Mirrored display face-to-face pair programming setup - <AUTHOR> http://pivotallabs.com/users/jsusser/blog/articles/1505-pairing-tete-a-tete

<comment><USER2> I like it.

For a while, we had a couple people who really liked pair programming at work. Our desks really, really weren't fit for that. They went through a lot of things and finally settled on 1 person having the work computer, and the second remoting into it. They would sit at their own desks, which were close enough to talk, if loudly.

Other than a few latency issues, it seemed to work pretty well for them.

This setup, though, would have been MUCH preferred.

As for the cost of the second monitor... Most non-pair places buy 2 computers AND 2 monitors... Our stations at work even have 2 monitors per computer, with only 1 developer at it.

I think the cost of the second monitor is a very small price to pay for efficiency.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand the concept of pair programming. It seems to me that the keyboard clashes, while able to be avoided, would be rather annoying and be less efficient. I could see collaborative editors working out much better.What does the second programmer do while the first one is writing code

<comment><USER4> You write code together. Typing is a minor part of creating software.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one here who hates the very idea of pair programming?

<comment><USER6> This may actually be a symptom of hating your co-workers.

There are people I like to pair with and people I am not as productive when paired with.

Try to pair with someone you like.

<comment><USER5> I prefer to discuss the design with co-workers and then work on my own. I'm more efficient that way.

<comment><USER6> Don't measure only your productivity - measure the team. When you pair with someone with a different skill-set, some learning also happens.

A good analogy is with sports. In a good team, every player knows what the other is doing, not because they can observe each other, but because they know each other so well they can predict what will happen in the field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never tried pair programming, and I'm not convinced it would be a good idea for most programmers out there. I like to be able to think alone, and sit and reflect upon things, then go back into discussion with my colleagues either via "real life conversation" or via GTalk or e-mail.

I'd be willing to check it out for the sake of not rejecting it without cause. However, finding a co-programmer that is a correct match seems to be the biggest challenge.

PS It's good to see that your workers also have decent chairs, and not just gymballs. :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems like the tables don't need to be so deep, which would help use less space. Maybe not, though,

I do something similar when I'm pairing, but we just sit on opposite sides of a conference room table. The offset is key so you're not constantly leaning over to see the other person.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hey Josh, what if I want to turn my head to the right to look at my pair? One of the things I need ergonomically is to even out the twists in my spine. Seems at a place like Pivotal you might want to encourage people to do the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Switching sides is good when you're sitting side-by-side. But I haven't noticed that there's enough neck twisting in the tete-a-tete configuration for that to be an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone ever tried pair programming with a collaborative editor? EG: gobby.

<comment><USER11> Good question. In general, what happens to this setup when two programmers use different editors, say vim/Emacs/TextMate?

<comment><USER12> It sucks. I just started a new job with lots of pair programming and all vim users. Struggle.

<comment><USER6> Quit complaining. You could have ended inside a Visual Studio shop...

See? I could be much worse.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


You Don't Need Superstar Developers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lunarlogic.io/2017/effective-collaboration-superstar-developers/ <comment><USER2> It depends so much on what you're building. If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars.

If you're building the average CRUD-plus-workflow application, the last thing you want are superstars who are going to get bored with routine work. Then they'll go off over-engineering some minor feature or spending weeks at a time inventing some algorithm you don't need instead of building the product you do need - just to keep themselves from going stir crazy.

What you really want are people who are technically not outstanding but quite capable and have very strong soft skills. People who can work well as part of a team; people who mentor and learn well; people who follow through on their tasks; people who not only can, but want to understand your product and business so they can make small decisions independently and well as they work; people who are good at prioritizing their own work; people who are good at identifying risk and knowing when it's worth the time to address; people who are good at communicating with both teammates and management.

Although you might argue that people with several or all these qualities are rare enough to be superstars in their own way, they're not superstars in the sense often discussed in forums like HN.

<comment><USER3> In other words, you want an office drone with minimal intellectual curiosity who is docile, does what they are told, and works well with others.

<comment><USER4> Speaking as an office drone who is docile and does what he's told and has minimum intellectual curiosity with regards to the software he's tasked with building, I don't get much done compared to the superstars around here who can put out 3000 lines of code a week, building out entire new features and workflows from scratch with beautiful, clean, well-organized code. I disagree with the suggestion that superstars (a.k.a. extremely productive and capable coders) do poorly on ordinary work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of my most useful insights in software development is that no matter how smart you are, if you write code that can't be understood by a junior developer, it means that you didn't do a good job writing that code.

<comment><USER6> And the reason that "the code is self-documenting" is a bad smell is because in 3 months even the 'rock star' who wrote it won't remember without appropriate help (eg comments).

I've worked with some pretty smart developers in some pretty interesting roles, and the people cock-sure of themselves are rarely anything other than a poisonous danger to overall performance and deliverables typically.

I say this as a lone wolf by inclination, though also unexpectedly happy on a trading floor with hundreds of people around not entirely managing their emotional interactions!

<comment><USER7> Besides, code speaks to the compiler/runtime; comments speak to the human.

\- The machine need to know _HOW_ something should happen. That's code.

\- The human needs to understand _WHY_ that thing should happen that way.

These are two different objectives, and good quality code weaves the two in the appropriate measure.

Having said that, I don't believe all code should be reduced to the subset that a junior dev can understand. Keep it simple when possible, yes. But don't limit yourself, otherwise it's just a shift to verbosity, eating into the finite attention span within the brain. Rather, if the intent is properly documented, then the junior devs can still work on the parts of the code they understand, and reach out to a senior dev when they need to touch the part they don't understand, because even if they don't quite grasp the "how", they can follow the "why" in the code.

<comment><USER8> yeah. I've seen a lot of comments like:

        // Sleep for 10 minutes
        sleep(15*60)

Unfortunately, the compiler cannot check your comments. Don't put facts that are better looked up in the actual code and that they only risk getting out of sync with the code.

<comment><USER7> That's a useless comment. A better one would be:

        // Prevent the two tasks from running right after each other,
        // to reduce load when this is run frequently
        sleep(15*60)

Even the most junior dev can infer that a multiplication by 60 for a sleep function probably means the unit is seconds and we want 15 minutes. No need to spell that out. But why sleep for 15 minutes and not just carry on to the next task? _THAT_ is what the comment is for.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Comments are for intent, not what the code does. If I want to know what the code does, I can just read the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think most of this is, or should be, uncontroversial. While it's incredibly important to avoid bad developers, once you hit a certain high level of technical ability other traits become more important. Besides, this isn't a fixed scale. Except for a few outliers, the concept of "more skilled" doesn't really have a meaning once you pass a certain level.

At that point, what many shops do is hire people they enjoy being around, which is usually a shorthand for hiring people just like them, and then create all sorts of pseudo-psychological justification for it. The truth is that one day isn't going to tell you much about a dev. Some people are really good when first meeting strangers, some people are very uncomfortable for at least a week. Everyone deals with that nervousness differently, and on the other side, most people are incredibly unaware of their own prejudices that might be affecting their one-day reaction to a new person.

At the end of the day, there's really no magic formulas for creating great teams.

</comment><comment><USER11> There is a third measurement. Experience. And the superstar developers tend to have more of it, although not exclusively.

Specifically they have probably seen and done the problem you are trying to solve already and don't need to spend as much time learning and researching.

Less seasoned developers take a lot of mentoring and not every company can do that. In fact the words "mentor" and "train" are nowhere in this article.

Granted you don't have to be a superstar to have experience. And also, on some projects (like CRUD as someone else mentioned) less experienced developers have plenty enough experience to do the job.

There is also the added benefit of experienced developers being able to see when something is being done the hard way. I've seen many cases in my career where a less experienced developer didn't know a tool or technique and would have (or did) go down the more expensive and time consuming path.

What this article should be (and i think might be getting at slightly) is "you don't need superstar developers if you have superstar mentors." If you have neither you're in for longer development time and higher cost over time.

The flip side of the coin is that superstars also have a tendency to favor projects that are mentally / academically challenging which leads to over- engineering or boredom and attrition.

</comment><comment><USER12> Team dynamics are of course critical, but part of that dynamic is "game recognizes game". Having highly skilled developers makes it easier to have an overall highly skilled team... and ironically that makes it easier to be selective for factors like "team dynamics". It's when you have weaker developers that you have conversations like, "we are just going to have to put up with the a __hole because without them we 'd be really screwed".

</comment><comment><USER13> Yeah, hire below-average developers instead and never end the job of cleaning up.

I heard about startup that changed team three times, and had to rewrite codebase likewise.

<comment><USER14> I fail to see where they said "below average developers".

Unless you think the average is "superstar".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > In our case, we want a new hire to be able to act as an independent > contributor, i.e. their work doesn't have to be double-checked. We also > focus a lot on craftsmanship since it means that we all are getting better > at what we do and at a good pace.

Maybe this varies between cities and job markets but when I read that baseline description he gives in an off-hand manner for the programmers he hires, I think I would probably be calling them "superstars". I don't know if the availability of skilled employees is great in Krakow, but when FizzBuzz type tests are still filtering a large percentage of applicants, it makes it sound like it's from another world.

