Gave up a day job Now what? - Income report #3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.kreci.net/reports/gave-up-a-day-job-now-what-income-report-3/

<comment><USER3> I think this story basically demonstrates that once you focus on the money and simply do many projects that quickly bring money, you will be successful in making money. The biggest problems with most startups is that they focus too much on the product and too little on the money.

<comment><USER4> Even though having any source of income is great, building a predictable, sustainable source of income is key to eventual success. Currently, it looks like iStockPhoto is the only source of sustainable income. And now he is focusing on the Andriod app, which is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm interested why you decided to sell the e-book site? It seems to me you could have put a small amount of effort in each month to keep the sales up to around the same amount - at least for a few months then sold it for a lot more!

Giving up website flipping seems a bad move - especially as you have now sold the e-book. Your only real source of income is iStockphoto.

I don't see how the e-book and website flipping can be replaced with Android apps given your location

<comment><AUTHOR> Mainly I have sold it because tax law in Poland sucks and it was too much to maintain all sales and be ok with all legal things. Moreover it took much more than you can think to promote such website.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why don't you just do iStockPhoto full-time for a few months? It seems to be a very steady source of revenue for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Temporary do not have good place to put all my studio equipment - <USER2> continue in next 2-3 month after I move to new house.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You just sold your 2 biggest websites, bringing in the most cash. What now? Seems like it can only go downhill from here.

</comment><comment><USER8> How sustainable you think website flipping is? Can you see yourself doing it for years?

<comment><USER9> Website flipping is not free cash or quick easy cash. You build a site/service/app, promote it, rank it, get traffic and users and then sell it for cash. It's like working for someone else project.

<comment><USER8> I understand what it is. My question was if it's sustainable, e.g. how hard would it be to come up with fresh ideas every goddamn month :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently I have more ideas that I am able to do ;) I am wondering about hiring someone to build some websites... but still in plans :)

<comment><USER9> Let's get in touch; we may do something together and learn from each other. (omar.abid2006-at-gmail.com)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find it pretty cool that you left your day job and do something that you really enjoy. (Not saying that a day job can't be something enjoyable thought). And yeah, it sure look impressive at first that you made 3x the income, however, it seems that you've went a little all-in with the stuff you already had.

Looking forward to see the next month with the android app! Question for you: Why android and not iphone?

<comment><AUTHOR> iPhone needs Mac for development (and of course iPhone). Android does not. Moreover I believe that on long term Android may be more profitable.

<comment><USER11> Why do you think that Android would be more profitable? It seems to me that Google is terrible at marketing; the only people I've seen interested in Droid have been geeks like us.

<comment><USER12> They're activating 160,000 Android phones a day. (<http://www.cnet.com/8301-19736_1-20008661-251.html>) Sounds like their marketing is all it really needs to be. You can find a lot more in depth analysis of the numbers and trends here: [http://www.fool.com/investing/high- growth/2010/05/27/deciphe...](http://www.fool.com/investing/high- growth/2010/05/27/deciphering-androids-smartphone-sales-figures.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks as if you could've sold the google page rank e-book for more than $510. At least for monthly revenue x 12 months...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As usual comments are welcome and very desired =)

<comment><USER9> Just wandering what the Amazon store thing is? (<http://astore.amazon.com/krsbl-20>). Do you build a page, fill it with products and take a commission in sales?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a tool provided by Amazon. You just choose products and customize design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How much time/effort did you put into the web sites you sold? How much did you purchase the domains/other necessities for?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of them are build in a few days and then maintained with a 2-3 hours per week per site. Some of them are build a lot longer but do not need maintenance at all but more promotion.

<comment><USER15> I would very much like to read a case study where you walk through your entire experience from initial idea to cash-in-hand... for each of the two types.

Congrats on your overall success. Keep it up dude!</comment></comment></comment>


My advice when asked for input on YC applications - <AUTHOR> http://squall.io/mdeiters/my-advice-when-asked-for-input-on-yc-applications

<comment><USER2> I think the quote is from Churchill not PG. Great Advice anyways.

<comment><USER3> You're right. I didn't intend to indicate that it was PG's quote - I can see the mistake now though.

