Yelponomics: What Really Drives Yelp Reservations - <AUTHOR> http://blog.eatmetrics.com/2011/04/yelponomics-what-really-drives-yelp-reservations/

<comment><USER2> I like the OkCupid-esque approach to data mining in this blog post. It's a great way to leverage customer data as a marketing tool. I'd love to see more posts of this kind going forward.

As for the data itself, I'd be interested to see which Yelp profile characteristics drive the most page views to the restaurant page (i.e. 4.5 stars vs. 3 categories vs. 500+ reviews). While the number of page views on Yelp may not be available, the number of click throughs to a restaurant's home page may be good proxy.

</comment><comment><USER3> "...a policy to ensure that no guest leaves the dining room unhappy" -- sounds like a good policy for any business to have, regardless of their Yelp presence.

<comment><AUTHOR> Believe it or not, this requires a real change in process for most businesses. Not many hostesses are hawk-eyed enough to spot an unhappy customer leaving.

<comment><USER4> I believe it -- I can only think of one time that a server even noticed a barely-touched entree and made an effort to find out if we were unhappy. Training, and eventually tools, for restaurants to understand customer sentiment before they leave the building would be amazingly powerful at influencing satisfaction scores. Call centers have technology at their disposal to perceive callers' moods from tone of voice and loop in a supervisor when they get exasperated. I wonder if anyone is applying this technology in restaurants?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting to hear that the number of categories associated with a yelp page correlates to how many reservations per month a restaurant receives.

<comment><USER6> Yes! I wasn't expecting the correlation to be quite so strong. It seems much easier to get listed in a variety of categories than to bump up your Yelp score by more than half a star.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While it's nice to see how this relates to online reservations, I'd like to see how it correlates to overall reservations.

<comment><USER6> I appreciate the feedback. I can say off the top of my head from "eyeballing it," that it does roughly correlate to overall reservations to some degree, but to dive deeper will probably require a follow-up post :)</comment></comment>


The letter the Feds sent to Theranos [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/5969923/Theranos_Inc_Cover_Letter_01-25-2016.0.pdf <comment><USER3> I looked up what those laws referred to are, and... this is very very serious and Theranos is unlikely to survive it.

The first two laws they are cited as having broken are about quality control standards. The next two laws they are cited as having broken are about qualifications that must be held by the laboratory director and technical supervisor. The last law they are cited as having broken is about qualifications that must be held by technicians. They have ten days to come into compliance, but in order to address these violations they will have to either hire new staff for key leadership and other positions, or pull their product from the market. They will do the latter.

This same company was previously forced to pull their "nanotainer" testing system from the market because when regulators sent them control samples, they fraudulently tested them on different equipment and with different procedures than they used with patient samples. I will be surprised if no criminal charges are brought against Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes.

<comment><USER4> They aren't laws, and they have ten days to submit a plan, not to execute the plan. Are you sure you know enough about this sector to weigh in on whether survival is likely?

<comment><USER3> Not laws? Those are section numbers from the US Code of Federal Regulations. Are you trying to point at the distinction between civil and criminal law?

<comment><USER5> The CFR is made up of _regulations_. Usually when people refer to "laws" in a U.S. context they are referring to statutes.

<comment><USER6> No no no, regulations have the force of law, and if you violate them you can be fined, jailed, banned from the industry, etc. This is serious.

<comment><USER4> I'm really not sure about that. There are so many conditions spanning when documents need to be signed, how to clean a nursing bag, when to hold meetings, what credentials personnel need to hold, how close to the floor/ceiling supplies can be stored.

What are some examples of COP violations leading to jail time?

<comment><USER7> Law - what is put together by Congress and signed by the President. This can involve tasking Federal agencies to do a specific task, referred to as a mandate.

Regulation - How the Agency turns its mandate, which is often broadly stated and sometimes nebulous, into concrete actions and policies. An example - <USER2> worked at the DOJ as an intern. There was a law passed to provide benefits to the families of public safety officers who died in the line of duty. What those benefits are? Who qualifies as a public safety officer? If a fire fighter gets in a car crash on his was home from a shift, does that qualify? The answers to these questions are determined by lawyers and experts in equal measure - the experts to determine what should be done to solve the problem, the lawyers to make sure the agency actually has the power to enact the policies the experts recommend. To put it in OOP terms, regulations are instances of law.

The stuff you mentioned - who is allowed to sign form 22a, minimum size of cleaning closets - is still law. The agencies also have the power to determine penalties for breaking regulations, not all of which involve going to jail. This power is again derived from what powers Congress assigns them when it writes the law.

<comment><USER4> These are rules for being a Medicare participating provider and the consequence of violating them is that you can't bill Medicare. I want to see one example of an individual doing time or even paying a fine for failing a CMS condition.

There are providers who don't bill Medicare, don't undergo CMS surveys, and don't follow the COPs. You guys are going overboard in calling it "the law."

<comment><USER8> A lab at Cleveland Clinic was placed in Immediate Jeopardy status a few months ago. They voluntarily stopped some services temporarily and were fined $600,000.

[http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/cms-fines- cleve...](http://www.beckershospitalreview.com/quality/cms-fines-cleveland- clinic-hospital-for-lab-deficiencies.html)

Whether or not regulations are technically "laws" is beside the point, and arguing about it so much is pedantic. The feds show up with a gun and have full authority to fine you or even padlock your lab (which has happened plenty of times). Theranos is in plenty of legal (or regulatory, who cares) hot water right now, whatever you call it.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for posting (and to seanccox who posted a similar link). I'm wrong, and it appears the lab business is different from other health care businesses where most surveys contain deficiencies and everybody just keeps working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're a digital health entrepreneur and treating what's happening with Theranos as a wakeup call to do rigorous science, you could do worse than to work with the UCSF Center for Digital Health innovation:

[http://centerfordigitalhealthinnovation.org/](http://centerfordigitalhealthinnovation.org/)

I'm a machine learning engineer working with UCSF cardiology. I certainly don't know all the answers, but I'm happy to try to answer questions or direct people to the right place.

<comment><USER10> I think it's quite dangerous when there's a company that says "we have breakthrough science, but we definitely can't tell you what it is", which was Theranos's M.O. for a long time.

Working in medicine is hard, working with biology is hard, not just because of regulatory hurdles, but because fundamentally the problems in those fields are much more commonly questions of basic science than engineering.

Good science leads to good companies, and if you can't do good science you're probably going to fail in this space. Good to see solid research institutions creating spaces to nurture good science at startups.

<comment><USER11> They claim that it's because they can't patent their inventions and are instead relying on trade secrets. Revealing their trade secrets wouldn't make them trade secrets anymore.

<comment><USER10> A lot of the things they've claimed to be developing (microfluidic devices, signal amplification strategies, novel assays, etc.) are totally patentable. Maybe they don't want to reveal their secrets to inhibit competition, but in medicine you have to prove the thing works before you actually use the thing.

I don't much care if they want to hide some aspects of how their process works, but under no circumstances should anyone in this space operate without conclusively, publicly and openly proving that the technology works. The standard for that is scientific publication, and the ability of disinterested parties to test the equipment and verify it does what it claims to do.

Plenty of medical/biotech/diagnostics companies have cleared that bar while maintaining trade secrets. Theranos should be submitted to the same standards, and as far as I can tell, whenever they have been tested, they have failed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> From a funding standpoint the first question that comes to mind is, "How did this happen?"

Theranos to date has raised $88.4M. The Series C was raised in 2010 following a 4-year hiatus.

In the ten years since the founding of Theranos, they were unable to hire anyone who would help them figure all this shit out?

It seems insane to me that a well respected venture firm like DFJ, who invested in their Series A,B and C, would not have done their due diligence and understood where Theranos would become vulnerable. Everyone knew that government regulators would be involved since day one.

I am bullish on Elizabeth. She is obviously extremely intelligent and charismatic but I'm bearish on her investors. Step one of funding should have been building a blood test that actually works and step two is getting that $88M test approved.

Without knowing the _whole_ story it's hard to form an opinion about the situation but I am super interested in the psychology of how all "this" happened.

Thoughts?

<comment><USER13> [http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/01/22/clinkle-up- in...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/01/22/clinkle-up-in-smoke-as- investors-want-their-money-back/)

> Clinkle had a polished demo that came before things like Apple Pay, said one > former employee, who declined to be named. But most importantly that person > added, Duplan "was charismatic when he wanted to be" and could "raise money > in absurd abundance."

You really want to change the world? Forget being a programmer, learn to be be charismatic.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't say that either Theranos or Clinkle have changed the world.

I would say that Apple, Google, EBay, Uber, Android, and Twitter have, but Steve Wozniak, Larry Page, Pierre Omidyar, Garrett Camp, Andy Rubin, and Evan Williams are far from charismatic.

This is more an example of "You can fool some of the people all the time or all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time." Charisma can help fool a critical mass of people early on, but once you try to expand to a product all the people use all the time, you'll fall flat on your face. Build something useful and then you don't have to fool anyone.

