In lawsuit, AT&T blames Cambridge, Mass. for crappy wireless service - <AUTHOR> http://www.universalhub.com/2010/lawsuit-att-blames-cambridge-crappy-cell-service-b

<comment><USER2> The law referenced in the article, from the complaint, regarding the "right" to build cellular towers:

      The [Telecommunications] Act contains five enumerated limitations to State and
      local zoning authority. See 47 U.S.C. § 332(c)(7). Among other things, "[i]f a
      [municipal] decision is not supported by substantial evidence, § 332(c)(7)(B)
      (iii), or if it effectively prohibits the provision of wireless service,
      § 332(c)(7)(B)(i)(II), then under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution,
      local law is pre-empted in order to effectuate the Act's national policy
      goals." Second Generation Props. L.P. v. Town of Pelham, 313 F.3d 620, 627
      (1st Cir. 2002).

ATT really has the right to judicial review of the Council's decision, which may result in the Cambridge City Council's decision being overturned on the basis given above.

</comment><comment><USER3> _The company said it looked at other locations in the area, but none would work, either because the owners didn't want cell antennas on their buildings..._

So either multiple owners are refusing to host antennas at any price, or AT&T just doesn't want to pay market rent in Harvard Square.

</comment><comment><USER4> The city wasn't built with cell phone coverage in mind. I can understand that they need to put antennas in weird locations to offer coverage.

I don't get what is so appalling about this. They are doing their best to avoid making it a blemish on the roof of that building.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but I don't see why this translates into AT&T having the _right_ to put up towers. If there's poor AT&T service in Harvard Square and customers complain, AT&T can simply direct them to petition the zoning board to allow them to put up towers. That way the issue can be resolved using local politics instead of lawsuits.

<comment><USER6> _Sure, but I don't see why this translates into AT &T having the right to put up towers._

I don't either, but apparently the federal government disagrees. The article doesn't cite this "law," however.

 _If there's poor AT &T service in Harvard Square and customers complain, AT&T can simply direct them to petition the zoning board to allow them to put up towers. That way the issue can be resolved using local politics instead of lawsuits._

More than likely, customers would just jump ship to Verizon instead, which is the last thing AT&T wants.

<comment><USER7> Given the vast number of iPhones I see in Harvard Square every day (probably about 40% of all visible phones), I don't know if Verizon is necessarily the logical end here.

<comment><USER8> It might be if Verizon gets the iPhone by the end of this year or early next year.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Please Fund More Science - <AUTHOR> https://blog.samaltman.com/please-fund-more-science <comment><USER2> During the clinton administration, NIH funding doubled over ~5 years. This led to a glut of PhDs (far, far more than there are faculty slots or biotech jobs) who had limited job options and it didn't really translate to higher scientific productivity (in some sense, it just ended up selecting for professors who were more cutthroat and willing to publish lower quality stuff in higher h-index journals).

I've also seen, repeatedly, that most biologists (both wet-lab and computational) will just waste more money rather than using it to scale up productivity.

The real question is ultimately "how do we scale scientific productivity in a way that benefits humanity directly and in the short term", and few people have any answer to that. It seems like the current state of the art, and hard to improve on, is to fund lots of people, give them time to be creative, and then send them to meetings to get tipsy with people who have money, while demonstrating their posters. I'm not kidding.

<comment><USER3> Correct me if I'm wrong, but the average institution or entity that Bill Gates chooses to fund is much more productive than the average NIH funded lab.

I think the answer lies in taking a good look at where the money is going. Particularly, I think I think we need to give more to the very productive people and institutions. I know it's the million dollar question, by what is Salk doing that others are not? Or CSHL which has something like 8 nobel laureates there.

One last observation is that a career in science just doesn't make sense anymore. Why slave away making $40 or $50k as a postdoc or an instructor after years of studious study when you can pull 6 figures in tech right out of school? This right here is one of the things that tells the bright ones to stay away from academia.

<comment><USER4> Ex-Scientist here: While I agree the gates foundation is likely doing a better job than the nih... The danger is this, how do you decide upon a metric for productivity? How do you then prevent 1) corruption, absent that, 2) inadvertent corruption via biases (I'm going to judge proposals in my field more favorably because they are less confusing or more comfortable, or the inverse, more harshly since I want to keep competition out or know the pitfalls better), and absent that, 3) goodhart's law?

<comment><USER5> Current scientist: I think the answer is easy. Take more risk. Science is by nature risky. We're trying to figure out things that we don't know. That results in a lot of failure (I definitely wouldn't use the Silicon Valley model of failure being a metric of success though).

One major change I would make from public money is publishing of results good or bad. There's this competition to get into top tier journals (which I don't think is bad or you can get rid of), but this is done at the cost of dumping good science just because it wasn't good enough for a top tier. Using impact as a metric is good but not great. The mark of a good scientist is their work and their passion, not where they publish. While there's a correlation, there's also Goodhart. If this is the only metric that we really concentrate on, then it will lead to slower science. We all know that we learn much more from failure than success. We all know that most of science is banging your head on the table for weeks out of frustration. But that's also not common knowledge.

So I'd say that those funding science need to be more risky and those in science need to be more open about their failures and be realistic in their discussion of science.

<comment><USER6> > _One major change I would make from public money is publishing of results > good or bad. There 's this competition to get into top tier journals (which > I don't think is bad or you can get rid of), but this is done at the cost of > dumping good science just because it wasn't good enough for a top tier. > Using impact as a metric is good but not great._

> _The mark of a good scientist is their work and their passion, not where > they publish._

You are overlooking an invisible but equally important mark of a good scientist: a scientist's impression on peers aka reputation, which usually comes down to two types: prestigious publication (in a prestigious journal or with a prestigious co-author) or having a good number of citations. The first kind of reputation is bequeathed almost immediately, the second kind of reputation is deferred — it can only be gained after the passage of time (years).

If a scientist is known to have co-authored a paper that peers later on characterize as a seminal contribution to the field, peers are much more likely to pay attention to future papers from that scientist. The converse is true.

The number of published papers, whether in prestigious journals or otherwise, far exceeds the number of people with free time and relevant qualifications to assess them.

At the end of the day, human attention is a scarce resource, which is why it is the metric those aspiring to be regarded as "good scientists" in their field optimize for. Taken together, a scientist's publication history is used as a proxy for authority in a field, which in turn is used to filter which papers to read or send to the trash can.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> According to a speech given in 2016 by Dr. Michael Bracken, an epidemiologist from Yale University, as much as 87.5% of biomedical research is wasted or inefficient.

To his point, "Waste is more than just a waste of money and resources. It can actually be harmful to people's health."

> He backed his staggering statistic with these additional stats: 50 out of > every 100 medical studies fail to produce published findings, and half of > those that do publish have serious design flaws. And those that aren't > flawed and manage to publish are often needlessly redundant.

What we need is NOT more funding, but we desperately need to improve the research and funding processes to make them more relevant, more efficient, and more reliable.

1\. Publicly funded studies should yield open source research data that is freely available, so that studies can be repeated and experimental methodologies be improved and scrutinized.

2\. We need to prioritize randomized clinical intervention trials over weak and questionable epidemiological surveys that often only muddy the waters and hinder our ability to draw sound conclusions.

3\. Consequentialism should drive research funding. We need better and more formalized ways to identify gaps in our current knowledge, and to identify the potential impact of research before funding it. We don't need to allocate our current proportions of funding into research on subjects that are already very well understood or unlikely to drive policy and decision making. For example, more studies showing that exercise is good for you aren't likely to have a large impact moving forward.

Here's a more in-depth link to Dr. Bracken's speech:

[https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while- ni...](https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/coronavirus/while-nih-failed- test-coronavirus-drugs-it-studied-drunk-monkeys-soap)

<comment><USER8> Absence of a result is still a result, it's just not publishable. There are very few journals that will take a paper that boils down to "we tried some things to solve this problem, and they didn't work, and not even in an interesting way".

Sometimes scientific progress goes "boink". Consequentialism is dangerous. Researchers, like everyone, need to be able to fail.

<comment><USER9> If the attempt is novel, wouldn't it be worthwhile to share your failed results to help prevent others going down the same dead-end path you just did?

<comment><USER10> Yes. But your (financial, career) incentives are against doing that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Biotech companies are responding well because their incentive structures are well-aligned with discovering a solution (treatment or cure) to this problem. Academics and other government-funded researchers are simply responding to their incentives, which are not well-aligned in this case.

The Manhattan project and others like it succeeded because they gave resources to scientists and researchers who were not adapted to gaming a government- funded and bureaucratically-run grant system. Major government funded research projects (especially international ones like nuclear fusion) are not stalling because of lack of money, it is simply the system and incentive structure. Pouring more money in will not help us.

A prize system like what Tyler Cowen is advocating may work better, though I can't say I'm sure about that.

