Exclave: Hardware Testing in Mass Production, Made Easier - <AUTHOR> https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=5450 <comment><USER2> _the original test specification was literally "plug the device into the USB port of [your] laptop, and type in this AVRDUDE command to load code_

At the outfit I work for this is pretty much what they were doing for one of the products when I started. It wasn't that they didn't know better (they had other items in mass production); it was that the product used to be such a low volume that typing in CLI commands to program and test it was (almost) good enough.

I spent months automating that to the point of "plug cable into device and watch for Pass/Fail" indication on screen. Now that we're shipping thousands per month it make a huge difference :-)

Testing is a weird thing. The points you test are a function of what you expect may fail in manufacturing. No point in testing something that's extremely unlikely to fail, unless it's required by regulation.

e.g., FDA (Food & Drug Administration) Good Manufacturing Practices state that if you don't build something using a documented and repeatable process then you _must_ test 100% of product coming off the line. If you have a tight manufacturing process, then you can decide what level of testing meets a good balance of safety and cost.

People spend their entire career as Test & Manufacturing engineers and it is quite a complex and interesting field.

</comment><comment><USER3> >Reputable factories will test 100% of every product shipped.

Frankly, this just isn't true. It depends on your expected defect rate, how your defect rate drifts over time, the cost of doing 100% inspection, and effects of product failures. If you're making safety-critical gear, yes you will probably inspect 100%. If you're making injection molded clamshells for connected consumer products, you're probably only doing inspection in batches.

<comment><USER4> I guess it depends on the industry but it is somewhat common for electronic components. There are a lot of failure modes in parts, picking, soldering, and assembly. The economics widely favor doing testing at manufacturing time (versus something like at a distributor or dealing with customer RMA which may come with other externalities like brand damage) because boards can be reworked in the factory and you avoid other waste like packaging, shipping, and tariffs.

Back in the day extremely elaborate and massive bed of nails in circuit test rigs would poke the leads of a through hole circuit board to do continuity testing and basic functions checks. Now a lot of that can be done with JTAG circuitry, a serial bus many ASICs implement and chain together to provide less invasive way to similar tests. Xray, thermal, optical scanners are often used in various parts of the assembly. And of course plenty of humans. Test rig design is a big part of any manufacturing process and may be used to verify overall system function like button presses and connector fidelity.

As a separate but related thought, in VLSI: verification design, for both manufacturing and BIST, can easily eclipse the rest of the design in some ASICs in terms of cost/effort/complexity.

Software engineering is kind of the odd duck in that it is frequently a shoot first ask questions later pursuit in most organizations (funnily, even commonly in places like semiconductor companies that invent and progress new formal methods). There are plenty of decent tools like Lamport's TLA+ that aren't widely used in addition to more familiar aspects of code test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> For another option, see OpenHTF from google, though this targets quite complex devices: [https://github.com/google/openhtf](https://github.com/google/openhtf)

<comment><USER6> I am starting to use OpenHTF at work. I was not aware of Exclave. Seems like I have interesting homework to do. This blog post by Bunnie was a very nice read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love Bunnies stuff. Reading about his reverse engineering work on the Xbox was one of the reasons I chose to study computer science. Excellent article, wish there were more people out there like him.

</comment><comment><USER8> Fantastic, thank you Bunnie & crew, well done.</comment>


Nic Cage or Not App - <AUTHOR> https://shift.infinite.red/cage-against-the-machine-a419b6980424 <comment><USER2> Great writeup, thanks! I look forward to digging in to those links. I could have done with it longer, but no-one could find it boring the way it is, so that's a good thing I guess. What's next?!

Sorry to be that guy, but I kept thinking of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKp29ZcslOM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKp29ZcslOM)</comment>


How to choose the right tool for the job: awe.sm's language journey - <AUTHOR> http://blog.awe.sm/2012/12/10/how-to-choose-the-right-tool-for-the-job-awe-sms-language-journey/

<comment><USER2> Good post describing the thought process involved in selecting a language. It is interesting to see that the choice boils down to having resident experts and the ability to steer/train the team quickly. I wonder what the decision would be if the entire team was open to using the best available language even without resident experts in that language. For APIs my biased decision would be node.js using CoffeeScript.

<comment><USER3> I think this misses the point a bit - the "best available language" is an assortment of criteria. If you take away some of those criteria, you're no longer asking the same question.

<comment><USER4> In that case this post tells us more about constraints present in their environment than about a process of selecting the right tool. We should gather many "best available language" definitions with their respective choices. Then we could extract some meaningful, general advice, otherwise it's anecdotal and not worth very much.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Excellent post. Choose the right tools for the jobs. Great analysis over the journey.

BTW, does Dropwizard work with Play! Framework?

<comment><USER6> Thanks! I can't imagine you'd want to use Dropwizard with Play! since they both accomplish similar tasks. That said, I'm not really familiar with Play, but to my understanding its a full web application framework. Dropwizard focuses more around creating web APIs but it does include a templating library in case you want to create applications beyond APIs.

Also, here is a presentation from the author of the "Play Framework Cookbook" walking through using Dropwizard: <http://spinscale.github.com/dropwizard/2012-03-intro.html#/></comment></comment>


Introducing Fleetsmith Free and New Security and DevOps Catalog Apps - <AUTHOR> https://blog.fleetsmith.com/introducing-fleetsmith-free-and-new-security-and-devops-catalog-apps/ <comment><USER2> If you're at a startup that's using Macs, this is a simple way to manage them and make sure they're secure.</comment>


Improving signups by 125% with a simple wording change - <AUTHOR> http://raygun.io/blog/2013/04/improving-sign-ups-by-125-percent/

<comment><USER2> Strangely enough your current copy on the page features the old version!

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the comment -- I'm the author of the post in question (and co- founder of Mindscape, producers of Raygun). We still have the test running - just following the guidelines of leaving it for 7 days even after a winner is determined.

Did you swing the statistics? ;-)

<comment><USER2> Aha. It'd also be nice to know the sample size along with the confidence interval.

For conversion, I'd suggest to stop asking for a first name and last name (and possibly even the password field).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wouldn't that be where Social Login comes into play?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Meditation healing powers? - <AUTHOR>

I've always been interested by Buddhism teachings about meditation and in particular mindfulness meditation. Someday I would like to go to the Himalayas and Mount Everest to truly experience what  they experience ( true happiness ).<p>But what is more interesting is that lately there is a lot of science supporting the change of the brain and happiness concerned with Meditation and compassion. I was wondering if anyone here tried meditation and experienced a change of life or more happiness or just a better quality of life?. Please explain your experience and techniques. <comment><USER2> Hi there, I've been meditating on and off since I was 15 (I'm now 34). When I was younger I meditated very regularly, and now I try to get in 20 minutes about 3-4 times a week. I've noticed that when I meditate, the next day goes a lot better, in terms of mental clarity, peace, productivity, emotional stability, and the ability to grasp the subtleties of my own intuition. I longed for a guru when I was a teen, and by the age of 21, I found him, or rather, he found me. I followed him to his Himalayan ashram and had many wonderful spiritual experiences there, which were more than merely coincidental. I'm a healthy skeptic so of course nothing mattered to me more than the direct perception of the truths they talk about in meditation. I have experienced a few of these over the years, but they are difficult to attain and the toughest thing is that in order to experience them, you cannot want them. These experiences sort of play 'hard to get' \- it's hard to explain, but I think the Universe designed it that way so we aren't attached to such experiences and we don't hanker after them -- to Hindus, that desire destroys the purpose of meditation, which "should" be done for its own sake.