That's my concern when reading these kinds of hiring articles, it feels very different to how hiring looks when you aren't privileged to have an abundance of skilled candidates available.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's always interesting to work with geniuses, but I think..

If your business model is based on your employees being geniuses, then you probably have a wrong model.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would add a second element to the title "You Don't need Superstar Developers: You Need High-Acheivers"

The challenge is really having a mixed team of high talent and minimal talent. While yes, those who are of lower talent will learn more from the super talented, the inverse is not always true.

I have found many lazy (or at least not super motivated) devs who have the required minimum competence level, but are not super driven to crank out high quality work. This then makes me not want to work as hard.

This is a little different in that in general companies should go after high- achievers, rather than a minimum technical competence.

<comment><USER9> I believe Spolsky summarized it as:

      1. Smart.
      2. Gets things done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well that's a broad statement. We don't all need the same thing.

<comment><USER19> Tomorrow from Gamesutra: "Developers are dead. Good developers don't have to be your audience!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Team working skills, business understanding, the ability to communicate from a social constructive point and an openness to working with prototyping in consumer focused project groups are much more important abilities than technical skills in a lot of modern development.

Superstars and best practice masters can be important, but all those enterprise applications we build on all the right practices are being replaced by web-apps, microservices and a range of other things, effectively rendering all the brilliant work useless because no one ever revisited shit.

I get why you'd want a technical superstar for certain things, like developing your long term libraries, but for most tasks a shitty programmer who is business savvy and actually capable of talking to non-it people will deliver a better end project.

Of course a lot of superstar developers do the other things really well, as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> _Evenness of communication is about giving everyone roughly equal chance to speak up, not having some parties dominate the conversation._

in my work experience, there are almost always one or two leads who dominate the conversation.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why wouldn't you try to get the best developer you can pay for?

<comment><USER23> See "We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest":

[https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/](https://danluu.com/programmer- moneyball/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> the real question is, can you afford Superstar Developers?

<comment><USER25> Yes because there's no real agreed upon definition of "super star" developer. So we're all super stars?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> True, mostly. You might steel need few of them to lead by example.</comment>


Ask HN: What has been your biggest "a-ha" moment and how has it changed you? - <AUTHOR> What has been the biggest "a-ha" moment or epiphany in your life thus far and how has that changed you? <comment><USER2> That the past is immutable. Once I accepted it (obviously it was something I knew, but acceptance is another matter), a lot of worry and anxiety fell away, almost instantly. I stopped replaying moments of regret in my mind, and became more present in the current day. Learn from the past, but don't get caught up trying to fix it. Act in the present to create the future that you want.

The second, related, was the realization that while I had some degree of success in life (good friends, ok job, good pay), I had coasted. I had not taken control of my life, I had just done the things that seemed like what I ought to do, without deliberation. This hadn't led me to a bad position, but it hadn't brought me where I wanted. I'm still not there, but I can see the paths now and I can make choices (in my employment opportunities, in my actions within those jobs, relationships, etc.) to take me down the paths I want.

The third, is that every moment is there to be lived. Until about 5 or 6 years ago I was very much the "live for the weekend" sort. I got through the week, but everything that really happened or mattered in my life was on Saturday and Sunday. That's when I did the things I wanted, work left me so stressed (perhaps just an excuse) that nothing happened during the week, in the evenings. One day I realized how much time I was wasting, I put down the video games and I started going out and doing the things I wanted. I organized events with friends, took up athletics that I'd long ago set aside, and while my job was still pretty meh, my life was substantially improved. I had something to do after work, and it wasn't lay around feeling exhausted (I still was), it was to be present. To learn, to socialize, to do what I wanted to do.

These realizations were all related.

</comment><comment><USER3> _If something is a game to you things become way easier._

You can tap in to that feeling even when something is more serious.

Especially useful for job interviews, salary discussions, not taking a business emergencies too personal, but also for flirting (though especially in love the "seriousness" of the situation can overwhelm you).

Sadly I have no secrete for you on how to experience this view or feeling a first time.

\---

 _Professionals are not as perfect as one might think._

Helps with imposter syndrome, with understanding how much more you know about your body than your doctor and with seeing the value in a plurality of expert opinions.

\---

 _It 's OK to be "mediocre"_

Another one to cope with success stories of the lucky and privileged ones everywhere and the expectations of others towards you. Success would be nice, but there are bigger joys in life and the cost/risk/benefit calculation for making it big just doesn't cut it.

And having no picture book career doesn't mean to be normcore¹ either.

\---

 _Sophistication in taste can make it diverge from what is purely pleasant_

This one is a more personal one and more the revelation of a dilemma than a revelation itself. I think if you are really in to art/music/food there will be less overlap between tickling your brain and soothing pure aesthetics/pop/kitsch.

I think this also drives many good artists out of pop culture and in to obscurity.

\---

¹ Good (arty) article about it: "It used to be possible to be special — to sustain unique differences through time, relative to a certain sense of audience. As long as you were different from the people around you, you were safe. But the Internet and globalization fucked this up for everyone." [https://khole.net/dl?v=4](https://khole.net/dl?v=4) (pdf)

</comment><comment><USER4> After nearly 50 years on this planet, a few in no special order:

If our imagination is limitless, our body and mental aptitude are not, which can be painful to realize but acceptance makes for a more gentle attitude towards ourselves and life in general.

Most people would rather be wrong in company than right alone.

Everything there is to experience and enjoy in life, family, friends, things, is not ours, it's borrowed and we don't know when we will have to give it back.

In everything lie its opposite: you can be peaceful in pain, relaxed in tumultuous time or sad in what would be considered good circumstances. There's very little correlation between our experiences and our mind states.

Most people are good but are confused, some (edit: few) are evil. Nothing to do about it besides avoiding the second group.

You can learn about the universe in a pebble, while traveling the world and stay ignorant.

Life is 95% boring, 5% sublime.

</comment><comment><USER5> That you can examine your negative thoughts/emotions mindfully, let them play out and then pass away. They rarely return, and the number of thoughts that trouble me has dropped ~95% in the last few years.

</comment><comment><USER6> A lot of life advice given by other people, even successful people, is riddled with arrogance, jealousy, and sabotage. Its not intentional, but no advice is ever given in a vacuum.

<comment><USER7> In this same vein I've leaned to ignore those on the edges of the distribution curve. They likely got there by luck.

<comment><USER6> They also usually got there by going 100% all in on some field or way of life. Which means they will commonly tell you all other fields/paths/ways of life are bad, as they had to convince themselves of that to take the risk of living such an undiversified life. Its a weird thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a great question, and a very difficult one to answer/convey in words, as I find these types of moments are very personal and based so much on individual circumstances.

The most valuable realizations I have made at various times in my life tend to revolve around recognizing precious small windows of time and opportunity that deserve more attention, such as getting the most out of relationships, education, careers, etc.

Again, it is hard to quantify and often I find that they come at the expense of having neglected to fully recognize an opportunity that has passed. But learning from these "mistakes" can be as equally valuable.

Most recently, this understanding has helped me to emphasize experiences with my young children before the opportunity passes. While I may have some anxiety around neglecting some shorter-term responsibilities, I know that I will never look back and wish I had spent less time with my kids. But it is surprisingly easy to let everyday life creep in and distract me from that realization. So I continue to draw from both times where I know I could have been more present and great memories and accomplishments from successfully doing so in advance.

</comment><comment><USER9> TLDR; I found the need for a bullsh*t detector

This isn't the biggest, but I had a moment like this last year. I realised that almost everything published, and some people I interact with professionally, are pushing an agenda and warping reality to suit their own ends. It sounds naive now, but I used to create content for the love of it and to for greater understanding (through writing, music, art), I had no angle, and I thought others were doing the same. It's now my view that 99.9% of conversations, posts, articles, books etc are some one or some group pushing an agenda to either get more money, power, or influence. It's actually quite hard, I think, to get to the objective truth anymore. One example, I know a good salesman who sets himself up a trusted consultant - but is pushing you in the direction of whatever product he getting commission for at that moment and time. It's like Orwellian double speak - 'the consultant' is someone you've brought in to help you but are in fact helping themselves. Further, any publication produced by a business will support their worldview and why you should buy their product.

It's changed me in the following way. I try to strip away the entire facade to see where either the money changes hands, or where the advantage is for the producer of the content (cui bono). When looked at in this simple way, you soon see what's really going on.

<comment><USER10> Then how do you cope with the constant feeling of seeing people as enemy ? recently I read Adlerian Psychology, from The Courage To Be Disliked [1]. Adlerian adviced we should see people as comrades as opposed to enemy, if people taking advantages of us, is their own task, not us. that way you live a life a simple way.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Be-Disliked-yourself- happines...](https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Be-Disliked-yourself-happiness- ebook/dp/B074TWG8V7)

<comment><USER9> I'll take a look at this book, I haven't heard of it before. Thanks. I guess I don't see people as the enemy (but I'll watch out for that as it could be easily done), rather I try to see what they are trying to achieve, such as financial gain or otherwise, and make a decision from there. Rather than getting swept up in the reality they are projecting. In Meditations there's a passage about seeing things for what they are, like good wine is just grapes, the best steak is just a cow and so on.its about stripping away the layers of advertising/propaganda to see the objective truth.