<comment><USER12> I don't think that's the whole picture. There's this popular idea on HN right now that academics are only after improving their h-index and that they don't care about the science. I'm doing physics research at a top 10 university in the US and I haven't seen anything that resembles this in my group or with any of my collaborators.

Sure, we spend a lot of time figuring out how to advertise and promote our work to get the most return from it. However, when it comes to running experiments and figuring out what projects to support, we only care about what would be important to our field. In fact my advisor funded me to spend a few months on a project he didn't even have a grant for. Even though he couldn't get money for it, he thought it was an important piece of work and wanted to see the results.

On the other hand, the lack of funding for public research is very real. Most of the equipment I use hasn't been updated since the 80s. My lab has had to grab used and broken equipment from around the whole state just to get our work done. This is the primary reason why I'm not interested in staying in academia. You have to beg for your funding and what you get isn't ever really enough to support the people on the ground. My lab computer for instance is a thin client that I'm forced to run CAD software on. It takes a solid minute to open some menus in it. I had to spend a month of my time rebuilding some ultra high vacuum pumps because we couldn't afford to pay a professional to do it and because I get paid pennies as a grad. student. I stick around, however, because I care about what I study, not because of citations.

<comment><USER13> Your view of the incentives argument is too narrow. In my experience, the people who actively try to game the system are rare. The majority of the problem is people and ideas being _filtered out_ by the system. This comment by Daniel Lakeland on Andrew Gelman's blog says it better than I could: [https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think- rese...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/05/17/think-research- research-criticism-research-criticism-criticism-research-criticism-criticism- criticism/#comment-737732)

> The way the incentives play out is that they create a survivorship bias. You > can't do science today without at least basically paying your own salary, > either through grants (many biomed researchers have to pay a large component > of their salary directly through their grants) or through making "having you > in the university" make sense for the university so that it pays your > salary. That again basically means either grants, or adding substantially to > the university prestige and the ability to charge money for tuition and get > high quality students etc.

> So, anyone with tenure in academia today has spent say 5 to 10 years minimum > creating a "brand" that somehow enables them to pay their salaries, and/or > funds for lab work etc. If the primary kind of "brand" that universities > respond to is a "fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand" then the > primary content of academia today is people who survived that cutoff…

> It's not so much that individuals see the incentives and change their own > behaviors to fit it (though this happens to some extent) it's more just that > lots of people go into the filter, and the ones that come out are enriched > for that particular behavior.

> Also note that this mechanism doesn't require the individual scientists to > be primarily money-driven. It's sufficient for the MBAs running the > dean/provost/president offices to be primarily money driven, which they > definitively are.

I would recommend reading chapter 4 of the book "Disciplined Minds" by Jeff Schmidt (a physics PhD). While I disagree with a large fraction of the book (in particular, I don't think the problem is inherently political), I think chapter 4 is mostly right and shows how a researcher can feel self-motivated while actually being under strong external influences.

[http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/](http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/)

I can give examples from my own experience in academia if anyone is interested.

<comment><USER12> Yes, yes, I understand your point. What I'm trying to say is that the PIs in my department (the ones who made it through the filter, that is) don't seem to have the "fake sciencey hypey overconfident, bullshit brand" that you're talking about.

I might just be really lucky to be in a clean department, but Machiavellian researchers accumulating in academia by filtering or otherwise just isn't my experience, sorry.

I'm interested in hearing your experience though because it sounds like it's very different. I'm studying accelerator physics by the way, an extremely applied sub-field of physics. It may be that it's easier to weed out the people that don't pull their weight here.

<comment><USER13> To be clear, I'm not thinking specifically about _hyped-up_ research that doesn't pan out. Low quality research in general is what I'm thinking about. And I see the vast majority of academics as well-intentioned and not manipulative. (And that includes my advisor, who, despite the disagreements we have as described below, has good intentions.)

Academics are incentivized to publish papers in recognized journals and bring in external funding. I'll focus specifically on publishing here for simplicity. I could write about funding if desired.

The source of many problems I have with the current system is that I want to do high quality research, but the current system doesn't make that easy. The most important research I've done so far has been to make a large data compilation and use this to test different models and hypotheses in my subfield. But my advisor never liked this, and mostly discouraged me from doing this research. He would have preferred instead that I stick to the more established path of skimming the literature for a problem some review article called open, doing a naive experiment about that, and then publishing the experiment. (Yes, I am being facetious, but unfortunately this characterization is accurate in my experience.) My experience is that review articles are far from comprehensive and frequently contain misinformation. It's important to actually assemble a large amount of data to see where the _real_ gaps are, not just what a review article _called_ a gap. This sort of data compilation is very rare in my experience.

It really was clearly about getting publications as quickly as possible. My advisor repeatedly pointed out to me what others recently published in my field and _exclusively_ what he pointed out to me I'd call naive. His point was "This is good enough to get a publication" and my point is "So what? Just because other people do a bad job doesn't mean that I should." To him, other people are getting publications when he's getting nothing! He didn't seem concerned that I thought most of these papers weren't making a contribution. That's not to say that he doesn't care _at all_ about quality, but in practice he's _more_ concerned about getting publications than quality. (He might not see the two as in conflict.)

In the end, I think I am making several large contributions, even if the "gestation" time was longer than people would like. To get tenure, you need to publish often and regularly, but a lot of valuable research takes longer than people would like to get results. The data compilation took a long time. I started this data compilation in roughly Jan. 2017. I had a conference presentation on it in Nov. 2017. I published a conference paper based in part on it in May 2018, and it wasn't until December 2019 that I submitted two journal papers using the data. (I prefer to take my time to perfect an article rather than rush it.) This sort of delay isn't acceptable in the current system, regardless of the value of the work at the end. In terms of total publications, I think I'm actually coming out ahead of most PhD students in my department, but by now I'm seen as unproductive by my advisor so that doesn't matter.

At this point, I'm waiting for one of my papers to be accepted because my advisor won't allow me to graduate until I have a paper accepted at a peer- reviewed journal. My original plan was to publish a few years after my PhD. I've been told multiple times by professors that the basic purpose of a PhD is to learn how to publish in peer reviewed journals, and they'll let you graduate once you've demonstrated that you can do that. And this _does_ actually seem to be the crux in my case. Doesn't seem to matter that nowhere in my department's rules does it say that peer-reviewed publication is required.

It would have been much easier to just pump out a naive paper every year. I would have been done my PhD years ago if that were the case, and science wouldn't have advanced much if at all.

Also, don't mistake my advisor's position as "the incentives say to publish papers so that's what we should do". No, his position is something along the lines of "publishing papers is part of the point of a PhD". He's not thinking about incentives. He genuinely believes that publishing tons of papers is a good thing. The incentives _selected_ him; he is not _responding_ to the incentives as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER14> I don't have a PhD, but I did run a large R&D program which funded a bunch (30+) of PhD students, and I worked closely with them and their supervisors.

I think you should consider listening more to your supervisor. I know nothing about your field, but I've seen a lot of PhDs go off the rails because they chased after something they thought was a great idea only to find it was a problem no one really cared about.

Young PhD students are really smart, but I've certainly seen that experience does seem to count in choosing good questions.

The incremental "find an open problem mentioned elsewhere and work on that for a while" isn't a bad way to start a PhD career. You learn a bunch about the field doing that.

 _At this point, I 'm waiting for one of my papers to be accepted because my advisor won't allow me to graduate until I have a paper accepted at a peer- reviewed journal. My original plan was to publish a few years after my PhD. I've been told multiple times by professors that the basic purpose of a PhD is to learn how to publish in peer reviewed journals, and they'll let you graduate once you've demonstrated that you can do that. And this does actually seem to be the crux in my case. Doesn't seem to matter that nowhere in my department's rules does it say that peer-reviewed publication is required._

This seems an odd thing to complain about. Surely a PhD is _all about_ peer review, and should be so. Peer review means people who know about the topic have reviewed it - how else should a PhD be done?

<comment><USER13> > I think you should consider listening more to your supervisor. I know > nothing about your field, but I've seen a lot of PhDs go off the rails > because they chased after something they thought was a great idea only to > find it was a problem no one really cared about.

Unfortunately only so much can be communicated in an online comment. I tried going into detail, but I'll leave it at this: I do listen to my advisor, but I disagree with him about how science is best done.

> The incremental "find an open problem mentioned elsewhere and work on that > for a while" isn't a bad way to start a PhD career. You learn a bunch about > the field doing that.

Reading your paragraph makes me think my point wasn't communicated clearly. I'm not arguing against working on open problems. I'm saying to make sure that the problem is actually open, and don't start doing expensive things like experiments without having a good idea of what you're doing. Given the existence of a large amount of archival literature, your great idea is likely to have been done already. There is value in reproducing previous experiments, but people should do new research too.

