Stop thinking about how to scale. Startups die from not having customers. - <AUTHOR> http://www.aorsi.com/wb/startups_die_for_not_having_customers_so_stop_thinking_about_how_to_scale/

<comment><USER3> I once worked for a start-up that had a grand vision of lightweight real-time messaging. This was 1996, and we were going to broadcast in real time, to zillions of clients, the events of the Summer Olympics. We had "push" stuff that worked really well, we had permission from IBM to do periodic scrapes of their event database, and we came up with a scaling system for handling feeds to massive numbers of clients. This was going to be a fantastic demo for potential customers. The publicity was going to be great.

We got everything ready, rented some co-lo space, got a bunch of servers set up (I think each miserable little Pentium 90 server could handle tens of thousands of clients), and . . . our top was maybe a couple dozen concurrent users. We could have run the thing out of our offices on our worst sales person's crummiest laptop. While that sales guy played Quake.

[Later, our /best/ sales guy had a patter that went like: "Well, we did this real-time monitoring app for the Olympics, and it scaled to ten, twenty thousand clients on a machine. You know how many we got? THIRTY."

Start-up was eventually bought, and then transitively bought, and I wound up with some shares of Oracle (spit).]

<comment><USER4> That sounds like this story: <http://www.dadhacker.com/blog/?p=935> I would like to know the name of the company or hear more war stories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The best advice I've ever heard regarding scaling is to only worry about one level of magnitude. If you have 20 users, make sure you can scale to 200 - <USER2> farther than that and you're likely wasting your time.

<comment><USER6> Best advice I ever got on the topic was "Just don't be stupid, reasonable solutions tend to scale idiotic ones don't."

Which basically boils down to don't worry about performance in the +/- 50% range, worry about performance when you are going to see x^3 or +/- 5,000%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The way I think about scale is:

1) Know your bottlenecks and write them down. This is where you will look first if you have problems.

2) Know how you will throw hardware at it or change configurations if you find yourself with sudden growth you didn't expect. You need to create a buffer so you have the time to solve real code issues. Write it down.

3) Whenever you make an architectural choice, make sure there isn't one that's equivalent in engineer time that will be easier to extend later.

Otherwise, just do whatever helps you learn about the product the quickest.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think there is an exception to this idea for startups that require data- centric scaling. If you are planning to grab as much data as you can and as quickly as possible, this could require scaling even when the user count itself is small. I had a startup that ground to a halt because I hadn't anticipated the sheer amount of data that the app would collect even before I had more than a handful of users. Of course, that isn't the traditional kind of scaling that people talk about.

<comment><USER9> e.g. Google, any startup working with Big Data (TM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is generally true.

However, just for fun, I'll note here that we are/were an extreme case where we spent a lot of time thinking about scaling in the early months and it paid off when we finally got traction (100 visits per day to 2,000,000 visits per day in 30 days). Sometimes it does matter. Moral: don't follow advice blindly.

<comment><USER11> Stormpulse is great. I've never been interested in hurricanes before, but I am now thanks to you guys.

<comment><USER10> Thanks! :-)

One of our goals is to create weather watchers in much the same way mint.com created budgeters (i.e. get people to enjoy an activity they previously considered mundane).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've never understood the obsession with scale when there are so many challenging problems left in user interface technology are relatively ignored. The room for innovation is staggering, yet we obsess over nosql.

<comment><USER13> Why is scaling such a popular obsession? Some hypotheses:

It's survivor bias. When you go to found a venture, where do you look for inspiration? You find a very successful analogue and read all about them. For example, if you want to found a social network, you look to Facebook for inspiration. And what is something that many incredibly successful web properties are worried about? Scaling.

It's objective, or it feels objective. You load the web page, it takes 20ms. You make a tweak and load the page again, it takes 15ms. You can measure benchmarks, and then you can point to the benchmarks getting better and claim that you were _objectively successful_. The fact that there's a scoring system lures people into the game.

It's fun to think about. Nobody likes the guy who points out the danger that the product will flop. Everyone likes the guy who points out that the product might just be _so successful that we'll be overwhelmed by success_. You get to sound like an ambitious, expansive optimist when planning out all the fancy hardware you're going to need. You're focusing on the positive, just as all the self-help manuals tell you to do.

It's Parkinson's Law, in its original form: By default, the size of a business unit grows until it is limited by resources, because the path to power in an organization is to be big. Lots of subordinates, lots of infrastructure, lots of budget. You might think that an organization would lavishly reward the person who could singlehandedly run the entire web infrastructure off of a single PC, but often the opposite is the case. So it pays to puff up the scalability problem as big as you can, in order to get the resources to build a big team, so that you gain political power from being the head of a big team...

<comment><USER14> > _It's survivor bias._

I really think it's as simple as that. When you read about a successful startup, they invariably mention the troubles they had scaling. So you immediately think "how can I avoid scaling troubles?", when you should be thinking "how can I build a site that will _have_ scaling troubles?"

<comment><USER15> >you should be thinking "how can I build a site that will have scaling troubles?"

I work for a company that does consulting for startups, and occasionally one of our clients takes off like a rocket. _Everyone_ has scaling problems, even the people who have thought about and worked on scaling. Load tests and projections are only so good: at the end of the day theory will meet practice and we all know who wins there.

We always tell them the same thing, "these are good problems to have". Everyone has a sleepless week or so until the bottlenecks are cleared, and then life is back to normal (except now people have heard about that thing you've been working on for the past couple years).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Certainly the most disappointing startup experience I ever had was with an early Internet firm that had spent too much of '95-6 building their hardware and most especially software (custom C++ database) to insanely scale, taking so long their angel timed out due to a sudden need to pump money into another venture.

When I joined they were closing with new investors who turned out to be devils only interested in owning 100% of nothing, they essentially ran it as a vanity company after chasing off almost all the competent staff, KPCB who got _very_ interested in what we were doing and who could have made a fantastic difference due to their relationship with Netscape etc.

That plus the company didn't do any Customer Development, ran in total stealth mode and spin in circles a whole lot theorizing about how people might use our service; as Blank says, there are no facts in the office, only opinions.

And we bet too much on our initial debut splash, which turned out to be a dull thud due to the incompetence of our marketing guy and/or the tech media (every article focused on the least attractive way out of 3 to use our service which was downloading a plug-in for your browser).

<comment><USER17> What was the startup?

<comment><USER16> Netword. The idea was that companies and people could buy Networds like "Intel annual report" and you could e.g. type into your browser address [whatever that widget it called]:

      netword/intel annual report

And you'd get redirected to the right page on Intel's site (at the time both Netscape and Microsoft Did The Right Thing with the above example (e.g. add .com)).

Besides solving search and design problems that hadn't yet been well addressed (this was before Google and truly ubiquitous use of search engines and at the dawn of usable site design) it could have bridged the old media to new media gap. I.e. "Netword foo bar" works a whole lot better than <http://www.mycompany.com/foo/bar> or whatever, it's something you might be able to remember from a radio, TV, highway sign etc. ad, less obnoxious on print ads etc.

A lot of the upfront development effort was devoted to dealing with misspellings quickly (the custom C++ tree database) and database replication so that it could insanely scale. We were using Digital Alpha hardware so we could have cheated in all sorts of ways just to get launched and then do Customer Development, (ADDED:) but there was this overriding fear that we'd get crushed with demand immediately after launch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You could even write that more starkly: worry about supporting your customers because customer support is the only thing that you can't scale easily, everything else will eventually work out. Are there lists of start-ups that failed because of scaling issues? Are there comparable lists of start-ups that failed because of marketing, sales, product, vision, support and a 100 other pitfalls that a start-up can easily fall in to?

I could not name a single company that folded because they could not handle the luxury problem of scaling. Because really, when scaling is your problem, you have no problem, you've figured out a way to beat the odds on all that other stuff so scaling will be solved as well, one way or another.

<comment><USER19> _I could not name a single company that folded because they could not handle the luxury problem of scaling_

Friendster is an obvious example that comes to mind:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15frien...](http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/business/yourmoney/15friend.html?ei=5090&en=3e9438ed349f7ce7&ex=1318564800&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1160935459-sNG2JSXPcNq7ZEaFg46TrQ)

 _As Friendster became more popular, its overwhelmed Web site became slower. Things would become so bad that a Friendster Web page took as long as 40 seconds to download. Yet, from where Mr. Lindstrom sat, technical difficulties proved too pedestrian for a board of this pedigree. The performance problems would come up, but the board devoted most of its time to talking about potential competitors and new features, such as the possibility of adding Internet phone services, or so-called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, to the site._

<comment><USER18> They didn't fold though, did they? They got bought by some asian consortium iirc. Also, the way you describe that it strikes me as a management problem more than a technical one. Once they had scaling issues they decided to not address them. They could have, but they didn't.

