Show HN: My 4-hour project, already profitable - <AUTHOR> http://snowday2011.com <comment><AUTHOR> I know this is not the norm for projects here on Hacker News and I realize that it may be seen as rather exploitive, so here's a very very brief background and my thought process:

\- Idea was conceived around 2am this morning. Saw a few events on facebook picking up speed (hundreds of thousands of attendees) so decided to leverage that instant-market

\- Wasn't sure whether or not it would work, but I didn't have too much to lose ($8 url and a few hours) so I went for it and started hacking away

\- Around 10am the project was launched, complete with a website, domain name, and orignal t-shirt design, all done by me

\- 4 minutes later the first orders came in, thus paying for the domain name and becoming profitable (minus my time value)

\- Since then the site has gone slightly viral, with several thousand hits, hundreds of "likes" and a bunch of tweets (not to mention t-shirt sales)

\- Became the "official t-shirt" and event photo for the Snowpocalypse 2011 facebook event with 300,000 attendees. That's a nice little market to advertise to, no?

This is really just a social + eCommerce experiment with a taste of vitality. While I have designed t-shirts and sold them online before, I have never done anything quite like this, ie "hopping on the bandwagon" and riding out a live- fast-die-fast trend. I have also never experimented with any sort of viral platforms. I hope to implement some potentially viral features in my current startup/project, so I figured it would be worth it to test the waters with this mini-project. It was indeed. I learned a lot, and hope to do a case study with detailed steps and statistics in the near future.

<comment><USER4> i wouldn't call it exploitive, rather i would say it's very savvy. even if it's a one-time shot, it's real money and you're not doing anything shady to earn it. that's how people build wealth -- seizing opportunity. congrats on the success.

<comment><USER5> Total agreement. There is no rule, law, or moral stricture against earning money efficiently. (Some people seem to accept that a lawyer can bill $4,000 in a day of work but an engineer who does the same thing must be cheating somehow. I've never understood this.)

<comment><USER6> A great many people also think that what the lawyer does is exploitative. It has just become an accepted social fiction that law is an exploitative profession and its to be expected of them.

"Well sure _lawyers_ do it, but engineers?! Come on, they're supposed to be the good guys!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _These costs are already factored into the price of the shirts, so you don't have to pay any additional costs for shipping_

Nice touch -- both for including the shipping price in the advertised price and for not calling it "free".

I also thought it's a good idea that you de-emphasized the "2011" in the design, so the shirt remains mostly relevant if there's another "snowpocalypse" sometime :)

</comment><comment><USER8> You might want to keep an eye on that Pay Pal account - the "pay me now and I'll send you $stuff in a few weeks" pattern is exactly the sort of thing that trips their "might be fraud, lock the account and keep all the money for 6 months" response.

<comment><USER9> That's a great point, bigian. FWIW that's not a PayPal-specific policy - <USER2> and MasterCard's TOS explicitly state that you cannot bill the credit card until the merchandise has shipped.

<comment><USER8> True, but I don't hear nearly so many horror stories about Visa/MasterCard choosing to keep all the money people think they have given you for 180 days (exactly as you agreed they could when you signed up) while they "investigate".

I also hear regular reports of businesses which perhaps should have chosen their payment processor more carefully given the nature of their business, who clearly have a product which doesn't get "shipped" in any way that could comply with that policy - I think a European Ruby conference was the most recent one I've seen discussed here, how should a conference organizer manage their bookings to comply with this sort of policy? He'll, even Burningman got burnt by their ticket seller a year or two back "we're just gonna hang on to a few million dollars worth of ticket sales money, because your annual event that's been running successfully for ~20 years now with ~50,000 people a year recently - it might all be a big fraud!"... Unfortunately, choosing to sign up with PayPal means explicitly agreeing to allow them to do exactly that with very little recourse - and it's not necessarily _wrong_ - PayPals business is basically built on betting they can do a better job of fraud prevention than e banks/credit card companies are doing, and offer payment services to more people than the banks will and earn money from people the banks consider "too high risk". This allows then to provide a service that let's people like the OP go from idea to fully functional ecommerce website in 4 hours, but it also means you're giving them rights to retain "your" money to cover any fraud risk they might consider you to expose them too.

Its not a wrong/bad policy of PayPals, but it's a policy that I've seen many people not realize they were signing up for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> For what it's worth, I just remembered two somewhat interesting points:

1) There were several copycat shirts that came out on Cafepress/Zazzle shortly after mine started gaining traction. The shirt concept itself is not completely unique as we've all seen "I SURVIVED ..." shirts before, but the copycat shirts used the same font, word placement, and everything. Am I upset? Absolutely not. Those just validate my idea. And I wasn't too worried about losing sales as the copycats were way overpriced ($24+s/h vs $16) with lower quality and far inferior presentation. I would be surprised if they sold any at all, really.

2) The copycat shirts went as far as using very similar descriptions for the shirts. Not only does this show a complete lack of creativity, it shows that I may have been onto something with the humorous/witty/questionable description that has been mentioned here a few times. Is it offensive? Possibly. But I think it did more good than harm (in terms of measurable things like sales and hits).

Just thought I'd throw those thoughts out there for pondering.

<comment><USER10> I think you would be very surprised as to what does and doesn't sell on CafePress. Are they doing as well as you are, I doubt they are, but are they doing anywhere near the work you are, no way in hell. They are likely targeting an entirely different market than you are. You're going with viral marketing centered around Facebook. CafePress is largely populated by middle aged women. I would guess the cross over for those two groups isn't that large.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow on the idea, wow on the execution, and wow on the design! Out of curiosity:

Domain Name: SNOWDAY2012.COM Created Date: 03-Feb-2011 Expiry Date: 03-Feb-2012 Registrant Name: Paul Jefferiesr

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the kind words. I guess that means the years of hardwork are paying off, even if the direct time investment was a few hours.

HA! I can't believe somebody registered that domain name. Too funny, it didn't even cross my mind. Snowday2011.com was my backup - I really wanted snowpocalypse.com!

<comment><USER11> The site design alone really is a superb lesson in simple effective good- looking usability. As someone else pointed out: one click ordering, brilliantly-worded concise text, good design, immediately understandable purpose and call to action. These things all instill confidence, and are no accident. Anyone who's ever tried should know how difficult it is to make something "simple"... so yes I'd say your years of hard work have paid off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What would be cool, and a nice courtesy gesture since HN gave you so much traffic, is if you shared actual numbers with us. Data we can use. I'd like to see:

Cost price of your tshirts, how many you sold over X time, conversion rate on the site, main sources of traffic, highest conversion source, lowest conversion source, fraud levels if known yet. Thanks.

<comment><USER13> if I understand this model, he has to get a certain number of orders (say 100) before he can actually print. the price of each shirt depends on a bulk amount and if he doesn't hit that, he can't ship the shirts. for these shirts I'd suspect it costs about $10 each (silkscreen printing), plus whatever shipping and handling. maybe $3-$4 profit each shirt x 100 = $300-$400

<comment><AUTHOR> I've mentioned this several times, but I'll bring it up again because I'm legitimately surprised at how expensive many seem to think these shirts are. Screen printing should absolutely not cost $10/ea for a 2-color print, especially for anything over 36 shirts. If you're paying this, then you're being robbed. End of story. I have had many shirts printed before so I know where to look, but it's really not that difficult to find a decent printer with fair prices. Right now my costs are below $6/ea, and that's for medium- grade, fashion fitted tees. If I went with cheapy Gildan tees, I would be at less than $5/ea, but I'd rather not sacrifice the quality to squeeze out a tiny more profit. I want people to be pleased with what they're buying. I'm thinking of myself in their shoes.

<comment><USER14> Which printer are you using?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15>
        > Shipping & Handling
        >
        > These costs are already factored into the price of the shirts, so you don't have to pay any additional costs for shipping. All shirts will be shipped via USPS First-Class Mail. Shirts will only be shipped within US/Canada/Mexico.

I can't emphasize how brilliant this is. It really is a privilege to only worry about people on in three countries.

You've really done a great job of refining a website - one that was made in four hours to boot!

</comment><comment><USER16> I would love a blog post describing the steps you used to get to a MVP; how you got the shirts en masse to be printed and shipped, platforms you used to quickly iterate, etc. Really inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER17> Where are the shirts being made? Are they made to order and drop-shipped like Cafe Press/Zazzle? Or are you building up inventory?

<comment><USER18> He answered that in another thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2173482>

<comment><USER17> Yeah I saw that. I also asked this question before endlessvoid94 did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I suppose I'll be in the minority on a site run by a VC, but I'm pretty disappointed that a get-"rich"-quick story like this can outpace technical articles here - no doubt the word "profitable" in the title helped. I certainly don't think there's anything "wrong" with what you did, it's just not what I come here to read. I'd always kind of held the belief that this was a site for lots of really smart folks talking about current technical issues, but maybe I've been fooling myself a bit.

Credit where it's due though, the site appears to have been coded up pretty well

</comment><comment><USER20> Nice work, your good site design is a big part of why it works. Maybe you can turn this into a brand that makes more ironic t-shirts about overblown current events?

<comment><USER21> My first reaction to this comment was: Why would you want to have a business model that relies so much on overblown current events? And then I thought of all the news channels, and suddenly it doesn't sound like a bad model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congrats. I suggest a "Snowmageddon" t-shirt as well.

</comment><comment><USER23> <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Pet_Rock>

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What if your orders go viral. How can you possibly fulfill them?