> This seems an odd thing to complain about. Surely a PhD is _all about_ peer > review, and should be so. Peer review means people who know about the topic > have reviewed it - how else should a PhD be done?

For what it's worth I don't believe peer review as currently practiced in journals provides much value. The reviews tend to be superficial at best, and are provided far too late in the research process to have a strong influence on it. In my experience the reviews mostly help to make the paper more clear, and not because the reviewers give good suggestions on writing themselves, rather, because the reviewers seem confused about things I thought were written clearly.

However, my advisor is definitely a strong believer in peer review as currently practiced. I mis-characterized him before. For him it's less "publishing in journals is the right thing to do" and more "publishing in journals provides a strong check on the work".

In my view, the most important thing someone can do to improve their research is to be deeply critical of it. Unfortunately few people are critical of their own work. Getting feedback from others is valuable, but I believe that the best way to do so at present is to actively solicit it yourself, which is what I've been doing. Peer review in a journal should be the _last step_ , not the _only step_ aside from one's supervisor looking over the work.

Also, I removed a paragraph about how I strongly dislike the current academic publishers. That's a major factor here as well. My field does not have good open access options at present. I'd really prefer to wait a few years as I think the landscape could change dramatically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Startup idea: make it easy for a company to pay for testing for their workforce. If every workplace had a 15 minute test required before an employee could begin work, we could get a lot of people back to work with relatively low risk.

Additionally, the same (or another) startup could make it easy for companies to pay to allow customers to be tested with a 15 minute test. I would not mind waiting outside a restauraunt or supermarket for 15 minutes while my test is run, if it means that I could enter knowing everyone else in the building is uninfected.

I imagine you would supply each business with one or more testing machines, test kits, and some number of technicians to operate the tests and test machines correctly.

The hard part is probably getting test machines/test kits while supplies are limited.

<comment><USER16> I know a guy who is trying to arrange serological testing for Union employees in the LA port area with this exact idea.

The problem is bulk ordering tests - you need a massive investment (about 750k for minimal order size of 100k tests), which he's been trying to find some philanthropic money for.

Those finger prick tests are convenient, but they only show results if your body is already producing antibodies. The really good test is an RT-PCR or RT- LAMP test, which uses a pretty invasive swab technique. It's pretty unpleasant.

Colormetric RT-LAMP is the right method for that startup (probably) because you can deploy it with pretty few resources and get rapid tests. However, it can be finicky, and isn't approved by the FDA AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Please pay more tax.

Then we can fund the science with it.

Honestly, I heard a comment on Slate Money to the effect of "Why aren't the billionaire class doing more to fund COVID research"

All the epidemiology, all the WHO plans for last decade, all the incredible co-ordinated response globally (#) has been publicly funded. Give over on the idea private companies are good for anything but taking existing research in the hands of hundreds and putting it into hands of millions and billions.

Pay tax. Vote for competence.

(#) yes I happen to think that shutting down most of the planet, in an attempt to save millions of lives, in a matter of weeks, is an amazing feat of global co-ordination. Yes there are lots of local differences and many many ways things could be better but humanity could have done so much worse.

<comment><USER18> Around 20% of all biotech revenue gets put back into R&D.

So the next time your insurance pays $1000 for a drug, know that $200 of that goes back to R&D.

<comment><USER19> The rest largely funds more fireworks at the Super Bowl through consumer targeted drug ads, and lunches to manipulate doctors into prescribing based on soft bribery.

<comment><USER20> And a significant part of R&D is in practice patent-engineering and slightly better solution to trivially solved issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think that people like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. can truly contribute to funding more science.

For starters they can ask companies they fund to start paying taxes in some other place than Jersey, Cayman Islands, Luxembourg or any other tax heaven.

Even more, they can start paying taxes themselves without passing their income through bogus "foundations", "funds", etc.

One off donation that many companies are doing now "for the sake of the virus" is a nice PR stunt but does not change anything in the long run.

<comment><USER22> What makes you think the government is more efficient at distributing money than Sam, Bill and Mark?

<comment><USER23> Funding of early fundamental and clinical research rarely comes from VC capital, since the probability for a positive ROI is quite low.

This is why early research is mostly funded by governments. Sadly, a lot of conditions are not properly researched due to lack of funding. Some governments are better at distributing funds than others. The current US administration isn't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Investors and donors—this is where we can help. Please consider shifting > some of your focus and capital to scientific efforts addressing the > pandemic. (And future pandemics too—I think this will be a before-and-after > moment in the world, and until we can defend against new viruses quickly, > things are going to be different.)

Although the sentiment resonates, the business logic does not.

Consider antibiotic drugs. Big Pharma and biotechs alike have been jettisoning programs. Why? It has nothing to do with science. These drugs simply aren't as profitable as others:

> Several major pharmaceutical companies recently shut down their antibiotic > and antiviral research projects, backing away from the growing threat of > superbugs, which may kill more than 10 million people a year by 2050.

[https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/big-pharma- ba...](https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/pharmacy/big-pharma-backs-off- superbug-why-5-drugmakers-bailed-on-antibiotic-research.html)

How much do you think a cure for COVID-19 will make its creator? Be careful when you answer, because you'll need to include all of the R&D effort in the calculation, and also consider the opportunity cost of not pursuing something more profitable.

The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots. It will take a fundamental shift in how the highly-unprofitable activity of developing drugs taken for a very short period of time and only once gets funded.

<comment><USER25> I think R&D is going to be a lot cheaper when you have the FDA authorizing emergency compassionate use for promising drugs.

>The next pandemic (or even this one) won't be cut short by science moonshots

Why not? We are basically in wartime conditions. Even if the government doesn't relax it's rules, there's a high likelihood that enough hospitals/doctors will to conduct high risk trials on critically ill patients. Now is the best time for moon shots.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The US has been politically antiscience for this entire administration. It's not a matter of funding more science. It's about voting out politicians that seek to benefit themselves instead of thinking about what science can do, and what science has already done for humanity.

I also would like to counter - science doesn't need any more money. Money distorts the progress of science (for example, look at the grants system - what a dumpster fire). What science needs is proper primary and secondary education and a healthy population. Start with fixing schools and healthcare, and you'll have so much science you wouldn't be able to stop it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Not sure if necessary. You can get so much funding for anything covid related, it's almost like ".com" in 90s or adding blockchain to your name more recently. But this time it's so much more urgent, so I think people will forgive easily the incredible amount of misses in the area that we'll probably have.

I'd much rather see the governments fund coronavirus-related research _after_ this is over. The primary reason why SARS (v1) still doesn't have a vaccine and research was abandoned was due to the incentive structure (SARS is gone, and so is funding). I wish we knew more about coronaviruses now, it's been over 10 years since SARS ...

</comment><comment><USER28> >Scientists can get us out of this. What they need are money and connections.

No.

It's too late to get us out of this. We can prevent the next case. But no, it's too late now.

What was needed with coronavirus was prevention. That's a matter of politics and economics. No science.

<comment><USER29> On the other hand, if this comes back next winter, and we would have a mass- producible vaccine ready, then you could say science has saved us from a second pandemic.

<comment><USER28> I'd love that, and it's possible. But given how hard other coronavirus vaccines have proven to be and quickly these viruses mutate...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In the future, I'm hoping some of the dreams of synthetic biology come true (basically, decentralization of biotech).

I work on that problem in close collaboration with a lot of community lab spaces, and it is surprising how many have the capacity and knowledge to implement rapid testing in their local communities and the inability to do so because of regulation. Biotech, if you run proper controls, isn't actually _that_ hard. A lot of those spaces are now seriously struggling because of the shut down.

The main thing that is stupid about how the FDA is approving tests is that they approve protocols, even though they have lots of controls for input->output. Coming from a computer science side, I'd imagine they'd so something along the lines of unit tests, but they aren't - they're still regulating how the protocol is done itself.

<comment><USER30> This is amazing! I used to do academic research, and I had _no idea_ that community biotech labs existed!

[https://crosscut.com/2019/03/seattles-only-community-lab- put...](https://crosscut.com/2019/03/seattles-only-community-lab-puts-diy- spin-biotech)

That article mentions the cost of equipment. In academia, we used to semi- seriously discuss building our own stuff. We generally didn't because even basic engineering, fabrication, and firmware require a lot of time and effort. (We were occasionally forced to when we needed something extremely specialized that simply wasn't available off the shelf.)

It seems like open source equipment designs don't exist largely because they don't usually make sense for academia or industry to fund. I wonder if that approach might be viable for this type of endeavor, since it would allow designs to be shared between groups and would lower the cash barrier to that of the raw materials? I'm not sure how you'd navigate the patent minefield, but if successful I think it would benefit society at large.

