I renounced my US citizenship - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@RachelHeller/https-medium-com-rachelheller-why-i-renounced-my-us-citizenship-e1f77b1969ce#.ml4ags1ed <comment><USER2> Charging for renunciation is the most ridiculous part. You are paying for a process that:

is expensive only since they want to investigate you as a presumed criminal or tax dodger (the movie Brazil comes to mind)

is a result of their non-compliance with international norms

is the result of the US declaring you have a status that was never requested

As an expat I consider all US citizens to be indentured servants due to this requirement to buy independence from the US and whatever it chooses to enact next. Effectively, these changes are not noticed by the US' domestics, but those who think they "can flee to Canada" when they have ethical problems with the US are now deluding themselves. "If you don't like it, then leave" may have been sarcastic BS, but at least it was a real choice that many people made in the Vietnam era, etc. If you don't like us leave us money (which we will use in the ways you probably object to)" is something else.

I will find it both funny and sad that when the people who supported the two party system are pissed by someone like Trump implementing fascist policies they will finally realize that their own willingness to destroy our basic civil rights makes it impossible for them to avoid helping a system they find morally repugnent and criminal.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious, what is stopping expats with foreign citizenship and an objection to the paperwork from just letting their US passports expire (or for the "accidental americans" not ever establishing one) and just not complying with all the annoying rules?

<comment><USER4> You could find yourself having a great deal of trouble coming back across the border.

So kiss vacations or business travel to the USA goodbye.

If you can live without that, I suspect you are fine.

<comment><USER5> Nope, if you are in Canada for example they'll just take your assets. They strongarmed the Canadian banks into forcing disclosure of all US citizens bank account contents.

And there are plenty of people around the world who have discovered they have US citizenship without knowing it before. And now they have to file with the IRS.

Glad I never got dual citizenship through my grandmother. In the past having USian citizenship would be nice. Now it would just be a pain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone living abroad, I agree there is a lot of bull shit now, involving banking.

I only have bank accounts in the US because of the complicated laws. That's not a big deal.

What REALLY pisses me off, is that banks in the US are declining service because you live abroad. For example, holding investment accounts back in the US. If they find out I'm living abroad they will promptly close my accounts. I can't have a retirement accounts because I live abroad!?

What do I do? Maintain a mailing address back in the US, in a state that collects no income tax. Use a VPN to login to retirement accounts. Insane.

Edit: I don't even mind paying taxes over 100k. Why? I can still go home whenever I want. I can go to one of the many embassies around the world and get a new passport. Ask for help, etc. I'll still get social security later. (Huge maybe)

[http://thunfinancial.com/us-brokerage-accounts-american- expa...](http://thunfinancial.com/us-brokerage-accounts-american-expats- closed-2015/) [http://blogs.wsj.com/expat/2015/09/20/american-expats- scramb...](http://blogs.wsj.com/expat/2015/09/20/american-expats-scramble-to- keep-u-s-investment-accounts/)

<comment><USER7> When you say "living abroad", do you mean you have a local job, get paid in the local currency, pay rent and bills in the local currency, etc.? Which you do all through a US bank? If so, what are you paying for international transaction fees? Surely much more than using a local debit card.

> I can still go home whenever I want. I can go to one of the many embassies > around the world and get a new passport.

There's nothing special about the US in that regard. A citizen of Germany can do the same at any German embassy, even when not a resident in Germany and therefore not paying German income taxes, and also has the right to return to Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is one of those things that should be repealed. I've frankly gotten tired of the punishing of normal people by dumb privacy invading laws[1], or frankly, taxing them when they are not in the US. There are easier ways of going after people and companies (looking at you Monster Cable) that play fast an lose with our tax laws. I am all for only taxing income / revenue earned in the US.

1) we can get rid of all the BS $10,000 stuff in deposits in the US.

<comment><USER9> Really FATCA is one of the most excellent laws that has been passed. Prior to this, you had expats who had milked the US and then they wanted to waltz off with their proceeds.

Americans gain huge benefits from the taxes paid by prior generations. The entire US system is the envy of much of the world--and how did it get that way? Americans paying their taxes. Whether or not you have kids--you must pay property taxes that fund your local schools. Unfair? Hardly. Those schools don't come out of thin air--taxpayers who came before you paid for them. Stop your whining. If you were born in the US, then you benefitted. If you are a US citizen and you get in trouble somewhere on earth, the US government will come to your aid. That's what you're paying for, in addition to paying for the next generation of Americans to have schools, roads, public utilities and the like.

Really, whining about having to pay your share--no matter where you have run off to--is ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> As someone who lives outside of the US: your political and economic system is at best illogical, and at worst incomprehensibly clueless.

Your government spends billions of dollars on wildly unsuccessful defense projects while at the same time arguing the there's no way to deal with poverty, access to education, homelessness, etc. By cutting back on defence spending, the US could still remain the most powerful military nation in the world and guarantee that every citizen gets a quality education and spends their lives healthy and well maintained. Instead, you insist on going trillions of dollars in debt and then complaining that the poor aren't paying their fair share while the people with so much wealth that it's literally impossible to comprehend use every loophole in the book to avoid paying anything at all. Warren Buffet himself has commented on how he pays less tax than his secretary does.

Meanwhile, your entire government is bought and run by corporations and lobby groups; because money runs the campaigns and the person with the most money wins, elected officials spend a huge portion of their time "in office" not serving their country, their electorate, or even their benefactors, in favour of travelling around, having meetings and dinners and fundraisers, so that they can ensure they get elected again. If you court the right interests then not only will they help pay for you to get re-elected over and over, when you're done with public life they'll offer you a consultancy position where you can make further millions for years convincing your old friends who are still in office to vote the way you want them to because you're old friends.

The entire US system, is, to much of the rest of the world, a farce made manifest. Many of us fail to understand how your populace even got into such ridiculous circumstances, let alone continues to tolerate them year after year.

To claim that someone overseas should pay thousands of euros to tell the US government that they owe no tax while millionaires are using fully legal loopholes that their rich congressional friends refuse to close to shirk millions of dollars of taxes is patently ridiculous.

Fix your system to stop exploiting the poor and giving rights, privileges, and power to the rich elite and you can claim that your system is the envy of the world.

And as for 'how it got that way'? Years and years of economic growth on the backs of slaves imported from Africa certainly helped. Being able to bootstrap your economy by cutting out the business owner's largest expense is certainly an effective way of getting ahead.

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry, I have to comment.

I don't think your characterization of the US is fair.

It is insulting and doesn't seem topical to the current post, which is about the paperwork burden of living abroad.

Suggesting slavery is "how it got that way" is uniquely tasteless. A lot of people gave their lives to abolish slavery. Many of us have relatives who were slaves or died fighting for its end.

<comment><USER12> Proceeds from 245 years of slavery is not a small thing.

However, everyone involved is dead and the speration on who is alive now that benefited or suffered from slavery is not clear cut.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_American](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_American)

Yep, looks like that's true. Seems like US hospitals need lawyers and accountants on staff to explain the liabilities a new born will have later in life and you guys need to have a law that allows parents to officially reject citizenship on behalf of a new born.

</comment><comment><USER14> Congratulations.

I think some small country should negotiate a deal with all other nations and come up with a citizenship program that gives good value for their passport and then allow Americans (or any other highly taxed nationals) to settle there. For example Lala-Land does some background checks and issues passport to its citizens which can then be used to travel almost all the countries in the world. Lala-Land will give passports to anyone who applies if they pay enough money and show some evidence that they arent criminals etc.

<comment><USER15> It's called St. Kitts and Nevis (and there's a few more).

[https://www.henleyglobal.com/citizenship-saint-kitts- nevis-c...](https://www.henleyglobal.com/citizenship-saint-kitts-nevis- citizenship/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having spent 10% of my life as a resident of another country, this hits home. If I leave the U.S. a second time, it will likely be a permanent departure with renunciation of citizenship. I know others who feel the same.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a duplicate of a submission I made 2 weeks ago.

Anyway, as an American abroad, I think about this periodically. Like the author, I never owe anything in taxes, but the stress and expense from making sure paperwork is correctly filed each year is really awful. If I mess something up on my FBARs, non-willfully, I would be fined enough to completely bankrupt me, the fines being way above the value of the accounts I might somehow misreport. How can you misreport an account? Well, you could use the wrong currency exchange rate, or you might not have access to information required on the form so you have o guess, or you could think that accounts with a balance of 0 all year do not need to be reported (turns out they do). Or maybe you think that an account with money for a loan does not need to be reported because it is not really your money (you do). And so on. Every mistake costs you 10k/account/year. It is true insanity.

Also, I currently have no tax deferred way to save for retirement because my employer funded pension account here (it is essentially a 401k, just based in Norway) is treated as a regular investment account by the IRS. So, I have to pay taxes on any gains each year on my pension. Luckily, this has always been below the standard deduction, but in some years, it will (hopefully) not be. I also cannot make any contributions myself to the account or else it turns into a PFIC (which is a Very Bad Thing).

That being said, I am hopeful that FATCA will be repealed, or at least revised so that it does not threaten to bankrupt middle class Americans with the ridiculous fee structure and recognizes foreign pension accounts. I do not want to give up my US citizenship, but will be forced to if something does not change in the next few years.

<comment><USER9> Amazing how every rich expat who hates FATCA attempts to complain that it goes after "middle class Americans". How convenient if FATCA were repealed and the good old days of Tax Evasion could resume.