<comment><USER25> Looking at the way he states there will be a 2 week delay I _assume_ he'll wait for the peak and then go ahead and contact his printer (I assume he's got contacts to make it easier) and get the amount he needs printed, that way he keeps costs down (ordering in bulk). If he got to the point where he couldn't handle the orders himself I'm pretty sure he'd be in the revenue areas that allowed him to contract multiple printers to do the work, printing t-shirts in bulk is cheap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Could you post a follow up statistics in a week or so? As this is a one shot sort of deal I wouldn't imagine you feel the need to keep the numbers under wraps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, planning on it. Keep an eye out on <http://madebyloren.com> \- my future blog for my startups/projects. I'll certainly make a post here on HN as well.

<comment><USER27> I would suggest publishing an RSS feed for your posts, because I probably won't remember to check your website again. Either way, please keep submitting updates to HN.

Looking at your site, you seem to be using a custom blog engine. Any details on your setup and how it came to be?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote the blog engine from scratch with Ruby on Rails. I wanted something really lightweight and suited for my needs, plus I figured it would be a good exercise. It's not finished yet, however. Sidetracked with instantly gratifying opportunities :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Created an account just to upvote this. Brilliant. There's nothing stopping you (or one of us) from doing it for every significant event in every country...

</comment><comment><USER29> What did you use to build the page, if you don't mind me asking?

I've been wondering for ages if pages like that share some common tool/template, or it it's just that the 'full width' idea makes them look cut from the same cloth.

<comment><AUTHOR> No templates or tools, unless you count Illustrator. This, along with all of my other projects, came straight from my crazy little mind, everything from design to code. I am a big fan of the "full width" style, and it definitely works well here.

Re templates: I'm sure they exist (especially on wordpress theme sites), but I really just prefer to create things on my own. Even coded my blog from scratch =]

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice! This reminds me of a similar sieze-the-moment kind of situation: When pluto was no more recognised as a planet, someone printed a shirt that said, "Pluto is still a planet!" (and several variations)...

</comment><comment><USER31> Snowpocalypse?

Did we already forget about the blizzard last year?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DCA_Blizzard_02_2010_9127....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DCA_Blizzard_02_2010_9127.JPG)

<comment><USER32> Snowpocalypse 2011

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I love online shirt designs / prints / creativity. I'm a regular fan of shirt woot, threadless, design by humans, etc. etc. Great job capitalizing on a fast trend, you can use the income to reinvest into other ideas and fast trend products.

</comment><comment><USER34> It might be a sensitive question for you. If you use PayPal as a payment platform, do they charge you income tax or will you have to claim income tax by yourself?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you're setting up the "buy now" links/buttons, you can choose to add sales tax.

As for income tax, every man for himself I believe. That's not Paypal's business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This success story reminds me of the just-in-time fashion design companies. They track the big runway shows and can quickly turn-out copy-cat fashions.

</comment><comment><USER36> it's only a matter of time until someone will try to capitalize on what's happening right now in Egypt...something like "I survived Mubarak"

</comment><comment><USER37> Are you taking care of the shipping (after printing the T-shirts locally) or is the wholesaler taking care of everything? Congrats!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm doing everything aside from printing. Good experience and more profit that way - cant go wrong there, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> You found the opportunity and owned it. I can't see how that deserves any criticism. How much did you make so far?

</comment><comment><USER39> how are you dealing with shipping to Mexico without paying for importation costs?

</comment><comment><USER40> This looks very polished for a 4 hour effort. Congrats on being profitable. :)

</comment><comment><USER41> what stack did you build it on?

Really impressive from conceptual to live site in 8 hours. Your profile says you're currently learning RoR. Is that the stack you built on?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, this one was just straight up css and html. Nothing fancy here - <USER3> reason to, its only a single page :) oh and its hosted on whatever my cheap web hosting is. Is it sad that I don't even know the tech specs? Maybe that's s reason for the success - only focusing on what matters.. now there's a good takeaway point

<comment><USER41> So when someone orders a shirt, where does that data go? via email?

<comment><AUTHOR> Paypal takes care of everything. They send an email when an order goes through and also have all order details available in the Paypal account dashboard. Doesn't get much simpler than that. I've always used paypal, but for once in my life I actually feel that the paypal fees are worth it. Good value and good service for a fair price. No complaints (yet).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> any word on revenue figures for this? kudos.

</comment><comment><USER43> keep us appraised of your sales, dude!

</comment><comment><USER44> how much are you making?

</comment><comment><USER45> I would suggest a shirt that says "SNOW MY GOD!!!"

<comment><USER46> snOMG

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> So are we expected to wear these T-Shirts in summer in Chicago? Nice idea at the right time but I am not sure why people would buy such things. But then again, you'd know better.

<comment><USER48> _"So are we expected to wear these T-Shirts in summer in Chicago?"_

You're thinking way too far ahead compared to the people who are ordering these shirts.

This product is clearly meant to be an impulse buy, in the same category as a mountain of junk sold on street corners, at festivals, and in souvenir shops.

If the prospective buyer thought about it for a couple of seconds, they'd probably realize that they really didn't need this, and might never even use it. But at the time it looks funny, or cute, or otherwise "brilliant". And they really feel like buying something, almost anything.

And that's how someone winds up walking out having bought a baseball cap with antlers on it, a singing fish, dancing Santa, or Snowpocalypse t-shirt.

The OP was just lucky enough to latch on to a trend before it died out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> When you earn enough to eat, let us know.

<comment><AUTHOR> In 8 hours I earned enough to pay for 3 months rent. How's that?

<comment><USER50> You should write a book and call it

        4 Hour Work-Month

<comment><USER42> Alternate title: The 4 Hour Blizzard of Cash.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mozilla Chromeless: making desktop apps with web technologies - <AUTHOR> http://mozillalabs.com/blog/2011/02/prism-is-now-chromeless/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone else wish that we could have the opposite? Web apps with desktop technology?

It seems strange that 20 years later the crude stateless hypertext technology designed to share physics documents has been hacked to serve desktop-wannabe apps. Yes, we all love the web's easy and ubiquitous deployment benefits, but what have we traded in exchange for that?

We've long since solved the problem of laying out desktop apps or printed materials. But it seems every time I read about CSS or Ajax hacks to get something similar to a desktop-style interaction it just boggles my mind at how much cruft we have to tack on to make the browser pretend to be a desktop system. Nowhere is this more apparent than the HTML5/canvas game development scene. While I'm cheering for open standards as much as the next guy, it's disappointing that a modern computer with its Gigahertz CPUs has trouble rendering a game that 20 years ago was being ran on CPUs in the tens of MHz range. We herald frameworks as our salvation, but these extra layers of abstraction will only serve to slow performance.

The Java applet, everyone's favorite web app bastard child was IMO at least a step in a (not the only) right direction. It would be cool if browsers supported a sandboxed execution environment that used a common open bytecode technology that allowed for languages other than javascript to be used (client-side python would be cool), and provided a common library for UI development and layout similar to what Java Swing has. It seems that everyone would love applets if they were introduced today using an open standard, implemented by the browser by default, and without everyone's memories of the horrible performance over dialup on orders of magnitude slower hardware and the whole Java/Sun thing.

Maybe it's time that we started looking for successors to HTTP and HTML designed with webapps/games in mind.

<comment><USER3> >> We've long since solved the problem of laying out desktop apps or printed materials.

We've long since solved the problem of world peace and disappearing socks.

UI layout != print layout. And it's not really clear that we've solved UI layout any more than we've solved web layout. In fact, there's a bit of a trend in desktop UI layout towards web-like technologies such as DOM and stylesheets. Look at WPF and XAML, for example.

<comment><USER4> WPF/XAML is terribly obnoxious as a layout system. Spark in Flex 4 is a much more reasonable system, and even then it still has its annoying foibles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Who remembers a few years back when Adobe Air was first making waves and Mozilla introduced Prism and Adobe's pr team hit the web to discredit it? Good times

Anyway, we've _developed_ an internal app at my job targeting webkit on os x and we required the use of fluid, it was very nice not to have to worry about cross-browser issues. Shout out to Air as I understand and Prism (now Chromeless), more people should use this tech

<comment><USER6> We're doing the same using Google Chrome Packaged Applications, which is based on Webkit. We use FireBreath NPAPI extensions for any OS specific enhancements. The end result is noticeably faster than AIR and less resources.

Chromeless sounds like a good idea but Google's V8 engine has been spanking Mozilla's engine for a while now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not a lot of people know this but the recent version of Chrome supports running any web-page as its own app. Try it out from Settings [wrench icon] > Tools > Create Application Shortcut. It's great for todo apps or gmail. I know it works on Windows. The link seems to be grayed out in my OSX box for some reason.

<comment><USER8> As you said, not in OS X.

They are working on it in theory, though I'm not sure what is taking so long: <http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=13148>

<comment><USER6> There's a simple AppleScript which lets you do it though. I'm not on my Macbook otherwise I'd leave a link.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is Mozilla intentionally trying to create market confusion? It isn't obvious from the name, but this is built on XULRunner and has no relation to Google Chrome.

<comment><USER10> Browser "Chrome" has been a term that's been around for ages. The confusion can be blamed on Google, actually.

<comment><USER11> Yes, but using "Chromeless" after the fact that Chrome is now considered as a browser name is asking for trouble.

It could have been a nice code name for the project, though :)

<comment><USER12> If you think that "Chrome" was chosen for any reason other than a direct reference to the widespread usage of the term with regard to Mozilla, you're crazy; i.e., if you have an agenda to name someone to blame for muddying the waters, pointing the finger at the Chrome team would be far more apropos.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The recovery puzzle: New factory in Ohio struggles to match jobs to job-seekers - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-recovery-puzzle-a-new-factory-in-ohio-struggles-to-match-jobs-to-job-seekers/2014/04/05/098d53ec-b44e-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html <comment><USER2> An article about having trouble filling jobs; but there is no indication that the hiring manager made any effort to determine why he is having trouble getting people to show for interviews.

