SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence in healthy blood donors during Covid-19 Milan outbreak - <AUTHOR> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20098442v1 <comment><AUTHOR> This study [1] published by Policlinico di Milano found that 4.6% of blood donors had anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgM/IgG antibodies at the start of the pandemic (February 24th).

See also these articles (in Italian):

\- [https://www.policlinico.mi.it/news/2020-05-20/1660/covid-19-...](https://www.policlinico.mi.it/news/2020-05-20/1660/covid-19-anticorpi- in-1-milanese-su-20-gia-settimane-prima-della-pandemia-la-conferma-in-uno- studio-del-policlinico-di-milano) \- [https://www.lastampa.it/cronaca/2020/05/20/news/il- coronavir...](https://www.lastampa.it/cronaca/2020/05/20/news/il-coronavirus- gia-diffuso-a-milano-alcune-settimane-prima-dell-epidemia-1.38868265)

[1]: [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20098442v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.11.20098442v1)

<comment><USER2> > 4.6% of blood donors had anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgM/IgG antibodies at the start of > the pandemic

Which would make sense. Inter Milano's player Romelu Lukaku was saying about a month ago that the vast majority of his teammates (23 out of 25) had already gotten the virus in January, and that for the Inter - Cagliari match (which was played on January 26th) one of his teammates had to be substituted off after only 25 minutes because he couldn't run anymore.

For whatever reasons Inter's officials didn't like his comments and reprimanded him, but it seems like Lukaku was closer to the truth than many would have liked to admit a month ago.

<comment><USER3> > For whatever reasons

Perhaps because he was making baseless claims about his teammates and tainting the reputation of the club. He should at least know that players being taken down by cold or flu is not unusual in football.

2014 Seven players are struck by 'flu symptoms': [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/germany/109...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/germany/10943357/Germany- hit-by-health-scare-as-seven-players-are-struck-by-flu-symptoms-ahead-of- World-Cup-quarter-final.html)

2017 Wenger fighting to contain outbreak: [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4296828/N...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-4296828/Now- Arsenal-players-hit-FLU.html)

Feb 2019 'Man flu'[0] sweeps through League Two club: [https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/47239534](https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/47239534)

March 2019 'epidemic' with eight players: [https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/football/8709002/poland- flu-e...](https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/football/8709002/poland-flu-epidemic- milik-piatek-bednarek/)

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

<comment><USER2> > He should at least know that players being taken down by cold or flu is not > unusual in football.

One could think so, of course, but then how does one explain the fact that when testing really started in Italy (end of February - actually early March for footballers, after the Juve - Inter match played on March 9th) not one football player from Inter tested positive, even though they were in what was even by then the center of the pandemic in Italy, Milano?

By contrast two Juve players (Dybala and Matuidi) tested positive immediately after March 9th, plus some other players from Firenze and Genoa. One of the only reasonable explanations would be that most (if not all) Internazionale players had already gotten the virus by then and had managed to get rid of it.

And I've heard of that "tainted" argument and for the life of me I couldn't understand it, being sick (or having been sick) doesn't taint anyone. It somehow reminds me of the infamous #milanononsiferma hashtag used by Milano's mayor (among others) at the end of February, people who were thinking that ignoring actual real stuff for fear of not "tainting" the city (in the mayor's case) would somehow make things better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Start is bad. February is two months after back computed patient zero is deemed to have existed in China. This is "infection demonstrated to exist in Italy before prior dates we believe"

<comment><USER5> > This is "infection demonstrated to exist in Italy before prior dates we > believe"

That is an unlikely hypothesis, given that we didn't see an exponential explosion in deaths, and people going to the hospital until February.

Either:

1\. The virus was for some reason less lethal before February.

2\. Only people who don't show symptoms were catching it.

3\. The serological studies are mostly finding false positives.

My money's on #3.

<comment><USER6> >That is an unlikely hypothesis, given that we didn't see an exponential explosion in deaths

The unmitigated doubling time of COVID-19 seems to be around 2.5 days. So if about 1% gets hospitalized and people noticed after 10 or so patients with the same symptoms (that's before any of them died, mind you) you'd need about 1000 people infected. To go from 1 infected person to 1000 takes log2(1000)=9.96 doublings. So if the doubling time is 2.5 that would be 25 days or over 3 weeks before anyone would notice.

Some of these numbers are a bit of a guess but I'm trying to show that "exponential explosion" can be very small and slow at the very beginning of an outbreak.

<comment><USER7> The variance in actual increase rate is probably way nosier with fewer subjects. I.e. in the beginning you can probably hover at a somewhat constant number of infected for a while before it takes off.

On average an infected person seems to spread it to 2-3 persons, but we don't know the variance. It could be something like 8/10 spread it to zero persons, 1 to 4 persons and 1 to 16 persons. With low number of infected that would make the increase very noisy. In fact, it has to be so, otherwise Covid19 would explode everywhere and not be more or less containable. It has to catch momentum or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> FTR, as the study was conducted on blood donors, it may not be representative of the whole population of the city. This suggests more than ever the need of extensive serological testing.

</comment><comment><USER9> The whole antibody testing looks totally unreliable to me. My wife was tested COVID-19 positive about 4 weeks ago. So was her boss at a different test location, so I assume the test was correct. Also she was ill with the typical symptoms. Meanwhile she has recovered and three days ago she had and antibody test and the result was negative, not even close to the threshold.

<comment><USER10> Do you happen to know which antibody test Was used? There are a number of different ones with very different specifications.

<comment><USER9> I was a test against IgG antibodies. The report does not mention the manufacturer of the test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games#Cont...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Military_World_Games#Controversies)

</comment><comment><USER12> So it started before they thought it did.

</comment><comment><USER13> The evidence is starting to stack up. Maybe the virus didn't come from China.

China was just the first to discover it.

If this is true, then all the Western countries took a collective dump on China, and accused them of spreading the virus.

Some theories and timelines so far:

1) July 2019, a lot of strange pneumonia cases were reported in Virginia. The symptoms sounds suspiciously like Covid19. Two people die. [1]

2) Three months later, on October 18, 2019, French athletes that attended the Military World Games in Wuhan reported testing positive for the Covid19 antibodies. They are muzzled, and told to not talk with reporters. [2]

3) December 16, 2019, The first documented hospital admission in China.

4) China investigates, and determines this is a new virus. They report it to the W.H.O. on December 31, 2019.

5) China checks past records, and determines an earlier infection was on November 17, 2019. [3] About a month before their previous first known case.

6) A New Jersey mayor tests positive for the antibodies, and claims he got sick in November 2019, a month before China detected their first known case. [4]

7) December 27, 2019, A woman in Seattle [5], with no travel history to China, who tested positive for the antibodies, claims she got sick two days after Christmas. This is 4 days before China reports the virus to the W.H.O. And three weeks before Seattle's first official case.

8) Jan 26, 2020, The Lancet theorizes that the virus did not originate from the seafood market. [6] Daniel Lucey asserts, "The virus came into that marketplace before it came out of that marketplace." Thus, this was not from Chinese people eating bats.

Conclusion:

We don't know anything for sure, but the W.H.O. needs to investigate those Virginia nursing home residents that got sick in July 2019, and test them for the coronavirus antibodies.

If, and this is a very big if, the virus did not originate from China, then, the western nations are going to have a very big egg on their faces. Especially after all their racist attacks against the Chinese people, for eating bats, and what not. And especially for demanding reparations of trillions of dollars in damages from China. Are they going to pay up instead? The mystery continues.

=====

[1] [https://abcnews.go.com/US/respiratory-outbreak- investigated-...](https://abcnews.go.com/US/respiratory-outbreak-investigated- retirement-community-54-residents-fall/story?id=64275865)

[2] [https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/athletes-at-world-military- gam...](https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/athletes-at-world-military-games-may- have-brought-coronavirus-to-europe/)

[3] [https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus- found.htm...](https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.html)

[4] [https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/new-jersey-mayor-believes- he-h...](https://nypost.com/2020/05/07/new-jersey-mayor-believes-he-had- coronavirus-in-november/)

[5] [https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/antibody-test- resu...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/antibody-test-results- of-2-snohomish-county-residents-throw-into-question-timeline-of-coronaviruss- u-s-arrival/)

[6] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood- market...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01/wuhan-seafood-market-may- not-be-source-novel-virus-spreading-globally)

<comment><USER14> The virus originated from chinese horseshoe bats. It can't just randomly teleport to some other country on the other side of the world to start an outbreak, before existing in human population of China.

<comment> nil-sec Well no, but also in the US there are research facilities working with Coronaviruses [1]. I am not advocating for this theory because there is zero credible evidence for it but there are scenarios that would make this theoretically possible.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4797993/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> So the question is what has caused increased deaths if there actually was an unusual increase compared to previous years at all? Was it something else, like a multiresistent hospital infection in nursing homes?