<comment><USER15> I don't think you picked up on Jeff's snark. I read it as "the key to successfully getting funding is to be charismatic" and "successfully getting funding" is currently synonymous with the sentiment that you would be "changing the world".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Definitions of "conditional-level deficiency" and "immediate jeopardy" can be found at [http://www.hospitalinspections.org/qa-with- cms/#10](http://www.hospitalinspections.org/qa-with-cms/#10)

I can't say Theranos's comments about the matter even begin to assuage the concerns this brings. Trying to pass off the immediate jeopardy fault in hematology (i.e. blood testing) as "not apply[ing] to the whole lab" is absurd. It's like a restaurant saying that the board of health complaint that shut them down focused too much on the rat feces in the kitchen, and not enough on the well watered house plants in the dining room. It's so tone deaf.

<comment><USER17> > It's like a restaurant saying that the board of health complaint that shut > them down focused too much on the rat feces in the kitchen, and not enough > on the well watered house plants in the dining room

To be fair, that has been Theranos' response to ALL criticism for the past 7 months. "Everyone is begging us for our secret recipes, but that is company secrets/proprietary science!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Discussion about a month ago [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10765562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10765562)

For the record, I'm pretty sure Theranos is up to something very shady. Spend a couple hours watching just interviews with Holmes and reading the glassdoor reviews by current and former employees and you'll quickly start to piece together some pretty sketchy stuff.

Their glassdoor profile is full of some of the most obviously fake reviews I've ever seen, I wouldn't at all be surprised if about half of them were written by Holmes herself instead of running the company.

[https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Theranos- Reviews-E248889.h...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Theranos- Reviews-E248889.htm?sort.sortType=RD&sort.ascending=false&filter.employmentStatus=REGULAR&filter.employmentStatus=PART_TIME&filter.employmentStatus=UNKNOWN)

Here's what I wrote on this about a month ago. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10765996](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10765996)

I've since spent some time looking into the company and asking some people I know in the industry about the company and the opinion seems to run from "scam" to "gross ineptitude".

Holmes' answers to simple questions are about as mealy mouthed as I've ever heard outside of Congress. e.g. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs- oj7U-bo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs-oj7U-bo)

Something smells really bad about Theranos and it's probably going to ruin a lot of people's careers while a select few are going to walk away with a nice percentage of the VC money in the end. The story on this will probably get caught up in post-Theranos litigation for many many years and I'll probably be retired long before the whole story is known.

The real problem is trying to ascertain motive. Money seems too easy for Holmes to have been working at it for so long. But it could be that simple.

<comment><USER19> I can't imagine what Liz's end game might be. What did she expect to happen in this situation? The healthcare industry is very tightly regulated. If you want to (temporarily?) mislead investors or customers, it's one of the worst options out there.

And after a decade in stealth mode, why did she make things public in 2013, before the technology was working? If she's as much of an attention-seeker as some say, how did she survive for the first decade without anyone caring?

<comment><USER18> > What did she expect to happen in this situation?

In my more charitable moments thinking about what they're up to the best I can come up with is "AirBnB/Uber". Just ignore the law and hope it goes away long enough to make money.

But both of those companies actually offer a working and viable service/product while Theranos doesn't seem to be even at that MVP point yet so that doesn't really even make sense either. At this point they're just taking VC money and lighting it on fire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is a little sensationalist - it's a list of deficiencies in their labs, not in their tests. More akin to an OSHA violation letter than a cease and desist letter.

Here is an example of the regs that they are violating. It's things like lack of lab personnel certification. [https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2011-title42-vol5/pdf/CFR-...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2011-title42-vol5/pdf/CFR-2011-title42-vol5-sec493-1441.pdf)

This is definitely not a good thing for Theranos, but it isn't them being called out for bogus biotech. (Not that that would surprise me immensely if it happened.)

<comment><USER21> It's only "sensationalist" if you cherry-pick the most bureaucratic-sounding requirement, and ignore the first one in the list, which is a lot more fundamental to what a diagnostic lab does -- they're violating some unspecified part(s) of the quality system requirements for labs:

[https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2011-title42-vol5/pdf/CFR-...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2011-title42-vol5/pdf/CFR-2011-title42-vol5-sec493-1215.pdf)

These are horribly oppressive, bureaucratic, unnecessary requirements like "maintain basic scientific controls":

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/493.1256](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/42/493.1256)

This also is a section, it's worth nothing, that consists mainly of references to lots of other, more specific, requirements. There's really no way of knowing what the violations are, other than to take the letter at its word that the violations are serious.

This isn't taxi medallions -- mess this basic stuff up, and you're putting people's lives directly at risk.

<comment><USER20> I only randomly picked a CFR to look up. This is totally a big deal! It just isn't the definitive 'none of these tests work' that many people have been expecting.

<comment><USER22> When it comes to biotech companies working in clinical diagnostics, lacking the proper credentials is way WORSE than 'none of these tests work.' Most diagnostics companies self regulate by hiring an FDA certified lab managers and technicians who share responsibility for making sure that the marketed product, in this case blood tests, is properly carried out and that it is comparable to the gold standard (usually much more expensive tests with known performance and false negative/positive rates). The FDA set it up this way because otherwise regulating all of the labs and their output like pharmaceuticals would be insanely more expensive and wildly impractical.

A company like Theranos selling blood tests without properly certified staff is the equivalent of Genentech or Pfizer marketing and selling snake oil disguised as cancer medication. It's the equivalent of selling something without having ever tested it to begin with.

<comment><USER23> This happened: [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-europe- idUSBRE85K1NH...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-roche-europe- idUSBRE85K1NH20120621)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how far Liz Holmes is going to take this thing. I wonder when it hits the breaking point where even she accepts the cold hard truth that this company that was famously valued at $9b is pure vaporware, built on little more than smoke and mirrors. Does the company need to file bankruptcy? Do investors need to sue to recover what money is left? Do insiders need to be criminally charged? I wonder...

<comment><USER25> Serious question: Even if Theranos goes down in flames, won't she walk away from this with a fortune? Maybe not quite the fortune she thought, but still many millions?

<comment><USER26> Quite likely. In later rounds, founders are often strongly encouraged to take money off the table by selling equity.

This isn't shady, it's so the founding team stops worrying about money and focuses full-time on the company. Ramen-profitable is good in the short term, but time becomes increasingly valuable as a company grows.

<comment><USER27> > This isn't shady, it's so the founding team stops worrying about money and > focuses full-time on the company.

Uh, no. It's so that the founders won't sell the company at a mere 4-5x rather than then 20-100x that the VC's want.

If it was genuinely about the company, they'd let _all_ the initial people take some stock off the table. Instead they only allow the people who could sell the company to take stock off the table.

Big difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Having a Unicorn go bust is akin to having a house get foreclosed on in your neighborhood in 2008. It doesn't reflect kindly on the value of the other homes in the neighborhood.

<comment><USER29> That is one of the reasons why venture capitalists not even affiliated to Theranos had suspiciously optimistic responses to the initial allegations last year:

[https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/655033793414238208](https://twitter.com/joshelman/status/655033793414238208)

[https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/658705178523258880](https://twitter.com/williamalden/status/658705178523258880)

[http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/21/in-defense-of- theranos/](http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/21/in-defense-of-theranos/) (Thanks to Analemma_ above for reminding me of this)

The Theranos saga is incidentally one of the reasons I wrote the "You Can't Criticize Startups" rant on Monday. (to be fair, _ignoring federal regulations_ is a different scope than mere criticism.)

<comment><USER28> I saw your post on the front page the other day but didn't have time to read it. I'll check it out. I'm a fan of your other posts. Keep up the solid writing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The corollary of "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" is "sometimes, you will ask forgiveness and be told 'hell no, what were you thinking?'"

</comment><comment><USER31> Unbelievable. I really dislike this company for trying to pull a fast one with people's health. I really hope some lawyers file a suit against Elizabeth Holmes or something bad happens to create a strong disincentive from someone ever trying to do something like ever again.

The chinese milk crisis is an extreme example of what could be done. The executives were executed or imprisoned, which again could be extreme, but I doubt anyone in china would ever try it again. [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia- pacific/8375638.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8375638.stm)

<comment><USER32> Totally agree. We need to bring Industry to heel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> CMS surveys, deficiencies, and plans of correction are to some extent business as usual for large health care providers. The article doesn't mention what they got hit with so it could be a big deal, or just an isolated incident that a surveyor happened to observe.

Correcting the problem tends to be easy, but measuring and reporting back your progress creates administrative expense. An example is paying for someone to train your employees on something related to the deficiency and then doing a random audit of their records at regular intervals for a few months afterwards.

Technically you can get shut down, but it isn't common.

<comment><USER33> If your comment were to be somehow combined with jimrandomh's, they would instantly combine, leaving nothing in their place.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, but I've been through multiple CMS surveys, some with deficiencies, some without. Some POCs were scary, some laughable. Personnel issues can be trivial (somebody's cpr certification expired yesterday) or serious (you hired somebody who claims to be a doctor but isn't). It's really hard to weigh in as an outsider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wow, not mincing words. I think we've found our first dead unicorn of 2016.

<comment><USER35> How many employees do they have? I would imagine that the impact of a dead unicorn would be directly proportional to the number of employees it had.