I found the quote here [http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/quo.html)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Advice for a newly grad, avoiding an intellectual rut. - misuse-permit

[tl;dr I'm looking for advice on how to spot an intellectually stimulating job]
I'm a newly grad in CS who's doing part time work over the summer while searching for a job. Fortunately for me, the jobs aren't in demand - I am. This comes with the consequence though that there seem to be a lot of crap jobs out there, lots of people looking for experts in Java or .NET.
I'd like some advice on how to spot a job that will actually foster my intellectual growth, and not keep me stuck using the same language/technology day in, day out. I want to be encouraged to learn new programming languages and technologies on the job (or at least for the job). I want to actually be using my computer science background (I know a lot of interviewers ask questions about algorithms, but how many jobs actually require this knowledge?).
I don't want to be a glorified IT professional, and I really don't want to get stuck at some company lego-programming Java code, which is what I feel most of my non-academic work has accumulated to over the years. Maybe I'm being too harsh on myself, but its hard to be proud of my work when every 30 minutes I have to lookup an example or reference of some part of an API, and then modify it for my purposes. Maybe this is normal.
I'd like to think that I'm smart and passionate, but of course its hard for me to judge. That said, I'm confident that with enough work, I'll be able to land a job at my ideal company. The trouble is, I don't really know where to look.
For what I'm pursuing, what do you think are the best types of companies to look for. Will tech giants like Google, Apple, and Microsoft have what I'm looking for? Should I search for smaller companies to start with? What about start-ups, would this be a good idea for someone straight out of college? (note, I have no debt, and money isn't much of a concern to me... yet) Lets not forget industry either. Which industries do you think encourage what I'm looking for, and which will tend to stifle it?
I'd like to hear your advice and learn about your experiences after college. Most of my hardcore experience is in Java, C, and C++, so advice on convincing employers that I can pick up other technologies quickly would be appreciated as well. Thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> I'm a CS graduate with 10 years in the field.

I've worked at 3 different companies and, compared to college coursework and projects, not a single one of these jobs has been intellectually stimulating for me. In fact, my first task at my first job was to document Java code created by foreign contractors. Most of the code was get/set functions for member variables. Nevertheless, there have been projects that I relished, but they have been few and far between.

Most of the work you do in college is individual work. It's completely the opposite in the working world. You have to work on a team of people, and your focus is building a product, not learning new things. This is not to say that you won't learn, but that aspect comes in a distant second to creating a working piece of software, on a schedule, that meets a business need.

My advice on keeping your intellectual needs met: do your brainy stuff outside of work. Work is not your muse; it's not your professor. Work pays the bills so you can live how you want outside of work.

At two jobs I was actually singled out and mocked for doing "advanced" things that had immediate positive effects on the business. Superiors and coworkers can feel threatened by a brainiac. Politicking isn't limited to the Beltway. These companies weren't exactly tech giants, but you'd probably find this situation is possible at any company. So being street smart is also a requirement. Don't showboat unnecessarily.

If you find a company that interests you, use your alumni association to find people who work there. Get in touch with them and ask them questions about what they do, what they like about the company, and what they don't like. Do some networking and research the work environment before you send a resume. It's very difficult to gauge a company from a job interview since it's a stressful situation and you're focused on presenting yourself as the ideal candidate.

Also consider jobs that aren't primarily tech-oriented, but permit you to use technology to do your job better. At a former company there was a sales guy who knew programming fairly well and he used it to streamline his processes. He was able to handle more clients more efficiently and he got promoted quickly. If there's something non-technical that you absolutely love, then taking a related job and applying tech to it might lead to interesting results.

As for start-ups vs. small companies vs. giants. It all depends on what you're comfortable with. Start-ups are risky but the atmosphere is generally pretty fun and they are often more open to using new technology and unorthodox methods. As companies get larger, the bureaucracy sets in and things become more about following a process than finding something that works. I'd recommend joining a start-up to any CS graduate, but do it before you settle down in life.

</comment><comment><USER2> _"there seem to be a lot of crap jobs out there, lots of people looking for experts in Java or .NET."_

Choice of language has little to do with whether or not the job will be intellectually challenging or whether the company will provide opportunities for you to grow your skills. There are a lot crap jobs in Java and .NET because there a just a lot of jobs in those languages in general. So unless you are keen on using a specific language I would try to be as language/tool agnostic as possible. As to how you detect whether a job will foster your intellectual growth, try asking some questions along those lines in your interviews. For example:

"How far do you feel you have come in terms of your skills compared to when you first started working here?"

"What was the most challenging thing you have gotten to work on here?"

As far as trying to convince employers that you can pick up whatever they are using, my experience has been that employers asking for X years of experience in Y are not likely to be convinced and the likely-hood of changing their minds is probably proportional to the number of years they are asking for. So look for employers emphasizing fundamental skills over particular technologies because they already get it and it won't really be a question.

