U.S. Government official: Coronavirus vaccine trial starts Monday - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/8089a3d0ec8f9fde971bddd7b3aa2ba1 <comment><USER3> I am extremely bearish on this whole global situation, but given the gravity of the situation, we're going to see the world's best institutions and minds working on vaccines and treatments with essentially unlimited funding and top priority.

Even during our darkest times, we're going to see the most remarkable science and engineering capabilities exposed in the coming weeks and months, for the sake of humanity.

<comment><USER4> Reading about Russia sending rockets to Venus in the 1960-70s [1], then later watching a documentary about the Viking program [2], was one of the things that cheered me up the most during this whole thing.

Humans have done amazing things in the face of dire odds. Nothing brings them together like these sorts of challenges.

Since then I've been reading a book called "The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs" and there's been so many extinction events, yet life still bounced back each time stronger than before. Looking at life on that timescale, what humans managed to accomplish in such a short one doesn't get enough praise. We've only scratched the surface on how much better we could be as a species.

I'm confident we'll be far better prepared for the next epidemic and at the very least hopefully China (and others like Vietnam) will eventually ban the wildlife trade for medicine as well, not just for food. Which is what early results by scientists are pointing to as the cause of this whole thing (Pangolins trafficked for Chinese medicine). Animal conservation plays an underrated role in epidemics, same with Ebola (monkeys) and SARS (bats). We don't need to be consuming any of this stuff.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlnM6kd3_n8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlnM6kd3_n8)

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

<comment><USER5> > we'll be far better prepared for the next epidemic

I agree. Being in California, it's a standing recommendation to maintain extra supplies in case of impact from wildfire or earthquake. So, I thought I was pretty well prepared. I already stock and rotate extra water, toilet paper, n95 masks, canned food, etc. But, I discovered some holes in my preparedness that I will rectify when the stores are back to normal supply levels -- I will be even better prepared for the next state of emergency.

I'm sure the preparedness will go wide and deep across many government and private organizations. At a minimum, I hope the CDC ensures there are plenty more ventilators ready for the next one.

<comment><USER6> "At a minimum, I hope the CDC ensures there are plenty more ventilators ready for the next one."

My only thought here is that we don't know that "the next one" will require ventilators. While I'd certainly like to see our national stockpile of PPE and emergency equipment like ventilators improved, I'd like to see the CDC preparing to face a wider-set of the "next one".

I think we should be looking at our manufacturing infrastructure and ability to rapidly ramp-up the production of _any_ life-saving hospital equipment in the face of a sudden need. With a national stockpile that's strong enough to cover the ramp-up period.

<comment><USER7> Besides this, the world not just the US need standby health personnel in a similar fashion to armies. Soldiers do nothing unless needed, a "health workers" army can do the same.

<comment><USER8> How much extra tax do you think people will be happy to pay -- forever, not just now while we have a pandemic on our hands -- to support this?

<comment><USER9> You question contains an implication in it that all current other tax spending will not be reduced, and that "pandemic preparedness" will have to be added to the current load.

If this goes really badly in the next couple of weeks or months, that's not going to be a true assumption. A changed nation is going to be looking at its spending priorities and a lot of reassessing will be done. Predicting exactly what the result will be is difficult, but predicting that there could be a lot of _change_ is not.

If we cross the logistic curve's inflection point today, then this may ultimately blow over and be remembered as an inconvenience (and, humans being humans, an overreaction). If this continues on for much longer and kills hundreds of thousands and (based on some of the nasty stuff I've read about) permanently damages the lungs of millions more or other such things, causing disability and long-tail mortality increases for the next 50 years, this will be a generation-defining event comparable to the Great Depression, and the usually-reliable "tomorrow will be mostly like today" prediction methodology will catastrophically break down in the next couple of months.

<comment><USER10> I guess the implication that the US military and also non discretionary fund won't be reduced based on the last 50 years of data is probably a status quo bet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's another new (as in just a few years old new) and fascinating technique for making vaccines that hasn't received much publicity. It's a general technique that can be quickly applied to any pathogen. It was recently used to develop a vaccine against Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus (VEEV), was used to vaccinate mice against staph, and is also being tried against new strains of polio emerging in India.

Here's an excerpt from paper about VEEV summarizing the technique's mechanism:

 _...a disease-causing organism (pathogen) can be exposed to gamma radiation in the presence of a Deinococcus Mn complex, and rendered non-replicative (killed) by overwhelming genetic damage, but still maintain the shape of key surface proteins needed to mount a highly protective immune response._

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530122345.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170530122345.htm)

I think this could have the potential to develop a cure but isn't receiving any attention from our (dysfunctional) government (who also happens to own the patents on it!).

<comment><USER12> I heard that killed virus vaccines from corona viruses can actually lead to a cytokine storm and higher mortality rate in those innoculated with it. There's a reason we don't have general vaccines for the common cold. During some previous corona related outbreaks (SARS, MERS) there was an attempt at using this method, but it actually has a backlash effect when the person is exposed to the virus.

<comment><USER13> We do have a vaccine for the common cold. Problem is the common cold is really about 300 different viruses, and a vaccine for just one of them didn't make a statistical difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The rationale against mass inoculation with an untested vaccine stems partially from the botched 1976 Fort Dix swine flu H1N1 outbreak and vaccine. The volunteers of successive regular clinical trial phases play Russian roulette on our behalf, and this takes time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_swine_flu_outbreak)

<comment><USER15> And this comapny's particular approach to vaccination has never been approved for any indication. I can't imagine why this company would be considered a first-line relative to classical approaches to vaccination (inactivated, attenuated live, made by recombinant hen egg, etc., etc.) that we roll out regularly and successfully.

<comment><USER13> All approaches need to be considered at this time because we don't know which if any will work. We also don't know what the side effects of the ones that will work might be.

When we get farther along in testing we will have more information and should re-evaluate. Maybe something will prove to work well (we can do a new flu shot in a few months because we have approved the process to create a new one), maybe everything else will fail. Maybe this will fail. We don't have enough useful information to work with now though.

<comment><USER15> You say these things like you know something about the field. In fact, we're talking about a technology for vaccination that is far less likely to work than many tried and true ones. It has never been FDA approved for anything.

<comment><USER13> That doesn't mean that it won't work, or that the others will work. If the others turn out to work and because they are more tried in general great, but right now all approaches are worth exploring

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> From this link:

[https://news.yahoo.com/government-official-coronavirus- vacci...](https://news.yahoo.com/government-official-coronavirus-vaccine- trial-232640596.html)

 _Even if initial safety tests go well, "you're talking about a year to a year and a half" before any vaccine could be ready for widespread use, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases._

So even if these trials go well that suggests a vaccine is a long way down the road.

<comment><USER17> Given how serious the situation is worldwide I suspect that there will be at least an attempt to speed things out as much as possible. I would be surprised if it actually would end up being a year and a half.

<comment><USER18> I'm not an expert at all, but my understanding of the articles I've read is that 1-1.5 years _is_ sped up quite a bit. 2-3 years would be more typical.

<comment><USER19> It definitely is, but if the entire global economy is still at a standstill in 3 months, I have no doubt the government will speed it up even more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I really hope people will take a more "effective altruism" approach to those 18 months with all the people dying. I'm guessing just with logistic and bureaucratic prioritizing we can shave 6 months (somebody mentioned above that it takes months just to set up testing with the large number of volunteers. Sure, normally it does, but definitely not today).