I am currently reading Transcendence by Dr. Norman E. Rosenthal and wish to get involved with a TM practice once I am situated in the bay area. As with anything, meditation is a practice and I've found that only when I sustain it, do I experience sustained benefits.

My adi guru, or first guru, was my father, and he gave me my first mantra, which I repeated for 7 years. After that, I took initiation from my guru; however, I still repeat the mantra that my father gave me. Now I can get into a meditative state rather quickly without using the tool of mantra to get there, but some days it's still a struggle.

I wish you well on your journey, which is 100% inward with meditation! If you have any questions feel free to email me at reel india at yahoo dot com

Om and Prem, Leena</comment>


There are many SARS-CoV-2 strains with gene deletions - <AUTHOR> https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/28/there-are-many-sars-cov-2-strains-with-gene-deletions/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a follow up post to a previous post on mine on how we might look for a natural attenuated (mild) strain of SARS-CoV-2 by genome sequencing [0]. While the COG-UK has not been looking directly for such a strain, their data does show that strains with the right type of mutations do exists.

While it might be possible to use a natural attenuated strain as a vaccine directly, the real value of having such a strain may be in using it as a safer test strain in a human challenge trial of a conventional vaccine. This could shave many months off us getting an effective vaccine for COVID-19 [1].

0\. [https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/05/a-solution-to- covid-19/](https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/05/a-solution-to-covid-19/)

1\. [https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/24/it-is-unethical-to- not-s...](https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/24/it-is-unethical-to-not-search- for-an-attenuated-sars-cov-2-strain/)

<comment><USER2> I wonder why everyone believes so strongly we will create a viable vaccine.

The FDA has never approved a vaccine for humans that is effective against any member of the coronavirus family, which includes SARS, MERS, and several that cause the common cold.

If political pressure/regulatory relaxation allows a vaccine to enter the market I would be suspicious of its efficacy.

<comment><USER3> Not exactly true. Moderna, and several others who are leading the vaccine race right now are out front because they had viable SARS and MERS vaccines but no where to test it other than in animal models.

Coronaviruses are easy to vaccinate against. They mutate very slowly. There's just not a viable business model for them when the symptoms are so mild and treatments are available cheaply over-the-counter.

<comment><USER4> > Coronaviruses are easy to vaccinate against. They mutate very slowly.

Wait can you expand on that? I thought RNA viruses mutate very quickly?

<comment><USER5> From what I understand, covid is a relatively small rna strand vs e.g. the flu which makes significant mutation way more rare

<comment><USER6> SARS-CoV-2 genome size is ~30 kb [1], influenza A genome size is ~14 kb [2]. A protein encoded in the SARS-CoV-2 genome is predicted to have exonuclease proofreading activity, which would result in a lower mutation rate [3].

[1] [https://mra.asm.org/content/9/11/e00169-20](https://mra.asm.org/content/9/11/e00169-20)

[2] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus#Structure_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus#Structure_and_genetics)

[3] [https://translational- medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10...](https://translational- medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-020-02344-6)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> rv-de Can somebody ELI16 why gene deletions are expected and what is the significance of this happening?

<comment><USER7> From what I understand:

Gene deletions are expected to some extent as a result of natural mutations.

The author is hypothesising that there should already exist natural virus particles ("in the wild") with key genes deleted that render it harmless to humans, and that these harmless strains may also be spreading in the population. We could possibly identify harmless virus particles with wide- ranging testing of asymptomatic people, and statistically identify what genes (or what parts of the genome) are important for disease.

The author's concept is that this would have potential as a vaccine. It's similar in concept to the polio vaccine, or giving cowpox to prevent smallpox infection.

In my opinion, the author is making several hypothetical leaps of logic that don't make this feel like a workable plan.

The author proposes to test 50,000 people and use this to identify safer strains: in my opinion that wildly underestimates what would be needed for this to have a chance of working.

Since the virus looks to be harmless in the vast majority of people it infects, it will be difficult and dangerous to distinguish strains that are genuinely harmless.

<comment><AUTHOR> First two paragraphs I have no issue with.

Third no. I am not arguing this at all.

Fourth is pure opinion.

Fifth the same, but as a counter argument sequencing 10,000 strains has found 69 candidate attenuation strains and that was without even trying.

Sixth no. It is actually quite easy to distinguish a harmless strain from a normal pathogenic strain as we can use the high morbidity rate as a proxy for danger.

<comment><USER8> You've identified 69 _strains_ (assuming no errors or false positives)

Saying they are candidate attenuation strains is like saying sugar is a candidate treatment.

[Edited after reconsidering, because it's worse than that:] Saying they are candidate attenuation strains is like saying drinking bleach is a candidate treatment. They are highly likely to still be extremely harmful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh so brave to be using a throwaway account to attack someone. Do you understand what the word candidate means? These 69 strains COULD be attenuated, but until we actually check into this we don't know. The only way to find out is to actually investigate.

How could it possible be harmful to check the clinical history of the patient that was infected with these deletion strains?

<comment><USER8> So you're agreeing that my interpretation was correct.

<comment><AUTHOR> No

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The linked website ([https://www.cogconsortium.uk/data/](https://www.cogconsortium.uk/data/)) has hidden links which you need to hover over to know it's a link. if you visited the site and haven't found anything to look at, try hovering your mouse around.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems to be a work in progress. It might be worth sending them a bug report.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have to say, I cannot understand why the idea of doing a challenge trial is controversial. If you are using healthy, young, volunteers who are observed and have good access to medical care, how could it be unethical?

We allow people to donate a kidney to another person, and that carries a significant amount of risk, and only one person benefits.

We allow assisted suicide in many places.

We allow people to assume great risks in auto racing, professional football, and boxing, and that's just for entertainment.

We allow doctors to treat COVID patients, sometimes without even proper PPE, knowing that a significant number will catch it. Many doctors are also not young, not in good health, and have preexisting conditions.

So all of this is allowed, but when the potential result is a vaccine that could save millions of lives, somehow this is unethical?

<comment><USER11> > I have to say, I cannot understand why the idea of doing a challenge trial > is controversial. If you are using healthy, young, volunteers who are > observed and have good access to medical care, how could it be unethical?

I think the most prelevant is COVID-19, at full strength, still kills seemingly healthy young people. The author mentions this in another article:

> The important question we have to consider is if it is ethical to > deliberately expose even the young and healthy to the dangerous SARS-CoV-2 > virus when we know it could seriously injure or kill them.[0]

In this article, we potentially have a weaker strains on our hands that could qualify as a fully ethical challenge trial that could accelerate the development.

At the end of the day, challenge trials are Phase trials with less restrictions in hopes of trading accuracy/rigor for speed.