Of course that's stupid.

<comment><USER19> True, they didn't fold per se, but they likely could have held their own against MySpace and Facebook. They just got bought out a few months ago for $40 million, when they could have had a billion dollar valuation like Facebook or a half-billion dollar buyout like MySpace.

Maybe if they had thought about scaling from the very beginning (like so many startups supposedly waste time doing), they would have had a plan in place to address it without having to bring it up at board meetings.

<comment><USER20> They could have held their own against MySpace and Facebook if they'd been focused on solving actual technical problems and adding features people wanted to use, instead of solving theoretical technical problems.

When Friendster finally hired Joyce Park to lead a reimplementation of the site (in PHP instead of Java) there was so much conflict over this inside the company that they fired her immediately after she finished, ostensibly for blogging. Imagine what Friendster could have done if user-focused, practical people like Joyce were honored and listened to, instead of tossed out like trash.

(I know Joyce. I'd even say she's a friend of mine, and I hope she'd agree.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Because lots of startup die for not having customers enough (or at all!), but I haven't heard of any died because at first was not able to scale millions of users.

...So you never heard of Friendster, then?

<comment><USER22> If your definition of dying includes getting bought for $40M then maybe dying isn't such a bad thing.

Dying from lack of customers looks completely different.

<comment><USER23> Pennies on the dollar _after_ the audience had already left. I'd call that dying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have to say a big AMEN here.

There are many startups that should just buy a dual-quad core Nehalem (or AMD Magny-Cours) system with redundant power supplies, 32GB or more of RAM, and fast disks (or even spend on a RAID5 of SSDs) and stop worrying about scaling for the meantime.

<comment><USER25> I/O is the scaling problem for most web startups, so it's really mostly about scaling RAM and to a lesser extent adding some SSDs.

<comment><USER26> If I could send myself a tweet to 2001 it would include 'Buy RAM & SSDs'

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I worked at a startup where the relentless focus on being able to scale to support millions of users from day one hurt the business very severely and was one of two reasons that the company failed. Spending almost 50% of the venture funding raised on hardware that was never used when 10 servers would've sufficed was not a smart idea.

</comment><comment><USER28> Lately it seems that every article I read about web technology is about scaling techniques. This stuff is fun to hack on but I have to agree that it's very unlikely that it should be the focus of any small company. I spoke recently with an engineer from a small but profitable and highly visible specialized e-commerce site. He runs their site quite comfortably and inexpensively on _two_ machines.

</comment><comment><USER29> I wish I knew how to learn how to get customers as well as I know how to learn how to scale technology

</comment><comment><USER30> This is not really a startling revelation, businesses need revenue to succeed but where does revenue come from? Customers .. duh! They also need to attract customers to gain angel inventors, funding, and partnership deals.

I'm not sure that I agree with the author's opinion that time would be better spent innovating on User Interface / usability. Having run a business since 2000, I would say that delivering an innovative service to a very specific marketplace and at the same time developing a rapport with that segment should be the ultimate goal of any startup.

</comment><comment><USER31> Its amusing that none of these comments even touch on the articles premise, which is that you need to be solving problems that someone (i.e. customers) else believes is important.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think it'd be an oversight to not stay on top of the new technologies that scale better.

A document store fits a lot of problems much better than doing everything in Postgres, and offers easier maintenance and replication. And can offer a lot simpler architecture when all is said and done.

But yes, obsessing about scaling on an app that has no users can be a very big time sink. Much better to just hack out some software with whatever tools are the most productive, and get a few customers to drive the human side of business requirements.</comment>


Ask HN: I often confuse words with another when I'm speaking, am I the only one? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
When I'm speaking (orally) I often misuse a word with another, saying "car" when I want to say "bike" for instance, because they have wheels. (That's the connection my brain make).
I think that when I'm speaking, I want to say words faster than my brain can build a sentence. By being able to follow, it simplifies the connections from my thoughts to my words (hence saying car instead of bike because the link is wheels and it doesn't have the time to think more in depth to ensure that's what I'm thinking about).
I'm suspecting that working on a computer for so many years might be the issue, where I spend most of my time speaking via a keyboard. That's why I'm talking about it here, on HN.
So I'm asking for your help, to know if I'm the only one, if this is something known, if this something that can be fixed, and how.
Thank you for your help. <comment><USER2> I'm quite lefty and I make this mistake often, so often that early in my life my parents took me to the doc thinking I had some sort of issue. I believe my right brain hemisphere is quite more developed than the other and the information when travelling from one side to the other isn't so fluent as other people. No matter how much I talk and practice, it doesn't get much better, but I've learned how to better compensate that with either using my left brain or with character.

Don't see it as a defect. Make it a quality.

In the end, it's not much of an issue. It sucks to communicate sometimes and I know I will never have that politician way of talking, but you can say sorry and people are ok with that and with a bit of experience dealing with those situations, you actually get to be funny or show some character.

I have no trouble working on my expertise and do absolutely well in math and abstract stuff though. Even with languages I do just fine, can speak 3 languages fluently, some others a bit well. I bet you can relate as well to things you do much better above others, focus on them. Don't sweat it :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

I do have other advantages against other people, but I believe that everyone is better than others in specific areas, so I didn't consider them much ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think everyone does this from time to time to some extent. I definitely do it with more technical jargon, and I often see other people do it. For example I will forget the official jargon and say something similar, but that will confuse someone who has the jargon embedded in their minds. Often I will resort to showing them the bit of the program or code I am talking about.

As for a solution. I don't know really. You could try toastmasters for public speaking, and practice speaking more slowly than you would normally speak in speeches. The funniest speeches I heard there were from someone who had a stammer and had to pause between each sentence to do a breathing exercise, but he used those pauses for building suspense in the story.

<comment> le-mark I've also been guilty of this for a long time. I annoy myself, and fear I undermine my credibility when talking to peers and managers.

> I think that when I'm speaking, I want to say words faster than my brain can > build a sentence.

This is the explanation I've thought of for myself many times. What I find helps is to practice mindfulness and try to listen to what I'm saying.

I recall at one job, the companies core systems database tables had really absurdly long names. I made a point of learning these names precisely. People would look at me in amazement when I would precisely rattled off the names during meetings and technical discussions. Oddly, this really helped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My wife has the exact same "problem" as you do.

In her case it presents itself in two main different forms:

\- she will use all the correct words but will swap the order of the key substantives of the phrase. For example: use the knife to hold the steak and cut with the fork.

\- she will do the above but instead of using one substantive from the current "context" she will swap it with one from the previous or next context.

She is an ESL teacher and YouTuber so I'm not sure it has much to do with anything programming related. She does spend quite a bit of time in front of the computer, though.

Another interesting detail is that she speaks really fast most of the time. Maybe that's related.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I relate completely with what your wife is saying here! I do often mix words in a phrase or swap the context.

And man, I speak fast (don't articulate much). My friends used to call me Buzz Lightyear because I was speaking at lightspeed ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's weird, but often instead of Monterrey Jack, I want to say Mercury Jack. It's the word that comes first in my brain, though I don't let it out of my mouth. It takes a few seconds to remember the proper name. I guess the words are pretty similar-looking in my brain. Oddly enough, I only seem to make the mistake when referring to the cheese and not the city, but it could simply be that I talk more about the cheese than the city, too.

</comment><comment><USER6> You have to sort of suppress other complex thoughts when speaking about complex thoughts on the fly. Most of the time, consciously trying to simplify individual sentences about already-complex topics makes them easier to say without really harming the inherent complexity that ensues in the conversation.

Just don't worry about making mistakes, people will almost always give you the benefit of the doubt about what you mean or give you the opportunity to re- explain something or to take a pause to collect your thoughts.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's indeed what often happens - having to re-explain or they understand what I meant to say. But every time I do this, I lose a bit of credibility, and that adds up in the long run.

Moreover, sometimes, I lose people completely because "car" was also correct in my phrase and made my phrase impossible to follow :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How often does this happen? The limited bandwidth of communication vs. thought can be frustrating, but I don't think "car" for "bike" is a natural substitution, even in a non-native language. They're too dissimilar, not subsets, etc.

Assuming this happens frequently enough to be concerning, I'd be concerned!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a bit concerned, hence my message here - but not too much to go see a doctor.

Maybe I'll drop a word next time I'm at the doctor in case he knows something ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I almost always say "lunch" instead of "dinner" but I guess that's much more natural than bike to car.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yeah, you're definitely not alone. I don't substitute similar words that often, but I do garble sentences to an extreme more than I'd like to. It ends up sounding like word substitution, but completely nonsensical.