</comment><comment><USER3> > _"Maybe I'm being too harsh on myself, but its hard to be proud of my work > when every 30 minutes I have to lookup an example or reference of some part > of an API, and then modify it for my purposes"_

The time to invent something new is when it will take ten weeks to complete your project using existing technology or five weeks using new technology and it will take two weeks to develop the new technology.*

The wheel has already been invented, so there's no point in building your own hexagonal version - focus instead on what is important: shipping.

* Credit to Neil Stephenson

</comment><comment><USER4> IMHO if you can work with a startup that is using technology you find interesting, that would be the best thing - you'd get a lot more breadth of experience and you'd have more of a chance to play with newer stuff. If you do join a big company, like you mentioned, make sure it isn't one of those Java shops where you wouldn't learn anything. I think that's a perfectly legitimate thing to ask in an interview - what kind of technology you would have the opportunity to work with.

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://card.io>, which seems like a _really_ cool company, is hiring: <https://gist.github.com/821454/>. I'm guessing the Java and C skills would be useful considering that 1) they're building SDKs for Android and 2) they're doing heavy duty image processing.

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER6> You bring it to the job, not the other way around.

<comment><USER7> Listen to this guy. If you let the job push you around you are the problem: you must engage with others in your tribe and interest them in the tools and techniques that you wish to use and learn. Even if the company is change adverse over time they will listen to the value you bring.

That said, picking a company should have very little to do with their technology stack and everything to do with the people that you work with. Find out about them: (a) do you respect them? (b) are they intelligent? (c) are they open-minded? (d) are they engaged in learning new things?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Consider grad school. I didn't regret it :)</comment>


Ask HN: Whats convenient way save webpages with links for offline reading? - <AUTHOR>

For instance, it is impossible to read a Wikipedia article on complex issue because one needs to follow a link which is not saved in PDF. I need all links to be pre-downloaded for offline reading. <comment><USER2> I like to wget, because you can easily automate and customize it. Here's the man page: [http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html](http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Pocket, Instapaper may work aswell.

[http://lifehacker.com/5894995/bookmark-and-read-later- apps-c...](http://lifehacker.com/5894995/bookmark-and-read-later-apps- compared-read-it-later-vs-instapaper-vs-readability)

[http://pieroxy.net/blog/2014/10/05/reeder_and_its_companion_...](http://pieroxy.net/blog/2014/10/05/reeder_and_its_companion_apps_readability_vs_pocket_vs_instapaper.html)

[http://recode.net/2014/06/09/read-this-when-you-actually- hav...](http://recode.net/2014/06/09/read-this-when-you-actually-have-time-a- guide-to-read-it-later-apps/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Use HTTrack, this tool can grab a webpage and the links in that page.

[http://www.httrack.com](http://www.httrack.com)

</comment><comment><USER5> This is what I do. I have the Pages App on my iPad. I copy and paste anything into it that I want to continue to read, reference or check it out later on. I only use this app for this purpose. I also created a reading list on Quora too, but I've only just started using this feature. If there is a specific app for this, let me know, I'd use it.

<comment><USER6> On an iPad, you can tap-hold on a link and Add to Reading List. That might be easier. It does do JS though, whereas Pages presumably doesn't.

<comment><USER5> Your awesome, cheers for the tip. I've only had my iPad for a couple of months so I don't know many iPad tricks yet.</comment></comment></comment>


TouchPad teardown: it costs $328 to make, $10 more than the iPad 2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/89308-hp-touchpad-32gb-costs-328-to-make-10-more-than-ipad-2 iSuppli breakdown is here: http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/News/Pages/HP-TouchPad-Carries-$318-Bill-of-Materials.aspx <comment><USER2> " Yes, believe it or not, the slim-and-beautiful Wi-Fi iPad 2 costs $10 less to make than the plastic-shelled, fat-bodied Wi-Fi TouchPad."

The odd thing is that iSuppli has the enclosure etc. at $35 for the iPad 2 and $30 for the TouchPad. I have a really hard time putting any faith in that number, since it's not like components where you just look up the price. Did iSuppli really figure out how much it would cost to make a custom machined aluminum case?</comment>


Dying Bookstore to NYC: Just Treat Us Like You Treated Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90369805/struggling-book-culture-to-nyc-just-treat-us-like-amazon <comment><USER2> It makes sense that they're making the same arguments, but sadly I think the difference is that unlike Amazon, this book store can't just pick up and go somewhere else. They inherently have no bargaining power, other than saying we'll go out of business.

If anything, it seems like being part of a community and sticking with it is almost a detriment these days. Companies move to where labor is cheap, and design processes to have replaceable people perform them quickly and efficiently. These tax breaks only go to companies that are pitting different areas against each other, which are very rarely any small or local business.