<comment><USER9> The quote from Meditations that I mentioned is the second one below, the first is more succinct;

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth"

"Like seeing roasted meat and other dishes in front of you and suddenly realizing: This is a dead fish. A dead bird. A dead pig. Perceptions like that—latching on onto thing and piercing through them, so we see what they really are. That's what we need to do all the time—all through our lives when things lay claim to our trust—to lay them bare and see how pointless they are, to strip away the legend that encrusts them."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Don't base your self worth solely on your accomplishments. There are so many smart people in the world. You may have been one of the smartest in your high school, but the bar was much lower then. Every electronic device you touch or see in the world was designed by a team of smart people. Forming your identity around being smart is a losing battle. It's ok to be mediocre.

</comment><comment><USER12> Instead of chasing to be the best at some one skill, its more rewarding to be great at one skill and good at another semi-related skill.

</comment><comment><USER13> Knowing that most of my stress comes from extrapolating and cascading the worse case scenarios into the future. Meditation helped me understand how such scary nightmares originate from simple problems that can be overcome. Once I understood that, they were no longer scary.

</comment><comment><USER14> \- Ideas are not quite entirely worthless, they're just close to it. There are exceptions, however they're very few and very far between. Being able to execute is half the battle, the idea is maybe 1-3%. I was a teenager during the dotcom bubble and I was mesmerized by it. I had to unlearn all sorts of bad notions that the bubble years had imprinted into my brain about how you build Internet companies.

\- The concept of knocking down the first bowling pin when building an Internet service, or really any type of business. Also known as finding a market small enough to own when getting started. The smallest segment you need to go down to such that you own a dominant position from which you can move outwards from. Peter Thiel has widely discussed these ideas, and I've always liked Chris Dixon's blog on this:

[https://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin- strategy](https://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy)

\- The various concepts around value investing. It has its own sphere of ideas and approaches to not just equity investing, but understanding how to value something in most any transaction or business in general. From Ben Graham, to Buffett, to Seth Klarman and several others. In my early to mid 20s they hugely influenced how I approach investing and making various financial value judgments.

\- Ruthlessly simplify your products. Get down to the most simple form of what your thing is. Remove, remove, remove, remove shit from it until you're afraid you're about to break it, and then remove some more unnecessary shit. Do I really need that feature? No, toss it. Do not add more than necessary until users / customers tell you they absolutely require it, and even then maintain some healthy skepticism that that is actually true. When I was young I used to believe there was immense value in adding to, making something big (and usually complex); the exact opposite is more often true, the value in your concept is unlocked for your audience thanks to simplicity, with complexity acting as a barrier (a form of intense friction) to adoption and understanding.

\- Focus is one of the most important things in life. Multi-tasking is bullshit, almost entirely a lie as a concept. When I was in my early 20s I was the type that would persistently get distracted wanting to build all sorts of things. I'd juggle three or four projects at a time, with frequently predictable results. I'd have an idea that intrigued me and off I'd go to build it, with a smattering of other projects in various stages of non- completion. Some of this is chalked up to liking the first 1/2 to 3/4 of a project and disliking what comes after. Maturity was accepting the often unenjoyable grind that is required to make something successful. Losing or splitting focus is disastrous if you want to make something successful. Figure out how to control your focus, hone that skill; it doesn't always have to be set to ON, you can turn it off when you don't need to be so diligent (because it can require a lot of exhaustive effort for some people). I've always liked the generic saying about a diamond: incredible pressure on a small point for a very long time. That's how you make something successful.

\- Exceptionally few opinions have any value. Very likely most of the people you know, they're not experts at what you're working on, they probably do not know better than you, their advice is likely _worthless_ ; do not take their advice, do not seek their advice as it pertains to the specifics of your area of work. Seeking their advice on broader life-business things or generic business issues, sure, that might make sense. Only seek advice from people that are experts - or as close to it as you can get - on the thing you're seeking advice on. Everyone has an opinion, so if you ask someone, the odds are they'll give it to you, even if they shouldn't due to their own ignorance. People are typically terrible at self-censoring when it comes to throwing around advice about subjects they know little about.

<comment><USER6> "\- Exceptionally few opinions have any value. Very likely most of the people you know, they're not experts at what you're working on, they probably do not know better than you, their advice is likely worthless; do not take their advice, do not seek their advice as it pertains to the specifics of your area of work. Seeking their advice on broader life-business things or generic business issues, sure, that might make sense. Only seek advice from people that are experts - or as close to it as you can get - on the thing you're seeking advice on. Everyone has an opinion, so if you ask someone, the odds are they'll give it to you, even if they shouldn't due to their own ignorance. People are typically terrible at self-censoring when it comes to throwing around advice about subjects they know little about."

Yup this is my opinion too. Took me way too long to realize it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Read a well-known academic text on sociobiology (no longer recall title), and provided real enlightenment for me on how romantic relationships work. Took a while, but now in a marriage that's aligned with those principles, and it's working out really well.

<comment><USER16> This sounds almost as intriguing as Fermat's scribbles in the margins.... "Got a great proof, no room here, brb" (I paraphrase). Hope it comes back to your mind!

<comment><USER15> Looking on Amazon, I think it was probably one of Edward O. Wilson's books. Probably "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis".

I was particularly struck by the typical behaviors of mates in primitive societies, and especially patterns that indicated a partner was unhappy in a relationship and/or trying to get rid of their mate.

We're not so far away from those that came before.

<comment><USER16> Thanks for replying with the potential book title! I'll take a look at it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Separating what you want to achieve from how. A simple idea that has massively changed my life. I'm sure I was told/read it lots before but the 'a-ha' moment only came when I had to work it out for myself.

<comment><USER18> Could you care to elaborate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> To eat food is to build a healthy body, not pleasure. It is a means to an end. That made me lose 60lbs and live happier with myself, while still eating good food, doing only one or maximum 2 meals a day.

</comment><comment><USER20> That alcohol and I can't be friends. Nor can I "have just one drink".

>and how has that changed you?

I'm healthier and am no longer drinking several fifths a week so saving money.

\---

In the past year and a half I've also realized that those with the means to really make change in the world are largely full of hot hair, hopium and unrealistic demands/desires:

Individuals love to talk about poverty, hunger, unclean water, while they sit on billions and even trillions of dollars. The Giving Pledge has over a trillion dollars of net worth pledged, go randomly look at what some of the individuals have pledged money are actually doing... funding cryptocurrency projects (Brian Armstrong, GiveGrypto), funding anti-bullying (MacKenzie Bezos, Bystander Revolution), politics (MacKenzie Bezos, With Honor, a nonpartisan organization working to increase the number of veterans in political office), funding post-grad education at Cambridge (David and Claudia Harding, $130 million donation to a school with a 6.441 billion GBP endowment...).

Investors for example want unreal returns. YC for example wants to give you a six figure check in hopes of you becoming a billion dollar company within a handful of years. This is not my opinion and can be found by reading their various material and statements from those in charge.

Investors will fund insane-sounding things, some of which are quite laughable to anyone outside of the bay area, such as (randomly taken from [https://yclist.com/](https://yclist.com/) ):

\- Poppy 'Poppy makes it easy for parents to find high quality childcare with just a text' While I'm not a parent, I'm not going to just fire off a text for child care. I'm going to want to meet multiple people, I'm going to check mycase for my state to see what sort of legal trouble they may have had, I'm going to go through their social media feeds, I'm going to want to talk to references...

\- Basically all of the blockchain companies. The Bitcoin network alone uses an insane amount of electricity, more than some first-world nations and has yet to gain any sort of adoption aside from speculators. Even the companies that accept cryptocurrencies don't do the bulk of their business via them.

\- Flock 'makes wireless security systems for neighborhoods'. Good luck trying to get neighborhoods to agree on something, even those with HOAs.

\- Gameday 'Play fantasy sports with friends on Facebook Messenger' basically "let's make money off of another platform before regulation or changes by that platform put us out of business".

\- Leon & George 'Buying and owning indoor potted plants made easy'... or you could go to Target or Walmart and buy a potted plant.

\- Origin 'Keurig for healthy smoothies.' It takes a minute to throw some produce into a blendtec/vitamix, blend, pour into your container of choice and rinse the pitcher out...

\- Yoshi 'Gas delivered to your car so you never have to go to the gas station again.' what... I drive by like 5 gas stations on the way to work, and again on the way back, and don't have to sit around waiting for someone to deliver gas to my car... I can stop if the price has drastically gone up but one station still has cheap, or you know... when I need gas and have 3 minutes to spare.

</comment><comment><USER21> When I was in my early 20's I once came home during a thunderstorm and walked into my house to discover no electricity. I then proceeded to do what I did every single day, which is walk into my bedroom and plug in my phone.

Only it didn't beep like it usually did to indicate it was charging. so I pulled the cord out of my phone and reinserted it. I did this multiple times. I even remember thinking to myself "you know, if the electricity wasn't out I could turn on the lights to see if I'm just not inserting it correctly". Then I reinserted it again.

And then the figurative light went on. I just sat the phone down, walked away, and laughed my ass off.