Beyond that we can probably cut another 6 months with judicious strategizing. Have certain populations defined that are high risk and high exposure - <USER2> elderly health care professionals - and start using the vaccine before the approval is complete. You might actually mix this with early testing and have the volunteers be actual beneficiaries. This way you get efficiency results from the field - it's trivial to implement a double blind and measure infection rates.

Lots of things can be done, if one is willing to look at the letter of the rule and re-think if it's applicable now.

</comment><comment><USER21> key line

 _Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine_

<comment><USER22> If 100K people start dying monthly, that'll be down to 3 months, and "fully validate" will be replaced with "hail Mary" and "pray to Jesus".

<comment><USER23> You can't magically whish vaccine into working. The controls aren't there in order to maximize the delay for when vaccines can be deployed.

A bad batch could essentially equal to purposefully infecting people with the disease, for example.

Ed: i don't see it mentioned explicitly: while young people might reasonably volunteer to be vaccinated and exposed to the virus - we really need to vaccinate the elderly and at risk - who has a high mortality rate. We might get volunteers, but it's still different to sign up for a 50/50 shot at death, than the risk of two weeks of mild flu...

And we probably do need to test for adverse effects in the at risk population too.

<comment><USER24> > A bad batch could essentially equal to purposefully infecting people with > the disease, for example.

Nope, impossible. mRNA based vaccines don't use a weakened version of the virus to train the body:

> [0]The use of mRNA has several beneficial features over subunit, killed and > live attenuated virus, as well as DNA-based vaccines. First, safety: as mRNA > is a non-infectious, non-integrating platform, there is no potential risk of > infection or insertional mutagenesis. Additionally, mRNA is degraded by > normal cellular processes, and its in vivo half-life can be regulated > through the use of various modifications and delivery methods

To use a bad analogy mRNA based vaccines train the body using a "signature" of the virus, essentially skipping the first step of actual infection and jumping to the second/third steps where the body's previously exposed to antigens are generated. It is an entirely new form of vaccine that has worked in trails before.

Which isn't to say it is 100% safe for other reasons. I'd say auto-immune reactions are the biggest risk (e.g. the body using the signature encoded to attack the body itself).

[0][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5906799/)

<comment><USER25> > _Which isn 't to say it is 100% safe for other reasons. I'd say auto-immune > reactions are the biggest risk (e.g. the body using the signature encoded to > attack the body itself)._

Out of curiousity, why couldn't potential auto-immune response be simulated on a computer up to a degree of confidence, if nothing? Would quantum computers drastically rid of current computing related handicaps wrt to simulating a large search space typical of such simulations? What role might yet the recent resurgence in deep-learning play for immediate future?

<comment><USER9> "Out of curiousity, why couldn't potential auto-immune response be simulated on a computer up to a degree of confidence, if nothing?"

Basically every answer you could imagine to that question is true. We don't understand the system well enough to simulate it at that level of detail. We don't have the computational power to do it if we did. If we did have aliens from space deliver to us both the power and the simulation, we'd have a difficult time verifying the validity of the simulation!

Quantum computing is still not well-understood enough to know if it's helpful; there's a certain barrier of "what can it actually do" that we won't really understand until we have them, and we start raising up quantum programmers. No slam against the theorists intended, it's just the difference between "the halting problem is unsolvable" and "here's a program for calculating payroll" is small in theory but large in practice. We won't really know what they can _do_ until we work with them for a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I found 5 trials, four of which are recruiting:

[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Corona+Virus+Inf...](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=Corona+Virus+Infection&term=vaccine&strd_s=01%2F01%2F2020&strd_e=07%2F12%2F2022&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=&Search=Search)

</comment><comment><USER27> > _Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully > validate any potential vaccine._

Why?

<comment><USER28> I'm not a professional vaccine researcher, but I can only imagine you want to validate 1. that the vaccine is effective and 2. that the vaccine doesn't cause everyone who takes it to get an aneurysm six months later. These things have to be pipelined. You don't want to inject 10k people with something you've only tested on 45. You don't want to inject 45 with something you haven't tested on animals. You don't want to stop the 10k person trial too early in case if there is a longer term side effect you missed. You don't want to start manufacturing billions of doses until your 10k trial is done. Etc.

<comment><USER29> As someone who works in the industry, you pretty much covered it.

If you dose people with a new vaccine, you'll need to monitor them 6 months at a minimum. 12 months would be better.

It takes 3 months to nail down the protocol and for all the sites to be ready. Then you start recruiting and for a vaccine, you'd want a large population (reflects usage). So assume 6 months to recruit 1000 people. They don't all start at the same time, so if you're tracking for 6 months, it will probably take 9 monthsfor the last person to finish the trial.

Then you need to analyze all the data you collected, so another 3 months. Then the FDA takes 3 months to review and approve.

There is a TON of work that goes into running a clinical trial.

<comment><USER30> But it does sound like if there's priority and fear, much time could be saved. For example, "6 months to recruit 1000 people". I suspect in this case, a week can work.

> Then you need to analyze all the data you collected, so another 3 months.

Help me understand this. You vaccinate 1000 people. In 6 months, the number of them that get sick is 10% of the rate of the unvaccinated. 0.1% have a bad reaction. How much more analysis do you need?

> the FDA takes 3 months to review and approve

How much time if that is moved to the front of the queue and all hands work on it? Given how enormously disruptive the coronavirus is, we cannot afford to not have all hands working on it.

<comment><USER29> Let's tackle recruitment. I've seen trials recruit really fast and that took a month. It's not like someone says "hey I'd like to take part in this trial" and you give them a shot of drug. You need to screen everyone who comes in. Basic labs, then make sure they don't have some other disease that will mess up the results. That's just one part of it.

Then in terms of the trial, 6 months would be nice, but it wouldn't be ethical to actually expose them to the virus. You'd simply need to recruit a very large number of patients and see if the treatment groups has less disease than the non-treated group. With infection rates pretty low across the entire population, you'd need to recruit thousands, just to capture the handful that actually get exposed.

Then when it comes to analysis, you need to clean the data (yes, there will be errors), then you need to do a statistical analysis of not only efficacy but every possible side effect. You're probably measuring things like viral shedding, so that's another entire dataset. Oh, then you'll have missing data. Do you toss that patient's data out entirely? Or keep them? What impact does that have on your conclusion?

I could go on and on, but suffice to say it's a ton of work. And yes, you can speed up some parts, but other parts you just have to let them run their course.

<comment><USER30> > Let's tackle recruitment. I've seen trials recruit really fast and that took > a month. It's not like someone says "hey I'd like to take part in this > trial" and you give them a shot of drug. You need to screen everyone who > comes in. Basic labs, then make sure they don't have some other disease that > will mess up the results.

You could do that time-consuming screening after they get the trial vaccine, not before. After all, I suspect it is highly unlikely that a virus vaccine would give someone a bacterial disease or a genetic disorder.

Also, before the 6 month trial is up, you're still going to have data trickling in that will give a good indication whether it's working or not.

Source: I saw the movie "Contagion" and learned that a vaccine is considered safe and effective based on one monkey not getting sick. I believe everything celebrities tell me.

<comment><USER29> _You could do that time-consuming screening after they get the trial vaccine, not before. After all, I suspect it is highly unlikely that a virus vaccine would give someone a bacterial disease or a genetic disorder._

Ok. So let's say you give the vaccine and run the tests later. This person's white blood cell count is way above normal.