<comment><USER3> There's a relevant saying in Japanese: No need to give bait to a fish you've already caught.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This happened to Borderlands in SF. Bookstores operate on such low margins that an increase in worker pay to livable levels in expensive markets puts the bookstore into the red (costing more to operate than it brings in) the owner had a community meeting to announce that the store was closing. Someone asked "what it would take to stay open and can we just give you that?" Borderlands now has a great membership program with neat incentives and invitations to private events. It was so successful that the owner took the bold step of buying a building since future rent increases were the next big threat.</comment>


H5N1 (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.samaltman.com/h5n1 <comment><USER2> The deadlier a virus is, the earlier it will trip alarm systems/panic. And as we've all learned in the past few weeks, in outbreaks days matter.

The perfect virus is balanced: just deadly _enough_.

It's possible SARS-CoV-2 hits the sweet spot.

<comment><USER3> It's natural selection all the way up.

Anything that's not in that "sweet spot" is naturally selected away and quickly extinguished (MERS, SARS, Ebola, etc). We're basically breeding a bioweapon.

Not that there is any other choice though. Food for thought.

<comment><USER4> No, we're causing strong selection bias towards something like the common cold.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want to get really scared and don't sleep tonight I suggest this presentation by John Sotos in 2019 Def Con:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIj0iJXTMug](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIj0iJXTMug)

It's really good.

<comment><USER6> Wow! I had no idea that triple helix was possible. Or that we know so much about what genes cause what diseases. Deffo reading up more on genetics and learning about the inner details of viruses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of Warren Buffett's _primary_ fears is weapons of mass destruction, I think since the 70s (as stated in his semi-autobiography, Snowball). During the cold-war, he put things like this (paraphrasing from memory): if there's a 4% chance of nuclear war per annum, there's a 70% chance of it happening over the next 30 years. If we reduce the annual chance to 2%, we reduce the 30-year chance to 45%.

<comment><USER8> for some reason those numbers are not adding up to me. do the chances compound year-over-year? how is the 4% any different in year 1 than in year 30? or any year in between? how does this add up to 70% over a 30 year period

<comment><USER9> If you assume 4% each year independently of each other year, then the chance of _not_ having nuclear war is 96% in any given year. Over 30 years, your chance of no war is (0.96)^30 = 30%.

<comment><USER10> > If you assume 4% each year independently of each other year, then the chance > of not having nuclear war is 96% in any given year. Over 30 years, your > chance of no war is (0.96)^30 = 30%.

It's clearly not independent though, but this calculation remains true if you assume only that _not_ having a nuclear war doesn't change the odds for future years, even if having one does.

<comment><USER9> My apologies, you are right -- I should have said "4% each year independently of each prior year" \-- and it's true that only the negation needs to be independent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A virus that is extremely deadly, extremely contagious, and has an extremely long incubation period is quite unlikely, if not impossible. As far as I know this is a typical "pick two" triangle.

<comment><USER12> Why? I agree that in the paper that Altman is referring to [0] H5N1 did appear to decrease in lethality after becoming airborne. The paper does not mention its incubation period.

Do you have references for why a combination of these is not possible (or even unlikely)? I feel that it is quite possible to achieve by using only passage between animals (artificial or otherwise).

——

[0] Table 1 of [https://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1534/tab- pdf](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6088/1534/tab-pdf)

<comment><USER13> Infectiousness and incubation period tend to be in tension with each other, many routes for virus shedding are symptoms (runny nose, cough, etc).

An extremely high death rate also does a better job of motivating responses, which while it isn't directly biological, has a significant impact on transmission.

I'm not so sure we really understand the full possibility space of infectious diseases though.

<comment><USER12> > Infectiousness and incubation period tend to be in tension with each other, > many routes for virus shedding are symptoms (runny nose, cough, etc).

Yeah, I agree, but I think this is somewhat orthogonal to my point—gain-of- function[0] studies seem to indicate that artificial passage is potentially selective enough to make this possible, even though these things are usually negatively correlated.

> An extremely high death rate also does a better job of motivating responses, > which while it isn't directly biological, has a significant impact on > transmission.

Absolutely. This was also likely why we saw such a huge and immediate response to SARS, which seemed roughly as (if not more) contagious than SARS-nCov-2, but had a CFR of around 10%. SK was also much less well-equipped to handle it then than it would be today (likely due to that exact reason).

> I'm not so sure we really understand the full possibility space of > infectious diseases though.

Agreed, and this is mostly my worry.