<comment><USER36> A quick google search suggests around 500.

<comment><USER34> 142 on LinkedIn - guessing whatever number you found is inflated by people working in clinics that do Theranos tests or something along those lines?

<comment><USER37> Maybe LinkedIn doesn't capture every worker? You think they have greater than 30% penetration into the market?

<comment><USER34> I've actually had the (dis)pleasure of doing a fair bit of work in this area and have found LinkedIn to be pretty directionally accurate - for tech companies, I'd ballpark it at closer to 80-90% in most cases. They may very well be one of the outliers - I typically saw that in businesses structured in a way that made it readily understandable (ie 75 core employees, but hundreds of hourly warehouse employees without LinkedIn accounts). Not sure if Theranos has such a structure - perhaps the medical/research side is much less likely to have LinkedIn accounts than the tech side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Without the actual statement of definicinies, there's not much to this letter other than that they have ten days to be in compliance with... something?

Does anyone know what they are being ask to fix?

<comment><USER39> You can look up the regulations listed in the letter although you won't know exactly what their deficiencies are.

What is interesting to me is that this is CMS, not the FDA. CMS runs Medicare and Medicaid and is basically saying that if they don't improve their compliance, CMS will stop paying for their lab tests.

<comment><USER8> CMS administers the CLIA program. This is about their ability to operate as a lab, not just about Medicare reimbursement.

See here for a clear breakdown of responsibility among government agencies: [http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidanc...](http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/IVDRegulatoryAssistance/ucm124105.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As a medical laboratory professional I can shed some light: The Immediate Hazard Hematology citation comes from an expired reagent being used on a Hematology analyzer (clearly a standard Siemens analyzer, not the mysterious new technology they won't disclose). This is easily fixable, but reveals a great deal about what is ACTUALLY going on in that lab

The Laboratory Director and Technical Consultant citations are standard when you have an Immediate Hazard citation. But they also reveal how poorly organized this lab is and how whomever is responsible for the laboratory leadership at a directorship level knows NOTHING about CMS laboratory regulations, or tried to pull a fast one on CMS/CLIA by hiring a patently unqualified Dermatologist to be a part-time director of a CLIA high-complexity lab. This is a MASSIVE glaring error in leadership and quality assurance at the very highest level. The executive leadership of this company appears to know nothing about the business they seek to upend. I am sure the Cleveland Clinic is wondering WTH they got themselves involved with. Also very telling that Holmes was at Cleveland Clinic the day after this letter was released.

They are clearly operating as a bog-standard lab doing conventional testing to be able to report patient results and be a traditional CLIA-certified lab (except may be one test they have - the HSV) This significant fact seems to have escaped everyone. They can't report any tests performed by their top- secret technology because it ain't FDA approved.

For a conventional refererence lab like Quest or Labcore, their inspection faults would be embarrasing but fixable. For Theranos, it's likely fixable but the PR fiasco may be ultimately fatal.

Someone shoukd really have studied the industry they seek to upturn and worked with real professionals rather than pusing global dominance and glossy PR. The cart is miles ahead of the horse at Theranos

</comment><comment><USER41> Hmm... I have a very good friend who is looking for a better job doing quality, regulatory, or compliance work at a biotech/medical device company. From what I understand, this seems kinda like the stuff a company in this area deals with regularly; It's just that most companies just don't publicize it. Anyway forwarded this to him.

edit: I should clarify, I mean general regulatory issues, I'm not commenting on the specifics, but every company faces audits and inspections.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is anyone else seeing a bunch of missing letters in the linked pdf? I know it's a side issue but it really makes the letter hard to read.

</comment><comment><USER43> Do you remember when the WSJ first started really dismantling the Theranos house of cards last fall, how a bunch of prominent VCs and publications like TechCrunch, with a lot to lose if the startup bubble pops, immediately circled the wagons? There was a lot of "this is a media hit piece", "we need time to evaluate the technology", "Liz Holmes is a visionary", etc. I wonder if we'll be getting retractions and apologies from those people.

<comment><USER44> What I saw was a lot of tech people and VCs cautioning against a rush to judgment. Which is totally reasonable. I for one will leave this up to the regulators to figure out. The people who invested in the company will lose (some/most/all) of their money. No need for us to get whipped up into outrage.

<comment><USER21> I'm not outraged by Theranos, but I do feel that stuff like this makes it all the harder for _legitimate_ science to get investment, by "raising the bar" on the number of stupid, oversimplified, breathless claims you need to make to get noticed.

Real science is too messy to be able to compete with a press release from a sufficiently motivated huckster -- and investors love a huckster in lab coat.

<comment><USER45> Doesn't real science ... publish real papers? Or at least file patents. It's the secret sauce that's so suspcious. To a skeptical outsider, it whiffs of e-Cat.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, but investors don't often _read_ papers...let alone have the expertise to know if they're any good. It's pretty common for investors to commit money based on good spin and social proof. Theranos has excelled at both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> To start with, I am a clinical lab medical director and clinical pathologist. I've commented on Theranos a few times before on HN. That said, I think three things have been missed in all of this

1) There are a lot of bad labs out there like Theranos, and Theranos' story is thus only unique because of how pumped up it got. Clinical labs are "old economy" businesses, and the idea that someone could sprinkle "new economy" fairy dust and turn it into an Uber or Netflix success story is more about the echo chamber that is Silicon Valley, the general lack of scientific interest or rigor in clinical diagnostics in the tech industry, a somewhat Aspergey yet charismatic CEO, black turtlenecks, and friendship with important ex- government officials and VC folks than anything special about what was going on in their laboratory. Plenty of labs have been caught and shut down for what Theranos has done, and while I didn't think that it was actually occurring there, I am not terribly surprised.

2) The magic of their Edison box, even if it had turned out to work, was not nearly as impressive if you know anything about how clinical labs operate today. The claims that they have made (can do tests on MICROLITERS and have imprecision LESS THAN 5-10%!) are actually standard these days for many assays. As a lab director, I was always disturbed by the lay press puff pieces that said things about Theranos that were totally uninteresting and unimpressive to anyone knowledgeable...what clearly happened was that no one at Forbes, etc.. actually asked anyone who works in a clinical lab to comment. The commentary always focused more on the phenomenon of Theranos, rather than the substance...probably because the substance was super boring.

3) What has consistently been missed, and is still missed today, is that even if Theranos' technology worked and their labs weren't being run with a criminal disregard for standard laboratory practice, is that Theranos' business objectives would STILL be a horrible idea. Their push to democratize health information, to do more testing early to prevent disease rather than detect late, to test for lots of things in healthy people to increase "wellness", etc... is all total bullshit. With few exceptions, lab tests are for sick people, and testing healthy people with lots of tests simply consumes money and generates false positive results that are expensive to work up. Also, there are NO TESTS for all of the conditions (cancers, etc...) that they claim to be helping you detect early. Getting your sodium and potassium levels weekly won't help you avoid kidney disease, cancer, or diabetes, but it will make your pocketbook shrink and it will give you some falsely abnormal values 1 in 20 times you do it. This has been the true play of Theranos, which is to do a massive amount of testing on well people, marketed directly to healthly people without the advice of doctors, with the intent of arming a bunch of worried well people with an avalanche of insignificant noisy information to present to their physicians. This helps no one other than Theranos.

I have often seen a lot of objections to (3) from people on HN, especially tech-sorts who think that they are better able to handle data than the average person. However, this is fundamentally flawed. For those who are interested in Bayesian analyses, consider the utility of any test when the pre-test probability is low - the answer is that positive results are almost always false positives, or at least difficult to interpret. The answer is not getting more tests, even if it's cheap. Lab tests these days ARE cheap...it's the clinical followup that is expensive.

I will be very interested to see how this all plays out now. The big players, Labcorp and Quest, have both tried the direct-to-consumer/in-drugstore model for testing, and amusingly actually shut their offerings down years ago because of lack of interest. The truth of the matter is that making health information more available to people sounds great, but really, the only people who end up collecting that information are affluent, worried-well people who should be discouraged from testing in the first place. The people who need more routine testing are poor, socially-underserved and neglected people with chronic illnesses, but I do not think that Theranos is planning on opening test facilities in Flint, Michigan to give Hemoglobin A1c monitoring tests for free to the elderly impoverished people there. To the contrary, they've tried to open in areas where they can get customers who they can trap into believing that they need lab tests like they need step counts from a fitbit. Hopefully, this bump in the road will caution others trying to do the same thing, but I really doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER47> I do hope Aaron Sorkin writes a movie about this.

<comment><USER48> They'd make the script a proprietary secret

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This interview snippet (only 4 minutes long) with the CEO Elizabeth Holmes is a revealing look into the mind of a possibly crazy person (crazy with power).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs- oj7U-bo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBs-oj7U-bo)

</comment><comment><USER50> Please look past your possible distaste for the source, but Zerohedge has an interesting angle on the situation regarding the composition of the board. At least take a look at the bottom half of the analysis, but make sure not to read the comments.

