French researcher posts successful Covid-19 chloroquine drug trial - <AUTHOR> https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/French-researcher-in-Marseille-posts-successful-Covid-19-coronavirus-drug-trial-results <comment><USER2> I have some meta-doubts about the linked presentation ([https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTi-g18ftNZUMRAj...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTi-g18ftNZUMRAj2SwRPodtscFio7bJ7GdNgbJAGbdfF67WuRJB3ZsidgpidB2eocFHAVjIL-7deJ7/pub))

1\. for starters, it's a random gdrive link not on medrxiv or biorxiv. why?

2\. it's GPL3'd? Conventionally, we disseminate open access research as CC-BY 4.

3\. the first author is who he says he is -- but he is a "managing partner" at blocktown capital not a practicing physician. [0]

4\. The second author is a bioinformatics masters student who is also a lawyer and not obviously a practicing researcher. [1]

5\. Figures 1 and 2 are presented without obvious attribution from [https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-42...](https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-2-69), which is not about SARS-CoV-2, but about the first SARS from 2002.

This isn't my field, but i am a biomedical researcher and i'm very used to reading the medical literature, and this read deeply strangely in a lot of ways that are hard to quantify. The language isn't what I'd expect for a research paper, but it's kind of written like it wants to be one. I'm not super clear on what's going on.

I have no reason to doubt the intentions of the authors, per se, but this work is super rough around the edges. It reads like a thrown-together collection of notes for a lab meeting, but not something I'd show off in public.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD](https://twitter.com/JamesTodaroMD) [1]: [https://www.riganollc.com/attorneys/gregory-j- rigano/](https://www.riganollc.com/attorneys/gregory-j-rigano/)

<comment><USER3> I'm generally in agreement with you, but tangentially, Chloroquine was already tried in some countries (not in the controlled sense we expect in an actual clinical trial), and showed "promising results"

[https://sci-hub.si/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...](https://sci- hub.si/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166354220301145)

<comment><USER2> that is a much more comprehensibly written document. Nice find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I listened to the linked video and read the article/papers. What I take from them is:

\- Chinese doctors initially tested chloroquine in-vitro on SARS-Cov-2 and it reduced the viral load significantly. Similar results were observed with other viruses including SARS-Cov.

\- They then tested it in-vivo (on patients) and it showed promising results

\- The speaker explains then that they had 3 cohorts of infected patients on which they tested daily for SARS-Cov-2. First cohort was the control (no treatment), second one received Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine), third one received Plaquenil and azithromycin (an antibiotic). After 7 days 1st cohort had approximately 85% testing positive, 2nd 40%, 3rd 5%. One could be surprised by the use of an antibiotic but it apparently helps with fight opportunistic bacterial infection resulting from a viral pneumonia. He adds that for every recorded death, the patient tested positive for the virus before their death and concludes that if the double treatment of azythromicin + Plaquenil reduces the viral load, then it would improve patient prognosis.

In conclusion, I think it's quite a big deal if it is confirmed that chloroquine can reduce contagiosity and improve outcomes. It's widely available, cheap and safe. Give it to everyone showing symptoms, individuals who were in contact with confirmed cases, medical professionals, and you'll surely reduce R0 significantly.

video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4J8kydOvbc&feature=emb_titl...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4J8kydOvbc&feature=emb_title)

pre-pub paper: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092485792...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920300820?via%3Dihub)

ppt (last page is result of experiment mentioned above): [https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp- content/uploads/20...](https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-19.pdf)

<comment><USER5> > last page is result of experiment mentioned above

The last slide is a bibliography. The second to the last is a slide is in vitro results.

There's not one shred of new clinical data in that presentation from what I can see.

What's happened is that the OP has linked to an article making claims that are not supported from the slide deck or YouTube video.

<comment><USER4> You're mistaken. The last slide is, like I said, the result of the experiment, the second to last is the bibliography.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good to see some progress. The more experimental research on this sort of stuff the better. It's still not clear if these sort of meds should be given early as soon as you get a temperature say, or wait till hospital, or how those options compare. I'm hoping there'll be some good result like giving it early means almost everyone recovers without hospital but then maybe that won't work. Test baby test!

In fact this sort of stuff may be our biggest hope. Containment doesn't seem to be working, vaccines will likely take too long but treatments like say giving chloroquine on fever might reduce deaths from 1% to 0.1% or some such. But we won't know without experiment.

</comment><comment><USER5> Call me skeptical.

The details in this article are insufficient to draw many conclusions. There is no paper, although a YouTube video (in French) is linked. The article doesn't make it clear whether Raoult was being interviewed, or the information was taken from the video.

The linked Google Doc (not regarding the study in question, despite another comment on this thread) summarizes results from other purported studies. Even then, this document itself appears to lack the usual signs of authenticity.

Be careful about drawing conclusions because the details just aren't there. Details are _everything_ in drug discovery.

Edit:

Then there's the vague language in the article.

> "We were able to ascertain that patients who had not received Plaquenil (the > drug containing hydroxychloroquine) were still contagious after six days, > but of those that had received Plaquenil, after six days, only 25% were > still contagious."

"Contagious" means nothing because AFAIK, there is no test for it. There is a PCR test being used around the world to detect the presence of viral RNA. So it's suspicious that an expert would be using the word "contagious," which implies the ability to transmit the virus under experimental conditions.

And it gets worse.

Have a look at the video linked in the article:

[https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/coronavirus- diagnosti...](https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/coronavirus- diagnostiquons-et-traitons-premiers-resultats-pour-la-chloroquine/)

First, it begins with a title that doesn't match the title of the speaker's slide deck.

Second, judging from the slides the video appears to be about COVID-19 testing in general. There doesn't seem to be anything of substance about chloroquine anywhere. I don't speak French, so maybe there is something there. If so, the slide deck doesn't reflect it. And there's no way that a successful clinical trial of a COVID-19 drug would begin with basic introductory slides that everyone already knows.

This just doesn't add up. I'm calling bullshit.

<comment><USER7> I have never heard of that news source, Connexion France. The language is all over the place. I'd be highly skeptical of that source. The hospital quoted isn't one of the main institute that would have a direct mandate from the government: Institut Pasteur (in spite of being private) would the reference research center for infectious diseases.

<comment><USER8> Institut Pasteur is not the only research body in France regarding infectious diseases... They are directly linked to the Marseille University Hospital (AP- HM) and all the usual public research bodies like INSERM, CNRS.

If you want another source than connexion France, you have this article from Le Monde: [https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2020/03/17/la- chloro...](https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/article/2020/03/17/la-chloroquine- une-piste-pour-lutter-contre-le-sars-cov-2_6033364_1650684.html)

Are you highly skeptical of Le Monde?

<comment><USER7> I would be skeptical of _Le Monde_ too indeed. My point was that particular site had all the flavours of the fake news site that had mushroomed in the last year, with non-sensical translations and controversial content.

Before anyone raids pharmacies, I'd rather have a vigorous debate with peers, clear methodology, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wish I could find the study so take this with a grain of salt without my presenting that, but I'll do a search; it's also all in French. It was a double blind, peer reviewed, replicated study that suggested 400-500mg hydroxyquinone (NOT hydroxyquinone sulfate,nor chloroquine nor chloroquine phosphate) + azithromycin (Zithromax, Z-pack, etc.) + zinc was shown to be effective either once symptoms began to shorten the duration, or can be used as a prophylactic measure, preventing the disease altogether in medical personnel. Raoult was one of the scientists behind the study, which differed slightly from his other studies. There was has been a 100% success rate so far, and presently they are testing on a larger sample of those in the medical profession. I will try to find the link.

Very interesting stuff on this page that I'll have to read through...

</comment><comment><USER10> The bottom line is there isn't any quality data. But there are a lot of clinical trials in patients going on, so there should be something more reliable in 4 weeks or so. The most relevant endpoint at this time is not viral clearance (which also has reliability issues), it is avoidance of severe disease requiring hospitalisation and respiratory support, in particular invasive ventilation. Also relevant is whether prophylactic treatment in people at high risk of infection, such as healthcare workers, is effective.

The treatment courses are short, so the side effects of hydroxychloroquine are largely irrelevant under the circumstances.

</comment><comment><USER11> That's hydroxychloroquine right?

Same drug they use to treat lupus so it's well tested?

edit: oh wait, maybe not [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32150618](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32150618)

          Hydroxychloroquine was found to be more potent than chloroquine to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 in vitro.

If so, goodrx shows it's $20, hopefully it will spare some deaths.