Is it worth it? I don't know. I'm not knowledgeable enough to say one way or another.

[0] [https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/24/it-is-unethical-to- not-s...](https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/24/it-is-unethical-to-not-search- for-an-attenuated-sars-cov-2-strain/)

<comment><USER10> If you can use a weaker strain and presumably get the same results, of course, pick the safer option. However, if you can't, and people of sound mind are volunteering for noble reasons, why wouldn't we do that?

Is it worth it? We've lost about 200,000 people worldwide just in the past month from this disease. It's the leading cause of death in many countries. In healthy young people (20s, no preexisting conditions), the fatality rate is well under 0.1%.

If the vaccine doesn't work at all, which is unlikely, you'd expect 0-1 deaths from the trial. To save perhaps a single life of a willing, altruistic volunteer subject while hundreds of thousands die every month, and the world is confined to its homes is to me, utter insanity.

Do we tell firefighters to not go into a burning building to save lives, even if there is considerable risk?

If this is the state of medical ethics, the field should be torn down and rebuilt. To deny approval for a challenge trial with volunteers is mass murder.

<comment><USER11> I've just learned in my thread above with the article author that there is no concept of exposing people post vaccination Phase II or III to see if it was effective. We normally wait a long time to see if people get sick. If it's effective them we go to mass rollout.

That's where the huge time savings is.

My previous statement of "it's a Phase trial with less restrictions" isn't true. It's making the feedback loop tighter.

With this new knowledge, I'm relatively convinced we should be doing a challenge trial to speed up the roll out.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is a concept of using a challenge trial, only it can only be used when the risk to the volunteer is very low.

Challenge trial are used in trials on things like the common cold. SARS-CoV-2 is considered too dangerous to use in a challenge trial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "This Week in Virology" podcast addressed this mutation issue just last week. Basically 20 out of 30,000+ genes have mutated. This is one of the slowest viral mutations, 5x slower than seasonal influenza. While most viruses tend to become milder as mutations and transmission happens, SARS-CoV-2 mutates so slow that the mortality will be high for quite some time. The good news is that a vaccine should provide long-lasting protection more like the measles shot rather than an annual flu vaccine that is hit or miss.

</comment><comment><USER12> > If we find that everyone who was infected with a particular deletion strain > only had a mild case of COVID-19, then we have our candidate attenuated > strain which could be used to accelerate vaccine development in a challenge > trial.

Heavy emphasis on "candidate". How can you tell if people had a mild case because the virus had deletions or because they mounted an appropriate immune response? It's not clear that the vaccine will be protective.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have addressed this many times before, but yes almost everyone with a mild case just has an immune system that is good at controlling the virus. This is irrelevant to finding an attenuated strain.

The real value of finding an attenuated strain (one that causes mild illness in everyone) is that it would be ethical to use it in a challenge trial of a conventional vaccine. The Oxford vaccine group for example are planning a large field trial because they don't think it is ethical to expose people to the normal dangerous strains. If we found an attenuated strain we could speed things up massively.

<comment><USER13> Ignorant question: is it possible to have something resembling a human immune system without a full body? One level would be just a container of liquid with live white and red blood cells, possibly connected to an oxygenation machine; you would insert some infected cells, then sample it or otherwise observe it periodically. If you need lung tissue or other non-blood cells for the virus to infect, then having disembodied blobs of flesh with blood vessels, being fed nutrients and oxygen, would be the next level.

Of course, if this testing infrastructure doesn't already exist, I imagine creating it would be too slow to help with this particular plague.

<comment><USER14> I know you prefaced your ignorant question with "Ignorant question:", and I don't think it's wrong to ask questions of experts on HN. (That's one of the best things about this site!) However, I'm downvoting you anyway because, despite that preface, you seem to be falling into the trap of a smart geek in one field vastly (vastly!) oversimplifying the complexities of another field, and acting as if all we needed to solve this problem was for someone like yourself to come up with this fantastic idea.

No, you can't approximate a human immune system with red and white blood cells in a container of liquid. No, adding some other cells in there won't help. If that were effective, we'd be doing it already. You are either overestimating your own ingenuity or underestimating the ingenuity of tens of thousands of scientists, doctors, and engineers.

<comment><USER15> Alternatively, OP could be answered by someone saying that this is already being done. And apparently it is in some form, according to a sibling comment of yours. Maybe that's incorrect, but you chose the least charitable interpretation instead of "Hey, here's an idea. Why doesn't it work like I think it would, and does it have any uses in any form?"

<comment><USER14> The question was, "is it possible to have something resembling a human immune system without a full body?"

The answer is no, for somewhat obvious reasons. The human immune system involves many organs and tissues and cells working together in very complex ways.

And I think your charitable interpretation is quite a bit too charitable. OP did not say anything like "why doesn't it work like I think it would".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The world actually is a giant field test at the moment. Many people get infected by potentially different strains of COVID. There is no need to infect voluntaries as thousands already get infected by the choose of the virus every day.

This data should be used: E.g. are there extreme examples, like many inhabitants of an elderly home getting infected but noone dies?!

One should look out for this and use this to boost the development of treatments and vaccines.

</comment><comment><USER17> Looking for a naturally occurring attenuated strain is a waste of time. The problem isn't a lack of vaccine candidates, it's a matter of testing latency. Any attenuated strain is just a live virus vaccine and this doesn't skip you to the head of the regulatory line. Finally, synonymous recoding with CpG enrichment is a more robust way to attenuate than relying on natural attenuation.

<comment><USER18> Would having just the virus envelope (with surface protiens) without the RNA payload be effective to provoke an immune response?

<comment><USER17> I don't know. My lab work was primarily with site directed mutagenesis in DNA viruses (PhiX 174). Production seems like it would be the trickiest part -- How do you produce the capsid in sufficient quantity without the machinery it needs for replication? Maybe you just transfect it into cells. Perhaps you clone some viral genes into the host genome and remove them from the virus? I don't know what this would do with regards to packing the remanent genome into the capsid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is very cool. Pardon my ignorance about this, my bio education is limited. If I understand it correctly, would it be possible to purposely infect willing volunteers in order to find a potentially attenuated strain for a vaccine?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sort of. The basic idea is that we use an attenuated strain to safely test one of the more conventional vaccines being developed by deliberately trying to infect those people vaccinated (i.e. a challenge trial).

Of course an attenuated strain may be able to be used as a vaccine directly, but this is somewhat controversial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Luckily enough we can detect gene deletions using our Office suite's spellcheck: [https://xkcd.com/2298/](https://xkcd.com/2298/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Not sure this helps us much. The problem is augmentation. A vaccine could take a healthy young person who would have had an asymptomatic infection, and change that into severe disease. Infecting them with an attenuated strain doesn't give enough certainty about the risk of augmentation with the real thing.

It is also a large effort to produce a medical grade attenuated strain that you could infect people with in a trial.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you are referring to ADE (antibody dependent enhancement). This is a function of the vaccine, not the virus. The idea here it to use a strain you know is safer than one you know is more dangerous.

For a challenge trial you only need enough virus for a few thousand people at most. It is not difficult to produce this amount of virus in cell culture.

