The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-a-saturation-diver <comment><USER2> been there. done that :)

not as dangerous as the article says. at least not the diving part. most of the injuries are people mishandling high-pressure systems (valves, plumbing), electrical hazards (water+electricity), gas leaks, burns ... basically anything that can go wrong on construction sites, but only you're out at sea exposed to the elements. those few times that accidents do happen with divers in a saturation chambers / diving bell (aka "in the bin") it's cited for decades. people are naturally scared of darkness, deep water. so when accidents do happen it makes for a gripping story told over and over. how else to pass time when you're waiting on the weather to get better on a rocky boat.

what's pretty cool is the survival training, e.g. practice escaping from a sinking helicopter [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Z8sGRje90](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Z8sGRje90) I have seen big tough man in their 40ies panic and in tears trying to stay calm while the sinking helicopter fully floods, and you can't open the doors until the cabin is fully flooded.

Another good one: part of the course is simulation of a burning rig. they lock you into a warehouse heated to around 60-70°C breathing air with a gas-mask, full body safety clothes (the heat alone can make you panic), then you have to navigate through a metal maze with a buddy (you're linked to your sobbing partner over radio-comms), and it's pitch black. You are only allowed to get out together and if one of you it bucks up you start over. Fantastic character building and understanding your mental limits.

Sometimes I sit in front of my code thinking why did I get out of this job. I fought so hard to get there and gave it all up for computers & code. The truth is that most of the time offshore life is quite boring. Guess my boredom with software made me go into IoT since I get to mess with physical systems again.

<comment><USER3> The population is tiny which means even if the accident rate is low per time, the risk per diver is extremely high.

It depends on you benchmark, but people think of police officer as a dangerous job and they mostly die in car accidents.

<comment><USER4> Isn't there something about how general aviation pilots mostly die flying if they don't retire from it young?

<comment><USER5> There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. That's the saying anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked as a technical diver, not a saturation diver, with full-face comms and Nitrox and spare air, servicing underwater hydraulics/electrical systems for over 450 dives. No need for extended stays underwater or lengthy decompression. Most injuries were related to the physical labor around heavy moving machinery and tool usage. Glad to say there were few injuries and these were all minor injuries of those involved. The important technical point is that the largest increase in volume takes place in the first atmosphere or 33 ft (10 m) under the surface. The inverted bucket example of a full bucket of air going from full of air to half air at 33 ft below surface. It goes from 1/2 full of air to 1/3 at the 2-3 atm change. And that's where most typical recreational diving takes place with a maximum of 30 m to 40 m (100 ft to 130 ft). Diving in confined spaces with the surface blocked by structure or machinery, and with the occasional oil leak causing visibility of less than 24 inches due to light diffusion provided for a mix of challenging tasks while staying calm and rational. I miss that part of it all.

<comment><USER7> Sorry if this is a stupid question but how far down could you dive?

<comment><USER8> It depends on the tables and physiology, because you need to safely oxygenate all the body's tissues with regular breathing at depth. He could probably dive [edit: said Nitrox, I'd learned non-air Nitrox increases maximum depth but it increases time-at-depth] Trimix until about 100m, deeper might need a different mix.

<comment><USER9> Nitrox's maximum operating depth is ~32m at 32%. Oxygen toxicity is a quick death. To go deeper you need to add helium and actually reduce the amount of oxygen in the gas.

<comment><USER10> To expand further, oxygen is toxic at 1.6ATA. For those unfamiliar, pressure doubles every 10m (33ft). So if I tried to breath 100% oxygen at 33ft (aka 2.0ATA), I'd die pretty quickly. At 66ft, that caps you at about 40% oxygen. At 99ft, you essentially can't breath any higher oxygen concentration than natural air.

As such, nitrox's purpose isn't to increase depth. It's actually used to increase bottom time (at a loss of max depth) without needing decompression. You get this increased bottom time due to lower amounts of nitrogen.

I've logged hundreds of nitrox dives from 28% - 60% oxygen levels, but never bit the bullet and gotten into more advanced air mixtures like Trimix. Trimix and other specialty blends are hard to get air fills for at the places I most commonly dive, so I keep pushing it off.

<comment><USER11> > For those unfamiliar, pressure doubles every 10m (33ft).

Does it? Or does it increase by one atmosphere every 10m?

<comment><USER12> Increase by one atmosphere. If it doubled then at the bottom of the Marianas Trench it'd be 10^330 atmospheres, or approximately 10^318 times greater than the pressure at the center of the Sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The decompression accident alluded to in the piece was the Byford Dolphin diving bell accident. The wikipedia description [1] contains this rather graphic paragraph:

> [...] Hellevik, being exposed to the highest pressure gradient and in the > process of moving to secure the inner door, was forced through the 60 > centimetres (24 in) diameter opening created by the jammed interior trunk > door by escaping air and violently dismembered, including bisection of his > thoracoabdominal cavity, which further resulted in expulsion of all of the > internal organs of his chest and abdomen, except the trachea and a section > of small intestine, and of the thoracic spine. These were projected some > distance, one section later being found 10 metres (30 ft) vertically above > the exterior pressure door.

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

<comment><USER14> That accident involved a pressure difference of 8 atmospheres. For comparison, when a plane explosively decompresses, the pressure difference is much less than 1 atmosphere, and that is enough to cause some pretty severe damage, so you can imagine just how much more violent an 8atm decompression is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know so many guys who planned to do this for 2-3 years to make some money and 20+ years later they're still doing it, they (or their wives) spend the money faster than they make it, and their bones are getting brittle from the nitrogen...

(Former professional diver but I never did North Sea etc)

<comment><USER16> The unfortunate truth for some people is unless they are very careful, spending money behaves like a gas and expands to take all available volume.

<comment><USER17> Sure what is money for but to be spent

<comment><USER18> The other main thing is saving to be spent later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sat diving in oil and gas is primarily conducted off a "DSV" aka diving support vessel. Usually SAT spread ia required for subsea work below 40m to 130m. While it is theoretically possible for deeper sat dives, the burn rate of oxygen at deeper depths is quite high which results in big increase in diving crew to 1 manhour of job. Most diving crews also hhave a DMT or diving medical tech. Kinda like diving ER. Mostly this stuff is safe but sometimes divers get disoriented or make mistakes which results in hazards.

</comment><comment><USER20> I got into diving a couple of years ago, and managed to combine the two passions - there's an Open Source diving computer[1], and it's fascinating to read through the source[2].

I was surprised on looking into it more that we're really just winging it algorithmically + safety margins, based on research done in the 60s. The empirical research basically consisted of the Navy et al. throwing people in at depth, and seeing what got them "bent".

Everybody's physiology is different though, and there are a large number of factors over-and-above that which affect whether you'll suffer Decompress Sickness (DCS).

Whilst there have been some iterations on Bühlmann[3] such as VPM-B[4] (which is based on bubble diameter vs. tissue compartment loading), the field is still lacking IMHO.

Not really through any fault of their own, it's just very difficult/expensive to peer into the body whilst they're down there to see what's going on, and it seems we'd need a large sample size due to individual physiology playing a part. Still, the algos seem to work... most of the time. Just don't drink too much alcohol, sleep well, hydrate. And do your stops! :)

Interestingly, saturation divers / Navy generally don't use a computer as the divemaster singularly plans the dives for the group with massive safety margins. As they're already saturated, they're generally not doing stops "outside" in the wet anyway. If they do have a computer, it will even have the tables/algos removed from it.

[1] [https://heinrichsweikamp.com/](https://heinrichsweikamp.com/)

[2] [https://bitbucket.org/heinrichsweikamp/ostc4/wiki/Home](https://bitbucket.org/heinrichsweikamp/ostc4/wiki/Home)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BChlmann_decompression_al...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BChlmann_decompression_algorithm)

[4] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dive_computer#Algorithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dive_computer#Algorithms)

Edit: Formatting

<comment><USER21> That dice computer looks great. Do you own one? Do like it?

<comment><USER20> I have both the OSTC4 and OSTC3 Plus. The screens are extremely visible underwater, with the OSTC4 having a better resolution and much larger screen (equivalent brightness). There are quite a few YouTube videos of other computers to compare - these stood out. As far as computers go, they have all the features needed (even up to tech). I find having a nice piece of technology on my wrist provides some intangible comfort, especially on Blackwater dives :) The screen is so vivid I even managed to spot a battery warning (forgot to charge it) on my buddies computer from distance!

<comment><USER21> Thanks. I have just started scuba diving and am looking at getting the ultra budget Cressi Leonardo Dive Computer. Is getting that a bad idea given I am just a newbie?

<comment><USER22> Buying a "starter" dive computer makes a lot of sense as many divers quit after a year or two. As your skills and interests progress, you can aways upgrade to a better one.

It's been a while since I bought my last dive computer, but looking at the spec for the Leonardo, it looks okay. Personally I'd prefer one that includes a stop timer, but that's not a show stopper. The ability to download your dives to a PC is a good one to have. Have a chat with your instructors and see what they use and why. Enjoy your diving and keep blowing them bubbles!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are they unusually well-compensated for this sort of construction work?

<comment><USER24> It may not be politically correct to say, but there ARE differences between men and women. One of them is that, generally speaking, men are more willing to take higher risks for money and recognition.

<comment><USER25> Saying this is politically correct. The contentious issue is the question of why this is so. Is it because society shapes us in such a way that men are more inclined to take risks for money and recognition. This would imply things can change and women can be excellent saturation divers. Or is it because our genes shape us in this way, making it impossible for women to excel at diving.

<comment><USER26> What about the society makes a compelling reason for either men or women to take high or low risks?