<comment><USER16> Open source equipment has been tried a lot in the DIY bio space, but a lot of it falls short because the used market is too good in biotech IMO

Lots of medical and academic labs liquidate, and you'd think that the market would compensate and labs would pick up used equipment, but that typically doesn't happen - probably for regulatory reasons and because (I've found) academic labs aren't typically in the position to take risks on equipment.

For example, an eBay seller ain't going to be able to test a PCR machine, so they sell it FOR-PARTS, which makes it so academic labs won't touch it. Then, you can swing in and buy perfectly fine $2,000 equipment for $150. Best deal I ever got was $350 for a fully functioning lab robot.

The SoundBio people are great, and there's lots of labs locally! They're really suffering right now though, because a revenue stream is often education.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This calls to mind the ever-relevant "Science: The Endless Frontier" [1] by Vannevar Bush, who more or less oversaw the entire American federal research enterprise during and post-WWII. He famously said that the best thing you can do for scientific progress is give scientists money and then get out of the way (i.e. not even putting out requests for grant submissions in specific domains, like the NIH often does now).

[1] [https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm](https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm)

</comment><comment><USER32> It seems to me that it is way easier to get funding for medical research vs straight up biology. That might be wrong.

Biology is what all of medical research eventually hinges on and any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money.

It is super easy to contribute to the search for treatments for particular diseases but how do you contribute to the fundamental research that ultimately fixes problems?

<comment><USER4> It might be wrong, but it also might be right.

>any significant breakthrough in biology tends to make vast swaths of medical science irrelevant and in a sense a waste of money

But most research in pure biology is irrelevant. So you're effectively mistaking a type II error for a type I error in your argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wouldn't these investors want a return on their investment? Is it possible to invest without profiting off of the pandemic?

<comment><USER34> I don't think anyone would mind some company "profiting from the pandemic" if it actually had something that works. Heck, the US government would probably sign you a hundred billion dollar check in 15 minutes at this point if you had a cure or a working therapeutic which can be deployed immediately.

<comment><USER35> They should offer that as a prize.

<comment><USER34> That's one way to do it. That's what it is, essentially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> It's not just funding. It's also focus. In recent years the CDC was tasked with fighting obesity and "gun violence" "epidemics" as well. Neither of those things is an epidemic. They are not contagious even. Why the fuck does the CDC waste their resources on this, instead of the real, actual epidemiological problems the eventual emergence of which is not only entirely plausible, but which have happened in practice several times already over the past couple of decades.

[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/...](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm)

[https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> Like it's often the case this is not just a problem of money. You can research virtually anything and not everything will yield anything of value to the human race. We need to have some direction. Epidemiology for example, sounds like a good high level scope that is definitely more directed towards human gains. Biology is a huge field. Also private funding and humanity's benefit are often at odds. Private funding tends to aim at making investors a return. What we really need (and Sam alludes to it) is a government/public fund for research so that labs have the ressources to research things that may never yield commercial profitability. If you leave it to big pharma and other private biotech companies to advance humanity, it's like leaving the food industry in charge of making humans healthier.... not happening :(

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm a fan of increased federal funding, but there's also a massive problem with the pricing of scientific supplies and chemicals. We commonly see 2-3x and sometimes 10x differences in prices for the exact same item from the same manufacuturer. We're ([https://labspend.com](https://labspend.com)) tackling this problem but it's massive and not often mentioned or known by people outside of the lab. We've consulted with companies and help them identify millions in savings.

A couple of issues contribute which are the pricing isn't transparent like hospitals in the USA. Also there are only 2-3 major suppliers and for certain items it's essentially a monopoly.

</comment><comment><USER38> This might be an unpopular opinion around here, but this is an obvious area for bold public investment. Countless startups sprung out of public investment into basic research during the 20th century. And places like Bell Labs spent more on R&D due to the tax situation of the time. Beginning in the 70s and 80s, investors began to push for lower and lower capital gains taxes. So, I guess I'm saying that if you're an investor and you want more research into basic science, we could release the vice grip on capital gains rates and let the public pour a ton of money into it.

I'm hoping for this to provoke a rational conversation and not a political flame-war – so, please respond fair-mindedly.

</comment><comment><USER39> Does anyone have a list of all the COVID-19 research and response orgs that would be funded?

I've worked in international dev where normally government grants go to a handful of familiars who subcontract out. It's often a question of visibility for everyone else (smaller groups either win subcontracts or have a shot at getting their work accelerated directly).

I know science funding is different, but I wanted to map all the orgs & relationships for visibility. The best list I can find are previous grantees of [https://wellcome.ac.uk/](https://wellcome.ac.uk/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Some would see a contradiction between that impulse and how companies from Y-Combinator might use a tax-reduction scheme. Some could even see a connection between tax lawyers introduced by Y-Combinator to founders and that practice.

I'm not saying that _has_ to be the case but "tax-avoidance / tax-optimisation / complex international structure / negotiation with government keen to offer low tax deal" is a common point made against large tech companies. I'm surprised why Sam doesn't connect that point to his point, or confront that issue directly.

<comment><USER41> The connection is extremely indirect. If companies voluntarily pay more tax than they are legally required to, the vast majority of that money will go to Medicare, Social Security, defense, and interest on the national debt, with only a tiny amount going to scientific research. Conversely, if companies use these "loopholes" to reduce their tax liability by $X, they can directly donate all of that money for scientific research.

Going beyond that for a moment, some corporations voluntarily foregoing these loopholes will not even be enough for the US federal government to be able to afford their existing obligations, let alone increase spending on research or anything else. Furthermore, in a competitive environment, any company that does forego these loopholes is likely to find itself losing out to a competitor that uses these loopholes to undercut their prices.

That leaves closing the loopholes altogether, which is something the government would have to do. But that's not even enough to address the deficit --the government would have to either cut spending or raise taxes elsewhere.

And it's entirely possible that closing corporate tax loopholes isn't even a good idea regardless. Corporations are legal straw men that, in most cases, ultimately pass on their earnings to their shareholders. A corporate tax effectively taxes all shareholders the same--in other words, the retired grandmother pays the same amount as the billionaire investor. In other words, corporate taxes can actually be far less progressive than individual taxes.

<comment><USER40> I would have loved Sam to make that argument explicitly: it's not his style to talk about government money as if it grows on trees. I suspect he wouldn't have looked at the overall distribution but where to assign marginal tax revenues.

<comment><USER41> Corporate taxes are only 4.4% of US tax revenue[1], there's no possible way that corporate tax avoidance would make a significant difference. Especially compared to what most successful startups end up doing, which is to employ people and pay them salaries that are within the upper tax brackets. Respectfully, you seem to be trying to draw a strong connection here where it's not obvious that one exists.

[1] [https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-by-tax- type-2020/](https://taxfoundation.org/us-tax-revenue-by-tax-type-2020/)

<comment><USER40> > there's no possible way that corporate tax avoidance would make a > significant difference

Citation needed.

<comment><USER41> I already provided one, what are you talking about?

<comment><USER40> You are saying that what's left after tax optimisation is small. Not that the potential revenue if corporate benefits were taxed effectively is small. Do you have an estimate of the revenue that is declared in low-tax jurisdiction?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> My company, Repair Biotechnologies, is working on regrowth of the atrophied thymus via FOXN1 upregulation. We're at the preclinical stage of getting the vector and formulation into shape, and the start of tests in influenza exposure models in mice.

The atrophy of the thymus is a major reason why the adaptive immune system declines. The evidence from sex steroid ablation in prostate cancer patients strongly suggests it is possible to provoke the naive T cell component of the adaptive immune system into regenerating itself in a matter of months, provided that the thymus is restored to more youthful activity. Also evidence from the Intervene Immune trial with growth hormone (not advisable as a strategy, but congratulations to that team on getting interesting data) for the same proposition.

To be clear this is a years long process for Repair Biotechnologies that would see us into trials around 2022, but at some point fixing the aged immune system will and must become a practical concern. At that point, we'll all be a lot less concerned about pandemics of this nature, as the mortality and hospitalization rates will be much reduced.

There are other things that need to handled to restore all of the aged immune system: getting hematopoietic stem cells back into line and functioning properly, regenerative medicine for lymph nodes, some form of targeted destruction for malfunctioning immune cells. But each of these items will give incremental benefits on its own.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is anybody thinking deeply about what it means to fight against natural selection as a modern species?

I know nobody wants to hear this nihilistic take but humans are the most destructive invasive species in existence.

I wish biomedical and health science research instead focused more on how we can lead rich lives with the little time we do have, knowing nature might take us back to dust for any reason, and leave the world a better place with more knowledge for the next generation. Instead we have old wealthy (mostly white) men driving the interests of science research for them to live longer and have more time to spend their money destroying the earth.

It is an ethical mess to know how to cure a disease or give one better health outcomes and intentionally not apply it but there has to be a balance. I worked in a hospice for a few years and I saw elderly folk often abandoned by their (alive and well) families and dieing alone. It sounds crazy to think but I feel like too much of anything, even longevity, is not good.