<comment><USER21> Yes although antibodies aren't the only mechanism. I'm not worried about post- vaccine enhancement with the attenuated strain, I'm worried that you can't reliably demonstrate the vaccine doesn't cause enhancement after the real infection.

<comment><AUTHOR> This problem exists with or without finding an attenuated strain. A better way to think about this is let's say we had two strains of the virus isolated - one that killed 10% of people infected and the other that killed less than 0.0001%. Which one should we use in a challenge trial?

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure what your point is. Ultimately you need to demonstrate a vaccine is safe and efficacious for the real disease. An attenuated strain isn't the real disease.

<comment><AUTHOR> No you don't if you choose the right attenuated strain, but even if you decided for some insane reason that you had to test the vaccine with a pathogenic strain you do this after you have shown that the vaccine protected the vaccinated person from the attenuated strain.

<comment><USER21> How do you know you've chosen the right attenuated strain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is so far the most exciting news I have seen since January. Would it help achieve herd immunity without having any vaccine? In other words, let the "vaccine" spread as fast as possible so more lives can be saved.

<comment><USER23> There's no feasible way to "let" a virus spread faster than another. Some spread faster than others naturally, and some mitigation tactics (c.f. masks vs. gloves vs. hand washing vs. social isolation) work differently against different viruses. But there's no way to pick a specific strain and say "we want everyone to get that one".

Now, you might culture it in a lab and then inject it into people deliberately so they develop antibodies that then work against the "true" virus. This technique is called "vaccination".

This is a report on some progress on one particular vaccine type. But it's minor progress. What we need is an attenuated strain. What this shows is just that there are some spreading strains with gene deletions (which is the kind of mutation which tends to produce attenuated strains). There's a lot of work to get from there to a vaccine.

<comment><USER24> Sure you could, via intentional infection by cultivated strains.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _This Week in Virology_ has debunked the claims that there multiple strains of the virus that are either more transmissible, or more or less severe, or that your immune system would react differently to.

Here is what they had to say in episode 590[1]:

Vincent Racaniello: _There are a series of articles here, where there have been some claims about different circulating lineages and what that means. Are you on this, Cathy?_

Cathy Spindler: _Right. So, there was an article that I first saw in the LA Times "Chinese Scientists Say Second Coronavirus Strain Is More Dangerous"[2]. But in that there's a link to virological.org, which we talked about another article posted there a couple of weeks ago[3], and they really debunk this and think even that this Chinese article about a second Coronavirus should be retracted. Two of the key claims that are reached by misunderstanding and overinterpreation of data and an additional analysis suffers from methodological limitations. So this long thing on virological.org goes in to the reasons why there's no real evidence for two different strains, a more severe strain and a less severe strain._

Rich Condit: _It also provides a nice summary of this sort of variation in sequence that 's being observed in the virus over time, which is good._

Vincent: _Yeah, it 's a good article. We'll put a link. It's worth reading, but as everyone should know, when these [indistinct] viruses, every replication cycle they sustain mutations in their genomes and the lethal ones are gone, the viruses don't reproduce, but some of them stay and if they're neutral they remain. So they can be characteristic. So the virus introduced in to the Washington area is a single introduction and then it's spread and you can tell that because it has a unique set of mutations compared to say, the Chinese isolate, but it doesn't mean anything biologically. It's just markers._

Rich: _And the markers are really interesting because they give you insight in to, I mean the insight that I got from observing what came out of the Washington cases is that from looking at the sequence of the virus they concluded that in fact it had been circulating for some time, and they could even get a very very rough estimate of how many cases might be out there based on the variation in sequence and the time at which the disease first showed up in a person._

Vincent: _I think there are some emails later about this. People are concerned that, and people suggest in these papers, at least the one here, that we 're being critical of that it could be evolved to be more virulent or more transmissible. There's no evidence for that whatsoever._

Rich: _This is the kind of thing that... it just won 't go away!_

Vincent: _Oh, it doesn 't go away... new outbreak and it comes back._

Rich: _Yeah, and there 's no evidence. People have looked at this. We've gone over this for several.. Zika, Ebola, where's there's been variation and people point to a particular variation and they say, "This is going to make it more virulent" or something, and then the experiments ultimately get done and no. It hasn't made a difference._

Vincent: _And also the issue of increased transmissibility, I think this virus is already very transmissible as it is, and I think the mutations that made it effectively transmissible among humans, which happened very early on, I don 't know, either in animals or in humans early on, before we knew about it, they're done, and it's going to be hard to know what they were. MERS coronavirus has never acquired those high transmissibility changes and it keeps fizzling out and then you have another reintroduction from camels but this particular SARS-Cov-2 sustained them probably early on and it's a very good transmitter. It doesn't need to get better, at least from my anthropocentric view. We never really know what viruses are selected by, but I don't think there's any evidence, and it's very hard to get that evidence. That paper tells you what you need to prove that mutations are doing something phenotypically. It's very hard to get that._

Rich: _It has occurred to me that people who don 't think about this stuff every day might be a little confused by this discussion relative to the discussion that goes on all the time about variation in influenza virus strains, and new strains coming up and having to change the vaccine and stuff. But that's different. That's variation in the influenza virus that makes it evade the existing immunity, and those sorts of variations arise so you get circulation of viruses that you don't have as good an immune response to, but that's different than a virus making mutations that make it more virulent. It's a different story._

Then they talk about it again in episode 592[4]:

Alan Dove: _David sends a link to a paper on possibly being two strains of SARS-CoV-2. This says, "I've seen this pop up."_

Vincent Racaniello: _These are just basically single nucleotide polymorphisms._

Dove: _Oh those, yeah._

Rich Condit: _This is the paper where they were talking about an S-type and an L-type and one maybe being more pathogenic than another and blah blah blah blah. Basically, yes, there 's variation in the virus. It doesn't necessarily mean anything._

Racaniello: _No. They have no evidence that 's it's functionally of any importance at all. No. But he does say "this virus has now conducted many human-to-human transmissions. Have we discovered mutations that enhance transmission? Welcome to evolution." Well, the problem is you need to have the virus before it started transmitting efficiently among people. Right? And we don't have that and I'm not sure we ever will. But then maybe you could look at it and see what changes occur. And I'm not sure you could ever do anything about it because you can't infect people and we don't have a good animal model for transmission so, no. Unfortunately we won't be able to know about that._

And in episode 596[5]:

Rich Condit: _So the second question is the doctor asking.. It 's basically, can the virus mutate so you wouldn't be immune to it? And our understanding, my understanding with SARS-CoV-2 now is that there's no evidence that it's going to undergo what we call antigenic drift, right, that it will be SARS- CoV-2 for the foreseable future, and once you mount an immune response to that you'll be immune to it and there won't be, as far as we know, new strains coming up to which you will not be immune. These things, the human coronaviruses seem to be pretty stable over time. Yes, they can accumulate mutations but they are of essentially no consequence._

Alan Dove: _And as viruses go, these coronaviruses, because of the proofreading are actually more stable than a lot of other viruses. Probably what the doctor is thinking of is that this is analogous to flu, where you do see antigenic drift and antigenic shift, and where yeah, you get different strains circulating all the time. But there 's no evidence, as Rich said, that SARS-CoV-2 is doing any of that._

[1] - [http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-590/](http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-590/) at about 13 minutes in

[2] - [https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-05/chinese- sci...](https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-05/chinese-scientists- say-second-coronavirus-strain-more-dangerous)

[3] - [http://virological.org/t/response-to-on-the-origin-and- conti...](http://virological.org/t/response-to-on-the-origin-and-continuing- evolution-of-sars-cov-2/418)

[4] - [http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-592/](http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-592/) at about 1 hour and 41 minutes in

[5] - [https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-596/](https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-596/) at about 39 minutes in

<comment><AUTHOR> While this is true, this has absolutely nothing to do with my post. You seem motivated enough to understand this topic in some depth so I think you would benefit from reading through all my posts on this topic and thing carefully about what I am arguing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Off topic, I wish HN downvoting cost something, maybe a bit of karma. Downvoting is too common.