[https://www.goodrx.com/hydroxychloroquine](https://www.goodrx.com/hydroxychloroquine)

<comment><USER12> Chloroquine is a common anti-malarial and can be purchased OTC in much of Latin America.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From the article

Paper: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTi-g18ftNZUMRAj...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTi-g18ftNZUMRAj2SwRPodtscFio7bJ7GdNgbJAGbdfF67WuRJB3ZsidgpidB2eocFHAVjIL-7deJ7/pub)

Video(not in English): [https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/coronavirus- diagnosti...](https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/coronavirus- diagnostiquons-et-traitons-premiers-resultats-pour-la-chloroquine/)

<comment><USER7> That researcher is likely, at best, controversial:

\- he starts by arguing against quarantine; his point is that it didn't work for Cholera in 1832;

\- he dismisses two thirds of the efforts against HIV/AIDS: understanding transmission effort and promoting condoms, focusing on treatment lowering viral load;

\- he then moves on to framing response to the pandemic in a conspiracy- sounding "shift of power towards the Far East";

\- he then says "most countries" have chosen to test extensively early — I don't think that's really true: South Korea, has but I don't think many other did;

\- he's surprisingly unmoved by mortality on the cruise boat ashore Japan; I know epidemiologists can seem comfortable with terrifying stats, but he's more than that.

He's not terrible over all and fairly eloquent to make his case but I'd take his presentation with a grain of salt.

Key points:

\- children don't seem to be contagious (they are asymptomatic but vectors for the flu);

\- viral loads are more predictive than anything;

\- people appear contagious for 20 days; key point isn't a fix duration but measuring viral load and isolating anyone with a high level;

\- the hospital has 143 samples, they are looking forward to comparing genes with symptoms.

He's happy that people are attacking him for advertising chloroquinine because the controversy drives traffic… Not sure most doctors would be confortable with that media strategy. He's unhappy that television features people without qualification, though.

He compares his findings with similar findings in China and Korea with slightly different treatment (600 mg vs 2x500 hydroxi-chloroquinine, which he claims to have been the first to propose for other infections).

He uses patients from nearby town who didn't receive the treatment in a quasi- experiment on the impact on viral-load duration. He's also recommending a combination with an anti-biotic because complications are often microbial.

His final point is to not recommend to go home but be tested and treated.

I think that he's onto something scientifically and he could be talking about it on TV but before that, he _needs_ to get some media training to focus on the positive.

<comment><USER14> Is that what you base him being "controversial" on? My understanding is that he regularly publishes in the Lancet [1] and New England Journal of Medecine [2] (if I am using pubmed correctly).

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=(Raoult%2C%20Didier...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=\(Raoult%2C%20Didier%5BAuthor%5D\)%20AND%20%22lancet%22%5BJournal%5D)

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=(Raoult%2C%20Didier...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=\(Raoult%2C%20Didier%5BAuthor%5D\)%20AND%20%22The%20New%20England%20journal%20of%20medicine%22%5BJournal%5D)

<comment><USER7> His tone is controversial: he's happy to say things that will make some people unhappy.

You are quoting a highly respected peer-review journal. Those were set-up to avoid appeals to individual authority and replace them with (anonymous) peer review. His presentation is certainly promising but it hasn't gone through such a review yet.

<comment><USER15> I don't think 'controversial' is the right word for "he's happy to say things that will make some people unhappy."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> New Paper just released by the same group: Hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as a treatment of COVID-19: results of an open- label non-randomized clinical trial Gregory Rigano @RiganoESQ (posted to twitter 7am PDT 3/18/2020 Didier Raoult MD, PhD

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/186Bel9RqfsmEx55FDum4xY_IlWS...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/186Bel9RqfsmEx55FDum4xY_IlWSHnGbj/view)

<comment><USER17> Gregory Rigano ist a LAWYER who is trying to get a patent for Hydroxychloroquinine as Covid-19 treatment. This must be a complete fraud! Obviously someone with high fever during the infection will have his temperature lowered, since this is also the purpose of the drug during a malaria attack! Even if there is a real effect in vitro, if it doesn't work in vivo, it means nothing! The medical world is littered with unsuccessful in vivo attempts of in vitro successes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This sounds really promising! I hope this report find its way to the officials...

<comment><USER19> Form what I read the UK has already stopped all export of this drug.

<comment><USER20> This is easy to synthesize and very cheap.

It also has potentially irreversible side effects, namely retina damage.

<comment><USER21> Thankfully retina damage seems to only be from continual use. This is medication people have stayed on for decades. It seems pretty benign for just a few weeks, unlike many medications where the long term side effects can kick in after just months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can readily believe this is helpful. It's related to quinine. I've used quinine for years to deal effectively with exposure to viral infections.

I have a compromised immune system and get sick very easily. I do a lot of weird stuff.

/Anecdata

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious about the Tocilizumab/Actemra study, but it's extremely dangerous to the heart, so I'm interested in the dosages and time frame used

Also curious about the Remdesivir studies...

</comment><comment><USER23> I can't say whether the work reported is defensible, but I can say that (1) chloroquine is not available over the counter in the US as it is in many places, (2) it can be dangerous, even fatal if misused, and (3) it is available in the US in pet stores for treating aquariums.

So, provided you only put it in the tank you swim in, you should be OK, but I don't know about the safety of chloroquine phosphate taken orally. Still, if you are on the down slide, it might be preferable to risk it, and also to have some on hand against such an event.

<comment><USER17> Hydroxychloroquinine is the drug that my father received during World WarII to treat Malaria tropica. The high dose worked so well on him, that he never again had a malaria attack. But unfortunately he developed severe liver damage as a consequence of the high dose, from which he never completely recovered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Patients were given 600mcg per day for 10 days.

Did they really mean micrograms or is this a mistranslation of milligrams? 600mcg is much lower than any dose I've heard of for other conditions.

<comment><USER7> In the video he says that his hospital and Korea use 600 mg/d and that Chinese authors mention two times 500 mg per day. He describes that larger treatment as "harder to handle" and I suspect he's referring to secondary effects.

<comment><USER25> The tests suggested in Italy also use a 500 mg per day dose, see article linked to here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616404](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22616404)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Summary of the best bit:

Viral load dropped to near zero in patients with azithromycin and hydroxychloroquine compared to not much change with the control group [https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp- content/uploads/20...](https://www.mediterranee-infection.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-19.pdf) (graph at bottom)

</comment><comment><USER26> Naive question, does this mean quinine may also help, and is there enough in tonic water to have any clinical effect?

<comment><USER27> No. 1 liter of commercial tonic water has about 83 mg of quinine, and the typical dose for malaria treatment is 648 mg three times a day. You'd have to drink 23.4 liters of tonic water a day to get that amount of quinine, and you'd probably poison yourself from that amount of water and sugar.

<comment><USER28> These doses are quite high though because they are using them for treatment.

Preventative doses of chloroquine for malaria are about 300mg per week. I'm not sure what preventative doses of quinine are typically, presumably much higher than chloroquine, but how much higher?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if quinine, a very similar drug, would have similar results. We already have industrial infrastructure in place to mass produce and disseminate quinine (tonic water) but would have to increase the amount in each bottle. Pure, unadulterated speculation though.

<comment><USER23> Quinine has much worse side effects than chloroquine's. The amount of quinine in tonic water is very, very low, or it would not be allowed.

Fun fact: the lifetime of chloroquine in the body is 1 to 2 months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I saw a tweet by a MD recently saying that some preliminary explanation of the effect of the virus (something about heme) would also explain why chloroquine would work.

There seem to be a web of low quality data going in a coherent direction.

</comment><comment><USER31> Explains why there's little outbreak in Africa.

<comment><USER6> Probably not. It's available there but it's not like everyone is on the stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Studies show that hydroxychloroquinone- not chloroquine or chloroquine phosphate - is what's effective. It has less side effects if not used for a long period of time (>5 years, then serious liver and retinal damage can occur). Plaquenil, the brand, is 100% hydroxychloroquine (possibly hydroxychloroquinone sulfate, I'd have to check), which requires perfect dosing per patient, usually around 500mg/day for a typical adult.

With the generic hydroxychloroquinone, there are fillers, so taking 600mg might be better off, but don't quote me.

The problem is that hydroxyc. can have major interactions with antibiotics (which interests me, since Azithromycin is recommended in conjunction - perhaps its referring to Flouroquonines which are very dangerous to cartilage anyway by themselves (Levaquin,Cipro,etc.). Also, seizure meds psychiatric meds, acetaminophen, and blood pressure medicines can cause interactions.

Hydroxychloroquinone can actually help with weight loss and lowering glucose levels.

I think this sounds promising - not as a treatment per se, nor a vaccine, but a prophylactic at the first sign of symptoms. I suspect adding zinc might be helpful, but that's just my idea for clearing up infections sooner.