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-27/beating-dead- unicor...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-27/beating-dead-unicorn- theranos-lab-poses-immediate-jeopardy-patient-safety-cms-warns)

<comment><USER51> That article makes me think that it's possible that Theranos is more concerned with their government contract work than this "blood test for the common man" spiel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Wasn't she supposed to be God's own anointed founder CEO?

All kidding aside, wasn't there some other controversy or someone revealed something about Theranos not too long ago? I guess I was right [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984035)

<comment><USER52> I'm guessing you're referring to the series of events consisting of (1) the original WSJ investigative report, (2) the Theranos rebuttal pointing out a missing piece of information in WSJ's report, and (3) WSJ coming back the very next day after the Theranos rebuttal with the very information they were called out on.

It was all very beautiful to observe. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> 100% agree. Except that USAians believe that they live in a meritocracy.

<comment><USER53> The accepted English demonym is American, and it has been for the last 200 years. Did you think you would be misunderstood if you said American?

The USA is the only country in the world with the word America in the name. Part of the world does consider North and South America to be one continent, but most of the English speaking world does not. Therefore in English there is no ambiguity when referring to someone as an American.

You'll also note that no one has any issue with Australians calling themselves Australian, despite the fact that Australia is not the only country on the Australian continent.

<comment><USER54> I agree with just about everything you said except that Australia is really just home to one country. or am I about to learn something new? Oh I see the shelf includes other islands

<comment><USER53> Yes, Papua New Guinea is part of the Australian continent. East Timor and parts of Indonesia are as well depending on who you ask.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Any science or medicine types know if a potential solution to the problem this company wants to fix can be achieved by a 'hack' of sorts: just make a finger- prick, but keep it bleeding somehow (using mechanics or other chemical agents) until you can collect enough of a blood sample?

Seems like an easier approach than inventing breakthroughs in microfluidics.

<comment><USER17> The problem is that the finger prick actually hurts a lot more than a traditional venous draw. There aren't any real benefits to a "finger prick" other than marketing spin that it's so easy breezy and good for people who can't stand needles.

imo if Theranos had stayed out of microfluidics and stuck with fundamentals of testing but done it well- regular draws but used the best trained phlebotomists who can find the vein on the first stick, do a painless draw and really improved their model of "easy access" walk in Walgreens testing, immediate/fast under 24 hour results, pay up front and low cost, they could have overtaken Quest and Labcorp just by exploiting inefficiencies in that market. Instead they got too sidetracked focusing on razzle dazzle nanotainer microfluidic science that doesn't even work.

<comment><USER56> _"...There aren't any real benefits to a "finger prick" other than marketing spin..._"

 _"...regular draws but used the best trained phlebotomists who can find the vein on the first stick..."_

 _That 's_ the advantage of a finger prick. You don't need to be a trained phlebotomist to do it. The microfluidics drove the idea that you only needed "a few drops" to perform the tests (since drawing 100mL out of a finger would take forever). Put those two together and you had the concept of a test that any semi-skilled person could perform in a drugstore. That was the hook Theranos was banking on.

<comment><USER17> > You don't need to be a trained phlebotomist to do it.

Yes, but Theranos still had phlebotomists doing their finger pricks. Also, phlebotomists aren't that expensive. Even in the Bay Area I think they only make around $18 an hour. Cheaper than a nurse, for sure.

<comment><USER56> They had phlebotomists because, as we discovered in the fall, they were still drawing the standard vacutainers for all of the tests except the one that actually worked on the microfluidic system.

The remainder were run through traditional ELISA and clin-chem machinery from other companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> [http://seattleorganicrestaurants.com/vegan-whole- food/instit...](http://seattleorganicrestaurants.com/vegan-whole- food/institutional-corruption-of-pharmaceuticals-how-FDA-cannot-be-trusted- with-public-safety.php)

<comment><USER49> Why is this being downvoted?

<comment><USER58> Because the linked site seems flaky - no references. A google search for the title of the 'Harvard paper that is about to be published' only returns that site.

<comment><USER49> OK, makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I don't understand the schadenfreude and hostility toward Theranos (and the founder). From everything I've seen there's very little actual information publicly available either way about what's going on (aside from some weak pop tech journalism).

I'd imagine this negative media attention is stressful for them - like it is for any startup. Should minimally wait for something substantial to see if there was any actual wrongdoing - there's not much here so far.

<comment><USER60> A bubble company like this is an event of staggering inefficiency, it sends huge amounts of very valuable resources (money, but also things like people's careers, creativity, press attention) into a situation where they are ultimately squandered.

Asset bubbles can be like wars, they can waste the promise of an entire generation, never to be recovered. Nobody wants to see a collapse for collapse's sake, but there is quite a bit of social good in avoiding or deflating an asset bubble, be it in residential mortgages, late stage technology companies, or a 20 year old college student who was allowed to lose tens of millions of dollars of people's pension money just because she happened to be born in the right neighborhood.

<comment><USER61> I certainly don't disagree with your analysis, but surely most of the blame should be placed on the shoulders of those that controlled the pension money ?

<comment><USER60> We, rightly, have a concept of "fiduciary duty" deeply embedded in our common law and in the practice of investing. That applies to all the people entrusted with the assets in question, from the pension fund manager to the VC firm to the firm receiving the investment. There's a difference between a bad or risky bet that doesn't pan out and violations of that duty like misrepresentation and self-dealing.

The blame should go to those who breached that duty. It seems that at minimum they engaged in misleading statements about the degree of progress they had made with their technology. That's certainly unethical and possibly fraudulent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> At this point, we (HN community) are just treating this like a season of Jersey Shore.

She's working her ass off to build a company with a mission far more important than email marketing or advertising or Candy Crush or blockchains.

Were they overly optimistic in their projections? Probably, but try starting a company and not being optimistic. You'll never get off the ground.

Did they not take reasonable precautions in an industry (biotech/healthcare) with serious repercussions? Absolutely. There are very real questions about her empathy and ethics.

That said, let's stop getting giddy every time Theranos (or some other startup) shows weakness. As founders — those "playing startup" excluded — it is incredibly hard. Let's have some empathy ourselves for those who have (likely) fucked up.

<comment><USER62> > She's working her ass off to build a company with a mission far more > important than email marketing or advertising or Candy Crush or blockchains.

And from all accounts, she's too busy playing PR games, as opposed to treating this _like_ a mission far more important than email marketing.

Theranos is in the business of medical testing. This is not an industry where you can half-ass your way through certification... Or where scrutiny like "Does the product you've been selling even work?" is misplaced.

Theranos could dismiss this entire charade, if they could only provide evidence that what they claim to have built actually works.

<comment><USER26> Honestly, I don't think they have the data. I'm not saying their product works or that she did the right thing.

I do, however, question what the after-the-fact self-righteousness does for anyone.

Should no one be working on this problem? How do we invest in potentially innovative ideas in more complex fields before they have proven it out?

<comment><USER60> > Should no one be working on this problem?

You have to understand that's a ludicrous fallacy of the excluded middle argument you're making.

There is a _long_ way between wanting nobody to work on this problem, and thinking it's a good idea to give tens of millions of dollars to a bright but utterly inexperienced college student to work on this problem because she happened to be school friends with some VC's daughters.

[0] [https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney- detection-k...](https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection- kit-carl-sagan/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to move from CTO to COO/CEO role - <AUTHOR> Hello All,
I am currently a CTO of a startup. My co founder is the CEO. I don't intend to be CEO at my current startup, I am happy and satisfied with my current role. I want to prepare myself to be a CEO or COO type of role in my future endeavors. I am an older candidate, introvert and a foreign national with an accent.
Here in my plan of action,

  Attend American Accent classes to neutralize the accent.
  Possibly, attend top tier part time mba program.
  Improve networking skills
 I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions yo u might have. <comment><USER2> As far as easy to digest resources go, Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" is a great reference as to what skills a good CEO should have.</comment>


PyPy-STM: first "interesting" release - <AUTHOR> http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2014/07/pypy-stm-first-interesting-release.html

<comment><USER2> Very cool.

I am interested to see how this progresses. It seems to me there is lots of optimisation possible to alleviate the cost of contention with greater number of threads. Single thread performance will always have to suffer somewhat but their cheap read barriers have done wonders already to bring that down to an acceptable level. It will reach a point however where the only way to speed it up further will be for the programmer to be able to specify STM hints for variables.

I would like to see this in Java or C# where there is more room for extended optimisation.

Kudos to the PyPy guys for sticking to their guns on this.

<comment><USER3> Java and C# don't have a GIL though, and have good support for threading right?

<comment><USER4> Linked list for single processor is a job for first year student.

Linked list for multiprocessors with mutexes and locks is a PhD-level job.

Linked list for multiprocessors with STM is a job for first year student again.

The quote is from one of Simon Peyton-Jones talks.

<comment><USER3> Thanks - that quote immediately shifted my thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That raises a few questions :

1- will this takes us closer to a golang like way of working in parallel ( since that means no GIL) ?

2- Why did dropbox / guido didn't join forces with pypy, since they already had proved that their approach was very efficient performance wise ? Is it because pypy doesn't deal with native C code at all, whereas the python LLVM approach they chose may let the two work better ?

3- does anyone else feel like the python world is a complete mess right now ?