Makes me wonder if he knows why and just isn't saying. Small town? Too far from major cities? Wages that are an insufficient draw for the type/location/work schedule?

<comment><USER3> Being from this region, I'm guessing it's the location, Fort Recovery. The nearest cities are Fort Wayne and Dayton, which are both small cities, and they're about 1.25 hours away. Fort Recovery isn't near any interstate highway. The job ads probably show up for everyone in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Indianapolis, and once they GPS it, they probably realize how far it is (2.25 hours from those cities).

The salary and benefits are competitive though ($65-70K/yr is what a mid-level software engineer makes), which is probably why a lot of people fire off an email.

<comment><USER4> In order to entice petroleum engineers to work above the Arctic circle or on an oil rig, energy companies compensate them accordingly. The wages offered in the story just aren't sufficient for this location.

<comment><USER5> Good point.

You are comparing rural Ohio to the Arctic circle, which, if you are from Ohio makes for a funny side note.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't see the struggle.

tl;dr: A factory, way out in the sticks, offering low-moderate wage jobs requiring minimal skills but sometimes high responsibility, attracts numerous candidates. Some don't show, some are awful, a couple are good, and one seems fit for management. This takes a day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why so many no-shows for the interviews?

Is it a sign that the economy is doing well and applicants (for these types of jobs in this area, at least) have multiple good offers on the table?

Or that the applicants are so worn down that they don't bother to turn up because they think they have no chance of getting the jobs they're apply for?

<comment><USER8> It would seem odd for the latter - why even bother applying, in that case?

<comment><USER9> To keep their unemployment benefits alive maybe? I believe you have to show you're out looking for work.

<comment><USER10> Not showing up for interviews will also get your benefits stopped.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > _Bernie likes to think of his job as if he's building a baseball team. (...) > Can the guy who applied for first base play right field instead? What about > the pitcher?_

Please don't do this. This makes this part of the article incomprehensible for a non-American person. First base? Right field? I have no idea what this means and will never learn (even if one told me today what it means, I would have completely forgotten tomorrow).

<comment><USER12> I bet you're a smarter individual than you're letting on. You might know what those mean right off the bat - but I'm sure you can infer the reference via some pretty good critical thinking skills.

I pay no attention to soccer, hockey or cricket, but if a fan uses a position term as part of a broader analogy, I could infer the overall context of his point.

Besides all that, baseball is hardly just an American sport, it might not be as widely popular in Europe, but it's quite popular in Central / South America as well as Japan / Taiwan.

<comment><USER6> Right off the bat?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "Bernie Coyle wants to hire people. In this hopeful moment in the recuperating American economy, he wants to _give_ 40 new employees health insurance, dental insurance, good wages and a 401(k) plan with a company match.."

Why do employers think they are "giving" people a job? Would they say the employee is looking to "give" them labor? Its business after all, both parties are exchanging something. Nothing is being "given".

<comment><USER14> >Why do employers think they are "giving" people a job? Would they say the employee is looking to "give" them labor? Its business after all, both parties are exchanging something. Nothing is being "given".

While I want to side with you in principle, for many workers this is their reality. For whatever reason, their own fault or not, they have trouble finding a job, and it is very easy to fall into the mental trap of relying on the generosity of others rather than one's own competence.

<comment><USER5> Employees and employers maybe legally have equal power, as in, on paper it is a peer to peer type relationship. But in practice it is not. There could be many reasons, low level of training required, lots of desperate candidates waiting at the door, jobs shipped overseas (so say local factory from another type of industry) was closed create a surplus of labor, and so on.

Normally people will be lining out at the door to take the place of anyone fired and will also work extra and sacrifice their free time in order to not get let go.

Another reason for what he said is the propaganda narrative that has been pushed through the ages -- "companies are good, they create jobs" "you should not unionize", "labor rights are wrong", "companies are benefactors and if you behave yourself you'll get a job from them". So this kind of mentality (even regardless of economic condition currently) is entrenched.

Think about it, usually that kind of jobs would be filled quickly and it would be make for a news story. The fact that it wasn't, it kind of became an anomaly and is now in the news.

Now he could probably change location (move to a more poor part of the country), raise the salary (to make it worthwhile to drive 2 or 3 hours a day), or few other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The only puzzle here is why the author of this story thinks these jobs are any good. Maybe because the journalism job market is so shitty that reporters actually think $50k/year is a great salary, and living in the midst of more chickens than people is enticing.

<comment><USER16> $50k/year is more than the median household income of the US, and out there with no culture or people the houses must be quite cheap!</comment></comment>


Will Washington take down Apple? - <AUTHOR> http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/2014/02/will-washington-take-down-apple-and-why/ ...Apple appealed the anti-trust judgement this Tuesday, but was unable to get the government "monitor's" work suspended while the case is under appeal. Among the interesting facts that have come out about the "monitor," Michael Bromwich: he bills for his time at $1,100 an hour and charged $138,432 for his first two weeks of "work." <comment><USER2> "Crony capitalism" is just apologetics for regular capitalism.</comment>


I'd buy that for a dollar - <AUTHOR> http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/id-buy-that-for.html <comment><USER2> Wow, that's cool! I've played with the program (name?) that does this with pre-configured shapes--but to have something that an instructor or student can invent/draw live is uberschweet.

</comment><comment><USER3> with that title, I half expected to see a picture of a half Euro.

<comment><USER4> with that title, I half expected to see a video of Robocop...

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093870/quotes></comment></comment>


Taking a full course of antibiotics doesn't help prevent spread of resistance - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2017/08/stop_taking_antibiotics_once_you_feel_better.html#lf_comment=720520299 <comment><USER2> The problem with stopping early is that you may have to start again. A whole course, since feeling better doesn't mean you have a low enough population of the bacteria to not reinfect you.

Surely, repeated/massive bottlenecks in a viral population aren't a good thing for antibiotic resistance.

Of course, the absolute best scenario to avoid resistance is to treat exactly as needed (say, kill 95% of the bacterial population, let the immune system clear the last 5%, done) but really, you can't realistically do that right now.

So you have two choices : Either you tell patients "Take it until the end even if you feel better!" which leads to _some_ antibiotic resistance, or you tell them "Take them until you feel better!" which probably leads to reinfection and use of a _second course_ of the same antibiotic.

Taking exactly enough > Taking more to make sure it's dead > Stopping too early, requiring the process to be done again.

<comment><USER3> However, this doesn't mean that the current courses that are being prescribed are in the sweet spot, and the article cites evidence showing that courses of certain shorter durations are _just as effective_ as the currently prescribed longer courses at curing the infection, with the added gains of being less likely to produce resistence, more likely to be completed, fewer side effects, and cheaper.

It's unfortunate that the Slate article reprinting the The Conversation article discussing the British Medical Journal article used a title of "Stop taking antibiotics once you feel better" which is not what the underlying article is claiming.

<comment><USER4> I just had a round of antibiotics for an infected spider bite (no super powers) and the prescription amount and duration was extremely arbitrary - 2000mg/day of something for 10 days. I'm guessing not only are they not hitting the sweet spot, but they're prescribing multiple times more than someone would need, just to be safe, considering they don't know the strain of bacteria or anything relevant about me besides my weight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're worried about antibiotic resistance, consider cutting back or eliminating animal agriculture products from your diet.

According to the FDA, 80% of antibiotics used in the US are given to farm animals. This is because it is cheaper to give antibiotics to every farm animal just in case rather than giving the medical care needed to properly diagnose and treat. Bird flu or swine flu has a decent probability of being the next epidemic because of this practice.

[http://www.sustainabletable.org/257/antibiotics](http://www.sustainabletable.org/257/antibiotics)

EDIT: My mistake, bird and swine flu are caused by viruses not bacteria and are therefore not affected by the antibiotic stuffing of farm animals. But the crowding and conditions of factory farms do contribute to potential bird and swine flu outbreaks. See my comment below.

<comment><USER6> > 80% of antibiotics used in the US are given to farm animals

These antibiotics are not the same ones used to treat human infections, and the correlation between the rise in antibiotic resistant infections and antibiotic use in livestock does not indicate causation.

> Bird flu or swine flu has a decent probability of being the next epidemic > because of this practice.

Influenza is caused by a virus, and is unaffected by antibiotics.

<comment><USER7> It's simply not the case that we use totally different antibiotics for agriculture.

Here's an article in Scientific American about the health risks of agricultural antibiotics. One quote: "One study reported that more than 90 percent of E. coli in pigs raised on conventional farms are resistant to tetracycline."

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-drug- resistan...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-drug-resistant- bacteria-travel-from-the-farm-to-your-table/)

I guess it's possible that the rise of both antibiotic use in livestock and antibiotic resistance in their bacteria is completely coincidental, but given the well-understood causal connection it seems quite unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is a systematic property of the modern medical system to overtreat.

At the first level, if a patient goes to a doctor the expectation is the doctor should do something to help. If the doctor says, "sorry there is nothing I can do" the patient will likely leave unhappy and try a different doctor. This leads to things like prescription of antibiotics for viral infections. There is no effective treatment, but patients leave happier with a useless treatment than with a denial.

One thing ignored in the article is that, in this role as a placebo prescription, a longer course of antibiotics outperforms a short course. That is because a longer course gives a viral infection a longer time to clear up on its own.

<comment><USER9> Secondary infection is a thing. Antibiotics may be prescribed to reduce the risk of that.