<comment><USER16> From the abstract:

> Conclusions: SARS-CoV-2 infection was already circulating in Milan at the > outbreak start.

It just means that the virus entered the region a few weeks or months earlier than thought so far (the study started on Feb-24), not that there have been COVID-19 waves in previous years.

This seems similar to the recent news that the first case in France was backtracked to December 2019, e.g. the virus was already spreading before the first cases were discovered:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-52526554](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-52526554)

<comment><USER17> If this is true, wouldn't that mean that the R is in fact not as high as we believe it is, because it was spreading for longer on a slower rate as opposed to spreading fast in a shorter time period? If we think that it is still highly infecious then the only other conclusion can be that we have a much larger population already immunonised?

<comment><USER18> Not necessarily. r0 can be much more reliably measured than severity. hospitalization and death rates give pretty clear picture of doubling time, but could represent wildly different percents of the overall infections</comment></comment></comment></comment>


An open source API for web scraping - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/owainlewis/falkor

<comment><AUTHOR> An example showing how to grab all the stories from the Hacker News homepage

[https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=https://news....](https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=https://news.ycombinator.com/news&q=td.title%20a)

</comment><comment><USER2> Title should probably contain 'Show HN:' ?

Very interesting though. Just tried scraping twitter and it works great: [https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=https://twitt...](https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=https://twitter.com/shit_hn_says&q=.tweet- text)

Edit: works great as long as there are no quotes, hashtags, or links in the tweets. Is it possible to include sub-elements?

So basically this is a DOM API in JSON. Simple, but I like it.

Any plans to add JSONP support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Thanks. Yeah I will add a ton of features over the next few days. JSONP should be an easy one. Feel free to add an issue in Github and I'll get it done for you.

Only really started hacking around on the idea the other day so early stages. Want to add filters so you can say "grab me only the text" or "grab me just the class names". Obviously another step would be to grab multiple elements in one request.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A better error message would be helpful. For example I tried to do: [https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=https://kodin...](https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=https://koding.com/Activity/Public/Liked&q=a), all I got was "Request failed"

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. I pretty much wrote this in an evening or two so haven't had time to refine it much. But yeah error messages will definitely be improved. It's because of the way URLs are handled in the underlying web app. Will be an easy fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cool idea. This could easily be extended to support something like a proxy pool; that way you can rate limit / rotate proxies for X domain globally at this server level. That way it's across all your projects, rather than having to do it on a per project basis.

Adding xPath support as well as CSS selectors would be a good addition.

<comment><AUTHOR> Will definitely do something with caching and rate limiting when I get some time. These queries are quite expensive so definitely needs a bit of work in those areas.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> An example query that extracts all the images from the Digg.com homepage.

[https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=http://digg.c...](https://falkor- api.herokuapp.com/api/query?url=http://digg.com&q=img\[src\])

</comment><comment><USER5> Pretty interesting. Wrote a web scraping api you can paste in to your browser and download results last year but took it down to work on another project. You can take look at what a url could look like.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140420162639/http://scrape.ly/](https://web.archive.org/web/20140420162639/http://scrape.ly/)

For example if you wanted the profile of authors of today's stories

        http://scrape.ly/s/{http://news.combination.com}
        {'ueoma87'}*{'next':'Next Page'}{'karma':'331',
        'username':'ueoma87'}

Would've returned all the profiles of each story's author today and yesterday and so on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. This looks really interesting. I may well borrow some ideas ; )</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would like to connect with people who do market research - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN,
If your role involves market research, I would love to talk to you.
If you know of a marketing analyst, I'm hoping that you can pass this message on as a favour - I'll owe you one. Either a beer or coffee.
Context: I'm building a customer analytics platform for small and medium-sized businesses and wanted to connect with marketing analysts in the industry to learn and get feedback on my product. <comment><USER2> Email in profile

</comment><comment><USER3> how can I reach you?

<comment><AUTHOR> would you have an email handy?</comment></comment>


Olympic bandwidth: On the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/08/digital_olympics_reach_stream_stats.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I also thought this might interest some people: the nbcolympics website went from 0 traffic to being the #31 most visited website during the olympic games: <https://www.quantcast.com/nbcolympics.com></comment>


Hacked emails reveal China's Internet propaganda machine - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/311832/hacked-emails-reveal-chinas-elaborate-and-absurd-internet-propaganda-machine/ <comment><USER2> It will be interesting to learn to what extent the USG does this. Certainly not at this scale or we would have already heard about it, but there have definitely been leaked US Army Intelligence reports which suggest it does go on to some degree.

I will say a far more common thing from the USG is seeing people edit Wikipedia pages, however those attempts are almost laughably unsophisticated (often being trivially traceable to the offices of the people they're editing).

I strongly suspect a certain controversial country in the middle east does it, as every time they come up in any discussion you get inundated with pro' people who have little posting history (or none) and who come across very unnaturally pro (like talking heads). I won't name the country since the same thing might happen here.

PS - I'm neither pro nor anti this middle eastern country, I've just noticed very unusual posting patterns when they're discussed. Particularly during large scale controversies (which seem to occur about once a year).

<comment><USER3> I'd be pretty surprised if the US employed people to do anything like this on domestic US sites at any scale. What would they post? Wouldn't a smart individual from a US site have detected this and shared, or a whistleblower have disclosed it?

That said, I'd be pretty unsurprised if we employed people to do it on specific, foreign sites in places like Iran, China, Syria, Lybia, etc. Monitoring + Posting + Commenting. That would be smart and part of normal intel gathering.

More interesting than the human commentary, however, would be bots running analysis on posts and comments, and then upvoting, downvoting, or spamming in the comments (with intent to ruin experience) based on content and sentiment -- allowing programatic and rule-driven propaganda effects.

<comment><USER4> >I'd be pretty surprised if the US employed people to do anything like this on domestic US sites at any scale. What would they post?

Call me a conspiracy nut, but now that social media is how most young people get their news, I wouldn't be surprised if the US gov paid people to post and promote bullshit fluff to keep people distracted from major events in the world. When those major stories do make it to the masses, there are people to comment about how it's a "non-issue" and "we need to focus on more important things" or that the US is doing what's necessary to protect its interests and the world's.

Just a couple examples:

All throughout the build up to the Manning trial, I distinctly remember most commenters on tech news sites supporting Manning. Upon conviction, I checked the comments on Ars Technica and the comments were overwhelmingly along the lines of "Let this be a sign to all future traitors.", "Lock HIM up and throw away the key!!" There was a comment about how suspicious the shift was, and the next three pages of comments were along the lines of, "How do we know YOU aren't working for someone?", "We never supported TRAITORS like YOU.", etc. It was bizarre.

The overwhelming coverage of The Interview days after the CIA torture report came out. People were outraged, but then every corner of the internet was plastered with patriotism and how we need to release some awful comedy to stick it to some dirt poor totalitarian state. Now people have forgotten about that movie, as well as the CIA's issues.

I also recall a huge amount of support for an invasion and increased funding of rebels in Syria back when the US government claimed Assad was using chemical weapons against his people. What shocked me was that the people most calling for war was liberal/feminist discussion circles. That all seems to be forgotten now that a group of rebels called ISIS is our enemy of the week.

<comment><USER5> If you are a conspiracy nut for not being surprised what am I? I would be surprised if they aren't. Because ... why wouldn't they? It would be effective and easy. We know the tech exists already, we know it's used around the world. It would be less illegal than the things we know they do.

<comment><USER6> In fact, it's known that there are organizations which do exactly this.

      Team Themis was developing a "persona management" system — a program,
      developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that
      allowed one user to control multiple online identities ("sock
      puppets") for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the
      appearance of grass roots support.  The contract was eventually
      awarded to another private intelligence firm.

[http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real- war...](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on- reality/?_r=0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how many private (i.e., non-governmental) groups in the U.S. use this practice, either for business purposes (e.g., Yelp and Amazon reviews, Twitter posts and responses, or popular and influential forums (such as HN!)), or political purposes.

On one hand, it's the 'Big Lie': People naturally doubt such deception is occurring until they see a smoking gun, and even then many deny it.

On the other, it is such an obvious, inexpensive way to drive public opinion, I'd be shocked if it wasn't widely used. Even paying U.S. minimum wage, you probably are paying under 50 cents/post. That's 10,000 comments in your favor for < $5K -- without knowing data on the influence of such things, it seems cost-effective compared to advertising. Imagine a local politician or a super- PAC doing it before an election in just one locality.

Also interesting: Many people I know think they can detect astroturfing when they see it. I'm sure that's true sometimes, but the astroturfers have more experience and are more sophisticated in their craft than we are -- they do it all day, every day. They know what makes something look credible, and you can see that discussed in the article.