It is precisely rich expats who have themselves to blame for FATCA.

If you find the paperwork onerous--why not just renounce your citizenship? Must be that you get some advantages you're not disclosing by keeping your US citizenship.

Every American who does their taxes has to deal with this stress. So, you're special and should get your US citizenship advantages without paying for them? You looking for expat welfare?

FATCA will never be repealed. On the contrary, it's being copied by other governments all over the world. But you had to have known that the tax evasion party was going to eventually come to an end. If you consider yourself a victim of FATCA, then your anger should be directed at other rich expats who abused the system so badly that they inspired Congress to pass FATCA with both Democratic and Republican support.

<comment><USER17> Did you miss the part where I do not have a way to save for retirement? And why on earth do you assume that I am rich? Because I live in Norway? I barely qualify as middle class. Thanks to student loans and zero support from my family, I still have a significant negative net worth, despite the fact that I live as thriftily as possible and have been working as an engineer since 2010.

If you are a US resident and mess up on your taxes, you do not get fined into bankruptcy. You just have to pay what you owed. The fee structure is the insane part of FATCA, not the taxes themselves.

As soon as I get Norwegian citizenship, if FATCA has not been repealed by that point, I will seriously consider renouncing. Because of the above reasons, not because I am some rich fat-cat wanting to evade taxes. If I wanted to evade taxes, I would move back to the US, which is a fantastic tax haven, instead of living my life here in Norway.

What the heck is "expat welfare"? The _only_ relationship I have with the US government at this point is stress and expense from these forms every year, along with my inability to save for retirement. Literally no other developed country imposes this stress and compliance cost on their residents abroad. It is not welfare to expect to be treated like everyone else. And, if it was just filing regular taxes, and then getting it excluded with the FEIE, that would still be annoying, but fine. However, there is a whole extra set of insanely confusing forms to navigate, where you get fined into non-dischargeable bankruptcy if you mess them up, even non-willfully. People develop mental health issues and have even had their marriages destroyed from the stress of this prospect. It is not "just some extra forms" or "expat welfare" to want this onerous burden to be removed.

Sometimes I walk past the US embassy because it is in downtown Oslo (it looks like a prison and is a total blight on an otherwise charming neighborhood, btw), but I do not get any kind of "expat welfare" from it. I suppose I will visit there when my passport needs renewing in a few years, but that is it. If I wanted to contact them or voice my concerns about the pension issue (which could be resolved if they updated the tax treaty, like Germany has done), I have no way of doing so.

Why are you trolling this thread with support for FATCA when it is clearly a terrible thing for millions of people? You have no idea what you are talking about. Ugh!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > To get the same records in the US, law enforcement would have to get a > subpoena

Don't any deposits over a threshold get reported domestically as well? IIRC 10k is the limit.

> At the same time, the US has worked out Intergovernmental Agreements (IGA's) > with many countries, including the Netherlands

Worked out... bullied. As I recall the threat was to stop allowing business with the US.

> By the US definition, they are US citizens as well, and should have been > filing US income tax forms every year. Many only discovered this recently > and are now under threat of huge fines if they do not get compliant with the > US taxation laws. The same goes for children of US citizens, like my son, > who are born abroad but qualify as US citizens.

Don't you have to apply to get citizenship? I thought it was more of you are entitled to citizenship. I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't tell the US gov't to get fucked in this situation, unless you actually are taking advantage of being a citizen.

So glad Canada (and nowhere else but what, 1-2 countries?) have this global taxation BS.

</comment><comment><USER19> One can always reapply for citizenship under the same conditions as anyone else. If her parents are Americans and she was born here, she will very likely get citizenship back.

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting. Although I have always just assumed that since I need a social security number to open any kind of account in the US that the IRS already knows how much I have in the bank.

>If US citizens living in the US had to report the balance of every account they had in their local bank — all their assets, in other words, not just their income — they would be up in arms, protesting the government's intrusion in citizens' private business.

</comment><comment><USER21> Millions of Americans every year don't pay taxes or file any tax returns. I would recommend that instead.

If you are a not particularly wealthy individual and you don't owe any back taxes to the IRS, the consequences of not any filing taxes are likely to be nothing.

</comment><comment><USER22> I know the US is set in their ways but adopting residence based taxation like everyone else wouldn't cause many problems. You can always have an anti avoidance clause for capital gains to stop billionaire shareholders skipping abroad to sell their shares.

</comment><comment><USER23> You complain about the US legal system, which based on the constitution protects everyone with due process rights, and like countries like the Netherlands which have no bill of rights? Me and my family spent our life savings, endured the horrors of leaving everything behind to come to the US to enjoy the liberty and rights that are guaranteed to everyone, yet people like you are not happy and want lower standards.

Good riddance. If you don't want to be a citizen of this great country, it would be better than you.

<comment><USER24> Uhm, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Netherland...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Netherlands#Chapter_1:_Basic_rights)

Although I agree with you that this does not seem like a good reason to renounce your US citizenship over, it is pointing out some issues with the US tax code that need fixing.

Your response doesn't address that and reads more like an ad hominem attack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Want to reduce stress and frustration in your life? Add this to your personal philosophy:

"If it's stupid, get away from it."

\- dumb boss? job transfer or new job

\- dumb family members causing you problems? Avoid them.

\- dumb taxation? get away from the legal clutches of the taxing authority

Everything detrimental in life that can be avoided, _should_ be avoided if possible.

There is enough unhappy other stuff that comes up in our lives that if you're not at __least __bailing on crappy situations, you 're missing a chance at a happier less stressful life.

</comment><comment><USER26> Her biggest complaint is that she has to report her overseas bank accounts. If she had done some basic research, she would have realized that this isn't specific to people residing outside the US, but any US national even within the US has to report foreign bank accounts with balances >$10k.

The rest of her post reads like whining about having to fill out forms.

<comment><USER8> I think you miss the part where the foreign bank does its own reporting, and how said banks are starting to refuse to have US Citizens as customers.

<comment><USER27> The author herself doesn't seem to be experiencing outrageous banking pain, though. She's paying no US taxes, and could almost certainly fill out her own tax forms if the thousand-Euro fee is onerous. It's completely unclear what, exactly, is so burdensome about her citizenship.

<comment><USER8> I would say her experience and stress of that experience are shown in her "Violation of Privacy" section. The final part "If they do not match, the US threatens excessively large fines, entirely out of proportion to the totals reported in those accounts, enough to wipe out one's entire savings. Many banks, meanwhile, are beginning to refuse to do business with US citizens in order to lower their compliance costs." seems pretty painful. I would worry a lot if an error could subject me to a lot of problems.

<comment><USER28> In general the IRS does not come after you if you make what they think is an honest mistake. I have had several friends get a letter with a correct tax return and simply had to make up the difference.

<comment><USER29> It's not the IRS to worry about, but a department within the treasury called the "Financial Crimes Enforcement Network." So the concern is very much still valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> And I would've taken it in a heartbeat. This post seeps with privilege. Oh no, you're in a position to choose between two first-world countries. We're so sad for you. Not.

</comment><comment><USER14> I could have become a US citizen long back but I have avoided taking that citizenship for the simple reason that I don't want to expose myself to American Tax Terrorism.

<comment><USER7> It couldn't have been that long back as three years ago you were newly in the US with an H4 spouse visa (see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6364977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6364977) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5323455) ).

I assume you asked [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11972642](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11972642) 5 hours ago for a friend?

Also, even greencard/non-citizens are subject to ATT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> 1\. Having American citizenship allows her to travel easily and often visa free to many countries.

2\. Allows her to work in America with no visa issues. Access to top companies in the world including most of the ones we see on HN.

3\. Allows her potential kids to have access same benefits and go to universities cheaper and again easily work in the US even if they didn't grow up there.

Should renunciation chargers be changed? Probably. Maybe if you don't earn very much you could pay less. Are there somethings that could be reformed? Yes. But she is complaining about forms and doesn't even pay taxes.

<comment><USER7> Having Dutch citizenship gives her #1. The Dutch passport gives visa-free access to 156 countries. The US passport gives visa-free access to _155_ countries. See [https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php?ccode=nl](https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php?ccode=nl) .

Her Dutch citizenship still gives her access to the EU, including many companies mentioned even on HN, a US-centric site.

LOL! 1) Her child _has_ US citizenship - that doesn't go away after she renounced, 2) As an EU citizen, her children would have rights that US citizens don't have, and 3) Standard tuition fees in the Netherlands are about $2500, which is less than a community college tuition in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sounds like she didn't pay US income tax, she just had to file a tax return, which seems reasonable.

The idea that the US government doesn't track US citizens bank accounts if they live in the US is laughable. Of course they do. Banks have to report all kinds of details of large transactions and balances. We don't have to fill out forms because the government can go directly to the banks to get the information.

The way voting works I think is entirely reasonable. How else should it work? Is she suggesting there be senators and representatives just for expats? I would honestly expect the states would not want expats voting in their local elections, so the expats have more rights than I would expect there. For the Presidential election, yeah our voting system is screwed up there, but it is screwed up for everyone.

So it sounds like she left to avoid paperwork that felt intrusive. Meh. Welcome to life.

<comment><USER18> > It sounds like she didn't pay US income tax, she just had to file a tax > return, which seems reasonable.

It's really not. That part about banks not wanting to serve american's is true. (Almost) no other countries do this type of thing.