> _I think that when I 'm speaking, I want to say words faster than my brain > can build a sentence._

That's pretty much what it feels like in my case.

> _I 'm suspecting that working on a computer for so many years might be the > issue, where I spend most of my time speaking via a keyboard._

Same. My history includes fairly extreme real life social isolation for about 15-20 years. Didn't have any friends I'd see in person on any sort of regular basis during that time, including my entire adolescence.

As such, my good friends that I talk to on a daily basis have historically been remote. Communicating with them has always been about 80% keyboard and 20% voice. In terms of voice, it's always been push-to-talk out of preference. Unlike open mics (think phone calls or default Skype settings), PTT allows you to mull over your reply quite a bit more without it being considered awkward. Combine that with typing being the preferred method of communication otherwise—which allows even more time to formulate a reply—and it's little wonder.

Some other components that likely play a part include being less comfortable than an average person in many social situations and at times poor eye contact. It almost feels like the verbal centers of my brain are rendered dumb due to a combination of having to come up with things to say faster, and processing facial expressions/body language (which historically wasn't required very often). It's not surprising that it goes hand-in-hand with not really being able to get the word in edgewise most of the time, nor being particularly good at thinking up new topics of conversation when engaging in small talk.

Despite being extremely social in person the last couple years, it still persists, though usually it's the worst at the beginning of a conversation. That may have to do with difficulty switching from my internal voice (which is usually fast) to actually verbalizing things.

If it's any sort of meaningful conversation in a relaxed environment, there's rarely any problem. Likewise if it's people I'm already comfortable with. Alcohol tends to make the problem evaporate—even with strangers. My theory is it simultaneously slows me down a bit and lowers my speaking inhibitions considerably, killing off the over-analysis and mental/verbal speed mismatch that garbles sentences in the first place.

> _So I 'm asking for your help, to know if I'm the only one, if this is > something known, if this something that can be fixed, and how._

Ultimately I think it's a latency thing. Some people aren't used to the lower reply latency that in-person interactions require.

Practice makes perfect I guess. Just keep talking to people in person more. I'm trying to do the same.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you are right. I identify in what you say here in many points.

As for the practice makes perfect, I recently started a "philosophic" group with a small set of friends where we speak about various stuff. The idea being to express my ideas, share my opinion, argue, and try to be understandable. Hope this wll yield some good results in the future.

Thanks :)</comment></comment>


Proto-internet trolls: Struensee and press freedom in 18th century Denmark - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2018/06/johann-friedrich-struensee.html <comment><USER2> The piece is interesting, but author's conclusions left very strange aftertaste. So there was a king with psychiatric problems, and his doctor who, abusing influence over his patient, usurped powers, and made a kid with the queen. And when aforementioned doctor decreed freedom of press, people of Denmark immediately started to express their dissatisfaction with the weird political situation. And the author calls it depressing, not constructive, and them proto-internet-trolls. Seriously?

<comment><USER3> I believe the subtle point is that Struensee did these actions for the good of the people, only for the people to then use these new tools against him.

I'm not sure we know of Struensee's motivations, but we can see that he advocated for and temporarily obtained some outcomes that can be seen as almost universally good for the people.

Regardless, maybe one takeaway can be, just because you have given your life towards something good for others, don't expect to be thanked.

<comment><USER4> Giving the people freedom of the press was good for the people? Probably. Having a kid with the queen was good for the people? Probably not.

So, was the criticism for giving them freedom of the press? Or for having the kid with the queen? Or was it for using his position as a doctor to put himself in political power in the first place?

<comment><USER5> Having a kid with the queen seems neutral, especially if the alternative is for a severely mentally ill man to be the father.

<comment><USER4> The queen having kids that didn't come from the king is capable of setting off a civil war once the king dies and someone has to succeed him. That's not neutral for the people.

<comment><USER5> What was important at that time was that the child be a recognized heir to the king and queen. Actual birth father is mostly irrelevant.

<comment><USER6> > Soon, not only had the doctor risen to become the King's most trusted > advisor in the Danish court, he had also become Queen Caroline Matilda's > lover – which fast became common knowledge.

Perhaps if it had not become common knowledge it would have remained irrelevant. I think your argument has fallen flat and you should reconsider your opinion before further entrenching yourself.

<comment><USER5> No, it has not fallen flat. Something being common knowledge, and yet still held to be irrelevant was exactly my point. You are free to peruse information about Louis Auguste if you'd like

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Louise_Auguste_of_Den...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Louise_Auguste_of_Denmark)

> Though officially regarded as the daughter of King Christian VII, it is > widely accepted that her biological father was Johann Friedrich Struensee, > the king's royal physician and de facto regent of the country at the time of > her birth.[1] She was referred to sometimes as "la petite Struensee"; __this > did not, however, have any effect on her position.[2] __

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The book referenced, Swedish title "Livläkarens besök", is one of the best I have read. Reviews do not seem to agree entirely through. On Amazon: [https://www.amazon.com/Royal-Physicians-Visit-Olov- Enquist/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Royal-Physicians-Visit-Olov- Enquist/dp/1585671967)

<comment><USER8> Enquist is one of my favorite authors, and Royal Physician's Visit among the many reasons why. That said, I have almost stopped recommending his work to others, as it seems to be hit-and-miss.

Nobody I know hates his work, but nobody takes to him quite the way I have. Royal Physician is fairly conventional in structure and tone, but Enquist's more personal work -- the work that feels like it comes from his deep interior life, like Downfall, and Captain Nemo's Library -- seem even harder for a lot of people to get into.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> These played a role during the Enlightment, American and European revolutions. A person of strong political views and middle class means could write, publish and distribute an anonymous political pamphlet. Establishment governments often didnt like this and hunt down and destroyed them.

<comment><USER10> This is, in part, why the USA constitution calls out freedom of the press (right after freedom of speech).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The printing press was subsidized by the Catholic Church as a way of reducing costs and increasing spread of their primary asset: the Bible.

They didn't realize this would drive down startup costs of presses by creating more press techniques and technicians looking to acquire new customers. With Church backing, the bar-to-entry for spreading information dropped until anyone could spread information, including anti-Church factions such as the Protestants. This did not end up well for the Church.

The same is true for America, their obsession with spreading democracy, and the transistor AKA the American Printing Press.

Once information propagation becomes cheap, noise floods everything, and trolling is the only effective way to create lasting context.</comment>


WordPress announces support for OpenID - <AUTHOR> http://wordpress.com/blog/2007/03/06/openid/ <comment><USER2> Careful with the wording. WordPress isn't fully supporting OpenID, and this can be dangerous. They're acting as an identity provider without also acting as a service provider.

It's true that WordPress users can use their blogs as OpenIDs to login elsewhere, but users who already have OpenIDs can't use them at WordPress.

Unless service providers implement the entire spec and treat all OpenID users as first-class citizens, regardless of identity provider, then there's really no interoperability here. What's the point of an OpenID if you can't use it at other "OpenID-enabled" sites like WordPress?

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for posting this. ReadWrite web is reporting that 37Signals has also joined the bandwagon: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_37signals_openid.php

<comment><AUTHOR> I just read that article too. WordPress.com will be acting as an identity provider, similar to AOL.

Any thoughts on OpenID implementation for existing popular networks? Considering that relying sites can filter which providers they allow authentication from, I am overall positive about an increased usage of OpenID.

<comment><USER3> While I don't use OpenID myself, there are a number of users on my social network asking for its integration. It seems that many users are now beginning to *expect* Web 2.0 startups to provide support for it (just as they did for Firefox). I anticipate that, in the future, when big name startups like Digg and LiveJournal begin supporting OpenID, there will be a huge following by other sites as well. Put simply, crowds follow crowds.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have read up on OpenID's specifications and what it aims to deliver. If it is labeled a bandwagon, I think it may be a good one to jump onto. There a few provisions one must be wary of regarding security, but for the most part I believe it is a move in a positive direction for managing web identities.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Money for Nothing: Virtual Worlds and Virtual Economies [PDF] - <AUTHOR> http://shaviro.com/Othertexts/MMOs.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> There is some interesting stuff here about the Economics of Abundance</comment>


Interesting notes on Google disks and file systems - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AS4ZhCZwxnAYZGhrY3JiZjZfNDA2ZHF6bnpjZmY&authkey=COqjgO0O&hl=en

<comment><USER2> Interesting about shingled writes ... I wonder if a hybrid flash/hard drive with 16-48GB of flash on board would solve the issues with the minimum write block size?</comment>


Elon Musk: California Is Going To Burn Money On A Bullet Train - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-hyper-loop-2012-9

<comment><USER2> Here is the link to the full 5 page article. It's worth every minute. [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-13/elon-musk- th...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-13/elon-musk-the-21st- century-industrialist#p1)

</comment><comment><USER3> I just had the strangest Futurama flashback.