I think the Azithromycin may be used to address any bacterial side effects to which the hydroxychloroquinone may leave the immune system more susceptible, such as eye problems and strep. Another reason I think early use of zinc may help.

Anyway, this is interesting stuff. And it's so cheap - since it's already a generic, no "lawyer" can patent this to make money.

I think they're just trying to find the treatment, and I'm grateful it's not big pharma!

</comment><comment><USER32> I am tremendously torn by this:

a. We have multiple indications that this is an adjunct therapy that can help

b. Humans are exceptionally easy to fool, and we know that placebos are incredibly effective because they trick our brain into creating chemicals.

The placebo is so strong that we design double blind studies because we can't even trust the person giving the experiment.

However, if it does help, it will be extremely encouraging. The critical thing is to get a double blind study with sufficient n to immediately make a choice. This is where having more resources do help because the safety of the drug, normally a massive bottleneck, is well understood.

<comment><USER3> You're missing the point that patients receiving this treatment are considered in a terminal condition and are likely on life-support (that is the only situation you could give an unapproved drug to a patient).

<comment><USER33> Is it unapproved? I thought it was in widespread use as an anti-malarial (for 70 + years)?

<comment><USER20> It is widespread but this usage is off label.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The problem is patients only get this at the point that they require hospitalization.

It should be as easy to get a short-term dose of this (unlikely to cause severe side effects) as it is to get a seasonal flu shot, and people should be advised to take it for two weeks (or whatever) at the onset of symptoms, or even as a prophylactic if they know they were exposed.

<comment><USER14> I don't think he was suggesting it as a preventive use. Rather as a way for patients that have been diagnosed with the virus, even with little symptoms, to make them less contagious quicker (and therefore to significantly slow down the propagation of the virus).

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> No placebo for the control group? no double-blind?

C'mon guys ... these kind of crisis are where strict scientific discipline is the most needed, because the risk of rushing to a false conclusion is higher.

"but we don't have time, so we'll take whatever that seems to work" would be a valid argument if Chloroquine had _zero_ negative side-effects. Which isn't the case.</comment>


Ask HN: Startup ecosystems: SF vs. Seattle - <AUTHOR>

For those of you who are familiar with SF & Seattle, I'd love to hear your opinion about which startup ecosystem you think is better to work in and why? I understand this is going to be different for everyone due to their varied experience - but just imagine filling out an Amazon product review for each city. I'm just looking for some simple data points as I'm not familiar with working in any of the cities and am considering a career move into one of them.<p>A more structured way to answer, may be to list pros/cons of each city relative to each other. <comment><USER2> SV's concentration of investors and startups is unparalleled. There's strong evidence to support this beyond qualitative assertions anybody may make.

But I believe that SV/SF is hitting against constraints. Of course history shows us during gold rushes, there's plenty of people willing to suffer poor conditions to pursue the perception of easy riches.

Seattle has a big limitation for startups because of the lack of ready angel investors. Any startup beginning in Seattle and unable to close a notable angel investor have a hard time raising an angel round. Though SV investors and VCs are showing a willingness to support early stage Seattle startups. A16z has made investments in Offerup and Distelli.

There is a lot of high quality engineering talent available in Seattle. Though many tend towards conservative choices for careers. Recruiting engineers into a startup requires some work. Though once a team's built, there's not the same velocity on job turnover that's typical of SF/SV.

Also for recent grads, Seattle offers a great lifestyle that shares a lot of attributes with SF and Portland. Housing is of high quality and available. Thanks to Modernist Cuisine by Nathan Myhrvold, many rising culinary stars are visiting Seattle in a form of a pilgrimage.

There's a lot of promise in Seattle. Many in the community are dedicated to growing the startup ecosystem. New Tech is a good meetup with great organizers in Red Russak and Brett Greene. I have nurtured my Python user group PuPPy for a year now. We're approaching 1000 members and hold monthly meetings that draw well in excess of 100 attendees at every event.

It's a personal choice. Like choosing a school, I'd recommend a visit. But I'd recommend making several trips over a period of time before making a commitment to either destination.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've worked in both (Not SF necessarily but San Jose). San Jose definitely has way more start ups to choose from.

I don't really know what you're looking for, but if I found an equally good job in both areas, I would rather stay in Seattle because the rent is much more reasonable and there's no state income tax. Weather in CA can't be beat though, unless you actually like rain or having seasons.

There are significantly more start ups in the Bay Area though. In Seattle, it's very common to meet people who work at Microsoft or Amazon. In San Jose, almost everyone is working at some start up and knows how to program. It's both kind of neat and also a bit annoying. Every start up thinks it's going to be the next big thing. There's way too much kool aid for my tastes, and I found the lack of diversity not to my tastes.

</comment><comment><USER4> If you are looking for startup ecosystem, there is no city, including Seattle, that come even close to SF Bay Area. Seattle startup ecosystem is very small, lacks diversity in ideas, people, and connections and primarily Amazon and Microsoft network-centric.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do not come to Seattle. There's no room and the tech sucks.

Love,

A local

<comment><USER6> says pretty much everyone in any desirable city ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Real estate prices: just look at the prices on Zillow or something. To borrow some Jerry Fodor: 1\. Obtaining Seattle real estate is remotely plausible. 2\. Remotely plausible is better than not at all.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd take fog rather then rain :)</comment>


MSQt: Qt with MS Windows logo - <AUTHOR> http://www.msqt.org/

<comment><USER2> There is people who really have nothing to do of their weekends.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this a joke?

Edit: Ah, yes, it is :) Phew...

At the bottom: "This is a satire, for the real Qt website go to qt.nokia.com"

</comment><comment><USER4> Look at the bottom of the page.

</comment><comment><USER5> Meh.</comment>


Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot-rp <comment><USER2> One prominent counterpoint to this article is the school of Afrofuturism. Lately, we have seen a resurgence in this thought line ranging from Black Panther to Janelle Monae. But those of us in technology often are not aware of this very important, visionary futuristic movement.

I'll also add if you haven't seen Black Panther, go and see it. Most science fiction reminds me of Kowloon by day, Tokyo by night. It is so refreshing to see a different, Africa-centric view of the future. Think Nairobi 2080.

<comment><USER3> I agree with and excited about this development. I'm an academically trained futurist and I'm continually frustrated by the future as being techno- solutionist-driven and mostly Western or some Hong Kong/Tokyo future.

Black Panther, I hope, will help people to be inspired by other ideas of what the future can be - from different cultural lenses, changes in view of technology, changes in ways of doing etc.

It's about decolonizing the future and opening the door to other ways of being.

Here's one of my favorite piece of futures work that I like to talk about. It's about the future of human relationships: [https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of- marriage/](https://jfsdigital.org/2017/09/22/the-future-of-marriage/)

Yes, it's still techno-driven and still very San Francisco, but at least its not about flying cars or fancy tech, just different ways of being.

<comment><USER4> > "I'm an academically trained futurist"

What does this mean?

> "and I'm continually frustrated by the future as being techno-solutionist- > driven and mostly Western or some Hong Kong/Tokyo future."

The future as it is and has been coming to pass? How we, today and recently, culturally portray the idea of the future?

<comment><USER5> I cringe every time i have to call myself a data scientist, but I guess I should be thankful I don't have to yet call myself an academically trained futurist :P

<comment><USER3> Haha, yes, I'd trade futurist for data scientist.

In academic circles, we're called foresight or futures studies field but no one knows what that is.

<comment><USER6> I can't believe this is a real thing. I really thought you were pulling a high-quality troll.

It legitimately sounds like you belong working at the Ministry of Magic.

<comment><USER3> madamelic, yeah I've gotten a lot of funny looks from people. When I explain that its relates to scenario planning, it sounds a bit less silly.

There are some govts, like in Finland or Singapore, that invest heavily in futures studies. Singapore Gov't has multiple foresight teams within the prime minister's office, ministry of trade etc. UAE has a quasi-Ministery of the Future: [https://www.mocaf.gov.ae/en](https://www.mocaf.gov.ae/en)

I'd rather be working at the Ministry of Magic though. :p

<comment><USER6> Oh, I wasn't like putting down your work. From what I found poking around it sounds like an important field.

Just the name cracked me up. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think futurists with a progressive bent can also be guilty of the opposite: assuming the cultural future somehow won't follow the present. The age of technological advancement will inevitably be good, because it will also miraculously be missing all our current bugbears like prejudice and inequality, which technology might otherwise worsen, rather than eliminate.

If we like to think that we're far more advanced than our predecessors, the conclusion is that our descendants will leave us in the dust. Maybe misplaced faith in the former encourages our hope for the latter over a dystopia where everything is as bad as it already is, only worse.