\---

[0] For an even more terrifying gain-of-function study on H7N9, with higher virulence and mortality than the H5N1 study, the reference is: [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12392](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12392)

In this case, the virus was also able to be transmitted from ferret to ferret and appeared to have very high concentration in the lungs of ferrets (much more so than H5N1 which was scary enough), which are the usual model for transmission and replication in humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > We worry about terrorist attacks and necrotizing fasciitis, but not much > about heart disease or car crashes. But in 2011, 17 US citizens worldwide > died as a result of terrorism and approximately 150 from necrotizing > fasciitis. There were nearly 600,000 deaths resulting from heart disease and > over 32,000 from car crashes.

> Based on current data, you are about 35,000 times more likely to die from > heart disease than from a terrorist attack. So everyone smart says that we > worry about terrorism way too much, and so far, they've been right.

Yes, thanks to our natural preference of exceptions, rarities, and oddities which the media fuels us with.

However this ignores any mitigation (and their costs) being done on these dangers. A proper risk analysis includes these.

> But another possibility is that we engineer the perfect happiness drug, with > no bad side effects, and no one wants to do anything but lay in bed and take > this drug all day, sapping all ambition from the human race. There are a lot > of other possibilities too, and it's very hard to think of them because we > don't have much experience with what's about to happen.

I'm not at all frightened by that because all drugs in past failed on that one. There is no up without a down.

On top of that, human beings want to be useful, they want to give their life purpose. Even if that involves pain. Laying all day in bed (or in quarantine) feels awful.

</comment><comment><USER15> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6889204)

</comment><comment><USER16> " But another possibility is that we engineer the perfect happiness drug, with no bad side effects, and no one wants to do anything but lay in bed and take this drug all day, sapping all ambition from the human race"

Someone has read Infinite Jest

<comment><USER17> Sam doesn't explain why this is scary. Why is ambition more important than happiness? I think if you were taking the happiness drug you wouldn't care that you weren't ambitious. It sounds like Sam is just afraid of letting go of his current value systems.

<comment><USER18> At some point, ethics becomes axiomatic. You can't deductively derive what you ought to be doing from how the world works. All you can do is try to make the axioms as few and as (seemingly) obvious as possible.

If you're a hedonist utilitarian, then taking the drug that gives you ultimate happiness for as long as you live may well be the best thing to do. But if you, for instance, intrinsically value life and civilization, then the externality the drug would produce might mean that life would end rather quickly, and that would be a bad thing. In simple terms, it would be too selfish for you to take.

Or you could have a value system that's not consequentialist at all. If you have a duty to yourself to stay clear-minded, and you consider drugs to be in violation of this, then you wouldn't take them no matter how much happiness you could get.

As you say, you might alter your value system once you've taken that drug, but that would lead people with other value systems to be even more reluctant in taking it.

<comment><USER17> I don't think the perfect happiness drug causes you to sit inside and end your life quickly. That sounds a lot like heroine, which we already have, and is very much not perfect.

When I'm happy, I still go out and do things, and the happier I am, the longer I want to live, so I eat healthfully and exercise. The _perfect_ happiness drug would make me want to extend my own life and spread joy to others, so I'd probably still have kids and try to provide for them. If it meanwhile made me give up hopes of winning the Superbowl or founding a unicorn, meh, I'm ok with that.

If you stretch the meaning of "ambition" to cover all of "life and civilization" then I think it's not possible to achieve happiness while dropping ambition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoqHJxf8hWQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoqHJxf8hWQ)

I don't think this is the talk I was looking for, but this covers all the points in the one I was thinking about. It's kind of possible to get the DNA sequence of a lethal bacteria, and then pay some DNA synthesis company to make that DNA for you and package that into a living bacteria.

Obviously doing that will immediately trigger automated detection systems and the FBI will be scheduling a surprise birthday party for you.... but who knows how secure that system is.

</comment><comment><USER19> [http://resiliencemaps.org](http://resiliencemaps.org) is a bunch of pandemic flu resources from the H5N1 days - planning specifically for a highly contagious mutation.

Gets into food security etc. It was intended as a toolkit for scenario planners and public health officials. See also guptaoption.com/6.SPRS.php and mattereum.com/CSR (coronavirus work.)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is, indeed, scary. Now we have global baseline. During pre-covid times self-isolating/self-sufficient communities were crazy-labelled - maybe that's going to change now. Maybe the world, as we know it (during our livetimes), will actually change in very noticable ways.

Pulling off global social distancing is the only short term, generic tool it seems, ie. next virus may not require ventilators to help at all so securing that is not a solution.