EDIT: I just found this:

Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy by Edward T. Walker

 _Although 'grassroots' conjures up images of independent citizen organizing, much mass participation today is sponsored by elite consultants working for corporations and powerful interest groups. This book pulls back the curtain to reveal a lucrative industry of consulting firms that incentivize public activism as a marketable service. Edward Walker illustrates how, spurred by the post-sixties advocacy explosion and rising business political engagement, elite consultants have deployed new technologies to commercialize mass participation. Using evidence from interviews, surveys and public records, Grassroots for Hire paints a detailed portrait of these consultants and their clients. Today, Fortune 500 firms hire them to counter-mobilize against regulation, protest or controversy. Ironically, some advocacy groups now outsource organizing to them. Walker also finds that consultants are reshaping both participation and policymaking, but unethical 'astroturf' strategies are often ineffective. This pathbreaking book calls for a rethinking of interactions between corporations, advocacy groups, and elites in politics._

[http://www.amazon.com/Grassroots-Hire-Consultants- American-D...](http://www.amazon.com/Grassroots-Hire-Consultants-American- Democracy/dp/1107619017)

<comment><USER8> I will be sure to read the book that you suggested, as this topic is of great interest to me.

A few thoughts:

1\. Astroturfing has been the norm for a few years now-- probably more years than I suspect, but the biggest difference was pre-2011.

2\. Most people don't even have astroturfing on their radar, and if the public ever did get any ideas, you can be sure they would be astroturfed into actually believing that astroturfing is a legitimate marketing technique rather than repugnant lying.

3\. Astroturfing varies wildly in quality, and I'm sure that some people could spot the weaker campaigns-- the most recent major campaign that was weak was probably the pro-Russia astroturfing of Reddit during Russia's invasion of Crimea.

4\. The quality of astroturf is inversely proportional to the time and thus money it requires to produce. A cheap statement "X is great, support X" blasted into every topic is easy to spot, whereas custom tailored shilling and misdirection is often far more insidious.

5\. I'd expect that most governments engage in astroturfing and shilling heavily-- if not on their own population (which is extremely likely) then on other populations. As evidence, consider that Eglin AFB is the "most addicted to reddit" community. I'm not sure what to do about this other than call it out when I see it, which is woefully ineffective.

<comment><USER9> >Sure, the majority of sales happen in this timespan, but that doesn't mean someone intent on pirating the game will give up and pay just because it isn't available now.

I'm not really surprised that a base full of youngish men with a heavy tech background (its a test base for air planes) like reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the article

 _Zhanggong district is Ganzhou's administrative center and home to about 460,000 people._

 _"There are at least 5,000 districts this size or bigger," said Qiang Xiao_

Am I missing something here? Do districts in China overlap? The population in China is currently standing at around 1.357 billion [0] according to World Bank, United States Census Bureau. Quick math puts 5,000 * 460,000 at 2.3 billion.

The list of districts in China [1] is _quite_ long. And when sorting for 2010 population there are quite a lot above 500,000 but it certainly can't be 5,000. Must be a misquote.

[0] - [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=population%20china)

[1] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_in_China](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_in_China)

<comment><USER11> It never explicitly states that the "this size or bigger" refers to its population, it could be area.

<comment><USER10> Good point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It is amusing and fascinating that there is (as of this post) zero discussion of China's internet propaganda machine.

>"When transferring the attention of netizens and blurring the public focus, going off the topic is very effective."

</comment><comment><USER13> I find it alarming, this thread already mimicking a USSR disinformation campaign. See below "Israeli shills".

As usual, the HN crowd (or state propagandists) turn to whataboutism and pointing fingers than discussing the topic on hand. This really isn't the place for any political discussion, it is so biased and factually divergent, half the time the threads here do not even match the articles.

</comment><comment><USER14> > "Zhanggong district is Ganzhou's administrative center and home to about > 460,000 people. "There are at least 5,000 districts this size or bigger," > said Qiang Xiao, editor of China Digital Times (CDT), a news site affiliated > with the University of California Berkeley that first reported on the > emails."

So, this means that China is home to at least 2.3B people??? The math doesn't add up.

<comment><USER15> > It never explicitly states that the "this size or bigger" refers to its > population, it could be area</comment></comment>


Ghost blog hosting - <AUTHOR> http://matthojo.github.io/Ghost-Services/

<comment><USER2> plus one on the digital ocean integration, stood up www.mobileappstack.com in < 1 min . few tweaks for GA and strong ops node perf mon .</comment>


Show HN: A/B testing in two shortcodes with WordPress - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/scotchfield/ab-see

<comment><USER2> very nice, definitely going to play with it. Maybe someone like Unbounce will buy you out if this pops :)</comment>


Ask HN: Python's bidict - what's a good use case for this? - <AUTHOR> http://pypi.python.org/pypi/bidict/0.1.1

<comment><USER2> When you have a set of 1-1 data pairs that you want to be able to look up both ways, and you don't want to maintain two dicts, as described in the article's HTMLEntities example.</comment>


Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/04/19/darwin-a-genomics-co-processor-provides-up-to-15000x-acceleration-on-long-read-assembly/ <comment><USER2> > The long read technology comes with a drawback though – high error rates in > sequencing of between 15%-40%

These error rate estimates are _seriously_ outdated (the quoted number is from a 2015 paper but it was obsolete pretty much as soon as that paper was published). Long-read technologies are evolving rapidly, so this is important. The state of the art is working with error rates of at most 15% (but usually much less), which, after correction, go down below 8% [1].

This is crucial because it makes the difference between a successful and a failed assembly: 40% error rate essentially means that you need different algorithms to perform sequence assembly (as the article notes, error correction takes up "orders of magnitude" more time than actual assembly).

I'd therefore be curious how this Darwin setup performs against conventional, state-of-the-art sequence assembly with state-of-the-art long read sequencing data.

[1] [https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4060](https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4060)

<comment><USER3> Read page 8 [206] of this paper to see the numbers they're providing. The PacBio reads are listed at up to 15% error rate. Their experiments were synthetic data from 15-40% error rates.

A few comments:

1\. This was published in ASPLOS, not a comp bio journal, which should raise some eyebrows.

2\. As another commenter said, error correction requires a reference, either by alignment, kmer filtering, or consensus. However, this is usually part of any assembly pipeline.

3\. Like you said, they failed to compare to actual state of the art alignment tools. They do cite Canu, but they don't use it as their baseline. The issue here is that the current best long read assemblers use locality-sensitive hashing. The Canu paper even states that miniasm can produce a higher-quality assembly for CHM1 in 1/400 the CPU time (though their discussion of the table selectively ignores this fact). Considering that a combination of algorithm and implementation is able to provide a 400x speedup makes this result seem significantly less impressive, and that a comparison of CPU time is slightly unfair to miniasm considering how perfectly it threadscales, which would make the other tools look even worse by comparison. Additionally, for problems where you really need the improvement in performance, the GPU RAM limitations and communication overhead would likely incur significant penalties to their method. It's not simply a matter of how many reads a second you can process because it's a quadratic overlap problem.

<comment><USER2> Their 40% number comes from the paper I referenced (i.e. that's the one the Darwin paper references). I completely agree with your point 2. I'm not sure I agree with your first point: I think it's pretty reasonable for it to have been published in that venue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Serious question: if the processing problems are classified as NP, then couldn't that processing be outsourced to a blockchain? Why have miners solve for useless problems that have no long lasting impact like "number of zeros in a SHA string" instead of processing data such as this? I can easily see it being the case that the mining problem in a given blockchain could be based on real scientific problems that needs solving.

I'm looking for someone to help me understand why the above isn't possible.

<comment><USER5> I thought about this as well before, but the problem is that you don't want just ANY NP-problem: You want an NP problem (it doesn't even have to be NP- complete) that you can easily adjust the difficulty.

How do you adjust the difficulty on something like this?

Also, you always have to calculate the "hashes" of the blocks. I guess you could encode a block as a graph and it's "hash" could be the smallest path that visited all the edges, but how useful would that be?

When I looked into this in the past, I stumbled into Gridcoin[1], but I don't know how they deal with the difficulty/usefulness of the solutions.

[1]: [https://www.gridcoin.us/](https://www.gridcoin.us/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the link. I'll look into it!

> you can easily adjust the difficulty.

For Prime Factorization for instance, which like you say, isn't even NP- complete. You can easily adjust the difficulty by increasing the size of the number in question.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if that's completely true for prime factorization. There are numbers that are larger, yet easier to factorize.

For example, I think that a power of two, like 1024, is much faster to factorize than, let's say, 1001 (7 _11_ 13). (I'm not quite sure this example is true)

Here's a more detailed description: [https://mathoverflow.net/questions/249266/classes-of- numbers...](https://mathoverflow.net/questions/249266/classes-of-numbers-that- are-easy-to-factorize-using-classical-computers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There have been a lot of co-processors in the genomics and sequencing world. They have all failed for obvious business reasons. It's not even clear that any genomics problem that exists today can't be solved with conventional hardware. Most genomics programs reach a few percent of the capacity of the hardware, so I think more software tuning and design is the right approach.