<comment><USER10> And as anyone with a child recently placed into daycare in a major city will tell you, what happens is the kid gets the sniffles from a cold virus/whatever, and it turns into a sore throat, then a bacterial sinus infection, then a ear infection, and at this point the bacterial infections at the daycare are resistant to antibiotics, so they end up gradually rolling down the sickness hill until the doctor prescribes something strong enough to knock it out.

And god forbid, mom/dad get it. I almost died from some crap my daughter brought home because the doctor sent me home twice with a "suck it up" attitude (after I had been "sucking it up" for nearly two months), until I ended up in the emergency room at 1AM with pneumonia, a massively elevated temp, and a pleural effusion that was so painful I could barely breath. The doctor that sent me home called a couple days later (because they took blood samples and some swabs) with a "we have to see you now" call, at which point I was like, yah thanks a lot for nothing...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not going to be able to explain my point clearly, but I will try.

you keep seeing rhetoric like this, 'we have antibiotic resistance because doctors were prescribing it willy nilly' all the time, but it just doesn't line up.

take a look at the list of diseases that formed / are forming resistance. they are all diseases you absolutely should have been taking antibiotics for. they werent diseases that gained super powers because someone was taking penicillin for the flu.

then you have things like MRSA, which was discovered almost immediately after antibiotics, however, it was probably discovered because people were experimenting with antibiotics and that made it show its face. In other words, it was always around. its documented that people died of such infections before, we just dont look too much past it because they didnt have antibiotics at the time.

<comment><USER12> 85% of all antibiotics sold are for livestock. The volume of antibiotic given to animals, and the cramped and dirty living conditions of many farms results in a damn good engine for creating antibiotic resistant bacteria

<comment><USER11> not just livestock, one of our most powerful antibiotics (tetracycline), was used en-mase to wash down produce such as grapes.

still, things like antibiotic resistant gonorrhea, syphilis, and tuberculosis scare me the most, and they have nothing to do with livestock.

we are in a bit of a catch 22, we want to treat these diseases, but in doing so the diseases are getting stronger in an arms race against our technology. meanwhile our bodies de-evolve due to its dependence on our technology to defend it.

<comment><USER12> > _meanwhile our bodies de-evolve due to its dependence on our technology to > defend it_

I saw in a documentary a couple years ago that skulls of our ancient hunter- gatherer ancestors had little to no dental cavities—their teeth were intact. It was attributed to their very diverse bacteria exposure (being hunter gatherers) and no sterilization. This changed with farming.

I'm a bigger fan of probiotic research rather than this antibacterial "arms race".

<comment><USER13> This has more to do with sugar (corn in the americas). For example, in Wisconsin it is possible to use dental information to identify if there was a diet of wild rice or corn. [https://www.wpr.org/shows/wisconsins-mound- builders](https://www.wpr.org/shows/wisconsins-mound-builders)

Farming is in part responsible for the concentration of sugars that bacteria use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This has been well established in medical circles for at least 5 years now, the difficulty is in ensuring that people in the community cease at an appropriate time (i.e. Not before it is fully cleared) because that is potentially worse than taking a 'whole' un-needed course

<comment><USER15> Is there any reliable self-managed way to determine what is the appropriate time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The message could be right, but the unnecessarily condescending and derisive tone of this article undermines its effectiveness. I for one don't feel any more informed about the data showing that longer courses of antibiotics create enhance the chances of creating resistant bacteria, nor about why this happens.

<comment><USER16> I think the mechanism might work like this (disclaimer, I'm not a doctor, I'm just making a theoretical guess):

What can an antibiotic do? Kill bacteria that are not resistant to it. If a bacterium is resistant to it, it will be unaffected. Now, if you stop taking it "early" the antibiotic didn't have the time to kill 100% of non-resistant bacteria. You leave your body in a mixed environment where non-resistant and resistant bacteria have to compete. If you keep taking it once you feel better maybe you killed all the non-resistant bacteria. So you leave your body in an homogeneous environment where only resistant bacteria live, don't have to compete, and can prosper undisturbed.

<comment><USER15> Makes sense; in the end, only experimental data could show how this works compared to the other mechanism, ie, that strains that aren't yet fully resistant, but have some genes that help resistance, are favored by a partial course, and thus have "time" to develop full resistance (especially if the patient then uses the same antibiotic again).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Please, after reading this, don't take this as advice not to finish your prescribed antibiotic courses. You personally do not know if a shorter course would work for you.

</comment><comment><USER18> > If you feel completely well before you finish that course, you should be > encouraged to call your physician to discuss if it is safe to stop early.

Not suggesting this is bad advice in general, but man, elsewhere in the world do doctors still speak to patients on the phone?

I remember it being possible as a child, but living as an adult in Australia I'm yet to find a doctor who takes phone calls. They won't speak to you at all unless you book an appointment.

<comment><USER19> I email my doctor or call them whenever I have an issue. I'm in Boston.

<comment><USER20> My insurance company has a phone number set up just for medical advice. You initially talk to a nurse, but they'll send me to my doctor if it's necessary. It's much cheaper for them to take a phone call than have me visit in person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _That's why your doctor gives you seven or 14 days' worth of antibiotics!_

This makes it seem like courses of antibiotics are always 7 or 14 days, but they're not. I just filled a prescription for a 5-day course. It may have been more uniform at 7/14 in the past, but it isn't now.

</comment><comment><USER22> The antibiotic problem has nothing to do with young people. It's old people that are always in the hospital and will die if infection is not treated immediatly with antibiotics. That's where resistance incubates, not in a bunch of 30 something's with cold.

</comment><comment><USER23> Maybe gut bacteria are quite a bit different from bacteria elsewhere in the body, but I had an experience that makes me wonder about antibiotic effectiveness in general. My sister gave me a couple of ubiome gut bacteria kits and I took one a few weeks before my first course of antibiotics (that I can recall - possibly I had to take them at some point decades ago) and one after two weeks on Amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, which was sampled right at the point where I would have taken the next pill if I wasn't stopping.

In the "microbiome diversity" score, I was at 7th percentile before the antibiotics and 15th percentile after (inverse Simpson's Diversity Index normalized to 10 score went from 6.05 to 6.69). I did a couple of times notice ubiome presenting obviously incorrect information (and they never made a substantial response to reporting the first one) so one possible explanation that I could believe is that ubiome simply presents incorrect data. Another is that gut motility changes and/or somehow due to the diarrhea I got earlier in the treatment there was a larger collection of dead bacteria from meals in my gut the second time. I guess a third is that when alive some bacteria are not only killing others that arrive from meals but destroying them beyond recognition. Still, this makes me wonder a tiny bit if even two weeks of antibiotics doesn't fully kill non-antibiotic resistant bacteria in the gut. I was taking the antibiotics to try to calm down overactive gut bacteria (it helped for a few months), so even if this is the case for me it might not be generally true, but if it is true for anyone than we could be the ones breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria in our gut.

</comment><comment><USER24> > If you are sick and your doctor mentions antibiotics to you, the first thing > you should say is, "Hey, doc, do I really need the antibiotic?"

This will of course never happen. Tragedy of the commons and all that.

<comment><USER25> Anecdata, but I always ask if I really need them, and 100% of the cases the doc says: we can probably wait a few days. In my life of 30years, never had to take antibiotics...not even once! My case might be special, but at least shows that most of the time (in our times at least) we can easily do without them.

<comment><USER26> I think you probably are fairly special. Most people I know have had some pretty intense infections that could have been fatal, though only two of them would have certainly been fatal. As for myself, I've had a jaw infection that actually got into the bone, meningitis, lyme disease, and walking pneumonia twice. Compared to some of my peers, I actually consider myself pretty healthy.

That being said, I have definitely been prescribed antibiotics a few times that it wasn't necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a little late to the game but I would like to point out that this doesn't apply to infected implants and some other special orthopaedic infections where you just as with TB need to treat for a long subclinical period. Otherwise I think it is an excellent article that many of my colleagues should read. I've actually also always wondered where this myth comes from.

</comment><comment><USER28> Warning: A scientific result that a _treatment_ "doesn't help" is always suspicious: (A) The study may have neglected to measure all the ways the treatment might help. (B) Getting a result of "doesn't help" is always easy -- just use a silly means, e.g., insensitive or nearly irrelevant, of evaluation.

</comment><comment><USER29> > Doctors may otherwise prescribe an antibiotic even when you don't need one, > out of fear that you will be unhappy without the prescription.

This is the argument for single provider right there. Patients are not customers and a doctors job is not to make the customer "happy" \- the job is to make them well.

<comment><USER30> I think this idea is a lot more appealing if we imagine someone else being unhappy with their doctor and wanting to go elsewhere, than if we imagine ourselves in that position. I think we have all had doctors who we did not like, who we thought missed something, whose philosophy of care we didn't share, and been grateful for the opportunity to go somewhere else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Actual article (the BMJ peer reviewed analysis) is behind a paywall. But my thoughts as a microbiologist are that this is more a situation when the "course" that's been prescribed is generally wrong or the diagnosis is wrong.

In either case, the risk for increased resistance is high, while the value for treatment low. Without a positive biochemical assay to assert a bacterial agent, antibiotics should not be prescribed, but likely are. Knowing how long a course to prescribe takes empirical evidence, which seems to indicate shorter courses are needed.

Since I don't have access to the actual research, I'm guessing that it's more like "old, long antibiotic prescriptions were generally over prescribed, doctors should prescribe shorter doses and confirm with lab that bacterial agent present"

It's been a decade since I've need antibiotics, but the last time I took a z-pak which is only 3 doses. Since initial immune response normally takes longer to ramp up and normally is a few days, this seems reasonable.