</comment><comment><USER44> US should create 100 more universities. Each university campus lights up the economy of otherwise sleepy written off towns. The state operated universities can help lower the tuition and in turn reduce the student debt burden - one of the biggest issue. It creates more faculty positions for PhDs coming out. It attracts more international students bringing in money and talent. It lowers stress on outrageously competitive higher education space. It creates more research departments and opportunities. A creation of typical university campus is merely $1B. For $100B total, this generates so many benefits that it shouldn't be even question. A lot of progress in US happened because of establishment of new universities. At some point we didn't kept pace with growing demands and now education as well as research has become scars, expensive things available Only to elite.

<comment><USER45> Enrollment in higher education is down over the last 10 years. There are already too many universities/colleges in the U.S. There are too many Ph.D.'s being granted in a quite a few areas. The funding per student today is much less than it was 20 years ago which again was less than it was the 20 years before then. This is not going to change. Building more physical classroom space is not needed and is too expensive. Society is not willing to fund these places. Around 50% of higher education courses are taught with adjunct labor that typically pays little and without benefits. I don't see that building more universities would change this. Especially when demand is decreasing.

<comment><USER44> Demand is decreasing because prices have sky rocketed. This is very similar to private hospitals working in concert for price gauging. The only way to get this under control is state jumping in and introduce some real competition. Education doesn't have to be expensive and everyone deserves education they want. From what I understand, demand for CS and general tech is as high as it has ever been but people can't get in to quality providers with reasonable cost.

<comment><USER45> Your first sentence sounds plausible and could be true. Do you know that it is true? Do the demographics of the country support an increase in higher education capacity? Do the realities of what it means to become educated support a percent increase in the number of highly education people?

I currently teach at a community college and have taught at some major universities. What I consider passing today is far less than what I would have considered passing 25 years ago. My anecdotal experience is that too many people are going to college. Standards have decreased and we are passing people through the system who should not be graduating. Even so there is increasing pressure from administration and politicians to increase the passing rate.

At my college tuition is increasing because state funding is decreasing. We are advertising to a population who realistically aren't college material. But we need the enrollment and I need a job. So I pass people who shouldn't pass. I strongly disagree with the notion that we need more colleges.

EDIT: What I perceive as a degradation in undergraduate degree quality has led to the present state where a Master's degree today has the same intellectual signaling value that a Bachelor's degree had 40 years ago.

<comment><USER44> I'm very familier with these views and staunchly opposed to them. Here the idea is that only a small portion of the population is "college worthy" and only those elites should be going to college. This then implies we don't need "too many" educated people and economy perhaps can't even handle them. I don't subscribe to any of these.

I believe, education needs to be distangled from jobs. People should not be educated for the sole purpose of slaving away 8 hours a day somewhere. Education is about learning, deeper reflections, aquiring skills you enjoy, developing reasoning, identifying pitfalls, dealing with abstractions, practising scientific methods, becoming desciplined. Only as side effect of all these, you _might_ be able to also do well at some job. This means everyone is _entitled_ to the highest level of education. In an ideal world, all humans should obtain a PhD in something they are passionate about, something they believe in and something they are interested in.

Now here's the problem. We have mutilated our education philosophy to the extent that it is no longer recognizable from what it used to be. When you step in modern day institutes, the education is all about getting good grades and passing exames. I have met inenumerable humans, starting from Kindergarten to PhDs where they are forced to memorize things, instead of really understand things in order to pass exams. People who don't have great memory powers are forced out of the system. Other day I was looking at 1st grade history lesson on Columbus. What was the test exam questions? Name the ships! Why does name of ships matter at all? Why not teach kids instead reason he needed 3 ships?

My core hypothesis is that all humans are curious, we all want to learn something, we all have some interests. We destroy most of these attributes as we grow up by making it a massive memorization contest with prizes given as pass and fail. Then we make it all about jobs so folks are forced to learn things they were never interested in the first place.

<comment><USER45> Your goal is noble. I think it is believed by you because you don't have extensive experience teaching in a classroom. Everyone talks about teaching concepts and whatnot. I used to think this way. But the reality of the classroom and the reality of what the average person is capable of understanding and what they are willing to try to understand is at odds with this noble view.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Pedantic correction: R0 actually refers to the contagiousness of a virus before any public health measures are taken (including vaccines). R is the contagiousness of a virus in the world as it currently is. So if an effective vaccine is produced, R will go below one, but R0 will be unaffected.

<comment><USER47> Is there a similar bit of terminology for the case fatality rate?

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Is Sam putting his money where his mouth is on this? Is he putting his time and effort there as well? Genuine questions. Even just putting together an obvious and simple historical timeline correlating increased scientific funding with improved standards of living would help. How come something as simple as that is not being brought forward instead? Is it possible that putting effort into proving this assertion might end up disproving it instead? We cannot know until better and more legitimate proof is attempted to be found.

Proof > Opinion

</comment><comment><USER49> Currently, scientific research is not efficient enough to deserve more funding. The pyramidal scheme, currently collapsing, is just extracting as much money as possible with as little innovation as possible.

If there were thousands of small research labs taking tiny amounts of money, it would be worth it purely for the massive amount of trial and error, but currently, the system is just collapsing.

</comment><comment><USER50> We do need to fund more science, but we also need to fund more PPE, more testing and contact tracing, more medical equipment and more nurses. Please support the Coronavirus Action Plan: [https://www.change.org/p/coronavirus- action-plan](https://www.change.org/p/coronavirus-action-plan)

</comment><comment><USER51> While you're at it, fix everything else too.

I'm not being snarky, I mean it. Bucky Fuller calculated that we could solve most of the world's problems for about $25B (this was in the 70's, so adjust for inflation and whatnot).

He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two. They had waterless toilets that captures BMs in little plastic bags, hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. )

Or see his Old Man River's City project ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project) [https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/](https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/) ) A city in a single building with ten million square feet of enclosed open space. Add some applied ecology ("Permaculture") and you've got an arcology ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology) ).

We have pretty much all the answers, the problem is to align our power with our values.

<comment><USER52> > houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by > helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two.

I'm currently writing a series on designing my own home and contrasting it with some soul-crushing new construction around here. It's very obvious that the places cherished and loved in New Hampshire were the villages built slowly, and the places least loved are the ones flash formed overnight by contractors trying to max out $$. Building on site is not very expensive but I'm not sure that making it cheaper is fixing any of the major problems with housing. It would just give more life to planning for lifeless sprawl.

If anything, we need ways to build more beautiful houses better or cheaper, in smaller, odd and non-level lots. Not assembly line houses.

<comment><USER53> Houses can be custom built in a factory.

They don't have to be identical copies at all, in the computer age.

<comment><USER52> You'd think that! You'd think that about something very simple, too, like door hardware. Eastlake (mid 1800's) style hardware has all these beautiful engravings on knobs, plates, hinges, even little places like the mortise plates that are rarely seen. Surely today in the computer age the doorknobs on half-million dollar homes must be more beautiful than these. But they're not.

<comment><USER20> I can make you an insanely intricate door if you want with a cheap CNC machine. But I don't see a ton of demand for it.

Also, the vast majority of the cost of a half million dollar home is the land.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I encourage everyone here to read the book Science-mart by Mirowski. It reveals a lot of limitations of adding markets and the search for "efficiency" in science.

</comment><comment><USER55> Please vote for logical not ideological candidates.

</comment><comment><USER56> Lets spend 1% of what we spend on wars and smartphones - on science. We wont have flu, cancers, fever and pandemics after 5 years.

Its shameful our high level civilization is threatened by a primitive virus.

We will now spend 100 times more on survival than we would need to spend to prevent a lots of deseases and pandemics in the first place.

Whole science power and money of our civilization is wasted on smartphones and wars. And health scientists work almost for free.begging for years for our attention. And we are where we are.

<comment><USER57> Oddly enough, "the war machine" in particular has driven R&D and science for thousands of years. I encourage you to look into the technologies that DARPA and others have had a hand in creating. Not to mention they fund things like cancer research already.

Smartphones have given millions of people access to information they would never have. Smartphones are the sum of 30 years of computer R&D, making them cheap enough that Kenya has more then 80% of there population online [1]

The issues you listed would take significantly more time then "five years" to cure.

I think there is room to argue how defense money is distributed and used.

[0] First link when searching for DARPA inventions: [https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa- in...](https://www.itpro.co.uk/technology/34730/10-amazing-darpa-inventions)

[1] [https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/...](https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/business/article/2001273507/smartphone- adoption-puts-kenya-at-top-of-internet-penetration-in-africa)

<comment><USER58> That is a falicy. Because we got something you notice it, but you have no idea what we missed because we were focused on what we got instead of something else. Maybe we would get smart phones sooner in some other alternative universe, we don't know.