<comment><USER25> Role models for example. Movie heroes, book or video game protagonists are predominantly male. That shapes perception and expectations of desired and acceptable behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A few years ago I did a "hard hat" diving experience that gives a teeny, tiny view into what these divers experience, and wow did it increase my respect for them.

It also included being compressed in the "pot" down to 50m and getting narked to hell. Any UK bods fancy trying the experience lookup "York Diver Training".

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice read about the life of aquanauts. Strange that there isn't a modern action/drama movie about them.

<comment><USER28> I thought the same thing. This topic would make for an entertaining movie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> All that for less than $60/hr.

<comment><USER30> $1400/24 is not a very fair comparison. Just to start, I bet these guys have to sleep significantly more than 8 hours per day, and that's no different from any other job involving strenuous labor. Also, living in a cramped pod does sound like a drag, but if you're lying in bed with Facebook and Netflix I think it counts as downtime.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> As much as I appreciate this type of content/story, its really starting to get old to read multi-paragraph descriptions with the very occasional drawing trying to tell me what the chamber looks like, when in 30 seconds of text-on- video with cuts and arrows they could have given me twice the info and left me with a much clearer understanding.

<comment><USER32> Contrary opinion; I hate video and greatly appreciate the use of text and picture. It loads faster, I can skim easier, I can offline consume it, and I can consume it without headphones.</comment></comment>


A Short Story About Verbosity - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/65.html <comment><USER2> I don't know who the publisher was, but it doesn't sound like O'Reilly. When I worked for them (in the 2000s) our mantra was that the right size for a book is however long it has to be to say what has to be said. There's a minimum length of around 120-150 pages, below which it's hard to have a visible cover on the spine, but there's no inherent benefit to 600 page books versus 250. With ebooks, of course, there's no such thing as a minimum size: it's whatever there's a market for.

</comment><comment><USER3> In my experience, the technical books to avoid are the really fat ones with more than four authors. There is usually little coordination between authors, meaning inconsistencies, holes, repetition abounds.

<comment><USER4> At least one of the publishers thoughtfully sticks (or at least used to) the pictures of all the authors on the front cover. Finding people that have both the time and knowledge to write about a particularly in-demand technology is difficult, I had a publisher I particularly respect approach me to write about SQL Server + XML years ago and I just didn't have the time ... of course if someone asks you for "just a chapter or two" and you think you have something interesting to add (note it was never about the money, at an hourly rate it truly sucked) you might feel like contributing to a "cut & shut" as I like to think of them. Of course if you take that approach you need a really good editing team/overview which doesn't always happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My best guess about the "600 pages" rule is that such a length gives the book a nice, thick spine, and a nice, thick spine is a great place to plant a catchy title in enormous lettering. That probably helped when selling the book on shelves. Furthermore, length could be used as a proxy for comprehensiveness, which helped when selling the book through B2B channels, like corporations, academia, etc. (Oftentimes, such buyers were more likely to complain about what a book _didn't_ contain than what it did, hence, the drive toward kitchen-sinkism).

All of which was great for sales back in the day, but not so great for the quality of the books.

</comment><comment><USER6> The book Don't Make Me Think states that it is meant to be easily readable during one intercontinental flight. I think that is a good length for an introductory book.

I have read a introductory books about programming languages. Usually, all I really need is a good introduction into the syntax and a pointers to the strenghts and peculiarities of a language. All the rest I will have to figure out while programming anyways. Sadly though, this means that I will typically only read about half the book.

</comment><comment><USER7> With the rise in popularity of ebooks, "number of pages" hopefully will come to matter less, as you'll care more about "quality of content" than "does this paper book feel thick and hefty and worth the $40+ price".

<comment><USER8> Not sure where most people stand on this, but if I buy a technical reference book, there is no way I want it to have only as a ebook format. If possible, I'd want to have both print and digital version. Unless you have multiple screens, it becomes very tedious to read the ebook and type your own code at the same time. Of course, an e-reader would help, but it's still nowhere as practical when you just want to "browse" in the contents of the book. Books are big, take space, are heavy to carry, but they have several functions that ebooks cannot replicate easily.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Technical books are overpriced?

The print edition of our book — Third-party JavaScript — sells for $45 (during a promotion it can frequently be had for much less). Besides teaching you how to properly write third-party scripts, it guides you through some pretty nasty browser quirks and bugs – issues you might not have known even existed.

If you were to encounter and debug these issues on your own, it could easily cost your firm hundreds – possibly even thousands – of dollars. At which point $45 (and the time to read the book) begins to look like a sound investment.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the perspective of an organization, technical books are cheap.

From the perspective of an autodidact, technical books are expensive.

From the perspective of a student buying "textbooks", technical books are expensive as hell.

Considering the existence of internet, google, stackoverflow and technical blogs, technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point and are borderline useless.

<comment><USER10> > technical books are silly expensive, take too long to get to the point and > are borderline useless.

Hey, don't tar the whole field with the sins of 99.9% of the elements. Some technical books (those by W. Richard Stevens, K&R, Knuth, and a few others) are wonderful resources.

<comment><USER11> I mean no disrespect to Knuth, but he seems an odd choice to include in this list. Are you saying his books are exemplars of cheap, fast, or practical?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> At the very same time very small technical books aren't good either.

I mean to say small books with only facts in them, really don't help at all. They may serve well as a reference once you know everything about the subject not in general.

A good technical book is something that gives out some facts and then make you think about it. Shows you the possibilities of what can be done with the facts presented, how you can use them, and show you the far implications of the facts.

Its quite a rarity to read books like OnLisp, K&R C, Higher order Perl, The joy of clojure etc.

</comment><comment><USER13> With e-books this shouldn't be an issue, as you can sell smaller units of product -- for example, just a chapter -- without incurring the cost of shipping, carrying excess inventory, etc. It seems the main players in the e-book market (Apple and Amazon) are sticking to a fairly conventional model but I think the industry is still open to disruption.

</comment><comment><USER14> I dunno. I have written a couple tech book chapters in my life and tech edited a lot more books. I suspect it's not (always) the fluff much rather the fact that explaining stuff in a way that it deserves printing takes a helluva lot more than just throwing up a blogpost.

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminds me of a quote by our friendly neighbourhood enigma, why the lucky stiff: "Attempt to search on Amazon for anything that's a beginners' text of, oh, let's say the 80-page range". As far as the Little Coder's Predicament goes, there's no doubt in my mind that we ought to focus on books that are as concise, fun, and immediately useful as possible. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who _already_ program are not concerned with the Little Coders and their plight, and thus 600-page tomes abound.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reminded me of the quote from Blaise Pascal [1]

"..I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter."

[1] <http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=177502>

</comment><comment><USER17> Well, not for long. You can find many books here. The site is slow as molasses, but the selection is very good.

<http://en.bookfi.org/>

<comment><USER18> I'm on a 3G connection currently (in southern England), and the site loads and searches instantly. Nice find, thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "I don't mean in the vague sense of sitting in a coffeeshop with my laptop and pretending to be a writer."

Yes, that definitely was not vague.</comment>


Dine's AI System Had a Major Freak Out. All Pictures Were Changed to Animals - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dinewithco/sorry-dine-s-ai-system-had-a-major-freak-out-all-pictures-were-changed-to-cute-animals-8df2fa0b0570#.2ttfjaoup <comment><AUTHOR> It's funny content!</comment>


Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00660-x <comment><USER2> I upvoted this just because of the nature.com link - but after I actually read it, I am disapointed. Summary:

Q: Why does the coronavirus spread so easily between people?

A: We don't know yet

The results presented not verified by experiments yet.

"But some researchers are cautious about overstating the role of the activation site in helping the coronavirus to spread more easily. "We don't know if this is going to be a big deal or not," says Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin"

<comment><USER3> It's really not hard to grasp why it would spread quickly. This virus harbors in the respiratory system of an infected patient. The viral infection invades cells and releases more of the virus.

This is so contagious because:

1\. Everyone breaths in nearly 8000 liters of air each day

2\. Virus are so small that they stay suspended in air for a while, some estimates are 30min (think how smoke stays afloat)

3\. We have no innate immunity to this novel virus

<comment><USER4> Article lists multiple leading experts working round the clock on this, all saying they're not sure why the virus is so contagious.

But some random person of uncertain credentials says "It's really not hard to grasp why it would spread quickly".

If you have some kind of expert credentials with serious evidence, then it would be great to hear it. Otherwise your opinions are just unhelpful, potentially dangerous noise - and the internet has no shortage of those already.

<comment><USER3> These experts are looking for the biochemical proof of why it's so contagious.

That's not needed to make judgements on why this virus could be spread easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I encourage everyone who wants to stay up to date to follow the daily video updates from Dr John Campbell. He's a (semi) retired academic doctor who specialises in respiratory diseases.

He looks at it from a scientific and pragmatic point of view, without typical media hyperbole. He'll often get info from doctors on the ground. He's been posting videos on COVID-19 since January.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/Campbellteaching/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/Campbellteaching/videos)

<comment><USER6> Another thread describes him as a retired nurse. Any pointers to his CV?

<comment><USER5> Both are true. He's a nurse with a doctorate. He actually address this in this video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAwYFEcvvOc&t=170](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAwYFEcvvOc&t=170)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Question for a virologist, but does it actually spread so easily between people? The article asks a loaded question, but is it "justifiably loaded"?

Given the background prevalence of influenza it might be hard to compare, but does it actually spread more easily than influenza does? Is that a conclusion we can already take? For sure it seems to be spreading faster than SARS did, but I don't know if SARS was considered "easy" in this regard either.