<comment><USER9> Nonsense. FATCA was started by the US but now the OECD and many, many other countries around the world are copying it--as they should.

Earlier, banks were more than willing to support the tax evasions of Americans. But in case you were living in a cave, the last few years have seen those tax-evasion-enabling international banks fall one by one, admitting they enabled tax evasion and paying massive fines. So, the banks don't want Americans because they know so frequently those Americans are practicing tax evasion. They were burned and never again want to enable tax evasion. Rightly so.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple's China Problem Is That Local Phones Are Good – And Cheap - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-24/apple-s-china-problem-is-that-local-phones-are-good-and-cheap <comment><USER2> I think the problem is far worse for high end Android manufactures. Apple at least has a unique ecosystem that serves as a point of differentiation. What does Samsung have to differentiate itself? A logo?

Apple is a luxury brand and people are willing to pay for luxury goods. If you amortize the additional cost of an iPhone over a year or two it's really not that expensive from a luxury/status good standpoint. Less expensive than visiting Starbucks 5 days a week.

People need to be able to justify that cost though and with Apple they can because it is a substantively different product and integrates well into the entire Apple product line. What can premium brand Android purchasers say?

<comment><USER3> Android has reached a level of maturity that makes comparison with Apple ecosystem neglectable nowadays; simply its no longer a selling point compared to previous years. Also, high end Android phones were able to introduce new technologies to the mobile market much faster that Apple (in example: VR). Just anecdotical, Im a Windows Phone user, but due to R&D work I use Apple and Android devices regularly. That unique, luxury feeling of Apple phones is no longer that visible as it was a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER4> > _Android has reached a level of maturity that makes comparison with Apple > ecosystem neglectable nowadays; simply its no longer a selling point > compared to previous years._

This spirit of this comment has been replicated _verbatim_ every year for the last 5 years by some random HN commenter.

I guess, eventually, it might be true.

<comment><USER5> Rather than dismiss the comment outright, could you elaborate on what part of it is untrue?

<comment><USER6> UI jank, or lack thereof on iOS.

Security, or lack thereof on Android.

Relative size of app ecosystems.

Whether devs can make money selling apps (hint: it's much harder on Android).

Fragmentation.

Etc.

<comment><USER7> saying android is much harder is not factually correct, it varies greatly by the niche of the app/game. some do much better on android then ios store.

<comment><USER8> It is factually correct, just because there might be some niche apps that perform better on Android does not negate the fact that, overall, the App Store generates far more revenue than the Play Store.

[http://9to5mac.com/2016/01/20/app-store-ios-downloads-vs- and...](http://9to5mac.com/2016/01/20/app-store-ios-downloads-vs-android- revenue/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is just Apple's general problem isn't it?

The cheaper phones are really good now. And if you are asking a premium you need to be significant better.

As I see it iPhone 4 was a lot better than the competition where as the current lineup is not.

Simply relying on expanding the market (selling more in China + other emerging markets) won't do the trick as they are not going to sell with their old big margins unless they are a lot better than the competition.

<comment><USER10> People have been saying that about the Mac since the 1980s. Consistently high quality and premium features and services sell product.

Apple doesn't need to 'rely' on selling more into China. If they end up locked out of the China market completely, they'll still do fine. As it is, they have a I've premium niche over there and will do just fine.

<comment><USER11> And marketing. Leave a TV on between shows, and an Apple ad is likely to crop up more often than not.

<comment><USER12> This is advertising, not marketing.

Marketing, specifically understanding the market for their products, is something Apple does insanely well compared to other companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> xiaomi phone is capable to block mobile data (and wifi) on app level. Say, gmail can access data on wifi only, chrome on mobile only and whatsapp on both mobile and wifi. It's a finer control than disabling background data.

Before xiaomi, I used asus and it eats mobile data like crazy with no control other than airplane mode.

bonus is that xiami has finer permission control too on app level. I can disallow whatsapp to access my contact and camera, for example. whatsapp can still function; however, it shows phone numbers instead of names in chats.

so even though xiaomi is cheaper, it's more powerful to use. definitely great user experience, easily beats any, more expensive android devices i ever use: motorolla, asus, samsung, etc

<comment><USER14> You can do this with stock Android also

[http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/prevent-any-app-using-mobile- da...](http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/prevent-any-app-using-mobile-data- android/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I had motorolla, asus, and more high end phones but i'm a happy $120 xiaomi redmi owner here.

the problem with iphone (&ipad) is that apple forces some limitations, like say... no sd card. my sister -- who has ipad -- always have trouble moving files to non-apple devices

i used to say "i don't own iphone, i can't help you", just like when someone asks for general computer problem, equivalently as saying "i don't use windows, sorry"

now i don't get apple related questions because everyone i know uses android, either as primary or secondary phone.

</comment><comment><USER15> In another 10 years the iPhone will be about as exciting as a refrigerator, even in the US. Innovation has slowed greatly on the phone product such that they need to start focusing more and more on vendor lock-in to maintain their monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER16> How do the huawei P9 and oppo R9 have almost double the battery capacity than the iPhone 6s, when they're around the same weight?

</comment><comment><USER17> Good documentary: Shenzhen: The Silicon Valley of Hardware (Full Documentary) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY)

</comment><comment><USER18> Both Apple and Samsung really need something to differentiate premium beyond color finishes and brand.

Either add some premium service like some sort of concierge on call, or I dunno some premium UI interface that is definitely measurably better then there is no reason to buy a more expensive phone. App's are all starting to look the same and it doesn't matter anymore. I'm a long time iOS user because I started that way and while

I love the platform it's only because of all the apps i've bought that keeps me on it. While I hate using android I'd probably learn to deal with it's nuisances for a difference of $200.

<comment><USER19> > premium UI interface that is definitely measurably better

Samsung has tried that to death. It has had the opposite effect, instead of people seeing the additional functionality as a benefit, it is criticised as clutter (and in fairness some of it does slow the device).

Worse still Samsung turns around and blames their "premium features" for why their phones lose software updates sooner. And then people see more benefit in a cheap phone with virgin Android then a premium phone with supposed premium features, since updates last longer and the phones are borderline disposable.

<comment><USER20> Unfortunately, Samsung didn't wind up designing a better UI, they wound up designing a complicated one with dozens of features that no one wanted or used instead of taking the standard Android UI and adding a handful of premium features really well (like split screen multi-tasking pre-Android 7). The mess of features and objectively poor design made for an annoying UI for users along with a long, long time for Samsung to get updates out if they got them out at all. I had a Galaxy S4 and won't be buying Samsung again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is a problem for other manufacturers too. Medium range phones are marginally worse than flagships to the everyday user. Things like 1080p vs 2K screen make little difference to users but increase the cost substantially.

</comment><comment><USER22> Something that the Chinese market seems to like also are _big phones_

See models from Xiaomi, or even the Asus ones, it seems the bigger the better.

I already dislike how big my Moto G3 is, but it seems they're fine with it

<comment><USER23> You know how in parodies 15 years ago, they made fun of how cell phones were getting smaller and smaller? They stopped that trend about 5 or 6 years ago and started getting bigger and bigger.

I only looked on from the outside as an observer, since I don't have the money to throw away on replacing my phone ever 2 years like everyone else seems to.

But now, with the iPhone SE, they're reversing that trend _again_.

It reminds me of that scene in Wall-E, where they say "red is the new blue" on all the screens, and suddenly everyone presses the button to change all their personal possessions (including clothing) to blue!

I hate the word sheeple, I really do, but seriously guys, what the hell? It's a fucking phone.

<comment><USER22> the iPhone SE not existing at the time was the reason I went with Android (I could have gone with an iPhone 5 but I didn't want a past model - and price was a factor as well)

I guess it's not much a reversal of the trend rather as a "return to normal"

Pockets and hands are still the same size as always

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Not reading the article yet since Bloomberg is blocked by the GFW and my VPN is down again, but isn't this what we should expect anyways? As smartphones become more mature and slow down in innovation, everyone else who are value players can more easily catch up, destroying apple's previous leading edge advantage. Basically, when/if smartphones become a commodity, Apple has to move into something else that isn't or join a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER25> Smartphones have already become a commodity. I wonder what else?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I bought a Huawei(P8 Lite) for a girlfriend of mine and we both fell in love with the phone. She use to make fun of my Nexus 6 as a result and called it a tablet.

Chinese companies are getting it right where it comes to affordable phones

<comment><USER26> I got a P8 Max and I'm not looking back. Great phablet for a very good price. Can't beat that battery life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Change phrasing and therefore idea:

Apple products premium price doesn't represent, have, offer or convey any benefit to China buyers.

</comment><comment><USER28> As long as software quality and synergy with hardware at Apple side there is no problem, For example Android video capture still nowhere close to iOS. In phones made for Chinese market its even worse right now, but getting better.

</comment><comment><USER29> I used a china phone and it was a way better phone than any american phone i ever used, and i couldn't even use it very good because it was in CHINESE.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Apple's China Problem Is That Local Phones Are Good – And Cheap

 _Other_ local phones, since you'd be hard presses to find something un- Chinese about the iPhone.

<comment><USER31> The OS? The software ecosystem? The App store? 99.999% of the apps? The brand? The industrial design? Just because something is manufactured somewhere, doesn't mean it originates from that place.