</comment><comment><USER4> Elon Musk is awesome.</comment>


Ask HN: jQuery Mobile Experience - <AUTHOR>

Does anyone have any experience with jQuery Mobile? Got any stories/blog posts/rants/tutorials/tips you can share?
I know it's still alpha, but I figured you guys were a good bunch to ask.
Thanks and Happy New Years to all! <comment><USER2> I very recently used it for a simple application.

My initial thoughts:

1\. It's dead simple to learn and use. The documentation is excellent.

2\. From my experience, it looked fairly ready for production even though it's still technically under beta.

3\. I showed a friend of mine (who is an android developer) the android app that I built using jQuery mobile and phonegap - and he could not find out that it was not a native app. Only after I told him, he said that if he were to really nit pick - it was a trifle slower than a native app.

4\. But, in my app I created a separate HTML page for each screen, and loaded them using  \- this causes complete page re-loading. I found this more snappier than loading pages using XHR request which jQuery mobile does by default.

5\. The transitions are a let down. On HTC Wildfire, they were very slow. I eventually ditched the page to page animation for my app.

I wish they would get better performance wise.</comment>


Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/magazine/palm-oil-borneo-climate-catastrophe.html <comment><USER2> While the 'unintended consequences' story is powerful, the article undermines its credibility by suggesting at first that palm oil's use in US biodiesel is a significant contributor to this clusterfuck, but only halfway through does it admit that US biodiesel is chiefly made with corn and soy, ostensibly leaving less of these oils for the US food industry -- forcing imports of other oils.

But the truth is even more complex: for the last two decades, US society has gone through a nutritional awakening about the risk of trans fats, and widespread phase-out of trans fats has occurred due to consumer demand and regulatory pressure. Trans fats are a hard-to-avoid byproduct of partial hydrogenation of unsaturated oils: a process you want in food manufacturing to convert a liquid oil to a solid shortening. Corn oil and soybean oil largely consist of unsaturated fats, so partial hydrogenation will turn a fair bit of product into trans fats. But palm oil and coconut oil are naturally high in saturated fats, which gives them desirable properties by natural means and without trans bonds.

This is the primary reason for US food manufacturing's increased palm oil imports into the US: if widespread partial hydrogenation were still on the table, plentiful cottonseed oil could have been used instead. Crisco and Wesson were both early pioneers of hydrogenated cottonseed oil, but even today's Crisco -- the archetypal hydrogenated shortening -- has been reformulated with palm oil and soybean oil.

Then there's the matter of occasional palm oil boycotts in the US and Europe, protesting about food companies' use of palm oil from plantations that haven't been certified sustainable. Other than the inherent fuzziness and conflict of interest about a trade group deciding what it means for clearcut-type agriculture to be 'sustainable', these protests unfortunately cause the average price of all palm oil to drop, leaving others whose priorities are different to buy them up on the cheap. For example, palm oil is widely used as a cooking oil in the Indian Subcontinent, because it's cheap, is produced nearby (as opposed to in the Americas or Europe), and those countries have populations whose demand for simple cooking oils well outstrips their domestic supply.

There are many factors to this story: the ones investigated in the article, and others that I hope to have shown were missing. This shows that reality is sometimes maddeningly complex, different actors are frequently at odds, and one group's good intentions rarely survive the realities and the intricacies the global economy and local situations on the ground where the rubber meets the road.

<comment><USER3> Fully hydrogenated fats contain (virtually?) no trans fats. I'm curious why the shift was to palm oil, rather than to just fully hydrogenating the oil and then blending it with unhydrogenated oil to achieve the desired consistency.

<comment><USER2> This is true: oils that have undergone full hydrogenation become saturated fats, because the carbon double bonds break and bond and with excess hydrogen until the fatty acid is fully saturated. The cis/trans distinction affects the double bonds, which no longer exist once the molecule is saturated.

On the other hand, advocacy about the likely adverse health effects of saturated fats has been commonplace for a lot longer than the awareness of trans fats. This, together with likely consumer confusion about terms like "partially hydrogenated" vs. [fully] "hydrogenated", and the unwieldiness of using a solid-at-room-temp fat in a blend all add up to reasons why it's probably easier to use palm oil.

So far, coconut oil and palm oil have largely managed to avoid being caught up in the conversation about saturated fats. Marketing and market positioning undoubtedly plays a key role. The other is nutrition as a field of study and a topic of conversation: rigor is hard to achieve, conflict of interest is everywhere, advice is a mix of unhelpful and conflicting, and pop publications do even more disservice by repeating soundbites without caveats and context. In a few years, the next 'awakening' \-- helped by the awful environmental and social justice of tropical oils -- will probably purge coconut oil and palm oil from manufactured foods in some countries, and we'll migrate to some other inconvenient tradeoff whose true consequences will become widely known only much much later, all the while the public is pleased that they precipitated positive change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is why taxing carbon is better policy than patchwork regulations.

<comment><USER5> The biggest problem with such a tax is that all countries would have to implement it. When the US is accounting for about 15% of global carbon emissions we can't solve the problem just by reducing our own carbon emission.

<comment><USER6> What?

That doesn't make sense.

Not all countries need to do it. Just most.

In in actual fact, the sooner leader countries like the USA do it the sooner other countries get their act together.

Don't act like this is all or nothing. It's not.

Furthermore, the sooner the USA does it the sooner technologies improve, the sooner other smaller countries are suddenly enabled by said technologies.

That aside whole "we all need to do it" is utter nonsense. No, you don't. Other countries taking advantage of you is still not a socially moral excuse. Mind yourself first thanks.

<comment><USER7> The US led the world in emission reductions in 2018, meanwhile the EU, Canada, India, and China increased their production significantly. Yet the US gets slammed by the global community

[https://imgur.com/a/sNWFP3k](https://imgur.com/a/sNWFP3k)

<comment><USER8> Because the US is so high absolutely. Should it get an award just because natural gas got cheaper than coal?

<comment><USER9> Yes it should. It made it happen because instead of having endless meetings and brainstorming sessions in Lesbos or Johannesburg, the heartless ignoramuses of Texas figured out how to drill for clean energy. What really did the brainstormes accomplish considering the chart presented?

<comment><USER6> You think fracking is clean?

You think the "brainstorming sessions" accomplished nothing because of cherry picked single year data on Imgur?

Yikes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought bioengineered algae oil (e.g. [http://algawise.com/](http://algawise.com/)) was supposed to help us save the planet, seeing as it's both healthier and more sustainable than palm oil.

<comment><USER11> The problem with algae derived oil is the algae requires lots of fertilizer. We need to grow azolla to use as a feedstock. It is remarkably efficient at pulling both nitrogen and carbon from the atmosphere, able to double in mass every 2-3 days in ideal conditions with minimal inputs other than sunlight and water. Makes a fairly good fertilizer, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is powerful stuff - palm oil production is clearly an evil. But what really struck me from this was the rather cavalier mention of their guide killing dozens of people with a machete, during an ethnic cleansing. Isn't there a court for people like that? In The Netherlands?

<comment><USER13> You want to see evil look at Malasian deforestation due to production of this crap. It's not even a tasty in cooking. Coconut is.

<comment><USER14> And where do you think oil coconuts are grown?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> After reading some of the informed comments, I take it that the cause-effect relationship is not as direct as what's described in the article. Specifically, most of palm oil being used for food in fast-growing Asian countries, along with how much more palm oil can be produced from the same land -compared to corn oil- suggest it may not be a naive political decision from a decade ago that's now reducing the Indonesian forest footprint.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article doesn't touch on it much, but the palm oil industry basically runs on slave labor, too.

</comment><comment><USER17> I thought it was just supposed to prevent a health crisis ie prevent heart attacks and other health issues. I don't remember any marketing for palm oil related to saving the environment. Am I wrong?

<comment><USER18> It's used for bio-diesel. The cars that run on it are sold as green, but by burning the rainforest to make enough palm oil, the cars that run on it are instead the least green.

<comment><USER17> I don't remember reading any articles about palm oil being used as biodiesel in US media. Most of the coverage centered around palm oil being the savior from trans-fats.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Palm oil is a great example of the Jevons paradox:

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

Vegetable oil was expensive and took a lot of land to produce, then the oil palm made it cheaper and produced more in less land. But now we spend more money on vegetable oil and cultivate more land than before.