If the money spent on space and military was spent on genetic engineering we might not have smart phones, but we would have fire breathing dragons!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> it's really rich to read a blog post from someone at YC wishing "the federal government was doing much more". YC and the extended universe of VCs have spent years providing an intellectual facade to undermine confidence in a centralized government, public funding of critical services, and promoting the profit motive in places like healthcare.

The past decade in America has seen the dominance of the capitalist tech utopians like Paul Graham, and we are seeing the results. For god's sake Peter Thiel was working with YC barely two years ago and now Sam wants to complain that the federal government isn't prepared to respond to crises?? what a joke.

<comment><USER60> You are being silenced, but you are 100% correct. Free market absolutism is religion dressed up as reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Science has enough money, but is it not efficiently used. Actual researchers are post docs on minimal salary. Most money gets redirected to HR, administrators, ISO compliance etc...

<comment><USER62> > but is it not efficiently used

This is the case with a lot of organizations like charities and government contractors.

When you have so many layers between the money source and sink, each layer takes some % cut like a parasite and each layer fights for its survival like a parasite.

It's like how healthcare.gov could have been made by 4 people in a garage being paid $100k/year each, but instead it required billions of dollars and thousands of people.

<comment><USER63> I agree that a lot of money is being wasted but your estimate of 4 people is very naive.

<comment><USER62> What makes healthcare.gov so complicated that 4 people can't handle it?

Less is more in software. Some of the best software ever written was written by one person (or a very small team). The more people you add to a project the less cohesive the code base becomes and the fewer people there are that can see the big picture.

<comment><USER63> There are tons of regulations for the whole country and each state. Then you have to deal with all insurers. I bet it took hundreds of man years just to get a handle on all the requirements. This is not some photo sharing site where you can make the rules. The rules are already set and you have to figure them out. Basically the tech is the easy part but understanding the requirements is very hard. This applies to a lot of big systems. It's hard to create a coherent system around convoluted rules.

<comment><USER62> And yet, the complaints about the website were not about the lack of regulatory compliance, dealing with insurers, etc., but of basic technical issues - logging in, navigating the site, "glitches".

<comment><USER63> Correct. They certainly could have done better but my point was that this is not something four guys in a basement can nail together.

<comment><USER62> Well, I still think 4 guys in a basement could have come up with a better framework to build off of even without the regulatory compliance part.

It's like the company Simplifile - small company in Utah. They have only a handful of developers that build actual website front/backend infrastructure, and then they have a team of specialists whose job it is to become expert in all of the county laws across the USA and create requirements out of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> In terms of COVID-19, I'm skeptical there's any real need for VC style funding:

1\. Existing biotech companies are probably perfectly capable of addressing this with usual means. Vaccines are a known quantity, not novel disruption.

2\. By the time any startup gets off the ground (6 months at least), the crisis will likely have passed

<comment><USER65> Existing vaccine efforts will probably succeed, but the possibility that they fail is real and quite scary (to me, anyway). So I'm glad we have a bunch of longer-term speculative projects as backup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Does HARC count?

</comment><comment><USER67> Even if you focus on pure tech problems, startups seems to be failing us in the US.

Other countries have scaled out thermal imaging for fever detection, face tracking for contact tracing, and have mobile apps that can warn people where a previous infected patient have visited before. I have yet to see any of that here.

<comment><USER68> > face tracking for contact tracing

These calls remind me of 9/11 when we permanently reduced our civil liberties for a momentary problem.

<comment><USER69> I am not opposed to some of these measures. A lot of lives are at stake, and also the ability to restart the economy.

But they _definitely_ need as part and parcel of the implementation, a 'self destruct' that goes into effect once the crisis is over.

<comment><USER68> That's definitely a step in the right direction.

But take a look at the Patriot Act. Much of it expired, but has been reauthorized time and time again -- with support from both parties, both Obama and Trump.

<comment><USER69> Yeah, that's tricky; people tend to adjust to things and they become the 'status quo'. I guess it's partially a matter of electing better politicians down the line.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Wizard of the Coast asking fans to scan old books - <AUTHOR> http://support.dmsguild.com/hc/en-us/articles/216504408 <comment><USER2> This doesn't sound like it's coming from the perspective of someone looking to archive or preserve these books, but rather someone who is looking to exploit other people to produce something they can monetize with no regard for quality.

They're accepting a container format (PDF) that's just a wrapper around a JPEG, PNG, TIFF or other rasters. Or they'd like a lossy format (JPEG) with no suggested compression settings.

They'd like you to use the enhancement features/filters of your scanner software which is like Instagramming your photos. Presumably because they don't have a processing workflow in place to perform this themselves.

They want you to convert what will natively be captured as RGB to CMYK, something you generally don't leave up to amateurs if you have any interest in maintaining an accurate conversion.

That all tells me they don't care to have quality master scans they can go back to, they just want something passable they can sell to others.

<comment><USER3> To be fair, if the company doesn't have the masters any more, but they want to give people legal access, they need to start somewhere... After they have a scanned copy, they at least have the ABILITY to re-type the text, fix the formatting, etc.

I empathize a lot with what they're trying to do. Imagine if you're a passionate employee, who cares about the books you grew up with. They're fun to read, and you really want to give more people access to them.

After months of pushing, your bosses give-in - Sure, sell the only stuff online.. But this isn't likely to make much money, so we're not giving you a budget for the project.

This gives them a way to get started - If the titles sell, and are popular, they can go back, and argue that it's worth improving their quality. If not, at least they're legally available at ALL, and that's better than letting them be forgotten.

<comment><USER2> Those are some valid points but the request to use descreening filters seems strange. Descreening is used to remove halftoning from images, not text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This superficially reminds me of Metallica's recent request for fans to send in old materials, which have been compiled into large box sets for the reissues of _Kill 'Em All_ and _Ride the Lightenting_ which were, in their heydey, bolstered by fan passion and tape trading. Now that the material has been curated / massaged / etc, fans can get ahold of the box sets for the one- time fee of $149.99. Each.

<comment><USER5> Do they want copies of Metallica's lawsuit against their own fans who used Napster?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sure. I'll scan 'em in and then send the magnet link to which they can point their torrent client. No? You want me to be a digital sharecropper where I do the work, send the results only to you, and you reap the profits? Mmm, gonna have to pass on that one.

<comment><USER7> > I do the work

I find it hard to believe that you believe that scanning a work (even if rare) that they own the rights to means that you deserve a cut of future profits. You could argue that $50 may not be enough money, but a fixed rate fee seems pretty reasonable for doing what amounts to manual labor.

<comment><USER8> Except that mikestew _in no way_ asked for "a cut in the future profits". He offered to make the results available for free for everyone.

<comment><USER7> I'd argue when he used the phrase "digital sharecropper", he _did_ imply that.

There's no official definition of "digital sharecropper", but Atwood's is as good as any: "Digital sharecroppers typically get nothing in return for the content they've provided, and often give up all rights to what they've created." [https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital- sharecropper...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/are-you-a-digital- sharecropper/)

<comment><USER6> teddyh got it right, and wowser, did you infer a lot from my pithy little comment. I mean, read what you quoted: "give up all rights to what they've created", including throwing it up on the pirate bay. Either free for all, or free for none, because i do charity work for actual charities, not multi- billion dollar for-profit corporations.

<comment><USER7> > charity work

$50 for your labor, no?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have a bunch of the books they want and I am definitely willing to scan them in even with the knowledge that it would be a lot of hard work.

Unfortunately, they recommend that the books be stripped and scanned page by page for "acceptable" results. That's where I lose all interest. :(

<comment><USER10> We need a D&D nerd on the google book scanning team to get involved so their scanners can be use for this.

Anyone know how to connect with them??

Wizards should also reach out to this team with this request...

<comment><USER2> I think Google's project is less about preserving the book, and more about indexing the content which is a subtly different goal. They care less about high fidelity reproduction and more about content acquisition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This isn't Wizards asking, right? It's DriveThruRPG. Remember when Wizards forced DriveThruRPG to pull all the PDFs of classic D&D books they had for sale a few years ago? Good times. The worm has turned.

<comment><USER12> Wizards is partnered with them now. The DMGuild thing that the page is under is Wizard's platform for letting people publish original content coupled with WotC IP not covered by the OGL. I have some issues with how they handle IP once someone publishes something to the DM's Guild (or whatever the actual name is), but the idea is pretty nifty.

Also, WotC has been selling classic (pre-3.0) D&D books through DriveThru for at least a year (but I feel like it's been longer).

<comment><USER11> Yeah, that's what I was referring to. There was old D&D material on DriveThruRPG for a few years before Wizards up and made them pull it. This was back in 2009, a good while after D&D 4th Edition had come out. The PDFs weren't available for purchase legally again until the beginning of 2013.