<comment><USER7> I agree. The problem in genomics isn't how fast alignment is going, it is where to put the gobs and gobs of data.

The bottleneck in speed is how fast you can flip a DNA sequencer, which right now with an illumina Novaseq that bottleneck is a few days per run. That gives plenty of time to process each runs data on an HPC on current software for alignment and snp calling.

However, when each runfolder takes up 30Tb and you're flipping 20 runfolders a week. The scale of storage get large, fast.

<comment><USER2> That's why compression of sequencing data is becoming so important. CRAM is nowhere near the theoretical limit (CRAM achieves ~2x over BAM; commercial products currently achieve up to 6x).

(COI disclaimer: I work for such a company.)

<comment><USER6> It's not clear you want to store your sequence data maximally compressed unless you have it archived. If you're doing live work on the data, it's better to have it modestly compressed with a fast decompressor, and a good index so you can minimize your total access.

<comment><USER2> That's plausible but it turns out not to be true. Disk read latency is larger than the overhead of our decompression, even on fast storage media. As a consequence, better compression actually leads to (slight) performance improvements. Additionally, genomic data is often accessed via relatively slow network storage on clusters or, worse, via the internet. Increasing throughput trumps all other considerations here. You're right concerning random access and indexing, of course.

<comment><USER6> I counter your argument: I have constructed systems that did this. Disk read latency doesn't matter for streaming reads.

The actual math for this for a product at scale is interesting; I built such a product and did the math, and we found that moderate compression gave higher rates. However, this is based on a production-class infrastructure.

<comment><USER6> I should also mention: using more CPU to decompress highly compressed data means you have less CPU available (on a multithreaded app in a resource- managed environment) for other work. Since after decompressing you're going to be doing a bunch of other work (and a lot of that work will be going on simultaneousy in other threads), using less CPU to decompress can give higher throughput. But, again, this is a very complex problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Slides from a talk by the author that give a good introduction to the landscape and the previous algorithms: [https://platformlab.stanford.edu/Seminar%20Talks/Yatish_Tura...](https://platformlab.stanford.edu/Seminar%20Talks/Yatish_Turakhia.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool. But I think the current state of the art is using minhashes (minimap2) to avoid doing expensive all vs all alignments. There is still a place for more sensitive alignments though.

</comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting write up too! I often read that computational biology is a different beast than the rest of the computational landscape (which usually revolve around solving PDE's fundamentally) and this was a nice picture into at least one problem on that side of the pond. A "best substring" search to me sounds closer to the kind of problems CS people think about than what computational cats do.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Up to x% faster" another marketing term that used to work.

</comment><comment><USER12> Oh no, someone should tell them that darwin is the name for the kernel inside of iOS/MacOS.

<comment><USER13> ... as well as a british biologist.

<comment><USER14> That was clearly the joke.</comment></comment></comment>


The Selfies are Coming. The Selfies are Here (Part 2) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/what-i-learned-building/af5a7e59ed40

<comment><USER2> Me today: I don't get social networking. Me as a teenager: social interactions on the internet--so cool and interesting.

My hypothesis: social networks create a _virtual_ world where we can construct the identity we hoped to construct. However as these networks age, mistakes in that identity come more often and suddenly that identity isn't so pristine. You can extrapolate this to anything that is on the internet and social from a simple forum to facebook.

Now recent attempts are "hey, let's just delete stuff and that will model reality a bit better" but it doesn't. You've just changed the rules to an alternate virtual world, not necessarily made the virtual _reality_.

My conclusion is therefore in order for you to experience life as _reality_ you should stop trying to rely on a virtual copy to emulate those same experiences.

When my friends get on their phones and computers and are so intent and focus on their digital identity, they can't experience what is real. The conversation is boring. The conversation exists in a digital virtual world that I'm not part of because I (now) refuse to export all of my time and experiences to that virtual world.

I was lucky to learn these lessons as a child as the internet had just taken off and I (being a teenager) took advantage of everything it had to offer from online gaming to working internationally with others around the world. When meeting in real life, however, things felt a bit strange. It was like two strangers that were previously friends had finally had a real-world interaction. The awkwardness now became how to do we reconcile are real-world- selves with the virtual-selves we've known. The sad truth was that we couldn't easily. The internet allowed us to only focus on what we found important and ignore the rest of reality. I feel that more and more people are falling into this trap and it will be a rude awakening for them when they are much older.

So is there a desire for such virtual worlds? Obviously yes. But the real question we should be asking ourselves is should we continuously be trying to feed that desire?

<comment><AUTHOR> good points here.. one tangential and very undeveloped thought I had was w selfie/expirations and how it fills in the gaps of real life activity. you should go live in the 3d world and taking precious time away to brag about things on FB et al is maybe not where we should be.. but as a quick gesture for the in between times, maybe there are products for this moments of nothingness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This seems backwards. "Authenticity" and "identity" aren't monolithic. To steal from Walt Whitman, we all contain multitudes.

What I express on IG is no more or less authentic than what I express here or on Quora or at a quiet meal with friends. They all express a sometimes- idealized aspect of myself. The goal is not a quest for "real identity." The idea itself is incoherent.

<comment><AUTHOR> this is true if you consider cases where sometimes your online interactions seem more real or authentic than anything you do offline and identity comprise both. I prob should bifurcate my idea that "real" here means where you spend the majority of your life, for me i'd rather be offline, and it feels like we're caught trying to one up each other talking about our offline lives on these social networks that may not be the most accurate representation of what really goes on. I guess I'm interested in the "multitudes" too, just see a very edited version on FB, Instagram, etc (they serve their purposes)

<comment><USER3> Just some thoughts! Feel free to ignore. None of this is personal, just things I've spent time thinking about in the context of building social software. I could be entirely wrong or confused and unjustified in my opinions.

We edit ourselves "offline," too. The "self" we present to our co-workers is different than the "self" we present to our family, friends, or lovers. Do you think people "edit" themselves more or less on Facebook or Instagram than they do when they're, say, at a job interview or on a first date?

And, sure, how we present ourselves online may not be the "most accurate representation of what really goes on," but is this more or less editing than you hiding your professional struggles from your closest friends because they act and talk as if you're more successful than you really are? Consider, for example, a husband and father who is close to losing his job. "Hey Sam, how's work going?" "Hey honey, how was work today?" "Hey daddy, do you love your job? Will you be the boss one day? I think you'd make a great boss."

And this isn't even to talk about the stories we tell ourselves about our own lives. We delude ourselves in a million ways, big and small, every day. This is normal and necessary.

I don't think it's about "more" or "less" editing, as if we decide what percentage of ourselves to reveal to other people or as if there's some indivisible, Platonic "identity" that I possess. It's more like an actor putting on a show. It depends on the actor, the play, the stage, and the audience. Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in _X-Men_ is no more or less authentic than Hugh Jackman as Curly in _Oklahoma!_. Maybe the part of him in Wolverine isn't brought out anywhere else in his life, in which case there's a way in which Hugh Jackman as Wolverine is both more _and_ less authentic than Hugh Jackman as his everyday self (whatever that means).

I don't think it's that "we're caught trying to one up each other talking about our offline lives on these social networks." We do that offline plenty. What online social networks _do_ provide is a discrete and, until now, unparalleled measure of control over how I express myself. I can invent a whole new self on Instagram if I want and I can delete it when I'm done with it. I can't do that with my friends, at least not without risking my friendship or becoming known as "that guy who reinvents himself all the time." This opens up whole new fields of expression and play.

For example, in your product your photos expire. Yes, this lowers the "cost to my identity." One consequence of this might be that folks reveal more of their "authentic self," whatever that means. Another consequence might be that they ham it up in ways they'd consider inappropriate in a more permanent or serious context. Another consequence might be that people turn it into a game where, because you know every photo has an expiration date, you try to see how much attention you can get in that timeframe. This will naturally lead to crazier, more extreme, and more controversial forms of expression.

This isn't a product critique, BTW. I think what you're doing is interesting, but I think you're fooling yourself if you believe that somehow folks will be more "authentic" on your service, in part because I think the idea of the "authentic self" is a bit of a fiction. If folks find that your service lets them express part of themselves that they couldn't before or were afraid to before, that's great! If you get a critical density of people doing that you have a successful social network! But I think "authenticity" isn't the axis along which those expressions will fall.