Is that caused by the vaccine? Was it something else? Was it always there? You have no idea because you didn't capture a baseline.

The challenge of clinical trials is you don't know what to expect, and you're measuring effects on top all the stuff that's happening in the background with completely healthy people.

The goal is to capture as much data as possible so you can actually draw conclusions from it. Otherwise you're left thinking "it's probably the drug, but I'm not sure".

<comment><USER30> > The goal is to capture as much data as possible

Normally, yes. But this isn't normally - here the goal is to get a vaccine as quickly as possible.

For example, white blood cell counts. Draw the blood, set it aside, inject the vaccine. Then get around to testing the blood. You save what, a week that way? That's a big deal.

Based on your descriptions, it seems that a lot of time can be saved by doing things concurrently rather than serially.

<comment><USER31> We had "if programmers build a plane". Maybe it's time for "if programmers run a vaccine development" video. Lol.

<comment><USER30> What can be done without bureaucracy:

"Although far behind, the United States did work hard to get a jet into the air during the war. Lockheed was engaged to build a jet fighter, using the British De Havilland Goblin engine. Speed was called for, and Lockheed gave Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson full authority for the project. He set up his special unit, the famous "Skunk Works," with 23 engineers and 105 shop men, and he did 96 percent of his own fabrication and all inspection. Lockheed's normal development procedure of engineering conferences was by-passed; only 700 drawings were made; sometimes parts were made from a drawing, and sometimes the reverse was done: simplicity was Johnson's keynote. The XP-80 cost only 63 percent of the XP-38 prototype, which had been made by the customary system of development. It was accepted by the AAF only 143 days after the start of development, even though the engine had not been on hand until the 132nd day. After General Electric had designed an improved Whittle- type engine, the 1-40 or J33, the XP-80A was designed around it: the United States had a jet fighter and one of the best aeronautical designs in its history by the end of 1945."

"The most telling criticism of massed-manpower engineering practices is the record of the "Skunk Works." Starting with the XF-80, this technique has been used periodically by Lockheed's Kelly Johnson to produce the U-2, the JetStar business jet, and the A-11 (F-12). The XF-80, it will be recalled, used 23 engineers and was designed in 143 days; the U-2 also used 23 engineers and took 80 days; the JetStar used 41 engineers and took 241 days; Johnson used 135 engineers to build the A-11, which was designed to go over Mach 3 at 20 miles high. This contrasts with the 3,500 engineers used to build North American's XB-70, which went Mach 3 at 15 miles high. Although it must be acknowledged that none of these aircraft are large, the XF-80, the U-2, and the A-11 all pushed beyond the state of the art, and the repeated success of the "Skunk Works" shows that effectiveness of the system is no fluke."

"The Jetmakers" by Charles Bright (yes, my dad)

Think about it - 23 engineers and 80 days for the U2. Kelly Johnson knew how to get things done.

<comment><USER31> I accept the ingenuity of people.

Though, if 1% of your planes have issue that causes them to stop working midflight after 1 year, at worst you'll lose a few pilots and fix the issue by inspecting rest of the planes.

Backtracking and fixing issues after giving a vaccine to millions of people is a bit more problematic. Not just technically, but also in gaining the trust back, etc.

<comment><USER30> You balance the risk of the vaccine against the certainty of people dying without it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> best of luck to USA - Hopefully coronavirus situation gets resolved ASAP. I have a feeling as humanity battles this virus, we will see the best of every nation.

Good luck to all!

</comment><comment><USER33> One of my biggest concerns is that they mean well and rush these vaccine trials as having a vaccine very soon would be IMMENSELY VALUABLE.

But the fear part is that they screw up, people get hurt, and the anti-vaxxers dominate the conversation which leads to broader fear of vaccines and a vastly worse outcome overall for the foreseeable future.

I would not envy anyone who has to make such decisions right now. And I would respect the process as it is, rather than be angry at it, because vaccines are overall some of the safest medicine in the history of medicine and that's really important to getting people to use them.

</comment><comment><USER34> > Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully > validate any potential vaccine.

About the same length of time that experts were originally saying that it would take to get it out - unless they corners, I suppose.

<comment><USER35> I'd love to see a breakdown of the "18 months".

If nothing else let's ramp up production in parallel with testing. If it doesn't work out we lose some time and money which isn't a big deal in a crisis.

<comment><USER36> That's assuming nothing needs to be changed in the formula (I'm no chemist, excuse my ignorance).

But logically, if these tests show that somehow it needs to be tweaked, you're practically throwing out funding that could otherwise go towards developing better candidates.

<comment><USER37> If funding for these projects is the problem, our society is even more short- sighted than I thought. We should be throwing money at them. I would be more worried about underlying physical constraints, like a shortage of manufacturing throughput.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If there are about 100k infected in the US today and this number grows 10x per week, we are 1 month from the entire country being infected. With 20% requiring hospitalization, it will be a blood bath. There will be nobody to benefit from this vaccine.

<comment><USER39> The rate is increasing, it's slightly worse. It's looking really really really bad. The vaccine's purpose will be to stop this from happening yearly for the rest of human history.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This makes me wonder: what happened to the Zika, MERS and SARS vaccines? Did researches give up because the virus(es) were mitigated?

<comment><USER41> Basically, yes.

Here's an excellent Planet Money article I heard yesterday going over this issue: [https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why- th...](https://www.npr.org/2020/03/13/815307821/planet-money-why-the-market- for-emergency-vaccines-is-like-no-other)

At least in the US, there's a policy of 'creating' a market for vaccines for these potential outbreaks in order to incentivize industry to research and produce them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Public health officials say it will take a year to 18 months to fully validate any potential vaccine."

That makes a lot of sense for a vaccine against, say, chickenpox, or anything else that kills a hundred or a thousand people a year. For something that, at a 3% fatality rate, is about to kill nine million people in this country alone, it's suicidally slow.

<comment><USER43> What's the alternative? Let it pass without sufficient test and possibly kill some people?

<comment><USER42> If you can prove it will save more people than it will kill, yes. That's difficult when you have to prove a safety margin of 99.9%. Proving a safety margin of 97% is much faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The same species that invented youtube also makes youtube comments. Keep that in mind.

<comment><USER45> It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one.

We do not need everyone to be Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi, or Michelangelo, or Bach or Einstein, or Shakespeare, or Newton or Galileo we just need to be smart enough to recognize when one of them is born amongst us. We've not always been good at that.. but we've been getting better at it.

<comment><USER46> > It has always been the case that 1% of humanity pulls the other 99% forward. > We do not need everyone to be a genius. We just need one.

This is such a ridiculous hero praising statement. It's also completely wrong.

While we love to hero worship, none of these heroes worked in isolation or without correspondence with others. Be it their teacher, peers they were having letter relationships with, their partners, their students or other people.

<comment><USER47> 1% of humanity is something like 75 million people. That's plenty of people to correspond and work together with.

<comment><USER48> 1% is actually now about 90 million as the world population currently approximated at around 9 Billion. And increasing by around 90-100Mil a year

<comment><USER49> Where did you get that number? The United Nations thinks that we're going to hit 8 billion by around 2023 and 9 billion by about 2037 [0].

[0] [https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/](https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I worry that _headlines_ like this will lead to complacency amongst certain parts of the population.

They'll think a vaccine will be here soon.