<comment><USER8> There are a few things that give me pause about progressive visions of the future, but the biggest one is just the sheer terrifying demographics of it.

The predominant culture of the developed world is catastrophically infertile. The more progressive parts of these cultures are often the least fertile, while the more conservative and traditional parts are more fertile. But the offspring of these traditional subcultures often convert into the progressive culture, at least where that culture is more prosperous and holds higher perceived status.

Part of what makes religions so persistent is their evolutionary fitness from a memetic perspective. "Tell everyone you know to worship $DEITY, have lots of babies, and also kill/shun anyone who tries to stop worshipping $DEITY" is a great algorithm for maximizing the number of $DEITY-worshippers. "Never have sex or try to convert anyone" is a shitty algorithm, which is why the Shakers are practically extinct while Islam is on course to become the world's largest religion (and may already be, if you subtract the plurality of western Christians who are behaviorally secular anyway).

I suspect some memetic program that survives contact with science, prosperity, and progressivism without turning infertile, if it ever evolves, will be the foundation of the future of human culture.

<comment><USER9> It would have to be the end of the nuclear family, the entire foundation of the traditional perspective in the developed world, replaced by some form of collective inter-gender polyamory whose main benefit is to reemploy the ancient notion of child rearing by "a village", permitting multiple members to rotate between wage earning, child rearing, and personal time, so that the lifestyle is compatible with trending standards in progressive living. If you've seen The Expanse, this would be familiar to you one of the lead characters grow up under these precise conditions in a possible future Earth.

We are already seeing a growing appreciation for practices like ethical polyamory, open marriage, etc today, coupled with the growing depreciation for things like real estate while the divorce rate tells us traditional marriage is becoming untenable.

The polyamorous communes of our progressive descendants may be more robust emotionally and economically, as they assume those functions of the nuclear family without the constraints of "traditional" two-adult family units (cheating, disinterest, work/life balance, max 2 earners, etc). The traditional perspective believes it has a monopoly on social harmony and fertility because it adheres to strict, heteronormative, and patriarchal rules that appear to have "always worked"; the wager our this collective polyamorous future is to recreate those "village" conditions, even more primordial than the nuclear family

<comment><USER8> I am polyamorous, and I happen to know a lot of polyamorous people. "Reproducing above replacement level" is not, in my experience, a good description of the polyamorous community.

While you're right in that nuclear families aren't ideal, the more fertile subcultures are those where _extended_ families are valued. And these cultures are, by and large, religious and culturally conservative. The only issue there is the tendency for the children of those cultures to assimilate into the progressive mainstream; after all, that's what happened to _us_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm reminded of Gerard O'Neill's seventies vision of space habitats [https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on- lagrange/](https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/home-on-lagrange/) The artistic depictions tend to have a "suburb in a bottle" feel.

</comment><comment><USER11> > Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes.

A Radcliffe outreach symposium about genetics research included a sketch of the history of the field. Someone asked where the dramatic innovation was coming from. It was clear they _really_ wanted an answer of Kuhn-revolution changes in perspective leading to better questions. They were notably unhappy with the answer that, no, it was mostly technological economics. Advancing tech (sequencing, PCR), dropping costs by orders of magnitude, changed the questions we could afford to pursue.

</comment><comment><USER12> > And yet zeppelins were flying in 1900; a year before, in New York City, the > first pedestrian had already been killed by an automobile. Was the notion of > air travel, or the thought that the car was going to change life on the > street, really so beyond envisioning—or is it merely the chauvinism of the > present, peering with faint condescension at our hopelessly primitive > predecessors?

I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. It's a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 years.

<comment><USER13> > I heartily recommend doing the Carousel of Progress ride at Disney World. > It's a quite eye-opening look at how little life has changed in the last 150 > years.

I just say: "Internet".

<comment><USER12> For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing anyway. Netflix is better than cable, but not fundamentally different. (You can tell, because people don't even use a lot of the advances enabled by the internet. Business people still use phone calls more than video conferencing for example.) Refrigerators or industrial farming had a bigger impact on fundamentally restructuring peoples' lives than the internet.

You could still run most of the modern world without the internet, replacing it with fax and telephone (century old technology at this point). It would be painful but doable. Without refrigerators society as currently structured would collapse.

<comment><USER14> > For the most part, people use the internet to do things they were doing > anyway.

More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a button. People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a pound item.

The fact we can easily have a calculator, GPS system, access to most information in the world, have an audio and video conference with people from all around the world thanks to some small item we carry in our pockets is now taken for granted but it was missed by most scifi writers until the 90s.

<comment><USER15> > _More than Internet the combination of internet and smartphones. Someone in > Africa could get the advice of a doctor in the USA just with the push of a > button_

Not like they can afford that advice. Or that it would do them much without treatment. Outside of special upper class cases this just doesn't happen.

> _People have access to the biggest encyclopedia thanks to a less than a > pound item_

Which they mainly use to settle BS quarrels about who did what, and to serve as a replacement from actually studying something...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It seems like the article is just beating up a straw man. It doesn't define futurism, name any major futurologists, and seems to just rely on the stereotype that it's "flying cars" and "the Jetsons". It does mention The Net, and notes that ordering a pizza online is not so different to ordering a pizza on the phone. It conveniently misses the main story - that the main character has essentially no IRL social connections at all (as she telecommutes to work, only socialises online, and doesn't even know her neighbors) which is what allows her to be made a complete unperson when her online records are attacked. Maybe it's not Utopia (another futurist work) but it hardly ignores the cultural impact of technology.

Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or comedy with fantastical sets and props. But even something as soft as Doctor Who (let alone the likes of Asimov, AC Clarke) often looks at culture (either how radically different it is, or how age-old problems remain). Then there's works like 1984 and Brave New World which were almost entirely about culture.

And it's not like The Jetsons ignored culture. It was deliberately a 1950s sit-com set in the far future, and was a follow-up to The Flintstones which was a 1950s sit-com set in the distant past. The fact that the original was a little conservative in its portrayal of culture might have had something to do with political environment (the Cuban missile crisis was just before it was written). I don't think it entirely ignored the possibility of social change, but was possibly trying to make some kind of statement about which economic system was really on the right side of history.

<comment><USER17> > Some science fiction (e.g. The Jetsons) is just a contemporary drama or > comedy with fantastical sets and props.

Or even modeled after age old stories. Like most writing recycles and reinterprets old material. I started to wonder what historic metaphors the Expanse relies on, what with ship travel taking months, pirates, colonies, the plague - but the opposite of slavery, with unconditional basic income. The gang "the Golden Bough" is a hint at Virgil's Aeneid, I learned today by coincident. It's not hard sci-fi at all. The sci-fi is kept to a minimum as much as the fantasy. That is, the fantastic elements should be kept to a minimum. Now I wonder what _that thing_ (not to spoiler) represents. Just a deus ex machina for sake of the story or a ring of ancient overlords?

<comment><USER18> Depends on what you focus. What makes it an intelligent story may be the consequences of ships traveling months, or consequences of UBI. What makes it both intelligent and sci-fi is why ships travel months, how do they travel, what particular technologies are imagined and how they solve the problems of space travel, why UBI is needed, that UBI is UBI and not slavery, etc.

Interpreting sci-fi stories as just normal stories with fantasy props robs them of half of their value.

<comment><USER17> as I said, ship travel on earth makes the same difference. The ship's propulsion is in the realm of fantasy, even.

<comment><USER18> Except everything about that travel is different. Distances, mode of travel (continuous thrust, flip&burn), time-lag for communication, range and length of combat - all different.

If you don't consider object-level descriptions as valuable in itself, then I don't think you'll find much enjoyment in science fiction (especially of works on the harder end of the scale).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Ain't futurism dead? Unfortunately?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_(disambiguation)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism_\(disambiguation\))

<comment><USER20> Futurism isn't dead, it just smells retro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Was [...] the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, > really so beyond envisioning

"Prediction #6: Automobiles will be cheaper than horses are today. Farmers will own automobile hay-wagons, automobile truck-wagons, plows, harrows and hay-rakes. A one-pound motor in one of these vehicles will do the work of a pair of horses or more. Children will ride in automobile sleighs in winter. Automobiles will have been substituted for every horse vehicle now known. There will be, as already exist today, automobile hearses, automobile police patrols, automobile ambulances, automobile street sweepers. The horse in harness will be as scarce, if, indeed, not even scarcer, then as the yoked ox is today." Dec 1900 [1]

I enjoy reading commentary about this set of predictions... to see how people misunderstand _the past_. Or _why_ something didn't happen.

