White House told federal health agency to classify coronavirus deliberations - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN20Y2LM <comment><USER3> It looks like the national response to the conronavirus here in the US is going to be, "Let's hope it's not much worse than a seasonal flu."

It's really not looking good.

I'm still hopeful, though that's because it's the only thing I've got.

<comment><USER4> A friend just said "This Contravirus thing is an attempt to make the President look bad for the election. It's nonsense."

Yikes.

<comment><USER5> That's crazy. March is much too early to try to ruin a November election.

<comment><USER6> And, ironically, a strong response by the only candidate with the bully pulpit, would have been the best way to ensure re-election.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, for those in the West who are virulently anti-CCP, last month was the best time in decades to topple their power. There was real indications that the simmering discontent would exceed the Chinese censor's ability to control and widespread public anger could have been harnessed into real regime change.

All the West had to do was fuck up less than China and the CCP could have been gone for good. Now, the exact opposite has happened, any anti-CCP voices inside of China have completely lost their legitimacy as the West manifestly has handled the virus worse than China. At the end of this, Xi has basically cemented his status as dictator for life with unchecked power because he was the leader that saved China from the worst of the virus (even if it eventually spreads to China, everyone is much more prepared now and the death toll will be much lower).

Never mind that the best predictive factor of how well you handle COVID 19 was whether your country was traumatized by SARS. Never mind that democracies like Taiwan were arguably more effective. Nobody in China is going to want a "Western" style government for the next 100 years because of COVID 19.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> People are already largely suspicious of the US government's statements and responses about coronavirus. This sort of thing doesn't exactly improve that problem.

<comment><USER9> The WHO and the US government have lost their credibility. I'm looking to state and local governments to step up. The California state government looks like they are doing and saying the right things ( better than the federal government at least ). Actions speak louder than words, look at what is working ( South Korea ) and what isn't.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately the California government seems to support the Trump administrations' coronavirus response.

[https://www.newsweek.com/californias-democrat-governor- prais...](https://www.newsweek.com/californias-democrat-governor-praises- trumps-coronavirus-response-every-single-thing-he-said-1491294)

<comment><USER11> From your source: "Correction: This article and headline has been updated to clarify that Governor Newsom was specifically referring to the support from the White House regarding the docking of the Grand Princess cruise ship."

There is no endorsement of the federal policy beyond the handling of that specific task.

<comment><USER10> Thank god!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have written off the federal government. I am writing to state and local officials here in Oregon - the mayor and state rep and state senator - <USER2> encourage them to start putting aggressive measure in place _now_.

Like Paul Graham just tweeted:

"When you're dealing with exponential growth, the time to act is when it feels too early."

[https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1237801364023017472](https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1237801364023017472)

<comment><USER13> Did twitter break mobile copy pasting? I can't get the text of the tweet to copy paste

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> #DontTestDontTell

[https://www.epsilontheory.com/dont-test-dont- tell/](https://www.epsilontheory.com/dont-test-dont-tell/)

</comment><comment><USER15> It is my understanding that there needs to be a specific reason to classify something (national security, etc.). Is that true or can the President classify anything, in the same way he can unclassify anything?

<comment><USER16> In the spirit of the principle of charity, it isn't that hard to believe that part of the discussion is the impact the virus will have on classified activities, including but not limited to intelligence activities, military activities, or may have included information considered sensitive (like, just by way of example, proof that the virus was gene engineered, which may cause an undesirable international stink if publicized; I mention this just as an example of something that they might classify, not as a claim that it is engineered).

I'd expect "the President" did not literally decide or not decide to classify this; it was probably driven by rules.

What's in the classified briefings isn't really the question; it's what's in the unclassified briefings and actions that are the question. That classified briefings are taking place is to be expected, as it will certainly be impacting classified things, along with all the other "pretty much everything" it will be impacting. I'm sure all the other countries are having classified briefings as well.

