is the best WordPress companion extension for Visual Studio Code. nearly 4,000 snippets covering the entire WordPress API.

This one differs from the others in that I've added argument type hints for functions. I've found this has helped me spend less time on documentation lookups, especially when I already know the function I want to use. Anyway, if you're doing WordPress development in VSCode, I'd be delighted if you'd give it a try, and let me know how it could be even better.

Higher-level snippets are coming soon, for things like quick shortcode and widget scaffolding.</comment>


Goodbye Handshakes?Some Companies Considering Banning All Physical Contact Work - <AUTHOR> https://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2019/04/29/goodbye-handshakes-some-companies-considering-banning-all-physical-contact-in-workplace/ <comment><USER2> Thanks Biden /s

But really, It is very hard to sit down and describe exhaustively what constitutes appropriate contact in a workplace setting, no matter how 'obvious' it seems. This was going to happen.</comment>


Show HN: 3D sensing SDK for iOS – Produces point cloud and 6DOF device motion - <AUTHOR> http://www.realitycap.com <comment> z-e-r-o Really impressive! Nice name, video, website!

However I would strongly recommend picking only one of your "features", the indoor navigation. If I were you, I'd definitely try to build a business by concentrating only on indoor navigation!

Indoor navigation is a huge new area where all the big players are looking for possible partners/acquisitions right now! Overlay-based AR, and the measuring tape demo is a joke compared what you've shown in indoor navigation!

You really have a chance of making a successful company based only on the indoor navigation feature. Forget the pricing for now, just offer it as a free beta on both iOS and Android and try to get the word out as much as you can.

Good luck!

<comment><USER2> I know of several large companies that would be seriously interested in the measurement feature. Manually measuring the rooms in a house is seriously time consuming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks very cool, but it feels like there's a big gap between Evaluation (online only, low API call limit) and Enterprise ("contact us") pricing models.

Not sure what market you're ultimately going for, but right now it seems to defeat the point of providing a nice simple API if it's only usable for either throwaway projects or by very large customers.

<comment><USER4> You make a great point, and we certainly don't want to exclude the in-between cases. We're still figuring out what those pricing tiers might look like, so if you've got an application that you're excited about, just let us know and we'll figure out a way to make it work!

<comment><USER5> Really amazing product! Is the form on your site the most expedient way to get in touch/get access to the SDK? Also, is the error accumulation small enough so that you could use the product continuously for extended periods of time?

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Yes, please use the form on the site. We're pretty busy today with our launch, but we promise to get it to you ASAP. And yes, usage over longer periods of time is possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool! Can you give a brief overview of the underlying technology you use to extract the distance data back out from a 2D image?

<comment><USER7> I'm fairly sure that the tech is based around "structure from motion". The API simultaneously estimates the position of the camera at each point in time, and the location of some reference points (blue circles in the vid).

Because the device has an accelerometer, it is even able to extract distances, not just relative distances. I'm actually surprised by this as I always assumed the accelerometer was too noisy to be of use for this.

I tried to do a similar thing myself, but the problem is technically very difficult. While a lot of research has been done on structure from motion, actually packaging it into a usable API is a big task

<comment><USER8> Accelerators are worthless to measure distances even if they were super precise. This is because you have to do double integration to get distance and the errors only accumulates. My guess is that they have used algorithms like SIFT to track points in space and estimate only small relative distances from sensors (gyro + accelerators). This is however is very cool. They should make this as an app that can construct 3D model (i.e. turning iPhone in to 3D scanner) and ability to send the model for printing.

<comment><USER7> >Accelerators are worthless to measure distances even if they were super precise. This is because you have to do double integration to get distance and the errors only accumulates.

I never said that a distance scale was obtained by applying double integration to the accelerometer output. I only said that in order to measure absolute distances, as opposed to relative distances, it is necessary to have an accelerometer, since no other data provides an absolute scale. See the other reply by one of the founders for the details.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This technology is awesome! If it's half as impressive in real life as the demo suggests you have done a fantastic job creating some really innovative technology. I wish you the best of luck in turning it into a real business!