Long incubation period is really scary as it renders social distancing useless (too late to be effective); the only survivors are natural survivors (immune system finding it's way to create antibodies) and isolated communities. Or Mars collonies, maybe.

<comment><USER21> > next virus may not require ventilators to help at all so securing that is > not a solution.

I would be interested to know if I'm missing something, but I believe that respiratory viruses are the only ones that have a large chance of becoming pandemics - sneezing, coughing, breathing, speaking are the only gestures that can spread with no real way of fully protecting yourself from it (save for wearing gas masks). Now, I suppose in principle you could have a virus that causes respiratory symptoms, but that affects some other organ more than the lungs, but I'm not sure how plausible that is biologically.

So, I think it is by far most likely that the next pandemic will also require ventilators and face masks. Stocking up on both everyhwere in the world would be a good idea.

Also, it should become required practice for all countries (and even most large companies) to have significant pandemic reserves. We know for sure that a new pandemic will arise in the future, and there is a good chance that it will happen again in the next 50 years let's say.

<comment><USER20> Zika, HIV are not about sneezing.

<comment><USER21> Right, insect-based infection is one vector I forgot.

HIV is kind of special,in that it took years before it was recognized as the cause of AIDS, and, since it was mainly affecting stigmatized groups, government efforts to contain it were non-existent for years. I'm not sure that another sexually-transmitted infection would follow the same epidemiology in the current age, at least in the more tolerant countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't think these fears of terrorism or flesh-eating bacteria are irrational.

The underlying thread here is about control. You can control your diet and lifestyle, and therefore your chances of dying from heart disease. You can't control whether that guy with the backpack on the subway car is carrying a bomb.

It's the same reason why people are way more afraid of flying than driving despite the statistics saying that driving kills way more people. If you or your spouse is behind the wheel, you feel more in control.

The whole point of fear is it focuses on unexpected enemies, like predators.

</comment><comment><USER23> I think influential people tend to be scared of these rare events simply because those are the ones that actually can effect them. Based on the assumption that influential people tend to be wealth, they have the money to insulate themselves from small incidents but not big crisis. I do not believe Sam Altman has been poor before to truly understand that this pandemic is no different than most people living day to day because any accident can ruin them.

</comment><comment><USER6> The perfect deadly virus would have to be some sort of a time bomb virus. Everyone thinks it's common flu and is spread to 90% of humans. Couple of years later it undergoes metamorphosis and turns into lethal suffocating or heart attacks. It would be almost impossible to control this.

Bio weapons are perhaps the nastiest of any weapon. Someone smart enough could make it in a lab and it could bring the entire globe to its knees.

</comment><comment><USER24> There's an interesting story about h1n1 in France. At the time it appeared, the French government took it really seriously and spent 2 billions to buy masks and vaccines. Fortunately the virus didn't spread, but the government's reaction was highly criticized.

For the covid19, the reaction was too slow, hospitals now struggle to get masks and I'm convinced that's because they didn't want to reproduce the h1n1 over reaction...

On the opposite, you have the South Korea who was highly prepared with masks and protocols, apparently thanks to their experience with Mers virus.

Let's hope that, thanks to covid19, a lot of countries will take strict measures, like South Korea before and that a virus like h5n1 won't wipe half of the world.

<comment><USER25> Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.

I wonder why France only chose to do a quarantine, after 6,000 people were infected. By the time you confirm someone is infected, then you might have 10 times the actual number infected. Meaning, France might have 60,000 infected, when they finally mandated the quarantine.

Good luck France. Stay safe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In another interview, the Scientist Ron Fouchier, said: "that GOF experiments are the only way to learn crucial information on what makes a flu virus a pandemic candidate.", I would like to know if he was able to predict COVID-19 and how he is really using his gained knowledge on H5N1 to fight COVID-19?

</comment><comment><USER27> We need a pandemic detection system, which is what I get out this blog post.

</comment><comment><USER28> It wouldn't be surprising for nCoV to evolve now since it has so many opportunities. For example, a strain which breaks the viral proofreading mechanism would dramatically increase the diversity of new strains. That would be bad because a more diverse Coronavirus would become a moving target for therapies, and thus, an endemic disease, exponentially more lethal than flu. Just imagine the economic impact if this became an annual event. We'd have to get much better at treatment and distancing

We designed a gene therapy for Covid19 but have yet to find a great manufacturing partner; if anyone knows someone who can do cGMP manufacturing of AAV, please let me know via email at bion at bitpharma dot com

<comment><USER17> what does "exponentially more lethal" mean here? The lethality is not yet known, but whatever it is, it's a multiplicative factor compared to flu.