<comment><USER17> "We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go," one official said. "These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary."

<comment><USER16> Said an official who may or may not have been in there; it wasn't clear from the article.

I assure you that these are hardly the only meetings taking place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This appears to be an attempt to criminalize the dissemination of some critical healthcare information.

Even if state and local officials are briefed by federal officials, they may not be able to talk about what they know or face possible legal repercussions.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've heard that the CDC has stopped collecting statistics on total tests and positive/negative counts. Are there other government agencies collecting this data?

<comment><USER20> Unbelievably, apparently the best numbers available are from a volunteer effort, in a google docs spreadsheet.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavir...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/coronavirus- testing-numbers/607714/)

The spreadsheet: [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRwAqp96T9sY...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRwAqp96T9sYYq2-i7Tj0pvTf6XVHjDSMIKBdZHXiCGGdNC0ypEU9NbngS8mxea55JuCFuua1MUeOj5/pubhtml)

It's not clear to me if this includes numbers from private labs. My kid's pediatrician now has access to a test from Quest Diagnostics and they can make their own determination as to whether testing is needed. They said that they can't use the local health department testing "for many reasons". I'm glad to hear that the private tests are rolling out, still concerned that it's so hard to get testing through public health labs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> [https://twitter.com/julianborger/status/1237748572415762437](https://twitter.com/julianborger/status/1237748572415762437)

> Robert Redfield, CDC Director, said there are no plans to set up drive > through #COVID19 test centres because "We're tryinjg to maintain the > relationship between individuals and their healthcare providers."

Bunch of ostriches with their heads in the sand.

<comment><USER22> > "We're tryinjg to maintain the relationship between individuals and their > healthcare providers." ...

... because drive-throughs and their lines and problems are visible to everyone, but visits and phone calls to doctors aren't so easy to see by the general public.

<comment><USER21> That, and the "can't have confirmed infections if we don't test!"

<comment><USER23> Nobody dies in Iraq if we don't keep a body count.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I work in government relations and this is neither news, nor anything new. Deliberations at the highest level have to be confidential at times, because the players are speaking brutally honest. They need to be able to make decisions and speak their mind without the media and the public second guessing everything. Passing legislation or making policy over time is one thing, but in a crisis like this, they have to move fast. I think the last thing we want is for policymakers to have to stop and keep justifying every single thing they do, that will just lead to paralysis.

<comment><USER25> ==I work in government relations and this is neither news, nor anything new. ==

Lots of people in this article disagree:

> A high-level former official who helped address public health outbreaks in > the George W. Bush administration said "it's not normal to classify > discussions about a response to a public health crisis."

> Attendees at the meetings included HHS Secretary Alex Azar and his chief of > staff Brian Harrison, the officials said. Azar and Harrison resisted the > classification of the meetings, the sources said.

> One of the administration officials suggested the security clearances for > meetings at HHS were imposed not to protect national security but to keep > the information within a tight circle, to prevent leaks. "It seemed to be a > tool for the White House - for the NSC - to keep participation in these > meetings low," the official said

<comment><USER10> Those quotes appear to prove OPs point about giving people in the discussions the ability to speak freely without second guessing from people like "a high- level former official".

<comment><USER26> The point of state secrets isn't to allow elected officials to say embarrassing things.

<comment><USER24> I didn't say embarrassing, but if you're talking about a mass casualty event and how many body bags are going to need, and limitations that are in the system, and where resources are going to be diverted, how many might die, etc etc the last thing you would want is the public questioning every single thing. Because they will. If they don't, the opposition party certainly will.

<comment><USER26> Using the classification system to shield yourself from criticism is abusing it. The criteria is damaging to national security, not damaging to an officials reputation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am old enough to remember when US media was lobbing criticism at China for downplaying the threat to the public.

We are what we think China is.

<comment><USER28> > We are what we think China is.