</comment><comment><USER10> I would love to see this combined with object extraction to make 3d models from the measurements. Here's an amazing demo: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oie1ZXWceqM)

</comment><comment><USER11> looks cool. You could probably use this for stabilising video footage</comment>


Most Startups Get No Professional Investor Cash - <AUTHOR> http://www.caycon.com/blog/2011/05/most-startups-get-no-professional-investor-cash/

<comment><USER2> These are very creative ways to fund a business. Angel investments and venture capital is not always the best way to go because it is hard to get funding here. However, a little creativity can go a long way.</comment>


Add Telephone Number Links With HTML5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulund.co.uk/add-telephone-number-links-with-html5

<comment><USER2> _tel:01234567890_

So, taking that as a UK phone number, what's the syntax to make it work from other countries? I'd guess tel:+441234567890, but is a plus sign allowed there?</comment>


What's The Optimal Number Of Co-Founders For A Startup? 2.09! - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/1242/What-s-The-Optimal-Number-Of-Co-Founders-For-A-Startup-2-09.aspx <comment><USER2> Then I guess we're set! My co-founder and I, due to our amazing intellectual prowess, are each worth 1.045 normal people!

<comment><AUTHOR> Only 1.045? ;-)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How is the California's new online cancellation law enforced? - <AUTHOR> So the new law[1] effect in 7/1/2018 requires business provide online cancellation if online subscription/offer is provided. But apparently the ADs I recently got were not doing that at all: let you activate your plan/subscription online by simply clicking a few buttons, then tell you "have to call to cancel". What department in California is supposed to enforce that law? How can they be aware of those violations?<p>[1]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billStatusClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB313 <comment><USER2> My guess would be the CA Attorney General, department of Consumer Rights. They handle other similar actions.</comment>


Hotel's Free Wi-Fi Comes With Hidden Extras - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/06/courtyard-marriott-wifi/?ref=technology

<comment><USER2> So, this post basically says that a hotel injects "white boxes" that could contain ads in a website when you use their free WiFi.

If one uses free WiFi, whether it is the hotel's or a Starbucks' access point, he/she should be aware that the access point cannot be trusted anyways and not only that, but also that every other user of the same WiFi might read all unencrypted traffic (which might be the more serious threat).

I guess in 2012 everyone should have a certain awareness around these things and the simple solution is to visit only HTTPS-sites from a free WiFi access point (and don't ignore the browser's SSL-warnings, if they happen to occur) or use your own (encrypted) VPN.

</comment><comment><USER3> I planned on doing the same thing but allowing completely free wifi access across a whole city. The content injection was the simplest hurdle. Offering free wifi (the plan was to use local businesses and offer them free advertising) was the problem as every telecom company we talked to literally revised their TOS to exclude allowing charging customers for internet use. Also force ssl as content injection will not do a MITM or at least it really should not..

</comment><comment><USER4> LOL amirite guyz? ssh -D 8080; then uhhhh set up your browser settings to proxy through local host 8080. amirite? Oh hey while were at it, use wireshark to sniff for a mac address and then clone yer machine to have someone else's mac address. this is old news. amirite?</comment>


A Comic Strip Tour of the Wild World of Pandemic Modeling - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-comic-strip-tour-of-the-wild-world-of-pandemic-modeling <comment><USER2> This should be mandatory reading for all journalists, and all politicians.</comment>


IPv6 adoption hits a wall - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html <comment><AUTHOR> Trying hard not to read too much into what is clearly a small number of datapoints, but it sure looks like IPv6 adoption hit a wall on January 1. Is this an artifact of the data collection process or a real effect?

<comment><USER2> IPv6 growth during the months of January-February was pretty flat for 2015 and 2016 as well, so this doesn't seem particularly noteworthy.</comment></comment>


HN Feature Request: Close comments thread - <AUTHOR>

A simple -/+ option to close/collapse an individual  thread of comments. <comment><USER2> Have you seen this?

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128583>

<comment><USER3> That's incredibly useful. Since it's MIT Licensed I've implemented it on UseTheSource.

<comment><USER4> Very nice. But the license doesn't give you the right to remove the license text and copyright notice.

<comment><USER3> You are absolutely correct. In copy/pasting your code I omitted the license. Having worked on lots of open source software all I can do is apologize profusely. It was an innocent oversight but it should not have happened. I have restored the copyright notice. Sorry.