Is there even a homegrown Chinese mobile OS? Re-skinning android doesn't count.

<comment><USER32> Please, no more NIH syndrome. Linux, which is built by an international community, is good enough.

<comment><USER31> Linux is just a kernel. Android is an entire ecosystem made by an American company. I think its a stretch to call Android an international product.

Its probably also a stretch to call Linux international considering its founder is an American citizen now and the vast majority of contributors are Americans and American companies. Not to mention its essentially a clone of an American proprietary product.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


eBooks compiled from top StackOverflow topics/answers - <AUTHOR> http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/ebooks/ <comment><USER2> A similar set-up I like is FAQoverflow:

<http://www.faqoverflow.com/>

Instead of eBooks, the content is visible directly in the browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found that these were actually a bit tricky to convert to PDF, with even (normally) reliable tools like Calibre outputting PDFs with really small text... I stumbled across mobi2html, part of mobiperl (<https://dev.mobileread.com/trac/mobiperl>).

Apart from a couple of character encoding bugs, it seems to do a good job. I've uploaded the eBooks as html here:

<http://alexpeattie.com/stackoverflow/html/>

I've then been using FF/Chrome and a print-to-PDF driver to make PDFs (again, the only method that worked for me) which I'm uploading here:

<http://alexpeattie.com/stackoverflow/>

PDFs are taking a while to generate, esp. the larger ones. If anyone can find a faster method to convert the html files, let me know!

</comment><comment><USER4> Neat, but .pdf's would have been nice...

<comment><USER5> enter the URL of the book in here and select your output format:

<http://www.docspal.com/>

(Edit: wow, that was terrible. Not one of the converts worked out properly. apologies if, like me, you downloaded them all)

<comment><USER6> The C one is using the most incredibly small font I've ever seen in a document. It took me a while to realize there was actual content in the pages. Then I zoomed in a thousand or so percent and could make out words.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For the curious of how this was compiled, and the source:

<http://ghewgill.livejournal.com/145305.html>

</comment><comment><USER8> wget commands for all of the books: <http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=HWnj8hBC>

<comment><USER5> or:

      wget -r -np -nd -A.mobi -erobots=off http://hewgill.com/~greg/stackoverflow/ebooks/

r = recursive

np = don't follow up to parent

nd = don't recreate directories locally

A = file extensions to dl

erobots = ignore robots, for some reason this site blocks wget

also, -i filename.txt will grab a list of urls for a file and download them, so no need for 'wget <url>'. adding -F will treat that local file as HTML and grab all the links out of it for download.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is there a way to view these in my android?

Nevermind, figured it out. Downloaded Amazon Kindle, moved the downloaded file to the kindle folder in the sdcard.

</comment><comment><USER10> What do people use for viewing .mobi files on linux?

<comment><USER11> I just found fbreader in the package manager which seems to work fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author should probably provide links to zipped versions of the file. Would definitely save his and other's bandwidth.

<comment><USER13> Mobipocket files are already compressed. Also, .mobi format files can be downloaded directly in the Kindle's web browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can you give any information or share any scripts about how you generated and converted these ?

<comment><USER13> I wrote a bit about how I generated these files here: <http://ghewgill.livejournal.com/145305.html> Also, there's a link to the source on Github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Excellent! I just loaded a few on my Kindle, and they work great. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> The CSS book makes good 'light reading.' The others are interesting but it's hard to retain much, from such dense material.

<comment><USER15> I downloaded those where I already know the technology well. That way, I hope to pick up a couple of neat tips and tricks every once in a while when I have a few minutes to read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> would have paid for this

</comment><comment><USER17> Well done, that's very neat and useful! Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER18> What a great idea. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER19> suggestions for a mobi viewer for Mac OS X?

</comment><comment><USER20> brilliant idea, stackoverflow on kindle :)</comment>


Coronavirus could travel 27 feet, stay in air for hours: MIT researcher - <AUTHOR> https://nypost.com/2020/03/31/coronavirus-could-travel-27-feet-stay-in-air-for-hours-mit-researcher/ <comment><USER2> Personally, I could believe it. However, that would basically amount to "if you stay at home in your apartment, the person sharing the same ventilation system can infect you", so I don't think authorities will be willing to admit it's true.</comment>


Transactional Synchronization Extension coming to Intel processors - <AUTHOR> http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/02/07/transactional-synchronization-in-haswell/

<comment><USER2> I found this illustration on his blog easier to follow: [http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/02/07/coarse- grai...](http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2012/02/07/coarse-grained- locks-and-transactional-synchronization-explained/)

</comment><comment><USER3> How much of a performance increase can be seen with transactional processing?

<comment><USER4> That depends on how often code goes through the 'get the lock' code path and it doesn't need to. It will be interesting to see how this extension is extended across the interchip buses in multi-CPU mother boards. Transactional region coherence was a feature of the DEC VAX architecture early on, it was implemented such that you simply didn't get to run until the previous thread left the region. Sort of like a 'one vehicle lane' where the imposition of the one thread of execution was done externally to the CPU. In the hash table example programmers could read the memory in the region without being impeded but as soon as one started writing it would block future readers and shoot down the pages in the lookaside cache of the MMU. SGI did something similar with a network card which could provide shared memory with transactional semantics across the network. Some of that work got folded into the InfiniBand spec as I recall. I suppose its just possible that all this stuff has finally fallen out of patent protection and so Intel feels they can put it into their chips.

<comment><USER5> IMHO Restricted Transactional Memory (RTM) is something different than simply blocking until you acquire the lock. There are also full software implementations (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory>).

Basically the code path is executed optimistically and in case of conflicts the application has to handle it somehow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'd except PyPy guys are keeping close eye on this.</comment>


Show HN: Someone.io – Task management for teams made easy - <AUTHOR> http://www.someone.io <comment><USER2> Hi guys, my name's Lasse I work at Someone.io :)

We are really pleased to see such interest and enthusiasm in the product, it chimes with what we've been hearing from users since we launched our beta in May. Your feedback is very useful for us - Someone.io is still in development and we are currently in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign which you can see over at [http://invest.someone.io](http://invest.someone.io) .

If there is anyone who wants to support us and become a shareholder, we'd love for you to go and have a look at our campaign and invest.

You're also more than welcome to follow us at [http://www.twitter.com/someoneapp](http://www.twitter.com/someoneapp) and [http://www.facebook.com/someoneapp](http://www.facebook.com/someoneapp) Thanks everyone!

Lasse @ Someone.io

<comment><USER3> When are you going to release it for real? Unclear, given that the pricing page says "Coming this summer"...is it possibly in 11.5 months? If you don't get payments, how can we know it will still exists in a few months?

Looks neat btw!

<comment><USER4> I came here to ask a very similar question - "this summer" means completely different things depending on where on the globe you sit, and it's even more confusing that the majority of readers have just exited the summer.

It gives the distinct impression they've already missed the promised deadline even if that's not the case.

<comment><USER3> Exactly!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been looking for software for months that would help facilitate a _lot_ of collaborative document production. I love the simplicity and user interface of this system -- almost every other system I've tried fails in some major element of the user experience.

It's missing two things that I would need to actually use it:

1\. An overview, where you can see the status and progress of all the projects at a glance. Right now, as far as I can tell, the only info the overview page gives about the projects is the project name and participants. I'd love to be able to see which columns were completed in the overview page.

2\. Project templates. I want to have a few different project types, each type of which loads a default set of columns, colors, and tasks.

One final observation is that I'm not sure what the "state" field of the columns does. Changing the state doesn't seem to have any visible effect. For my purposes I'd like each of the columns to represent project stages and for it to be very meaningful when we've moved from one project state to the next.

Looking forward to seeing future iterations of this project! I've been amazed at how hard it is to find a software solution for my needs, and am very glad to see new promising new development in this area.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bateman.

Thanks for taking the time trying out our product.

1.The product so far is in its early days. A better overview across projects will definitely be developed. 2\. In the backend, a project is based on a template system. It's not visible to the user yet as this concept further needs adjustments before we can roll it out . In fact the current project design is just our first "plugin" of how a project can look. We hope to offer multiple ways to visualize a project in the future.

The state field is a system state (not changeable) that is used for triggers and in the future reporting. When you tick of a Task as finished, a trigger occurs that will look up the column with the system state "Completed" and move the task there. It's a bit rough at the moment, but could be a handy way to automate certain tasks later on and provide reports across projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks awesome. But our company probably won't use it. And here's why.

Committing to a new process or software is an investment of time and trust. When we choose something to use in our group, we want to know it's going to be there in a year or two, and still doing the thing we bought it for.

Software you can purchase and install on your own servers / desktops does that. In fact, we'll choose one software package over another if it doesn't force us to submit to updates until we want them, or rely on someone else's servers to stay functional.

Browser-based tools from someone else can make it into our workflow, but only after they've been around long enough and achieved mainstream adoption, so we can be relatively sure they're unlikely to "pivot" or disappear. Google Docs and Slack are good examples of this.

When you're new and unproven, there are already a lot of hurdles to leap in order to get users, especially business users.

Making your software user-installable eliminates a huge hurdle, I would recommend it.

<comment><USER7> Hi Jaysonelliot, thanks for the terrific comment. It's really helpful for us to get this kind of insight.

Onboarding your team to any software is a risk. Our focus on being the easiest and most engaging task manager is aimed at being the least risky. We want to remove as many of those hurdles for business users as we can through simplicity and making team members feel more interconnected.