I imagine their thought processes would be like: what's the big deal with this virus, why do we need to mess up the economy by social distancing, if we're going to have a vaccine quite soon?

<comment><USER51> I don't know how you can look around and seriously worry about complacency right now. Yes, complacency is very bad, but so is panic. We need to find a healthy, productive middle ground. A trip to my local grocery store is all the evidence I need to confidently say the pendulum has swung too far the other way.

People are exhausting our supplies of essential hygiene products and cheap, non-perishable foods. Scalpers are re-selling the supplies online with huge markups. Hourly workers are loosing their incomes and parents are struggling to find means to take care of their kids who are suddenly without school for the foreseeable future.

We need public awareness. We need people to take this matter seriously. But we also need a balanced approach to ensure we don't cause even more devastation in the long term.

Frankly, I'm happy for _anything_ that gets people to calm down for a second and just commit to good hygiene practices and avoiding crowds for a few months.

<comment><USER50> Complacency and panic aren't the only two options.

Complacency is a massive problem right now. So many people are not taking social distancing seriously, and it's going to have disastrous consequences, al la how things are currently playing out in Italy, in many countries.

And _compared to that_ , the temporary exhausting of supplies is a trifling matter. (Wait until the real panic sets in when hospitals can't keep up). But like I said, it's not like we have to chose between complacency OR panic. We can take it seriously and take appropriate actions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Unfortunately a vaccine is unlikely to work. This is probably being done more for optics. This virus likely has Antibody Dependent Enhancement. Same reason there's no vaccine for SARS or MERS. It's 4am and I should be sleeping but there's a paper floating around where a bunch of SARS candidates were trialed on multiple species. In ever case immunity was conferred but upon re-exposure the animals had autoimmune lung damage.

This virus is far more dangerous than most people understand now. The news media has been a month late in everything since they started reporting because all of this is evolving too rapidly to confirm to journalistic standards. You have to dig for this information yourself.

<comment><USER53> You're a ML engineer, not a specialist in this area.

<comment><USER54> I hate credentialism like this. It's anti-intellectual.

There are many smart people on HN who are perfectly capable of reading and understanding research literature in an area that is NOT their primary expertise, and who can make half-decent arguments and deductions.

Reply to the points he raises (if you can). Don't belittle him.

<comment><USER55> Credentialism aside, there were no sources provided.

I do find the point about no SARS vaccine compelling, however. Is that true?

I know the flu vaccine gets updated every year or so with new viruses that are prevalent, so if there is no SARS vaccine then I wonder if that is true and if it is true it couldn't be developed.

Again, multiple things thrown out there without sources which are not common knowledge, followed by "you can look this up yourself".

<comment><USER56> I've only quickly searched, and to be honest it's a bit thick with foreign terminology for me to quickly glean much from it, but seems like this might be the paper the top-level commenter referred to:

[https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02395-10](https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.02395-10)

> I do find the point about no SARS [-CoV[-1]] vaccine compelling, however. Is > that true?

Wikipedia says so, and just gives essentially the same advice as being given for SARS-CoV-2 (or any human-transmissible virus, I imagine).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndrome#Prevention)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> The world.

<comment><USER58> The virus is subsiding in China because they took massive preventative steps to prevent the spread of the disease. Not all countries are taking such extensive steps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> So Trump didn't need to try to buy a German biotech company to produce a vaccine "for the US only"?

[https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/president-trump- tries-...](https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/president-trump-tries-to- lure-curevac-to-make-a-u-s-vaccine-but-german-government-steps)

<comment><USER60> > The Welt am Sonntag story spoke to an anonymous German government source as > saying Trump was trying to essentially buy the work from the scientists for > a vaccine, "but only for the United States."

Bareknuckle and self-interested as Trump's foreign policy may be at times, I have a hard time believing he'd go so far as to deny the world a vaccine for this, though I do see the sense in attempting to acquire promising research teams in order to avoid the overhead of multi-organizational collaboration.

If the last four years have taught me much, it's that anonymous government officials say a lot of things. I can't read German, does the original article do anything to validate this claim?

<comment><USER61> The german ministry of health confirmed[1] the newspaper report. If this is true it's a major turning point in the trans-atlantic partnership.

[1] [https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/so-agiert-trump-beim- coro...](https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/so-agiert-trump-beim-coronavirus- usa-wollen-deutsche-impfstoff-forscher-anlocken/25645578.html)

<comment><USER62> Unless there is a new set of information out there, there has been no confirmation on the exclusivity as part of the negotiation, only the outlandish statements of a socialist politician who is pushing for a top to bottom overhaul of the German health care system. The same sources have been getting a lot of the basic facts wrong (such as the company already being partly owned by the bill and melinda gates foundation, and a large portion of their research happening in Boston).

I suspect that this is the same xenophobia that is resulting in the same rumors floating around the US that China has a vaccine that they are denying the rest of the world.

Regardless, it might make sense to wait a bit for facts to come out.

<comment><USER63> In this case do you mean the world's xenophobia of the states? I find it hard to believe that this message somehow stokes the United States to xenophobic sentiment.

<comment><USER62> Germany.

The Xenophobia in the states that there are some who believe that the Chinese are doing the same to the US.

<comment><USER63> Why would that be only limited to Germany? The whole world saw that news story, knowing it would have effects on everyone that's not in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> You had one job.

</comment><comment><USER65> From the article:

> There's no chance participants could get infected from the shots, because > they don't contain the virus itself.

So ... what's in the vaccine? Is it just saline? Without a viral load I don't think we could call it a vaccine in the traditional sense; if this is some crazy new technology that enables the immune system to process the virus without introducing some viral material, that's neat and all, but deserves some deeper explanation.

<comment><USER66> Many vaccines only use parts of the virus (such as proteins from the exterior of the virus). These vaccines can't cause infection because only certain parts of the virus are included, not whole viruses.

<comment><USER65> I was not aware of that -- I thought that all vaccines used some live/dead/weakened/attenuated viral load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Yeah, we don't even know if this disease is vaccine-able, meaning whether people get long term immunity post exposure.

Worth noting that the SARS (v1) vaccine was abandoned after the disease disappeared. Idiotic lack of long term thinking.

<comment><USER68> Why develop a vaccine for a disease that is now non-existent? We still have the research from that and that's why we already know about some of the workable treatments like HIV and Malaria drugs.

There's a number of Zika vaccines that have been developed years ago that still aren't close to regulatory approval.

SARS-COV-1 infected people for 2 years, then it was gone. There's certainly a chance that SARS-COV-2 disappears before a vaccine could make it to market.

<comment><USER67> > Why develop (...)

To get more research, obviously.

Also - epidemics are tail risks. You cannot just leave them to the market to be priced on the expected value basis, that will leave them grossly underpriced.

<comment><USER68> > Why develop (a vaccine for a disease that is now non-existent?)

Unless there's somehow infinite amounts to spend on research that's not viable whatsoever and actively diverting away funding from more pressing needs.

<comment><USER67> There are no more pressing needs than tail risks involving the entire population.

But again, you leave it to markets and people that think in broken expected values and yeah it will seem like the project is stupid.

Expected values make no sense when the system lacks ergodicity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> I'm not sure we can wait 12-18 months... Everybody will have to put all resources onto this, because if the virus comes back in autumn, it's going to be worse according some predictions. Hope it's not tho.</comment>


Exploring alternative funding models for the web - <AUTHOR> https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring-alternative-funding-models-for-the-web/ <comment><USER2> For a long time I've thought that we need a browser based universal tip jar. Some way that lets me read a blog post, and then tip the site with however much I want. 1 cent, 25 cents, 1 dollar, 200 dollars, any amount.