<comment><USER26> It does. Users need to be over a certain age and/or have themselves enough karma to downvote.

<comment><USER27> Age doesn't affect it. You just need > 500 karma.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Could one theoretically sequence their genome before and after infection and use contemporary gene editing techniques to restore any changes made? Could we version-control our DNA?

<comment><USER29> Covid-19 isn't a retrovirus. It does not directly change the host's DNA. The article is talking about deletions in the genes of the virus.</comment></comment>


Flaw in New 'Secure' Credit Cards - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/11/chip-n-pin-foreign-currency-vulnerability/

<comment><USER2> Good job incorrectly conflating chip & pin with contactless transactions there Mr. Author. Entirely ignoring the fact that many US cards already have contactless built in even inspite of not having chip & pin.

Honestly the author is trying too hard to make this news US-centric. Trying to turn it into a discussion about why rolling out chip & pin in the US is "bad." While entirely ignoring the fact that chip & pin and contactless aren't one in the same, and that the US already has contactless.

Really poor article in general. The author either doesn't know what they're talking about or worse does and is trying to mislead the reader.</comment>


Sshuttle - tunnel all your traffic through ssh - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle <comment><USER2> NOT all your traffic. This only does TCP. Any DNS, UDP, and other non-TCP IP traffic won't go through the tunnel!

I tried sshuttle awhile ago and abandoned it because of this. The only thing worse than no security is a false sense of security.

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally don't use it for security reasons, but to be able to listen to last.fm easily through a vps in a country, where that is for free. (just one example)

Security is never just a software you install, it also depends on you, knowing, what you do.

<comment><USER2> Sure there are other uses. I'm just making sure people know, because it's being advertised as a VPN alternative, and this problem wasn't obvious to me when I first looked at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> +1 for a reference to slirp, which let you turn a dial-in connection to a Unix terminal into a real internet connection back in the days when your University would give you a terminal connection but not a PPP connection.

<comment><USER4> I remember SLIRP -- and The Internet Adapter.

<comment><USER5> I used SlipKnot for that -- it converted a shell-dialup at University of Oregon into a SLIP connection that I could use with Netscape 1.0

<comment><USER4> SLIP being a "competitor" to PPP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just a little nitpicking, when he talks about TunnelVision, he should have said:

      And nobody never notified me of any security flaws in my key exchange,

Instead of:

      And nobody ever found any security flaws in my key exchange,

Yeah, hell is in the details...

Regarding SSHuttle itself, I really liked it! (coming from someone who does all his browsing with ssh -D)

</comment><comment><USER7> The alternative that predates this is to this is to just tunnel ppp over ssh using pppd:

        pppd updetach noauth pty "ssh firstname.lastname@example.com pppd nodetach notty noauth" ipparam 192.168.1.100:192.168.1.2

I used this for many years before switching to openvpn. This does require root access on the host to execute pppd however.

</comment><comment><USER8> I set up an OpenVPN server for this purpose. This solution is so much easier and elegant, it's not even funny.

<comment><USER9> I tried to setup an openVPN server, but after chasing a rabbit hole of instructions down the craziest URLs with obsolete or missing information I finally gave up.

How did you get it to work?

<comment><USER10> I did this on Linode:

<http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/>

Super easy to do even if you are a linux noob.

<comment><USER8> That's the same guide I used. Very comprehensive and easy to follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/commit/33efa5ac62eaf9cf...](https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle/commit/33efa5ac62eaf9cf924de88d2dfde7547ed9e570) is the point where I get confused.

In a normal tunnel setup, one tunnels at the IP layer, and dumps all IP packets into the tunnel. At the far end of the tunnel, packets are sent onwards based on the far end's routing table. Things like DNS "just work" because everything happens at a layer below TCP and UDP. In this system, he's making it work for each non-tcp using layer 4 protocol separately, leading to weirdness like rewriting /etc/hosts.

For tcp, he's nating all traffic locally to a local server, which then multiplexes all incoming traffic into the ssh connection. The remote side then unmultiplexes the data. I don't fully understand how this avoids tcp over tcp. Maybe I'm dumb. [edit: yeah, I'm dumb. the tcp connection is terminated at the local server, the contents are pumped over the ssh connection, and the remote side opens a new tcp connection]

I wrote this mostly because I read the readme and went "but how does it work?".

<comment><USER12> sshuttle does not (currently) attempt to do anything other than TCP and DNS. UDP ought to be possible (other than that UDP-over-TCP could have similar problems to TCP-over-TCP, ie. that packets are never lost and this could confuse a hypothetical UDP-based congestion control algorithm). ICMP is probably not possible unless we run the server side as root.

The "--auto-hosts" option you linked to is _not_ the same as the "--dns" option. auto-hosts doesn't capture DNS at all; instead it just adds to your local /etc/hosts. I use this feature much more than --dns, actually, because unlike --dns, it works great if you have multiple tunnels to different offices open at once. (You get _all_ the hostnames from _all_ the offices.)

sshuttle was originally designed to VPN into an office and forward a couple of subnets over. In that case, you often _don't_ want to use the remote DNS server, you just want to know the remote hostnames, because _most_ of your DNS lookups have nothing to do with the remote server. Hence --auto-nets and --auto-hosts.

Nowadays it seems like sshuttle is mostly being used to counter things like Firesheep, which means you want to forward _all_ your traffic to a remote server. In that case --dns - which forwards _all_ your port 53 traffic over the VPN - is preferable.

We could actually do all the other UDP ports the same way we do --dns. We just don't, because I haven't needed it and nobody else has submitted a patch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How does this compare to OpenSSH VPN and Socks Support[1]?

[1] - <http://wiki.enigmacurry.com/OpenSSH>

<comment><USER14> Very much different. He explains it in the article quite clearly. No need to manually configure clients to use the proxy, as it uses the client's firewall to forward connections.

<comment><USER15> But plain OpenVPN uses the normal IP routing machinery to send stuff over the VPN, which is even easier.

<comment> mike-cardwell To use OpenVPN you have to install extra software on the server and edit configuration files and set up keys. Not sure how that is easier?

<comment><USER15> The setup cost is higher, true, but the performance is better. TCP-over-TCP does not work well.