<comment><USER20> Thank you for that, interesting like branching before and after git (and all), if something is easy and effortless you do it more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It is amazing that around 2007 the US had declining oil production, an oil price shock and peak oil scare which probably were the primary reasons for the invasion of Iraq and terrible ethanol and biofuel policies. Now, there is talk of the US not requiring any imported oil by 2025 (not sure if that counts imports from the biggest supplier Canada), how times change due to a technological advancement in drilling practices.

I believe US foreign policy will potentially have very large changes due to their new found energy independence.

<comment><USER22> Credit where credit is due: It was because of the Bush administration's policies around the strategic reserve and opening drilling that got us off of our dependence on middle eastern oil. I'm no fan of the Bush admin, but this is one of the few things they probably got right.

<comment><USER23> Meh, I'd rather keep ours in the ground and be the last to run out. Maybe that's a selfish and defeatist mindset, but it's another way to look at things besides just "lets not ruin our own environment".

<comment><USER24> This is assuming oil is still valuable in the future in the face of increasing pollution standards, potential carbon taxes, and the rise of cheaper renewable energy production.

<comment><USER11> Oil will be a valuable feedstock for the forseeable future. Look at all the plastic in your house, in your clothes, in your car, wrapping your food, coating your circuit boards, the list goes on. Yeah, that's oil. Shame we can't harvest the plastic from the oceans and reformulate it into something useful.

<comment><USER25> Why not?

<comment><USER11> I haven't run the numbers, but seriously doubt it is economically viable. Most of the ocean plastic is small particles and it'd have to be collected, filtered and dried first.

<comment><USER25> Those first two can be done passively, or on the go with solar power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In UK rain forest anti deforestation TV ad "Rang-tan" was banned for being "too political" \- [https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/how-the-world-is- wakin...](https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/how-the-world-is-waking-up-to- palm-oil-in-the-wake-of-banned-iceland-orangutan-advert-a3992311.html)

<comment><USER27> It was not the ad that was deemed too political. The problem was that it was made by a political organization. If Iceland had made it themselves, it would likely have been fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The more general pattern is that, because of the sheer volume of demand, solutions that merely substitute one material resource for another no longer work.

</comment><comment><USER29> Reminder: Don't buy crap with palm oil in it, at least not things with oils not clearly marked as sustainably/ethically produced.

<comment><USER30> So I should eat hydrogoneated oil instead and have a heart attack?

<comment><USER29> Buy stuff with no, or with good palm oil in it. It's not that hard, not much more expensive, and more pleasant than a heart attack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I believe we are already at point of no return and our grandchildren will live in mostly sterile world compared with what we have now. Probably only external expansion to the Solar system can save tiny bits of wild life they will have at that time.

<comment><USER32> No matter how badly we screw up the Earth it will still be much more hospitable than any other place in the Solar System.

<comment><USER11> I hope you are right. I'd still rather live some place else in the solar system. This place is getting kind of crowded for my taste.

<comment><USER32> Did you give Alaska a chance?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DollarShaveClub: $1/month shaving blade subscriptions - <AUTHOR> http://www.dollarshaveclub.com/index.php

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. Far more useful than those other hyped services that send dildos, condoms or underwear!</comment>


Ask HN: Does anybody know what 'searchbenny' is? - <AUTHOR>

I installed Skype on a new mac and then bing hijacked my Chrome and Safari and now I can't get rid of it...And also when I search for something it goes to search.searchbenny.com, is this a virus? Anyone know how to remove? <comment><USER2> Many thanks, this helped me too. I got it from downloading a supposedly safe app from

[http://en.softonic.com/s/pdf-merge:mac](http://en.softonic.com/s/pdf- merge:mac)

</comment><comment><USER3> Where did you download the Skype installer from?

It is malware quite likely and can be undone. If you could share the link of where you downloaded the Skype dmg I can try and give you a fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> It appears I stupidly downloaded it from here:

[http://skype.download-for-mac.com/](http://skype.download-for-mac.com/)

I wasn't really paying attention at the time.

Would be great if you could help, thanks!

<comment><USER4> So here goes:

1\. Open Finder.

2\. Go to Applications

3\. You'll see an app called "Reset Search" Alternatively there may be a folder called "InstallMac". Drag it to Trash and empty Trash

4\. Open Chrome. Go to Settings

5\. Click the button called "manage search engines" and make Google the default. Then click the cross to remove "search the web"

6\. In Chrome Settings under "Appearance" click "Change" and then set "Use the new tab page." Also in the "On Startup" section ensure you delete the searchbenny page. and then set to "open a new tab".

7\. In Safari open Preferences and head to "General Settings". Change your default engine (IMHO bing is better than Google). In newer Safari versions you can do this in the "Search" tab. Also remove all garbage from the "Manage Websites" section.

8\. Set the homepage to "[http://www.apple.com/startpage/"](http://www.apple.com/startpage/") Alternatively open "Top Sites" in a new tab and use that by selecting "Use Current page"

9\. Open "Activity Monitor" \- Quit the "InstallerT" process.

10\. You're set. Just some malware. No permanent damage. All it did was change your search defaults.

Had to post using a different account cause HN says I was submitting too fast.

<comment><AUTHOR> WOW! It worked, thank you so much, pleased it wasn't anything too harmful. Thanks a lot for spending the time to help on this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have not been able to uninstall searchbenny. I have a mac and I'm using foxfire. I deleted install mac, emptied trash and reset google chrome settings. And restared computer. Search benny.com still comes up as search engine. I'm very frustrated. Can anyone help.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use fox fire and have not been able to get rid of searchbenny. I deleted file called installmac and when I go to google chrome it looks like all settings have been corrected I even restarted computer many time but search benny keeps opening as my search engine.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have also the same problem. If I search in Google, and click on a search result. I don't go to the URL of the search result, but to Bing, in the URL it says 'search.searchbenny.com' How do you remove this? I have a Mac and use Safari

<comment><USER7> I had the same problem and just fixed it.

it was an extension named "fast search" in the Safari > Preferences > Extensions section. I unistalled it and the problem was solved!

Before that though i moved to trash all the suspicious files from the Finder > Applications section as they were described from the wildthing84 below.

hope i helped

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I solved my problem, searchbenny actually provides a link that tells you how to uninstall in variety of situations - safari, foxfire etc

</comment><comment><USER8> Hello, I downloaded the same malware on accident when trying to download utorrent. I have followed the steps below sucessfully, but I noticed that the installerT process keeps coming back after I reboot my computer. Also advice on how to remove it completely? Thanks, this thread has been extremely helpful.</comment>


CA governor projecting 25.5M COVID19 cases in CA in 8 weeks [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/3.18.20-Letter-USNS-Mercy-Hospital-Ship.pdf <comment><USER2> As pointed out below[0], this is a sensationalist headline and should be changed. This is the projection if _no measures_ were taken.

Which makes sense: if 56% of the population is going to contract coronavirus in the next eight weeks, then the lockdown is pointless. You're nearly to herd immunity at that point, why cripple the economy if it doesn't even make a dent in the transmission rate.

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22634268](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22634268)

<comment><AUTHOR> > As pointed out below[0], this is a sensationalist headline and should be > changed.

The title was based on the entirety of the linked content — the letter from the CA governor to the president — which included no context around the numbers being based on no measures being taken.

<comment><USER2> Understandable, but since there's been clarification, I think that should be reflected in the title.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would disagree that the title should be changed, since the linked content does not reflect the additional context you're referring to.

I suppose a more fully-qualified title might append "in letter to the president".

But appending "if no measures are taken" is not accurate, since this article — his letter to the president — doesn't include this context.

Saying the title is sensationalist is equivalent to saying the letter is sensationalist.

And if that is the case, the most you could say is a sensationalist title accurately represents a sensationalist letter.

<comment><USER2> Generally the HN style has been to actively editorialize to tone down sensationalism, even if the linked title or content is sensationalist.

<comment><USER3> I think GP was suggesting that the letter is itself not sensationalist, and thus neither is the title as it accurately reflects the content linked, and thus it is fine as-is.

I agree, it is a reasonable statement and reasonable projection (within an order of magnitude) that reflects the gravity of the situation. A lot of people don't seem to realize just how big this is about to become.

<comment><USER4> i think the measures most places have taken are going to reduce the spread significantly(USA, 2000 instead of 2 million deaths), i pray.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Swag maths on the business-as-usual scenario incoming, bound to be very wrong:

3.4% mortality rate among those presenting symptoms. (via WHO)

As low as 17.9% of cases asymptomatic: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/03/18/what- percen...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/03/18/what-percentage- have-covid-19-coronavirus-but-do-not-know-it/#42991ddf7e90)

Of the symptomatic cases, 80.9% are mild ([https://www.sciencealert.com/large- chinese-study-finds-most-...](https://www.sciencealert.com/large-chinese- study-finds-most-coronavirus-infections-are-mild)) and we're assuming only the ones that present risks are being tested.