<comment><USER32> > _Actual article (the BMJ peer reviewed analysis) is behind a paywall._

I might be barking up the wrong tree here but if you're referring to [http://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418](http://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418) then that page has an open(-access) link to [http://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418.full.pdf](http://www.bmj.com/content/358/bmj.j3418.full.pdf).

<comment><USER31> Still paid wall, you only get the abstract.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The author here clearly has an axe to grind. Is this an established fact now, or an exaggeration of one study?

<comment><USER7> From the article: "in the last two decades, we actually have had dozens of clinical trials published demonstrating that shorter courses of antibiotics are just as effective as longer courses."

And from the linked WHO page: "There has been a lot of research into how long antibiotic courses should be, to determine the shortest possible length of course needed to completely kill all bacteria....Evidence is emerging that shorter courses of antibiotics may be just as effective as longer courses for some infections....They also reduce the exposure of bacteria to antibiotics, thereby reducing the speed by which the pathogen develops resistance."

[http://www.who.int/features/qa/stopping-antibiotic- treatment...](http://www.who.int/features/qa/stopping-antibiotic- treatment/en/)

<comment><USER34> 'Reducing the speed' Is this being measured or just an assumption?

Because resistance shows up extremely quickly with short dosage. But, it seems like a dangerous experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Meta comment: The HN headline is difficult to parse. The original headline is a lot better.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first half of the original headline is clickbait; the second is too long for an HN title. What text would you suggest?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> What? It's to prevent reinfection not resistance.

</comment><comment><USER36> He sure can't help calling himself an expert.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a shit article that provides no insight into what we learned that changed our mind about how antibiotic resistance arises. He simple derides as silly and stupid the idea that we ever thought that resistance could possibly arise if we quit taking antibiotics before the bacteria were all dead, leaving a population with better survival characteristics to rebuild the population.

Interesting finding if true, but don't waste your time with this article.

<comment><USER38> Experts, such as the author should be listened to. Because they are experts. And you should listen to them /s

I dislike when someone needs to inflate the worth of their ideas by repeatedly reminding us they are experts. Show me facts. Briefly, and I mean briefly, introduce your background up front and let your evidence and ideas talk, not "I am an expert, trust me". Especially on issues such as this one.

This is not to say credible people should always be challenged constantly for facts, but said credible don't need to make such a deal out of it.

<comment><USER39> I dislike the general feeling among some in the HN community to conflate tone with message and, generally within one paragraph of a linked article, determine that the style of delivery is not within the community standard of humorlessness and pedantry and thus requires a metaphorical (or literal) downvote.

Actually reading this article, we discover that the author refers to himself exactly once as an 'expert'. He cites a number of other professionals, mostly in order to provide linked journal references supporting his position. It's generally difficult to get published in a peer-reviewed journal without some kind of credentials in a field, so if the presence of opinions by professionals in an area is offensive, it's going to be hard to find anything of substance to read.

<comment><USER37> I read the entire article before I posted. Despite the downvotes, I stand by my original claim. This article sheds no insight on the mechanism, and takes a supercilious tone towards those who believed in the "old" ideas.

This is akin to someone announcing a paper that shows evidence of a "fifth force" (baryonic) after all (30 years or so later) and dismisses everybody who believed in the old law of mass attraction (gravity only) as being silly.

IMHO, it's a shitty way to be, _especially_ when you don't even _bother_ to present the new insight.

<comment><USER40> From the HN guidelines:

 _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading._

<comment><USER37> The downvote comment was ancillary to my message. I'm new here, y'know.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Covid-19 Treatment with Zinc Plus Low Dose Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin - <AUTHOR> https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202007.0025/v1 <comment><USER2> This needs more supporting data and independent verification. It's Vladimir Zelenko, again.[1] Without an outside review of the data, again. Also, all the patients are apparently from Kiyras Joel, which is a cult community in New York State with group prayer three times a day. It's a high-density situation, like a nursing home. Zelenko had previously stated that "90% of Kiryas Joel had COVID-19 after 9 of his first 14 tests came back positive — a conclusion the Orange County health commissioner blasted as irresponsible."[2]

Lots of stories from March, few later, probably because NYC had a much bigger epidemic.

[1] [http://archive.is/rg1IG](http://archive.is/rg1IG)

[2] [https://www.lohud.com/story/news/coronavirus/2020/03/24/kiry...](https://www.lohud.com/story/news/coronavirus/2020/03/24/kiryas- joel-doctor-coronavirus-videos/2913292001/)

</comment><comment><USER3> As pointed out in the comments on the site, the key issue here is that it is not a blind study, but a case series study where the demographics of the control group are unreported:

 _> The main problem with this work is that the demographics of the control group are not reported, so we have no idea if they are similar. This them means that we have no idea if the differences in outcomes are because of the treatment, or if they would be expected because of the demographies of the groups._

 _> A subtler point is that the reported age profile of the treatment group is impossible. Group A is aged >60 years, and almost half of the treatment group was in that group. But the IQR was reported as 40-60, so only 25% of the treatment group had an age >60\. I hope this was due to excessive rounding, or a similar error that can be corrected._

It appears that the researchers selected the treatment group based on a set of quite specific criteria and then compared the outcomes of those patients with outcomes in the general population (see figure 1).

</comment><comment><USER4> From the link:

Conclusions: Risk stratification-based treatment of COVID-19 outpatients as early as possible after symptom onset with the used triple therapy, including the combination of zinc with low dose hydroxychloroquine, was associated with significantly less hospitalizations and 5 times less all-cause deaths.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a covid fatalist now, but I hope I live long enough to see a clear timeline of HCQ.

I remember when the media politicized the drug, and it caused places like medium to ban articles saying it was useful:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20200405061401/https://medium.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200405061401/https://medium.com/@agaiziunas/covid-19-had- us-all-fooled-but-now-we-might-have-finally-found-its-secret-91182386efcb)

Then we find out there was fabricated data about the drug in the world's top medical journal that had to be retracted.

wtf is going on

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by media politizing HCQ ?

I saw some media posting medical disinformation like the claim that in Italy lupus patients treated with HCQ were protected from covid.. [https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/media-lied- people-d...](https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/04/media-lied-people-died- italian-study-finds-incredible-prophylaxis-results-patients- hydroxychloroquine/) Denial from the Italia reumatology society: [https://www.iltempo.it/cronache/2020/05/02/news/idrossicloro...](https://www.iltempo.it/cronache/2020/05/02/news/idrossiclorochina- dati-registro-sir-1322382/) And claiming that people who do not think HCQ is effective do so because of their anti-Trump feelings.. So that seems to match your claim about media politizing..

What I saw on Twitter is many GOP/Trump militants making dubious claims about HCQ effectiveness and branding everyone who disagree victims of TDS..

And I'm all for medium or others censoring medical disinformation as it was the case with the article you linked to.

Looking at the many studies that were made in the last monthes (including RCTs) and their respective shortcoming it is clear that HCQ isn't effective..

<comment><USER7> > What I saw on Twitter is many GOP/Trump militants making dubious claims > about HCQ effectiveness and branding everyone who disagree victims of TDS..

I also saw the opposite, people saying "we knew all along", before some solid evidence was out (RECOVERY, and the UMN study: the latter however has limits due to lack of PCR-confirmed viral tests). Or they believed the flawed Lancet paper unconditionally (count me among them, it was a mistake).

The whole matter was politicized too heavily and the first victim was science, as far as I can see.

I say "some" and not "the" evidence because there are still some large studies going on, like COPCOV.

<comment><USER8> This is one of the reasons many experienced politicians choose not to comment on things that they know will only politicize a thing. As soon as Trump decided to tie his political fortunes to something, it created negative motivations for others to see it fail. And with Trump's record, as soon as he mentions something, a lot of people are going to instantly assume the truth must be elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> This does not excuse people (in particular well-educated people) from _not_ using their brains.

I'd go further, and say that actually a lot regarding this disease is still heavily polarized, without any room for more nuanced positions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Tired of hearing about observational studies 5 months after CQ/HCQ was first reported as promising. RCT or GTFO.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's some discussion on the r/COVID19 subreddit about it: [https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/hkgj7a/covid19_out...](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/hkgj7a/covid19_outpatients_early_riskstratified/)

<comment><USER11> Current top comment on reddit by PAJW:

This is a study with authorship by Vladimir Zelenko, MD, a New York physician who has often spoken in favor of HCQ in the popular press. I'm not sure what role the two German authors played.

The study finds a clear decrease in hospitalization and death among those treated with HCQ + AZT + Zinc to an "untreated public reference". Essentially no details are given regarding the control group except whether they sought hospitalization or died as a result of COVID-19.

The study group was clearly younger than the usual COVID-19 death (median age: 58; IQR 40-60), but 70% had one or more medical condition that may serve as a comorbidity (most common: hypertension 28%, obesity 28%, hyperlipidema 23%).

As with many of the studies that aren't RCTs, it is difficult to say whether the treatment worked or not. In this case, since the control group is unknown in composition, the data is really murky. 4 hospitalizations among 141 COVID- positive patients sounds fairly low, but I can't say that definitively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This study from 2014 details the interaction of Zinc and HCQ. This isn't new knowledge but it is being used as a political cudgel. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/)

A study at NYU study showed a 44% reduction in death rate for patients treated with HCQ and ZINC. [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.02.20080036v1) A recent study in Michigan at Henry Ford Health System showed a significant cut in death rate using HCQ . [https://www.henryford.com/news/2020/07/hydro- treatment-study](https://www.henryford.com/news/2020/07/hydro-treatment-study)

Some doctors are able to put 2+2 together, Zinc kills the virus, HCQ helps Zinc into the cell and they are saving lives with this treatment. Other doctors hate Orangeman so much they would rather see people die than give any sort of credit to Orangeman. When this becomes clear to the American people that 44% of those lost to this disease could have been spared, there will be a revolution.