<comment> mike-cardwell I've heared the claim that TCP over TCP doesn't work well countless times. I've been using OpenVPN in tcp mode for at least 5 years on a daily basis and never noticed a problem. I've even done SIP over a TCP OpenVPN configuration without a noticeable problem.

It makes sense to me that it _should_ perform badly, and it probably does for uses cases with a lot of traffic, but for an average user on a laptop, a TCP based VPN is fine.

<comment><USER12> What happens is you essentially get "infinite bufferbloat." When there's no packet loss, you end up absolutely filling the transmit buffers at the entry points to the tunnels. The result, as other people have mentioned, is _extremely_ poor interactive performance when you're simultaneously transferring large files.

TCP-over-TCP not "broken" in the sense that the sessions will randomly drop or your kernel will crash or anything. It's just that doing it correctly is much better.

Mind you, given the prevalence of bufferbloat (mostly caused by misdesigned routers/DSL/cablemodems) nowadays, interactive performance _already_ largely sucks when you're transferring large files. So you might not even notice a difference.

Bufferbloat makes me sad :(

<comment> mike-cardwell Yeah. I understand why it is claimed to be bad. But in all my years of using it, I've never had a problem like that which you just described.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Socat can do this: first read: <http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat- tun.html> then read: [http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat- openssltunnel.ht...](http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/doc/socat- openssltunnel.html)

<comment><USER17> Does the TCP over TCP problem occur with socat tunnels?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's always good when there's only 2 steps to get it working and they work perfectly.

Using it over hotel wifi as I'm typing!

</comment><comment><USER19> Can I receive postbacks using this ?

Explanation - as usual, my company works on a shared LAN which goes through a single internet connection. To test some applications, we have to be able to receive postbacks (on our developer machines) through 3'rd party services. The best way we found was to have an OpenVPN server running somewhere. Each developer connects to the VPN server and receives a private IP-address. All postbacks go to the VPN server and are then routed through nginx to the correct developer machine (on the private IP address).

VPN is a pain to setup and configure - can something like this be used instead ? The question really is - how does nginx forward requests to the correct developer machine.

<comment><USER20> Have you looked at <http://pagekite.net/> ?

It's a generic "expose my local HTTP server to the Internet" tool, designed to be really convenient and easy to set up (assuming you already have a local HTTP server). If I understand you correctly, it may be exactly what you are looking for.

It's FOSS so if you don't want to use the service (my startup!) you can roll your own. :-) But if you're looking for convenience, the service is probably hard to beat. Come chat on #pagekite on Freenode if you've got any questions!

<comment><USER19> looks awesome - thanks !

I suppose we will sign up sooner or later - 10 Euro isnt too expensive.

<comment><USER20> Cool! We're actually doing a pilot program right now to try and better understand the needs of web developers who use PageKite, so be in touch if you'd like to be part of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How would one go about setting this up with a firmware rewritable consumer- grade router?

Can I have a ww-drt install act as a client with Sshuttle and install a public key to require no login?

<comment><USER22> You can have Python running on the DD-WRT box of course, which will probably drastically slow down your router. You can also generate a public key for the router and append it to a remote host's .ssh/authorized_keys file, but for reason number 1 above, it's probably not a good idea. Now if you have a PC box running Vyatta or pfSense, then you might be able to pull this off with minimum impact.

<comment><USER21> Any inexpensive and small form-factor recommendations for hardware for pfSense?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Brilliant. Before this I used `ssh -d` and tunnelled everything through the port with proxifier.app but this is a much nicer (and free) solution!

</comment><comment><USER24> Very cool. I wonder how hard it would be to port the muxer core to C, and run it under tcpclient / tcpserver on either end of the ssh connection.

<comment><AUTHOR> Click the little "fork" button and let us know, what you came up with :-)

<comment><USER24> Maybe I will. ;)

A few years back, I wrote a multiplexer / tunneler similar to Sshuttle in Python for a "Go To My PC" style web service. We wanted to tunnel over ssh, but had problems automating the client key generation and first-time connection. So we went with SSL. That and the cross platform requirement (most clients were running Windows) really took the fun out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've been running this for months now and really like it. Really simple to setup and quite flexible.

</comment><comment><USER26> Anyone know of a portable Chrome that I can SSH into home with? Preferably something I can leave on a shared computer, while only I have access to the stunnel. Also, it may need to be able to use port 80, I don't know the filter inside-out.

</comment><comment><USER27> Would this circumvent the checks Hulu does for example by forcing Flash to always connect directly. i.e using SOCKS Proxy will not work with Hulu but using full VPN will, so how will sshuttle rate ?

<comment><USER28> Full VPN, but it doesn't work on windows.

Also, if you start streaming Hulu through a shell account, there is a good chance that your shell account provider will notice and possibly get angry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm a little confused. I'm outside USA and I want to browse some restricted content for users located outside of the U.S. Can I do this using Sshttle and a VPS?

<comment><USER30> All traffic will come from the machine that you are SSH'd into.

<comment><USER31> Translation: Yes, if your VPS is in the US.

<comment><USER29> Yes, It's in the US. I'm not confused anymore.

<comment><USER32> you don't need shuttle

> ssh -D localhost:8888 <firstname.lastname@example.com>

then enter localhost:8888 as your socks proxy in your web browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Previously on HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1313083>

</comment><comment><USER33> <http://bodhizazen.net/Tutorials/VPN-Over-SSH/>

<comment><USER34> Please actually read the linked articles before replying, and signal some recognition of the fact you have done so in your reply. If you wish to argue that the arguments put forth in the sshuttle README are somehow invalid and that what you linked is still better, please do so, but at the moment it looks like you haven't even read them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> _From the github.com page_

This is how you use it:

        git clone git://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle on your client machine. You'll need root or sudo access, and python needs to be installed.

        ./sshuttle -r username@sshserver 0.0.0.0/0 -vv

(You may be prompted for one or more passwords; first, the local password to become root using either sudo or su, and then the remote ssh password. Or you might have sudo and ssh set up to not require passwords, in which case you won't be prompted at all.)

That's it! Now your local machine can access the remote network as if you were right there. And if your "client" machine is a router, everyone on your local network can make connections to your remote network.

You don't need to install sshuttle on the remote server; the remote server just needs to have python available. sshuttle will automatically upload and run its source code to the remote python interpreter.

This creates a transparent proxy server on your local machine for all IP addresses that match 0.0.0.0/0. (You can use more specific IP addresses if you want; use any number of IP addresses or subnets to change which addresses get proxied. Using 0.0.0.0/0 proxies everything, which is interesting if you don't trust the people on your local network.)

Any TCP session you initiate to one of the proxied IP addresses will be captured by sshuttle and sent over an ssh session to the remote copy of sshuttle, which will then regenerate the connection on that end, and funnel the data back and forth through ssh.