I don't think there would be much economic impact if this were annual. The overarching impact would be a reduced lifespan in developed countries (by a small number!). We wouldn't shut down everything every year.

<comment><USER28> What I mean is, nCoV is already shown to be exponentially more lethal than flu. If it becomes an annual event, that's a major uptick in selection pressure

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article is about bioterrorist threats. It still underplays the idea of a natural pandemic as being "unlikely to occur in nature."

</comment><comment><USER30> So with the advent of CRISPR is the only thing stopping a particularly sociopathic entrepreneur from creating a virus+vaccine combo in a Deus Ex scenario... ethics of lab technicians doing gene splicing? What could possibly go wrong...?

<comment><USER31> I think creating that virus is probably very challenging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> >> a virus that spreads extremely easily, has greater than 50% mortality, and has an incubation period of several weeks? ... without the world having time to prepare, could wipe out more than half the population in a matter of months.

I am not sure if Sam or anyone would have expected this to happen in the near future?

<comment><USER33> Sam seems preoccupied with a weaponized virus rather than a natural mutation.

Gates had a 2015 TED talk about "the next epidemic"

Hopefully we will be more prepared for the next one. Covid-19's mortality is much lower than 50%, so in some sense this is a warm up for the big one that Sam fears.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > For whatever reason, we seem to be wired to overweight the risk of the > dramatic, scary, but very unlikely and underweight the risk of the mundane, > familiar, and probable.

Two things. One, we do not sufficiently emphasize pandemics/epidemics -- this is partly because these things have been fairly rare and rarely very bad, and we have a way of focusing on what we're able to be aware of. As a result we get very upset when rare, very noticeable events happen, but we don't take notice of the risk of their happening when... they're not happening.

Second, we do very much care about _intent_. Nobody doubts that if Al-Qaeda had been able to steal and use nuclear weapons, they would have -- their intent was evil, and that meant they needed to be taken care of. As long terrorists can only kill a few, we can ignore them, but given their intent is to kill many, we can't ignore them entirely. Regarding car crashes and other accidents, the rates of fatalities per-mile traveled and such have been going down, and can be expected to go down further as technology progresses -- and we do invest in improving technology to make our roads and cars safer.

Fatalities from terrorism and fatalities from traffic accidents are simply not comparable -- they're apples and oranges. Accident fatalities won't spike, but terrorism fatalities are liable to spike intolerably at any moment. The difference is intent: no one intends to make traffic accidents occur, but there are people who intend to kill many other people. Perhaps in the long run both obey statistical distributions, just different ones, but for the human psyche, intent counts.

Perhaps we shouldn't care about intent. Or perhaps we should focus on limiting the capabilities of those with evil intent -- but this is not much different than saying we must continue to put effort into hunting terrorists.

Anyone making the traffic accident vs. terrorism comparison needs to acknowledge the intent distinction if they are to be taken seriously. They almost never do though.

> Also in 2011, some researchers figured out how to reengineer H5N1—avian > influenza virus—to make it much scarier by causing five mutations at the > same time that all together made the virus both easy to spread and quite > lethal. These five mutations could all occur in nature, but it'd be unlikely > in the same copy of the virus. I have no doubt that the media overstated the > danger, but it's still worth thinking about.

Is it possible to overstate the danger of engineered pathogens? All that's needed for that to lead to catastrophe, besides engineering, is _intent_ , or accidental release. Naturally occurring pathogens are acts of god. Engineered pathogens are not -- their use against populations certainly isn't, even if resulting from lab accidents.

If an engineered pathogen could kill millions, and all that's missing is intent, then engineered pathogens are as problematic as nuclear weapons. More problematic than nuclear weapons, in fact, because the technology needed to engineer pathogens is harder to control, easier to come by / develop, etc. The only mitigation is the -admittedly massive- risk to the user of having the pathogen hit them too.

Pathogen engineering comes with a number of advantages to developing and using them, and just one disadvantage:

\- adv.: cheap, difficult to control against proliferation \- adv.: plausible deniability, allowing anonymous use \- disadv.: can boomerang on the user

The disadvantage is the strongest reason to believe that covid-19 wasn't both, engineered _and_ released with intent. And if it was, it has boomeranged.

That one disadvantage can be negated with time by also developing vaccines and treatments ahead of use. But that wouldn't work for a state actor, as that would erase plausible deniability and thus invite counter-attacks if used. Fortunately, developing vaccines and treatments gets costly enough to put it beyond a terrorist group's means, but then, a suicidal terrorist might use it anyways.

But even if bioweapons are unlikely to be used with intent, doesn't mean that they aren't worth worrying about. Lab accidents are a possibility, thus something to worry about.