I actually think if you over-focus on "authenticity" you run the risk of making bad product decisions. What happens if folks start using your service to do things you consider inauthentic? Do you ban them? Do you try to curtail the behavior through product design and other feedback mechanisms? If you do, you run the risk of squashing the kinds of activity that can lead to a robust network. Those unexpected expressions are exactly what a community or tribe building a sense of identity look like, even if you disagree with that conception of identity or consider it inauthentic.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I think the "authentic" and "real" stuff is one direction that we gravitated towards after seeing early usage; we purposefully made it really simple with a few constraints to see how people would use it. We thought it was going to be a side project, but so far the lessons have been unexpected and fun. I don't know where the product exactly goes, and we're not going to try to push it into any preconceived box, but there is something interesting going on about how people see themselves and what they're willing to share. For me, authenticity = diversity. And weirdly, there's a lot of diversity to be found in just our faces! Appreciate the thoughts on this - I like thinking about this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tangential question: Dailybooth used to do pretty much what Selfie.im does now, but failed and shut down a couple of years back - Do you think Dailybooth would be more successful if they launched now?

</comment><comment><USER5> Fascinating article. I like their perspective and that the app is getting some traction. The whole notion of romanticism vs. realism is an interesting one.

</comment><comment><USER6> The world totally needs this.

<comment><USER7> I agree, indulging narcissism is perhaps _the_ most important issue of our day.

<comment><AUTHOR> narcissism is getting love from people about your "awesome" life - it applies to selfies too .. but I also think taking photos of yourself gives you control over how you want the photo framed, the face you make, etc.. think control might be a bigger factor?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "you like that Miley Cyrus is twerking or you aspire to be a photographer"

Or I aspire to be Miley Cyrus's twerk photographer.

<comment><AUTHOR> maybe there should be a network for twerking

<comment><USER9> twerkagram, or maybe instatwerk?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why does the service impose a mandatory expiration date on selfies? There are candid photos of me that I didn't like at the time but now (and some of this is just plain old bei familiar with them) are amusing and valuable to me.

This is a cool side project and I hate to do a serious critique of it...but since the OP decided to go the pithy Medium essay route, I'll take it he's sincere about thinking these this through. Here's my critique: the world doesn't need a constant stream of the ordinary. Ignoring the damage of enviousness, many FB users suffer from just spending too much time being interested in other people's lives...and that's just the highlights. What mental appetite or capacity do we have to consume all the mundane moments too?

<comment><USER11> This is discussed at length in the article. It was found that having an expiration lets people worry less about getting the photo "right". Also, it's not about having another place to waste time living vicariously. Quite the opposite, as it's becoming a vibrant community where you can actually interact in a surprising way.

That said, it is worth experimenting with the dates and/or ways of saving certain images of yourself for posterity.

<comment><USER12> That's an argument for an optional timeout, but it doesn't explain having a mandatory one.

<comment><USER13> Mandatory timeout means that even the best photos go away. No proliferation of the beautiful and perfect, no buildup of the quick and dirty.

Every one dies.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Things I wish I knew about Redux - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/horrible-hacks/things-i-wish-i-knew-about-redux-9924abf2f9e0#.x0vsp5vtw <comment><USER2> I got thrown into a react project last year that switched from flummox to redux.

I had no idea what was happening, just had to get new featurea ready quick.

When I got some strange errors, someone told me about pure functions and stuff.

I mean, I knew what they were, I just didn't use them all the time.

All in all pretty confusing, coming from Ember and two-way-binding.

But through Redux I found RxJS and became a better dev, I think :)</comment>


Blooms: Phi-Based Strobe Animated Sculptures - <AUTHOR> http://www.instructables.com/id/Blooming-Zoetrope-Sculptures/ <comment><USER2> This is great, I love John Edmark's work. Reminds of a similar sculpture I saw in the SFMoMA: [https://youtu.be/R1SWmfZLx3E](https://youtu.be/R1SWmfZLx3E)

Interestingly, it seems both creations came into being some time around 2014. I wonder if there was a flow of inspiration in either direction.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also see John Edmark's own site: [http://www.johnedmark.com/#/phi/](http://www.johnedmark.com/#/phi/)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm an animator working in similar space to John but using media like embroidery and digital painting instead. I've previously written about some of the concepts if anyone's interested: [https://medium.com/@elliotschultz/making-of-animal- collectiv...](https://medium.com/@elliotschultz/making-of-animal-collective-s- animated-slipmat-ac3acb104863)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ooh you can see one in the exploratorium in SF [https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibit/flourish](https://www.exploratorium.edu/exhibit/flourish)</comment>


Show HN: I rewrote the Backbone.js Todo example - <AUTHOR> http://ahamlett.com/Backbone.localStorage

<comment><USER2> For those who wonder how to build a Todo app in different javascript frameworks, you should definitely check out TodoMVC: <http://addyosmani.github.com/todomvc/>

<comment><USER3> It is a great site to check out different frameworks/approaches/philosophies. There is also an example for the todo app written in Dart using Web Components (similar to AngularJS)

[https://github.com/dart-lang/web- ui/tree/master/example/todo...](https://github.com/dart-lang/web- ui/tree/master/example/todomvc)

<comment><USER4> I'd suggest keeping in mind that TodoMVC hides how well the different frameworks perform with more complex (nested / inter-dependent) models though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe I'm misreading it, but it looks like you might have a typo in todos- router.js. See [http://ahamlett.com/Backbone.localStorage/docs/todos- router....](http://ahamlett.com/Backbone.localStorage/docs/todos-router.html), in the call to define() -- your dependencies are 'jquery' and 'backbone', but you take in '_' and 'Backbone'. Then, you later use '$'.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch! It's fixed now. Keep the feedback coming! I'm particularly interested in design pattern suggestions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice documentation! Hadn't seen docco before; pretty neat doc generator. <http://jashkenas.github.com/docco/>

</comment><comment><USER7> This comment has nothing to do with Backbone but we tend to use the sugar syntax for defines:

define(function(require){ var whatever = require('dependency'); });

instead of

define([ 'dependency', ], function(whatever) { });

We do this because it's way more readable for files with numerous dependencies.

Also, we make Backbone, $ and _ globals so we don't have to inject them in every single module.

<comment><USER8> > Also, we make Backbone, $ and _ globals so we don't have to inject them in > every single module.

We don't; we explicitly define every dependency, always, so that it does not make any assumptions about the environment it runs in (a webpage with jquery / underscore included via script tags, for example). Second, our end-product is a single .js with Backbone and some other dependencies all combined into it. (we're not allowed to use a CDN)

<comment><USER7> That sounds like a pretty good reason not to make those globals.

We did it when we realized 100% of our modules had those three dependencies. Haven't found a drawback yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An example of the TODOs app with AMD is great! Now if only Backbone and Underscore would support AMD natively so you wouldn't need to Shim them.

<comment><USER10> there's always the amd-version of those here -> <https://github.com/amdjs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like the fresh take on organizing the example but I disagree with the 2nd bullet point. Jérôme Gravel-Niquet's example encapsulates everything inside of an anonymous function and I don't see any var leakage into the global namespace.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very nice idea. Good stuff! Should todolist.js be in a folder called Collections?

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe, I like to pretend it's a flask app and lump anything that models an api resource in the same folder. After all, a Collection is just an array of Models.

What do you think?

Probably should be named TodoCollection.js either way.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I have to agree with keeping them separate and renaming it to TodoCollection.js.

As someone looking at this for the first time, even after breezing over the code that was my immediate question: wait, where was the collection again?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the todo app is not good enough to compare different frameworks maybe we should come up with another app , that has a least some ajax and a more complex business logic to handle.

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally agree. The only problem is hosting the api for a new example app. I could write an example app using the github api requiring OAuth. Does anyone know of a public api that allows modifying resources without login?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know how to say this without sounding like a dick, so apologies in advance.

For fuck's sake, people - it's 2013. Get with the CoffeeScript program already.

<comment><USER16> CoffeeScript isn't for everyone. I've used it, and I really prefer JavaScript. While there's some nice things about it, I personally find it to be incredibly unreadable. (Sure, you can write a mix of JS and CS, but that just seems wrong.)

(That being said, I love LESS and can't imagine writing pure CSS, so I do understand how you feel.)

<comment><USER17> Same here, I've used CoffeeScript on a biggish project and found myself longing to return to JavaScript.</comment></comment></comment>


Shopify CEO says long hours aren't necessary for success - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242184341000192 <comment><USER3> I don't believe anyone really does 80 hours. I just don't think it is possible and I don't think you can call sitting at a desk doing nothing "work".

I've done 60 hours during intense periods just fine... but it was only effective because of the nature of the work I was doing at the time. And, I usually took a break down the road to compensate. In no way was it even 50% creative work.

4 to 6 creative hours seems right, but a lot of work isn't creative. There is also the bullshit work that still has to get done, ie, loading up contacts in a CRM, building and nurturing relationships, reviewing emails, checking links, etc etc etc..

<comment><USER4> Most of my work weeks clock in around 50-60 hours regularly. It's pretty simple how this happens. It's meetings all day and then once meetings are over it's email, documents, admin paperwork, training etc...