<comment><USER8> Are there any examples of Flu or anything else infecting a cruise ship in a short time period? That was the thing that stood out the most to me.

<comment><USER9> Norovirus (aka food poisoning) can spread incredibly quickly and is the usual example of "fast moving virus in isolated population".

e.g. [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/norovirus-outbreak-hits- royal-c...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/norovirus-outbreak-hits-royal- caribbean-cruise-ship-277-people-sick-passengers-crew/)

<comment><USER10> Norovirus is the bane of my existence as a parent of 3 small children. One kid throwing up? Great. Expect everyone in the family to have it within three or four days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most droplet born viruses are very contagious (e.g. efficiently infect a target). It wouldnt surprise me if the covid-19 virus is so contagious because symptoms are slow to develop.

SARS was effectively stopped because fever developed quickly so it could be easily detected.

Rubeola, pertussis, and TB are all incredibly infectious (R0 > 10) because they are truly airborne. They essentially can survive and still be very infectious in a desiccated form that can float in the air for a long time.

Molecularly you can look at the ID 50 (infectious dose) required to start an infection.

Epidemiologically speaking there can be broader causes like temperature stability, length of illness, severity of illness, amount of virus production, induction of coughing, etc etc.

My bet is on non molecular epidemiological reasons

<comment><USER12> The endlessly bad/conflicting advice

\- dont wear masks, save them for the actual sick. For a disease most people dont know they have and incubates for days seems like the advice should be "wear a mask if you have a cough".

\- dont cough on your clothing, cough into tissues, toss them and wash your hands. This seems almost impossible given most people seem to cough multiple times a minute. Why not teach them to contain the spray. Eg Best: Dont go out. Next best: wear a mask. As a last restort, cough into your shirt (as in pull the collar up over your mouth an cough down inside the shirt so the spray is contained inside it).

<comment><USER13> Masks are currently in short supply. At this point it's more important for medical personnel to have access to masks, than it is for individuals. Because if the hospitals get overwhelmed, we're all screwed — this being a classic tragedy of the commons.

Also it's pretty hard to wear a mask correctly. I've seen plenty of people wearing surgical masks with their nose out. If you aren't going to wear that mask correctly, then what's the freaking point?

And even if you can train yourself to wear a mask correctly, to properly dispose of it, etc, the price of masks, even surgical ones, has gone through the roof and even if you can afford to wear a new one each day or two, the supply of masks isn't reliable.

So I'm afraid that at this point, even if you have a cough, the best you can do is to isolate yourself, because masks are in short supply and expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Impressive, a gene analysis shows that SARS-Cov2 is the first known SARS virus that has genes for docking at furin activation sites. And furin sites are not only in the lungs, but also in the liver and small intestines. This may explain why there are actual cases with liver failures.

</comment><comment><USER15> It can likely survive up to 9 days on fomites (surfaces and objects), or longer with low temperatures and high humidity.

[https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200211/Coronavirus- can-l...](https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200211/Coronavirus-can-live-on- common-surfaces-for-nine-days-how-to-kill-it.aspx)

which references:

[https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/situati...](https://www.who.int/docs/default- source/coronaviruse/situation- reports/20200211-sitrep-22-ncov.pdf?sfvrsn=fb6d49b1_2)

[https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-670...](https://www.journalofhospitalinfection.com/article/S0195-6701\(20\)30046-3/fulltext)

</comment><comment><USER16> > Their experiments have shown that the spike protein binds to a receptor on > human cells — known as angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) — at least ten > times more tightly than does the spike protein in the SARS virus. Veesler's > team has also found this, which suggests that the receptor is another > potential target for vaccines or therapies. For example, a drug that blocks > the receptor might make it harder for coronavirus to enter cells.

First, let me say that although the government doesn't formally recognize me as a doctor, I watch a lot of medical stuff on TikTok so I'm basically getting my MD 7 seconds at a time.

That aside, this seems dubious to me; if anything it's likely better to take ACE inhibitors now so that your body makes more ACE2 receptors before you get the virus. One of the ways the virus kills people is by detroying their ACE2 receptors, which your lung cells need in order to function. Downregulating them is unlikely to prevent the virus from getting into your cells, rather it will just leave your cells with less healthy ones left over after the virus destroys the ones it uses to enter your cells.

As evidence from this epidemic, smoking cigarettes upregulates your ACE2 receptors, and smokers are less likely to get serious illness from COVID-19. Of course if they do get seriously ill then they're more likely to die, but this is probably just because of the lung damage caused by smoking. At the very least it seems irresponsible to put out a statement like this without saying that all the available evidence currently points the opposite way, as does the evidence from the SARS epidemic.

<comment><USER17> > and smokers are less likely to get serious illness from COVID-19.

Source? Genuinely interested

<comment><USER16> [https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fdb2g6/new_study_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fdb2g6/new_study_reports_only_578_patients_were_smokers/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fbodxp/study_finds...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fbodxp/study_finds_unexpected_age_distribution_and_rates/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f8wldm/unlike_appa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f8wldm/unlike_apparently_sars_and_ncov2019_smoking_is_a/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/ff06im/bulk_and_si...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/ff06im/bulk_and_singlecell_transcriptomics_identify/)

<comment><USER18> If a smoker does get it though, is it more severe?

> Consistent with earlier results, the few smokers who do get diagnosed sem to > be more likely to progress to severe illness (3/5 vs ~1/5 expected). > [https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fdb2g6/new_study_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fdb2g6/new_study_reports_only_578_patients_were_smokers/)

<comment><USER16> Yes, that's also what I said in my original comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Where can one obtain raw (anonymized) data on individual cases? Age, sex, location, infection date, severity, outcome, resolution date? Preferably machine readable?

Edit: thanks for the links, guys!

<comment><USER20> That's still PII; you need to aggregate to actually anonymize.

<comment><USER19> Ok. The question still stands?

<comment><USER21> it probably is not available to random folks on Hacker News. I doubt this sort of information is being widely disseminated, with centralized collection, due to the rapidly evolving nature of the epidemic, and, as mentioned, the PII issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not a medical person, so I thought I'd pass this along ... information from a major King Country hospital, _citing the CDC_ (and an eye-opener for me ... see site for more helpful details).

"1 person out of 200 people who are exposed to a COVID-19 positive individual, will become COVID-19 positive (0.5% transmission rate in the general public)"

[https://www.evergreenhealth.com/coronavirus](https://www.evergreenhealth.com/coronavirus)

</comment><comment><USER23> Very encouraging to see such deep analysis available to the general public.

As a layperson, I feel I know very little about how SARS-CoV-2 spreads from person to person, especially given that asymptomatic persons are communicable.

<comment><USER24> Just FYI, this is not "deep analysis".

If you really want to understand what's going on with CV19 you can try reading the pre-print papers posted at www.reddit.com/r/COVID19 which is a heavily moderated science-focused sub. The analyses posted by users down thread often contain links to even more recent source data.

I've learned an enormous amount there (and also how inaccurate media headlines can be in a complex, rapidly-evolving situation like this).

<comment><USER19> Linked: [https://reddit.com/r/COVID19](https://reddit.com/r/COVID19)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There doesn't seem to be statistics about how an enthicity affects the virus spread and severity.

From reported cases it looks like certain communities are more endangered than others.

<comment><USER26> > From reported cases it looks like certain communities are more endangered > than others.

Italians?

I mean, this particular conspiracy theory never seemed at all plausible, but it seems particularly non-plausible _now_.

<comment><USER25> Italians have custom to kiss when greeting people, that can increase the spread.

<comment><USER27> As far as I know Italy also has a hospital culture that is extremely open, e.g. it is common for patients (non-ICU I guess) to get home-cooked meals brought by friends and family instead of having a hospital meal. That means that if there is community spread, the very weakest of the elderly, those already hospitalized, will be more exposed than in countries where hospital visits are less common. An extremely cynical view would be that this increases deaths early on but frees up valuable beds for the peak of the wave. (It's painful to just write this)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Because it's both CONTAGIOUS and highly INFECTIOUS.</comment>


Graph Data Structure Interview Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.techiedelight.com/graphs-interview-questions/ <comment><USER2> While this is really interesting and I'll probably read through all of them just to brush up on my graph knowledge... but "Interview Questions"?

Does anyone really ask you to write this kind of code in interviews? They feel more like Computer Science homework questions.

<comment> wh-uws Yeah honestly anything after number 6 (bfs and dfs to be more specific) you would not be asked or really even have time for in an interview.

Unless of course you are interviewing for a graph heavy job.

Very interesting stuff though. Love graph algorithms have coded many myself in JavaScript to prep for interviews.

edit source:

my algorithms code base test suite

[https://travis-ci.org/williscool/code_gym/jobs/129218676](https://travis- ci.org/williscool/code_gym/jobs/129218676)

<comment><USER3> > Love graph algorithms have coded many myself in JavaScript to prep for > interviews.

...but have you coded any in JavaScript _after_ the interview as part of the job? I suspect for most people the answer is no. It has always seemed strange to me to ask a topic that you're never going to encounter during your day to day work (yes, I know for some roles this isn't true).

<comment><USER4> I think there's a general consensus that mastering the specific material you would encounter in an undergraduate CS program proves you have the more general cognitive skills necessary to succeed in any entry-level programming job.

We just don't trust the university to say that you've done the projects and sat the exams and demonstrated competence (what it's doing when it issues a degree), so each company unwraps that abstraction and runs its own projects and exams on the same material. But it is fundamentally based on college curricula.

Trusting universities is likely out of the question. Eventually, I expect the industry will create something like the Bar Exam so each candidate can pass a _trusted_ test _once_ upon graduation (or even without going to college), rather than creating the burden for each company to do all that grading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A candidate's performance on these questions is probably not indicative of his or her performance at your iPhone fart app company.