Fun, right? A poor man's instant VPN, and you don't even have to have admin access on the server.</comment>


Ask HN: What to do with several unused domains? - <AUTHOR>

I have collected a number of potentially useful but currently useless (PUCU) domain names over the years, and while a couple seem obvious, I'm interested in opinions from others on what might be done with them.
Should I sell them, setup forums and wikis and hope the community self-polices (or forms in the first place), start blogging on specific topics, etc.
Thanks in advance :)

  actropolis.com
  arsauralis.com
  digitalrights.ca
  elite720.com
  fashiontouches.me
  firestrum.com
  innereyes.com
  iwriters.net
  kincms.com
  slashbracket.com
  spankk.me
  withanks.com
 <comment><USER2> What is with your redirect to indy army needed? You should be monetizing those sites at the minimum with parked installations. check out www.dnforum.com for help.

spankk.me is obvious. But I'd put it up on sedo and let someone else develop it.

park everything else with a microsite and limited seo. You might make 1-5$ a month with each. Also put them on sedo for sale.

iwriters.net is the only one i'd develop. Freelance writers for hire and a closed forum for them to discuss things. (pretend it's closed, just auto- authorize everyone after a few days with a "You've been confirmed! yay!" message.

<comment><AUTHOR> The IndyArmy link is just the "skeleton" that gets loaded when a site is created but has no other content. No redirect involved, and it's meant to let my clients know their site is working and to get something on it quickly :)

Thanks for the input - I'll look into your idea for iwriters.net and see if I have the time to create/maintain such a community.</comment></comment>


Google to dumb down Android search to escape Apple's patent - <AUTHOR> http://phandroid.com/2012/07/03/galaxy-nexus-denied-temporary-ban-lift-samsung-and-google-working-on-software-patch/

<comment><USER2> I, disagree with Apple's stance on this issue, but at the same time I would be interested in hearing a valid argument for the continuous stream of comments around the web that essentially say: "Apple is destroying innovation through its Android lawsuits." This is, as far as any rational argument is concerned, false.

Innovation refers to the process by which something is rendered more effective by changing or being different. If we accept this definition, Apple is driving innovation through its aggressive pursuit of its patents. They are forcing competitors to do things different, to change, in order to compete. That's innovation.

What I think people actually mean to say is Apple is destroying IMPROVEMENT via its aggressive use of patents.

There is a subtle and profound difference between innovation and improvement.

<comment><USER3> How would you define "improvement" if not rendering something more effective by changing it or making it different? In this particular case, search on Android is being made more effective by searching contacts and apps.

As Steve Jobs said, "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." They just want to stop everyone else from doing it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why we can't have nice things. Pretty ridiculous that this is happening.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if there will be a different version of Google's search app for the US, or even a different ROM?

I am really sorry for you guys in the US, but I hope not all of us have to share this downgrade with you.</comment>


Google wins trial against Oracle as jury finds Android is fair use - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/05/google-wins-trial-against-oracle-as-jury-finds-android-is-fair-use/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11781053).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is possibly my best-case scenario. APIs are copywriteable (so says the Supreme Court), and this seems reasonable, since some APIs really are very good and treating them like an artistic work has benefits. But implementing them is fair use, preserving the utility of APIs for compatibility. Great news!

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow I did not expect the verdict so soon. This is fantastic news.</comment>


We are last generation that can stop climate change - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/03/we-are-last-generation-that-can-stop-climate-change-un-summit <comment><USER2> As the desert bands encircling the earth's northern and southern hemispheres continue to expand, the headwaters of the Euphrates River will increasingly experience desert-like conditions causing the river itself to completely run dry.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Where 'can' of course expresses only the possibility of the technocrat (but that's the Graun for you).</comment>


Crowdstart Capital wants to reward blockchain contributors - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1JjJWXzSvo3vTKW_BUFtSV4KMeqp3Q9dD8nAExz9jyq0/ <comment><AUTHOR> [https://crowdstart.capital](https://crowdstart.capital) are airdropping tokens to those who've programmed something with blockchain, written a tutorial, or otherwise contributed to the blockchain ecosystem! More tokens can be earned by referring your friends!</comment>


All the plastic you can and cannot recycle - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45496884?app=news.science_and_environment.story.45496884.page <comment><USER2> There was a similar discussion on reddit yesterday morning:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9hee9n/what_mak...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/9hee9n/what_makes_recycling_certain_plastics/?utm_source=reddit- android)

Several different experts weighed in on the comment section. Plastics engineer, garbage collector, recycling machine salesman all had some thing to post.

I've always tried to sort my trash, but now I realize that tossing every type of plastic in same bin may not be helping as much.

Now I try to minimize plastic purchasing. Bulk dry food and produce without packaging seems to help, and it usually means learning to cook more which in turn saves money. I've been using the same $3 stainless steel liter canteen from Goodwill for the past year. Might last the rest of my life

<comment><USER3> This reinforces my perception that plastics recycling is mostly a ploy by the plastics industry to make themselves appear less wasteful while shifting the burden and the blame to the customer. Some things we're encouraged to do, like carefully washing out plastic peanut butter jars, seem like they're probably a net waste of resources.

<comment><USER4> Yeah I don't recycle anything that needs to be washed first. Quick rinse OK, but if I need hot water and soap it goes into the trash instead.

<comment><USER5> It's exactly this mindset that creates such a huge plastic problem. You aren't wrong, and you shouldn't feel guilty either. People in charge of deciding packaging should be taking their end customer's ideas and habits in mind. Why are all my vegetables and fresh foods packaged on styrofoam trays, wrapped in plastic, and packed home in a plastic bag? At least the plastic bag can be reused, but the rest has zero hope of being reusable. It's also a huge problem to recycle plastics that have food waste on them.

All in all, plastics are really not needed in most of the things we buy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I was just talking to my dad about this. He's in his 60s and says he can remember a time when plastics were relatively rare. As a kid, his milk came in glass bottles which were returned, sanitized, refilled, and re-delivered. There was no permanent waste in that process that he can recall.

So, within one generation, we went from that to the average house on my street discarding a massive rolling trash-can worth of plastic every week (roughly). I try hard to reduce my family's contribution to the problem, but it's really tough. For example, we buy organic produce, and every single one has plastic stickers, rubber bands, and labels. It's pretty depressing.

<comment><USER7> > There was no permanent waste in that process that he can recall.

Except for the energy wasted to manufacture the glass bottle, clean it, transport it back to be cleaned, and the increased weight/fragility over a similar plastic container.

For example, the reusable canvas shopping bag must be reused 170+ times to actually break even with the environmental impact of choosing it over plastic bags. By the way, that's without washing it.

<comment><USER8> How do you capture the cost of the plastic litter? IMO these arguments are usually questionable and are based on figures from people with a bias.

The department of public works guy who picks up the discarded bags at the roadside or in bushes costs the taxpayer $30-50/hr. What's the cost of the cubic yard of the earth lost for hundreds of years?

When my county was voting to ban on styrofoam, Walmart and Sam's club put up posters about how the weight of styrofoam was saving gas vs paper cups. Supposedly a hypothetical tractor trailer loaded with a full load of styrofoam would save some quantity of carbon and diesel.

End of the day, waste is waste and it is difficult to account for the cost of discarded materials in a meaningful way.

<comment><USER9> >How do you capture the cost of the plastic litter?

WRT the parent comment, glass bottles can too be litter. I don't think they're relevant here.

<comment><USER8> Reusable glass bottles by their nature have a lower litter rate because there is a deposit associated with them.