This sort of analysis always gets downvoted on HN, but it's true. In many ways we are further along in the direction of having an obedient population (compared to China) but we still have our own great firewall and social credit score systems in place to help keep everyone under control.

China is more overtly authoritarian than the modern US, which is actually an advantage* in fighting a pandemic. So ironically most of the criticisms of China (as hypocritical as they may be) give China a leg up in this kind of crisis.

* Note that I am not condoning authoritarian rule, just noting that it is in some cases effective.

<comment><USER29> Like most things, there are shades of gray and it's not black and white.

China made some critical missteps early on in silencing doctors who spoke up about a novel virus. They also downplayed the crisis to avoid bad news around the New Years celebration (and kept the banquet in Wuhan that was a turning point in the explosive growth of the virus).

Once they mobilized, yes, it was impressive — and judging by their numbers today, it has been effective.

The US is also a mixed bag. There's going to be _wide_ variation in the response at state and local levels. But something really stinks with the lack of testing. And despite having China and then Italy show us how seriously we needed to be taking this, we sleep-walked through a critical period and are now creating the top of the roller coaster.

<comment><USER30> The difference is, here we're allowed to speak up, even the CDC to some extent, counter the President's opinion. The facts are still available

No one has that opportunity in China when it comes to Xi Xinping's message, if they do, they're censored or get a visit to their home by the police.

I see Trump to some extent trying to negate a mass panic amongst the populace by downplaying it while the real decision makers look to the CDC to make decisions about what actions to take. At least the optimistic side of me believes that's how its working. Problem is its now backfiring and people are saying its just another flu, which curtails any advice the CDC has on cancelling events, limiting contact, etc.

<comment><USER6> It's a very charitable interpretation. Unfortunately, the administration is actively working to prevent the CDC from spreading useful information.

<comment><USER31> If that's what they're trying, it's failing; and I'm not sure that's an accurate idea of what they're trying either.

<comment><USER6> It IS failing, due to public interest.

Reuters reported today that Coronavirus briefings have been classified to limit information sharing [1]

They've blamed it on Mexicans running over the southern border [2]

They've called it "the flu"

They've kneecapped professionals at every turn (stopped the CDC from reporting how many people have been tested, tried to muzzle Nancy Messonnier for saying a Coronavirus outbreak was inevitable in this country, [3]

They're still asking for cuts to the CDC [4]

The president called the Governor of Washington "a snake" to cut down his credibility, cut off his head of HHS to lie to the public and say tests were available, he's most concerned that the US count of infections will go up if they let the cruise ship passengers on US soil, preferring, presumably, to let them die and infect each other [5]

They overrode CDC's plan to recommend that elderly people and fragile people not get on airplanes [6]

Generally, it is beyond clear that they are most concerned with not looking in control, and giving out mixed messages that will lead to death.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- secrec...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-secrecy- exclusive/exclusive-white-house-told-federal-health-agency-to-classify- coronavirus-deliberations-sources-idUSKBN20Y2LM)

[2] [https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/cdc-director- border...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/10/cdc-director-border-wall- coronavirus-125007)

[3] [https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/07/trump- coronavirus-m...](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/07/trump-coronavirus- management-style-123465)

[4] [https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump- administratio...](https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trump- administration-isn-t-backing-proposed-cuts-cdc-budget-n1155411)

[5] [https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-coronavirus-press- event-w...](https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-coronavirus-press-event-was- even-worse-than-it-looked/)

[6] [https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/486475-trump- administr...](https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/486475-trump- administration-overrode-health-officials-recommendation-that-elderly)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Not great, not terrible.

</comment><comment><USER33> US corporate culture is primarily one of absolute loyalism. Absolute loyalty is demanded and expected all the way up the management chain and it trumps (no pun intended) all else, including job competence. What some Americans may not realize is that this isn't universally true globally.