</comment><comment><USER6> just in July of 2016, an unnamed hedge-fund was hiring architect/programmers. After a brief review of my resume (I have been in sr management and sr architecture roles for 17 of 25 years, but also code at home) -- was asked to take an online coding test.

The coding test was 2 hours through a interview/code website (forgot the name). They monitored your keystrokes and report to the interviewer when open tabs on web-browser outside of their window. (I can dig and recall what that website was if others are interested).

The coding problem was basically masqueraded Union Find graph problem. I knew that after about 2 minutes of 'browsing' (as I can translate a functional ask into an existing pattern that's already solved).

[http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/union-find/](http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/union- find/)

Still went ahead trying to implement this by hand.. and failed. So did not get a job.

<comment><USER7> Almost certainly TwoSigma.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> On related topic (not necessarily graph):

DFS Interview Questions - [http://www.techiedelight.com/dfs-interview- questions/](http://www.techiedelight.com/dfs-interview-questions/)

BFS Interview Questions - [http://www.techiedelight.com/bfs-interview- questions/](http://www.techiedelight.com/bfs-interview-questions/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Um, the graph doesn't match the given list of vertices and edges. At all. In the very first paragraph.

Added later: they fixed it. Quietly.

<comment><USER9> Unless I missed something, it matches if you don't treat it as a directed graph. Edge (1,6) accounts for both (1,6) and (6,1) in that case.

<comment><USER10> You didn't miss anything. This is why these are good interview questions, because it weeds out the people who are asleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The problem with these "interview questions" is that knowing a algorithms inside out is not how you solve problems it is how yiu solve A SPECIFIC problem. The problemsolving skill comes from the reductions one can make and thus apply different algorithms in order to solve a new problem.

</comment><comment><USER12> Much more applicable than knowing how to implement these techniques, would be knowledge of "how to solve given realworld problems with these concepts". It is likely a developer would have access to optimized libraries implementing these, and would need to know when they apply.

</comment><comment><USER13> The only questions an interviewer can ask is how to build a graph and do graph operation(to test data structure skill). Graph Theory is too specific and many programmers never use any graph algorithms in their life.

You can always ask these questions to reject a candidate because you don't like his body odor.</comment>


Driving Inside the Soviets' Secret Submarine Lair - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/04/driving-inside-the-soviets-secret-submarine-lair/ <comment><USER3> " _[...]the humidity in the room, which had to be critically maintained at 60 percent — deviation either way could have resulted in an explosion large enough to destroy the entire base, not to mention the mountain that housed it and much of the surrounding area._ "

I'm going to assume that anything large enough to destroy the surrounding mountain would require at least one of the missiles/warheads to go (thermo-)nuclear. But my understanding is that actually achieving the Big Bang is really rather difficult to do intentionally, let alone by accident - <USER2> worst you have a few kton fizzle. So how is a small change in humidity able to trigger one or more of these weapons? (And, if one did successfully trigger, is it possible that it could daisy-chain the rest, or would they be torn apart before achieving supercritical geometry?)

Then again, I guess it's maybe possible that the supplies of conventional munitions and maybe nasty missile/rocket propellants could do some major damage, but a whole mountain?

<comment><USER4> That part struck me as embellished writing (or perhaps the tour guide exaggerated that point). I hardly know a thing about the sensitivity of explosive weapons, but consider the importance the Soviets placed on secrecy. If there was such a danger, I can't imagine them working so hard to construct the place in near-total obscurity, and subsequently relegating the safety of up to six submarines and up to 3000 people to the accuracy of a single hair.

Although, having looked it up now, hair-tension hygrometers could be a bit more accurate than what I initially guessed, though there are more accurate alternatives.

<comment><USER5> I agree the writing was probably embellished but the challenge of low humidity is static charge. I suspect the threat was more that a static discharge would _disable_ the weapon (it wouldn't actually work) rather than to cause it to spontaneously explode. ESD damage is a scourge in all weapon plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Kind of meta, but what an absolutely horrible "slideshow".

<comment><USER7> Yes, it reloads the whole page _and_ the dozen or so social widgets all while constantly moving the slideshow image further down the screen. I need to install one of those widget blocker addons again...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Odd that they'd have put this in the Black Sea, where the only salt-water egress is via the Bosporus & Dardanelles, i.e. through the narrow waters of a NATO member.

<comment><USER9> It's not odd because it worked the other way around - USSR sent ships onto the Black Sea to protect themselves from the ones approaching through Bosphor. Defence.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_t...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_the_Regime_of_the_Turkish_Straits)

<comment><USER10> Under the treaty, they could send submarines through the straits but they had to notify Turkey:

 _Under Article 12, Black Sea states are also allowed to send submarines through the Straits, with prior notice, as long as the vessels have been constructed, purchased or sent for repair outside the Black Sea. The less restrictive rules applicable to Black Sea states were agreed as, effectively, a concession to the Soviet Union, the only Black Sea state other than Turkey with any significant number of capital ships or submarines.[8][14] The passage of civil aircraft between the Mediterranean and Black Seas is permitted, but only along routes authorised by the Turkish government.[15]_

When I sailed through the Bosphorous, we had a tour guide who told us that once a Soviet sub was spotted outside of the black sea and later spotted inside but notice had never been given and the sub had never been seen going through. They later figured out that the sub had made the journey by shadowing underneath a large civilian ship to prevent from being spotted (by sonar I suppose). After that, they decided to run chains across the straight underneath the depth of a normal ship.

I'm not sure how true it is, but it makes a good story. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Entertaining article. Now I want to buy a Land Rover so I can have the same kinds of adventures exploring old submarine bases!

<comment><USER12> Last year I finished driving from Alaska to Argentina in a Jeep...

If you are seriously interested in this kind of Overland travel, checkout <http://wikioverland.org> The Encyclopedia of Overland Travel which contains pretty much everything you need to know.

<comment><USER13> What did you do for the Darién Gap? :)

<comment><USER12> I loaded my Jeep into a shipping container and had it shipped from Colon (Panama) to Cartagena (Colombia). I flew.

I documented the whole process in great detail so others can do the same: [http://theroadchoseme.com/shipping-across-the-darien-gap- pt-...](http://theroadchoseme.com/shipping-across-the-darien-gap-pt-1)

<comment><USER14> How do you afford this?

<comment><USER12> I saved every penny I had for 2 years working as a Software Engineer. During the trip I freelanced a little, managed a hostel for 5 months, and wound up with the balance on my credit card.

I've just finished paying off my Credit Card, so have started saving for the next one. I work full time and am just about to start my 2nd and 3rd concurrent jobs.

The whole price breakdown can be seen at <http://theroadchoseme.com/the-price- of-adventure>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The woman guide claims that she worked there at "level 2 security" (2nd to highest) in 1982. That would make her roughly 48 to 52 today. She doesn't look that age. She looks younger (lack of wrinkles and she isn't doing botox we can assume). But more importantly who would give somebody that young (about 18 to 22) that type of security clearance?

<comment><USER16> Why can we assume she hasn't had botox injections?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Actually, the visa regime in Ukraine is pretty soft now. Most people can stay up to 3 months without a visa.

And there are guided tours for the Balaklava Submarine base.

I was in town just last summer, didn't get to go to the base though.

</comment><comment><USER18> Didn't realise that shot of the sub was a model until watching the video. How dishappointing.</comment>


Facebook's CTO says the next big social disruption will come to news - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2011/02/11/facebook-cto-bret-taylor-on-problems-mistakes-and-the-next-big-thing/ <comment><USER2> thanks for sharing but this is the source of our article: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2205250>. I'd imagine most on here would rather be directed to that:</comment>


How a Nuclear Bomb Could Save Earth From an Asteroid - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/14857-asteroid-nuclear-bomb-explosion-video.html

<comment><USER2> I saw this movie like 10 years ago...</comment>


Use your favorite programming language to provision Infrastructure as Code - <AUTHOR> https://opensource.com/article/20/8/infrastructure-as-code-pulumi <comment><USER2> How many extra tools and runtimes will this require your CI/CD system to have? I'm not sure the complexity is worth it.

iirc, it's just using Terraform behind the scenes anyway. If that is the case, is Pulumi just a glorified transpiler?

<comment><USER3> The defining characteristic about Pulumi compared to other tools is that it's _not_ a transpiler, in fact. It's a multi-language runtime written in Go that can host many language plugins (Node.js, Python, .NET, Go, etc), as well as many resource provider plugins (native ones, OpenAPI-based, Terraform-based). So although yes it can use Terraform providers -- great for coverage across many infrastructure providers as well as easy portability if you're coming from Terraform/HCL -- it's not correct to say that it's "just using Terraform" or is a "transpiler".

Pulumi is open source on GitHub if you want to check it out: [https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi](https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi).

<comment><USER2> So they are implementing their own N language runtimes? That sounds like trouble waiting to happen. How do they have the man power to support N languages as a single company?

(edit)

Apparently they shell out to other language runtimes. So my original question about needing N runtimes available still applies. I'm not interested in supporting N runtimes for my IaC, TF seems good enough. Put Cuelang on top of that and you have a much better system. There are people already doing this.

As a Pulumi employee, what is your response to the N runtime problem and sharing of modules in an org?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Pulumi : CDK :: Terraform : CloudFormation, essentially</comment>


Hckr news: chronological interface to hn, plus chrome/safari5 extension - <AUTHOR> http://hckrnews.com/about.html <comment><AUTHOR> I realize there's been a few alternative ways to read Hacker News that have been posted in the last few weeks, and this is yet another. I started building this a couple months ago, because I wanted it, and finished it because I found it quite useful. I hope you find it as useful as I have.