Take horses. One commentary says, 'no, wrong, horses were cheaper than cars are today'... and compares only purchase price, being unfamiliar with stabling. Another claims horses were more environmentally friendly than cars... forgetting that horse fodder was once a primary import of cities, their waste a primary export, and that it and carcasses once decorated streets. A major use of horses was... shipping fodder for horses. And I fuzzily recall an SV person giving a talk at Stanford, arguing you can't predict the future (sigh), and dissing the article in general, and the horse prediction as 'they thought horses will become _extinct_ \- silly them'. When they didn't say extinct; and some commercial breeds are; and given the change of urban horse populations (from like cars, to like giraffes), a non-technical "extinct" wouldn't have been wrong.

Unfamiliar with the past; inattentive to the present; and lackadaisical in thought; we watch the future arrive, and find it unexpected. There's a surprise.

Perhaps VR ("so this is what it was like... oh, _that 's_ weird"), and AR ("overlay the past on the present"[2]) will help.

[1] "What may happen in the next hundred years" (Watkins; 1900; _The Ladies Home Journal_ ) as jpeg: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elf...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0c/John_Elfreth_Watkins_Ladies_Home_Journal_Predictions_1900.jpg) ; as text: [http://yorktownhistory.org/wp- content/archives/homepages/190...](http://yorktownhistory.org/wp- content/archives/homepages/1900_predictions.htm) [2] Old photos overlaid on new: Zoltán [https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra](https://www.facebook.com/ablakamultra) [https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/7215762614911821...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsultan/sets/72157626149118210/) ; assorted [https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=i...](https://www.google.com/search?q=then+and+now+composite&tbm=isch)

</comment><comment><USER21> Can this article be read without enabling tracking?</comment>


Optimizing Data Transfer for Web(GL) Applications (using PNG) - <AUTHOR> http://cg.alexandra.dk/2012/11/26/webgl-tutorial-optimizing-data-transfer-for-webgl-applications/#more-1386

<comment><AUTHOR> Changed the title because imho this can be used for more types of Web Applications.</comment>


Chromium Blog: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change - <AUTHOR> http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/more-about-chrome-html-video-codec.html <comment><USER2> I've been trying to refrain from commenting on these stories the last few days, but oh well.

This whole debate is stupid and of course WebM exclusivity is the right way to go. Mozilla supports it, Chrome supports it, Opera supports it, Flash will be supporting it in the near future, meaning any of the other desktop browsers will support it.

The only reason people are complaining is that their iPhones have H.264 hardware acceleration. Well, dude, you'll just have to deal with software decode for some videos. The world does not revolve around iOS, no matter how much you want it to.

There is no good reason to support H.264 -- WebM provides roughly equivalent features and quality and MPEG-LA will be out for blood ever more as the clock ticks down on H.264 patents.

Everyone knows that there is no valid argument here for supporting H.264 other than "but... that'll decrease the battery life on my iPad or iPhone! :(". That's life, man; technology moves forward and old things get obsoleted, even mind-blowingly shiny things made by Apple.

I find the pointless hipster-fanboy whining to be pretty grating, personally.

<comment><USER3> Ignoring the cost in ignoring the revenue from millions of iOS users, let me focus instead of the looming legal question of WebM. If Google were to indemnify WebM users (sites who encode in WebM, developers who release decoders, OEMs who release hardware decoders), I would be much more willing to embrace WebM. As is, there is a very cogent argument to be made that the MPEG- LA group has already suggested that some of their patents may be encapsulated in WebM and users could be opening themselves up to lawsuits as co-defendants with Google. H.264 isn't free, but it's a known cost and licensing from MPEG- LA indemnifies you from any legal costs that might be associated with patent trolls popping up to sue you to death.

<comment><USER2> This point has already been discussed a lot, but I'll just review it quickly for you.

Basically, if you use any software at all, you can't go around living your life in constant fear of patent threats. WebM is probably safer than most because you have a big entity to fight most of your battle for you, presuming such a battle ever materializes.

Of course it's possible that MPEG-LA will be angry to see their H.264 revenue stream run consistently drier and sue in hopes of retaliation and a declaration that all WebM users must pay MPEG-LA royalties anyway. There's no guarantee that this will happen, however, and that MPEG-LA hasn't made an attempt to "nip this in the bud" demonstrates that they may not be all that certain they have a case here.

Google released WebM explicitly to circumvent the restrictions with H.264 so I suspect they did their due diligence and deviated from the H.264 patents in the necessary ways, but as above, there's nothing you can do if you irritate a group that has money and lawyers and wants to try their hand at milking something out of you. That's a general fact of life whether you use WebM or not.

If you're really worried about the FUD MPEG-LA puts out to scare you into paying protection money, then I guess you are free to pay that, if it makes you feel happier. But "Google shouldn't promote free standards because it might make someone angry and then they might sue you" is just not a very solid argument -- we can't refuse to do anything because someone might sue us. There will always be vultures out there, and we can't stop progress because of them.

<comment><USER4> Why would Google do their due diligence and not share it? MPEG-LA has detailed very clearly where each patent claim applies to the H264 spec.

Google owes it to its users to go through the MPEG-LA document and do at least one sentence explaining why WebM doesn't infringe each point. It would be a month exercise for a dev and product manager, but well worth it.

<comment><USER5> It ccurs to me that there's one possible motive for Google doing what it's doing that isn't purely cynical -- it may want the MPEG-LA to sue it now and reach some kind of settlement than wait a few years and ambush it.

<comment><USER4> The problem with that is that MPEG-LA's licensors can sue more than once.

In fact if I was MPEG-LA I'd do exactly that. I'd work with my licensors to ensure not everyone sue at once, but rather do it all in succession. Literally have WebM in courts everyday for a decade. And remember, only one licensor need win, and they don't have to grant WebM RAND terms. They could just come right out and say, "take it off the market". And since there's no indemnification, they could in theory even go after end-users of phones, although not likely.

Of course the same can be done against H264, but it appears far less likely.

But a "flush out the enemy" strategy doesn't seem likely given the raw number of patents and licensors associated with H264.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What I find funny is that half the Internet was complaining when Google announced to support H.264 in the first place when, clearly, supporting nothing but open formats was the right way to go (see Mozilla's decision to only support theora)

And now that Google is removing H.264 support again, half the Internet is, again, up in arms about the decision, using the same arguments as before.

Well, I guess this time it's the half of the Internet that wasnt complaining last time :-)

<comment><USER7> There was no WebM back then. The only alternative was Ogg Theora (even before 1.1 improvements IIRC), which Google didn't consider as suitable alternative.

Google doesn't have RMS's consistency on the matter. They balance practicality with idealism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If Google really wants to force WebM adoption they need to go "all-in". Set a deadline for pulling all h.264 videos from YouTube and force Apple and Microsoft to support the WebM standard.

I know that sounds worse than what they're doing but hear me out. Right now they're creating an environment where everyone will have to do twice the work to support HTML5. That's not good for anyone.

So if they're insistent on making WebM the standard they need to pull out the big guns and force Apple and Microsoft to capitulate. It'll be bitter and nasty but at the end we'll get a standard out of it and not a fragmented mess.

<comment><USER9> This "twice the work" argument was clearly addressed by the post. Firefox has a much larger market share than Chrome and has already clearly stated they will not support h.264. If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was Firefox and Google has just decided to support them in it.

And using their position as owner of YouTube to force h.264 out before WebM is ready would just hurt YouTube and make everyone with a mobile device made prior to WebM decoders being included (assuming that gains momentum) unable to watch YouTube videos.

<comment><USER10> > If anyone created a problem of having to do "twice the work" it was > Firefox...

Huh? As I understand it, H.264 was never an option for Firefox due to the patent encumbrance and licensing fees they would incur for distributing it.

The people who chose to use H.264, despite knowing that the second most popular browser wouldn't support it, made twice the work for _themselves_.

<comment><USER11> There were three options.

One was to build in explicit support for h.264 in Firefox and for Mozilla to pay the MPEG-LA ~$5million/year in licensing fees.

Another was to punt to the operating system and let gstreamer/directmedia/quicktime do the decode. Even though it would have been without cost to them, Mozilla chose not to do this as part of their moral stand against h.264. This was why they were so sharply criticized.

The third option was to let the Firefox Flash plugin do the decoding, which is what we have today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not sure why Google is getting so much hate. I would direct it at the following instead:

\- MPEG-LA

\- Firefox

\- Opera

I'm not sure what everyone expected here. There was no way that h.264 would be the standard format for the video tag.

This is one of many moves to push WebM forward as the undisputed standard. It's been less than 1 year since public announcement of WebM, and Google IO is around the corner in May '11. Expect more positive news on the WebM front.