What we have now is a president who comes from and exemplifies this culture so his administration absolutely reflects that. Jeff Sessions recusing himself on the Russia investigation instead of blocking it even if it cost him everything, personally, was an unforgivable sin to an absolute loyalist.

So I guarantee you that the prime consideration for this pandemic (which it now officially is, according to the WHO) in the US government is how this impacts the GOP in general and Trump's reelection in particular. Nothing else matters.

Go back to, say, the Watergate era and you had behaviour by a president that even his own party ultimately found unacceptable. If Watergate repeated today, it would be "fake news", painted as partisan Democratic slander aimed at the administration and defended beyond all reason.

The sad and scary part of this is that we now have 40% of the population who will absolutely eat this up and refuse to believe anything that makes the president look bad. To be fair, there are absolute devotees on the other side too but objectively we've seen nothing to the degree of GOP blind loyalism on from the Democrats (yet).

There was a time when our representatives held higher loyalties to the institutions they represent because undermining those is incredibly dangerous. Those days seem to be a distant memory as we have a mass organized effort to disenfranchise those who tend to vote Democrat (under the guise of removing "felons" from voter rolls), a refusal by the Senate to take up legislation that would pass at a completely unprecedented rate, a Senate whose only priority is filling lifetime judicial nominees with more loyalists and the refusal to even take up a president's Supreme Court nominee with flimsily- constructed justification you know for a fact wouldn't apply if the situation was reversed.

This is the trait of dictators and despots. Why do you think Trump admires Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-Un?

So yes, it should come as no surprise that the planning, messaging and response to this pandemic is being seen through the exact same filter: how does this help or hurt Trump?

And it will kill people. I don't wish ill on anyone here but it's hard not to see the irony that the most at-risk groups of death from Covid-19 are, well, Trump's core voters and Fox News's core target market for fearmongering and dog-whistle racism.

Classifying public health responses is unprecedented. Yet as long as Trump's base (40% of voters) don't hold the government to account absolutely nothing will change. And the only time that's happened that I recall is the family separation for detained illegal immigrants. Has there been any other reversal of policy like this?

</comment><comment><USER34> My interpretation is that the Trump administration maximized the effect the virus outbreak had in a trade and propaganda war against China but in return sacrificed America's internal preparation for a potential outbreak.

</comment><comment><USER35> No surprise. We had Larry Kudlow saying a week or two ago that the virus was "fully contained" in the US. [1]

We had the CDC take down the number of folks tested from their website because it was embarrassingly low and different then the Pence / Trump narrative of a million tests. [2]

We've had a weird / crazy argument being made by at least some at the top that masks don't help with transmission reduction of a viral disease. While not perfect, they are low cost, low impact and even surgical masks, while likely not used by doctors treating patients may help general population by reducing hand to mouth / nose transmission, transmission from sick to healthy and environment when sneezing and/or touching face mouth and then environment etc. Other countries are going the other way (masks distributed via post offices, mask wearing mandatory in high impact areas etc).

[1] - [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/25/larry-kudlow-says-us-has- con...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/25/larry-kudlow-says-us-has-contained- the-coronavirus-and-the-economy-is-holding-up-nicely.html)

[2] - [https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1234536619270688768](https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1234536619270688768)

[3] - [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662657/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662657/) \- Adherence to mask use was associated with a significantly reduced risk of ILI-associated infection.

<comment><USER36> (Kudlow is the Director of the National Economic Council and advises WH)

The book Superforecasting (2015) uses Larry Kudlow as an example of 'hedgehog forecaster' that is consistently wrong.

Not only is Kudlow consistently wrong in forecasting, he also fails nowcasting. When Financial crisis was unfolding Kudlow did not realize that something was going wrong.