I was a recent grad with a double major in CS & Math, so by no means stupid. But I'm still a dumbass. We're all dumbasses.</comment>


What Would Feminist Data Visualization Look Like? - <AUTHOR> https://civic.mit.edu/feminist-data-visualization <comment><AUTHOR> More critical analysis of data is appreciated.

This article reminds me of Radical Statistics - [http://www.radstats.org.uk/](http://www.radstats.org.uk/) which may or may not have more geographers than other academics.</comment>


Ask HN: Why don't windows and mac apps default directories the way emacs does? - <AUTHOR> I've been using Mac OS's and Windows OS's since the '80's like everyone else. I <i>still</i> do not like and do not even get what standard, modern apps use to determine what directory to start out in when you do File -> Open....  And I still don't get what directory they choose to use when you do File -> Save As....  In Emacs, it's always been simple and right: when you do "open" (c-x c-f), it defaults to the same directory as the document you're looking at (the current buffer), and when you do Save As..., it also defaults to saving in the same directory as the document you're looking at (the current buffer).  I waste so much time in "modern" apps navigating to the directory I want when it's almost always just the directory of the current file. I wonder if I'm just missing something about the way it works, but I would like to know what is the rationale, if anyone knows.  The only other time I asked someone seriously about this, a Windows app developer, was when I suggested defaulting the way I'm used to, and he said that was a great idea, he'd never thought of that. I thought that he might have been pulling my leg though. I kind of don't get it. :) <comment><USER2> Obviously it depends on the app. Most apps I use do it intelligently. Maybe I am avoiding the dumb ones?

I suspect your developer friend is more like the typical developer. In that they never thought about that.

I cannot tell you how many apps / web sites I have used where it is obvious that no one ever took a critical look at the user interaction. They have the pretty picture but not the functional interaction. My biggest bitch is the things that ask you to create, yet another password. Then they do not tell you what BS rules they have until you violate them. In the back of my mind I hear jerk laughing "oh no thats just not right, what wrong with you, you need Upper Lower number symbol, at least 3 of each, not repeating not adjacent on keyboard or ordinarily a note from your mother etc etc...." WTF why can they not list the rules up front. <thank you I feel better now getting that off my chest :)>

</comment><comment><USER3> > I wonder if I'm just missing something about the way it works

On Windows when you create the dialog there is a flag named "restore directory" or something like this depending on the API. It will open the dialog on the same folder you used last time for this type of dialog for this application. It's stored in the registry. Depending on the application this could be a better default than the currently opened file.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because it's called "Finder" so it'd be weird if you were already in the right place.

But seriously? You're right. Modern software is rushed out the door according to a marketing deadline. These kinds of details never get priority. Nobody gets promoted at Apple for these kinds of things.

</comment><comment><USER5> The answer is in the question: defaults. If the app developer didn't conscoiusly provide the starting directory for an open/save-as dialog it will use the system default. On Windows this will often be the directory containing the program executable which is quite useless. Blame the File open/save dialog api.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because "worse is better" ate the world a long time ago

</comment><comment><USER7> Thankfully VSCode behaves like how you describe Emacs too.</comment>


Multi-Armed Bandits and the Stitch Fix Experimentation Platform - <AUTHOR> https://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/2020/08/05/bandits/ <comment><USER2> I have mixed feelings about using multi-armed bandit for product testing like this. Regret minimization makes sense 100% as a framework if you are testing a large inventory of things - i.e. the classic examples of showing ads or recommendations - since there might be some real opportunity cost in not showing some of the things in inventory (particularly if the inventory has a shelf life). (I'm also quite surprised they don't use thompson sampling...)

For testing product features though, I feel like there is often a high long term cost to the dev team and the regret from showing users a non-optimal treatment during the experiment is pretty minimal (the regret is usually to first order only the cost of experimental bandwidth).

The team cost comes in several subtle forms:

\- in practice, bandits encourage lots of small experiments which leave behind a large surface area graveyard of code - you can mitigate this by having strict stopping points for bandit experiments

\- bandits have higher statistical power, but also higher false-positive rate; false positives can be quite high cost since they cause thrash and require time to investigate if a feature that tested well does poorly in production

\- you are introducing novelty effects over time as new sample groups get added in the dynamic allocation; probably nbd for most experiments, but it's complicated to correct for this if your experiment has novelty effects

\- there are often cyclical time-dependent changes in the composition of users being exposed (daytime vs night time, week day vs weekend, geography bc of timezone differences); also, probably nbd for most experiments, but requires complex stratification to correct for if this is an issue

I would also say that the majority of product changes have small, but measurable effects on metrics, so I'm not sure that bandits help all that much in those cases. If there are runaway successes or failures, early stopping techniques seem like a better way to free up resources - early stopping policies can be tuned to address the experiment design problems above fairly simply.

Again, this is all for product testing. I think for recommendations and personalization, contextual bandits make lots of sense.

<comment><USER3> > I'm also quite surprised they don't use thompson sampling

Half of the article talks about how they use Thompson Sampling

<comment><USER2> huh, wierd - I saw this post in Aug and can't understand how I missed that. Thanks for pointing that out - it does indeed discuss it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Setting a good objective function is pretty hard. In this context of consumer goods, it is at the intersection of three difficult problems:

\- equivalent to incentivising salespeople, which is known to be very difficult, as short term incentives often are in opposition to long term ones

\- distinguishing and dealing with spammers, robots and crawlers

\- and setting up a stable reinforcement learning behaviour even for the short term, which is tough even without the first two problems

For these reasons, naturally business partners, designers, and others will be very curious how the bandit affects the customer experience.

Many years ago to solve this I made a system that would emit a list of (suboptimal) rules to exploit the opportunities learnt from small A-B test groups (like an epsilon greedy contextual bandit). These rules were reviewed by relevant stakeholders and then explicitly deployed to production as a configuration change, which allows for manual consideration of issues in the three above areas that are hard to automate.

<comment><USER5> Producing a set of impactful decision boundaries as functions and then manually curating the functions reminds me how much work maintaining rule based systems can be. Moreover, so much time is spent on figuring out which rules might be helpful in the first place - this being partly what makes rule based systems traditionally brittle (It takes far longer to evolve the rule- based system than to work around the rules).

I really like the idea of models producing functions over values, thanks for sharing that insight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stitchfix blog posts are always very smart with a lot of equations but last time there was a article about the company on HN and the comments were saying things like 'I have explicitly told them not to send me white shirts and they keep doing it'.

I find it a bit paradoxical.</comment>


Show HN: TDD Screencast #3: Implementing Kind Sort - <AUTHOR> http://waterlink.github.io/blog/2016/02/04/tdd-number-3-kind-sort/ <comment><USER2> By watching these videos I continue to affirm my believe that TDD doesn't really lead to design, nor good tests.

In video #2 we saw the evolution of a bubble sort. In video #3 we saw a quicksort.

However, nothing in the tests lead to one design over the other. It was only in the mind of the developer, and the only difference to get to the different designs was the statement that #3 must return a new list. Which can be done (as was said) by a copy, so that didn't really drive the development or design.

In fact, there are no simple tests that can drive one implementation over the other. It's only by counting the number of swaps, or measuring the performance, and with performance requirements, that one version comes out better than the other.

One of my issues with TDD is the 'refactor' step, which is supposed to take place during green. One of the refactor transformations is "Substitute Algorithm." I've always thought that was a huge loophole as the appropriate tests for a new algorithm can be quite different than the tests for the existing algorithm, but TDD says not to worry about that.

That issue is applicable here, as #3 really is a "Substitute Algorithm" refactor of #2. It could have started with the previous sort test cases, and shown how refactor the algorithm in the TDD framework rather than redo the code from scratch. So far I haven't actually seen any of the TDD example walkthroughs do it, at least with a non-trivial example like sorting, so showing this might also be enlightening or at least novel.

A test case goal should be to convince people that the code works. The test cases here aren't enough. For example, there is no test for when values are equal, and I don't recall the spec saying duplicate values were disallowed. This is important because some broken sort implementations might get into a loop for this case.

If this were implemented in Python then there's a maximum recursion depth. I think the worst case for this quicksort implementation is if the input is sorted. So I would want to try sorting 100,000 sorted to feel more comfortable. This sort of error analysis must be part of TDD, but it doesn't really fit into the red/green test cycle because it's a test you write when you expect the code to pass, not fail.

Also, from an API perspective, if the input is the empty list then this code returns the original list, otherwise it returns a new list. I would prefer to always get a new list, so I have a better idea of ownership.

<comment><AUTHOR> By the way, I am currently researching, if it is possible to use TDD and property-based testing. It might be a pretty interesting mix, and should cover some of your points too.

Have you tried something like that?

<comment><USER2> I have no experience with property-based testing.</comment></comment></comment>


Zed follows up on the search for Matt - <AUTHOR> http://www.zedshaw.com/blog/2008-10-30.html

<comment><USER2> The most interesting part of that post is Zed's commentary on reddit. As an early reddit user I found it blunt, but it struck a chord none-the-less.

I think it's time to move the discussion from how reddit's different to how news.yc is going to prevent the same thing from happening here. It's clear (at least to me) that comment voting just promotes group-think.

It seems we have a few stop-gap solutions (i.e. moderation) but nothing yet that's practical, elegant, and effective.

<comment><USER3> I think the problem is humor.