This is the only trial in the US that has a chance of completing a study of HCQ+Zinc. Unfortunately, it is not being fast-tracked while people are dying. Call you representative and demand that this trial be fast-tracked before big pharma and the Orangeman haters destroy it.

[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04370782](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04370782)

</comment><comment><USER13> Why are the researchers combining several different substances at once without understanding the full effects of a single one of the substances in relation to COVID-19? What if zinc (a vitamin that is important to the immune system) is solely responsible for the improved health outcomes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Dr. Zelenko stated in a widely circulated letter Mar 23 2020:

        My out-patient treatment regimen is as follows:

        1. Hydroxychloroquine 200mg twice a day for 5 days

        2. Azithromycin 500mg once a day for 5 days

        3. Zinc sulfate 220mg once a day for 5 days

        The rationale for my treatment plan is as follows. I combined the
        data available from China and South Korea with the recent study
        published from France (sites available on request). We know that
        hydroxychloroquine helps Zinc enter the cell. We know that Zinc
        slows viral replication within the cell. Regarding the use of
        azithromycin, I postulate it prevents secondary bacterial
        infections. These three drugs are well known and usually well
        tolerated, hence the risk to the patient is low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why are all articles about HCQ getting flagged? Who is afraid of the discussion? If it works, we should be able to discuss it. If it doesn't work, we should also be able to discuss it. Sunlight and truth is key.

What is going on, HN?

<comment><USER11> This is yet another observational study without a proper control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the comments are somewhat telling about this paper and preprints as sources of medical decision making overall.

Comment 1: "A subtler point is that the reported age profile of the treatment group is impossible. Group A is aged >60 years, and almost half of the treatment group was in that group. But the IQR was reported as 40-60, so only 25% of the treatment group had an age >60\. I hope this was due to excessive rounding, or a similar error that can be corrected."

Comment 2: 'I know nothing of this field but study seems well done'

Comment 3: lauds the authors, makes no comments about the study, and rants about the pharmaceutical industry

Authors include a hand surgeon and a family practitioner (Zelenko) who has been urging hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for a long time now, and was one of Trump's main sources[0].

[0] [https://forward.com/news/national/447109/zelenko- hydroxychlo...](https://forward.com/news/national/447109/zelenko- hydroxychloroquine-trump/)</comment>


Journalists to Other Journalists: Call Out Windows - <AUTHOR> http://techrights.org/2010/04/21/windows-rarely-named-and-shamed/

<comment><USER2> I don't see a reason for news journalists to act as proxies for Apple etc.'s PR departments. News is news because it's new; there's nothing much new about the dominant platform being targeted by malware, and it's not because Windows is intrinsically flawed, but because it's the big target.

Also, the article's site is an amazingly shrill opponent of anything relating to MS or Bill Gates. "Author Calls for Action to Stop Bill Gates' Abduction of US Education", "Microsoft Exploits the Poor", "Gates Foundation (and Microsoft) Take the Libraries Takeover Global", etc. It reads like the author(s) puppies got squished by MS early in life, or something. Definitely personal, not rational.

<comment><USER3> Since when does calling out Microsoft equal being PR for Apple? Reporters should be attacking bad policies, no matter what the company. And wether the arguments are rational or personal, they make some good points. Some of the articles seem as if the guy is wearing a tin foil hat but then again, it is well documented what Microsoft has done against Linux/Open Source movement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No company in the industry has spent more to address security than Microsoft, in absolute terms or in figures relative to their size or market penetration. I say this as an inveterate Apple customer who came up using Linux by way of 386bsd.

You see a journalist "calling out" Microsoft for insecurity, and you've got a coin-flip's chance that that reporter has absolutely no idea what he's talking about when it comes to security.

<comment><USER5> Yes, Microsoft spent a lot of money on security, and this has paid off to some extent (Win7 is _much_ better than, say, 98); but don't you think they still, well, suck? In at least an absolute sense, if not a relative sense?

<comment><USER4> Do I enjoy using Win7? No.

Would I trust Win7 code more than... other code? Very yes.

This is basically like asking me, "which would you trust more: code that you're reasonably sure Mike Eddington fuzzed, or code that you're pretty confident he hasn't."

<comment><USER5> It's not that Microsoft has crappy coders: their programmers are good and motivated. It's not that Microsoft doesn't care about security: they got burnt badly enough that they learned their lesson. It's just that there is so _much_ code.

A good OpenBSD install, even one with lots of functionality, just has much less trusted code (i.e. code which absolutely has to be correct). And while I _do_ like OpenBSD, it's not unique: the other BSDs are also solid, and Solaris - despite a somewhat bad reputation in some circles - is also pretty good.

I'm sure that there are some very smart people working on Windows security; it's just that engineering everything for security beats "features first".

[EDIT: thank you for your reply! I'm happy to learn, even if we're unlikely to convince each other...]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "What would it be like if Linux, or any real multi-user networking operating system with a sane design, were the standard operating system? I bet money we would not have tens of millions of Linux PCs in botnets, even with a large population of unsophisticated users. No botnets pumping out phishes, spam, and malware, no drive-by infections from merely visiting infected Web sites"

I call BS on this quote. I have no reason to believe that, e.g. firefox on linux is any more secure than firefox on windows. There is no reason a botnet needs root access on a linux hosts. The only reason we don't have huge swarms of linux botnets is that hackers get more bang for the buck by targeting windows.

<comment><USER7> Firefox is just ridiculously insecure all around as a platform for extensions.

Instead of developing a new least-privilege extension API like Chrome did, Mozilla put in an App Store style review process on A.M.O. for real extensions and developed a new API just for lame themes. They have code signing baked in but don't even use it for their own code, so an annoying 'unsigned' warning is the expected default.

Even with all that, the extensions themselves have highly-exploitable vulnerabilities: <http://lwn.net/Articles/348769/>

It's probably the best means to get remote code execution on Linux, especially since extensions can bundle native NPAPI plugins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The entire premise is flawed. Microsoft gets called out all the time in the press for bugs and security flaws.

<comment><USER9> Not very explicitly. When have you heard some journalist write an article about a "Windows Worm"? They're always always always "PC Worms" or "PC Viruses".

Microsoft gets big credit for releasing a patch for many "PC Worms" or "PC vulnerabilities", but the vulnerability in never ever a "Windows" problem.

<comment><USER10> Because the standard reporter's assumption is that a "PC" is a computer running Windows. Otherwise, it's a Mac.

<comment><USER8> Not just reporters, everybody except a small group of techies. Just look at the Mac vs. PC ads, which were really Mac vs. Windows.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The publications may be worried MS will pull advertising. Sort of like political campaign funding: fund only those who can and will support you. Sun Microsystems got quite a bit of bad PR during dotgone because it wasn't advertising as much, and when it did, the press improved. So it works both ways, need to spend $$ to get good pr, or to just to avoid bad pr.</comment>


ObjClean - <AUTHOR> http://objclean.com/index.html <comment><USER2> I am programming Objective-C for over 10 years now. Alone and together with other people.

My co-founder is also a long-term Objective-C developer and we have different "styles" of programming. When I write code I care about style but only to a certain extend. When I edit my co-founder's source code I simply adopt to his style and that's it. No need to "formalize" anything as long as no really dumb code formatting rule is used that has real technical drawbacks like:

        if(expr)
            doThisOneLinerWithoutCurlyBraces();

I worry much more about the architecture, correctness and good names for things these days...

A tool like this certainly has its benefits though. Depending on how experienced your team is you want to give junior developers automated guidance.

What would be really cool though is if the formatting rules were applied by Xcode itself. Then each team member could have individual coding style settings. Before pushing to git a "company wide" rule would be applied. This has drawbacks as well: gif giff becomes less useful for sharing between co workers, debugging information is out of sync...

<comment><USER3> Not sure what the "technical drawbacks" are, unless doThisOneLinerWithoutCurlyBraces is a macro and the author didn't think to do the do { } while (0) trick. The Linux kernel coding style actually advocates this style: [http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v3.12.6/Documentation/CodingStyle](http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v3.12.6/Documentation/CodingStyle) (line 157, "Do not unnecessarily use braces where a single statement will do.")

I agree with what you're saying though. Making whitespace differences into a build break seems to miss the point a bit. Is that what the author thinks "clean code" means? Consistent whitespace and nothing more? Consistent whitespace is certainly a good idea but there's so much more to a sane code base than how many newlines follow a declaration or whatever.

<comment><USER4> Without curly braces it is simpler to mess up if you revisit the code, maybe especially adding ambiguous else conditions.

I'm sure you and the GP would never forget to add curly braces when inserting an else, but the junior developer who comes afterwards might, and it's just not a huge deal to have the braces because it's two extra chars.

Quite frankly the Linux kernel coding style is wrong on this one in general, I guess we can assume they are experienced enough to put braces in when adding an else clause and so it's not going to cause them errors. But with junior devs it certainly could.

<comment><USER5> If you are worried about else conditions, wouldn't this be the way around it?

{if (condition) singleFunctionCall();}

<comment><USER5> Why is this being downvoted? How do curly braces around the function call help with ambiguous else branches?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice idea.

I took the survey. A few comments:

The early questions show only one sample option. If I remember my survey design fundamentals, there will likely be a bias in the results for the answer that matches the sample. This is especially confounding because, as I interpret it, the sample shown is also the probably-most-common preference.