It's easy to say Google was also once "new and unproven", but Mahn's response below is an excellent one. I guess the issue is epeople want tools they can trust which here is "only after they've been around long enough and achieved mainstream adoption". But then, Slack was launched in August 2013 with 0 users. By June 2015 they had 1M+ users and a valuation of $2.76bn. (Source: WSJ). So new entrants to this market like us can establish themselves quickly but they need to be very good at what they do and they need to earn trust.

We aim to do just that and as jipiboily points out elsewhere, a payment solution is the first step to sustainability, which we've been developing with our research partners and will be rolled out at the end of the month.

<comment><USER6> For us, the preferable solution is to let us pay for it and install it ourselves.

For every Slack or Google that reaches mainstream adoption, there are a hundred smaller, often amazing companies, who don't.

Rather than rolling the dice on an all-or-nothing SAAS strategy that requires a big hit to get people to feel comfortable committing a whole organization, you can sell something people can buy, install, and own.

It doesn't mean you can't offer the freemium hosted option. What it does do is give you a chance to see organic growth in the early days. With subscription- based support services, you can even book more revenue — just the kind of thing a startup needs when they're looking for traction in the bootstrapped / angel funded days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it interesting that as a newly released product that is likely to hold sensitive information security seems to be lightly addressed. The only reference to anything you'd do to keep my data safe is this single paragraph under the Privacy Policy: "The security of your Personal Information is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security."

You also have a limit of liability for the actual amount paid to you over the last 12 months (for a free service, this is $0), and on top of that a pretty broad indemnity clause.

Depending on your target audience, I think a pay for option at the lowest tier would help, as at least then I'm not left wondering how you make money and if you plan on selling data to advertising partners as a "related service".

From a design and functionality standpoint I appreciate the simple slick design and feature set. It focuses on the core need without feature bloat. Best of luck!

<comment><USER9> The quoted clause is part truism part obviousness. There is and never will be absolute security. Then they just state that they do their best - to the extent commercially acceptable - to protect the data (who doesn't?). I really don't see anything wrong here. If someone else promises you something else they're most likely either over-confident or lying. Or investing in their security more than their budget allows them to do.

Paired with liability clause, basically this reads to me (my personal interpretation) as "we'll try our best but don't trust us with anything you that you really value and can't afford to lose". Which is probably acceptable for teams with low or no secrecy requirements, although it probably won't fit a group with stricter needs.

Disclaimer: not affiliated by any means, just looked up few pages, found no demo, haven't bothered to sign-up, still have opinion (haha)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to use Trello + Burndown for Trello + Scrum for Trello prior to this. This looks better. It will have to be very fast loading and should have burndown & scrum like features before I can convince my team to switch, but thumbs up for the great job!

I will give it a shot :)

Kudos!

Edit — Tried it out! is awesome! A few minor things though – It's a little too similar to Trello for me to bother switching, but looks way better (subjective I know, but works well for me!)

and also this: For the buttons (signup button on the home page. The element:focus{outline: none;} is something that really goes a long way in showing polish and detail on the front end.

<comment><USER11> "element:focus{outline: none;}" also violates accessibility guidelines unless an alternative styling is added.

It's kind of not cool to discriminate for the sake of "polish".

Reference: [http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#navigation- me...](http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#navigation-mechanisms- focus-visible) [http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE- WCAG20-TECHS-20081211/F78](http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE- WCAG20-TECHS-20081211/F78)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The page allows to register with www.someone.io Of course, that will not redirect properly to the board afterwards, but I was able to register a board with that address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yepp. Saw that :-)

Edited your domain name, and restricted www so it can't happen again. Thanks for pointing it out so we could correct it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> How is this different to trello?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi garrensmith.

I'll admit that there are some similarities, but our focus is very different. What you see today is perhaps closer to Trello than what the experience of Someone.io will be a few months from now.

We have heard from many users who tell us that it is our design and attention to detail that they prefer over Trello. We know that won't be the case for everyone, but there is plenty of demand for products that serve a similar purpose to Trello, but do things a little differently.

With that said, I think there are 3 main differences between us and Trello. 1\. We are team focused. Someone.io is specifically focused on delivering value to teams in a work environment, where Trello has much broader aims. Our focus on teams allows us to better meet their needs. 2\. We have simple but beautiful design. We want to be the easiest and most engaging task management tool on the market. Our research tells us that some users find Trello to be "dull" and "uninspiring" and we've found particular traction with creative teams who enjoy our approach. 3\. We are in the process of becoming the first "Social Task Management" tool. Together with our research partners, we have developed some features designed to make users feel more interconnected with their team and more engaged with their work which we'll start deploying soon.

Thanks for your question, have a great day!

<comment><USER14> This is how i read those points:

1\. Our focus is to serve teams so in the near future, all of our new features will be directed towards teams. (btw which features of trello do you feel lack "focus on teams" ?)

2\. Our visual design is better than Trello.

3\. We will eventually bring in more "social" collaborative tools (any idea what these will be like?)

<comment><USER15> My feelings exactly. Right now it's Trello with a better visual design. The other features are unknown at this point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks awesome. A live demo page would have been great, but decided to gamble and provide my email anyways!

Some comments on initial signup: \- Great approach to validating emails by sending an email after initially providing just that, As opposed to the classic "doing so after filling in all info". This way you get to figure out you messed up your email early in the process! I liked that.

\- The confirmation email had a link to `Get started with...`. It would have been great if you also had smaller text saying "Or copy this link and paste in your browser: ...". Maybe it's just me but I get scared of clicking on links in emails without knowing where they are going to (or downloading in malicious cases)

\- Would have been great to not have to go through so many screens for signup. Maybe have me provide my team name, name and password in one screen.

\- The animations on the task cards and their dragging is pretty great!

</comment><comment><USER17> Although the UI looks good, there are a few problems that are still keeping me from using it:

1\. When two or more people are editing the same card's description, the description goes out of sync and ends up not saving either of the changes.

2\. The UI doesn't feel very snappy -- it feels kind of slow.

3\. The state field of a column has no other purpose right now than to mark it as completed so that cards end up moving there automatically when completed. Perhaps show the state field somewhere?

4\. Why are cards automatically moved when completed? I liked Trello because I can organize it in whatever way I wish..I'll turn off the Completed lane for now.

5\. I can't assign more than one label/tag/color to a card.

<comment><USER7> Hi pookeh, thanks for your comment :)

This feedback is invaluable to us. We've been receiving a lot since this post hit No.1 this morning and the development team will be hard at work for the coming weeks implementing the best of the suggestions we have got.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> So what does this do better than for example Trello? It looks like a very basic product.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Legoblocks. I replied to garrensmith who also wanted to know this. You can read my reply there [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330518)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Signed up to take a look but apart from the lovely interface, it seems to be lacking in unique features that'd turn my head away from Trello.

While I do love Trello, I find it is missing support for some aspects of Kanban such as swimlanes and list limits. If something out there could match Trello on the majority of features, add in the classic Kanban stuff (optionally) and have a nice looking interface + mobile client, I'd be sold.

</comment><comment><USER20> The quality of web apps seems to be inversely proportional to the vertical length of its front webpage. So this looks pretty good!

For an app like this, dedicating the team's time to it should take no less than 5 minutes of attention per person, about the time it takes someone to deliver post-it notes to everyone's desk or mount a corkboard to the wall. This also seems to work within that principle.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nice product. We've been doing the same - "Task management is easy" being also our headline at hiTask, [http://hitask.com](http://hitask.com) It's a task management tool for teams, with mobile apps, Google sync integration and much more.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is duplicating a project on the road map?

We've been looking for a tool with a good interface to use as a collaborative check list. Every checklist shares the bulk of its tasks + it has a few unique tasks per project. Duplicating the tasks by hand seems cumbersome.

If anyone has an alternative, it would be appreciated as well :)

<comment><USER7> Hi waxjar, thanks for your comment.

Yes, duplicating projects is something other users have asked us for and it's something we have in the pipeline. There are a lot of really great suggestions we've had in recent weeks and this is just one that you can expect to see in the run up to Christmas.

Thanks again for your suggestion,

Dan @ Someone.io

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> We use [https://svyft.com/](https://svyft.com/) and [https://trello.com/](https://trello.com/) at office. This looks smilar but will try it for a small upcoming project. Good work.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey Lasse and team!

We just signed up and are giving it a spin. So far we love how simple and light everything is at the moment. All the features were intuitive as well, even those not explicitly stated i.e. dragging tasks around to reorder for example. Super cool and looking forward to a mobile app ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> I scanned over the product's landing page so it's possible that I missed it, but I think something that organizes task priority by color should also have some option for a color blind mode. I wish there was a way to demo the product without giving my email and company name.

</comment><comment><USER26> Main priority of the website seems to be to get your email address rather rather than to inform.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ahhhhh!!! I've just got everyone onto trello after a bitter fight. This is too much!

</comment><comment><USER28> Thumbs up! I gave it a try and ended up using it for my project!

These are the things I like about it:

1\. Simplicity and easy set up. 2\. I am not forced to provide my personal information 3\. Customizable workspace 4\. Easy to invite co-workers

</comment><comment><USER29> Just from looking at it, it looks simple, clean and intuitive. Would love to know how it's different from Trello, since it looks like you guys use Kanban too.