From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money.

The second thing is making sure the money goes where it is supposed to. With services like Scroll, the site owner has to register with Scroll. Patreon requires the user register to send money to the site owner.

So, here's a thought, Mozilla should create a tip jar non-profit organization. Tipping would be something built into Firefox. If you tip someone, it's sent to the non-profit's bank, and connected to the url. Site owners could then register with the non-profit, in manner similar to Google Webmaster tools, that would let them access the tips they've received.

Anyway, implementation would be pretty difficult, but I'd rather something like that than hope that my favorite blogger is somehow able to get onto Scroll or another service like that.

<comment><USER3> What happens with the tips sent to a website that doesn't register with Mozilla? Maybe there should be a standard meta tag that websites can add to show they are looking for tips. And then they can even add a URL on the tag so they can use another provider if for some reason they don't want Mozilla to be the gatekeeper of their tip jar.

But then again, they can just add the link in the website itself like they already do.

<comment><USER4> Beaker Browser has (a version of) this feature -- you can specify a donate link for your dat site, and the browser then displays a heart button that takes you to that page.

<comment><USER2> Never heard of Beaker before. A quick skim of their site makes me interested. Thanks for sharing about it. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _> One such partner that we are collaborating with is Scroll. [...] The service enables web users to pay for an ad-free experience on their favorite sites, across their devices._

To try and understand what this is, I go to the landing page of partner's site, Scroll: [https://scroll.com/](https://scroll.com/)

Their webpage has no obvious explanation of what this is. Is this a tip jar? Micropayments? Subscription?

I then go to Scroll's blog: [https://scroll.blog/](https://scroll.blog/)

Way way down the page, it finally has this blurb:

 _> Be a flat monthly subscription at a price consumers would happily pay._

Ok... so what's the price? $9.99/month? $19.99/month?

I see Scroll is offering invitations. Would users signing up with their email know the price? Or is it a free trial?

<comment><USER5> Fyi... I later found an older article (2018) that said it was $5/month: [https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/scroll-the-5-month-news- su...](https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/02/scroll-the-5-month-news-subscription- startup-signs-up-the-atlantic-business-insider-fusion-media-group-slate-and- others/)

Since Scroll's landing page today in 2019 does not prominently display "$5/month" anywhere, it signals to me that Scroll may have changed its mind about that $5 amount and has yet to commit to a publicized and transparent monthly price. With the "Request Invitation" button, are they collecting emails to gauge the level of interest to help them determine a price?

If Scroll is actually still charging $5/month, why not make that fact obvious on its website?

Google search doesn't show much written about Scroll by Tony Haile in 2019: [https://www.google.com/search?q=scroll+haile+subscription+pr...](https://www.google.com/search?q=scroll+haile+subscription+price+-elder)

(To add more confusion, there's another _unrelated_ website that charges $5/month with a similar name: [https://scroll.in/subscribe](https://scroll.in/subscribe))

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've come to the conclusion that advertising is the only viable monetization model for most content businesses. This is not a new phenomenon, this is the same reason advertising is dominated television (even paid cable channels), print media like newspapers and magazines, and even in sports. The economics of it are pretty straightforward—customers simply don't value most content at what it costs to produce it.

I do a good amount of media buying and content production. From where I stand, the issue is in the consolidation of power. Content discovery and ad placement are far too closely related, which is bad for everyone involved (well, all but the ad platforms). Going directly to publishers is possible but difficult, it's not currently a scalable solution.

<comment><USER7> It's definitely viable, but I'm not sure about it being the only way.

Netflix shows that there's an appetite towards paying for content, and HBO furthers the idea while demonstrating how that same approach can be much more profitable.

For journalism side, premium, niche publications like The Information putting bets on the idea that users are willing to pay a lot of money for content as long as it's much better and more useful than the free alternatives.

<comment><USER8> >Netflix shows that there's an appetite towards paying for content

Content that was originally created with advertising money (The Office). Whether or not Netflix will last the next 5 years is debatable and unknown.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://flattr.com/](https://flattr.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> I think what a lot of these models miss is the consent part of the system. In ads you don't give explicit consent to pay the publisher but they do get paid. I think that psychological element is both very obvious and almost always ignored with any new model. If we want to make a successful model we have to maybe borrow good ideas from models that are most successful today and lack of explicit consent is absolutely one of them. This reminds of the water my plant project where someone created a bot controlled by a subreddit to water a plant. Can we sort of allow access to a money account that we, the user, own but controlled by someone else? What would happen if any website publisher could withdraw from that account based on their judgement? There would need to be some obvious limits in place.

</comment><comment><USER11> The web doesn't need a funding model.

Many content providers want a funding model for their work. That's fine. Nothing to do with the web, specifically.

IMO the web technology is and should be totally orthogonal to the needs of some businesses that happen to want to use it.

The web should be a mechanism for people to publish documents. That's it. And that's great. In fact we should be making it easier for normal humans to do this. The web had lots of excellent content long before anyone expected they would profit _directly_ from eyeballs on their web-content.

</comment><comment><USER12> Honestly, I just want a subscription model like Netflix or Google Music: A nominal monthly fee for ad-free access to most content on most major websites.

<comment><USER13> Paid by the ISP which I already pay for

<comment><USER14> Why should Comcast pay for peoples' hentai blogs?

Problems like creating an online tipping protocol could be addressed with work on new web standards, not private partnerships with for-profit companies spearheaded by a single browser developer. If something like this could work, it needs to be an open standard. I appreciate Mozilla's work on this important issue, but don't think they are even starting with the right approach.

<comment><USER13> > Why should Comcast pay for peoples' hentai blogs?

It wouldn't, and this whole subthread of tipping is way off from what this article and service provider is even on about. So since we aren't actually talking about micropayment tipping, lets continue:

Having the ISP handle both the subscription and payment would be reducing and bundling a pooled monthly subscription away from consumers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is from February, not something new.

(It's still from 2019 so HN probably won't add that info to the title)

</comment><comment><USER16> Exploring alternative funding models for the web publishers*

That said, if it's so little money in it due to ads. Then shop around. If you're going to complain about the elephant in the room, Google being the only choice, then create your own ad network and charge more. Google has such a monopoly, that you may be getting pennies for every thousands they get. As well, ad blockers are becoming a fact of life that there's no solution for.

My opinion; Incredibly, the only way for publishers to publish on Internet and still have food on table is UBI. Sucks if you are the business owner though.

</comment><comment><USER17> Google Contributor already solved this problem in a way that every site that runs ads can handle without having to opt-in to an alternative payment universe. Of course, Google shut down Contributor, but if anyone has the ability to reimplement it on a large scale it's probably Firefox (or Microsoft, or Apple I guess).

It's pretty straightforward. You bid on ads on the user's behalf, and you show them cat pictures - or nothing, user's choice. The ad revenue still goes to the website and the user doesn't have to see ads. Everyone gets what they want and _this is really important_ sites don't have to opt-in.

I've run large internet sites and we'd get email into our webmaster@ address saying we'd be tipped by some users and if we went to sign up we could claim our $3.35 or something. Nobody got time for that. Just use the existing payment rails (the ad system).

If over time the sites saw more people using this, they might change their business model to support subscriptions or something and cut the exchanges out of the middle, but to start, this would work.