Later questions have display samples of A, B, C, ... form. Some of the samples aren't labelled. Minor oversight that the audience should be able to handle, but it's a source of error.

I'd really like to be able to see the compiled results. Downloading the rulesets is great, but a browser-digestible form with response weightings would be much more generally useful.

Also, I can't see the MAS from my iPad, so I can't see the product page. Some details on the website would be awesome. I think I get it, it's an Xcode plugin to style-lint my code. How much does it cost? Can it autofix, a la gofmt?

Even Apple's sample code is full of stylistic inconsistencies, some of which are distant echoes of K&R vs ANSI C. I like style guides, especially those that I can customize to my liking.

<comment><USER7> It's currently listed on the App Store for $4.99 US/CAD. Other countries may vary. The listing says " __This app is temporarily 50% off! We are very interested in getting it into the hands of more developers to get more insights and feedback. Please consider sending us an email about your experience using our app! Check us out at objclean.com for more information, and to setup your own custom build configuration file. __"

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one who thought this was going to be adding OO stuff to Clean[1]?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_(programming_language)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_\(programming_language\))

</comment><comment><USER9> Until they autoformat according to rules, the tool is really painful to use (I own a license, and tried it)

They've said they're adding it, but it's going in my later list until they get around to it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Anyone try AppCode for code formatting? I've noticed many Obj-C developers shy away from using anything other than Xcode, but AppCode's code formatting is about as good as it gets.

[http://i.imgur.com/U1i7vlU.png](http://i.imgur.com/U1i7vlU.png)

Disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with the developers, I just find it to be an underrated/overlooked Obj-C IDE.

<comment><USER11> I like Appcode's formatting tools, and could configure it how I like. (I'm only picky about one or two things stylistically, and one or two things that affect code generation: what Appcode does when it generates an @property for me, for example).

I haven't tried sharing these styles across the team who uses AppCode. I'd really like to be able to share styles across IDEs: if some of the team uses XCode they could use the style I've defined. But I don't see a way to share these cross-tool either.

Even Uncrustify integration (export?) for Appcode would be nice, but it's missing. Heck, I'd even like Uncrustify in AppCode, but haven't found a plugin for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> [http://universalindent.sourceforge.net](http://universalindent.sourceforge.net) <\- similar but free

</comment><comment><USER13> Code cleaning is a good idea in general, but when applied everywhere without consideration it can lead to some odd code in some places. The screenshots show this throwing errors when it encounters 'malformed' code.

I would much rather it showed warnings, so that I can choose to ignore them if I think an exception to the rule is better in a specific case. Perhaps it would be nice if the tool even respected some sort of pragma mark, or other preprocessor statement so that it can be disabled or partially restricted for specific parts of the code.

<comment> k-mcgrady I took their survey and they ask whether you would prefer errors or warnings for unclean code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Took the survey, I too would be interested in seeing how other people fall in line and/or a breakdown of what Github/Apple looks like.

Ideally though one should be able to switch between different styles. I take it that ObcClean only points the errors out and won't go as far as to correct them/put them all in one style for you? If not that would be cool.

</comment><comment><USER15> This might be an implementation question you don't want to address but I was trying to build this using uncrustify but the immense option list proved to be just complex where it would do certain things that I desired but cause small inconsistent bugs in other parts of the codebase. Did you end up building your own or did you just figure out the mess that is Uncrusitify?

</comment><comment><USER16> I answered around 30 of the questions along with the majority. I only disagree with around 2 conventions. When the concensus was split 45 / 55, I tended to be on the 45% side.

I use 2 Xcode Plugins right now: XcodeColors and XAlign.

This could be my third. However, it goes against some XAlign features.

Free app code / $.99 cent sale?

</comment><comment><USER17> My ternary style wasn't available in the survey. I prefer to use `a? b: c` over the two other choices.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there any alternative that will auto format the code, instead of just throwing an error?

<comment><USER19> I set this up for my team using Uncrustify and a Git pre-commit hook. It will reject any commit which has files that don't adhere to our Uncrustify config file. If it rejects the commit it gives you a command to execute that will automatically fix your style issues.

<comment><USER20> A thought about this: Years ago I would have agreed, but now I'd strongly disagree, because of the noise it can add to diffs. When you're triaging a bug, or trying to figure out what effect someone's change had, you frequently go back through old commits, and look at the log message to see what the change was supposed to do. Perhaps a bug or side effect was introduced.

If the diff is full of additional formatting/stylistic changes, it can make it a lot harder to cut through the noise and get down to the heart of the change.

I'm not saying you should never clean up old code/files, however when I see that needs to be done, I try to do it in a separate commit that I make after the "real" change. The log message for that change is something like "Formatting", or "Cleanup, no functional changes".

<comment><USER19> Early on in the project we ran Uncrustify across our entire-codebase before introducing the pre-commit hook. The major downside to this was that git-blame now pointed to this large commit for almost every line of our project. It became a pain to trace back changes before the mass style change. Luckily we did this fairly early in the project so that it hasn't really been a big problem.

However, because the entire code-base was cleaned up at once we now have no additional noise from Uncrustify being run on our commits. The only changes to style it will ever suggest are with your current changes you are attempting to commit since everything in the repo right now is "clean".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> UK-AL Can this be integrated into continuous integration software like jenkins?

</comment><comment><USER21> Anyone knows if something similar exists for Java/Eclipse?

<comment><USER22> I think there is eclipse checkstyle(eclipse-cs)

plus a findbugs plugin for static analysis(rather then style issues).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> go fmt

</comment><comment><USER24> Figures that Apple coders would cook something like this up. Seriously, stylistic habits..are habits. If you need a checker for them, they are no longer stylistic, they are significant, and you need to remember the patterns. This is cool but fruitless.

<comment><USER25> You're entitled to your opinion, but code style checking is not something new and was most likely not cooked up by Apple coders. Checkstyle [1] is a Java code style tool and has been around since at least 2001.

[1] [http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/](http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/)

<comment><USER24> I stand corrected. Thank you.</comment></comment></comment>


Discoveries Ten Years Later in Zelda Speedrun - <AUTHOR> http://blog.joellehman.com/index.php/2013/10/incredible-discoveries-ten-years-later-in-zelda-speedrun/ <comment><USER3> Fun to see Cosmo on Hacker News. He's been getting a fair amount of attention recently, including an article on Yahoo!. If you're interested in seeing him exploit more video game glitches in the name of speedrunning, you can watch him on Twitch.tv at <[http://twitch.tv/cosmowright>](http://twitch.tv/cosmowright>). He is one of the (and occasionally the single) best Wind Waker runners in the world. Right now he's concentrating on The Wind Waker HD.

If you liked the video in the article, you might also enjoy his commentary on a full Wind Waker run (nearly 5 hours): [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u3djy6Ednc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u3djy6Ednc)

<comment><USER4> He'll also be at the Awesome Games Done Quick marathon coming around again this January: [http://marathon.speeddemosarchive.com/upcoming](http://marathon.speeddemosarchive.com/upcoming)

<comment><USER5> love watching these - the Final Fantasy 4 and Secret of Evermore runs blew my mind last time

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend one of the "original" speedruns - Quake Done Quick (on Nightmare, naturally). It's less about glitches and more about playing extremely well. If you have ever played a fast-paced FPS, you'll appreciate it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiNDxssUL0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpiNDxssUL0)

<comment><USER7> I like "Quake done 100 quickest" much more. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhzXKMqZBBc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhzXKMqZBBc)

In most speedruns, player runs away like a sissy little girl. In this speedrun, players aim for 100% kills and 100% secrets. Secrets actually make it more interesting to watch, as they often store the Quad Damage powerup.

<comment><USER8> "sissy little girl"? You sure you don't mean "scared little boy"? Why use such antagonistic gender language?

<comment><USER9> It obviously wasn't intentional. Why do you speak with much violence?

<comment><USER10> Because it's important for us to root out sexism where we find it, for the same reasons we pull up any obnoxious weed. The fact it _wasn 't_ intentional makes it all the more obnoxious.

<comment><USER11> Sexism... by replacing "girl" with "boy"? Equally sexist.

By replacing "boy/girl" with "child"? Ageism.

By replacing boy/girl/child with "person"? Humanism.

Yes I can go on.

<comment><USER10> > By replacing boy/girl/child with "person"? Humanism.

Obviously idiotic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case my server gets too sluggish, here's the important youtube link: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7IINwTFVw&t=16m2s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M7IINwTFVw&t=16m2s)

Basically there's a speedrunner who is technically adept at the game, is a good communicator, and explains as he plays a complex exploit that facilitates skipping a large part of the game

<comment><USER12> I was watching that video and expecting an explanation along the lines of "If I tap the c-pad, then b really fast at just the right time" and being met with an explanation that shows an intricate working knowledge of the game....it was impressive to say the least.

Wow. That guy is a hacker. Maybe he is only a hacker of this one game, I don't know. But, this is a video that deserves to be linked by HackerNews.

<comment><USER13> I agree that this guy is a hacker, however I just want to share what a hacker on steroids playing a game looks like.

Have you seen bortreb's pokemon hack?

[http://hackaday.com/2012/11/24/programming-a-game-boy- while-...](http://hackaday.com/2012/11/24/programming-a-game-boy-while- playing-pokemon/)

"Realizing this ROM hack is able to control the CPU with only the player's inventory, [bortreb] wanted to see how far he could push this hack. He ended up writing a bootstrapping program by depositing and discarding items from the in-game PC, and was then able to reprogram the Game Boy with a number of button presses on the D-pad, select, start, A and B buttons."