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it just me or are the icons on the screenshots misaligned? Seems to be off by one pixel to some direction, I don't know why it seems so disturbing to me.

</comment><comment><USER31> Cant use services that are free for work, if stuff is free there is no liability or even reason for the system provider to fix issues or problems.

Provide a paid version.

<comment><USER7> Hi Callesgg, thanks for your comment.

i understand your point. A premium, paid solution is actually something we are going to be releasing before the end of the year so you can put your mind at ease on that one and feel free to test the product in the meantime.

Dan @ Someone.io

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a killer UI. Congrats. Once you get a live demo rolling I'm willing to bet you'll drum-up even more interest.

</comment><comment><USER33> I fail (as well) to see how this is different from Trello and why I should move all my trello stuff to here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi jnardiello. I replied to garrensmith who also wanted to know this. You can read my reply there [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330518](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330518)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > Someone looks simple and feels easy.

This may be the funniest tagline I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER35> Looks great! Could you please share what stack this is built on?

<comment><USER36> here is some clues: [https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.someone.io%2f](https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.someone.io%2f)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Trello is bloated with useless features, this is simple. Kudos!

<comment><USER38> That's because it's early in development. More features are planned for the future :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I really expect a live demo for such things these days.

</comment><comment><USER40> fwiw, I'm still looking for a product that does task management well with good integration/visibility of tasks within Slack.

<comment><USER7> hi ckluis, thanks for your comment

we actually do integrate with slack! You can read a how to guide right here - [http://blog.someone.io/post/117160294470/integrate- slack](http://blog.someone.io/post/117160294470/integrate-slack)

Dan @ Someone.io

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Your logo looks like RoboVM [robovm.com].

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out. Funny :-) We chose the ninja-logo as the product was codenamed ninja in the beginning and we kinda liked it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I would be more tempted to try this if there was a demo board that could be viewed and interacted with without having to sign up. I am wary of giving my email address before I can even see a basic example working.

<comment><USER43> I tend to think similarly, but there are many ways to generate a temporary email address.

It isn't the case here but site/app makings take note: _this is why I_ never _" sign-in using <social media account or some such>" so if that is the only option you offer I won't be trying your service/app/other._

For email I have a sub-domain set as catch-all and give out addresses in that to new sites. If an address starts getting junk I can just block it. If the sub-domain as a whole gets deluged then I kill it and start another (any site/app/other I continue using gets given an address on my main domain so I'd lose nothing, though I've never actually had to do that). Because it is a sub- domain it gets skipped by junk mailers guessing email@example.com addresses. Some sites have bad email address checking that rejects email@example.com (I assume their regexp doesn't like the extra dot in the server name) but if someone gets that wrong I don't trust the code in the rest of their app so I move on.

<comment><USER44> Then it comes down to wether you are interested enough to go through and create a temporary email to check it out. I was not that interested and rarely is.

<comment><USER45> If you're on Chrome it's as easy as right clicking the email field. The extension's called Easy disposable email address.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Useful

</comment><comment><USER47> so how is this superior/different from other task management system like teamwork, asana, trello, etc, etc...?

</comment><comment><USER48> Nice application! Task management for teams is exactly what we have been doing at [http://tasksinabox.com/](http://tasksinabox.com/) . Besides streamlined task operations, we aim to accommodate and sync your tasks across different applications and sites, such as O365 and Outlook, and integrate with your files and calendars on Microsoft and Google platforms as not having 'one more task-list' was something our users were very keen on. We have a free tier so you don't have to take my word for it. Uservoice is integrated in the app site, and all feedback is more than welcome!</comment>


Why to start a business if you are an introvert - <AUTHOR> http://istarthub.net/why-to-start-a-business-if-you-are-an-introvert/ <comment><USER2> As as introvert, as much as I like to see an article showing the positives that introverts bring to a business environment, this article unfortunately perpetuates many of the popularly-held untruths about introverts.

Let's start with the crux: introversion vs. extroversion is mostly about energy. Spending time with other people drains an introvert's energy, whereas it gives energy to an extrovert.

Many of the traits the article mistakenly attributes to introverts (don't like seeing unknown phone numbers calling / uncomfortable in the company of new people / hate being in the center of attention / go through hell every time they have to ask unknown people something / are ready to die visiting a party) are _not_ traits I recognise in myself or in other introverted friends – I'd argue that they are just examples of people being socially awkward, or shy, which is different.

On the contrary, I know plenty of introverts who perform brilliantly on stage, are great communicators, great leaders, enjoy nights out –and even enjoy singing karaoke!– and have no problem meeting or engaging with new people.

Given there was only one trait listed which I recognise as being generally- held by introverts (enjoy being alone for some time), I wonder whether the author of this article is an extrovert (given uninformed extroverts often think that introverts are just shy and socially awkward) or alternatively someone who is shy and socially awkward, and finds solace in blaming this on being an introvert?

<comment><USER3> > _Many of the traits the article mistakenly attributes to introverts (don't > like seeing unknown phone numbers calling / uncomfortable in the company of > new people / hate being in the center of attention / go through hell every > time they have to ask unknown people something / are ready to die visiting a > party) are not traits I recognise in myself or in other introverted friends > – I'd argue that they are just examples of people being socially awkward, or > shy, which is different._

Being introverted myself and having many of the difficulties listed above and having seen similar behavior from other introverted people I've met, I'd say that the article is correct and those are indeed traits of introversion.</comment></comment>


How to write a simple operating system - <AUTHOR> http://mikeos.berlios.de/write-your-own-os.html <comment> a-priori While it's cool and all to write your own bootloader, this means you have to deal with a lot of the really ugly bits of x86/PC architecture... like the A20 gate, for example (if you don't know what that is, count yourself lucky).

Instead, I suggest using GRUB to boot your kernel image. It leaves you in 32-bit mode and a relatively sane state. It's not hard to write a loader file (in assembly) which contains the multiboot header and an entry point. Presumably you'll want to set up a basic C runtime environment and call your C "main" function.

<http://wiki.osdev.org/Bare_bones>

<comment><USER2> Writing your own bootloader is actually an excellent exercise in getting to know the intricacies of the memory mapping on the PC architecture. After you're done you can always decide to go for a read-made one but rolling your own is definitely useful if you plan on writing your own OS.

NIH applies like always, but if you plan on taking control of the machine you might as well begin at the beginning. Rolling your own BIOS would be a step too far I think :)

<comment> a-priori I suppose it depends what you want to get out of it. There's certainly educational value in going as deep as you have the stomach for. But, for me at least, learning the specifics of how to get a processor on the PC architecture into a usable state gets tedious fast.

<comment><USER3> If I were to write a basic OS, I'd do it for one of the microcontroller kits that are available, e.g. <http://www.pjrc.com/teensy/> or something similar with an ARM7 cpu. Having a cleaner CPU architecture than x86 is bound to save a lot of headache...

<comment><USER2> The biggest challenge I found was not to adapt to CPU architecture headaches but to get to the point where the OS was self hosting its development. That took considerably longer than I ever bargained for and at the time virtual machines were pretty much non-existent so djgpp was used to bridge the gap. An edit-compile-test cycle of several minutes + a hang or so quickly eats up the days.

<comment><USER3> _An edit-compile-test cycle of several minutes + a hang or so quickly eats up the days._

That's why the micros are an interesting option, they're running on real hardware but can be flashed in seconds and debugged in realtime with a JTAG cable. Very convenient. But on the other hand they tend not to have much storage or network connectivity, so it depends on what you're interested in if they're the right choice. Blinking LEDs and controlling step motors is always fun, though!

<comment><USER4> <http://pandaboard.org/> and <http://beagleboard.org/> to the rescue I think, though there's no free software that supports Pandaboard (OMAP 4430/Cortex-A9) JTAG yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also have a bare bones OS project up on GitHub:

<https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb-bare-bones>

It's a bit of a niche inside a niche: it explains how to set things up to write an OS in D. This was extracted from the OS that my friends and I started a while ago, that's now two of theirs' PhD research:

<https://github.com/xomboverlord/xomb>

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're into building custom OS' but not interested in doing the lowest level bits (bootloader, fiddling page table bits, worrying about the processor details, etc), using a pre-existing microkernel and building whatever you want on top of it can be interesting.

I used my diploma thesis as an excuse to build a toy OS on top of a L4 (L4Ka::Pistachio) microkernel. It provides the basics, incl. IPC and VM building blocks, and a straightforward C/C++ API, and you can do the rest (there's also a number of things built on top of it that you could mix'n'match - i just implemented most of my userspace stuff because that was what I was interested in).

Some links (haven't been in touch for a few years, I don't know how up to date they are):

L4Ka project: <http://os.ibds.kit.edu/1953.php> OKL3 (successor to Pistachio, as far as I can tell): <http://wiki.ok-labs.com/> Iguana, a set of components to be (re)used on top of L4: [http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/software/kenge/iguana- project/...](http://www.ertos.nicta.com.au/software/kenge/iguana- project/latest//) Misc L4 resources: <http://www.l4hq.org/projects/os/>

If anyone's interested, I could try to find my old code and put it on GitHub (it's a combination of MIT and GPL licenced things).

<comment><USER7> Please, do find!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found this invaluable when writing my own small OS.