</comment><comment><USER2> One thing that I have been itching for is an RSS feed of the top articles. Maybe there's already some way to get that which I haven't found?

<comment><AUTHOR> This was posted a few days ago, that probably does what you're looking for:

A cure for Hacker News overload <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1547998>

<comment><USER2> thanks! I totally missed that in my effort to reclaim some of my time.</comment></comment></comment>


The Speech That Facebook Plans to Punish - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/facebook-punish-censorship/577654/ <comment><USER2> Wow Facebook can't win huh. Lax moderation and one set of people complain about fake news and sensationalism, strict moderation and another set (I hope) complain about censorship. Not an enviable position.

</comment><comment> time-domain0 It's very hard for humans, much less algorithms, to _quickly_ distinguish marginalized speech of the legitimate, unpopular, thought-leading, high- integrity from conspiracy theorist, utopian, pipe-dream, violence-advocating, mystical nonsense _without a deep evaluation of a large sample of content, including understanding satire, snark and comedy._ Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, Phil Donahue come to mind as marginalized, reliable sources.

Maybe some obvious topics can be blacklisted if they're repeatedly, seriously mentioned like chemtrails, anti-fluoridation, anti-vaxx, zero-point energy, pizzagate and antisemitic conspiracy theories... and an appeal for those who get caught up in a comedy refrain.

<comment><USER3> How would you determine if a user is "seriously" mentioning any of those topics?</comment></comment>


How do programmers in the west see programmers in the east? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/50831/468

<comment><USER2> Having lots of friends who worked in big outsourcing firms in India, and worked myself at a offshore research center for a US company I definitely viewed programmers in the west as better programmers than we were. However, being the US for a couple of years now, I've realized it has a lot more to do with the majority composition of developers in India.

(Of course all of the points below are just what I've seen or felt, and do not apply to everybody.)

New developers working in big outsourcing firms in India:

\- Many college graduates who end up in these jobs, are only there because that is the best paying option they found. It is not something they want to do for a long period of time. It's not hard to see that there are not tons of people who are self-motivated to work on piece meal code that belongs to someone else.

\- Like in the US, most good developers want some control over the architecture of the code they work on, or want to work on something that they are excited about. This is usually not afforded by the environments in the outsourcing firms. It results in working just for completing the work, and not being very involved in the products.

\- Personally I don't think developers in the _east_ are happier just following instructions and not imaginative. Working on different projects every few weeks, without much control over the projects assigned leads many times leads to such behavior. Again, many developers are just looking to do an MBA, move into a project management position, move to the US, or just do something else.

\- My friends always talked about _those strange people_ who were content by starting jobs at outsourcing firms. Some of these people really liked development, and were able to handle the lack of control and investment in the result of their work. Others, were more focussed on the money, or external concerns such as loans, marriage etc. These are the people who sometimes are seen as the yes men - working hard, but not smart. However, it's just that their smarts are targeted elsewhere.

\- Developers working in outsourcing firms are the ones who come in contact with programmers in the US. The majority of that group, in my opinion, is not really looking to work long time in their position, not interested in development or move away into other areas if they are (or get) better. Only a small portion likes their work, and as mentioned - paid appropriately.

\- Thankfully, there is an ecosystem for good developers who want to start their own companies. Also larger companies such as Adobe, Faceboook, Google etc have more equal sharing of responsibility between their US and India centers.

In the _bay area_ most people who work in development roles, really like and want to be doing software development. On the whole, they have more say in the product, architecture and process of development, than developers working in outsourcing firms in India. Also, developers working in companies that value software engineering usually interact with a similar pool of people (which explains the surprise that most 'developers' can't solve FizzBuzz kind questions).

</comment><comment><USER3> The discussion on stackexchange focused more on whether programmers in the east, generally speaking, are of sufficient quality. Living in China and going to a local university learning chinese, I've feel that a lot of the symptoms described in the discussion are more of a result of education systems.

A lot of my Chinese friends have expressed the need to get a good job, thus there is pressure for them to be in a major that 'guarantees' that: computer science/engineering is seen as desirable in that light. Having attended one of the computer science classes, I've seen two striking things:

1) Only a small percent of the people in this major are have an actual interest in the topic. The rest hope to get some administrative job in a big company and that this degree will be their ticket in.

2) There is a mechanical sense to the way projects and assignments are done. The philosophy seems to be: if I follow the steps that the teacher gave then I am able to solve this problem. There isn't an emphasis on analysis or synthesis. I attribute this to the emphasis on rote learning.

These two things make it easier to see why the symptoms described in the discussion occur. In addition, I noticed that the level of education is quite behind my own college experience. They were learning things in their third- year first semester that I learned in my first-year second semester.

As a side note, I don't go to one of the top tier universities; I was told that my university is a second or third tier university, so I suspect that this is the reality for most Chinese computer science students.

<comment><USER4> Funny I noticed both (1) AND (2) to be prevalent at _all_ 2-4 "western" (German, British) unis I observed. And my suspicion was that (2) was a direct result of (1).

Obviously these issues won't exist in UK Cambridge, MIT, Stanford. Also not in Masters degrees at most unis. But I wouldn't call it a Chinese thing at all. Happens the world over based on my anecdotal evidence.

<comment><USER5> I think it's related to the idea that people are going to college for "training". I see the word 'training', implying blue collar vocational education, used a lot nowadays for supposedly university education. Someone will train you, meaning show you the reproducible steps for operating the machinery or replacing worn brakes. So a lot of people getting these degrees (regardless of country) are expecting to be shown what to do step by step, and that no design will be involved on their own part, given specifications they mechanically translate the specifications into working code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a developer for a US based software company, I have experienced some of the differences first hand. We recently tried to farm out a near impossible task to an Indian company. They, as most of these companies do, promised everything we asked, and built in some contractual loop holes to protect themselves. The code we received is crap. It doesnt really follow our architecture, and will probably take just as long to clean up as it would to rewrite.

That said, I think the problem is that managers think code just needs to be "typed up" to work. Developers are viewed as interchangeable cogs and not technical assets. I'm actually amazed the "port" came out as well as it did with the set of circumstances we presented the company. I work with 3 Indian expats who are all very competent developers, I would say among the best I have worked with. Its just the combination of distance, cultural difference, and lack of problem domain familiarity that causes outsourcing to fail, not bad developers.

</comment><comment><USER7> The First/Third World East/West split isn't as concrete or relevant as it used to be, perhaps best explained by Hans Rosling: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUwS1uAdUcI>

The first proper comment in TFA hits the nail on the head for India, and is relevant elsewhere. If you approach programmers in a non-Anglospheric country adopting the cultural and business manners and expectations of the Anglosphere then your project is doomed from the get go. This is doubly true for countries like India that technically are too big and diverse to form part of the Anglosphere but have a massive number of English speakers, often as a second language.

I don't perceive programmers from any nation in any particular way, because there are good programmers, there are crap programmers and there are culturally different programmers.

What I will say is that for programmers who have English as a second or third language or not at all it's much harder for them to work as most of the tutorials, books, online resources are written primarily in English for an English speaking populous. Even the languages themselves are written in English following English idioms. How would you feel about programming in a language that uses Mandarin or Hindi as a base language?

</comment><comment><USER5> That's an interesting discussion on stackexchange. Don't miss the matching question posted at the same time, "How do programmers in the east see programmers in the west?"

[http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/50884/how- do-...](http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/50884/how-do- programmers-in-the-east-see-programmers-in-the-west)

A lot of the remarks there by eastern programmers reflect on their own view of their fellow programmers in the east. The answers show a high level of awareness of the problems caused by the cultural expectations to follow orders and obey the structure and hierarchy.

</comment><comment><USER8> Part of it has to do with the fact that countries in the east have high brain drain problem. Those who are smarter end up in some college/univ. in the West. If you are in the US, look at the some of the best CS colleges and the number of foreign students studying CS - quite diverse and lots of students from East.

</comment><comment><USER9> The sane among us think that 99% of developers here in the States are mediocre at best. The EAST is no different. Does this answer the question?

<comment><USER10> Numbers can be deceiving. It might not seem like there'd be much difference between 99%, 99.9%, or 99.99%, but there most definitely is -- the same difference as between 1%, 0.1%, and 0.01%.

<comment><USER9> Of course, once you find yourself in the realm of decimal points someone will bring up margin of error :-)

<comment><USER10> And it's a fair point too. And I'm not meaning to claim that these particular numbers are actually relevant to the debate.

<comment><USER9> agreed

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've worked for a large US consulting company together with the deliverycenters in Manila and Bangalore. The main prominent characteristic of the eastern workstyle seems to me to be discipline.

I'm used from my western colleagues to a lot of discussions on "how"s and "why"s (which I think to be necessary, for the record) but which is absent in the coding practices of my eastern colleagues. They will usually follow a middle road which leads quickly to a usable result

</comment><comment><USER12> Through telescopes... <squint>

</comment><comment><USER13> One stark difference between programmers in the east and west is that in the east, people tend to stay in one company much longer. I think that effectively limit their development. Those who are in the west tend to be much more well rounded.

<comment><USER14> Do you have a citation for that? I worked for a pretty big American firm in Bangalore, and the execs were always complaining to us about attrition in India.

<comment><USER15> Same here in Vietnam, turn-over rate in the low-paying outsouring "factories" is sky-high. There's actually a real concern that a significant portion of the employees just don't come back after Têt (week long holiday for the Vietnamese new year.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Any discussion like this always conveniently forgets:

1\. Japanese programmers wrote a huge proportion of cutting edge video games in the 80s, 90s, and 00s.