It's fun, it gets you lots of upvotes because maybe it makes someone smile. But it's too damn easy. It short-circuits real discussion with pop culture references and snarkiness. Conversation is quickly suffocated when solid posts are blanketed with 4chan memes as responses.

<comment><USER4> Hm. That's an interesting observation, but I respectfully disagree.

It comes down again to the quality of the comment. Is it a good humorous comment (e.g., not cliched, satiric, perhaps humorous _and_ insightful, and so on), or is it a bad humorous comment (e.g., stale, not actually funny)? Right back where we started.

As Homer Simpson says, "When will people learn? Democracy just doesn't work."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You did the right thing Zed. Glad you at least have answers now.

<comment><USER6> I agree. Especially since there's a socially conditioned stigma against falling for a false alarm when trying to help. It seems to be seen as a display of hysteria on the helper's part. That's why most people act "too cool" to actually do something - better not risk that precious reputation.

Better a few false positives than a false negative.

<comment><USER7> This was three years ago: [http://kirubakaran.blogspot.com/2005/12/interesting- evening....](http://kirubakaran.blogspot.com/2005/12/interesting-evening.html) I still feel stupid for calling 911 (that I acted like some granny). You are right on about the stigma.

<comment><USER8> If you didn't do anything, you would have felt far worse. You did the right thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Manipulation by pity is the single human quality I hate the most. It might be possible to build a complete personality on avoiding to manipulate others, ever; I'm trying to.

<comment><USER10> I think the will to eschew manipulation of others is an admirable one.

You've reminded me of something I've been thinking about lately and feel like writing down.

If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground. You haven't gotten rid of X; you've fragmented your consciousness so that you're no longer aware of X, which makes you think X is gone when really it's continuing to operate. And X can work a lot more mischief now that it's autonomous from the part of you that wants to regulate it.

A straightforward example is the religious fanatic who suppresses his "demonic" impulses. We all know what such people tend to really be like.

Perhaps a more meaningful example for this forum is the kind of person who wants to overcome his fear by motivating himself to think he's not afraid and by executing certain actions to prove it. The trouble with doing this naively is that you can end up not with an absence of fear, but with unconscious fear, which continues to prevent you from doing things, only in ways you can't explain.

Of course, literature is replete with examples of this dynamic. The bottom line is that you can't minimize X in yourself by trying to eliminate it. It seems that a better strategy is to stay aware of X as it is happening. That way X and the part of you that is against X remain in the same field and there is a possibility of integration.

So, counterintuitively, if you really want to minimize something in yourself you have to accept it.

<comment><USER9> > If you try to eliminate something from your personality in a straightforward > way, what tends to happen is that it goes underground.

This sounds neat, but is it true? Executing actions really does drive away fear, moreover it seems to be the only effective way to overcome fear. If you tried it, you know. :-) Quitting smoking or stopping manipulative behavior cold turkey really does work, while the gradual approach doesn't work and is self-deceptive. I have decisively and successfully driven away certain qualities, and other people agree when asked that I no longer have them.

<comment><USER10> I don't mean to deny anything that works for you. My experience has been that the straightforward strategies stop working after a while and that at that point the game becomes one of integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FTA: "No, they don't even try to mask their collective stupidity."

This kind of behavior, being conscious of and _proud of_ one's own mediocrity, is something that has baffled me time and time again. Can someone please explain the thought process that leads to this? "People usually expect a certain level of decency and self-respect and I'm a unique, cool rebel so I'll do the opposite"?

</comment><comment><USER12> Maddox called, he wants his writing style back.

<comment><USER13> Did you read the commentary about they types of comments his post attracted on reddit? Or some of the commentary about this phenomenon here?

Do you think your comment is more typical of HN or of reddit?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Pix Kings - <AUTHOR> http://www.pixkings.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Instagram photos & videos for popular brands and celebrities.</comment>


C# and the Compilation Tax - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/05/c-and-the-compilation-tax.html <comment><USER2> Article is from 2007. The example that he gives is not valid in Visual Studio 2010.</comment>


With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases - <AUTHOR> https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/covid-19_with-no-prospects-for-profits--big-pharma-turns-back-on-new-infectious-diseases/45598436 <comment><USER2> What's needed is a new payment model for anti-infectives. This already happens at a small scale with grants from institutions like BARDA. The DOD of also does this for vaccines for biological weapons like anthrax where there is a high likelihood the drug will never be used, but a vaccine is needed because if there is an outbreak, the consequences are severe.

Basically, rather than paying for drugs on a per unit basis, you pay a lump sum for access to the drug. This solves the issues of spending $100M to develop a new treatment for some disease where there is never a outbreak and you cover none of the cost of R&D.

There have been ideas to have X-Prizes for new antibiotics. Discover a new drug for a anti-biotic resistant infection? Great, here is $500M as long as you agree to produce as much drug as needed for free or some nominal cost.

<comment><USER3> > Basically, rather than paying for drugs on a per unit basis, you pay a lump > sum for access to the drug.

Hmm... a system where uncommon but extreme spikes in the cost of care are artificially distributed so that an entire society can bear them as a group... that sounds oddly familiar...

<comment><USER4> _Please put the invisible hands of the market over your ears and wait for the drugs to trickle down._

Jokes aside - while people are justifiably pointing out the community healthcare angle, arguably this problem is exacerbated by the American FDA drug approval model, ie no corporation will fund clinical trials unless they're guaranteed a profit monopoly.

<comment><USER5> Actually, there is a market solution to this problem. I cannot claim to have thought this up, it was discussed in an episode of econtalk. Don't remember the person that was interviewed.

The idea is that big pharma companies have to publicly post a price for each of their patents. If anyone is prepared to pay that price they get the patent for that price. Next there needs to be a tax that is a percentage of the price of the patent. The money that comes from this tax needs to be funneled back into healthcare or even better go straight to the ones who are paying for the particular medicine that the patent protects.

Now the level of innovation can be set by how high the percentage of the tax is. If the tax is very low healthcare will be expensive but there can be lots of innovation. If the tax is high healthcare costs will be low but one can also not expect much innovation.

Of course, there also are some other things that need to be fixed. E.g., doctors should not get all of their schooling financed by pharma companies and so on.

The general idea of such taxes could be applicable to any sort of non- replacable entity, e.g., it could also apply to land. For one thing, this would make feudalism regarding land quite impossible, which would generally be considered a good thing.

<comment><USER6> Why would there be lots more innovation with a low tax? In the limit, that's the system we have now (0% patent tax, companies are free to price their patents however they want).

<comment><USER7> The assumption there is that the current system is already highly innovative in the U.S., which is generally accepted as true.

<comment><USER6> But the premise of this entire thread is that "With no prospects for profits, big pharma neglects new infectious diseases".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps they're behaving entirely rationally. Infectious diseases do not kill that many people compared to cancer in America.

We may have a bad "flu" year this year, with a spike of elderly deaths, but we have a bad cancer year every year.

<comment><USER9> But we don't really develop "cancer" drugs. We develop a drug that treats certain type of pancreatic cancer that give the individuals another 3-6 months to live. But curing an infectious disease can give someone another 40 years.

<comment><USER2> There are several cancer (lymphomas) that were literal death sentences a decade or two ago, but how have a very high cure rate.

It's not fair to say we don't develop cancer drugs because some, very difficult to treat cancers, haven't seen as much progress as others.

<comment><USER10> Testicular cancer is now very treatable, but before Cisplatin, the prognosis was pretty grim. I guess to grandparent's comment, we absolutely do develop chemotherapy drugs, and many don't just buy you six months, they're life- saving.

<comment><USER2> I unfortunately can't find it, but there was an interesting chart that showed overall survival in metastatic colorectal cancer.

It covered the last 30 years. Each new therapy improved survival by only 6-12 months, but each new drug was more effective than the last. Over those 30 years, the median survival went from 6 months to over 5 years.

People shouldn't discount incremental improvements because that's often how medicine progresses.

<comment><USER11> Cell type is much more relevant to curability than location.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Are there national laboratories with the capabilities to find a cure?

Is there a NASA equivalent for infectious diseases to launch a covid-19 moonshot?

<comment><USER13> The WHO is saying a vaccine is 18 months out, and I'm very curious what that means. I haven't seen any detail as to why it takes that long.

It's short enough that clearly they expect it won't be very hard, like no one would say a general cure for cancer is 18 months out. So what is preventing us from speeding it up more? Why can't it be made in 6 months, or 3 months? Is the majority of that 18 months a basic r&d phase of figuring out what will work? If so, why can't it be parallelized and sped up with more resources? Is it time for clinical trials? To ramp up manufacturing? I can't help thinking that for a disease that prevents such a big risk to society, there must be clever ways to speed up the normal process for this kind of thing, perhaps with some government involvement in funding or coordinating efforts.

<comment><USER14> > People have been saying a vaccine is 12-18 months out, and I'm very curious > what that means. I haven't seen any detail as to why it takes that long.

All the things you said are factors. Clinical trials are one of the biggest because you have multiple phases to observe to guarantee safety.

It's no use shipping a vaccine in 3 months after a small test and have everyone die in a year because of a side effect no one waited long enough to see.