So, mea culpa.

<http://usethesource.com/uts.js>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I turned the collapsible thread bookmarklet into a greasemonkey script: [http://gist.github.com/raw/473833/d2c50b643aed41d31da7be269f...](http://gist.github.com/raw/473833/d2c50b643aed41d31da7be269f4126df4465786b/hncollapse.user.js)

</comment><comment><USER6> It would be pretty easy to write a simple greasemonkey script for this.</comment>


How Rumblr Hacked the Media - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/life-learning/how-we-hacked-the-media-and-landed-six-figure-contracts-in-four-days-96ea4aca4eef <comment><USER2> Of course, it's a lot easier to 'hack the media' if your concept is controversial to begin with. I mean, Rumblr was basically real life Fight Club, and the idea made for perfect stories about how either apps and startups were pushing the boundaries legally, or how crazy these apps are, etc. On the other hand, if their product was something rather boring (like say, accounting software), I suspect they wouldn't have got anywhere near the press they did.

Props for their efforts promoting the hoax, but the concept alone could well have taken off anyway simply due to how insane it is.</comment>


Reddit becomes reddit Inc. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/independence.html

<comment><USER3> The question for reddit isn't whether or not people enjoy it and want to spend time on it, but whether or not the owners can make money selling those people's attention. The traffic to reddit - while admirably large - <USER2> relatively unattractive to most advertisers.

"Reach" (impressions/eyeballs) are only important insofar as you're talking to someone who might buy what you're selling (see "relevancy"). The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub- reddits.

Anecdotally, the audience would also seem to be advertisement-averse. An advertiser should be willing to pay network prices for the audience (i.e. pennies CPM), which makes it a nice living for a small group of folks living off their passion, but pretty useless to a Condé Nast trying to run a media empire.

I think the business model in a reddit-like site could be selling curated content in other media, e.g. a meme-series of coffee table books. Think Harry Potter, not Oprah.

If you're in the content game, your business's value is in having the attention of a group of people. Your first attempt to monetize that asset needn't be to sell your audience's attention to someone else, in this case undermining your ability to keep their attention. Instead, you should focus on bringing things your audience wants - and would pay for - to them. Sometimes that means you need to make the things they want to buy instead of shilling them for someone else, because no one sells what your people want.

Condé Nast isn't built to do this.

<comment><USER4> "The sub-reddit system could theoretically segment the audience in interesting ways, but other than r/gaming, there aren't many natural industry fits amongst popular sub-reddits." In my opinion this is only true for a few (admittedly most popular) subreddits like r/funny and r/wtf and everything nsfw . Nearly every subreddit that I read has an industry that fits, r/photography -> photo gear, r/parenting -> baby stuff, r/science -> journals and books, r/somethingimade -> etsy, etc. I'm also sure that reddit knows a lot more about my interests than google and facebook together. But maybe that's just me...

<comment><USER3> You're not wrong by any means, but it's also a question of scale and purchasing power. There's no doubt that r/parenting is filled with people worth talking to about, say, baby products. But then look at the advertising sales minisite for Babycenter.com[1]; a company like Johnson & Johnson isn't going to bother with r/parenting. Smaller companies might be interested, but small companies don't spend much money on ads. When they do, they mostly spend it on Adwords.

Of course the joke here is that J&J bought Babycenter. If I were a category- specific CPG company, I'd cut out the publisher middleman, too.

Ad networks & exchanges lead us to think there's a perfectly efficient & liquid market for ad space, but there's a real scaling problem for big advertisers that leads them to stick with big publishers. Quality control on r/parenting would be a concern.

[1] <http://www.babycentersolutions.com/>

<comment><USER5> _> a company like Johnson & Johnson isn't going to bother with r/parenting_

This is false. My girlfriend works in social media at a Fortune 100 company. Just a few of their many products are geared toward babies and other things of interest to parents. She attends "mommy blogger" conferences, reaches out to people on Twitter and Facebook, and otherwise works with people who have a substantial audience in order to advertise with them.