Even the modest $0.05 deposit in many states results in 80% recycling rate for soft drink containers, versus about 35-40% for other plastic containers. At the co-op that I used to work at, reusable glass milk bottles had a $1 deposit and 95% return rate.

When I volunteered on an "adopt a highway" program through an employer when I was in college, we'd clean up a couple of thousand yards of urban highway shoulder and collect around a thousand gallons of trash. Plastic bags, plastic bottles and coffee cups were about half of the objects picked up. The rest ranged from the gross to the unusual (an iron bath tub).

<comment><USER9> In some states, many plastic bottles also have a deposit. I have never heard of a $1 deposit, but I assume it's very effective with certain audiences.

<comment><USER10> We have a ~25c deposit here, and it really does help reduce the amount of waste. There are also "deposit shelves" on most public garbage cans, so you can leave the bottle for someone else to deposit, if you can't or won't. That way they don't have to rummage through the garbage for it.

Local music festivals have also started introducing a ~$1 deposit on plastic cups. It really helps clean up in front of the stages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> speaking as an automotive engine mechanic, another problematic plastic youll encounter is stuff that goes in your car or light truck.

these plastics are doped with chemicals to help them withstand rodents, cold weather, or excessive heat/UV. The panels from a 1993 Saturn, while revolutionary in their dent resistance, are landfill fodder. No one will touch them. Certain parts near the ECU will also come doped with electromagnetic shielding.

The PHB's at BMW apparently got pretty fired up around fibre reinforced plastics around 2010 as well...so much so that most components like radiators, pumps and switches are all glass fibre reinforced polyplastics. These cant get recycled, even though they contain metal parts that often can.

<comment><USER12> >These cant get recycled, even though they contain metal parts that often can.

Well, you can grind up the entire part and density separate the metal. Of course, you have ground up plastic stuff now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some recycling practices I've come across:

Michigan - All soft drinks (and similar beverages) carry a $0.10 fee a the point of sale that you recoup when you recycle them. A few states seem to do $0.05, but at $0.10 people seem to start to care a lot more. Growing up there, almost everyone kept a pile of cans in their garage that they would take in to recycle. Almost all supermarkets had machines that you can deposit your cans/bottles in to get refunds. After parties in college, students are meticulous to recycle the cans because it would mean 10% off the price of the next party.

Cambridge, MA - Single stream recycling. Just throw everything in to the same recycling bin and the city sorts it. Makes it much easier to recycle but I'm sure this is expensive.

Egypt - When I was there, a coca cola from a corner shop came in a glass bottle and cost about $0.25 (USD). But you had to drink it there so they could recycle the bottle. If you wanted to take it with you, you'd pay twice as much. Personally, I loved drinking it out of the glass bottles, which are also very easy to clean, sterilize and reuse.

Miami, FL - Basically no one recycles. I've been in vegan cafes (not to stereotype, but the sorts of places you'd expect to see eco-consciousness) that don't have bottle recycling bins. My apartment building doesn't provide a means to recycle bottles, so if I wanted to do so, I'd need to drop them off somewhere (which I'm pretty sure isn't close by). As a result, I don't recycle plastic.

Interestingly, more and more buildings in Miami are recycling boxes. What I recently learned is that because of online delivery, cardboard boxes have proliferated causing a whole industry of recycling companies for these. People will actually pay you (I think about $100/pallet) for used boxes, so all of the apartment/condo buildings are getting in on the action.

In any case, I wish we would address the root cause of the problem, which is too much packaging. I've had Amazon packages with boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes. Every time I buy cereal, I'm buying a thick bag inside of a box. Our culture has too much packaging.

<comment><USER14> Interestingly it looks like the Michigan bottle bill was enacted in 1978 when $.10 was more like $.40 today

<comment><USER15> FWIW, I think 10 cents is probably sufficient. We have a 10 cent deposit here in Oregon. As a result, on the night before trash day in our neighborhood there is always a lady going through the recycling bins to pull out the cans and bottles with deposits. Growing up in Los Angeles, where they also have a deposit, it was common to see homeless people pushing trains of shopping carts down major thoroughfares filled with cans and bottles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You're probably best off looking at the instructions from your town if you're in the US.

<comment><USER17> Second this. Whoever collects your trash (municipal or commercial) will likely have instructions posted for what is and isn't recyclable. If you can't find it, call or email them. It's almost guaranteed that someone will give you a good response, because some items like plastic bags will actively jam or clutter sorting machinery.

On that note, plastic bags from grocers (labeled carrier bags in the article) are almost never accepted by recycling centers for the above reason. However, there is likely a grocer nearby that will accept those bags for recycling. I think all Wal-Mart stores will accept these bags.

<comment><USER4> Our municipality will not accept plastic shopping bags because they say there is no market for them.

Some of the supermarkets do take them but I have to suspect that they just truck them to a landfill.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reverse supply chain disassembly into raw resources for reuse is not being done in any meaningful way except for a glass, some chips, paper, precious metals and a few other things. We really need a large upgrade in the detection, cleaning, sorting, disassembly, prep for reuse and bulk source materials creation of human waste streams (garbage and recycling).

It starts with detection and sorting robots (one example: [https://www.amprobotics.com](https://www.amprobotics.com)). Add sensors to tell organic materials from plastics, sort into cleaning. Once cleaned use sensors to detect one type of plastic from another, then sort plastic types.

If one type of plastic is bound to another with a metal screw, use a disassembly robot to get the screw out.

Once sorted, use standard techniques to turn single plastic parts into bulk plastic materials ready for reuse. (Ex. of do-it-yourself version for HDPE [https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Blocks-out-of- HDPE-m...](https://www.instructables.com/id/Making-Blocks-out-of-HDPE-milk- jugs/))

Using machine learning and the latest in robotics, this entire cascade could be accomplished but the business model is broken. The machinery would be too expensive to pay back with the value of the recycled materials. Instead we need to value the effort of keeping these pollutants out of the general environment. Carbon credits are a great example of how this value can be created.

Create a plastics pollution credits marketplace where you get paid to keep plastics out of landfills. Now maybe the robots, sensors, and recycling technologies are cost effective.

<comment><USER19> If there was actually political will for carbon credits or waste reduction I would much rather it go to a far more efficient target - reduce the amount of waste in the first place instead of making incredibly complicated recycling robots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sounds like a robot that sorts at the trash collection facility is a good startup idea!

Seriously, with all the talk about automated cars, and robotic this-and-that, you'd think we'd just have robots do all the sorting.

<comment><USER21> The best thing of all would be having the cost of recycling included in the price of the product. Then manufacturers would be incentivized to make recycling as effective as possible.

<comment><USER22> Also, expand the bottle bill to include all recyclable containers, not just beverage bottles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There should be a better set of symbols focused on recyclablity. I'm sure people see a symbol with a group of arrows in a cycle and assume it must be recyclable.

<comment><USER24> There should be a symbol that says not-recyclable! Which would be great when my SO tries to put another milk carton in the cardboard recycling again.

<comment><USER25> Some places _do_ recycle milk cartons though.

<comment><USER24> Ooooh, my wife is going to love this lol.</comment></comment></comment></comment>