Here's an example of just last Thursday which was busy but was at least not double booked and had some times I could stop and go to the bathroom, I also wasn't traveling this day which was good:

8-12 - US Senate Staff Delegation and budget review

12-1 - Software Requisition Review

1-2 - Infrastructure planning meeting

2-3 - Conference call with colleague in HI

3-4 - Meeting with an LP

4-5 - Talking with my Deputy and Admin

5-7 - Meeting with Army Futures

7 - <USER2>

8-10 - Emails, Award review for employees, look over presentations due in Jan/Feb

Now, almost none of that work is creative because I'm not in a creative job anymore really. I am an executive with a 200 person data engineering and data science team building the future way the DoD builds and runs software.

That's how you get to these hours.

I'd also suggest that "Building and nurturing relationships" isn't "Bullshit work."

<comment><USER5> I keep seeing this but why do non-creatives count dinner, commuting and exercise as work? (You don't do all these but you put dinner there)

As a creative I find it hard to justify that, sure I did talk about work during lunch with a coworker or an ex coworker or friend but damn I was just enjoying my pork chops, that's not work!!!

<comment><USER6> Why do we culturally accept the distinction 'creatives' and 'non-creatives'. It's gross.

<comment><USER7> People like putting themselves in boxes, and the one he used is generally accepted classification. I don't think it's something to be offended about.

I think Tech community is quite elitist at times

<comment><USER6> No domain has a monopoly on original thought, so calling some of them 'creative' is just lazy and imprecise.

I'm just pissing into the wind. Ultimately it doesn't really matter and I agree it's not worth getting offended about.

<comment><USER8> Some people get paid to have original thoughts while others get paid to not have original thoughts. To me that seems like a pretty clear line. It isn't about whether the people can be creative or not, but whether they are expected to be creative at work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A few thoughts to add to the discussion, loosely related:

1) If I know exactly where to spend my time for the best rate of return, its likely that I'll have to spend relatively few hours achieving success.

2) For most people, the success they can achieve through just having a plain old job can be had for a mere 40 hours. Anything they want above what 40 hours can grant them should probably be done elsewhere (second job, side-hustle, etc) since the ROI will be very low for spending those additional hours at work.

3) The 80 hour week lifestyle is probably necessary for people who are still frantically doing what Felix Dennis calls "The Search", trying to build a company without the foggiest notion what people want.

<comment><USER10> Study after study has shown that working 80 hours dramatically reduces your productivity during those hours.

I loved what Tobi said in this tweet: [https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297](https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297)

"For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company."

5 creative hours in a day absolutely matches my experience based on my own career. I can get a HUGE amount done in those 5 hours if I apply them sensibly.

<comment><USER11> If he's asking for 4 hours of work, then why ask for a 40 hour work week and not a 20 hour one?

40 hours (9-6) is rough enough!

<comment><USER12> No. He is not asking for 4 hours of work. He is asking for laser-focused, 100% productive 4 hours work. You can do additional work in the rest of the hours left that not necessarily is going to require that level of focus.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> These successful people sound like working long hours is an absolute evil. I think they underestimate the effort that an ordinary person needs to be even moderately successful. What if it takes me twice as long to debug a problem as my team's standard? What if a concept is so simple to everyone else in my team yet it's just so hard for me to understand? What if I see an opportunity to build a truly great product, yet I don't have the required technical background while I have at most two weeks to catch up? What if I really want to tap into machine learning yet I have meetings all day, so my only choice is to study after work? Now, before you ask me to switch my career, what if I do have a passion in tech and I'm even worse at doing anything else?

See? Working long hours sometimes is not a burden, but a choice, a choice that one makes to master what they love, and to make sure they won't regret wasting their life when looking back years later. And sometimes working long hours, as long as it's voluntary, is the only way to succeed.

<comment><USER14> If it's a choice, that is fine. If it's an assumed baseline that management leverages to squeeze ever more "productivity" out of people without compensating them for it, then its not.

If the latter, I guarantee you will have just as much regret looking back years later. The 'voluntary' part is the gray area that most seem to talk around.

<comment><USER13> True

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> _" I've never worked through a night. The only times I worked more than 40 hours in a week was when I had the burning desire to do so. I need 8ish hours of sleep a night. Same with everybody else, whether we admit it or not"_

So he didn't. What about his employees?

Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But they're also endemic. Some bosses do get away with working shorter hours while they flog their employees to work like crazy. On the other hand, workaholism at many companies tends to gets worse and worse as you gain responsibility, and some of the most insane hours are worked by those near the top.

<comment><USER16> > Not to imply that long hours are necessary. I think they're abhorrent. But > they're also endemic.

That's definitely true of the Bay Area, but Shopify is an Ottawa, Canada company. Having gone to college there, I don't get the feeling that Tobi is doing anything out of the ordinary for an Ottawa company. That may not be the case in Kitchener/Waterloo or Vancouver -- and it's definitely not true of the Bay Area -- but it's much less endemic out there.

It's at once nice to see but also frustrating because I feel like Ottawa tends to lack that drive, motivation and commitment broadly speaking to develop more Shopify-type companies. There's IBM, Mitel, Adobe, Blackberry, Corel and a bunch of companies selling into government out there from a tech perspective. But hey, hopefully Shopify leads the way here and we see more of them.

Shopify is something of a point of pride for Ottawa and I do wish them all the best!

<comment><USER17> For those who are not familiar, Ottawa is Canada's capital and its labour market is dominated by government jobs. It's a very 9 to 5 (actually, more like 9 to 4:30) culture and anything else would be a shock to the system for most people.

<comment><USER18> The people in Ottawa are so nice, and the bilingualism is pleasant and if you're comfortable living on the Quebec side of Ottawa, housing is dirt cheap, something like 2x or 3x gross salary.

I just wish it had a night life. The expression "nothing good in Ottawa happens after 8pm" is funny because politicians mean it one way, while people from Toronto mean it the other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I always like Richard Hamming's take on hours worked: " Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former." (From "You and Your Research": [https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html))

I started incorporating this thinking into my own work schedule, and I believe it to be true. I certainly found that I grew incredibly quickly in my abilities when I started working more (as long as I was applying the hours intelligently, which is admittedly its own trick)

<comment><USER20> I think this is the generally accepted and obvious view, but there seems to be a push from several popular personalities to virtue signal against it in the name of better working conditions. In the process they are accusing startup founders of abusing their workforce if they mention such an idea as working a little extra to get ahead.

<comment><USER21> As they very well should.

If startup founders want to work extra - let them. But when they create a culture where they expect everyone to give the same extreme amount of sacrifice and work while they stand to gain only a fraction of what those who own the capital or have power in running the companies will gain - that is something that should be fought against as vigorously as possible on every level of society - culture, law etc.

So I applaud this "virtue signaling" and call it common sense.

<comment><USER22> Why? Other people who also want to work hard exist. If that particular startup or culture is not for _you_ then you should leave, but don't tell everyone else what to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In a "fresh out of school / fresh out of first job founder-wanting-to-build-a- startup" context, you often start with no connections, no capital, no world- class skills, no team, no game-changing idea. The only variable you can control is the amount of effort (time) you put into the venture trying to find something that works before you can no longer afford ramen. The hours are justified in that scenario, because you have no other resource to leverage outside of time.

Years later, when you're already comfortable, have a rich network of experts and trusted past associates, have easy access to capital, have decades of experience of building businesses, and a deep understanding of an industry of two? Yeah, you don't need the long hours, you're fine.

</comment><comment><USER24> Original thread on twitter: [https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242184341000192?s=20](https://twitter.com/tobi/status/1210242184341000192?s=20)

<comment><USER25> Thanks! We changed the URL to that from [https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-ceo-success-long- hou...](https://www.businessinsider.com/shopify-ceo-success-long- hours-40-hour-week-2019-12), which is mostly just reporting on it.

What does the s=20 do?

<comment><USER26> > What does the s=20 do?

Seems to be tacked on by Twitter to track the source of shares. Pretty sure the number changes by device.

<comment><USER27> s=20 is shared from mobile website (iOS and android tested). 21 is iOS app. Don't have others to test offhand.

There's a Twitter thread from a few years ago where a few folk collected a bunch of them, but I can't find it anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Me thinks there's a bit of selection bias here.

If you're fortunate enough to hit product market fit without too much struggle ... and then can scale it as a regular company - good on you.

But I suggest in the early years, it's really not like that for most founders as they pivot and strife.

In the scale years, I suggest it probably could be more like that for most company employees and leadership. And FYI I think most companies are like this i.e. more or less 9-to-5, even very well known corps.

I also think this might have very much to do with the nature of the technology and the inherent competitiveness/barriers in the category: in companies wherein there's a significant number of talented individuals needed to focus - crunching happens.

For example: Pixar films. Apparently people work pretty long and hard to make production work. It involves a lot of specific talent, working together with ambiguous timelines and schedules, last minute creative changes.

Spotify seems to be the kind of company perhaps wherein the work can be spread out fairly efficiently thereby enabling not only 9-5 hours, but perhaps more importantly: no need for A+ Valley Top Talent. I know Ottawa very well and there isn't remotely enough raw, high end A+ talent and specialisation of skills to make something like the iPhone.