There are 3 major arguments left standing against WebM

1) h.264 is better than vp8

2) prevalent hardware support for WebM

3) iOS

Would anyone really be that surprised if 2 of the 3 are addressed within the year?

</comment><comment><USER13> H.264 is just not going to work for web video, even as a defacto standard. Firefox will never support it and it prevents any small time player from entering the browser game down the road.

It's also a serious risk for big corps who don't have a license. Keep that in mind when you criticize Google. You're asking them to expose themselves to liability (or pay huge license fees).

If we're going to the trouble of phasing in a <video> tag that will take years to become viable, we might as well throw in a properly unencumbered codec that will also take years to become viable. Why bother with <video> if it's just going to go rotten as soon as it gains critical mass and the patent trolls pounce?

Nothing critical is breaking today, we're just going to have to wait a bit longer to play with the shiny new video tag, which is well worth it to have it done properly. Just be glad that one of the tech megacorps is pushing for standards and freedom as part of their business plan. Usually it's the other way around.

</comment><comment><USER14> This seems to work under a bit of a hazy assumption that there needs to be a "baseline" video codec. The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the dawn of the web.

If using a baseline format was their real argument they wouldn't be supporting a patent encumbered MP3 format for the audio tag, same as Firefox.

<comment><USER15> >The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the dawn of the web.

IE's historically poor support for PNG is probably the main reason so many sites still use GIFs where PNGs would be better. (Edit: And for that matter, as others have pointed out here, PNG was invented because the owners of the GIF patents threatened to sue the entire Internet.) Browser support for TIFF is an inconsistent mess.

In the case of the img tag, the most common browsers all supported two common formats pretty well (JPEG and GIF), so those two formats became the de-facto baseline image formats organically.

I think the situation with video is similar. If Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (the influential browsers used mainly by the early-adopter, techie crowd) all support one specific codec for HTML5 video, that will become the de-facto baseline video format organically.

<comment><USER16> TIFF itself is an inconsistent mess :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure what Google's motivations are but they are taking a huge risk here. If WebM gets a strong patent challenge, or isn't widely adopted/supported for other reasons, then Google is going to demonstrate their ability to pick the wrong horse in a very high profile way. It will be interesting to see what type of fallout that creates. Imagine a new world where Google, with all of its power, cannot influence the future of the web? I think that would have some major ramifications.

</comment><comment><USER18> I just don't get why my reaction should be different for WebM than it was from OpenXML. A "standard" controlled my one company is not something I think I can trust.

</comment><comment><USER19> When are they going to remove MP3 support from the audio tag?

<comment><USER2> Never. Google is not actively attempting to promote Vorbis or non-MP3 technologies at the moment. It'd be silly to waste resources doing that as MP3 patents are nearing their end-of-life. MP3 is already a lost battle and the patents have so little life left in them that it's not worth trying to squeeze what can be gotten out of that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> FYI, the person in charge (Mike Jazayeri) previously worked at Microsoft. I am not suggesting anything, just find it is quite interesting.

<comment><USER21> It's almost like employment is some sort of contract instead of some sort of religion.

<comment><USER20> I think it is interesting to think how a person's past (work) experience may influence the person's current thinking and judgement. Nothing else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has Google donated the patents they hold encompassing WebM to the public domain?

<comment><USER23> No, but the WebM license includes a perpetual, royalty-free patent license: <http://www.webmproject.org/license/additional/>

The patent license is irrevocable unless you file a suit against VP8 users claiming that VP8 violates your own patents. (This is a common clause for open-source patent grants; basically it means that Google can still use its patents "defensively" as a deterrent against other patent suits, but it can't use them in an "offensive" first-strike.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just when I thought there was a chance that this topic would get a break on HN. I guess I appreciate the link, if Google hadn't tweeted about it (I'm assuming they will) I probably wouldn't have seen this link.

Their answers are right, but it's the answers that aren't present, that are more telling. They don't address why they're removing it, why they chose to do it now, or whether or not they'll be consistent across their platforms. In my opinion, those are the only questions worth asking.

Their answers about H.264 having little adoption with the <video> tag and about having to dually encode with the current HTML5 video scene anyway is spot on. WebM gets you native playback in every major browser but IE, with Flash fallback working in IE. There actually is a day, very soon that, Flash assisted, anything will play WebM.

Of course, hardware adoption is still a huge question mark which I noticed Google also failed to discuss further in this post.

<comment><USER25> Are you saying Safari doesn't count as a "major browser"?

<comment><USER4> And lets be clear Safari on the desktop isn't the interesting one. Its the iOS devices. The iOS devices won't have Flash to fallback on either. So basically every iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch won't be able to watch your WebM videos AT ALL. There is no fallback, unless you encode to H264.

Now maybe you can say that in this new HTML5 web world mobile Apple devices are irrelevant. I personally think you'd be wrong.

H264 is the only codec that will generally be supported on every device, either directly or by Flash. From Chrome to Firefox to iOS to IE.

<comment><USER26> If Youtube goes WebM/flash only, iOS will support WebM, period. Not being able to watch youtube videos would be like the Flash noise of a year ago, but worse, as there's no reason _not_ to support WebM.

<comment><USER4> Apple and Jobs aren't shy about saying, "Nope, not doing it". Especially with those they view as enemies and trust me, Google is their arch enemy now, much moreso than Microsoft.

A big reason they may not do it is backwards compat on HW accleration. They have a working solution on all devices today (H264). They're not likely to want to screw their old customers over a codec they aren't particularly fond of that was rammed down their throat by Google.

Here's what I'd do if I were Apple, host my own video service, that serves H264 or Flash. MS and Apple throw their marketing weight and services around that (their various products auto upload to this new service). Now all iOS devices can play this video AND so can everyone else. YouTube dies a MySpace like death.

If YouTube tries that I really think they may be sealing their own fate.

To put it another way, people are NOT going to give up their iOS devices. But they will use a different video service.

<comment><USER27> If YouTube and all online video is WebM, then iOS will have no way to play 99% of videos (no flash remember). Apple can't afford for ipad to be "the device that doesn't play videos"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> let's all acknowledge this controversy for what it is: an apple vs. google popularity contest. and with that said: suck it apple. suck it long, and suck it hard.

sent from my iPhone.</comment>


Swiftype Raises $13M - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/05/swiftype-series-b/

<comment><USER2> It's been a fun ride these last two years. I'm excited to see (and help build) what comes next.

We're hiring, obviously. I'm happy to talk to anyone about working at Swiftype. My email is easy to find.

<comment><USER3> Do you hire any remote positions? I think I may have seen a posting or two on weworkremotley. Any bonus points for search backgrounds?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't currently hire remotely, but we do offer relocation assistance. Plenty of bonus points for IR backgrounds, too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just installed it for my blog. [http://oonwoye.com](http://oonwoye.com). It's Looking great.

I'd love to give credit but I do not want to tamper with my footer code before I break something.

I would not mind if it is made part of the plugin code that way people will not be "forced" to withhold credit.

<comment><USER5> Yep, we installed it for [https://eaternet.io](https://eaternet.io) – restaurant health inspection scores. Looks beautiful.

I usually do a manual installation of Sphinx Search or something similar, and do all the tuning myself. But for this project, we're using Heroku and total PaaS-based development. Swiftype was a great drop-in solution. It's been excellent, and as a fast as a well tuned Sphinx implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats!

Swiftype is the kind of product that you install once and then forget it because it just keeps working as you would expect. It's basically a good one :)

</comment><comment><USER7> Congrats Matt and Quin! Scribd alums killing it.

</comment><comment><USER8> So happy for Swiftype. I hope they can take on the Oracle Endeca's of the world and continue to provide an amazing service.

</comment><comment><USER9> Excellent product - glad to see them do well. Used them for a couple clients can definitely recommend.

</comment><comment><USER10> What a phenomenal product! Keep doing amazing work guys

</comment><comment><USER11> Congrats Quin!</comment>


Support Neovim - <AUTHOR> https://salt.bountysource.com/teams/neovim

<comment><USER2> $7500 is considered a full time salary? Obviously, I have the wrong job because this is a lot more than what I make.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2450](https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/2450)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What tool do you use to track investments? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I can recommend "Portfolio Performance" [https://www.portfolio- performance.info/portfolio/](https://www.portfolio- performance.info/portfolio/) [https://github.com/buchen/portfolio](https://github.com/buchen/portfolio)

</comment><comment><USER3> Personal capital app has almost all the needed features, and would be perfect if not for their broken business model where they constantly try to upsell you on managing your money.