I hate how everyone wants to reinvent the wheel. _looking at you Brave_. We don't need cryptocurrency to solve this.

</comment><comment><USER18> I read about puma browser that is using coil to power an alternate funding model. Sounds interesting. [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/puma- browser](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/puma-browser) [https://coil.com/](https://coil.com/)

</comment><comment><USER19> Doesn't Brave already do this?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think the basic problem with all these schemes is people don't want to pay for most content, the entire concept of 'surfing' the web is frictionless interactions with content and constantly needing to make decisions about whether to buy something, even if it were pennies, is a cognitive burden that forced accounting and a shopping mentality on a reader who just wants to fall down the rabbit hole of link chasing.

Sure, some high quality long form content can pull this off, but would I pay for the Verge, or say, MKBHD's reviews? No. Maybe Anandtech once in a while.

There's a paradox of choice as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> If anything gets adopted it either needs to be from a group of big players (think: Libra) or in a decentralized way with a consortium (blockchain + 2 major browsers). Would love to see it happen, but having a startup run it just won't surmount the needed push to make it a standard.

</comment><comment><USER22> The tier where to implement this seems (mobile) Telcos who have already your details, a customer account, etc., and who are on the regulatory hook anyway.

</comment><comment><USER23> Firefox should build in support for real cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Maybe create some Web Payments API for it or something.

</comment><comment><USER24> I was considering building a system similar to scroll, but now that it exists and is in use... that's nice :) I hope things go well for them!

</comment><comment><USER25> Did you mean: Brave Browser? [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/)

</comment><comment><USER26> If they don't add a way to opt out of those "random surveys" I'll be pretty pissed.

<comment><USER27> Firefox is working on a first-party JS popup blocker. They're collecting data on them now. You can report them with this add-on: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/in-page- pop-u...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/in-page-pop-up- reporter/) Chrome version: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/in-page- pop-up-rep...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/in-page-pop-up- reporter/dkpphegmeomaffjanagefmejpeebfcmh)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you use for cloud hosted contact forms? - <AUTHOR>

I am starting a new project and I am curious what you do for hosted contact forms?  I really don't want to go through adding a full backend just to support a contact form.   I know of services like mail chimp and contactology but they are more for list management.    And sites like wufoo are really expensive and I hate online theme designers.<p>Any suggestions?   Thanks in advance for the feedback <comment><USER2> I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for but I created RESTMailer (<http://restmailer.mihirgarimella.com>) a little while ago. It does exactly this - you create the form and RESTMailer powers the rest, including validation and sending. I use it for my own contact form...

</comment><comment><USER3> WuFoo but I'd like something cheaper. A lot cheaper.</comment>


Cinavia DRM: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Blu-ray's Self-Destruction - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/5693/cinavia-drm-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-blurays-selfdestruction

<comment><USER2> Single page link for those would would prefer to read the article while, instead of chopped up into seven pieces:

<http://www.anandtech.com/print/5693></comment>


New Theory Explains Why Europe's Original Dogs Vanished - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/new-theory-explains-why-europes-original-dogs-vanished-1829863402 <comment><USER2> The dogs didn't vanish, they were subsumed into the wider dog gene pool, and the closest this article gets to recognizing it is that the european dogs "were replaced in terms of genetic frequency".

Meanwhile, the original paper's headline is: "Dogs accompanied humans during the Neolithic expansion into Europe." Much more straightforward and leads directly with the finding rather than an awkward narrative bolted on top.

could we link directly to the paper here? [http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/10/2018028...](http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/14/10/20180286)

</comment><comment><USER3> Any information on which modern breeds are closest to the old European stock?

<comment><USER4> What would it mean for one modern breed to be "closer" than another to the old stock?

<comment><USER2> Presumably having more of the genes that remain from the original stock.

That said I'd be pretty surprised if this was significant at the breed level—most breeds are a fraction of the 11kya mentioned here.

<comment><USER4> > Presumably having more of the genes that remain from the original stock.

That only makes sense if you believe that all "genes" are equally significant. By that metric, a hyrax is more similar to an elephant than it is to a marmot.

<comment><USER5> That does not matter. We want to measure closeness, not superficial similarity. Which species have the most recent common ancestor.

A hyrax _is_ closer to an elephant. It's not even a rodent. Dolphins and whales aren't fish either, even though they live under water and have fins.

<comment><USER4> If you want to measure _that_ way, then the idea of one modern breed being closer to a common ancestor than another modern breed is is total nonsense; by definition, they're all equally close.

<comment><USER5> No they're not. Look at that Nature article linked above.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Year's Resolutions and the Science of Willpower - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/new-years-resolutions-and-the-science-of-willpower

<comment><USER2> I don't really care for this article. The link that they provided was on how exercising your willpower increases overall self control is an abstract for a paper about how people whose "self-regulatory resources were experimentally bolstered via a 2-week training regimen" are less likely to commit intimate partner violence.

The problem I have with that is that it doesn't, at least in the abstract, talk about what the training regimen was. The blog post it implies that it's caused by constantly depleting your willpower.

I disagree with the conclusions drawn though. I do agree that you can train your capacity for willpower, but I don't think that a new years resolution is a good way to do it.

The reason I disagree is that there's a lot of competing factors. When you exercise a muscle, say you are running, your ability to run is lower to start with. You run, you get tired, you rest. You're sore for a couple of days, and then you go back out and run again when you've recovered. You do this a few times a week and in a few months you're able to run much further. In a few years running isn't a burden.

On the other hand, when you exercise willpower, you utilize it, you get tired, and then what? Now your willpower is exhausted. Say you are avoiding alcohol, and you really enjoy drinking, maybe you're even an alcoholic. You constantly crave it, and you avoid it, but you eventually exhaust your willpower. Then what? If this were running, you would rest. But this is a resolution, you can't give in and drink, otherwise you're breaking your resolution. So you keep avoiding it, pushing yourself to do that. That builds stress, and stress is bad in this case. Stress works doubly against you because it starts to push you to make irrational decisions. But just say you continue to avoid it. You manage to do so, but at the cost of a lot of stress the whole time its happening. If you do break the resolution there's all sorts of other things that happen with your reward valuation and memory that make it hard to want to try it again. You've now tried and failed to stop, and the next time you want to try, you'll remember the failure, and feel stress, which will make you more prone to irrational behavior. There's also self-image issues.

You maybe end up changing your behavior as there's extinction processes when it comes to habits, and you will have developed coping mechanisms. But a question is whether your overall willpower has improved. That's hard to say.

When you run, if you continue to run, and then continue to run even more, and then hook yourself up to a machine that stimulates your muscles when they eventually give up, you aren't really helping build those muscles. They are constantly working, they are getting damaged, they are not resting and rebuilding.

But lets think about something less of an addiction, and more like the cotton candy example. The problem with a resolution to avoid cotton candy is that it's trivial and meaningless. You're not exhausting anything. It's like saying your running regimen is running for 25 seconds whenever you hear Rick Astley on the radio. Sure, the occasion when you do happen to hear him, you run, but it's not strenuous or common enough to help at all.