Spotify can be built with a large number of 'smart people' (which Ottawa has aplenty), but I'm doubtful there will ever be an iPhone or 'Toy Story' come out of Ottawa either (though I would desperately like to be wrong).

<comment><USER29> s/Spotify/Shopify/g

<comment><USER28> Yes, of course. Shopify.

But weirdly enough - the same _might_ be said of Spotify.

In the sense that Stocholm is not the Valley and doesn't have A+ stars in many tech categories. But - because Sweden has a historical special relationship with the music industry, and Spotify requires 'smart people and a few geniuses but not tons of specialised geniuses' \- Stockholm might make a better choice than the Valley.

One thing about Sweden though - they hit way above their weight in other, more classical industries. They're a small country that makes massive international brands, car companies - for gosh sakes they make the most complicated product category: _Jet fighters_. Mind you, not all of it, especially the engines, but making a 'Jet Figther' requires A+ players across a broad set of industrial categories, including a diplomatic corps that's deeply and efficiently embedded with industry, as many European countries have. Canada does not have this at all, and is probably last place in the OECD for this kind of economic cooperation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> In my opinion there's absolutely nothing to be proud about in working long hours for long stretches. All you're doing is setting up or maintaining a completely unmaintainable situation. If you're finding you have to work > 40 hours regularly, someone is making and signing off on bad estimates.

If you're salaried, and you're working extra hours regularly, all you're doing is reducing your effective hourly rate.

</comment><comment><USER31> The reality is that there is no single answer. There are companies like Shopify that are able to build a platform while encouraging work-life balance. And then there are companies like Tesla, where employees are expected to forgo work-life balance. I think it comes down to how quickly you as a company may die if left on autopilot. I am going to guess that Shopify had near death moments, but probably fewer. OTOH, Tesla, remains in the default dead territory even now, that they are close to shipping half a million cars per year.

That said, a great work-life balance is great to strive for, just that depending on what your company does, it may or may not happen soon enough.

<comment><USER32> Shopify started off selling snowboards on the internet, Elon took on one of the most powerful, politically connected, and entrenched industries head-on.

There's always going to be significant differences in the business dynamics and the public pressure on Tesla and their crew was insane. Unfortunately that shit rolls downhill sometimes and it's hard to control.

Shopify also never faced the massive and constant vitriol and naysayers from day one. It was a massive play out of the gate, not a hockey stick growth but a massive capital investment covering multiple very difficult verticles all at once from design to operations to production and managing a very expensive and risky customer lifespan and regulatory risk for every car sold. Not to downplay how hard it is to do what Shopify accomplished, which was significant and very admirable. But ultimately it's comparing apples to oranges at a high level like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> 1st week of December, I did 87 hours clocked on clockify for clients. I turn clock off when I go to the bathroom, or get distracted on HN/Reddit. It's only on while I'm coding.

But I get burnt out fast when on a schedule like that, and knew I'd have some downtime with holidays and need to fill up on work to pay bills in January. Definitely couldn't sustain hours like that unless I was CEO and it was my baby then I'd be more apt to just keep going because it's a passion project.

</comment><comment><USER34> Its funny following this story since I saw the original tweet from Ryan Selkis a crypto twitter entrepreneur. [https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1209443243924045825](https://twitter.com/twobitidiot/status/1209443243924045825)

It has spread to take over twitter and spawned articles and CEOs of large companies weighing in, and now on hacker news. Fascinating to watch where our news starts from and how it spreads

</comment><comment><USER35> Jason Fried was talking about this a few days ago:

[https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1209115637148274690](https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/1209115637148274690)

I wholeheartedly agree as well. The key to working less, while being successful is to focus on what will give you the best rate of return and not doing the things that are not useful. That is really hard to figure out initially though. But I think it gets easier as you get more experienced, as your personal value system gets better tweaked to match reality.

This applies to the company as well like Jason Fried said. The company should have clear values that are attuned to market value and it should be professionally run.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm quite glad that working more hours isn't productive. It's good we have an inate defense against that race to the bottom. Makes the societal battle (imagine it being illegal to work more hours, deemed being unfair competition) a bit easier to win.

</comment><comment><USER37> The word "work" is not specific enough in this context, and this whole discussion lacks nuance. When we talk about "work" are we talking about renting your own time, or building something you have a stake in? Does a side project that may give you insight into your main focus apply as work? Does reading and curiosity count as work? I spend nearly every waking hour trying to be successful... is that work? I'd like to introduce the word "toil" into the discussion. Elon Musk may "work" 100 hours a week, but there's no chance he's "toiling" 100 hours a week.

</comment><comment><USER38> I find if you have a exciting project and you've developed a great team (which includes soft-skills; great technical skills does not necessarily make a great employee), I find a lot of team members voluntarily thinking about the project outside of hours or staying late because they want to.

Whilst more hours certainly doesn't mean more productivity, the idea of nurturing intrinsic motivation is often omitted in discussions about working late and it's more an implicit by-product of a good working environment.

</comment><comment><USER39> I remember when I applied to work there as an iOS engineer and they didn't even phone screen me because I didn't have a strong enough social media profile.

<comment><USER40> Did they communicate this reason to you? That seems like a ridiculous requirement. Especially for engineers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Long hours are neither necessary or sufficient to be successful, some have to work long hours just to keep their head above water.

</comment><comment><USER42> If you hit the product market fit jackpot, long hours aren't necessary. Until then, most of us have to grind it out.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think the shortening of "financial and business success" to "success" can be a bit unfortunate.

My big metric for success is currently how many hours I can spend on my bike a week while still feeding myself and providing for loved ones responsibly.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is really a lovely thread. In general I loathe working at large companies and try to avoid it, but this really changes my perception of Shopify. The fact is that people who say they work 80 hours don't really do it. If they _ever_ do it it's a rare event in the totality of their labor.

</comment><comment><USER45> If Tesla took Shopify's advice it will be dead right now. Every scenario is different.

</comment><comment><USER46> Working long hours is for the poor who need to make the rent. Not for successful.

</comment><comment><USER47> let's see what happens if he starts today all over again. He forgot to mention the most important thing, that he was at the right place and right time. No matter how you come up with a 1000x better Shopify today, you most probably won't go anywhere. Many clunky business projects that were started with the rise of social media (around 2004-2013) made their owners kings ONLY because they were at the right place and time. The free ride is over. His argument is mostly bullshit for anyone starting today, the internet is much more centralized and you can't go viral unless you spend a fortune assuming having a superior product. It's a billion times harder today to succeed with a great product today than with a barely average one 15 years ago.

<comment><USER48> I don't think that argument holds at all. The low hanging fruit from 10 years ago has been picked. But in a lot of ways we only see it as low hanging fruit in hindsight. Today there are new business opportunities that in 10 years will seem like they were low hanging fruit. There are new technologies today that will enable new businesses that wouldn't have been feasible before.

Even then, there are only going to be but so many companies that get to the kind of scale of Shopify and that was true 15 years ago, and it's true today. But there is plenty of room for new small and medium sized companies to make millions of dollars. Success doesn't always have to be at the 3 comma level.

<comment><USER47> I get your argument and I appreciate it. But the nature of those low hanging fruit are more complicated today. For example, you can't just recreate Twitter, Facebook, Reddit today in your home with a couple of friends with no solid experience. You similarly can't start most successful SaaS ideas that were started in 2010-2014. Most successful YouTubers started their channels around 2008-2011. This was a time when you could make a very successful venture relying on the viral marketing by social media and Google search. Nowadays, this is over. You can go and try this same hippie way for starting a small business today but your chances of success are 1000x lower. The internet is much bigger, and it's much more centralized and concentrated and the competition is much more harsher.

<comment><USER49> Snapchat was founded in 2011 when people thought there couldn't be any other successful social media company. On the other hand, Salesforce, an epitome of SAAS, was founded in 1999. I believe there are always business opportunities and I'd argue there are more opportunities today because the space is more complicated and the cost of starting a company is much lower than before.

<comment><USER50> I don't necessarily disagree with your argument, but Snapchat might not be the best example. Snap has never posted a profit and their stock, even after a rise of almost 275% this calendar year, is still 42% below its IPO price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> In jobs that don't compensate overtime, that have no improved networking component after hours, and suffer from declined cognitive output after 6-8 hours you absolutely shouldnt work longer

Success is never defined

</comment><comment><USER52> What's unfortunate is that on the other side of the coin, "rockstar CEOs" like Elon Musk claim they sleep 4 hours a night and work 90 hour weeks. I think Musk does this mostly for publicity/image reasons and not that it's actually true, but you've got plenty of wantapreneurs parroting this (imo) unhealthy lifestyle.

<comment><USER53> There is anecdotal information that he does indeed do what he claims. And he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history, so long hours must work for some people.