EDIT : didn't want to sound harsh, on the contrary. Seing so many smart people work on separate path on great projects for so long feels like some great energy is going to end up a waste of time.

<comment><USER6> >1- will this takes us closer to a golang like way of working in parallel ( since that means no GIL) ?

I doubt it. The asyncio module was an attempt at this but the API isn't that great and it also isn't closely integrated with the language like goroutines are in Golang. This is still a great improvement though, as is PyPy in general. Basically, currently existing programs should run faster, and people will use the multiprocessing module less and the threading module more. It may change the way lower level parallel code is written, and library maintainers may be able to simplify some things.

>2- Why did dropbox / guido didn't join forces with pypy, since they already had proved that their approach was very efficient performance wise ? Is it because pypy doesn't deal with native C code at all, whereas the python LLVM approach they chose may let the two work better?

Probably a mix of "NIH" and also the belief that Dropbox has some of the best Python devs (and BDFLs) out there, so surely they can create the best solution. We'll see in the next few years if it plays out for them.

>3- does anyone else feel like the python world is a complete mess right now ?

Not that much. It's a big mess if you're trying to maintain a large open source project and need to keep retaining compatibility from 2.6 to 3.4+, but as a regular developer it's not too terrible. Personally I am still going to stick with 2.7 for personal projects for years to come, though.

<comment><USER7> For 3, even that isn't terrible in a lot of cases. All of OpenStack (AFAIK) maintains py26, py27 and py33 support (and one of the projects I work on aims for pypy as well, but isn't gating on it yet).

<comment><USER6> It's not that terrible, but it can be annoying. And arguably worst of all, it can make code a lot uglier than it needs to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat stuff.

Not sure why they have "(insert LLVM snark here)" when the docs say "At the LLVM IR level, the behavior of these special address spaces depends in part on the underlying OS or runtime environment, and they are specific to the target (and LLVM doesn't yet handle them correctly in some cases)."

Expecting that to work without fighting bugs seems "optimistic" to say the least :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Awesome news. I'm kind of scared to think how much Python code is written to assume the GIL though. I have a feeling a lot of libraries and code will have very subtle race conditions and issues, but it's still great to have an option for getting around the GIL.

<comment><USER10> I think the big idea is that this STM only attempts to commit at points where the GIL would have traditionally been released anyway - after so many bytecodes or some other condition. The linearisation of the memory writes of the different threads should be the same as if there was a GIL.</comment></comment>


Yale physicists find signs of a time crystal - <AUTHOR> https://news.yale.edu/2018/05/02/yale-physicists-find-signs-time-crystal <comment><USER2> Glad to see Sean make such a noteworthy discovery. I worked in the lab next door and remember him being the happiest and kindest person in the building. Kudos!

<comment><USER3> The "small world" effect of HN never ceases to astound me. It's always so cool to have somebody chime in with an anecdote about (what appears to an outsider as) something totally niche and out-there.

<comment><USER4> Sean was just Ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> First author here -- happy to take any questions!

<comment><USER5> There are a few questions about an "overview," so I'll give that a shot here. This is some imagery I've been using recently, about how our observed signatures are related to crystals.

Sometimes physicists think of phase transitions in terms of "symmetry breaking." Imagine zooming in very close on the molecules in a glass of liquid water, all tumbling quickly into and out of your field of view. The situation is highly "symmetric": if you closed your eyes and I shifted the field of view slightly to the left, you wouldn't know what I'd done when you opened your eyes again.

Now suppose the water freezes into a crystal of ice, so that the molecules are arranged on a regular lattice. If I repeat my "shift-slightly-to-the-left" experiment, you'd be able to tell I moved things. That is, somehow the molecules chose a particular location for the lattice, even though any other location of the lattice could have done just as well. In jargon, we say the water "spontaneously broke the continuous translational symmetry": the defining _equations of motion_ are agnostic about the particular location in space, but the _state of the system_ chose a location anyways.

In our experiment, we do something similar in time rather than space. We drive the system with pulses once every time period "T", so the _equations of motion_ are identical under this "discrete" shift in time. However, the _state of the system_ (in our case, the direction of the nuclear magnetization) only goes back to itself every time 2T, and so "breaks discrete time translational symmetry."

There is one more important feature of the observed signature in this analogy: if you nudge an atom that is in a crystal lattice, it will want to return to its original position. Similarly, the period of the magnetization's direction- reversal is robust to our pulse imperfections, if we allow the quantum interactions long enough to act. So, the "region" of parameter space where you can observe this effect is not confined to perfectly ideal pulses, but is instead robust to our pulse imperfections -- the "robustness" depends on the amount of time we allow the nuclear spin interactions to take place.

\---

I hope this helps. I recommend the synopses available at prl.aps.org, and searching for the PDF preprints on the Arxiv (not yet quite as good as the published versions), if you don't have Physical Review access.

\---

[Edit for links]

[2012 overview] [https://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/116](https://physics.aps.org/articles/v5/116)

[2013 overview] [https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/31](https://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/31)

[2013 quanta mag.] [https://www.quantamagazine.org/perpetual-motion-test- could-a...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/perpetual-motion-test-could-amend- theory-of-time-20130425/)

[2017 overviews: "recipe" and first two results]

[https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/5](https://physics.aps.org/articles/v10/5)

[https://www.nature.com/news/the-quest-to-crystallize- time-1....](https://www.nature.com/news/the-quest-to-crystallize-time-1.21595)

[2018 announcement] [https://physics.aps.org/synopsis- for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120...](https://physics.aps.org/synopsis- for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.180603)

[A different background by (the great) Natalie Wolchover of Quanta Mag., which provides context for the original thrust of one branch of this research. Our first significant involvement was after a talk about "Time Translational Symmetry Breaking" by Chetan Nayak of Microsoft's Station Q.]

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-aim-to-classify- al...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-aim-to-classify-all-possible- phases-of-matter-20180103/)

<comment><USER6> Is there any relationship between this kind of lossless vibration, and other lossless processes like superconductivity or superfluidity?

<comment><USER5> I'm not confident that what we're observing are "lossless vibrations," but it is the case that there is something that is "lossless" about what we call "unitary evolution." The signal we start with decays to zero after a while, but we are able to show that this signal can be (in large part) restored, demonstrating that much of what initially looked like irretrievable loss is actually what we think of as "evolution towards a complicated but coherent state."

<comment><USER6> I'm more confused, now. Some of the articles you linked to talk about time crystals as a type of perpetual motion machine, albeit one that is "exactly unity" instead of "over unity" as the crackpots would say.

If you have to hit the system with an impulse every once in a while to keep it toggling, how is it different than any other kind of resonant oscillating system? Is it that the cycle goes through states like:

* disorganized

* organized, directional

* disorganized

* organized, opposite direction

I still feel like the part of this system that is special and interesting is getting lost in the translation to lay language :(

<comment><USER5> This is a good question. The "directions" you mention would, in our system, typically be considered to depend on the nature of the drive. For instance, if you repeatedly rotate the magnetization by 180 degrees, you can imagine the magnetization going up-down-up-down-... repeatedly, whereas if you instead used rotations of 181 degrees, it would take a long time for the state to come back around to pointing along its exact original orientation.

The proposed signature of a "discrete time crystal" was to observe the magnetization point up-down-up-down-... even when you used e.g. 181 degree rotations, _if_ you allow dipole-dipole interactions to act for long enough between rotations. This is what we observe: "wrapped" magnetization when we use imperfect rotations with short nuclear spin interaction times, then locked up-down-up-down-... magnetization when we use imperfect rotations with longer nuclear spin interaction times.

A last subtelty when comparing to traditional oscillating systems is that the response is not at the same frequency as the drive, but will have a period determined by both the drive period T and the symmetry of the dipole interactions. Our system's interactions have 2 symmetric states, so the response period is at 2T. Other systems have other symmetries; for instance, the research team at Harvard showed oscillations at 3T using a spin system with different interaction symmetries.

<comment><USER6> (HN doesn't do private messages, or this would be sent privately)

Thanks for coming out here and fielding our totally ignorant questions. Its an amazing and beautiful world out there, thank you for sharing your discoveries about it.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the kind words. I've focused a good deal in the past few years on teaching/communication (see my profile for a link to some of my basic-physics lectures for student taking the MCAT), and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to discuss our work with this community. Thanks for your interest and great questions!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > a time crystal — a form of matter that "ticks" when exposed to an > electromagnetic pulse

what a fancy name.

We would have called that an "oscillator" or a "resonator" or so back in the days :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Out of curiosity, how is this different from the crystals used for timing in a small electronic device like an arduino? Is this an effect different from the piezoelectric effect?

<comment><USER9> instead of readily usable voltage/current changes, you get (so far) useless, probably cased by the measurements, electron spin in one direction or another flipping over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Most of this stuff goes way above my head, but I remember that creating time crystals used to be a thing last year? [0]

What's so special about these Yale time crystals, are they of a different type then these previous ones? This all feels a bit weird like there's some kind of secretive time crystal production going on, by people initiated into the dark arts of metaphysics.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13505287](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13505287)

<comment><USER5> There are a few key differences in our work. First, it's a very different system; the prior experiments were done using trapped ions, and "defects" (nitrogen-vacancy centers) in diamond, while our system used nuclear spins. The more important difference is that our system is very ordered, since it took place on an actual crystal lattice with a high degree of symmetry (this matters because some theories proposed the need for this disorder to observe the effect -- the trapped ion experiment even purposely included disorder). This is the reason for our use of the word "ordered" in the title of the paper.