Drug development and safety is a very complex space from what I've learned

<comment><USER15> Guaranteeing safety is absolutely a crucial part of it. And if you pull something out that doesn't work, giving people a false sense of immunity would also make things worse.

And safety shouldn't be underestimated. The story of dengue vaccine development is a cautionary tale. The first time you get dengue is usually not too bad, but it can be deadly if you get it again. Part of that is hypothesized to be driven by your own immune system, which, once immunized against one strain, produces antibodies against it in the next infection. However, if it's a slightly different strain of dengue the second time around, the antibodies meant to neutralize the disease are believed to make the disease more virulent instead (antibody-dependent enhancement). The immune system makes it worse. So when a dengue vaccine that didn't fully immunize against all strains was developed (not deliberately, people tried to immunize against all strains but this is a case where less efficacy than expected made things worse), it didn't make things better. It ended up priming people to get dengue.

Biology is super weird - even something as "simple" as vaccine development has a lot of unknown unknowns. And as dengue showed us, it's not just a case of "it might not work," because it could make things worse. That's why we have to run these clinical trials and take time to do things right, especially for something that would be as widely deployed as a coronavirus vaccine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the 1960s big increases in regulations on new drug development led to big cost increases, and hence less interest in non-blockbuster treatments.

<comment><USER2> Sure, but as a result we don't have problems like thalidomide popping up every decade or so. There are benefits (and drawbacks) to having a much more stringent approval process.

And probably worth adding that in public health emergencies, the FDA is more than willing to pull back on regulations in the interest of the public good.

<comment> barry-cotter You can have a stringent safety process without having _any_ efficacy process. The FDA has no incentive to approve drugs but plenty to deny them so delay is the order of the day. Delay in approving new effective drugs costs lives.

The FDA has not shown any willingness to pull back on regulations during the current COVID crisis, nor have they historically shown any such willingness. Politicians have forced them to. They have _never_ shown any organic willingness to relax regulations.

<comment><USER15> I'm not clear on whether you're arguing that the FDA should not be requiring efficacy? The FDA makes exceptions on cases of urgent need, and not having efficacy as a bar would reduce the reward for innovation - why would you spend all the time and effort to development a treatment for a disease if vitamins with no efficacy are already filling the market? False hope is dangerous, and healthcare is uniquely suited to attracting snake oil salesmen with cure-alls because of how serious health needs are - these regulations are written in blood

<comment> barry-cotter The FDA should not require efficacy testing. If it's safe let patients and their doctors do what they want. In practice that's what they do anyway, see off label prescribing which is around one fifth of all prescriptions in the US. Removing efficacy testing would double or more the number of new drugs available.

Fraud is already illegal. Doctors can already be sued for malpractice. Testing for efficacy makes no sense in a world in which off label prescribing is routine.

> Assessing the FDA via the Anomaly of Off-Label Drug Prescribing —————— > ——————

> Once a drug has been approved for some use, the FDA has almost no control > over how that drug is actually prescribed. The prescribing of drugs for non- > FDA-approved uses, called "off-label prescribing," is widespread. Drugs > prescribed off-label have not met the FDA's requirements for proving > efficacy in the off-label applications. The practice of off-label > prescribing therefore raises interesting questions. Why does the FDA, in > effect, require that some drugs be tested for efficacy but not others? If > there are good reasons for the FDA to have strong pre-approval powers > regarding efficacy, shouldn't FDA post-approval powers be commensurate? > Alternatively, if there is good reason for widespread off-label prescribing, > doesn't this call into question the FDA's pre-approval powers?

[https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=...](https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=240)

> There are also scientific reasons to replace Phase 3. The reasoning behind > the Phase 3 requirement — that the average efficacy of a drug is relevant to > an individual patient — flies in the face of what we now know about drug > responsiveness. Very few drugs are effective in all individuals. In fact, > most are not effective in large portions of the population, for reasons that > we are just beginning to understand.

> It's much easier to get approval for drugs that are marginally effective in, > say, half the population than drugs that are very effective in a small > fraction of patients. This statistical barrier discourages the > pharmaceutical industry from even beginning to attack diseases, such as > Parkinson's, that are likely to have several subtypes, each of which may > respond to a different drug. These drugs are the underappreciated casualties > of the Phase 3 requirement; they will never be developed because the risk of > failure at Phase 3 is simply too great.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/articles/A43257-2003Nov...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/articles/A43257-2003Nov14.html)

<comment><USER15> Off label use is allowed. Marketing for off label use is absolutely not allowed. Claims of off label efficacy are not remotely allowed. And the FDA has post approval powers to revoke approval for drugs not found effective. Doctor's autonomy leads to off label being allowed, and some of the legal arguments for it involve freedom of speech, not medical optimality.

Phase 3s already are no longer required, it looks like the article you linked was written in 2003? That was literally almost 17 years ago when we'd just barely sequenced the first human genome. There are entire fields of medicine - precision medicine - that literally address the whole subgroup question. Companion diagnostics are routine, rare disease approvals are up, plenty of Huntington trials in progress - that article might as well be about an alien civilization with how different things are today. Value based pricing, redefining cancer into separate genetically defined baubgroups and developing drugs for each, Gene therapy, ... It's no longer easier to get approval of a drug that's marginally successful in a large population, smaller populations with large effects make it way easier to see responses. And the 21st century cures act in 2016 evolved the regulatory landscape even more - it's like comparing Sputnik with the ISS. Yeah, they're both sattelites, but the field has come a long way in the time between the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The article mentions the difficulties with clinical trials. It makes sense, now China running hundreds of studies on coronovirus with thousands of people: [http://www.chictr.org.cn/searchprojen.aspx?title=&officialna...](http://www.chictr.org.cn/searchprojen.aspx?title=&officialname=&subjectid=&secondaryid=&applier=&studyleader=&ethicalcommitteesanction=&sponsor=&studyailment=coronavirus&studyailmentcode=&studytype=0&studystage=0&studydesign=0&minstudyexecutetime=&maxstudyexecutetime=&recruitmentstatus=0&gender=0&agreetosign=&secsponsor=&regno=&regstatus=0&country=&province=&city=&institution=&institutionlevel=&measure=&intercode=&sourceofspends=&createyear=0&isuploadrf=&whetherpublic=&btngo=btn&verifycode=&page=1) testing few drugs and their combination at a time, it's hard to do outside of epidemic.

</comment><comment><USER18> Why are we surprised? If the incentives are not for curing infectious diseases than they won't do it. For big pharma, the incentives are: keep humans sick as long as it is physically possible and charge along the way.

</comment><comment> VvR-Ox 1:0 for Capitalism vs. Humanity.

Exactly this is why the motivation to do at least some things should not be bound to earning profit.

There is common goods that we need to share, global issues that need to be addressed together and we need to find ways to achieve this if we want to develop further as a civilization.

Money must not be the sole reason why we do things or we will fail with this "strategy" and we need to come up with good ideas for an alternative and try it.

I know this will probably not make me very popular especially with people living in the US as their minds are constantly being flooded with the idea that everything straying from capitalism is socialism and therefor evil. I will post it nevertheless, down-votes don't hurt and I will write my opinion until it is censored completely.

<comment><USER19> Not sure 1:0 is accurate scoring. Most of the drugs and medical advances we have came out of capitalist systems. Not saying that capitalism is perfect or there shouldn't be government funded labs also.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I would imagine living customers and a workforce that is not quarantined would be reason enough, but hindsight is 20/20\. It would be silly if the offices of a big pharma company are closed due to an infectious disease that the big pharma company would have been best suited to tackle but cant due to neglect in fighting infectious diseases.

</comment><comment><USER21> one way around this is to develop platforms which apply to a range of diseases. why reinvent some fancy shape of atoms for each disease? it's entirely possible to develop something which works on cancer and coronavirus. just look at CRISPR, or RNAi ... master delivery and you can simply re-target the therapy toward different sequences.

Here ([https://github.com/bionicles/coronavirus](https://github.com/bionicles/coronavirus)) is code to design CRISPR-Cas13 CARVER ([https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109727651...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1097276519306987?via%3Dihub)) 30mer guides against regions of Coronavirus conserved between SARS, MERS, HKU1, and SARS-nCoV-2 (Covid-19 Virus) and not found in highly expressed Lung protein-coding RNA. Uses BioPython, Redis SADD/SISMEMBER, and tools from EMBL (Emboss Consensus and Clustal Omega Alignment) and data from NCBI. The good news is, it's probably possible to delete Coronavirus genome directly inside the lungs, without vaccines; just deliver nanoparticles or adenovirus (doesn't replicate) with an inhaler and express CRISPR-Cas13 and the gRNA using the Surfactant promoter sequence for lung-only expression of the therapy

disclaimer: I need to work on the readme and write a blog post, but the data is there and the general core works. There's ~30k guides possible and 226 target 13 longest conserved regions across 4 different outbreaks spanning 17 years of virus evolution (provides reasonable confidence these regions are necessary for the virus to function)

If anyone knows some folks in the Pharma / Biotech industry I could use help to run the tests on this, tell em to email bion at bitpharma.com

edit: readme improved. currently looking for promoter consensus sequences for lung (surfactant protein TFs like TTF-1)

</comment><comment><USER22> With the amount of economic upheaval from the coronavirus scare, I fail to see how there are no prospects for profit.