>The National Bureau of Economic Research later designated December 2007 as the official start of the Great Recession of 2007–9. As the months passed, the economy weakened and worries grew, but Kudlow did not budge. There is no recession and there will be no recession, he insisted. When the White House said the same in April 2008, Kudlow wrote, "President George W. Bush may turn out to be the top economic forecaster in the country."20 Through the spring and into summer, the economy worsened but Kudlow denied it. "We are in a mental recession, not an actual recession,"21 he wrote, a theme he kept repeating until September 15, when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Wall Street was thrown into chaos, the global financial system froze, and people the world over felt like passengers in a plunging jet, eyes wide, fingers digging into armrests.

<comment><USER37> Kudlow has been criminally wrong on pretty much everything for a long time. I don't understand why this guy is still getting publicity.

<comment><USER36> Because audience likes the way he and others like him talk.

From the book:

> Not that being wrong hurt Kudlow's career. In January 2009, with the > American economy in a crisis worse than any since the Great Depression, > Kudlow's new show, The Kudlow Report, premiered on CNBC. That too is > consistent with the EPJ data, which revealed an inverse correlation between > fame and accuracy: the more famous an expert was, the less accurate he was. > That's not because editors, producers, and the public go looking for bad > forecasters. They go looking for hedgehogs, who just happen to be bad > forecasters. Animated by a Big Idea, hedgehogs tell tight, simple, clear > stories that grab and hold audiences. As anyone who has done media training > knows, the first rule is "keep it simple, stupid." Better still, hedgehogs > are confident. With their one-perspective analysis, hedgehogs can pile up > reasons why they are right—"furthermore," "moreover"—without considering > other perspectives and the pesky doubts and caveats they raise. And so, as > EPJ showed, hedgehogs are likelier to say something definitely will or won't > happen. For many audiences, that's satisfying. People tend to find > uncertainty disturbing and "maybe" underscores uncertainty with a bright red > crayon. The simplicity and confidence of the hedgehog impairs foresight, but > it calms nerves—which is good for the careers of hedgehogs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were > excluded from the interagency meetings

> "We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who > could not go,"

So... is there any justification for this? It sounds entirely political</comment>


DeepMind is asking how AI helped turn the internet into an echo chamber - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613083/deepmind-is-asking-how-google-helped-turn-the-internet-into-an-echo-chamber/ <comment><AUTHOR> How can we go about solving this?

<comment><USER2> Stop using browser that track and recommend. Then you will get generalized content and a lot of noise. Maybe we stop using recommendation and filters?</comment></comment>


Dutch join backlash at expensive drugs by making their own - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-netherlands-pharmaceuticals-insight-idUSKCN1QP0M4 <comment><USER2> One thing that is typically not mentioned in these debates is the fundamental structure of the industry. Let's say someone finds a research compound which looks to be promising, and they start a new company to try to commercialize it. Often, they are looking at at least 1-2 decades to get that product to market. Assuming they don't sell out to a big company, they almost certainly have to go public before starting trials in order to amass the required funds. Normally, a public company is expected to show regular profits and growth. This is impossible for a new pharma company because they don't have a product yet, so they are expecting investors to foot the bill for years and years of development and trials. During this time, if the compound fails a major trial, the entire company can go under because it may be prohibitively expensive to start over again if there is a problem. Therefore, not only is there a massively delayed ROI but a lot of risk. As such, when a company gets something to market, investors expect massive profits for shouldering that risk and delay. It is simply not feasible for companies to charge small amounts of money because no investor could justify locking up capital / taking those risks for something other than a huge return.

<comment><USER3> Maybe drug "companies" should be government entities then and not for-profit at all.