<comment><USER14> I prefer the Pi Day celebration hack. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNPisyK43Lc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNPisyK43Lc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love speedruns. There's a vibrant community of speedrunners and fans out there. With fast Internet connections, they can now stream their attempts live.

Some resources:

[http://speedrunslive.com](http://speedrunslive.com) \- who's playing right now?

[http://twitch.tv](http://twitch.tv) \- service for live streaming of games.

[http://twitch.tv/cosmowright](http://twitch.tv/cosmowright) \- Cosmo, the speedrunner in the article.

<comment><USER16> Just a heads-up to anybody interested -- there are generally two types of speedruns, tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) and unassisted. Searching for "$GAME TAS" (eg: Super Mario World TAS) usually results in very impressive videos so they're usually easier to find.

There are a variety of other terms as well, for example sequence breaking, no- glitch, 100% completion, and so forth. Understandably there are numerous videos on Youtube for pretty much every console game that can be played on an emulator.

<comment><USER17> By far my favorite kind of speedrun to watch is a non-TAS with commentary. Often, these runs are done by teams. There's typically one player who is good at executing, and then you might have someone responsible for planning the route through the game, and another person responsible for researching glitches and how they can be used most efficiently, etc.

Hearing these people discuss their craft, and hearing the dynamics between their interactions (personal and practical) is fascinating. The best example I know of this is the ingx24 speedrun of Majora's Mask: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85k0fo1qnyo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85k0fo1qnyo)

Humans are amazing animals. The fact that this level and coordination is possible even when the stakes are, ultimately, pretty pointless, is a testament to that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's also a cool, recent exploit in Super Mario World speed runs that uses similar RAM corruption techniques to "beat" the game in less than 3 minutes. (more details here: [http://minimaxir.com/2013/03/127-yoshis-in- slot-6/](http://minimaxir.com/2013/03/127-yoshis-in-slot-6/) )

<comment><USER19> The technical details of how this series of exploits were identified, much less applied, is staggeringly complex. I love speed and/or glitch runs and I can't imagine this one being dethroned anytime soon.

<comment><USER20> Actually, it already was. The fastest Super Mario World speedrun is now 1 minute and 40 seconds. For more details see [http://tasvideos.org/2380M.html](http://tasvideos.org/2380M.html). It's even more complex.

<comment><USER18> _" Suffice to say that 8 controllers are required to get this to work."_

You weren't kidding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A speedrun thread on HN? What a beautiful, beautiful day!

There's also a good subreddit that discusses the latest speedruns, [http://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/](http://www.reddit.com/r/speedrun/)

</comment><comment><USER22> "It probably helps that I'm guessing this game had to be rushed out the door and perhaps had some inexperienced programmers working on it, which led to a more fascinating and strange world for speed-runners to explore."

Every piece of software has bugs. But, the kinds of things they exploit in OOT you wouldn't find in %99.999 of normal playthroughs.

<comment><USER23> Yep, there are a ton of huge / game-breaking bugs. But it did take quite a while (10+ years) and a lot of people to find many of them. The fact that people really love to speed run the game certainly was a huge factor in finding these subtle bugs, not to mention technology like emulators really accelerated the process, especially when it came to finding, for example, the correct frame to leave Gohma's room for the wrong-warp to Ganon's castle (it's a frame perfect trick). I would imagine that most games made at the time, if subjected to the same level of scrutiny, would display near or the same level of brokenness. Donkey Kong 64 certainly comes to mind. I don't think this is indicative of inexperienced programmers.

And then we have to think of the system limitations at the time and the fact that the N64 was a pretty new system with a new way of displaying graphics. It was a pretty big paradigm shift and yes, for the first 3D Zelda game it, like all games, could have benefitted from more time.

A lot of the bugs with the game have to do with messing with memory and exploiting pointer arithmetic. Using pointer manipulation to handle cutscene / area changes as well as items on the C-buttons obviously isn't ideal but sure as hell saved space compared to alternative solutions. There is very little error checking (for buffer overflows and 'impossible' situations such as having a deku stick on 'B') for what I would imagine to be performance concerns as well as simply good time management.

To your point, absolutely. Very few people for the first few years encountered any such bugs. The first real speed run of the game came in 2003, 5 years after its release. Even that run featured very few bugs; it was mostly route optimization and practice. The latest wrong warp glitch which enables you to jump from Deku Tree to Ganon's Castle was found in 2012. That's a full 14 years after the game's release.

If anything, this speaks more to the dedication of speed runners and glitch finders that the incompetency of OoT programmers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> These kinds of things always remind me of everyone's favorite game exploit. Good ol MissingNo from pokemon and the rare candy trick.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MissingNo.#Characteristics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MissingNo.#Characteristics)

[http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Item_duplication_glit...](http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Item_duplication_glitch)

<comment><USER25> On the topic of Pokemon: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5T81yHkHtI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5T81yHkHtI)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you are interested in seeing more of the best speedrunners, Awesome Games Done Quick is happening in January. It is a week-long 24/7 marathon of speedrunning to raise money for charity: [http://marathon.speeddemosarchive.com/upcoming](http://marathon.speeddemosarchive.com/upcoming)

</comment><comment><USER27> The speed demos archive has a lot of excellent speedruns: [http://speeddemosarchive.com/](http://speeddemosarchive.com/)

</comment><comment><USER28> One of my favourite speedruns, Portal Done Pro: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1U5RUVENNE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1U5RUVENNE)

Gets interesting at 3 mins. There's also an explanatory series.

<comment><USER29> This is just badass. He also did Portal 2 IIRC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is an interesting subculture of gaming: people trying to dissect a game by all means possible. For Shadow of the Colossus, there is a community dedicated to finding every bit of the game world, even the unfinished parts that made it into the final versions:

[http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-05-02-the-quest- for-s...](http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-05-02-the-quest-for-shadow- of-the-colossuss-last-big-secret)

</comment><comment> ben-yu I just recently got into the speedrunning scene, and it's interesting how the community categorizes speedruns based on version differences and platform. Cosmo wrote a great blog post specifically about OOT: [http://blog.cosmowright.com/?p=33](http://blog.cosmowright.com/?p=33)

</comment><comment><USER31> It's incredible that he's able to do these by hand. Most glitches of that nature are tool-assisted. Tool-assisted game-play[0] is a true artform.

[0]: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXCLNnj8OBY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXCLNnj8OBY)

</comment><comment><USER32> If anyone's interested, I think the forum thread Cosmo mentions in the video is this one:

[https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/ocarina_of_time__al...](https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/ocarina_of_time__all_categoriesn64.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Predictably, this speed run is now quite outdated, even though it's less than a year later. There have been several major discoveries that have now lowered the world record to just over 19 minutes.

</comment><comment><USER34> Another glitch that was found relatively recently (not shown in linked run):

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mp0uHr2X6U&t=19m20s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mp0uHr2X6U&t=19m20s)

A more complete explanation of the glitch occurs earlier in the video, but he explains the basics of it after he performs the glitch (unfortunately dying in the process). Apparently three different exploiters found three exploits that, when combined, enabled this glitch. Quite fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER17> Speedruns are amazingly interesting. When I tell people about watching them, their reaction is usually something along the lines of "why do people waste their lives on that?"

But there's so much interesting going on there. The parallels to optimization in programming are striking.

<comment><USER35> Sorry to be that guy, but isn't one of the cornerstones of optimization in programming that you should only do it when it actually gives a meaningful benefit? E.g. don't spend days or weeks to make a part of the program that gets called very rarely run 0.1% faster, when you could instead spend that time on solving a new problem, or making an actually useful optimization, or doing something else entirely.

Of course, it's silly to bicker about what is "useful" when it comes to things people do to relax or entertain themselves; and usually fruitless when it comes to things they do as escapism or getting a feeling of achievement to compensate for areas where they are stuck or blocked off. I do think the psychology of it is interesting though, and my personal guess is that most if not all people have the innate desire to progress and achieve things, but we often can't for some reason or other. Why does a caged animal endlessly walk in circles? Because it's better than doing nothing. And before you think I'm just being snarky, think again, please; I did and do my fair share of such things myself, I just also can't help but notice that the smaller and more powerless people become, the more we celebrate rather pointless things - <USER2> and the interwebs are full of that. And even if I'm wrong about the motivations of everybody else on the planet, I do know myself well enough, and although I might be projecting, it's at worst a honest mistake.

<comment><USER17> I'm trying to understand what your point is with relationship to my comment, but I don't see it.

<comment><USER35> 1.) "premature optimization", the fact that optimization for the sake of optimization isn't optimization, but rather counterproductive, if not obsession or procrastination.

2.) my attempt to answer the question "why do people do this?", which is something I ponder a lot, in relation to gaming and other things as well. Imagine someone cooking the same meal over and over again, to optimize the amount of time they take for it, and the amount of ingredients they use, but never actually eating what they cooked.

<comment><USER17> As for number 2, if they get satisfaction out of it, I think that's a perfectly fine (if unusual) hobby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Check out Masterjun's similar Super Mario World exploits here:

[http://tasvideos.org/3957S.html](http://tasvideos.org/3957S.html)

[http://tasvideos.org/3413S.html](http://tasvideos.org/3413S.html)

</comment><comment><USER37> Those four paragraphs don't really add anything. Why not link directly to the video?

</comment><comment><USER38> Shouldn't a true speedrun be about going as fast as possible through the _intended_ game, without exploiting obvious bugs? Finding those bugs is really cool, but I wouldn't call the result a speedrun.

<comment><USER39> You should look for videos or streamers who specify glitchless in the category. Otherwise glitching is implied in a speedrun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Now only if I could find suck hacks in physics.

</comment><comment><USER41> test</comment>