<http://www.jamesmolloy.co.uk/tutorial_html/index.html>

He includes a lot of details, and seems to try to do things "The Right Way" as much as possible. (Not that I am a good person to judge that)

<comment><USER9> This is most definitely the best (existing) tutorial for getting started in kernel development. It explains how to implement a small unix-like kernel, focusing on interesting problems like virtual memory, multithreading and system calls rather than fiddly details of the x86 architecture from 20+ years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The project seems to be dead these days, but if you're interested in writing OSes, take a look at the Flux OSKit:

<http://www.cs.utah.edu/flux/oskit/>

OSKit aims to be a set of libraries that dramatically lower the barrier to entry on OS development.

</comment><comment><USER9> There is no reason to write your own x86 bootloader- it's just an exercise in abstracting away the most brain-dead ISA on the planet.

What you should do instead is write the kernel and just load it with GRUB. It allows you to immediately jump into the interesting stuff that makes your kernel unique, makes it easy to test on real hardware without getting a second machine, and makes it possible to dual-boot with it if/when you get that far.

I haven't tried this, but it might be fun to write a kernel for some other system- some ARM device, maybe. Any kind of bootloader would be infinitely less encumbered with x86's layer upon layer of compatibility stuff.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is where floppy disks come in handy. Burning an ISO to a CD for each round of testing is a pain and wasteful. When I dabbled into this years ago I was lucky enough to still have a floppy drive.

<comment><USER12> well, you can always use virtual stuff, xen, virtualbox, qemu among others ?

<comment><USER11> A great suggestion of course. I do admit that it didn't immediately spring to mind (or rather, didn't spring to mind at all until I read your response). Honest question: is it possible that you might run into difficulties getting your low-level OS to function properly in a virtualization, or has the tech come along enough to where this is essentially a non-issue?

<comment><USER9> In my experience VirtualBox works okay for low-level stuff, but it's impossible to debug with. qemu and bochs are much better tools since you can actually debug your kernel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Or another for AMD64: [http://code.jeffkent.net/trac/shiny_moose/browser/trunk/kern...](http://code.jeffkent.net/trac/shiny_moose/browser/trunk/kernel)</comment>


Population-level herd immunity against Covid-19 will not be achieved in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/from-our-experts/early-herd-immunity-against-covid-19-a-dangerous-misconception <comment><USER2> Herd Immunity would seem a dangerous strategy or objective bearing in mind the following:

\- Immunity may only last a short time, in common with other Coronaviruses. Re-infection may be less severe, more severe, or not possible. We don't know.

\- Infection Fatality Rate is uncertain, but could be as high as 1%.

\- Long term health effects are unknown, but for example some evidence suggests permanent lung damage is possible.

Significant areas of the globe have successfully suppressed the virus, and may even be looking towards eradication. Such countries are looking to establish 'travel bubbles' or 'green zones' between them and get back to normal (within their virus free spheres).

For other areas, it may be too late for suppression, or for societal reasons suppression may never have been practicable, in which case herd immunity as an idea could be considered a palliative.

<comment><USER3> > Immunity may only last a short time, in common with other Coronaviruses

Where you get this information? I seem to recall exact opposite. Coronaviruses mutate slowly and immune responses last several years. For four seasonal coronaviruses the immunity lasts 1-2 years, longer than other viruses causing influenza.

<comment><USER4> [http://www.columbia.edu/~jls106/galanti_shaman_ms_supp.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/~jls106/galanti_shaman_ms_supp.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We still don't even know whether immunity to this lasts more than a few months (as is common with other coronaviruses). So it's premature to talk about herd immunity regardless.

<comment><USER6> SARS, another corona virus immunity lasts for 3-4 years on average with some cases up to 11 years. So it wouldn't be surprising at all with at least 1-3 years of immunity for people who had more serious infections.

<comment><USER7> How could this possibly be known? The first case was in 2002, and the last case was in 2004.

<comment><USER6> Because you can study the response without having the disease in the wild.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7115611/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7115611/)

<comment><USER7> That's a nice article. Thanks for responding. The 3-4 year timeframe you mention isn't in there. Is there another source for that?

<comment><USER6> I've seen it mentioned with sources on /r/COVID19 a bunch of times.

I think this is the study they might have been referring to? And this is antibodies, not the memory cells mentioned above.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2851497/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's interesting to compare how the world reacted to AIDS which is still a pandemic.

Before the hiv was understood in detail, policy responses were blunt or non- existent. Many kids including myself were taught to abstain from sex entirely, which of course is a policy which would work on paper but with which no one can comply in practice.

Here in Texas our lockdown has has little effect on the viruses rate of transmission. I believe that's because like many southern states, we could never achieve good compliance.

More realistic policies which take into account the fact that young people are at far less risk for the virus will likely win the day. We can better support and sustain quarantine if it's triaged for those at greatest risk.

Instead it Looks like policymakers will just let go of trying to control this in the US, and many older people will die unnecessarily.

<comment><USER9> > Here in Texas our lockdown has has little effect on the viruses rate of > transmission.

What makes you say that? (Genuine question, not a challenge.) This website shows the estimated Rt going from a peak of 2.08 down to below 1, before stabilizing at 1.06:

[https://www.covidactnow.org/us/tx](https://www.covidactnow.org/us/tx)

1.06 is still > 1 which is bad, but it's certainly a lot better than 2.

EDIT: Rt, not R0

<comment><USER8> Well, I was eyeballin' off a log-log plot, which is admittedly much less precise than your link. Even on that plot though R dips before we even officially shut down (Texas' cases were probably mostly imported from LA and elsewhere, and cut down by travel ending before we had an order in place)

I'm also concerned that the law currently is at variance with the reality that the parks are full here in Austin. Instead of rushing to be open, I wish the government would tailor it's message to people who need it, and come up with 'clean' food/resource pathways for people who are vulnerable to this virus rather than trying to keep kids out of the water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why would it? Everyone is trying to avoid getting infected (and dying). Isn't that what we should do?

Herd immunity means "it's killed as many people as it could".

<comment> stargazer-3 No, herd immunity means "enough people are resistant so the vulnerable ones don't get infection spread to them at all". There's a big difference there.

<comment><USER11> How would you be resistant without getting infected? There's no vaccine.

<comment><USER12> You wouldn't be, you'd just be relatively unlikely to be infected since most people around you would be immune and the virus would have difficulty getting to you.

But the degree and duration of immunity that usually follows SARS-nCoV-2 infection isn't well established yet, and coronaviruses in general are noted for not producing lasting immunity.

<comment><USER11> Yeah that's what I'm asking. By the time you get to "herd immunity", most of the population has already been infected. To get most people to be resistant, most people need to get sick first!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anyone could have told you that. Or rather, anyone could have told you that _if we make some attempt at 'slowing the curve' in order to try and keep the number of ICU-requiring cases below the number of available ICU beds_ then it will take years if not decades to achieve herd immunity.

You could just go for broke, let everyone catch it at once, and RIP 5-10% of your population. Even then it'll take most of a year to run its course and that year will be much, MUCH worse than just not being able to go to the pub or get a manicure.

<comment><USER14> People are dying in their homes both from not going to the hospital and from suicide. This isn't just about whether people are killed by one particular virus.

<comment><USER15> Those numbers are tiny compared to the virus deaths, and even more tiny compared to the death rate if the virus was simply allowed to cull as many people as possible.

<comment><USER16> CDC is estimating that a little less than 40% of the excess deaths in the past few weeks were not caused by COVID-19: [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm)

<comment><USER17> That is not what I get from this page.

> These deaths could represent misclassified COVID-19 deaths, or potentially > could be indirectly related to COVID-19 (e.g., deaths from other causes > occurring in the context of health care shortages or overburdened health > care systems).

That is not saying "those deaths were not caused by COVID-19". They explicitly mention that these could be misclassified.

<comment><USER16> Nice catch, thanks. Most of them are not, you'll find out:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart- at...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/patients-with-heart-attacks- strokes-and-even-appendicitis-vanish-from- hospitals/2020/04/19/9ca3ef24-7eb4-11ea-9040-68981f488eed_story.html)

[https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/05/04/coronavirus- covid-19-...](https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/05/04/coronavirus- covid-19-massachusetts-fatal-crashes-rate-doubled-april-massdot/)

[https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus- queen...](https://www.nydailynews.com/coronavirus/ny-coronavirus-queens- suicide-rates-increase-20200429-mqyzdplseva5belmqewn43u56i-story.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The epidemiologists at JHU certainly understand this stuff better than I do, but a couple things about this article stood out to me. Is there an epidemiologist out there who could comment?

\- The herd immunity threshold depends on the reproduction number of the disease (R0). There's a basic reproduction number which is the rate they expect based on properties of the virus, and an effective reproduction number which is what ends up happening in reality. When effective R<1 the virus starts to die out.

\- The basic number can't be changed but the effective number can be changed dramatically. Lockdowns and social distancing have already changed it, with varying levels of success in different locations.

\- I have seen numbers thrown around that peg the herd immunity threshold for COVID-19 at 50-70%. This number is actually influenced by R, the lower R is, the lower your herd immunity threshold goes. JHU uses 70% here and that's the most pessimistic estimate I have seen.

\- Wouldn't good, sustained social distancing lower effective R and thus produce a herd immunity threshold lower than 70%, perhaps much lower?

\- New York is at 15-20% exposure already.