<comment><USER23> Creating value is one part, capturing it is another

<comment><USER24> Not sure why people are downvoting you. It's clearly the case that there are lots of problems you can solve that create value and make/save people money, yet don't result in you capturing any of that money for yourself. For-profit companies mostly ignore those kinds of problems by definition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "Neglects" implies that they're ignoring their responsibilities. How is this the case?

</comment><comment><USER26> I think governments should take charge in this. Look at how much the development of the ebola vaccine bounced around for years. [https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story- scientists-...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story-scientists- produced-world-first-ebola-vaccine/)

</comment><comment><USER27> If commercial incentive isn't viable then the incentive needs to change. Think of it like the military but as a medical industrial complex.

</comment><comment><USER28> The market does not solve everything, but it does create everything. Therefore we are evolving into pure consumerism.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is the part where public corporations come in.

</comment><comment><USER30> The opportunity is a generalized approach to solving these diseases which i think we are getting to finally. Thats the true promise of digital technology.

Thats how incentives gets aligned.

</comment><comment><USER31> Since COVID-19 is targeting elders, I can imagine there are evil capitalists or bureaucrats who view this pandemic as a gigantic economic stimulus for the next decade. Sorry for my evil thought.

<comment><USER32> The price of the Wirecutter's #1 recommended forehead/ear thermometer on Amazon has changed from $30 between 2016 and February 2020 to $100 since February.

[https://camelcamelcamel.com/iProven-Thermometer-Temporal- For...](https://camelcamelcamel.com/iProven-Thermometer-Temporal-Forehead- Function/product/B01H3MTVE8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> ...as they develop a vaccine for Ebola.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_vaccine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola_vaccine)

</comment><comment><USER34> How can you target "new" infectious diseases if they are really "new" every year other than by guessing the right vaccine (as they do e.g. for the flu)? I mean, what worked for SARS won't necessarily work for COVID19, even though it's also a subvariant of SARS. If this is the case, by the time you come up with a drug and take it through all the (extremely costly) stages of testing approval, it'll be too late already, and herd immunity would have obviated the need for what you've just invested billions and countless person-years into.

<comment><USER35> You can monitor existing viruses in wild animal populations and give them treatment before it mutates and goes to humans. This would be relatively cheap compared to solving the problem afterwards. We now know that bats are prime suspects for carriers of these diseases because they them selves don't get sick much from them, live is close quarters, fly and are mammals.

<comment><USER36> You'd be wasting money, though, and not necessarily saving money. Most animal diseases do not cross over to humans and IIRC, most of them that have crossed over come from farm animals. More people live in close contact with farm animals than they do things like bats.

This effort would honestly be better spent working on things humans already have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Maybe there's just some things that are common good and should be publicly funded rather then gambling on capitalism to solve it

</comment><comment><USER38> So there you have it.

Late Stage Capitalism Failure.

No ability to make a bajillion dollars in rent-seeking profit. So F it! Let the people die.

<comment><USER39> Well, if capitalism is the problem, then why don't the socialist/communist countries develop the drug instead? Or alternatively, the community could come together and they could work on coming up with the treatment as a group. But we all know that neither of these are likely to happen. Researchers need money to live, labs need money to run.

<comment> VvR-Ox Because there is no such countries until someone can prove otherwise (which will not happen because they don't exist).

Big capital put this idea inside the heads of many people living in the West and until today they really believe there is countries who are socialist/communist. Neither the GDR nor the UDSSR or China are examples for countries like that and people who know about politics, economy and society know this as a fact.

It is easy for you to criticize all alternatives at once because you have never seen any and chose to believe what the ruling party (=capitalism) makes you believe.

<comment><USER40> The classic no true communist country fallacy. Have you considered that no such country exists because it is impossible, vecause it so quickly devolves into socialist hell like in USSR, north korea?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like a good time for capital N nationalization! :)

</comment><comment><USER42> I thought the "party line" was that private industry doesn't accomplish much if anything, so isn't "big pharma" irrelevant? It makes more sense to demand higher taxes and more basic research.

<comment><USER43> The problem is that regulation is so expensive there isn't any financial motivation in researching does that are unlikely to generate massive revenue.

The reason for this is FDA is fundamentally extremely conservative. The people that run the regulatory system are just faceless bureaucrats and are risk adverse. Their pay is based on seniority and there isn't any financial motivation for them to take risks or stand out. FDA is nothing more then a collection of individuals so the motivation of the agency is a mirror image of the motivations of the people running it.

To put it bluntly:

When diseases like cancer or influenza or <insert name of any disease> kill people the diseases get blamed. But if a drug makes to it market and ends up maiming people or killing them then the FDA gets blamed.

So from the FDA's perspective it's much more important that we have ultra-safe drugs then it is to have new drugs to cure and treat diseases.

The regulators are going to take the default position that more testing and screening and expenses are good. While allowing consumers and doctors to take risks to treat diseases is bad. And over the decades it has just gotten more and more and more and more expensive to get the drugs out to the public.

And since it's too expensive to make new drug companies because of the regulators then you will never see any smaller nimble companies come in and compete with them and force the big companies to behave themselves.

This is why you see all the generic drugs being bought up in the past couple decades. During the Obama administration they signed regulatory changes that rose the cost of validating generic drugs considerably. It wasn't so expensive that it would drive generics from the market, but it's expensive enough that you can't make new generic drug companies. So the big name brand drug companies just buys them all up. And because of that they no longer face competition from generics. They own both the name brands and the generics.

If it was cheaper to make generic drug companies this approach wouldn't work. People would make new companies for the sole purpose of getting bought. It would make buying companies up to kill competition unsustainable.

I've worked in heavily regulated industries before and it's a pretty obvious pattern. Regulators regulate. Costs go up. Competition goes down. And then the big companies become isolated from competition because it's just too expensive to compete with them. Then the government has to bend over backwards to ensure the profitability of these dominate corporations because if they were to go out of business there would never be any replacements.

It's a form of market lock-in. Over regulation effectively becomes a license for these big pharma companies to do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. They love it.

<comment><USER42> I think people who talk about "over regulation" should be excluded from serious discussion. "More" or "less" or "no" regulation is never the answer.

I don't think we have ultra safe drugs. I could be just paranoid, but I don't think the FDA is that good at monitoring the manufacturing of drugs. And I know I've read about how sometimes they approved a new dosage without actual testing and it turned out in at least one case the delivery mechanics didn't work properly.

Deregulation is like reform. Enough people think it's automatically good, that it's completely meaningless, and because it's meaningless the worst people pick it up as a slogan and run with it.

As someone that could really benefit from new drug approvals, I don't see deregulation as my savior because if it's executed by the worst people, then it will just lead to more snake oil and less ability to differentiate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What a pile of sensationalist rubbish.

In 2018 we had an estimated 400k people dying of Malaria [1] & around 600k (est.) people dying of cancer in the US alone. [2] Compare that to the 3110 deaths that have happened in the last 3 or so months for COVID-19. [3]

I think a little perspective would go a long way here.

[1] [https://www.who.int/news-room/feature- stories/detail/world-m...](https://www.who.int/news-room/feature- stories/detail/world-malaria-report-2019)

[2] [https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts- statistics/all-...](https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts- statistics/all-cancer-facts-figures/cancer-facts-figures-2019.html)

[3] [https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director- general-...](https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s- opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid-19---3-march-2020)

<comment><USER45> Covid if not put under control will effect every one everywhere (unlike malaria) . Imagine a 1% fatality on the human population but at a repetitive rate .

<comment><USER44> That 1% is still to be confirmed. We don't know the mortality rate yet.</comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk may be about to leave Tesla [August 2017] - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Is-Elon-Musk-about-to-leave-Tesla/answer/Zachary-E-Fishbein?share=1 <comment><USER2> That article is from August last year, in January he got a deal too good to decline.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-23/tesla- top...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-23/tesla-tops-ups-all- in-bet-on-musk-with-2-6-billion-option-award)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I didn't know. I'll include the date on the title to avoid confusion.</comment></comment>


China-based hackers burrow inside satellite, defense, and telecoms firms - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/06/this-app-in-google-play-wants-to-use-phone-mics-to-enforce-copyrights/ <comment><USER2> Weird. I see:

> This app in Google Play wants to use phone mics to enforce copyrights

> App with 10 million downloads asks for mic and GPS permissions to catch > scofflaws.

> Dan Goodin - Jun 12, 2018 8:33 pm UTC

> If ever there were a case for rejecting requested device permissions, it's > made by an Android app with more than 10 million downloads from Google Play. > The official app for the Spanish soccer league La Liga was recently updated > to seek access to users' microphone and GPS settings. When granted, the app > processes audio snippets in an attempt to identify public venues that > broadcast soccer games without a license.

> According to a statement issued by La Liga officials, the functionality was > added last Friday and is enabled only after users click "yes" to an Android > dialog asking if the app can access the mic and geolocation of the device. > The statement says the audio is used solely to identify establishments that > broadcast games without a license and that the app takes special precautions > to prevent it from spying on end users.