So if the 25.5m figure stands correct, we're looking at what, a range of 195,000 to 695,000 possibly passed on in california before June depending on whether you apply it to not-mild (19.1%) cases v. all symptomatic (82.1%) cases?

I can't find any concrete sources on how anyone is calculating current mortality rates for the bug, but:

1\. that swing is _unfathomable_ to me

2\. those numbers are _unfathomable_ to me. Especially once extrapolated to the whole country assuming 56% of the nation contracts it.

<comment><USER6> This article[1] states that our best natural experiment for COVID-19 is the Diamond Princess cruise ship and its quarantine passengers. From that he estimates the the mortality rate is between 0.05% and 1%. That is, we don't really know what the rate is. The WHO giving a number with two significant digits implying some reasonable certainty about the number, is very deceiving and very likely just plain wrong.

[1][https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the- making-a...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-as- the-coronavirus-pandemic-takes-hold-we-are-making-decisions-without-reliable- data/)

By:John P.A. Ioannidis professor of medicine, of epidemiology and population health, of biomedical data science, and of statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Meta-Research Innovation Center.

<comment><USER7> 0.05% is just ridiculous. That's half the death rate of the flu, so the only way he can justify a number like that is if he believes we are missing the VAST majority of all cases (due to them being mild) and only seeing the severe ones / deaths. But there's a simple check to this - how many deaths does Italy have per day in a bad flu season vs how many Covid-19 deaths per day are they having now? Worst flu year on record I could find for Italy was 25,000 deaths (average year ~15,000 deaths). Spread those over 3 months for flu season, and that's 277 deaths per day. Italy had 475 deaths yesterday from Covid-19. Even if you assumed EVERY Italian has contracted Covid-19, death rate would have to be at least 2x the flu. Now, think about how the majority (80%?) of deaths in Italy are in the Lombardy region, which has maybe 1/4 the population, and thus 1/4 the flu deaths per year. Now it's clear Covid-19 must have fatality rate at least 5-6 times worse than the flu, even assuming every Italian has it...

Edit:

Flu mortality stats for Italy: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S120197121...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971219303285)

Covid-19 deaths per day in Italy: [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/)

<comment><USER8> I think Ioannidis included that very low number as an example of how ridiculous the statistics can look when using the Diamond Princess as a sample and factoring in the relevant sources of uncertainty.

<<Projecting the Diamond Princess mortality rate onto the age structure of the U.S. population, the death rate among people infected with Covid-19 would be 0.125%. But since this estimate is based on extremely thin data — there were just seven deaths among the 700 infected passengers and crew — the real death rate could stretch from five times lower (0.025%) to five times higher (0.625%). It is also possible that some of the passengers who were infected might die later, and that tourists may have different frequencies of chronic diseases — a risk factor for worse outcomes with SARS-CoV-2 infection — than the general population. Adding these extra sources of uncertainty, reasonable estimates for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population vary from 0.05% to 1%.>>

Mainly I think he wants more testing, but people are cherry picking his argument to try to downplay the risk.

His key point from the overall piece is something like "we need more testing, including randomly sampled data. Let's not give up on testing while we ratchet up the countermeasures."

Evidence:

Second graph- <<At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact.>>

in the middle- <<The most valuable piece of information for answering those questions would be to know the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population and to repeat this exercise at regular time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections. Sadly, that's information we don't have.>>

concluding graph- <<If we decide to jump off the cliff, we need some data to inform us about the rationale of such an action and the chances of landing somewhere safe.>>

\---

Coming from a different angle, the latest estimate from Wuhan is 1.4% (.9-2.1)

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7?mod=articl...](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0822-7?mod=article_inline)

<comment><USER7> Well given how widely people have carried his "0.05%" as lower bound, I'd imagine he'd have said something if he didn't really think it was a "reasonable estimate for the case fatality ratio in the general U.S. population", as he said.

I do agree though that more data is critical. Although we have far more than enough evidence now to know that we need to act strongly at least for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why did we give up on containment?

China and South Korea have shown that it's possible. China capped out at only 100k infected for a population of 1.4 billion.

Aiming to let 56% of your population get infected of which more than 3% will die is NOT the solution.

China's strategy seems simple enough. Close off borders of a region, stamp out all existing cases with aggressive testing, then keep the region at 0 cases by requiring mandatory 2 week quarantine before letting anyone in. Do this one region at a time until your country is all clean. Now their biggest problem is teaching the rest of the world this strategy.

<comment><USER10> We have an extreme wealth disparity with many having no savings and no social safety net. We can't force everyone to stay home for months, the economy would collapse.

China maintained draconian levels of control - citizens had cards with their risk level, and were tested frequently when they went to a public space. Have symptoms or some reason to believe you might be infected? You were quarantined from your family and not released until 4+ hours later. If they needed to be kept overnight, they had special hotels to quarantine people in. Citizens there actually listen to what the government tells them to do, and dissent is stamped out. In the states, a lot of people openly don't trust the government.

If we tried to control peoples' lives like that, our citizens would riot. You'd have armed citizens refuse to leave their homes.

They also did things that are unimaginable here - they built an entire hospital in 10 days. They have infrastructure and equipment from SARS that they were able to mobilize.

We aren't China, and we can't accomplish what they've done. Not in eight weeks. We are not prepared for this.

<comment><USER11> > We can't force everyone to stay home for months, the economy would collapse.

You could. Just pay everyone $1000/month until it ends.

<comment><USER12> And what do you pay the businesses that are closed?

<comment><USER13> We've long been pursuing the supply side economics for far too long. Massive tax cuts and bailouts. Banks came back rather quickly after 2008. The citizens, well, it took a while.

I'm beginning to think that if businesses can't survive for 6 months in a catastrophe, maybe it's better that they die. Moral hazard, you know.

If businesses die, you still have the people to build more businesses. If people die, you'll have neither.

<comment><USER14> That's an awful lot of people's life savings in their small business that goes poof. A lot of the businesses that can't survive are leaving behind people that are not capable of bringing them back, and people that won't be employed there afterwords.

<comment><USER13> So a lot of people's life savings have gone poof, not just small businesses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not trying to throw a ton of water on this, but this is a political document. Is it possible that they've put out this large number to justify their heavy handed response when it falls well short of that? Because people, once the economic impact if fully felt, are going to want a justification for their sacrifice.

<comment><USER16> Take a look at the graphs on this page, particularly "World, Confirmed Cases" and "US States, Confirmed Cases Per Million Inhabitants":

[http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/](http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/)

We are not near an inflection point yet.

<comment><USER17> Great link thank you - it looks like if the US follows China, is it nearly two months from the peak, with Washington state about 10 days closer. If China is even comparable. We will know more when Italy reaches its peak.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think it's honest for these reports _that accompany executive decrees_ to not take into account the reality on the ground.

This report assumes "business as usual" whereas the reality is people absolutely _are_ social distancing. Therefore any data submitted to the public as the rationale behind a decision should reflect that: the numbers report should indicate the projection based off of the current Bay Area shutdown and the general self-isolation and self-distancing that is in effect to make its point.

</comment><comment><USER19> This doesn't make sense right? As of today, California has 1000 cases.

Even assume the infections double every 4 days, in 8 weeks that gives us: 16.4 millions.

And currently Santa Clara county is in a virtual lockdown, I am wrapping my head how could we reach this number really?

<comment><USER20> I'm concerned that there is a vast disparity between the number of confirmed cases and the actual number of contracted cases (esp. asymptomatic).

NY has tested the largest number of people out of all states and has >4000 confirmed cases as of March 19th, and it's _still_ being undertested for relative to countries like South Korea.

</comment></comment><comment> dis-sys There is something I really don't understand - if most people just stay at home and cut all non essential public activities to the minimum, how 50% of the population could still get infected?

<comment><USER21> We only have lagging indicators by about a week or more.

It takes people at least a day, and usually a few days to get sick. A little while longer for them to go to the hospital (if they go at all -- most don't because it's usually mild). Then testing, if it happens at all, takes a few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's pretty clear that the current policies are misguided, IMO. The vast majority of those dying are the elderly and people with pre-existing conditions, most of the time, both. THOSE people should be locked down tight and they should receive testing and resources if we are to minimize the death toll. We're also fortunate in the sense that only 16% of US population is over 65 years old. Germany and especially Italy are nowhere near this lucky.