I read this article from the Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine a while back which observed that the early estimates for epidemics and pandemics are invariably worse than what ends up happening in reality, and it got me thinking. [https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case- fatality-...](https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality- rates/)

My personal bias is that I don't believe it is even possible, let alone wise, to keep people locked down on the time scales that are needed for controlling this virus, so they just kick the can down the road. But unprecedented levels of social distancing _might_ be possible if we are smart enough. Every single person who works from home, wears a mask, or keeps their distance in public is helping.

</comment><comment><USER19> With this mindset and approach the US will continue to have 20 million + unemployed all the way through Christmas.

<comment><USER20> What mindset? That preserving life is more palatable than making money? I'm ok with that. I'd rather be unemployed than dead.

<comment><USER21> If unemployment is better than death, why stop at doing this for Covid-19? For example, the flu kills quite a lot of people each year, and even though Covid-19 is somewhat more deadly that's counterbalanced by the fact that stronger, longer measures are required to stop it. Why not shut down parts of the economy every flu season?

(I've generally seen this kind of not one life argument go hand in hand with the idea that Covid-19 cannot be compared to any other cause of death, for obvious reasons.)

<comment><USER22> Don't know why this is being downvoted. The flu kills tens of thousands a year, yet no one seemed to want to shut down the economy in the past. . .

<comment><USER20> 10s of thousands vs 100s of thousands (or millions). Between higher mortality rate and higher level of transmission, C19 is FAR more deadly than seasonal flu.

The flu is a recurring problem. We can't avoid it.

COVID is (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (just as the 1918 flu was).

<comment><USER22> But death still occurs with the flu! Doesn't this mean you don't think life is more palateable than making money?

<comment><USER23> The same philosophical discussion can happen with respect to raising the speed limit by 5 miles per hour; it will result in more deaths... is it worth it?

But letting Covid-19 run unchecked is more akin to raising the speed limit by 50 miles per hour. The prudent choice is not to go with it.

<comment><USER22> But quarantining after the flu can "save lives". But my point is that it runs counter to the "That preserving life is more palatable than making money" argument. It's a tradeoff, in other words. If you REALLY wanted to "save lives", you can quarantine during every flu epidemic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Even in hotspots like New York City that have been hit hardest by the > pandemic, initial studies suggest that perhaps 15-21%6,7 of people have been > exposed so far.

That's people with antibodies, not necessarily everyone who was exposed. There is zero information on seroconversion rates for mild and asymptomatic cases. We need to PCR-test a huge random sample, then follow up later with a serosurvey. Why are we not studying this? And why does nobody ever write a disclaimer listing their assumptions when making authoritative proclamations like this? It's going to shred their credibility into dust by the time this is all over, even if half of their assumptions turn out to be correct.

Another study suggests that 20% infected could be enough for herd immunity, if individual variation in susceptibility is similar to the estimate for SARS- CoV-1: [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.27.20081893v1)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm trying to figure out if this article is actually saying anything or saying effectively nothing.

> Even in hotspots like New York City that have been hit hardest by the > pandemic, initial studies suggest that perhaps 15-21%6,7 of people have been > exposed so far.

(goes on to mention how many people are dying)

> Some have entertained the idea of "controlled voluntary infection,"9 akin to > the "chickenpox parties" of the 1980s. However, COVID-19 is 100 times more > lethal than the chickenpox.

(goes on to completely dismiss whether that would actually lead to some level of herd immunity)

I get that the disease is more deadly. But is this one of those cases where it's better to pull hard and rip the band-aid off in one go? Nobody seems to really want to broach this topic seriously.

> To reach herd immunity for COVID-19, likely 70% or more of the population > would need to be immune. Without a vaccine, over 200 million Americans would > have to get infected before we reach this threshold. Put another way, even > if the current pace of the COVID-19 pandemic continues in the United States > – with over 25,000 confirmed cases a day – it will be well into 2021 before > we reach herd immunity. If current daily death rates continue, over half a > million Americans would be dead from COVID-19 by that time.

It's unclear to me whether the author is stating that herd immunity would take too long under the condition that we completely opened up the global economy or if we all continued to stay isolated.

We're definitely not going to reach 70% with the way things are.

<comment><USER24> We have talked about "pull off the bandaid"- to have 200M people get the disease means we're going to lose somewhere between 1-2M people (just in the US).

Doing that quickly means hospitals and morgues overflowing with dead from COVID.

We HAVE talked about this from the beginning - this is the point of "flattening the curve". If we let a million Americans die in a short time, it'll tank the economy and overwhelm our healthcare system and ability to treat not only this disease but all others at the same time.

It'd be one thing if we were testing and tracing to try and limit. But this YOLO strategy is a recipe for complete chaos.

Even more inportantly: we don't understand the long term impacts for those who survive. What is the 5-year mortality rate from complications? The US DOD has already decided that COVID infection disqualifies you for future military service (ostensibly because of the lung complications, but they haven't said why formally yet).

The YOLO strategy that some folks are proposing is insane given how much we don't know about this disease. It would be like proposing in 1982 that we get everyone infected with AIDS so we had "herd immunity". Think about how that would have worked out for us... and then tell me that it's a good idea to do it this time.

There may be a time when we know enough to make smart risk decisions about this disease, but less than 6 months after emergence isn't it.

<comment><USER25> > We have talked about "pull off the bandaid"- to have 200M people get the > disease means we're going to lose somewhere between 1-2M people (just in the > US).

IF a few things are true:

1\. The population being infected matches the demographics of the US as a whole. If the population is instead "healthy people under 60", IIRC the deaths go from 1-2M to 10-20k.

2\. There is no way to infect someone deliberately in a way that reduces death rates. Variolation [0] has worked in the past, and is a possibility here. If it provides an additional factor of 10 safety benefit, you could now estimate 1-2k deaths, down from 1-2 million.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think herd immunity is an interesting point. Sweden is not there yet but its effective R value has already dropped below 1 a while back and it will continue to drop as the susceptible population continues to shrink.

Then there's approaches like shielding that are interesting that are being discussed a lot. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0895-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0895-3)

There's something to note about this virus infection fatality rate: we don't seem to have an agreed upon value for it and there is quite a window. It may depend on locale, population health, age, etc. But the 1% for the diamond princess is quite high and I think that number was cited for caution.

<comment><USER27> > But the 1% for the diamond princess is quite high and I think that number > was cited for caution.

Why? The Diamond Princess has had 14 fatalities out of 712 cases which implies a fatality rate of 2%, with 8 unresolved cases still in the hospital that could push it even higher.

<comment><USER26> I came across this the other day on reddit. It is another cfr study with much lower rates. [https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g6nmtf/_/foatvgv/?cont...](https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g6nmtf/_/foatvgv/?context=1)

There's other highly tested populations with lower CFRs and then there's IFR estimates based on serology and indirect estimates on CFR that slew much lower than 1%

<comment><USER27> > I came across this the other day on reddit. It is another cfr study with > much lower rates. > [https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g6nmtf/_/foatvgv/?cont...](https://reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g6nmtf/_/foatvgv/?cont..).

I would be careful about generalizing results from that particular study as 99.5% of the workers sampled were under the age of 70. If your sampled population does not include the most vulnerable age groups then of course your fatality rate will be lower than normal.

> There's other highly tested populations with lower CFRs and then there's IFR > estimates based on serology and indirect estimates on CFR that slew much > lower than 1%

I'm curious what you mean by "much lower"? Some of the antibody studies published recently have found prevalence rates that were not much higher than the false positive rates for the test, making confidence in their results somewhat dubious. In studies where the prevalence has been higher (e.g. NYC, Geneva), the IFR is trending towards 0.5-1%.

This meta-analysis was published yesterday which suggests an IFR of 0.75% (CI: 0.49-1.01%): [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.03.20089854v1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> In the article that section about the cruise ship talked about voluntary self- infecting and how that would be risky (1-2% death rate).

What this completely ignores is that obviously only young and healthy people would attend those "corona parties" and thus the CFR of the voluntaries would rather be around 0%. And obviously those people wouldn't immediately go see grandpa but instead self-isolate for three weeks.

I hate that so many are pretending that it's like russian roulette when in reality the odds are so highly skewed.

</comment><comment><USER29> I would liked to have read their opinions on Sweden.

<comment><USER30> Do you live in Sweden?

A lot of people seem to be using it as some example of a country who haven't introduced lockdown measures, whereas in reality they are actually self- isolating and social distancing, just like everyone else.

Worth noting also that Sweden has the 6th highest case fatality rate in Europe (other Nordic countries are near the bottom of that list).

<comment><USER31> Yeah, I'm swedish and we are very much self-isolating. We didn't close schools, our idiot state epidemiologist didn't think nursing staff should use masks etc. so lots of elderly got infected. Stockholm infection numbers are insane, and we are probably getting there up north soon too.

Lots of small businesses are defaulting. I'm trying to support my local restaurant by eating lunch there every day.

All in all, it's a mess.

<comment><USER32> Did they close bars and indoor dining?

<comment><USER31> Gatherings over 50 persons are prohibited, many bars and restaurants have went bankrupt though so I guess it's self-regulating.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


$3 Million Prize Offered to Solve Hospital Admissions Puzzle - <AUTHOR> http://www.healthleadersmedia.com/content/QUA-260799/3-Million-Prize-Offered-to-Solve-Hospital-Admissions-Puzzle <comment><USER2> $400 entry fee, wtf.. have they learned NOTHING from the netflix challenge?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious what kind of sensitivity and specificity qualifies as "good enough".

Here's the prize's website: <http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/></comment>