Big companies are _much_ more likely than small companies to even have such a role. They are very interested in promoting themselves and increasing their profits in any way possible. There's absolutely no reason they wouldn't be interested in something like r/parenting

<comment><USER6> > This is false. My girlfriend works in social media at a Fortune 100 company. > Just a few of their many products are geared toward babies and other things > of interest to parents. She attends "mommy blogger" conferences, reaches out > to people on Twitter and Facebook, and otherwise works with people who have > a substantial audience in order to advertise with them.

By bother he meant spend a bunch of cash, not @reply to people on Twitter. They can hire your girlfriend to submit stuff and comment on reddit all day, but that doesn't give reddit any revenue.

<comment><USER7> Paying someone to reply to people on twitter cost 20000 + benefits per person. Not to mention conference tickets, transportation to conferences. Maybe some facebook ads?

<comment><USER6> It could be cheaper, but I'd never see a Facebook ad or Promoted Tweet. Sometimes the warm body making personal contact is what it takes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sad to see them hiring an outside CEO instead of promoting from within. I don't think hired CEOs work so well for products that are still at the stage Reddit is at.

They need someone with deep, intimate knowledge of the community and the product. The best source for that in my opinion would be internal.

<comment><USER9> I believe they only have one person from within still there that could do it.

<comment><USER8> Do they need more than one CEO?

Sounds like you should have said "they still have someone within who could do it!"

<comment><USER9> I guess I was trying to make a snarky comment about the fact that most of us who would be reasonable choices left before it became an option.

<comment><USER10> Was it really that bad? (Or am I just reading the tone of your comment incorrectly?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can someone with more business know-how tell me how a company like Condé Nast benefits from making Reddit an incorporated subsidiary? It doesn't sound like all that much is changing, honestly.

<comment><USER12> Instead of Reddit being a division on the Org. chart of C.N., Reddit Inc. shares are held by C.N. This means that Reddit can take on equity investors to finance operations and operate externally of any organizational influence Conde Nast had (which may not have been much anyways).

<comment><USER13> Reddit, Inc., will be owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Condé Nast, so it will be a corporate sibling of CN and more independent of it. Advance Publications owns other divisions in addition to CN, including a newspaper division that presumably does not is not influenced very much by the magazine folks:

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reddit could become an email replacement. My college campus has all-campus email that anyone can send to. Discussions in email simply don't turn out well, there's no good way to respond to just one person while letting everyone view it, there's no good way to voice agreement or disagreement, and it's mixed in with much more important information.

Reddit would be perfect for it, and for campuses with less generous email policies. It doesn't interfere with work communication and its better suited for the sort of discussions and arguments that email often plays host to.

As a student, I can't speak much for companies. And I'm aware of Reddit's recent College promotion and how easy it is to make, moderate, etc a new Reddit. But a dedicated Reddit integrated with college websites or email could be a profit stream.

</comment><comment><USER15> _This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can better handle future growth and opportunities._

FTFY: This change is all about setting up reddit so that it can be be sold.

<comment><USER16> My thoughts exactly... Reddit is a misfit in the overall organization and with the current exponential growth it's experiencing, it's the best and most leveraged time to sell it off. Would be a strategically good decision IMO.. I'm surprised this comment isn't voted higher..

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here are a bunch of monetization ideas that wont divert too much from their culture:

1\. paid mobile apps 2\. paid API access 3\. build an internal Flattr like service 4\. offline events 5\. go compete with Disqus

<comment><USER18> I can't even begin to imagine what Reddit would be like if Karma had a monetary value. Karma whore-ier I'd presume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've mentioned this before in a different comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2948396>

I would like to see reddit release a product where I, can implement a forum system much like reddit but completely autonomous and hosted on their own service - basically a replacement to the dreaded phpBB. Hell, I'd pay for it.

<comment><USER20> The reddit code is open source

<comment><USER21> That's true, however it's not really in a highly usable state. I believe it's one of their aims (although, that's been the case for a while) to remedy that situation, but you'd have a tough time using it in this way at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like they may be making it more attractive as an aquisition target.

<comment><USER23> You underestimate the ability of a large media company to squash innovation and morale. They might get outside investment so they can iterate harder/better/faster but Advance wants to hold onto this goldmine.