Instead, we're spreading limited resources super thin, and fucking up the economy in the process for everyone. Seems like offering these vulnerable populations temporary shelter and supported isolation for a month would do a heck of a lot better job than locking down everything _and not providing any support to the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions_. And you could easily offer such isolation: millions of hotel rooms are currently empty, and hoteliers are hurting for cash, which bodes well for getting those rooms (and room service to go with it) at cost.

Case in point: as of March 17, only 17 people of those who died in Italy were under the age of 50. That's out of something like 2800. And the median age of those dying was 80.5 years. Same stats on the ship: all of the deaths were among 70-80 year olds. This shows you who's really at risk in a Western-style medical system in a developed country.

<comment><USER20> Please see the Imperial College London report, recently released, for a model that contradicts what you're suggesting [0].

In particular, see Figure 3 for a direct refutation of the idea that simply applying suppression techniques to the infected or primarily-at-risk groups is adequate.

Anything other than immediate and severe suppression techniques puts us over ICU capacity in the next few months, and the estimated number of deaths skyrockets into the millions.

[0] [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/s...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI- modelling-16-03-2020.pdf)

<comment><USER22> I might be misreading this, but see graph on page 8 of the report. What I'm proposing is the blue curve.

<comment><USER20> Yes, I'm saying that the figures on page 10 imply that the blue curve (on its own) is not effective enough to avoid critically overwhelming the hospital system in the UK in the short term.

The guidance towards the measures you see now (nonessential workplace closures, social distancing, restrictions on movement and activity) are what seem to be recommended throughout the rest of the report to suppress the catastrophically high death tolls.

If you read further to Figure 4 (page 12) you'll see a model for "adaptive triggering" of suppressive techniques (basically staggering to allow a resumption of activity before starting again) which would need to be in place until a vaccine has been successfully verified as safe and inoculation has started.

EDIT:

"Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that _mitigation is unlikely to be feasible_ without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. [...]

In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US. [...]

We therefore conclude that _epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy_ at the current time."

Emphasis mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't believe they will have 26M tests in 8 weeks.

<comment><USER24> right, if you don't get tested then do you really have coronavirus?

<comment><USER25> Schrödingerona's virus

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If the governor is assuming exponential growth, what's the doubling time? From the formula:

        N(t) = N0*2exp(t/Td)

where:

\- N(t) is the final count (25.5M)

\- N0 is the initial count (1040 according to Johns Hopkins)

\- t is the time (8 weeks)

\- Td is the doubling time (TBD)

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

Solving for Td:

        Td = t/(ln(N(t)/N0)

Plugging in the numbers, I get Td = 0.8 weeks, or 5.6 days.

<comment><USER27> Which I think is roughly what the numbers have been showing so far--debatably an upper bound, given the under-availability of testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Easiest way to get this number: estimate actual/confirmed case ratio is 10x, and estimate a 5-day infection doubling time. That hits the projection almost exactly.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are 1030 known positive CA cases right now according to the JHU map.

The governor's letter is using a doubling time of 4 days, but there's good reason to believe this 4-day time is due to recently increased testing.

If the governor instead takes the best-guess mean doubling time from several epidemiological studies[1] of 6.4 days, then, you would have to assume there are are 38.5 actual cases for any one tested positive case right now in order to get to 25.5M.

(25.5 * (10 ^ 6)) / (1030 * (2 ^ ((7 days/wk * 8 wk) / 6.4 days_to_double))) = 38.46742327016

So to get there, the governor has to be assuming that the current measures being put in place will do absolutely nothing, and also assuming almost actual 40 cases per real case, which is quite possible.

If you assume the 4-day doubling time they quoted will continue for 8 straight weeks, and the number of current cases is accurate (again, probably not - probably an underestimate), you still just get to 16.9M cases.

Seems to me the more likely situation is that: (1) there are more cases than we think right now (Maybe not 40x, but maybe 10-20x?). (2) the doubling time will be affected quite A LOT by the measures being put in place. It might drop the R0 to close to 1.

In that case, I would expect the enacted measures to at least half the R0 starting from this week, beginning of a flattening of active case count starting at this point.

That new R0 would hugely affect doubling time. But even conservatively estimating that R0 only goes down by 25% vs 50%, in 8 weeks time the projection of cases in CA would still be reduced by almost 60x.

TLDR - Best guess 8 weeks from now, CA has between 400k-1M cases. But not anything close to 25.5M. You can downvote me in 8 weeks if I'm wrong. Hopefully, the real number is closer to mine than to Gov. Newsom's.

[1] [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30260-9/fulltext)

<comment><USER30> "Any statistics can be extrapolated to the point where they show disaster" — Thomas Sowell, 1996

<comment><USER29> Also - "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."

― Ronald H. Coase

<comment><USER31> Also "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." —Herbert Stein

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> At what point will they capitulate and give up?

This sounds like they have completely given up on containing it. We are now left to our own fate.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is this the projection _with_ the lockdown measures that are in place?

<comment><USER34> No, the projection assumes no measures at all are taken - not even the ones that already have been.

"Newsom's request said 56 percent of California's population, a whopping 25.5 million people, would be infected over an eight-week period. A governor spokesperson later clarified the projection included zero mitigation efforts such as the Bay Area's shutdown of non-essential businesses to decrease contact between residents."

[https://www.ocregister.com/2020/03/19/gov- newsom-56-percent-...](https://www.ocregister.com/2020/03/19/gov- newsom-56-percent-of-californians-projected-to-be-infected-with-coronavirus- in-8-week-period-2/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Politician math != math

</comment><comment><USER36> I hope no one projects COVID19 onto anyone. What a rude man. Hope he reconsiders.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm not saying there isn't a report on Gavin's desk with a bunch of lines on it, one of which extends to 25.5M in 8 weeks.

Yes, if you double 1,000 14 or 15 times you get to 25.5M.

The problem is that the population of California is 40 million. Even with basically unmitigated spread, your clusters will slow growth simply due to lack of new available uninflected contacts.

Going from 1,000 people to 63% of your population in 8 weeks is frankly not a serious projection. Keep in mind this is a political document, not a scientific paper.

<comment><USER38> We have 1000 confirmed cases when most people who have symptoms can't get tests to confirm whether they have it.

That is a long way from having only 1000 cases at present. We are at a significant multiple of that. Estimates of Wuhan at a similar point suggest that they had 7x official figures. We are likely about 5000-10000 in reality.

Now what is the growth? Here is a trivial sanity check. From [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus- cases/...](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/#case- tot-outchina) on a log scale it is clear that reported cases worldwide have been growing by a factor of 10 every 2 weeks. Projecting that out for 8 weeks starting with 1000 gives you 10 million. Starting with our likely 5000-10000 we hit all of California. At which point the limit is not that exponential growth doesn't get us there, but rather that the exponential curve hits saturation and breaks down. At which point you fit to other models based on past epidemics to get an estimate of where it tops out.

Now 63% is in line with projections we've seen for weeks. That's 25 million people. if we believe the recent Lancet estimate that the fatality rate is 0.5-1.5% of people who get it, that is 1.25-3.75 million dead Californians. If we believe more conservative estimates, that's still a lot of dead people no matter how you slice it.

<comment><USER37> A good basic sanity check is to look at the log-graph of total cases in any given country, not the whole world.

Take Italy for example. You'll see immediately the growth is not a constant exponent. Nor would even simple theoretical models expect it to be. It's a logistics curve, or "S" curve, which means the exponent starts out at the highest value (once it takes off) and then is constantly decreasing over time.

What that looks like in the logarithmic charts is a line which starts at a high slope and flattens over time.

See, for example: [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/)</comment></comment></comment>


Dish Network buys Blockbuster for $320 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/06/us-blockbuster-dishnetwork-idUSTRE7351VA20110406

<comment><USER2> It makes me happy that a company that so blatantly laughed in the face of one of their competitors (Netflix) is now being sold on the chopping block for pennies on the dollar.

Really makes Reed Hastings look like a visionary.

<comment><USER3> Redbox is another example of their lack of vision.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dish probably came out ahead by purchasing the entire company rather than letting Icahn win and then buying the relevant assets. If Icahn was chasing it, there was real-estate value there.

And that appears to be the case when one considers that Dish only paid $190k per store. Based on $20k per store per year that's a 11% cap rate - and the worst performing locations have already been culled from the portfolio. Consider that $20k per store per year can probably be achieved with less than 10 Dish network subscription sales per month and the deal for corporate controlled retail locations makes more sense.

All the rest of it - the streaming and content deals, kiosks, etc. is just more upside.

</comment><comment><USER5> Few people probably realize that the Blockbuster Express kiosks all over the country in supermarkets and whatnot are owned by NCR who just licensed the name from Blockbuster, inc. Dish Network doesn't really benefit from those in this deal as far as I can tell.