<comment><USER52> > ... he is the most impressive CEO in this generation, perhaps in history

How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind when even in the tech vertical he has some serious competition (are we forgetting about Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc.), let alone actual _historical_ figures like Henry Ford, John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, etc.

<comment><USER54> >How anyone can say this with a straight face blows my mind

Elon is the only person to ever start four 1bn+ companies (paypal, tesla, SpaceX, Solarcity). He has/is driving innovation across multiple industries on a time scale that I don't think any of the people you mentioned can really touch, not to mention hyperloop and the Boring Company. Its not even debatable IMO.

<comment><USER55> I'd still say that John Rockefeller is more impressive. Adjusted for inflation John Rockefeller's company Standard Oil was worth over $1 trillion.

Or Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the guy who started the Dutch East India company, which adjusted for inflation was worth over $8.2 trillion.

Modern companies have nothing on what entrepreneurs did in the past and how much money they made. It doesn't matter how many markets Elon Musk "disrupts" nothing he can do will ever match the impact that the Dutch East India company had on the world: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company)

<comment><USER56> >I'd still say that John Rockefeller is more impressive. Adjusted for inflation John Rockefeller's company Standard Oil was worth over $1 trillion dollars. >Or Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the guy who started the Dutch East India company

Yeah, it's amazing what those guys could get away with back in the days of slavery and before regulation. /sarcasm

<comment><USER57> Standard Oil was founded in 1870, five years after the 13th amendment completely abolished slavery in the US.

Rockefeller's success is attributed to his relentless pursuit of horizontal and vertical integration, not cheap labor via slavery.

<comment><USER56> Hence the >and before regulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Long hours or continuous working exhausts. This does not lead to productive work. Creative work is key and that depends upon flexibility.

</comment><comment><USER59> I think we're all rooting for the narrative that it's possible to get ahead working 9-5. But it's hard for me to ignore the survivorship bias at play here. Yes, if your company has a market cap in the billions, you probably don't _need_ to be grinding on the weekends anymore. If you've built a company with amazing programmers and predictable revenue (e.g., dhh/Jason Fried) you probably don't need to grind weekends.

But when you're at the front lines, striving to create something new, you'll be competing against very motivated entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs will often have more resources than you, and zero aversion to working weekends. In those circumstances, Tobi's lifestyle probably isn't going to cut it. When an entrepreneur is working to create that spark, it pays to be completely obsessed, sometimes for years.

Thankfully, very few of us are on the front lines struggling to launch something momentous. Tobi once was, but he was smart and surrounded by great people, and now he's in scaling mode, which seems like a much different beast. I'm grateful that he and other successful tech leaders don't force their teams to work as hard as they needed to in the early days.

<comment><USER60> > But it's hard for me to ignore the survivorship bias at play here.

Surely it works the other way as well -- for all the stories of people who worked all night to achieve success, there are others about people who either did so and didn't win, or worse yet burnt themselves out or hurt their lives in other ways.

<comment><USER61> This.

Everyone thinks their experience reflects an universal truth.

That's the one big error, in my opinion.

What I learned in my life is, find your individual way. Don't play other peoples games, play your own game.

Pick what you need from the system and throw the rest away.

I'm bad at standing up before 12 and even worse at working 40h a week.

I'm don't like doing the same stuff for years.

I'm bad at networking for work, most people I meet there are just boring or upsetting to me.

All these things set me up for failure, still I'm doing better than most of my friends who are better at these things by a mile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shopify is obsessed with growth like every other public company. They are nothing like Basecamp. They can get away with shorter hours, maybe, because Canadian salaries are relatively low compared to San Francisco, but something will eventually have to give.

<comment><USER62> whats the average hours for FAANG in SV? 60-65 ?

<comment><USER63> It depends what hours you are trying to count. In the office? Remote? Actually 'working'? Including shuttle time? In my FAANG circle, small N, none of those values would be above 40 hours a week, except possibly if you include shuttle time. Certainly not anything approaching an average of 60-65 hours a week. That's _averaging_ a 12-13 hour day, in a 10am-4pm core hour culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> _> For creative work, you can't cheat. My believe is that there are 5 creative hours in everyone's day. All I ask of people at Shopify is that 4 of those are channeled into the company._

He's practically asking to put company success before personal growth. That's incredibly selfish if you ask me.

<comment><USER65> That's not how I read it.

Some others, with job titles similar to him, speak of "giving 110%" and how their employees are so dedicated to the company, they gladly take on overtime and crunch and whatnot. This seems refreshingly honest to me in comparison.

Using his math, there's 35 creative hours per person per week; assuming a 5-day work week, he's _paying_ for 20 of those and leaving 15 for personal growth. Sure, some might prefer a different ratio, but at least he's acknowledging that there needs to be a balance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I think it's wrong to celebrate a company that claims 80% of what it is to be you, even when other companies claim even more. I question the reason behind us devoting ourselves to these undemocratic structures.

<comment><USER67> I worked at Shopify for 4 1/2 years. I was happy to devote those creative hours because I believe in the mission. It's where I wanted my energy to be spent, and this was the general sentiment.

You have to remember most of the people who work there can work almost anywhere. They have specifically chosen to dedicate 80% of their creative energy at Shopify.

<comment><USER68> Why did you leave? (I am just curious) I am considering applying for the company in the coming months.

<comment><USER67> I needed some serious change in my life. Stepping away from Shopify was very difficult, but felt like a good first step in where I was personally.

Honestly, I think about going back almost weekly. It's a fantastic company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Long hours aren't necessary for success, and you should do what works for you, but they're needed if you're aiming for the top in your field.

It's an inconvenient truth, but you're not going to be able to reach the John Carmacks of the world if you're working 40 and they're working 60: [https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1210593150303031296](https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1210593150303031296)

Anyone who thinks he would've achieved the same with far fewer hours are just kidding themselves and pulling crabs down into the bucket. Also implicit in that is Carmack being a fool for working 60, when he would've been as or more(!) effective with less? Nonsense.

<comment><USER70> Founding and being the CEO of Shopify, a $48bn company and one of the best- performing stocks of the last few years, isn't "the top"?

Different people have different styles that work for them. Some people love to work 60+ hours and are productive doing it, others get more and better work done when they limit themselves to 40 and take time off. What works for you/Tobi/John doesn't universally work for others.</comment></comment>


'Kill Switch' Internet bill alarms privacy experts  - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2011-02-15-kill-switch_N.htm

<comment><USER2> This idea of a 'Kill Switch' is nonsense. Lieberman is a pussy as he scares easily. Imagine the propaganda people are going to spread, like "the government wants to control us". Actions like this will cause a revolt because of false facts.</comment>


The word 'robot' is meaningless - <AUTHOR> http://fusion.net/story/205093/stop-saying-robot/ <comment><USER2> I feel like trying to convince people to use the term 'automaton', when referring to devices that look similar to humans but are non-biological, is a feeble venture. The term 'robot' is just so ingrained in our society to describe a humanoid-like piece of hardware...

<comment><USER3> Isn't the word 'Android' already invented for that class or organism?

<comment><USER2> They could be used interchangeably, 'automaton' predates 'android' by a margin, primarily because an 'automaton' doesn't necessarily have to be an electronic device. It could be a water-powered wooden nutcracker. So yes, 'android' is probably the best candidate to describe the 'robots' that the author is referring to.

<comment><USER4> A roomba is an automaton, but not an android.

Automaton refers to acting on it's own. Android literally means humanlike. Electronics have no bearing on either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also true for pretty much every other term I've seen mainstream journalists 'learn'... hack, app, cloud, algorithm...

</comment><comment><USER6> Best line in the article, the one that convinced me: _Robots are things that don't do useful things. Once they eventually work, we call them what they are, like "dishwasher" or "toaster" or "drone."_</comment>


Does severity of Covid-19 depend on viral dose? - <AUTHOR> Possibly the severity of Covid-19 is worse if the initial exposure is to a larger number of viral particles. These could infect more cells, causing more rapid proliferation, and more easily overwhelm the immune response. Other factors may be which tissues are infected first, innate immunity, and the vigor of the immune system.<p>On the other hand, perhaps the multiplier in viral replication is so great that the number of initial viral particles is not much of a factor. <comment><USER2> Best guess is "yes". That's speculated to be why several young, healthy doctors have passed away from it - they're not in the danger zone by age or pre-existing condition, but they're exposed to so much virus that it overwhelms their immune system regardless.

<comment><USER3> While that speculation is plausible, it could also be explained by exhaustion and stress of being overworked well into their illness.</comment></comment>


The Second Life of One Photographer's Ad Images - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/08/t-magazine/art/gary-perweiler-ad-photos.html <comment><USER2> Those photos were wonderful and well crafter. For a modern photographer who adds a creative twist to still life advertising photography, I recommend looking through Natasha V's work: [http://www.natashav.com](http://www.natashav.com)</comment>