I ain't gonna speculate on motivations, but the timing of these events sure does line up with certain publishing decisions that Wizards was making.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say access completely lines up with their reprints. Also I from what I've heard about their business now that having the PDFs for sale is probably one of the few ways to get "new" conent for now. They do seem to be in some what of a holding pattern. Not a lot of new content and a lot of what is generated is contracted out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not sure how to interpret this. "WotC has given us permission to republish their old books, but absolutely will not lift a finger to give us access to any of them, so we've got to fall back on begging fans to scan their old stuff" is my best guess.

And then they're telling people to cut the spine off their 30-year-old collector's item for best scanning results. In exchange for $50. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't be surprised if WotC didn't actually have access to the older reference materials anyways. Stuff is lost all of the time.

That said, this definitely sounds like "We'll give you $50 bucks so that we can start reselling it since the rights are ours anyways. Thanks Chumps!"

<comment><USER15> TSR was notorious for throwing stuff away. Like all the original artwork for many classic modules and manuals. This was also well before era of digital.

<comment><USER14> I'd certainly pay quite a bit for the original drawing/painting for the Tarrasque[0]

[0] - [http://www.monkeyinthecage.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/Ta...](http://www.monkeyinthecage.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/07/Tarrasque.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was all ready to help out because I have a stash of most of their missing 1st edition adventures (e.g. S1 Tomb of Horrors, etc.), well-preserved and in plastic... until I saw this:

> You will get best results by cutting the spine off the book and by using a > sheet-fed scanner for interiors and a flatbed scanner for covers.

Ack. no way, sorry.

<comment><USER17> According to the Japanese manga scanlation scene, the best way to get the pages out without damage is to heat the spine with a hairdrier, or solder gun or even a microwave so the glue melts away. Also, buy 2 copies, one for scanning, the other for preserving.

Or so I've heard :^)

<comment><USER18> Well, libraries have proper equipment and proper staff. Can _you_ imagine the Vergilius Palatinus cut up for scanning? Turns out, with proper equipment you don't have to: [http://bibliotheca-laureshamensis- digital.de/bav/bav_pal_lat...](http://bibliotheca-laureshamensis- digital.de/bav/bav_pal_lat_1631)

The digital plantation OTOH knows no limit to cheapness and shoddiness. The rights owner doesn't want to rent equiment for preservation, they don't want to acquire the material they have rights to, instead they ask someone else to do the work for them, including post-processing. For USD 50. Wizards of the Coast, go away and die.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Uhhh.. for those people yelling "rip off", you have no idea of the demand or lack of for these titles. This may be the only economical way to get these titles preserved.

The reality might just be that it just isn't worth it to do it any other way.

As someone who loves old D&D modules (and has actually bought from DriveThru), I think it's really great.

My guess is that there was someone who works for these guys who also loves old D&D modules that couldn't convince anyone to make this happen unless they did it this way.

<comment><USER20> Is there any guarantee (perhaps via some sort of license) that the materials will be made freely available to all? If not, I'm not sure what the point of working for free for someone else's gain is.

I think I speak for most hardcore D&D fans when I say that most players will be perfectly fine continuing to torrent these books for the foreseeable future. In fact, unless I missed something, I'm kind of surprised this company didn't just do that since people have gone through the trouble of converting them to PDF already.

<comment><USER21> $50 is not free. I worked at a print shop- a D&D module would take like 10 minutes to scan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> To add a little more fuel to the "this is a rip-off" fire, many of the books they're looking for in 3.5e, 3e, and 2e are not hard to come by, either in physical form on auction sites or in digital form. They don't _need_ fans to do the leg work of finding these books for them. The only reason to do it this way is to avoid paying fair compensation for the time required to scan them.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's great to see that they're taking such an active role in preserving this aspect of 'nerd heritage'.

</comment><comment><USER23> My gut feeling is there is no way the recent stuff with Archive.org and old video games hasn't been a major cause of this "project" by Wizards. They have this huge library of stuff that could be considered abandoned, and with this they could make the argument that they haven't abandoned the works.

</comment><comment><USER24> Stuff like this is why public libraries are important and not a "relic of the past".

<comment><USER12> I mean, minus the parts where the libraries wouldn't get any funding from this, and DriveThru/WotC are making all the profit off sales.

<comment><USER25> Nothing stops you from dumping the PDFs on the bay afterwards.

<comment><USER12> That still doesn't really help the libraries though. It just makes the content more accessible through illicit means.

<comment><USER25> Nothing is going to help libraries except local community action to protect them (which I fully support). But that's a separate issue from this archival initiative.

The libraries of today are the community meeting and learning spaces of tomorrow.

<comment><USER26> My and WotC taxes help libraries. I'm glad they're providing value.

<comment><USER25> True, but only where you and WotC reside! Libraries are funded through local property tax (at least in the US).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> What is also curious is that simple Google searches such as [https://www.google.com/search?q=Advanced+Dugeons+and+Dragons...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Advanced+Dugeons+and+Dragons+book+2+edition) turn op decent scans of the materials on the very first result page. I don't think this was thought through at all. Is there some legal angle why they need someone that owns the book send them a personally scanned file?

</comment><comment><USER27> I have the 1995 prints of the 2nd edition core books (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide and also the Monstrous Manual), sometimes referred to as the 2.5 edition. They are not in this list and also not in the DMG store. While rule-wise there were almost no changes from the original 2nd edition, the layout and color prints got a complete overhaul. And before you ask, no, I'm not going to cut them up and scan, sorry.

</comment><comment><USER28> Wow, the two adventure modules I have are on the list. They were hella fun to play and would love to share so others can enjoy. They are stapled bindings though, and I really don't want to cut the pages to put them through my Doxie. Any tips on scanning them without having to cut them?

</comment><comment><USER27> I wonder why they didn't trawl eBay first? A lot of what they are after can be found there for <50$. Is it just to avoid the actual scanning work?

</comment><comment><USER29> Wouldn't they be better off purchasing the books and scanning in-house?</comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on landing page v2? - <AUTHOR>

Thanks to HN, I got lots of advice in creating a better landing page the last time which resulted in a full redesign. V2 is out.
Same as last time, looking for feedback. Any and all suggestions even criticism welcome.
www.grooovy.me <comment><USER3> The 1px gray border around the phone on the landing page blends right into the blue stripe, and the top metal bezel blends right into the white, making the whole design feel very flat. It would look better if you in some way added a bit of separation between phone and background.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'll make a note of this and see what I can do. Maybe I'll add a slight background glow behind the phone or something.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry for the duplicate submission if anyone sees it. I figured that this post would be well on his way to oblivion (was ranked beyond the top 200 posts on HN) so I made a similar submission to this one but now it's back towards the top again. Either way, thank you HN!

</comment><comment><USER4> "Join or create customized events..." could be aligned with the text above. Not sure I like the indentation between the title and paragraph - <USER2> difference in font weight ought to be enough, maybe?

Aside fron that, great overall design!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'll definitely take a look at the indentation. Anyone else feel the same way? I'll be running a lot of A/B tests to figure out what exactly works out as this is my first real landing page. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Text aligning for content on blue stripe could be left, I think.

And I'd placed those bullets representing slides below/above content. It takes time to find it.

BTW, app seems pretty beautiful.

<comment><AUTHOR> Text aligning on blue stripe is left for me on my firefox, chrome and IE. Could you specify which content and browser where it's not left? Much appreciated!

Spot on on the bullets, will look into making that more user friendly.

Thanks! I'm no designer, so I had to put a lot of hardwork in to make up for it. It's great to know someone admires it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not much of a criticism, but I love the design. It's pretty generic, but it feels like a generic app site _done absolutely right_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'm glad you think it's good. It's not criticism, but definitely helpful. I'd take compliments any day ;). It's my first time learning design since 11 weeks ago so didn't think it would turn out as well as it did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> the only thing that matters with a landing page is how well it converts. You can tweak a design all day long, but are you actually tracking whether people are submitting their email more with this design compared to your last iteration? If it's lower conversion than your last one, it's technically a worse design even if it looks better

</comment><comment><USER8> It fails miserably on mobile (Android here) Layout is confusing, text is hard to read and the image seems to jump around.

<comment><USER8> Just had a look on my laptop - it's a _very_ nice landing page :o

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for taking extra time to check it out on your laptop! I apologize for the slight problems you had on Android so far. Since this app is bootstrapped by my cofounder and I, we don't have enough resources out of working on the app to create a completely mobile-friendly site yet. I know it's no excuse, but we're working on it! Thank you for letting us know though- we plan on buying an android sometime in the future to test with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Video is missing in Step 4. Looks good in latest Firefox and IE9.

Good luck!</comment>


Microsoft releases ASP.NET MVC under the (OSI-approved) MS-PL open source license - <AUTHOR> http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Apr-02.html

<comment><USER2> This really isn't big news. Asp.Net MVC framework has been under and Open Source license (a custom license - <http://aspnet.codeplex.com/license>) for a long time now. This news is just that they switched to the common MS-PL license.