Other differences include our further work to clarify the phemomenon, including the creation of "echoes" to explore the coherence of the system (see my other comments) among other new contributions about the parameter space and behavior of the effect. Finally, it's just surprising to have observed this effect across so many systems which are all so different from each other (very different Hamiltonians).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Naively I'm imagining the flips are triggered via incoming particles - photons? If so, what are the characteristics required of the inputs and how does that affect the particles in/out of the system?

I'm wondering about possible applications for time crystals?

Anyway this is really intriguing! When I first read of time crystals they really seemed unlikely to ever be observed. But if they're in human made crystals they just might be either more common or easier to produce than I'd thought.

<comment><USER5> We use a solenoid to drive magnetic fields in our sample (RF frequencies, near field), but yes, we do often envision an absorption or emission event by a given nuclear spin as it changes its spin state in the presence of an even stronger, static magnetic field. We have to carefully match the frequency of the driving magnetic field to the so-called Larmor frequency of the spins, which allows them to absorb the supplied energy.

We're working on understanding possible applications now, and we also wonder whether this is a more commonly available phenomenon than originally thought. As experimentalists, we're very conservative in our claims -- for instance, we explain our observation of the "DTC signature" specifically proposed by theorists, without making claims as to the final interpretation of the results for the existing theory. Instead, our job is to very clearly explain what we did and what resulted, and then we get to see (and in some ways participate in) how the broader condensed matter community comes to understand the phenomena. It's an exciting position to be in, there are still many interesting unknowns!

<comment><USER12> Is the timing of the crystal influenced by its size, shape, or composition? Does it just double whatever the input signal is, or do you have to find a particular resonant frequency? If you brought a ticking crystal into contact with one that was not, or was ticking at a different frequency, would there be transfer or loss? If you just charge up a corner of a crystal, does it extend to the rest? Can you look for ticking in crystals you haven't charged, and if so, are they readable long enough to be used for dating or information storage?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Off-topic, but the name "time crystals" just sounds like something straight out of a Doctor Who episode.

</comment><comment><USER14> So what are the practical applications of a "time crystal"? The name certainly allows the mind to run wild...

:)

</comment><comment><USER15> Does it have four-corner rotation?

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

</comment><comment><USER16> "Scientists say that understanding time crystals may lead to improvements in atomic clocks, gyroscopes, and magnetometers, as well as aid in building potential quantum technologies"

So you are saying that the Time Stone/Gem is real? How exciting!!!!

</comment><comment><USER17> Can I somehow integrate this with my 1982 DeLorean?

<comment><USER5> Admittedly, if you asked me 20 years ago which one of "time crystal" or "flux capacitor" were actually from a movie called "Back to the Future," I am _not_ confident I would answer correctly.

<comment><USER18> I hope that's because you were too young to have seen the movie, because 20 years ago was 1998.

Back to the Future was 1985. (And 1989/1990)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't let Thanos get it.

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm still waiting for researchers to find a Time Cube.

<comment><USER21> Hold off- we need to find a Time Square first!

"The 4-equidistant Time points can be considered as Time Square imprinted upon the circle of Earth."

I don't think it's this:

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/New_york...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/New_york_times_square- terabass.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You could argue that all crystals travel through time

<comment><USER23> No argument there.

Hello readers from the future!

<comment><USER24> Hi, you from 8 minutes ago!

<comment><USER25> He won't see your message :(

<comment><USER26> Who?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In other news, Timex remains in business and the Marvel Comics Universe will be hiring the most photogenic of the three for "scientific consulting" on the next 3 to 7 MCU films.</comment>


I built a wind map with WebGL (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mapbox.com/how-i-built-a-wind-map-with-webgl-b63022b5537f <comment><USER2> Slightly offtopic, but the windy.com service referenced in the article is really a fantastic resource if you learn to use it properly. I rely on it for paragliding a lot, the animated winds are much easier to understand for the brain than static map. Comparing different weather models helps to assess the accuracy of the prediction.

<comment><USER3> [http://windy.com](http://windy.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the reason I got more serious about programming. This is really awesome.

</comment><comment><USER5> Author here — very happy to see this resurfacing on HN! So, ask me anything!

<comment><USER6> I am just adding a second thanks for all the work you've done for the mapping community. I've made a decent amount of spatial apps over the years, and they wouldn't be possible without your work with Mapbox GL JS, Leaflet and the algorithms you've shared.

<comment><USER5> Thank you very much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> (This is a bit off-topic from the subject of the article about particular methodology of rendering data as opposed to usage of these kind of wind maps)

I worked on X's project loon in operations for a spell. We were interacting with balloons in flight regularly. The referenced nullschool wind map was unendingly useful.

Something I always wanted for using nullschool or other similar publicly available "tools" was more granularity between wind layers, or derived estimations of data between wind layers.

When putting any flight systems in the atmosphere, having visualizations (even estimates) of wind direction and speed estimations at more altitude levels is more valuable than visualizing more particles more efficiently, IMO.

I wish similar thought and processing power was put towards smoothing out guesses at wind speeds at different altitudes.

Tl;dr: I wish this demo map had an altitude slider, even if it was smoothed out guestimates between available data layers.

<comment><USER8> I briefly looked into this, and from what I remember these were all always based on the "satellite" based wind models which were interpolations of predictions at a very low resolution based on infrared. Winds aloft, as I'm sure you know, are often measured by radiosondes, but the subtle thing being that these samplings only make it into aeronautical forecasts, and at least in the US, stay US only, and don't bubble up to global summaries. These global data sets are not granular at all, and wouldn't provide the detail at different elevations. I wish such a data set was available... perhaps with the global satellite based ADS-B someone could do some kind of sampling based on live flight data, but I'm sure it would be a private (and costly) dataset.

<comment><USER9> I really don't know if it's open to the public or not but windguru definitely has the dataset that you described. You might want to contact them to figure it out :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very nice work. The result is visually speaking.

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool</comment>


The Real Problem with Facebook and the News - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2016/the-real-problem-with-facebook-and-the-news/ <comment><USER2> This article is among many recently that have been citing Pew's ongoing research into political polarization. That's starting to bug me because although Pew puts out a nuanced 100-page interpretation of their data, most news outlets can't be bothered with nuance. Of particular interest to me are underlying long-term trends that must necessarily be interpreted by Pew's method as "polarization". One of their ten questions to classify respondents into liberal or conservative bins is whether homosexuality should be accepted or discouraged. This question probably made as much sense in 1994 as a question about interracial marriage would have made in 1950. At that time interracial marriage was universally opposed by white people (96% opposed in a poll), but today it is universally accepted (87% not opposed in 2010). Acceptance of homosexuality is on a similar long-term trend. Many people were opposed to acceptance of homosexuality in 1994 for the same reason that 1950's white people were opposed to interracial marriage: those people were bigoted assholes. As those bigots get old and die the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever. If you doubt this just look at the trends by respondent age. Practically all Americans under 30 years old are accepting of homosexuality.

So, given that long-term trend, it seems quite silly to say that liberals are now more consistently liberal, and that amounts to polarization. In the past there were people who were liberal on the environment or racial equality or other issues but were against gays, or were liberal on the environment and were against both racial and sexual equality. Those people are now dead. To call this polarization is to treat with moral equanimity the positions of tolerance and of hate, which isn't useful. There are not equally valid positions.

<comment><USER3> >the trend shifts dramatically to acceptance, and it's not going to shift back, ever

Although one could make parallels about Roman culture and homosexuality.. Once an empire fails, the religious vultures prey on the weak-willed and once again spread bigotry and hate (much like certain political candidates) as scapegoats for the failure of the empire.

<comment><USER4> Can you turn this around and say that as long as the bigoted political candidates don't succeed, the empire hasn't fallen yet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those interested in breaking free from the Facebook trending news headlines, I wrote an open source extension to replace them with stories from real news sources (or any RSS feed): [http://www.fluffblocker.com/](http://www.fluffblocker.com/)

<comment><USER6> For those interested in breaking free from Facebook trending news headlines, why not quit Facebook?

<comment><USER5> I like to use Facebook for several reasons, but I want to hide the silly headlines--hence this project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Silicon Valley darlings (twitter, fb) really need to stay out of politics, attempting to curate what people say and see at the very least.

<comment><USER8> FB's entire business model is provided a UX that is curated for stickiness, comfort, and convenience with a veneer of organic feeling so as to make it a comfortable platform for multiple different kinds of ads, which are what they make money from.

<comment><USER7> I find it hard to believe that attempting to marginalize half your users to match the political outlook of your employees is driven by profit. If it was I wouldn't criticize it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _Indeed, one could make the argument that an authoritative news module from Facebook would actually be a civil benefit: at least we would all be starting from a common set of facts. What is far more damaging — and far more engaging, and thus lucrative for Facebook — is all of us in our own virtual neighborhoods of our own making, liking opinions that tell us we're right instead of engaging with viewpoints that make us question our assumptions._

Agreed.