I do train my willpower. I do it not through something like a resolution, but rather through every day things. For instance, recently I played a video game, Might and Magic 1. A large part of that game is mapping. It's something quite enjoyable when I have the willpower, but it is fiddly the way I was doing it, (I was using mspaint and doing it pixel by pixel.) I can tell when I run out of willpower because I stop being willing to do it, I start to take shortcuts, I start to get frustrated. I push myself hard to do that, and then I rest. I do that in the evening, and I work during the day. I do my normal work during the day, and that exhausts some willpower, and then if I still have it left over, I push it hard again at night. That game was just an example, but I do many different things to the same end. The point is that it's intentional, and I do it with awareness of how I'm feeling.

The big thing is, I'm aware of how hard I'm pushing it, and I stop without feeling guilty. The problem with a resolution is it's harder to exercise that resolution when you want to (I'm going to not eat rice so hard right now!) and that you can't stop exercising it when you need a rest without breaking your resolution.

I think the hardest part about training willpower is knowing when to relax it.</comment>


Google Said to Have Tried to Get Support Over Attack  - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aOyMuHml05Ak

<comment><USER2> I think the key statement is:

"It's all about profit, and I understand where the silence is coming from, but they are missing the long-term picture," Slane said in an interview. Chinese leaders' "end game is to extract as much technology out of American companies as they can, transfer that to their own companies and, when they feel those companies have reached a level of technical maturity, show the American companies the door."

Looks like most companies are looking at short term gains and profits and not worrying about the longer term effect, when it would be someone else's problem.

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't Cisco provide the specialized hardware for the great firewall? If so, then their response is a bit disingenuous.</comment>


The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/27333/trillion-dollar-vision-dee-hock <comment> th-ai Dee Hock wanted to extend ownership, defined as 'nontransferable right of participation', to merchants and cardholders, but that was too much for the mental models in 1970, and even challenges our mental models today: VISA's cooperative/competitive ownership structure lasted until 2007, when it devolved into traditional shareholder ownership via IPO.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#IPO_and_restructurin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Inc.#IPO_and_restructuring)</comment>


How Rackspace lost its mojo - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/09/03/how-rackspace-lost-its-mojo/

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that Rackspace lost their mojo so much as the market shifted away from owning/renting servers.

The low end market is more interesting at Digital Ocean or Linode, and the massive scale stuff feels like Amazon still owns that, so I'm not really sure where Rackspace is fantastic.

If service is what makes Rackspace best in the world, then they need to play that card as hard as they can instead of chasing "markets" like the "open cloud". Chasing markets sort of killed Sun and it could easily kill Rackspace.

<comment><USER4> I don't think the market shifted away from owning/renting servers (IaaS?) - <USER2> think part of the shift was from web-based startups and companies having just development teams to having "devops" teams. Devops replaces the managed service that Rackspace hung its hat on.

<comment><USER3> Sure, I meant that I believe in the past you would like purchase or lease a server with a long term contract and they would build it for you and put it in their racks. Now, that pretty much goes away and you just rent on an hourly basis. That is a pretty big shift from signing contracts and ordering machines that used to be much more common.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Rackspace has already figured this out.

It's really not that hard to understand: you choose Rackspace if you want someone to call when you have a question or problem. That's true whether you buy a dinky cloud server or a dedicated network segment with 30 leased boxes. Everything comes with full phone and ticket support now.

If you don't care about that--if you just want some VMs to run your shit-- you'll go with DO or Linode on the low end, AWS, Google, or Azure on the high end. Or maybe PaaS like Heroku.

Rackspace has only "lost their mojo" in that they are not a utility cloud provider, which is what Wall Street is hot on right now. But they're a profitable company with good customer loyalty and good technology.</comment>


Interactive Sistine Chapel - <AUTHOR> http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html

<comment><USER2> When I was there, I was expecting the iconic god image to be huge but it was only a small part of the ceiling.

In fact, even though the ceiling takes most of the fame, my favorite painting was Michaelangelo's Last Judgement depicted in the altar wall:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Judgment_(Michelangelo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Judgment_\(Michelangelo\))

The later-added fig leaves and robe parts do stand out which I thought was a shame. Lots of art in the Vatican museum have private parts which have been broken (in statues) or covered/painted over.

Another impressive point that stands out is that the ceiling is mostly flat. The painted arches and columns give it an amazing 3D look.

<comment><USER3> Extremely impressive. It took me a few minutes to catch on to the fact that everything was flat, and all of the intricate woodwork I saw around the windows and awnings was, in fact, painted.

Further in the Vatican tour, after the chapel, there's a room which has its ceiling similarly painted to look like woodwork. There is no illusion; you see it immediately for what it is. It helped to demonstrate to me how good Michelangelo was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Having never been there, I was pretty interested in using the site to discover the Chapel... until 4-5 minutes in and the Flash still wasn't fully pre-loaded on my 50 Mbit connection!

While the final size of the download might remain the same in the end, only loading the requested zoom level à la Google Maps instead would give it a way more acceptable "instant-like" feeling. Pre-loading the entire thing before users can interact is just plain bad usability.

If it wasn't a famous landmark, I would have left the site within 30 seconds. Still, I applaud the initiative and am happy to have seen the place in such details!

<comment><USER2> Interesting. It did demand-load here. In fact it is still loading (there's a progress bar at about 80% in the middle of the screen and some parts of the image are still blurry)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems so small. For those of you that have actually been there, is it really small, or is the perspective just warped because of the medium through which I'm seeing it?

<comment><USER6> I was there about 7 years ago and it seemed a decent size, but it wasnt big like St. Peters.

A more objective view from wikipedia: "Above is the main space, the Chapel, the internal measurements of which are 40.9 metres (134 ft) long by 13.4 metres (44 ft) wide—the dimensions of the Temple of Solomon, as given in the Old Testament[9]."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At Disney's Epcot Center some 13 years ago I remember they had virtual sistine chapel with a headtracking setup and 3d headset. The other people in the room could just watch on a projector.

I got to 'drive' it but we had to stop it early because some lady in the room was getting severe motion sickness from me flying around the room quickly. I guess she wasn't used to seeing things like that.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks like PixelCase technology, which has a similar styled aerial view of Australian cities: <http://melbourne.com/> \- and New York <http://www.pixelcase.com.au/vr/2009/newyork/></comment>


The Anti-Stupid - <AUTHOR> http://blog.figuringshitout.com/the-anti-stupid/

<comment><USER2> "I've also learned that, if it's your birthday, you can ask a very nice Ethiopian man very nicely and he will drive you and 9 of your friends 300 miles from Seattle to Portland and then back to Seattle in a H3 stretch limousine for the cost of gas, a lap dance and a steak."

Now this is a story worth hearing...

</comment><comment><USER3> "Paradoxically, this means that if you want to avoid stupidities, the way to do so is to become even more stupid. It's only by repeatedly trying stupid things that you can learn where stupidities lie and how to spot them. Being stupid as a reflex is the best way to hone your "wait, this is stupid" detector and gives you a sixth sense about how to spot those buried landmines of stupidities."

Sorry but _that's_ stupid, and I don't just mean "anti-smart". This guy seems to have a fixation on stupidity. Ok, you need to fail a lot before you can win and things like that, but let's not go overboard with it.

</comment><comment><USER4> The word you are looking for is "rationality." It is indeed a completely separate quality from intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER5> It might have been nice to see some examples of deep stupidity in the article.

All I got out of the article was you can do stupid stuff and enjoy it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think he's confusing anti-stupid with experiencing new things and deciding on the merits of the experience.