From [http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/06/a-startup-is-reborn- reddi...](http://www.betabeat.com/2011/09/06/a-startup-is-reborn-reddit-no- longer-part-of-conde-nast-seeks-ceo/):

Greater independence will mean reddit can go to a new board, which includes reddit OG Alexix Ohanian, who had been serving as an "advisor," as well as representatives from Conde and Advance, with proposals instead of jockeying within Conde's budget. Reddit doesn't plan to seek outside funding at this time, Mr. Martin said, but it's not out of the question. "It's a lot more more of a startup," he said. "It's able to happen faster with less overhead."

<comment><USER22> Hmm, in that case they seem to be making a reasonable move: remove to some extent the overhead of Conde Nast. If that's the primary motivation, then I am impressed that Conde Nast can recognize it's limitations, and give reddit a chance to grow outside of their oversight. That being said, my impression was that Conde Nast was remarkably hands off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So. Who will end up buying this new reddit with high traffic and lots of user affection?

How much? I'd say 50M$ would be adequate.

<comment><USER25> Would be really amazed if Reddit would sell so low, considering their fast- growing visitor numbers. <http://blog.reddit.com/2011/09/how-reddit- works.html>

<comment><USER26> However, Reddit users are notoriously cheap and anti-commercial.

<comment><USER27> As the user base grows there is a growing amount of thinly disguised commercial content that sneaks in, often through strategic product placement in pictures.

Since the community is less vigilant than it used to, I assume that the newcomers are less concerned about commerce.

<comment><USER28> It doesn't take much to send a fickle user base like Reddit's running for the next Internet hangout. There are plenty of examples from the recent past. Remember Digg?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have to say, although Reddit is a large and possibly even influential service. I can't agree that they will be able to influence the news industry greatly (I use greatly loosely as the industry is so large).

I think an online service could revolutionise the way we all read and digest news, Reddit is the first stepping stone in this revolution but I expect it to be overtaken soon by a superior service (The same way Facebook has MySpace).

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems like what happened to digg. Didn't Digg balloon to 75+ employees at one point? I wonder if Reddit is going to head down that same route.

<comment><USER31> As long as I'm on the board, I'll do everything I can to stop any nonsense like that.

<comment><USER32> My first thought when they said you were on the board was "Well at least we'll have an honest witness to the train wreck that's likely to ensue."

I really hope they actually listen to you. Would you consider taking the CEO job there? Best possible outcome.

<comment><USER33> Conde Nast buys reddit, and people predict a train wreck. Conde Nast spins reddit off, and people predict a train wreck.

There's just no pleasing you guys...

<comment><USER32> For years the cat was bored with the mouse so it just kept it caged up and starving. But the mouse got fat and juicy anyway. Now the cat is licking its lips.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> 3M pageviews per hour? Whoa, that's staggering.

</comment><comment><USER35> Perhaps it's dying and they are trying to cut it loose first.

<comment><USER36> They're currently experiencing explosive growth: [http://soshable.com/reddit- traffic-has-exploded-in-12-months...](http://soshable.com/reddit-traffic-has- exploded-in-12-months/)

They have also, in my opinion, implemented mainstream and niche news so well (via subreddits) that they're not in immediate danger of being replaced by another aggregate news and/or niche site.

<comment><USER37> >They're currently experiencing explosive growth

so was Digg, and Fark before it, and Slashdot before that.

Am I wrong? History shows that these sites are basically popular for a certain amount of time, and then they lose huge market share when they inevitably do something to sour the community-at-large (like trying to monetize).

<comment><USER8> The thing is, Reddit started at the same time Digg did. It's been growing slowly and consistently ever since. Their growth rate actually hasn't changed much over time.

Reddit figured out how to support subcommunities in a way that those other sites never did. In my opinion that's what's different.

See also: social networks. Every social network was a passing fad...until Facebook wasn't.

<comment><USER37> Is it growing slowly and consistently, or experiencing explosive growth? The link I was replying to shows that while Reddit and Digg started at about the same time, Reddit really only took off when Digg committed suicide.

[http://soshable.com/reddit-traffic-has-exploded- in-12-months...](http://soshable.com/reddit-traffic-has-exploded- in-12-months/)

<comment><USER38> Correlation is not necessarily causation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Reddit is cool. Get a CEO who is cool.</comment>