It follows, though, that attempting to inject a balanced view in the Trending News is necessary (i.e., not suppressing content of one perspective through careful curation). Otherwise, only one side will be "engaging with viewpoints that make them question their assumptions."

Proposed solution: eliminate human curation from the mix altogether, and let the algorithms fight it out.

<comment><USER2> "The algorithm" is easy to game and not fundamentally neutral. Ask Rick Santorum for his thoughts on this.

<comment><USER4> Wait isn't that the guy named after... uh, nevermind

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't get it. Facebook is a private company. If they want to present biased news they have the right to do that. If they want to withhold information about their editorial process, or even lie about it, they have the right to do that too. Fox News does it, why can't Facebook?

<comment><USER11> I don't think people are saying it's illegal -- people are saying it's a bad thing. Those don't necessarily equal each other. Concepts like "censorship" or "freedom of speech" can exist and be talked about independently of the United States First Amendment; there may not be legal grounds for prosecution but from a social/philosophical angle these are still things that can be legitimately debated.

My main concern is that, as more and more of the average Internet user's communications becomes funneled through a small number of big private companies, the typical media ecosystem that we're accustomed to is changing. For some people, Facebook and their feed basically _is_ the Internet. I don't know what the solution is or if there is one, but I find it unsettling to imagine a future where more and more of everyday life becomes dependent on private forces that pride themselves on not having to provide the protections that people grew up assuming they could rely on.

<comment><USER10> > people are saying it's a bad thing

I understand that. But _why_ is it a bad thing? We have freedom of the press in the U.S. That means that the press is free to be biased.

<comment><USER11> If people go to a media source with the assumption that they're going to be receiving useful information about the world, then I'd consider it a self- evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them and give them information that isn't representative of reality. To put it into machine learning terms, giving people a bunch of training data that is biased (i.e. isn't sampled from the same distribution as reality) is going to train people's judgment to be less in tune with reality.

I don't think I need to argue the laws of the US to make this point, but the press is free to be biased (up to a limit, remember that!) because excessive legal attempts to curtail media bias can tend toward making things worse -- simply putting the people in power in charge of doing the biasing.

<comment><USER10> > I'd consider it a self-evident bad thing for the media source to lie to them > and give them information that isn't representative of reality.

And I would agree. Nonetheless, in a free country, the owners of a media source are not bound by what you and I think (and that's a good thing).

> up to a limit, remember that!

Huh? What's the limit?

<comment><USER11> There are rules regarding libel and slander -- they're not as overly strict as some other countries, but media isn't free to say absolutely anything about anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is using human curators to _assert_ , without challenge, what is "trending" with the _other humans_ and then denying it.

i.e. The real problem with Facebook and the News is that facebook is _fucking blatantly spreading propaganda by misrepresenting consensus and then lying about it._

<comment><USER4> Serious question. When it comes to "Top Stories" or "News" or anything on Facebook, did anyone actually believe for real that it was _purely_ the output of an algorithm and that _no_ provisions were made to have a human in the loop? I doubt anyone ever thought that, so I'm not sure how anyone is surprised by any of this.

<comment><USER11> Consider how often the 24-hour news networks would fill their time by talking about "what's trending" on Twitter or Facebook or the like. The implication is obviously that the fact that they are trending is a newsworthy thing in and of itself, that it's some sign of "people making something go viral."

I don't think people necessarily thought that it was a purely automatic algorithmic creation (although I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case -- remember that most people are not nearly as tech-savvy as the HN crowd in knowing what is or isn't likely to be the result of "pure algorithms"). But the fact that it's called "trending" inherently implies that it's a representative snapshot of what the current attention ecosystem is -- that it's a passive record into what "is trending." By manually inserting or removing things from the "trending" list, that creates a false impression that certain things are or aren't popular.</comment></comment></comment>


Stradivarius violins lose in blind test against new ones - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/stradivarius-violins-lose-in-blind-test-against-new-ones-1.2601191

<comment><USER2> If the blind test was conducted similar to the one the they did in 2011 then I'd say the results are pretty suspect. [http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20121/13039/](http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20121/13039/)</comment>


Luna Programming Language – a small, elegant VM implemented in C - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tj/luna <comment><USER2> Author here. Not sure why it was posted, but this (really old) project is basically defunct. I gave github.com/luna/* to the people creating the visual Luna language that was on HN recently. Moving it to my account must have caught someone's eye.

Anyway it was just a toy project that I never had enough time/motivation to complete. I was inspired by the size of Lua's VM, but deterred by its obscurity (and lack of inline documentation), so my original goal was to create a very clean and minimal VM.

<comment><USER3> > I was inspired by the size of Lua's VM, but deterred by its obscurity (and > lack of inline documentation), so my original goal was to create a very > clean and minimal VM.

Me too, so I created Wren:

[https://github.com/munificent/wren](https://github.com/munificent/wren)

It's about the same size as Lua, significantly faster, and _much_ more thoroughly documented. I also like the language itself more — it's object model is more familiar to someone coming from Java/C++/C#/etc. — but that's personal preference.

... heh and then I scroll down and see two people have already mentioned Wren. I guess I'm doing a good job of branding it as the "better documented Lua". :)

<comment><USER2> Nice! Looks cool, I thought at first that it was this Wren: [https://github.com/darius/wren](https://github.com/darius/wren), it's super compact, but not so easy to read haha.

<comment><USER3> Oh, dang. When I first picked the name, I hunted around and didn't see if being used for anything, but I guess I missed this one. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Luna looked great a year ago, since its syntax it ever-so-close to ideal. If it has momentum now, I'd invest a lot of time writing bindings to popular C libraries, an event loop, and a web framework. But it's not functional yet, or probably ever unless someone adopts it. I'm a fan of tj's other work though. I don't see how he can pump out so many quality npm packages and the like.

<comment><USER5> [http://crystal-lang.org/](http://crystal-lang.org/) might be a good fit for you then. Or [http://nim-lang.org/](http://nim-lang.org/) if you're flexible on syntax.

<comment><USER4> Those languages are too big, so I might as well use Ruby or the Node environment when I need a full-featured language with lots of libraries. I'd like something dead simple that I can statically link into my C programs, with a syntax I can completely explain to someone in 15 minutes. I currently use duktape/Coffeescript or Lua/Moonscript for that, since hosting it in C is about ~5 lines of boilerplate code.

Edit: Does anyone know of any other languages similar to the syntax of Coffeescript and Moonscript?

<comment><USER6> [http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/) _looks_ quite similar, although it is functional (and backed by the Erlang VM BEAM).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't look like this project has gotten past parsing, since all it appears to do is dump an AST.

<comment><USER8> It has some opcodes implemented, but at a quick glance I found no signs of any memory management and no way to actually execute opcodes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> In the same vein: [https://github.com/munificent/wren](https://github.com/munificent/wren)

</comment><comment><USER10> Neat! Out of curiosity how long did this take you to write?

</comment><comment><USER11> Name clash with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11144828](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11144828)

<comment><USER12> Name clash with [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_(goddess)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_\(goddess\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another language that's basically Python 1.5...

<comment><USER14> I never dealt with Python until the 2.x series, but hasn't Python always been dynamically typed?

Also, the coroutine business seems a significant difference, as Python's concurrency model has always (to my knowledge) been limited by the GIL.

<comment><USER15> Coroutines != Multithreading. Also as I understand it, GIL places limitations on Python multithreading. Please correct me if I'm wrong.</comment></comment></comment>


Venmo: how the payment app exposes our private lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/17/venmo-payments-app-default-privacy-settings-public-information <comment><USER2> I set my default privacy policy to private, problem solved.

In fact I just checked and venmo allows you to in one click set all your past transactions to private.

Either way, people ignoring the fact that their seemingly intimate conversations are public is true across social networks.

<comment><USER3> _I set my default privacy policy to private, problem solved._

If you have to set it, then it's not the default. That's the point of the article: That Venmo exposes personal information by default.

<comment><USER2> As jake said, I changing the default setting for future transactions, yes it's set to public when you create your account, but if you're not willing to read anything, at all, when using a service I'm not sure there's any way to protect you anyways. In the app it's pretty clear what's gonna be private and public when you're setting up the transaction and if you can't be bothered to pay attention then idk what to tell you.

Also as others have pointed out, it seems most people enjoy the social aspect of venmo, in fact they'll usually post things in a way that seems to be for a more public audience, I'd argue that venmo would be doing a disservice to its users if it forced them to change their privacy policy from private to public when most people seem to want it to be public.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> FYI covered extensively previously here, i.e.: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14833269)

<comment><USER5> that feels like the single worst comment thread on HN

starts woth 200 comments of pundits going back and forth between "everyone I know" and "nobody" uses this app

then clueless ppl trying to defend that this app is the only way poor colege students can properly pay a bar bill with friends if they were not drinking, as the only alternative in their universe is spliting the bill equally, as if money or credit card had minds of their own or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find venmo part social network part p2p payment platform. My friends and I have good fun commenting/joking on each others transactions.