</comment><comment><USER7> I feel stupider for having read that.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I leave a high paying first job within the first 2 months? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, I'm in a dilemna right now and I hope that I can seek your advice. Its been a pretty nervewrecking past few days thinking about this and I thought it will be better for my mental health if I could ask for your advice.
I'm a recent graduate who managed to secure a high paying job at a Tier-1 Investment Bank doing entry level IT work (Graduates Program). Its been 2 weeks since I've joined my team at my desk after my 3 weeks of training and I don't like it at all.
The job is boring, the team is dysfunctional and the corporate systems and processes are just getting depressing.
During my undergraduate days, I've started a couple of businesses and was able to survive on doing freelance webdevelopment for startups. I have no idea why I applied for this current job, but I thought it was something I should do after all my peers all did.
I'm thinking of leaving my company perhaps to join a small startup or start my own freelance development business again but I'm not sure if its the right move. After all, I'll most likely be taking a significant paycut and I don't know if the new job will be any better.
I know most of my peers would kill to be in my current job, but I'm just not happy in it. HN, what should I do? <comment><USER2> If you have good software skills and can communicate effectively, the job market is really, really hot right now. Life's too short to spend it doing something you hate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Better to leave now than to string the company along for a while and leave with more depending on you.

Also: if you're going to post a question like this, I'd suggest not doing it with a Hacker News handle that looks like a real name. Consider if your employer read this post before you told them you were leaving, or worse yet if you decided to stay.

<comment><USER4> _Better to leave now than to string the company along for a while and leave with more depending on you._

One thing I learned over the years, there is no large company that truly depends on an employee. The machine will keep on ticking, even if it has a little bit of difficulty for a short (relatively) period of time.

To the OP: If you can handle your existing financial responsibilities with the change, then by all means go for it.

I wish I had followed it as much as I believe, but... if you do what you enjoy/love then enough money will follow.

Like you, I got sucked in to a job with the salary and then after getting married the spouse wasn't comfortable with taking the chance on leaving.

EDIT: As far as your friends go.. They are not the one's living your life. (yet another one of my mistakes).

<comment><USER5> I _completely_ agree with the last line here. All too often I hear about people saying "I will miss my friends/coworkers/boss/family [if I leave my job]". Life is too short, and they'll move on. Just do it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Make the move and switch. It's always more important to be happy about your job than to have money. Remember that you spend 5 days a week at work for about 8 hours so if you don't like being there, every aspect of your life will be badly influenced because of all these bad feelings you have towards your current job.

I was in a situation like you not so long ago : Right out of college I got a good paying job (probably not as good as a bank) but after a year I started to hate my job. I promptly switched to a small startup and I asked to work 4 days a week so I can do some freelance work on the side. I love my startup job and I love doing freelance work and I hope to be able to switch to full time freelance sometime in the coming years. Overall, it's been the best decision I have ever made in my life.

<comment><USER7> _It's always more important to be happy about your job than to have money._

Not necessarily true. It's more important to be happy about your _life_ than to have money. But sometimes working at a job you dislike can bring a net happiness increase. Two ways this can happen:

1\. The income prevents a financial disaster.

2\. The income allows you to save or pay down debt so that you can eventually achieve other important goals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Most are going to tell you to leave and not knowing your thought on what you really want to do I am hesitant to give that advice. If you are OK with freelancing then sure jump, but if freelancing is just a notch better than what you are doing now, then why not use this position as a spring board. Look at the high pay as a spring board to give you runway on your own ventures. One of the hardest kinds of capital to procure is seed capital. So if you plan to pursue your own venture then I would say stay, save a much as you realistically can and then use that money to support yourself in your own ventures. So my recommendation would be, if you are going to freelance leave, if you want to start a venture, put the time in and save.

</comment><comment><USER9> _I have no idea why I applied for this current job, but I thought it was something I should do after all my peers all did_

That is rarely a good reason to do something. I would say leave now...jobs you hate now rarely get better later. I left a job after only 3 months even though it looked like a dream job - sexy startup, free fully-stocked kitchen, half- day Fridays, free "Cadillac" health insurance, 4 weeks vacation and bonuses in excess of 100% of base salary. I just didn't agree with how they ran their business. I just happened to immediately find a better job, but if I hadn't, I would have gone the freelance route until I started my own business.

</comment><comment><USER10> Everybody hates their first year (or 5) at a top tier investment bank. since everyone is telling you to bail, ill tell you to bite the bullet and quit only after you get your bonus...or even your second one. most people I know take jobs at firms like yours because of what they can do after they leave...not because it's the greatest job in the world.</comment>


4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb#.as032sx8v <comment><USER2> The article takes a long time to come to the conclusion that young men are voting for Trump because they're losers, thaf it's trolling and their way of giving in. Classic lazy millennials trope.

It says nothing about the obvious status of trump as an outsider and the desire of the young to change the status quo.

It goes to mention that both generations have had the American dream shattered but then goes on to say the older generation that votes for Trump is somehow better because reasons.

The truth is the reasons that most people across age groups voted for Trump was the same. They were tired of getting screwed and thought pulling in someone kinda crazy from outside politics would be better than continuing the Clinton dynasty with Hillary.

It's funny that an article that mostly talks about younger Trump voters being losers because they aren't doing anything about their situation fails to grasp that voting for somebody as crazy as Trump was pretty much the best thing these voters could do to gaurantee change, for better or worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> A sort of tldr..

"The older generation of Trump supporters the press often focuses on, the so called "forgotten white working class", are in this sense easier to explain since they fit into the schema of a 1950s-style electorate. Like the factory workers in Factotum, the baby boomers were promised pensions and prosperity, but received instead simply the promises.

Here the narrative is simple. The workers were promised something and someone (the politicians? the economy? the system itself?) never delivered. Their horse never came in.

This telling of the story ignores the fact that, as Trump often points out, "it was a bad deal". The real story is not that the promise was never fulfilled. Manny and Hank's deal with the workers was the same as the factory's deal with them: the empty promise was the bargain. The real story is not that the horse didn't come in, it's that the bet was never placed"

Hense the support of Trump as a joke, a prank, as it doesn't really matter, as they are powerless anyway

</comment><comment><USER4> This has already been submitted before:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13672742](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13672742)

(and flagkilled unfairly, but that's a different problem)</comment>


I'm Not a Designer, but I Know Good Design When I See It - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottporad.com/2011/04/21/im-not-a-designer-but-i-know-good-design-when-i-see-it/

<comment><USER2> I call baloney.

There's a skill called "taste". It's separate from design capability, and it's not important to every business. The Google homepage, for example, survives on 100% pure design; no taste is required in its evaluation. But if your business requires beauty, then it's not enough to meet the rules of proper design. You need someone who can make pretty things, and someone "in management" (preferably the CEO) who can hire that person and protect their work. You need a team with taste.

Why is it that every single thing on picnik.com looks so pretty? Why does mint.com make people want to hug their monitors? Why do Apple devices cause people to offer forth their wallets in glorious tribute? Its because their leadership has taste, and they hire designers with great taste, and it flows from there.

The problem is that people aren't very good at self-evaluating for taste. Which is why you hear a lot of the title phrase of this post.

<comment><USER3> What the f is "taste"?</comment></comment>


Why FriendFeed won't go mainstream - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/18/why-friendfeed-wont-go-mainstream/ <comment><USER2> These are interesting insights, but Scoble is basing all of his points on the current version of Friendfeed.

Surely, in the future, most of these problems will be solved (at least to some degree). The people behind Friendfeed are not stupid.</comment>