2\. China (and Japan, and Korea, and India...) has a massive domestic consumer and b2b internet, written and scaled by domestic talent. It's much bigger than the US internet.

3\. You better believe Koreans and Japanese write a _WHOLE LOT_ of firmware. When was the last time your TV or BluRay player or Toyota ECU crashed? China is clearly playing catch up here - Chinese electronics crash all the time lol.

Of course then there's always the people who don't consider Japan to be "the east"... which always makes me laugh.

<comment><USER17> 3: Uh, crashed or were terrible? Former, not so often. Latter...

...

DOT DOT DOT

<comment><USER18> Your wording is odd but this is a great point.

Software is rubbish across the consumer space: TVs, DVDs, home routers. To interact with, it feels like somebody has scraped some functions together in assembly to meet a broad requirement, and then left it as soon as they could get away with it.

I expect the projects are hardware-driven. The movers and shakers care about the hardware, and design this first. Then some hardware-oriented guy get the short straw and is told "build a software layer on this technology to fill these checkboxes". The result is the unresponsive, buggy, hard-to-use rubbish that we get in our consumer devices.

I think companies would need to take a different approach to device design to get around this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> At first I interpreted this as east coast USA vs west coast USA... and in which case, that's an interesting comparison as well. It isn't nearly as interesting as the former but interesting nonetheless. And if that were the matter in question, I'm actually not sure what I'd think.</comment>


What's an efficient way to change my 200+ account passwords? - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/questions/739774/whats-an-efficient-way-to-change-my-200-account-passwords <comment><USER2> Gotta love it when people ask for magical solutions.

The only way to change the password on 200 accounts is to change the password on 200 accounts.</comment>


Bitcoin Is More Useful Than Fiat Currency in Zimbabwe - <AUTHOR> http://thedashtimes.com/2016/08/10/bitcoin-useful-fiat-currency-zimbabwe/ <comment><USER2> Yeah, but the Zimbabwean GDP is basically worth the sum of a metric ton of mustaches. You might as well be saying dirt is more useful.</comment>


AI Learns to Write Haikus - <AUTHOR> https://www.brianweet.com/2019/06/16/write-ai-gpt-2-haiku.html <comment><USER2> After the training is done, does the algorithm use a dictionary file to generate haikus, or is it allowed to use entire lines from the dataset? If the former, I'm impressed. If the latter, I'm just annoyed that this is being presented as something of any significance whatsoever.</comment>


The Moral Urgency of Mental Health - <AUTHOR> https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/mental-health-spending-pays-for-itself-by-michael-plant-and-peter-singer-2017-11 <comment><USER2> > Overall, the researchers claim, eliminating depression and anxiety would > reduce misery by 20%, whereas eliminating poverty would reduce it by just > 5%.

Why are these framed as independent factors? For many people the lack of financial stability is a primary source of depression and anxiety. When you truly don't know how your are going to afford next week's food/medication/rent, survival instinct kick in causing anxiety and huge mental burden that can make it difficult to focus on anything else.

One of the easier ways to fix a large amount of depression and anxiety _is_ financial stability.

> If your neighbor becomes richer, you feel poorer.

While, I completely support increased funding to mental health services for everyone, as someone trying to figure out how to pay for a new $100/month _insulin_ prescription with a laughably tiny disability check and a medicare "donut hole", this is pretty offensive. Feeling bad because you can't keep up with the consumerism rat race isn't "misery".

<comment><USER3> > Why are these framed as independent factors?

Because people have lived in poverty for thousands of years without debilitating depression and anxiety.

<comment><USER4> One can live in poverty without living in misery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > In the United Kingdom, it costs about £650 per patient to provide > psychotherapy, which is effective for about 50% of patients. That figure > indicates how much governments would need to spend, but does not take into > account what they might get back.

they don't appear to provide a source for this. The English NHS collects, and publishes, a lot of data for the IAPT (Improved access to psychological therapies programme). IAPT provides access to short forms of therapy such as cognitive behaviour therapy (which would normally be about 7 weeks).

[http://www.digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB30153](http://www.digital.nhs.uk/catalogue/PUB30153)

> In August 2017 there were:

> 113,541 new referrals

> 83,330 referrals entered treatment

> 47,100 referrals finished a course of treatment, of which:

> 88.5 per cent waited less than 6 weeks and 98.9 per cent waited less than 18 > weeks to enter treatment

> 43,922 started treatment at caseness, with 50.8 per cent moving to recovery

there's a large unweidly spreedsheet with results for each provider.

the latest figures are here: [http://content.digital.nhs.uk/iaptmonthly](http://content.digital.nhs.uk/iaptmonthly)

<comment><USER6> psychotherapy is less than 10% effective. In fact, its almost no science.

<comment><USER7> And when it goes wrong the practitioner will lie in your medical records to cover it up. When it goes even more wrong and the person is dead they'll just say "s(he) had serious issues". Having said that, I've seen it do wonders for some people.

<comment><USER8> It worked really well for me, but I probably wasn't as mentally ill as a lot of people who would seek psychotherapy. Either that or my therapist was just really good or we had a good working relationship.

Trying to act on how I feel continues to be the hardest thing I have ever had to do.

<comment><USER7> Not sure if you're religious it not, but let me phase it like that. God put you on Earth to be you and do it your way. In an evolutionary context, it's a random process where the value of an individual can only be determined in hindsight after you're gone. Hence you need to be you and leave judgement to the ages. If you're at all concerned about that, you're a long way from being cluster B or dark triad, so don't sweat it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This doesn't touch on a potentially even bigger barrier to adoption of better mental health care: that those who benefit from better mental health care often aren't the people paying for it, and that it is really really hard to measure the specific financial benefits of improving mental health in a way that will convince payers / employers / government to actually put real money on the line

</comment><comment><USER10> Mental Health for those in crisis is fucked. If you feel suicidal, you get locked up. It's as simple as that.

<comment><USER11> My own personal theory on this matter is that a lot of emotional state is feedback loops.

Have a positive environment where things tend to go well and everyone else likes you? Then you share in to that same environment (drink the Koolaid).

Have a mostly neutral or slightly negative environment? Then you end up circling the drain hoping to have an energy exchange that allows you escape velocity in to the above rather than...

Having a mostly negative environment; even if it's just a little. The slow crushing weight of reality and those around you chips away at every part of your being and self until there is nothing left but a broken and hateful individual. May become either a neutron star (hermit) or go supernova (usually leading to jail or death).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mental health needs to be a huge priority.

I have several teenager relatives all depressed. The constant social media and comparisons to the top 10% of people in beauty, intelligence, money, and etc are destroying them. Ive caught my teenage nephew and niece watching tons of plastic surgery qa on youtube.

We really need to get our primate impulses in check. Im hoping the research on brain implants will help overcome our ugly genetic history.

</comment><comment><USER13> I am hopeful that we will soon see AI-based psychotherapy available at scale at a price such that anyone who wants it will be able to get it. I can imagine that it would be more or less like having a telephone conversation with a real therapist, except in this case the therapist is an AI application running in a datacenter.

I think we will see something like this in the next five to ten years.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER9> It would be great if that were possible, but a lot of the value of therapy comes from the therapeutic relationship rather than a specific type of therapy. Most types of psychotherapy tend to have the same level of effect in studies, suggesting there is no "recipe" for the type of therapy that works. This phenomenon also suggests (but does not prove) that the human relationship, rather than therapeutic program, accounts for the measured improvement in outcomes

Not to say an AI tool wouldn't be helpful for some people, but it isn't clear it would be that useful. And i don't know of any evidence or plausible hypotheses that an AI tool could work for anything other than mild anxiety or depression

AI + human therapy could potentially be better than human therapy alone however

<comment><USER14> I thought Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was actually the only kind of talk therapy that showed greater effect than placebo.

<comment><USER9> Cognitive behavioral therapy is a more standardized and measurable type of therapy than things like interpersonal therapy or problem solving therapy or psychodynamic therapy, and thus it is easier to study in a controlled setting. So there are more studies of CBT than other types of therapy just because it is easier to study

I don't have references offhand but there are controlled studies that show benefit of other types of therapy

Overall all though, all psychotherapy studies are messy

<comment><USER14> That makes sense. If you want to go beyond self reporting, you have to use very long term measures like employment, incidence of suicide, etc. And of course it's very hard to guarantee that an individual pursued and sustained a specific type of therapy for a substantial amount of a long term study period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _Overall, the researchers claim, eliminating depression and anxiety would reduce misery by 20%, whereas eliminating poverty would reduce it by just 5%. If we want to reduce misery in the developed world, then mental health is the biggest challenge we need to overcome._

Everything I have ever seen suggests that the chronically poor have intractable personal issues, such as medical problems, mental health problems, learning disabilities or other personal issues. So this seems like a false dichotomy to me.

<comment><USER16> I would see it as less a false dichotomy than just recognizing that these issues are not always orthogonal.

<comment><USER15> I don't really understand that use of the word orthogonal.

But for clarity's sake: I have read about issues like poverty for decades. In any given year, about 10 to 15 percent of Americans are below the federal poverty level. But only about 2 percent of Americans are _chronically poor._ This is typically defined as below the federal poverty level for at least 5 years out of 10.

In fact, I have even seen stats that suggest that being in the bottom 20 percent in one year is actually a reasonable predictor for being in the top 20 percent the following year. Some people below the federal poverty level in a given year are temporarily unemployed and job hunting. In some cases, they are actually starting a new business. So, most folks don't stay below the poverty level.