<comment><USER4> I've heard that if you listen to their pitch once, they'll stop bothering you. I think I also saw a setting on their page about opting out of that.

Personal capital is quite good, and my only real complaint is that it keeps asking me to type in a code from my phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My investments are in two places: Betterment and Vanguard. So I either use Personal Capital to aggregate them all, or just check individually. Since all my investments are long term and index funds, I don't check often.

</comment><comment><USER6> I use a custom email service I made with interactive brokers, investing.com charting, and Interactive brokers account management

</comment><comment><USER7> Google Sheets, =googlefinance() function

<comment><USER8> I have same approach.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Got hired to build a site/ what should I do now besides give a proposal? - <AUTHOR>

I have zero idea on what to do in order to make it a legit job as a freelancer.<p>Any ideas on contracts or something? any help would be fantastic <comment><USER2> I am a lawyer.

I have hired freelancers to build websites.

The first rule of deals like this is to not over-engineer stuff.

If this contract is for under $1,000, create some arbitrary project milestones. Get some money up front whether you quote a fixed price or hourly. (Hint. Don't quote hourly.). Get another payment midway through. Leave about 20% at the back end when you deliver.

You get cash up front because it is a psychological test of your customer. The way your customer responds when you say "Give me $100x now" is the way you will be treated forever. If there is negotiation, delay, etc. that is what you will experience forever. You have been warned. You will ignore the warnings. You will experience pain. You will learn. :-)

Make the milestones things that you control. Do not tie it to customer approval or decision. Sometimes people procrastinate. That delays your payment.

The contract can be simple. Bullet points. Signed by both sides because you're not going to sue if they stop paying you. And if they stop paying you then you are going to stop work.

The value of WIP should be something you can walk away from in order to fire a bad customer. This is your psychological threshold. Start playing with the idea that you only put forward enough work so they owe you $1,500. It will hurt to walk away but you won't die. And if you walk away from someone in this circumstance you are avoiding far worse results. The best decisions are sometimes the jobs you didn't take on. But we make mistakes so the second-best decisions are the assholes we fired quickly.

Welcome to owning your own life. :-)

EDIT: I guess I should mention that I follow this philosophy in my business with six-figure jobs. It isn't for small jobs only.

</comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations on your win. First off, I am by no means an attorney so... You can probably find some sample contract templates via a Google search. Critical to your success though you will want to make sure that no matter what you cover at least the following: (1) timeline to completion; (2) payment terms as far as milestones and when payment is to be made and what happens if payment is not made on time or within a grace period; (3) the deliverables and timeframe for them; (4) what the client's responsibilities are (will they pay for any photos, licensing of plugins, what content they need to provide, and payment obligations; (5) I would add a clause that final copyright and/or files will not be turned over to the customer until final payment is received and cleared. Depending on the customer all of this can be something as simple as a Word document just spelling everything out that both sides agree to. If you plan to move full on with freelancing I would suggest hiring an attorney to draft up a simple contract that you can easily amend with the above details on a customer by customer basis. It may cost you a couple hundred dollars, but can be a lifesaver down the road should you run into that one customer (and the chances that will happen are pretty good if you freelance full-time).

</comment><comment><USER4> IANAL but.

Definitely get something in writing, as specific as possible in terms of what's expected, and when, and what's to be owed and when. Get an advance if possible, but DO NOT give up control of anything until you have money in the bank. I'm currently sitting on about a thousand dollars' worth of work for clients who have either disappeared or conveniently forgotten my invoices this year. Don't be stupid like me and do work for people you know without deadlines - it's a business, so treat it like a business.

Also, good luck.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you really need a formal contract? Couldn't an email trail documenting the requirements, scope and fees be enough? I am trying to understand the need for formal contracts as recently I have been taking on more and more consulting projects.

My projects are typically high value and short term. I never ask my clients for a formal contract/NDA etc neither do any of my clients. After our phone conversations, I typically summarize the discussion in an email. I prefer to have most of our communication via email after the initial phone discussions. Only safeguard I take is with the new clients. I typically request shorter engagements (< $5K) with $1K-2K as advance payment which all new clients to date have complied.

I find that keeping things informal (avoiding or minimizing legalese) keeps my clients comfortable working with me and better relationships. May be it depends on clients, mine tend to be small investment firms (few partners) who most probably care less about legal stuff and more about value they are getting.

</comment><comment><USER6> Although I have never used it, you should check out: [http://www.shakelaw.com/](http://www.shakelaw.com/)</comment>


Mark Cuban offers to pay SEC lawyers to speed up the investigation against him - <AUTHOR> http://abovethelaw.com/2010/10/mark-cuban-wants-to-pay-government-attorneys-to-get-off-their-ass/ <comment><USER2> He can't expect it to actually happen, so presumably his aim is to give the impression that he's confident of winning the case (and, I hope, to create a little entertainment - I sure found it bloody hilarious.)

<comment><USER3> Keep in mind that this is the same guy that responds to NBA fines by donating a matching amount to charity. Also, after getting fined for claiming a referee "wasn't fit to run a Dairy Queen", he worked at a Dairy Queen for a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So how _do_ you organize legal cases with over 66,000 pages of paperwork? I know that blowing cases up to this size is standard operating procedure, but I'm curious how it is handled in practice.

<comment><USER5> This is tiny, I'm sorry to say! E-discovery requests now yield millions of documents as a matter of routine. Mrs Browl works for a company in this sector, though I'd rather not say which one (it isn't mentioned in this thread though, and yes, most software in this area is hideous).

This is the industry reference that everyone more or less agrees on: <http://edrm.net/>

Essentially one side can request any and all data concerning people/places/events in the case, though they have to specify (loosely) what they want and why, and what format they want it delivered in - some want native files, some PDFs, some TIFF images, some even want paper.

Typically attorneys of both the plaintiff and defendant work through the terms of a court order, then the defendant's lawyers do a big data collection with the aid of forensic specialists, possibly supervised by the plaintiff's attorneys. This can be as disruptive as an IRS audit, but across the entire company - engineering, sales, business development, finance, executive suite, you name it. Assume everything will be collected, and I do mean _everything_ : the idea is to get a snapshot of all relevant data that was available on the date the court granted the motion. Many firms are now moving towards just archiving everything ahead of time to avoid disrupting operations. Also, that makes it much easier to manage as a rolling process for both sides later. As well as the original files, there's a giant database of all textual content (including transcriptions of audio/video) and case-specific legal metadata referencing the source material.

The plaintiff isn't entitled to see all of this stuff, but is entitled to know it has been preserved as evidence whose completeness can be verified legally, so everything's numbdered and tracked from here on. Then the defendant's lawyers go through looking for a) anything that could fall within the scope of the court order, b) what they think the Plaintiff is going to use against them in particular, and c) what the defendant is entitled to keep from them (eg the communications between the CEO and company counsel, or material which is just not relevant to the plaintiff's case).

They build (a) by doing wide-ranging database searches for each legal issue in the case, of which there can be many. Then a team of review attorneys looks at every document individually to see if it's responsive (relevant) to the issue and/or privileged (legally private), maybe adding a short description that will go into a list of evidence. In a big case like Google v. Oracle there can be over 100 attorneys doing this for months on end, factory style. They're usually contractors, not employees. 5 years ago this paid $60-75/hour or more; now it typically pays half that, and some companies pay as little as $15/hour. The job is so basic that only minimal qualifications are required, so now a lot of material is sent to India; because a bunch of law schools got certified in the years before the financial crisis and many more exaggerated hiring stats for their grads, there's a huge surplus of JDs and far fewer jobs; a lot of law firms went bust in the crisis, and a lot more complain schools graduate too many theorists unprepared to actually practice law; and most of these grads are $1-200k in non-dischargeable debt for their student loans. Hence debt-ridden attorneys being offered $15/hour.

Naturally they aren't happy, and everyone is waiting to see if (more like when) a class action lawsuit gets filed against the whole legal education establishment. In the meantime, most law schools still charge at least $30k/year in tuition.

After the review team has classified everything to legal standards, the defendant's attorneys - the ones earning real money this time - then go through double and triple checking what's responsive, redact any information that might be privileged, and approving each document required for production to the plaintiff, they're all given another set of numbers and converted to the agreed-upon output format. They also (typically) approve lots more documents which look responsive but aren't and are safe to give away, so as to bury the plaintiff's attorneys in as much irrelevant data as they possibly can - because the plaintiff's lawyers _don't_ get access to this trove of metadata, just the bare document in digital or occasionally printed form.

Then the _other side_ puts all those into a big database of their own, hires a smaller bunch of review attorneys, and does essentially the same thing. Often the defendant has launched a countersuit against them in the meantime, and requests discovery of the original plaintiff's documents...this process sometimes takes a few years before the trial proper starts.