I have done a project on the MVC framework, and must say that it is a huge breath of fresh air compared with the ASP.NET Web Forms framework.

</comment><comment><USER3> The only reason I would consider building something for ASP.NET is an overwhelmingly huge legacy codebase I would have to rewrite for something more modern like Rails or Django.

Or something really cool like Seaside or Weblocks.

<comment><AUTHOR> ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC are actually completely different (even though they share the same name) - ASP.NET MVC is an MVC framework, just like Rails (and Django, mostly), whereas ASP.NET is component-oriented.

I would use ASP.NET MVC over ASP.NET for any web project I had to build using .Net.

<comment><USER4> \-- ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC are actually completely different (even though they share the same name) --

They use dirrent rending engines, but the business logic is more important and is usually > 50% of the codebase, so it can still be reused in MVC Asp.Net.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The original announcement by Scott Guthrie: [http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net- mv...](http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-1-0.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER6> MVC is so 2007

<comment><USER4> Its Ok, coz the target market for the MVC Asp.Net is 2005 or ealier. Lots companies are still at dotnet 1.1 actually with the latest version 3.5</comment></comment>


Linux is now hosted on GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/torvalds/linux <comment><USER2> For anyone pulling the kernel tree from github - here is how you can verify it.

linux-2.6 $ git pull git://github.com/torvalds/linux.git

linux-2.6 $ git fetch --tags git://github.com/torvalds/linux.git

linux-2.6 $ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 76E21CBB

linux-2.6 $ git verify-tag v3.1-rc5

gpg: Signature made Sun 04 Sep 2011 06:45:37 PM EDT using DSA key ID 76E21CBB gpg: Good signature from "Linus Torvalds (tag signing key) <firstname.lastname@example.com>"

<comment><USER3> So how to we verify 76E21CBB?

<comment><USER4> gpg --check-sigs 76E21CBB

If you don't trust the key of anyone that has verified his key (which is true in my case), attend more signings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like he's using it as a temp place while master.kernel.org is down:

<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1187888>

</comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't go so far as to say "hosted" on Github. It's probably just a mirror, and/or Linus playing around with Github. Linux already has a very strong hierarchy for managing patches, and I certainly don't see them moving to a proprietary platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, everything is a mirror with git.

Look at his public activity [1]: comments, pull requests, issues… he is using GitHub, for real.

[1] <https://github.com/torvalds>

<comment><USER6> He is using comments, pull requests, and issues to develop diveclog, a relatively minor pet project, not Linux. As I said: Linux has its own infrastructure, and were Linus seriously considering a move to Github, there would be some announcement on a mailing list.

Which, this makes me wonder what will happen when someone forks "linux" and sends Linus a pull request. ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We will soon have an answer, for sure! :-)

<comment><USER7> You already have it, at this time and in the foreseeable future the main linux repository is _not_ hosted on github, only a mirror like gazillions others. For sure :-)

<comment><USER8> Reread the comment you responded to: It was not suggesting this is the new official Linux repo, as that was already addressed in grandparent's comment. The question under discussion was what linus would do with a pull request on github, so your smiling correction was unnecessary. For sure. :)

<comment><USER9> "Is there some way to just turn off github pull requests? They're all jokes." - [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7#issuecomment-200563...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7#issuecomment-2005630)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Presumably just Linus playing around with Github? There's been a mirror for some time - <https://github.com/mirrors/linux-2.6> and <https://github.com/mirrors/linux>

</comment><comment><USER11> Would not be entirely surprised if the attack on kernel.org made the community (or even just Linus) investigate alternative hosting.

I know nothing important was compromised, but nobody likes to deal with being hacked. It's like being the victim in a car accident- insurance makes you whole, but the whole experience sucks all the same.

<comment><USER12> seriously though, do you think github.com, with thousands of valuable high profile private repositories and hundreds of fancy features and millions of users, would be a more secure place to host the Linux source code?

<comment><USER11> It's not about security- the kernel team has already explained the code itself is not vulnerable. Everything is signed by Linus, and hacking github does not a signed release make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Though I use Linux on daily basis, I see the source code for the first time.

<comment><USER6> That is one important contribution of Github, Bitbucket, Gitorious etc. to the open source world: the ability to browse a project's code instantly or near- instantly. Most SVN or CVS-based systems have an outdated, painful Web interface, buried under a thousand menus - assuming the project even sets one up to begin with. Even when you have a program installed on your computer, it's easier to browse the code on Github.

<comment><USER14> There was some article on the intertubes about how Github panders to devs, while Sourceforge panders to distributers.

<comment><USER15> The one thing I would disagree with is that Github's issue tracking still needs some serious love (although it has improved significantly since launch).

Mainly I would say that it works great for projects with relatively few contributors (like most Ruby gems), but seems to fall apart on very large projects (like Rails, who uses Lighthouse for issue tracking). Everything else about Github is amazing, though.

<comment><USER16> I think Github's issue tracker is the best around, now that search actually works. Very lightweight, and the integration with commits and pull requests is really nice.

dhh doesn't sound like he was ever a fan of Lighthouse: <https://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/63366853636009985>

<comment><USER17> I would use it if it allowed groups to keep all of their issues in one place. Our organization has 20+ repos, so having 20+ bug trackers is pretty dumb. If they make a toplevel issue tracker, I think we'd switch to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Someone discovered a bug... <https://github.com/torvalds/linux/issues/1>

<comment><USER19> I feel bad for Linus. On Google+ and, now, at Github, he seems to attract irrelevant and foolish (mostly) and sometimes trollish comments. People seem to get starstruck and blabber whatever is on the tip of their tongue without thinking if Linus will even care to read it.

<comment><USER20> He probably wouldn't join these social networks if he wanted to avoid trolls. And they are probably nice change from LKMLs trolls :)

<comment><USER21> ...and celebrities probably wouldn't fly on airplanes if they wanted to avoid paparazzi. Banning yourself from using things that your friends and colleagues are using is not a reasonable way to solve the problem that some people do not know how to behave themselves. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Kudos to Github. Hard to think of a better endorsement than that.

<comment><USER23> Endorsement? Linus said he threw it up on github as a temporary mirror to see if github is any good because kernel.org is down. It's more of a trial than an endorsement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I was wondering how long it would take for this to happen: [https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7#issuecomment-200563...](https://github.com/torvalds/linux/pull/7#issuecomment-2005630)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Just a mirror." [1]

[1] [http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1187888/focus=118...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1187888/focus=1187922)

</comment><comment><USER25> Days like today make me consider building from source. Until I sober up, anyway.

<comment><USER5> It's actually easier than you think (and quite fun.)

This page helped me a lot: [https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile#AltBuildMet...](https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Kernel/Compile#AltBuildMethod)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> In less than 3 hours he gained 300 watchers, I wouldn't doubt that it'll be become the most popular repo on Github.

<comment><USER27> Needs about 10,000 more to beat Rails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The network graph makes for interesting viewing.

I suppose it comes as no surprise that Linux makes extensive use of Git's features.

</comment><comment><USER29> Has anyone managed to view the Github Impact graph ?<https://github.com/torvalds/linux/graphs/impact>

<comment><USER30> It works in Firefox after continuing thru the "slow script" message a couple of times, but my WebKit browsers just crash or freeze.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I thought that Github wasn't accessible from all countries due to US export regulations.

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems like Bill Gates already forked it: <https://github.com/bill- gates/linux>. Will Windows 8 be based on Linux?

<comment><USER33> Nope SteveJobs is still working on it... <https://github.com/stevejobs/Windows-8>

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Should be a good test of github's infrastructure.

<comment><USER35> I'd be surprised if linux has more people hacking on it than RoR does.

<comment><USER36> Hosting the kernel git repositories has many more implications than simply managing a raw number of contributors. The kernel repostiory and source is much, much larger than Ruby on Rails.

<comment><USER35> in which sense? I have yet to see an argument why it would be more of a "test of GH's infrastructure" than RoR.

<comment><USER37> The kernel source has about 10 times more files. The total filesize is about 10 times larger as well.

      linux-3.1-rc3$ ls -R -l |wc -l
      46855
      linux-3.1-rc3$ du -h -s
      500M

      rails$ ls -R -l |wc -l
      4141
      rails$ du -h -s
      59M	.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A New Way of Thinking: The IBM Quantum Experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.research.ibm.com/quantum/ <comment><USER2> Skimmed the link, but didn't see any details about the hardware. Is this an actual quantum computer? If so how many qubits and how many gate operations can be performed without losing coherence?

If it's not, then nothing to see here other than marketing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is a 360 video of the research lab: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7D8snlsnQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf7D8snlsnQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow ! Mindbogling !</comment>