<comment><USER4> One could make a pretty good argument that a government funded drug research system would end up with more expensive drugs (in the form of higher taxes) than a for profit system

Drugs, as a whole, aren't that expensive today compared to other healthcare. They make up 9.8% of US health care expenditure, which is pretty much middle of the pack compared to OECD countries. Hospitals, largely "non profit" (but sometimes massively profitable) make up 35%. But drugs feel more expensive bc copays are typically higher for drugs than for medical care

As it stands today the drug industry spends ~$200B a year to get 20-50 new FDA approved drugs a year. Virtually no fda approved drugs are developed solely by academia. NIH budget is $30-35B and on a steady long term decline. So you'd have a massive taxpayer expense just to build out that r&d function

Then you'd have to build out manufacturing. And some sales and marketing analog -- even if you aren't trying to profit, somebody needs to go out and tell doctors about your new drug and share with them very detailed data about how the drug works, what patients it works for, compared to the competition. Doctors can't stay on top of this themselves -- they are too busy and there's too much info

Then you'd need to build out some administrative function and some way to decide what projects move forward at what stage. This is where publicly funded drug research would probably massively underperform private for profit r&d

If you are making drugs for profit, you have a strong incentive to be efficient with your research. If not you go out of business. The more these decisions are driven by politics rather than profit motive, the less productive r&d is. And r&d cost and productivity is the reason drugs are expensive

There's evidence that startups are 10x more productive at r&d than pharma and it isn't crazy to attribute a lot of that to less politics

As of now something like 30-50% of published academic findings are thought to be false. 30%+ of all NIH money goes to "overhead", i.e. Profit to universities. And yields no fda approved drugs without private company investment

<comment><USER5> _One could make a pretty good argument that a government funded drug research system would end up with more expensive drugs (in the form of higher taxes) than a for profit system._

That sounds like a pretty interesting argument, but I notice that you didn't actually make it. The rest of your post is full of claims sans evidence, and a lot of numbers out of context. For example how many of those newly approved drugs are novel therapies vs. rejiggered stereochemistry to keep a patent or compete in an existing field? How many are significant improvements over existing therapies and not just potential profit centers?

<comment><USER6> > rejiggered stereochemistry to keep a patent

Can someone tell me how this patent extension works? If they improve on something, is that a new patent? Does the original patent expire or gets extended? Why couldn't someone else have discovered the new stereochemistry before the original inventor dose so? If the new discovery is not significant, wouldn't its be sufficient to use the generic form of the original chemistry?

<comment><USER5> A great, easy to understand example is found in the drug Prilosec vs. Nexium, the latter of which is a stereoisomer of the former. Prilosec is Omeprazole, which is part of a class of drugs called Proton Pump Inhibitors (PPI's) which treat severe recurrent heartburn and GERD, as well as esophageal erosion from those conditions. Prilosec (Omeprazole) was due to go generic, so the company decided to isolate and purify the S isomer and worked hard to convince the FDA that it represented a truly new treatment. IIRC the rationale was that the enantiopure drug was half the dose of the racemic mixture, and regulatory capture did the rest of the work. Of course there was no tangible benefit to taking 10mg of Esomeprazole vs 20mg of Omeprazole, except the monetary benefit for the company.

As to why some other company didn't snap up the patent, it's an expensive proposition and not trivial to make enantiopure drugs, so a lot of the R&D budget touted by apologists and shills is entirely self-serving. Now sometimes an isomer is actually superior to a racemic mixture and there are plenty of cases where one isomer is therapeutic and the other is ineffective or toxic. Of course in those cases none of this patent fuckery applies, and there is no way to get a new patent issued or FDA writ because only one viable form of the drug exists.

It's also true that a generic in the case of something like Esomeprazole vs. Omeprazole is viable, and that's where the astronomical marketing budget that dwarfs R&D comes into play. Advertising directly to patients and doctors ensures that plenty of people won't understsnd the value of a generic is they were even aware of it. You also get cases, as with Epi-pens, where supplies of the generic are scarce compared to the expensive branded version.

Good list of this kind of thing found here: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiopure_drug](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiopure_drug)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In Denmark I recently saw a discussion between politicians and the just resigned head doctor of a major hospital where he said he no longer could bear the responsibility of "optimizing" and that there was not enough money in the coming years no mattter how much money the politicians were promising in their soon to be election campaigning.. and his belief was we had to decide what we can afford as a country in regard to medicine. Meaning we had to choose who should live or die or die sooner as medicine treatment prices were too high and new treatments are coming all the time.