</comment><comment><USER7> There are lots of other apps in this space. I'm surprised anyone would use the one that airs their dirty laundry in public.

When I am asked to use Venmo, I get to see how much my friends pay in rent, who they're dating, etc. It's super creepy.

<comment><USER8> No you can't, Venmo doesn't show you the dollar amounts of other people's payments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My roommate and one of my friends on the other side of the country keep telling me to use Venmo. One refuses to get a PayPal account. I hate the concept of Venmo, because every other country in the world has direct bank-to- bank transfers and we don't in America:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking- system-i...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/the-american-banking-system-is- still-in-the-1990s/)

I've heard 5/3 Bank lets you put in someone's ABA/Account number and do direct person-to-person ACH. There's Zelle, but it's a private implementation by individual banks, not a federally mandated and regulated system.

I wish we'd get mandated person-to-person digital transfers. Right now, I have to print out a check with my ABA/Account number and payment details, hand it to my roommate/landlord and he has to scan it with his phone in order to pay rent.

<comment><USER10> It would be better to have a mandated decent system, but there are lots of decent-in-application systems that don't either make transactions public by default or require the recipient to provide their banking info in advance to the sender.</comment></comment>


Flash vs HTML 5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/external/readwriteweb/2010/03/10/10readwriteweb-does-html5-really-beat-flash-the-surprising-81090.html

<comment><USER2> This is an unchanged repost of a ReadWriteWeb post, which in turn only summarises the original article by Jan Ozer which is discussed here:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1181452>

</comment><comment><USER3> This has nothing to do with HTML5 and everything to do with _playing videos_. Flash vs <insert browser's decoder here>.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are other factors to consider here besides performance. Security for one.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention functionality - code the same thing in Flash and using Canvas and compare what is involved. Some things that are trivial in Flash/Flex are (as far as I can see) pretty difficult when using Canvas.

Note that I _really_ want to use Canvas - but at the moment when it comes to interactive graphical applications I don't think the two are currently directly comparable.

<comment><USER3> Give it time. The canvas element isn't even out of draft phases yet. How long has Flash been around?

Honestly, I think canvas will catch up to Flash in capabilities pretty quickly. And I'm holding out hope for OpenCL hooks for Javascript for this reason precisely. What's really needed now is a _good editor_ like Flash's studio.

People are still largely doing everything by hand-coding things. Put Flash on that same level, and see how easy things are to do.

<comment><USER6> Actually a lot of Flash apps are mainly code + assets now, that's certainly the way we make things.

I've tried using canvas to replicate some things that we've made in Flash, and quickly ran into some problems:

1) There is no way of interacting with elements drawn to canvas, as it's just a flat image (as someone else mentioned in the comments here, canvas is just a way of drawing bitmaps). You could obviously write your code to deal with mouse and keyboard interaction, but it's even more overhead on something that is already quite slow, and even if you could interact with individual elements it brings me to the other thing...

2) Flash has everything in layers that can be updated independently, when it comes to canvas if you want to change something you have to redraw that section of the image entirely, something that isn't always practical which means you end up redrawing the whole canvas. Essentially Flash does the same thing, but as the compositing is handled by the plugin it is far faster than anything you can do in Javascript at the moment.

Also related to the above, the drawImage method that draws bitmap data to the canvas is painfully slow at the moment, so compositing using that is out of the question. If that can be optimised significantly it will certainly help.

Basically canvas is too low level to duplicate the kind of functionality Flash offers at the moment. Until manipulating the canvas and Javascript is optimised further it's not possible to layer in the interaction or flexibility of rendering that Flash has. I'm sure a framework offering this will happen one day, but it won't be any time soon.

<comment><USER3> 1) I'll seriously disagree with you on this. Flash is likely much easier, because it's designed around doing this, but it's easily possible in Canvas too. Just maybe not currently. An OpenGL-like pipeline to help figure out what you clicked on, combined with JavaScript objects that can draw themselves, allows identical behavior. I don't know about interaction speed, can't comment on that. And I'm only using OpenGL as an example because I have some idea of how it works, there are other ways to detect what was clicked.

Heck, if you wanted, you could literally duplicate OpenGL in its entirety in JS for Canvas. There's _nothing_ preventing this, except lack of threading / parallel processing, though I admit it'd be ungodly slow.

2) Also primarily a problem currently, and likely due mostly to the lack of mature libraries to do just this. With compositing rules (source-over, source- atop, etc) and masks for objects, you can re-render only the displayed portion of any object on a Canvas as well.

Low level: well yeah, it's a thin layer over a bitmap surface. Libraries are needed to abstract away from that. It's kind of like saying that OpenGL isn't fast because it's core is low-level. That low-level feature-set Canvas has will be wrapped in libraries to make specific uses simpler, I guarantee it. Speed will come, especially as Canvas gains focus. It's still very new. Was Flash this fast/capable in pre-1.0 days? I have no idea if it'll catch up / surpass Flash, but it's far from its optimum right now.

I'm not calling for the death of Flash, and I seriously doubt it'll ever supersede Flash on everything, so Flash has it's uses and will continue to do so. Just pointing out that they're not on equal playing grounds in terms of development.

<comment><USER6> Actually I think you just agreed with everything I was saying!

My point was canvas isn't quite there _yet_ , not that it never will be, and also that I think the Flash-has-an-editor argument isn't the reason why canvas isn't ready yet.

As a side note, I'm already one of the people writing a library/framework to overcome the things I mentioned, the problem is I don't think it's going to be fast enough to do much with for a while.

<comment><USER3> Aaah, ok. I was keying in on the "There is no way of..." and "have to..." to mean you thought it was impossible, not that it just wasn't easy currently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's with NYT anti HTML5 agenda?

<comment><USER5> Why does it have to be an "anti HTML5 agenda"?

<comment><USER8> Because it's not saying what everyone wants to hear aka flash is doomed!!!!

<comment><USER9> dont you want flash to be doomed? In 5 years why should the web require a plugin to show video or vector graphics?

<comment><USER8> I love Flash, and the core problems people rant about boil down to crap Adobe can fix.

HTML5 has some amazing possibilities ahead of it but none of that eradicates Flash's future. Fantasizing and circlejerking about that possibility is just retarded -plugins fill a void the W3C and browser vendors can't do themselves - and that is keeping up.

What are your needs in 5 years and what makes you think HTML5 is somehow perfectly anticipating them? How about 10 years? How about even _one_ year from now?

Are you going to upgrade any software at all you use over the next 5 years? Or did they all get it perfect too?

<comment><USER10> "Adobe can fix" < "Anybody can fix"

I've lived in a world where I couldn't access online banking if I was using anything as exotic as Mozilla on Linux. Thankfully, the situation has improved a bit since those days, but I would never want to return to them. Note that today you don't have to stray very far from the mainstream before Adobe stops delivering their plugin. The web should be such that it can be used on innovative platforms without being at the mercy of one CEO who doesn't like another CEO that day, or thinks your FreeBSD or Plan 9 or Haiku are too marginal, or that your CPU instruction set insufficiently ubiquitous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This article seems to miss the point.

First, it starts off talking about the iPad and how Flash may not be the CPU hog its made out to be. It then goes on to say that HTML5 is more efficient than Flash in Safari. The iPad runs Safari, in effect contradicting their previous argument about the iPad.

Next, they say that Apple could allow Adobe to make Flash faster, all they have to do is open up access to the hardware APIs. Who exactly wants a browser plugin to have low level access to the hardware APIs?

Seems kind of ridiculous to say that something else is at work here. Does Apple want to kill Flash? Probably, but even if they didn't want to, they've got plenty of reasons not to allow flash on the iPhone/iPad/etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> The problem with HTML5 is that it does not provide any better new features of multimedia, but an incomplete alternative to Flash. I would definitely choose HTML5 if I can make something that can not be done with Flash nor HTML4

<comment><USER13> "I would definitely choose HTML5 if I can make something that can not be done with Flash nor HTML4"

Interactive graphics that work on the iPhone and iPad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> 2010 and i am bound to a company so i can have "proper" video on a web page.

Flash VS HTML5 is a no brainer for any sane person.

I almost forgot, FU Adobe i use FreeBSD.

Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER15> HTML is doomed. Flash is way more powerful and installed on almost every computer in the world. Flash also runs almost the same on all browsers, even IE6, where many HTML sites break - another clear advantage...

Seriously, this argument is getting old. Chose the right technology for your purpose and use it wisely to prevent CPU spikes, security issues, etc. HTML makes strides forward and so does Flash. HTML is great for 90% of all needs, and Flash fills in the other 10% where you need some more flexibility, play audio, have multiple file-uploads, run it as an Air app on the desktop, etc.

<comment><USER3> _HTML is doomed. Flash is way more powerful and installed on almost every computer in the world._

What, HTML isn't installed on almost every computer in the world?</comment></comment>


Apple's WWDC 2009 dates announced + registration open - <AUTHOR> http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/ <comment><USER2> ...and just two days after Aaron Hillegass said he wouldn't go on those dates: <http://www.possibleprobable.com/?p=203></comment>