When BB filed for chapter 11, NCR sent out an email stating that it would not affect BBExpress kiosks in the slightest.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't really see any reason for Dish to do this. What value is there? Brand image? Maybe, but $320 million doesn't sound right.

<comment><USER7> Digital content distribution deals that blockbuster has cultivated. They don't give no shits about the stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a bad move! A company of a dying type buys an already dead company. Nothing new or original to come out of this.

<comment><USER9> You think that's bad? I still see new video stores opening.

What bank would possibly fund a new B&M video store in 2011?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Funny response by Fast Company about what to do with it: [http://www.fastcompany.com/1745065/blockbuster-bought-by- dis...](http://www.fastcompany.com/1745065/blockbuster-bought-by-dish- for-320-million-what-next)</comment>


A Plane Just Flew Around the World Without a Single Drop of Fuel - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/solar-impulse-2-around-the-world-flight_us_5796aca1e4b01180b530065b <comment><USER2> Manned flight doesn't seem to be a good application for solar aircraft given the weight and speed limitations. Solar drones seem a much better fit. Airbus seems furthest along with their Zephyr [0], it has stayed aloft for 14 days (!). They are targeting the military as a customer and are marketing it as an alternative to a satellite, that is, an indefinite surveillance capability.

Facebook has a similar program, Aquila, which is aimed at providing internet access. They just recently had first flight of a full scale version [1].

[0] [https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military- air...](https://airbusdefenceandspace.com/our-portfolio/military- aircraft/uav/zephyr/)

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/07/facebo...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2016/07/facebook-tests-full-scale-solar-powered-internet-drone/)

<comment><USER3> > Solar drones seem a much better fit

Does that mean you could have a drone permanently hovering just above the clouds, taking constant video or photo surveillance, periodically sending data to whomever, all of this powered entirely by the sun without ever needing to come down or stop?

<comment><USER4> Yes, that's what Facebook is aiming for with their Aquila project, for example:

[https://code.facebook.com/posts/268598690180189](https://code.facebook.com/posts/268598690180189)

(Except they want to provide wireless internet, not surveillance.)

<comment><USER5> * they want to provide wireless internet _for_ surveillance.

Facebook's raison d'etre is to surveil you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about the mushy on board computer powered by glucose?

<comment><USER7> Having a person on board cost several hundred pounds where the electronics would have been under 1. AKA, the person was closer to cargo, than necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Things get interesting when we cross the inflection point of having an abundance of lift.

Once you can achieve X+Y lbs of indefinite lift, where X is the necessary weight and Y is the excess, then maintaining Y*C aloft indefinitely becomes simply a matter of scaling the number of crafts to contribute the requisite excess lift (aerodynamics aside for the time being).

What affect will indefinitely floating object, barges, buildings (living, restaurants, business), etc... have on society where fuel isn't a factor? (e.g., Facebook's global internet, cheaper flying transports, cars and eventually domiciles)

<comment><USER9> You're absolutely right, above a certain ratio of surface area to mass it becomes downright _hard_ to keep a structure on the ground.

I'm experimenting with kites and the Magnus effect to eventually build exactly what you describe: infrastructure in the sky. (Note the absence of "cloud" puns, that is deliberate.) With computer control I see no reason why we couldn't have flying buildings.

My concern is that we will need to be able to fly to pass through the current mass extinction. I was looking at birds one day and realized that the dinosaurs that made it could fly. One way or another we are going to need to move lots of people and things rapidly over great distances.

I want to make swarms of cellular kite robots that can reconfigure themselves and combine to create vast lifting bodies.

\----

Should mention Bucky Fuller's discovery: An aluminium geodesic sphere of one- half mile or greater diameter will float.

Sunlight reflecting internally from the metal heats the air which expands. Above the critical size the mass of the air displaced from the sphere by thermal expansion exceeds the mass of the aluminium shell. If you sealed the sphere (even if it leaked a bit) it would remain aloft overnight.

Bucky called them "Cloud Nine" and wanted to build cities in them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Next step would be building it emission free and without use of any products that use the same fossil resources for the plastics?

<comment><USER11> Why? Then you would have 1 experimental solar plane that uses 0 fossil fuels anywhere it the supply chain.

It's not necessary to make everything use 100% renewable but rather solve some big problems that'll make a difference in reducing green house gases. Solving only 1% of a problem by reducing it to 0 means global disaster.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, you'd do far better by trying to improve the fuel efficiency for super freighters by half a percent, or less.

<comment><USER10> oh yeah if they would already enforce current regulations on emissions of these big ship (freighters, cruise, all of them) in international waters. Now they only have to be efficient, low emission near ports for example.

<comment><USER13> Ships must abide by flag country laws in international waters. There are treaties that cover most states. Compliance is an issue now though to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is less a plane, and more of a battery with wings. The amount of cargo a solar plane could carry is minuscule.

Limits to battery energy density means that we can't improve very much on this.

<comment><USER15> Batteries are (in theory) optional and irrelevant for solar planes. The 747 uses about 80MW of power on takeoff, and maybe half that for cruising. The 747 has 525 m^2 of wing surface area. The sun blankets the earth with 1kW per square meter.

Solar cell efficiency is the limiting factor, if you are willing to fly only at day. No batteries needed. And it will never be enough with current designs, since 500kW is well under 40MW.

Of course a solar plane can cruise much higher since it doesn't need oxygen for the motors. And it gets more range traveling westward. At a fast enough speed (tantalizing "easy" mach 1.4) a plane on the equator could cruise under high noon forever. Wing size tends to go down with speed, so I doubt that design will ever be possible.

<comment><USER14> Edit: You were originally off by three orders of magnitude.

Solar flux at 1 AU is ~1.3 KW/m^2. At sea level, due to atmospheric absorbtion, it is between 1 KW/m^2 and 500 W/M^2.

And yeah, 500 KW of power is probably enough to get a Cessna off the ground... Not so much a useful aircraft.

<comment><USER15> Sorry, I think I fixed it while you were typing out your post?

Atmosphere conditions are usually a bit better at 9km up than at sea level. If the numbers weren't quite so bad there would be a case for detachable JATO units to get a solar plane off the ground, which then fly back to the airport to launch the next plane.

... and I forgot the speed of sound gets slower at altitude. It would need to do mach 1.6 to stay under the sun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> My bet for carbon-neutral aviation is not batteries, it's synthetic hydrocarbon fuels.

A factory that can make kerosene out of atmospheric carbon and electricity at a reasonable cost seems like a smaller stretch than an exotic new battery with orders of magnitude better energy density.

<comment><USER17> Yep. If only we can make it work economically, carbon-neutral oil will be a complete win.

<comment><USER18> I think that hydrogen may be a practical alternative. Hydrogen seems vastly inferior for _cars_ but I think the economics are very different for large aircraft.

<comment><USER13> Hydrogen is low energy density and next to impossible to contain or transport without lossage. These are major barriers to commercial adoption absent a breakthrough, laying aside the problem of generation.

<comment><USER18> Hydrogen has low energy density by volume, but very good energy density by weight. The overhead of the volume might be offset by the gains from the reduced weight, which is especially important for aircraft.

Lossage is certainly a problem, but I think once your aircraft is airborne, you can basically burn any hydrogen as it outgasses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder if the plane had a small backup generator of some type in case they had total power loss over water, or was there a chase plane?

<comment><USER20> Was not there just a parachute for the pilot?

<comment><USER21> You still need someone to pick up the pilot before they drown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> For the heck of it, I compared this to what it would have taken to ship the SI2 via container ship. Apparently, a container ship can move a ton of cargo 500 miles on a gallon of fuel, so to ship the SI2 the entire distance of it's trip would take about 120 gallons of fuel.

The container ship would have been significantly faster, taking 50 days to complete the trip, versus over 500.

<comment><USER20> SI2 was the first time a trip around the world without chemical fuel was attempted.

Container ships move much more than that, leveraging the scale of cargo transport.

When the same amount of cargo is moved by non-chemical means, I'd be interested to compare the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> That pic over the pyramids is stunningly beautiful. Hopefully this achievement opens more eyes.

</comment><comment><USER24> Except the fuel used to create the airplane ;)</comment>


It's time to put down the civet-poop coffee - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/03/21/civet-poop-coffee-southeast-asia-globalpost/82066314/ <comment><USER2> It's just like conflict diamonds, (conflict oil??), sweatshop clothes, and electronic "recycling": make sure you're buying from an ethical dealer. One of the reasons the coffee is so expensive is you have to find the poop of wild palm civets somewhere on your coffee farm. It's not very easy to do at scale.</comment>