The people who are chronically poor are the ones that have significant personal challenges. These personal challenges both make them miserable and are also a root cause of their poverty. If they can't resolve their personal issues in some manner, they remain poor.

I have not only studied such things, I have lived it. Misery is not just having X problem, but knowing that you may never be able to resolve it and that the world does a really sucky job of providing some means for people like you to have some kind of baseline level of comfort. It is a kind of personal hell.

<comment><USER8> > I don't really understand that use of the word orthogonal.

You can imagine a two-dimensional graph with the quantity "intractable personal issues" on one axis and "chronically poor" on the other. But when the level of chronic poorness varies, sometimes the level of intractable personal issues varies as well, leading to the motion of the quantity along both axes at the same time.

That is moving the measurement in one dimension sometimes results in its motion in the other dimension, so there is no way to move completely orthogonally(perpendicularly) to one axis. This is what is meant by "not completely orthogonal."

<comment><USER15> Thanks. One of the great mysteries of HN may have just been solved for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


TypWrittr – Inspirational, Minimalistic, Distraction-free Text editor - <AUTHOR> http://www.typwrittr.com

<comment><USER2> Distraction-free and minimalistic, with background photography? I mean... not even the text area has a solid background, as it blends with the photography! It's noisy as hell, quite the opposite of what you are selling.

I'm sorry for the criticism, and I do support the initiative, but please try to align your product with your conceptual premises. Validate it, empirically. You claim it to be distraction-free? Try to get some metrics and subjective reviews, test with users. Also, you _can_ stand on the shoulder of giants. There's literature about attention, even about typing.

<comment><AUTHOR> backgrounds do not distract, at least me, but they do help to dive deeply into story, you just have to find one. And in case you really want to have a blank white paper with black ink - just set it via preferences.

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, but the background (behind the text) is essentially noise. It will impact your reading which will, of course, impact typing.

And about the "at least me" argument... I'm all for personal inspiration and taste in personal projects, and applaud you for following what you like. But you're trying to provide distraction-free writing for _others_ , so you have to consider their characteristics, you have to consider what science knows about attention, reading and typing - not your taste.

I've noticed that you replied elsewhere that your typographic choice was also motivated by personal taste. Both noisy backgrounds and typography will deeply impact how your product performs in providing distraction-free writing. I think you can balance your personal _touch_ with improvements in the fundamental dimensions of your product.

<comment><AUTHOR> that is why there's a variety of customization options present - feel free to customize it as you wish. Also, there are two "blank" inspirational presets already build in, much inspired by blank black old terminals.

<comment><USER3> Why not stick to your tagline and make it blank/minimal by _default_ and allow people to add silly backgrounds like trees if they really want it?

<comment><AUTHOR> because there are tonns of 'minimal/blank' projects exists already, why create another one? )

<comment><USER3> Your own title says it's yet another "minimalistic" one. Maybe you should answer your own question then.

<comment><AUTHOR> if there's one word in common, it doesn't mean projects will all be the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To be honest I never really understood this need for minimalistic text editors. I can understand if all you know is MS Word, but when I need distraction free editing, I just launch Vim, open a file in my dropbox, and switch to full screen, done. No need for 10,000 projects like this (FocusWriter, WriteMonkey, WriteRoom, and whatever else).

(and as everyone else already mentioned, don't start by asking people their email).

<comment> andrey-p I found my favourite writing environment (IWE?) to be Vim + Goyo [1] + line- wrapping with j/k keys mapped to gj/gk [2]

[1]: [https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim](https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim)

[2]: [http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Move_cursor_by_display_lines_when_...](http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Move_cursor_by_display_lines_when_wrapping)

<comment><USER4> +1 for Goyo.

As a side note, I don't like line-wrapping too much, I prefer auto formatting (:set tw=80 and then type away, vim will handle the line breaks)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh sweets, needs sign-in.. _ctrl-w_

<comment><USER6> Agreed - nothing more annoying than a product that wants my credentials before I can even try it out, see a screenshot, or anything else that might make me want it. _le sigh_

<comment><AUTHOR> noted, will surely add some screenshots!

<comment><USER7> add an guest account, something we can experiment with? :)

it's sweet for chromebooks...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A fresh spin in online book writing. typWrittr is designed to be as minimalistic as possible, but features high customizability, cloud storage and "Inspirational presets". Feels like you've been teleported into story with your good old typewriter.

<comment><USER8> A couple of questions:

1\. Was it a conscious choice to only offer up monospaced fonts?

2\. I can't find a way to close the "cabinet" after I open it to access my list of notes: is this a bug, or am I missing something obvious?

3\. Any change you have the source code up somewhere?

Thanks btw, looks nice!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. yes, monospaced fonts reminds me ones on typewriters. 2\. just press the same button that opens cabinet. 3\. in public repo - no (

<comment><USER9> Are the mono font's hard-coded? i.e. font-family: "custom font" vs. font- family: "monospace"

<comment><AUTHOR> they are preloaded on demand. Cannot reply more, but I get your point. No, fonts are used only that are defined by me, but I your idea of using system- defined monospace font sound as 'feature to add' to me =)

<comment><USER9> right, but does it use the default monospace fonts set by the user or do you set your own?

For example, my default monospace font is Source Code Pro - will it use my font or your own (if any)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting. I would actually consider something like this for my current writing project, provided there is:

1\. Some means of account recovery. I didn't notice a forgot password link.

2\. Way to bulk import and export files. I will have my own primary storage.

3\. Save the font, color, background and border settings as my own presets

4\. Change the background _without_ changing (3). A graphical writing prompt for each different scene is useful, but having to change the rest of the formatting each time is an inconvenience.

5\. Make it HTTPS

</comment><comment><USER11> I was thinking aren't all text-editors are minimalistic and distraction free. I use KWrite and Emacs. Emacs is awesome for text-editing. There is nothing in my Emacs expect an empty space to write.

<comment><AUTHOR> They sure are in some way or another. But 'distraction-free', as a term for editor (and, as well, editor for writers) means ability to go full-screen, so nothing can distract you (like news in another tab). But having a blank paper wasn't what I wanted, I wanted distraction-free editor with nice picture on background, like space nebula when I write scifi novel about space travelling and galactic battles. TypWrittr is a synergy of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it intentional that "cloud" is omitted from the submission title? Because I bet many would've never clicked on it otherwise. I mean, a text editor that you need to _sign in_ into? How crazy. I'll stick with Emacs.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a limit of 80 chars per title (

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ulysses. Why anything else?

It is:

\- minimalist

\- has cloud storage

\- configurable

\- pleasant to work in

Boom!

<comment><AUTHOR> ulysses is not free and it's an app, and it seems it's an app for mac only.

<comment><USER13> It's true, that it's Mac only.

But, I came to realise, that free isn't without cost. So, I'd invest in a good tool, if I need to work with it a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> strlen("Minimalistic") > strlen("Minimalist")

Also, [http://www.typwrittr.com/screenshots/scr2.png](http://www.typwrittr.com/screenshots/scr2.png) "And I am _exited_ to share it with you"

<comment><AUTHOR> minimalistic sounds better a bit.. to me. Screenshots are fixed now, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Great product. Any chance to implement saving files to dropbox?

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, Paulo, I will consider it as a feature request, and I will research if it is possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> @O_W_Grant : where are these backgrounds coming from ?

</comment><comment><USER17> exited to share?? excited to share!

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed that, thank you!</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Encrypted Storage with File Requests? - <AUTHOR> We are struggling with sharing small but confidential files (SPII) between us and customers. When we discuss PoC with customer, we usually exchange smaller batch of data, like Excel sheets, encrypted through email. We have S3 set-up for processing any bigger load of data after that.
As you can guess email is not ideal and I really don't like it from a security standpoint. If we try to go directly with S3, the business user is usually not too tech-savvy to get the CLI going.
Giving him a GUI, like Cloudberry, requires involvement of IT department, which as you can guess, takes quite a big of time in any reasonable bigger company and slows the process down.
I looked at Dropbox, Box, SpiderOak, Syncplicity, and Sookasa, but none of them fit the need. Basically I'm looking for a SaaS (preferably) offering that has the following features: * Browser client or support for Windows and macOS
* File requests with password support * 2FA to access the files * File residency options or located in Europe * SOC2, HIPAA, ISO or any equivalent security certificate * Access logs and auditable at least on IP level * User-friendly and accessible for non-technical people
Nice to have: * File upload (through file requests) without an account * Zero knowledge encryption and open-sourced
I might just want too much though... Do you have your own solution? Is there something that I can host myself (rather not)? <comment><USER2> For open source you might look at NextCloud [1]. They have both a cloud and self hosted solution. Each users files are encrypted with their keys. Disclaimer, I do not use it. We were going to use it for an internal project but the AGPL license is not compatible for our company.

[1] - [https://nextcloud.com/](https://nextcloud.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks like a powerful service. From a quick check, it seems to have all the things I need. Thanks a lot, it's a step in right direction for me!

<comment><USER2> No problem. It looks like Linode [1] even have a way to deploy this as a pre- packaged app on a VM. I bet some other VPS providers probably do this too.

[1] - [https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/](https://www.linode.com/marketplace/apps/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Long-time lurker here. My colleague and I are currently building our own distribution platform, primarily to share access to our software product artifacts (Docker images, ZIP files, MSI packages) to Gumroad subscribers. We are using S3 as a backend, so atleast some of your requirements would be fulfilled. 2FA is on our TBD list.