Going back to the first point above, there really are many threats to worry about, and we can't all worry equally about all of them. This is why we have a national security apparatus: so we can focus sufficient resources on each threat. Even if the national security apparatus here, in the U.S., had done everything right as to pandemics, they would have to have been doing it for many years.

One thing we can count on is the national security apparatus taking pandemics much more seriously going forwards, though that will be at the risk of preparing to fight yesterday's war, ignoring the risk that tomorrow's threat may look much different. If that happens, it will be because humans have a hard time planning against the unknown or the unlikely.

Before 9/11 there were people who thought that passenger airplane attacks were a threat, but those were not taken seriously. We see this over and over. I wouldn't bet on anyone being particularly readier for the next big problem than we were in this case, in the case of Katrina, in the case of 9/11, in 1918, in 1941, etc.</comment>


Profitable Giants Like Amazon Pay $0 in Taxes. Some Voters Are Sick of It - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/us/politics/democrats-taxes-2020.html <comment><USER2> Do they have editors at the NYT anymore? How do you write an article like this and not answer the question "why did these companies not pay taxes in 2018"?</comment>


Ask HN: Anybody willing to take on a quick study for the summer? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN,
I decided to take up iOS development earlier this year and I'm at the point where I understand objective-C, object-oriented programming, and M-V-C. I read the Kochan books and Apple docs, so I understand properties, memory management, the Foundation Framework, and I can solve problems in objective-C. However, progressing to actually writing an iOS app has been daunting. I bought the BNR book and I tried the getting started guide on the Apple developer website, but I can't make the leap to producing anything beyond simple, linear apps like Timers.
I know that these are all very good resources, and to a large extent, I can comprehend what's going on. However, putting something of my own together has been tough. I can put together simple things using Nav controllers and TableView Controllers, but I'm having trouble progressing to anything more complex.
Having learned what I could learn by myself, I think I'm at the point where I need to be around people with experience and see how apps are actually made in real life. Unfortunately, iOS meet-ups aren't very frequent (which is very weird for NYC) and I don't really know anyone from whom I can learn, so I'm asking you HN; would it be possible to shadow an actual developer for any length of time this summer or meet up whenever you're free? It would be great to have someone who already knows what their doing to ask questions and get a feel for iOS development as it's done professionally. I don't want to reduce anyone's productivity and I would be as unobtrusive as possible but I'd be very grateful if anyone could spare the time. I'm very dedicated to becoming a good developer and I will bring that same dedication to learning and helping out as soon as I get the hang of everything. So please let me know if you'd be willing to; it would really help a lot! I'm in the NYC area, but we can also talk on Skype if you'd prefer
Thank you! <comment><USER2> I'm glad that you are getting excited about iOS development. I've been developing part time while I go to school. I'll be starting my second internship in about a month so I can't really offer to let you shadow me, but I can give you some advice on where to find people that can help. I actually attend several iOS meetups in Manhattan every month.

I think the best one for you to start really diving into iOS would be iOS Side Projects [1]. We meet about twice a month and have some really smart devs help out. We also have a slack chat that is full of people excited to help people out [2].

Additionally there's the New York iOS Developers meetup that happens monthly [3]. And then my personal favorite is iOSoho which is monthly and much more selective [4]. These two meetups are a lot more advance than side projects, often with talks about more technical and specific parts of the job.

I've met a lot of really great people at these events and really encourage you to try and make it out to some of them. As I said earlier, I'm not in a position to let you shadow me, but if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me on twitter: @MichaelSelsky. Good luck in your endeavors.

[1] [http://www.meetup.com/iOS-Side-Projects/](http://www.meetup.com/iOS-Side- Projects/)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16mTeoZmB_xAiRQ2banhgOZOepGN...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/16mTeoZmB_xAiRQ2banhgOZOepGNA0jwhMWQ7AR7oRKg/viewform)

[3] [http://www.meetup.com/new-york-ios-developer/](http://www.meetup.com/new- york-ios-developer/)

[4] [http://www.meetup.com/iOSoho/](http://www.meetup.com/iOSoho/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll definitely look into those. I've been to one of those already; looking forward to finding more

<comment><USER2> No problem. Feel free to find me at any of these or on that slack chat.</comment></comment></comment>


Misogynistic gamebros drove these two women out of gaming - <AUTHOR> http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/09/05/youll-never-guess-what-misogynistic-gamebros-did-to-these-two-women-in-gaming-hint-drove-them-out/

<comment><USER2> This is a very poorly written hit piece with an obvious bias. This is not HN quality writing.</comment>