<comment><USER2> [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/06/china...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/06/china-based-hackers-burrow-inside-satellite-defense-and- telecoms-firms/)</comment></comment>


Brazilian mayor takes issue with Amazon.com in graffiti debate - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-brazil-idUSKBN16Z2XU <comment><USER2> Found the commercial. Although I don't speak Portugese.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Slb2GgV4D4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Slb2GgV4D4)

This seems to me they are taking offense to something they really shouldn't be. Amazon just thought of a clever idea of shining book quotes onto the walls. A topical marketing idea.

It seems like political spin to take this minor off-hand comment as a insult, for this persons political gain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Context:

This mayor has done (and previous mayors did it too, but to a lesser extent) some painting over graffiti.

Given political discussions at this moment (in Brazil, but similar to those happening in the US and Europe), his attitude was criticized. He is more right-inclined (coming from business, specially in real state, and so on) and the left did criticize such painting a lot.

The ad from Amazon says that the city is now too grey and they shined those book quotes over those places (that had graffitis just 1 or 2 months ago).

The great point is that removing graffitis was supported by some parcel of the citizens, and the Amazon ad was downvoted. When the Mayor replied in another video, asking Amazon to donate books and Kindles, all the debate ignated, with people pro- and against- the ad campaign.

And some companies jumped onboard and used twitter to say that they will donate books, before Amazon replied.</comment></comment>


SurfEasy Online Privacy – An Opera Software Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.surfeasy.com/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a great service, especially if it does something to block the handful of trackers reported by ghostery on their own site.</comment>


Show HN: Acquainted – Create simple conversational surveys - <AUTHOR> https://getacquainted.co/ <comment><USER2> Very fresh approach, but based on the video this is not really a "chat bot", but only works with predefined answers?

The landing page is also very thin on details... what kind of survey elements are supported? Can the surveys branch based on previous answers? Can the response data be exported?

Oh and the "I Accept Terms and Conditions" link gives error..

<comment><AUTHOR> Terms and conditions fixed.

Agree about the chatbot bit, we were thinking about changing it to 'conversational' but it's a bit of a mouthful.

Functionality is really basic for this MVP. Simple multiple choice answers, so no logic or free text entry, but we aim to get those done in the next few months.

Results are collated in your dashboard, we need to add an export option (it's on the roadmap). I'm developing this with a mate - we both work full time so finding the time to work on this as much as we'd like has been a challenge.

Thanks for your feedback.

<comment><USER2> I don't think lack of real "chat" is a problem, as long as you are clear about it.

for me the real attraction was that this looks like a more fun way to answer boring survey questions, and thus hopefully higher percentage of people will complete the survey.

Best of luck, and i'll be following how this progresses!

<comment><USER3> This was my sentiment exactly when I first showcased on IndieHackers. Seems like a faster way to complete surveys although I am wondering if you'll be integrating keypress based responses any time soon so I can just quickly select my responses - having a more controlled UI seems quicker than trying to use a mouse to hit a target area.

<comment><USER4> Did you actually try the live version? 3 or 4 questions took way longer than had they all been presented.

I like the idea, but actually using it was a bit frustrating IMO.

<comment><USER3> I did but I guess I didn't fully create an actual survey - was mostly test questions.

What did you find was frustrating about it? I felt the UI gave it a fresh approach to completing surveys plus the clicking areas are all fairly close.

<comment><USER4> Mainly waiting for the questions and answers. It took me 1 minute to answer something that could have been answered in ~10 seconds tops. And I didn't know if I had to answer 2 or 200 questions, so a few more and I would have given up.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


BlackBerry gives Indian spooks BBM and BIS access - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/11/blackberry_gives_indian_spooks_access/

<comment><USER3> Indian access to BIS is nothing new. They've been doing that since at least 2011. This is BlackBerry Internet Service, where the mail infrastructure is partially controlled by RIM. As far as I understand the BlackBerry Infrastructure, RIM can't give access to BES (Enterprise) Servers.

Even if you're not part of an enterprise, you can run a BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express at home or in a datacenter. With your own encryption keys protecting communication between the phone and your server. In order to grant access to the government, RIM would have to steal your key. Possible, but unlikely. Security is one of the few reasons why RIM still ships phones.

</comment><comment><USER4> Giving the Indian government access to BBM and BIS was a requirement to operate as a messaging service in India. People shouldn't be upset with BlackBerry for complying with regulations; outrage should be directed at the government for creating and enforcing these regulations.

If the US government decreed 'Phones made with white plastic are no longer allowed, they can not be sold in our country', would you get upset with Apple for only selling black iPhones in the US?

</comment><comment><USER5> Much was made of this when it was first announced a few months ago, but in reality it just puts India on par with most other major governments. When proper procedure is followed, BIS communication records can be obtained - <USER2> the same way a carrier hands over records in the US when a warrant is served. (Or without a warrant, as the case may be...)

BlackBerry still can't provide access to BES communication -- and this what India was actually pushing hard for.

</comment><comment><USER6> These are governments that cater exclusively to politicians. 30% of said politicians are hardened criminals. One should expect arbitrary arrests for private opinion.

<comment><USER7> "Politics and crime -- they're the same thing."

\- Michael Corleone

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not clear to me that the _content_ of BBM messages is available. The article(s) only mention getting access to delivery reports (i.e delivered/read).

If people are using non-encrypted mail, then that was already 'insecure' so this news report doesn't indicate anything new in that respect (other than getting access via BlackBerry).

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting that right when the tide might be moving towards privacy, giving BlackBerry an opportunity, they break their security.

</comment><comment><USER10> ...which means they now comply like all other mobile providers.

</comment><comment><USER11> While Snowden's disclosures were a bit creepy my thoughts were: at least _we_ (USA + NATO) have the homefield advantage on this

The I'm genuinely scared about is what about the Russian, Chinese, Iranian (?) intelligence services would do with information like that</comment>


Clojure Pre- and post-conditions: a quest for a nicer syntax - <AUTHOR> http://onclojure.com/2010/03/05/pre-and-post-conditions-a-quest-for-a-nicer-syntax/ <comment><USER2> I've looked on the Clojure website, and I can't seem to find documentation on Clojure's default syntax for pre- and post-conditions. Can anyone point me to it?

<comment><USER3> [http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28fn%20na...](http://clojure.org/special_forms#Special%20Forms--%28fn%20name%3F%20%28\[params*%20\]%20condition- map%3F%20exprs*%29%2B%29)

It's part of the fn form (and by extension defn).</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you draw the line between bikeshedding and design? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I am currently working on a project with my co-founder. We will sit down and talk about the design decisions we want to make before we start to code anything up. We have been doing this for about 2 months now. Sometimes the chats feel like design talks and sometimes it feels like bikeshedding.
Where and how do you draw the line between application design and bikeshedding?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality <comment><USER2> My ex-cofounder and I sat down at a table and hashed everything out at the interface level--what HTTP requests to make, how messages were handled, etc. We didn't second-guess each others' implementations, because as long as the interface was stuck to things were fine. That saved us a lot of bikeshedding.

I would say the line is generally "Are we both right given the current business needs?". If the answer is yes, then you're bikeshedding, and should just flip a coin and move on.

<comment><AUTHOR> I like this advice. You hit it right on the head. I am asking about programing design, not interface design. We will start to flip a coin.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When are you getting feedback on the design? Real design is about adapting to the users' needs, not the founders. You do need to put something out there to get useful feedback, but you should spend the bulk of time implementing things that the users would not have thought of by themselves.

As a general rule of thumb for the startup phase, if people are arguing about it it's not worth arguing about. Pick one and show it to users, and usually the users will resolve the question for you. The design decisions that matter are the ones that everybody can look at and say "This looks off", eg. including adequate margins and whitespace, picking a sane color palette, making information easily skimmable, not forcing the user to perform extra clicks or interactions. When they fail, it's usually because the founders never thought about them in the first place rather than because they thought of them and picked the wrong one of two equally-viable alternatives.

<comment><AUTHOR> We have yet to launch. I was talking about system design, not so much user design but I will keep this in mind as we start to get more and more into user design.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ask "how much does the customer care"? If the answer is "not much", waste very little time deciding what to do.

Then, pay attention to when one of those decisions turns out to really matter, and be willing to revisit it when actually needed.

</comment><comment> a-dub Two people, two months, zero built?

Bikeshedding is piping up on trivial issues to draw attention to yourself in a group. There's only two of you? You should have enough mutual trust such that nobody feels the need to show off.

I'd suggest putting a stop to any more design meetings. Get a prototype working, iterate from there. What needs to happen will become apparent. It's all smoke and mirrors in the beginning anyhow. Take a page from the Italians and their fancy A-GEE-LAY methods.

<comment><AUTHOR> I worded this incorrectly. We have quite a lot bilt. We talk about code design for each part before we build that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> depends on your project and its complexity.

perhaps one way to improve the approach is instead of thinking about your design and if it's perfect, encourage thought along the lines of "how do we build this so we can change how it works later?"

things always change. there is no perfect spec or style on day 1. the best code is always written during refactoring, so design to make that part easy and while your idea is new and not launched optimize to get it launched.</comment>


Town – Docker multi-container application tool - kiril-me https://github.com/lookify/town

<comment> kiril-me Your feedback is welcome</comment>