Totally of topic: I primarily replied because I found your LinkedIn profile, saw "Beaker" as product name for your previous work and laughed hard: We also chose a Muppet name for the platform described above: "Gonzo" ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like we might need to roll our own :( Ha, Gonzo is great! Frankly, the name was the only exciting thing about the product. But I would definitely choose a similar name again, it makes my presentations funnier if I can insert a relevant picture with a muppet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sync.com is a Canadian solution that does what you are asking.

Maybe add them to your search keyword list!? :-)</comment>


All You Need to Know About SEO #1 – The SEO Academy List - <AUTHOR> http://www.positronapp.com/seo-academy/1-the-basics-of-search-engine-optimization?ref=hn

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Guys!

I'm writing a basic SEO guide at the moment. The first article is already published and the next will be finished soon: [http://www.positronapp.com/seo- academy/1-the-basics-of-searc...](http://www.positronapp.com/seo- academy/1-the-basics-of-search-engine-optimization)

Please join the list – so I can see the demand and what's interesting for you: [http://www.positronapp.com/seo-academy](http://www.positronapp.com/seo- academy)

Cheers, Torsten</comment>


How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free - <AUTHOR> http://outkastz.com/gogo-in-flight-wireless-internet-free/ <comment><USER2> The researcher rubs me the wrong way for a few reasons:

1\. 15 days for a major company not nearly enough to remedy this issue.

2\. The activity log reads like a ransom timeline. This isn't some l33t hacker exploit it's simple session hijack and mac spoof. You're not owed anything for finding this.

Anyone that tries this could tread carefully. If you get caught (chances are slim), it wouldn't be hard to convince a jury that you're hacking an airborne plane's network.

<fun hearted bit of sarcasm> Did you know a bathroom lock is woefully insecure!?! Time to hold the government ransom about this exploit and collect my millions. If they don't pay, I'll post it on the internet. </sarcasm>

<comment><USER3> Yep, yet another Gogo "exploit" disclosure. This one is actually quite pathetic.

Here's my security disclosure for the day:

You can walk out of most stores without paying for their merchandise if you hide it in your pocket.

Which vendor do I talk to about getting paid for this information?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No tools needed:

      `arp -a`

followed by

      `sudo ifconfig en0 ether $macaddress`

should be enough. You'd be surprised on how many paid-for hotspots this actually works (ethical issues aside).

<comment><USER5> I haven't gotten TFA to load yet. Is this the same thing? What exactly does this do?

<comment><USER4> arp: [http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=arp&sektion=8](http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=arp&sektion=8)

 _arp -a_ gives you a list of other connected devices on the network with their IP and mac address. For a paid-for hotspot this usually means devices that have paid for access and are active.

the _ifconfig_ command changes your mac address into one of the chosen above; the AP thinks you're one of the earlier connected devices and gives you access to the internet.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the explanation.

The network I'm on has a bunch of people connected, but `arp -a` only prints one line. Is this the access point isolation the article refers to?

Also, why do they bother replaying the session, if changing the mac address is all that it takes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was recently disappointed by the huge price hike of gogo in flight. It's been $10 for a flight for quite some time now which I'd felt was perfectly fair considering the quality. On my recent flight to NYC for work and play it was $10 per hour which essentially amounts to a 5x increase. I grabbed it for 2 hours and it was just as bad as always. Fine for email and Facebook but unideal for pushing a significant commit on a large git repo.

On the way home I just didn't bother since I'd spent my whole air-fi budget at the beginning of the trip.

Just seemed like an enormous and unfair price hike for a product that hasn't improved whatsoever.

<comment><USER7> They have a $14 all day pass, which is what I get, since I usually have to change planes when going to the west coast.

[http://www.gogoair.com/gogo/listAllProducts.do](http://www.gogoair.com/gogo/listAllProducts.do)

<comment><USER6> Interesting. My memory is a bit hazy, but I assume their all-day pass either wasn't available, easy to find, or that price. I only say that because I've purchased an all-day pass for a multi-leg flight in the past, so there must have been good reason for me not to use it this time. Or it could be as simple as grogginess from catching a 7am flight.

<comment> sjm-lbm FWIW, they've changed the menu - there's still a "Flight Pass" that's within a dollar or two of what it's always been, but you have to do some more hunting to find it. It's annoying, because every flight now I spend a few minutes paranoid that they removed the option that I'm looking for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This looks like it dups a paying customer's IP and MAC addresses. Does that work if both devices are running at the same time? I was under the impression TCP didn't like that.

<comment><USER9> Agreed, you're basically someone else's session who did the right thing and paid up. I fail to understand why anyone with a decent moral compass would want to do this.

<comment><USER10> This will be exploited by people _without_ a moral compass. What are you trying to get at? The author isn't suggesting this as a life hack for free internet, he's just showing that it can be done.

<comment><USER11> _" The author isn't suggesting this as a life hack for free internet"_

The HN Title is _(I can 't see the actual article as the machine is hosed)_:

      "How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free"

and the URL is

      gogo-in-flight-wireless-internet-free

Both of which, I would suggest, propose an article about "How to get internet for free", specifically "How to get Gogo in-flight wireless internet for free".

Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER12> > Or am I missing something?

Yes, you're missing something. The article is a disclosure of a security vulnerability that has already been reported to the company responsible, including notice that it would be published and a request for confirmation that it has been fixed. (Edit: but your response is reasonable - I can see how the article title is misleading.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Gogo offers free internet to Blackberry users.

Just change your User Agent (via chrome dev tools) to blackberry. Authenticate and you have free internet!

</comment><comment><USER14> Here's a completely different solution to using Gogo for free that doesn't involve piggy-backing on someone else's purchase: [http://www.bryceboe.com/2012/03/12/bypassing-gogos- inflight-...](http://www.bryceboe.com/2012/03/12/bypassing-gogos-inflight- internet-authentication/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Has anyone else noticed that Gogo shows higher prices to mobile phones? That seriously pisses me off.

The fact that none of my mobile browsers can change the user agent string pisses me off even more.

<comment><USER16> In fact I've always had the opposite experience — that the smartphone-only plan costs less.

<comment><USER17> Maybe it presents a higher cost to iPhone/iPad users?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For anyone who is not played with Dsploit (the network exploitation and analysis tool mentioned in the article), it is fantastic. I followed it in its early days on XDA, where the developer relentlessly answered all user questions, patched bugs, took in many features requests, and genuinely kicked ass.

I respect that dev a lot. I hope other people show his some love.

</comment><comment><USER19> How can MAC spoofing be stopped?

All the counter-measures I can think of seriously degrade the experience. I can think of approaches that work for HTTP, for example, but I can't see how you would allow e.g. SSH while preventing MAC spoofing.

<comment><USER20> > How can MAC spoofing be stopped?

802.1x

<comment><USER19> Can you explain a bit about how this would work here (i.e. for Gogo)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Lots of people have known this for quite a while - nothing new to see here. Here's a blog post by a friend of mine, from 2007 ("Bypass a wifi captive portal"), which includes an example of a script to handle it all: [http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/2007/Aug/11](http://www.semicomplete.com/blog/2007/Aug/11)

The basic idea is as follows:

1) ping the broadcast/multicast addresses to quickly fill the arp cache

2) change your mac address to that of the detected nodes

3) see if you can access the internet now [repeat step #2-3 until you can]

</comment><comment><USER22> Oh well. I have a ping tunnel on my VPS. I also run a DNS-tunnel.

I can get past pretty much any "pay me money for internet" lock. Of course, that makes me a bad netizen.

</comment><comment><USER23> Although the prices are a bit over the top, I can respect GoGo's customer support. A while back I reported to them how I was able to gain access to Facebook and Youtube almost effortlessly and they gave me two free coupons for unlimited in-flight WiFi as a token of appreciation. I would have informed them directly of this and awaited a response. They appeared to be pretty good at responding to my inquiries.

</comment><comment><USER24> The price hike has been very disappointing and actually biz killing. 10$ for a flight was a smooth price point while 10$ per hr is atrocious.

</comment><comment><USER25> What is proper etiquette for responsible disclosure?

Hacker: "I'm publishing on the 15th."

Vendor: "We'd like to see your post first"

Hacker: "Ok, here you go"

15th comes and goes

Hacker: "Hey any response?"

Hacker: "Ok its the 18th... I'm publishing"

Is this how this usually works? Or how it should work?

<comment><USER26> A full month of notification is plenty. If the vendor acknowledges you and tells you they're working on it and asks you to hold off then that's one thing, but if they basically ignore you for a month then you've done your part. Especially with an exploit like this, you're not opening up access to PII, although it sounds like you are opening the window to possible fraudulent charges.

<comment><USER27> No, disclosure timelines only make sense if the public is at risk. There is nothing like that here. The outcome is gogo not getting paid. This is just grandstanding a fairly unsophisticated bug in their service. The end result is that gogo will end up with more money.

<comment><USER26> _> disclosure timelines only make sense if the public is at risk_

The post says that fraudulent charges can be made without a password or credit card number by using this exploit.

I would bet that you can access account info as well which means there is some PII leaking. I would consider PII + fraudulent transactions to be a step above gogo losing oney.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> stealing a sub-par product is no fun.

<comment><USER29> YOU HAVE INTERNET ON A PLANE IN THE AIR TRAVELLING HUNDREDS OF MILES PER HOUR! What more do you want?

<comment><USER30> _What more do you want?_

People to stop treating recent progress like the rediscovery of fire. Or that future incremental progress is anything other than an inevitability.

Its like telling someone 100 years ago that the very notion of airtravel at all is unreasonable because YOU HAVE THE GERM THEORY OF DISEASE!

<comment><USER31> Amen!

I tell you, that Louis CK bit was the worst thing to happen to modern technology discussion..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> & in a few days patched.</comment>