There are huge profits to be had, but lots of competition; also most law firms are conservative about technology. So it's not a fast buck.

<comment><USER6> I looks to me like we're reaching some kind of information singularity that will ground down the wheels of legislation any day now. After all, you can get a million documents with the click of a mouse to presumably support your case. But you'll still have to comb through them in order to get to the good stuff and automation will only help so much with that. In the end it boils down to human analysis.

<comment><USER5> Arguably we're at or even past that point in some respects. I'm very interested in law (as you can probably tell) and the more I study the more I feel that clarity predicts quality. If anyone in the Bay Area or beyond wants to have recurring discussions about interesting research avenues I'd be delighted.

Right now most vendors compete on volume processing and retrieval speed, which are very important - deadlines in this field are not targets, but legal obligations, and inaccuracy or failure to perform is a quick path to ruin. But I have a growing wishlist of less obviously commercial things that should exist already but don't. I'm more interested in studying law than researching what's hot in semantic modeling, text parsers and so on...but thee's a ton of interesting possibilities and vast public domain datasets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe the SEC should counter by saying that they will take his money to make their entire operation faster -- his case will be processed faster, along with everyone elses!

</comment><comment><USER8> The ammount of paperwork is astounding. Make simpler, better rules instead of just more regulations!

<comment><USER9> Good point, make that into a 55k page recommendation and attach it to a morality bill, then congress will look at it.

<comment><USER10> If by "look at it" you mean "ignore it and vote based upon the title of the bill, its nominal purpose, which party proposed the bill, and how the party whips say to vote on it"...then yes, Congress will "look at it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't see why it wouldn't make sense. As long as it's handled in a careful way. You can pay extra to expedite all kinds of government services, why not SEC investigations?

<comment><USER12> It creates a conflict of interest for the attorneys. It sets a precedent that wealthy people can receive faster treatment from the SEC. Of course, the SEC tends to investigate people who have made large amounts of money through potentially illegal means, so this may not be an issue. However, it also provides less incentive for the SEC to move quickly on other cases. If the SEC can accept money in exchange for speeding up the process, they are now one step away from slowing down or drawing out the whole process as a means for extorting money.

<comment><USER13> "SEC tends to investigate people who have made large amounts of money through potentially illegal means"

I suspect it is illegal to accept illegally-obtained money. Therefore, if Mark was found guilty, the staff cannot be paid. Which also gives incentive to not find him guilty, resulting in a conflict of interest. IANAL, though.

<comment><USER5> No, his staff are still owed unless they're complicit. Are you going to raid his janitor for happening to sweep the wrong floor? Same concept.

<comment><USER14> Your parent meant the SEC staff, not Mark Cuban's staff.

<comment><USER5> D'oh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If Cuban can draw some attention to the SEC's chronic, deliberate under- funding, more power to him.

Congress has for years siphoned off the majority of the fees the SEC collects. They raise enough revenue to do significantly more than they have (whether, politically, they would ever be allowed/enabled/encouraged to, is another matter). But Washington gathers it up and wastes (err, spends) it elsewhere. [1]

A few years ago, there was a lot of hoopla and excitement over the SEC's "receiving" additional funding for 100 more attorneys to prosecute investigations and regulatory proceedings (100, IIRC). Last I checked (earlier this year), SEC management was still "optimistic" that that additional funding would soon be showing up. (My resulting impression after that conversation was, 'yeah, RSN (Real Soon Now)'.)

[1] This is off the top of my head (or out of my *ss), but I seem to recall a few years ago seeing SEC fee and whatnot revenues quoted as being in the $600 million range, while their annual budget was set at around $100 - $110 million. Maybe someone else here will have better knowledge of this.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm not up on this case at all. Any other thoughts as to Cuban's motives here?

<comment><USER17> the procedural history of cuban's case is somewhat confusing. there are actually two ongoing suits right now.

one is the insider trading lawsuit. the sec's suit against cuban was dismissed by a district judge in dallas for failure to state a claim (even if all the facts accused were true, they still wouldn't be enough to support a conviction of cuban). however, the court of appeals overturned that on appeal and sent the case back to the district court to keep going on the case. that happened relatively recently. the basic issue is whether cuban agreed to keep confidential the information he received.

not long after the sec sued cuban, cuban sued the sec in district court in washington dc based on the freedom of information act (foia). this is the case being discussed in the article. he wants documents the sec used in its investigation of him and other documents. presumably cuban would get ahold of the relevant documents as part of the discovery process in the first lawsuit, but perhaps cuban sought some pr benefits of looking like he was going on the offensive and perhaps he thought he could learn more about what the sec had on him to prepare for the first litigation. the gist is that the sec acted in bad faith by withholding relevant documents from cuban.

there was some discussion about whether the sec was stalling in the hopes that they'd get an exemption to foia provided by congress, but i believe obama repealed that provision in early october. cuban has been pretty brash this whole time, and as a matter of law, it's clearly not an open and shut case. the bravado i find somewhat embarrassing because it's pure grandstanding -- no court would ever grant his request (although judge walton is known as a bit of a renegade). as a matter of litigation strategy, i don't see much benefit to what cuban is doing here. the sec isn't going to back down and has been quite dogged about pursuing the case against cuban. i don't see any advantage in terms of litigation strategy. seems like pure pr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Mark Cuban is my hero. This guy has balls and he's not afraid to use them.</comment>


Tell the TSA 'Don't touch my junk' – here's how - <AUTHOR> http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/22/5510440-tell-the-tsa-dont-touch-my-junk-heres-how <comment><USER2> Hey it if weren't for TSA pat-downs I wouldn't have a social life.</comment>


Stats from "I will build your prototype" - <AUTHOR> http://chris-granger.com/blog/view/iwbyp-stats

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me know if there's anything else you guys would like to know about!</comment>


Dubset makes Sony the first major label legalized for remixing - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/22/dubset-makes-sony-the-first-major-label-legalized-for-remixing <comment><USER2> Better title: "Dubset advances the major labels' goal of utterly obliterating the concept of transformative fair use"

Next we need "Wordset", a service that allows authors to monetize any time people use three words together that have previously appeared in a published work. Not even satire - see "Bridgeport Music, Inc. et. al. vs. Dimension Films et. al.".</comment>


$39k in eBook Sales Part 2: Design, Testimonials, and Traffic - <AUTHOR> http://nathanbarry.com/39k-ebook-sales-part-2/

<comment><USER2> Let me excerpt a really, really important part:

 _I got the email list up to 800 subscribers at the time of launch. My goal was 1,000, and I didn't quite make it. That list converted really well. I'm not sure the exact numbers, but after sending out an email to that list announcing the book I had $1,000 worth of sales in 10 minutes._

If you hypothetically know you have a product coming out, you _really_ want to start with a built-in fanbase rather than starting from zero. This counsels collecting emails early and keeping them warm by sending them things they will enjoy, then reminding them a few times prior to launch a) what it was you were doing again and b) why it is going to make their lives better, after it launches, which is happening in a week.

P.S. Already launched? That is no reason to not start an email list today, since you will eventually have something of mutual interest to say to people, so start getting their permission to say it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. It's amazing how well this can convert. For anyone wondering how to collect the emails, I found the simplest way is to write a very useful article or tutorial on your topic and have a signup link at the bottom. Pretty straight forward. You can also use the "free report" giveaway or something similar. I did this with a CSS3 course I put out last week.

It has taken me years to learn how important email is (and I'm just getting started).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is part 2 of me (Sacha Greif) and Nathan's podcast about eBook marketing. As usual, feel free to ask us questions. And here is a link to the HN discussion about part 1: <http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=4600394>

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I'm happy to answer any questions as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for taking the time to write the transcript!

Nathan, how did you get your first few sales? You stated that you "..released the book. Sales started coming in." Those first few sales seem to be the most difficult (I'm currently trying to market an eBook myself), and I'm interested to see how you achieved your first batch of sales prior to your HN post.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the prelaunch list of 800 signups was the most valuable. Other sources of traffic were my own blog, Twitter, and Reddit.</comment></comment>


Why do 0! and a^0 equal 1? - <AUTHOR> http://aperiodical.com/2014/02/why-do-0-factorial-and-a-to-the-0-equal-1/

<comment><USER2> The title filter ate the "!" in "0!" !

Correct title: "Why do 0! and a^0 equal 1?"

Alternative title: "Why do factorial(0) and a^0 equal 1?"

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed - I've returned and edited it, and the system kept the pling in the edit. Thanks for the reminder that I need to check what HN does to headlines.</comment></comment>