<comment><USER8> I am wondering if any cost-analysis studies have been done to assess the trade-off between lengthy end-of-life terminal care and the corresponding cost. Doctors seem to make such decisions all the time; but we may have at some point to discuss collectively how much of the public money involved in end-of-life terminal care (last two months, say) for elderly should be used instead for better care earlier in life.

In countries where such care is provided by private insurance and not the state, I am wondering why this trade-off is not given as a choice to the consumer. Many people might be OK to get smaller premiums and better coverage throughout their life by explicitly rejecting coverage of end-of-life care.

<comment><USER9> For better or worse, people don't apply purely rational thinking about trade- offs to healthcare. I think it would make a lot of people squeamish to hear this argument about why somebody, where somebody might be mom or dad, isn't going to receive certain care because they didn't pay for it earlier in their life.

Unfortunately the trade-offs don't go away, and we haven't figured out a way of making these trade offs that doesn't feel horribly statist (so called "death panels") or callous (private insurance denying care).

<comment><USER10> > Unfortunately the trade-offs don't go away, and we haven't figured out a way > of making these trade offs that doesn't feel horribly statist (so called > "death panels")

These already exist. Donor organs are a scarce resource and there aren't enough to go around, so some person(s) has to decide who lives and who dies. People already regularly die in the United States because it is uneconomical to have Level I/II trauma centers within emergency response distance of the entire country.

People have very different ethical standards for how people should act in advance planning scenarios versus in the moment. I think most people agree with the unreasonableness of arranging to have an on call neurosurgeon in a small town in the middle of nowhere. But I think people would have a very different reaction if the same neurosurgeon refused to skip a day of teaching medical students to instead walk across the hospital and carry out a 12 hour brain surgery on a 90 year old patient with dementia who will be dead from lung cancer in two months anyway.

I think people will just have to get over it. There aren't alternatives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes, less payout on rare disease drugs is less of an incentive to research them. But:

* Drug companies have profit margins of 15% on average indicating there is room. * many recent 'orphan drugs' were not newly developed, but off-label uses registered with the FDA for a whole new patent. * these drugs rely heavily on research done by universities through public funding. It stands to reason the public should get to benefit. * there is something morally wrong about setting the price of drugs purely based on demand. It is essentially blackmail: pay me or die / suffer.

<comment><USER4> Drug companies increasingly fund r&d with their balance sheet, not with internal r&d. So the money they pay for new drugs is not reflected in the profit and loss statement.

There are maybe 15 pharma companies that commercialize a large portion of the drugs developed in the world. The vast vast majority of drug companies never make a penny in profit. They sell their products or companies to bigger, commercial companies

So the profits in the industry all accrue to a few big players, and the losses largely accrue to companies you've never heard of

Something like 65% of FDA approved drugs are developed by small companies that will never generate revenue. Bigger companies buy these drugs and plug them into their established sales forces

Virtually (probably literally in the last few years) no drugs emerge fully formed from academia. For profit companies bear the brunt of the r&d costs. 30% of public r&d goes to academic "overhead" and much goes to research that will never come close to informing drug r&d. The NIH spends $30-35B a year, the top 15 pharma companies spend $75B in r&d

<comment><USER12> I am pretty uninformed in this space, but the D in pharma R&D includes the cost of direct to consumer advertising, correct?

I see a lot of expensive looking ads on TV. Those ads were made legal in my lifetime. Maybe it's time to ban prescription ads again?

<comment><USER4> The "d" is for development. Basically "research" is finding a potential drug (making a chemical that has an effect on disease in animal or in vitro models and has good pharmacological properties) and "development" is testing it in tox studies, scaling up manufacturing, testing it for safety and effectiveness in humans. There is a ton of risk and cost in the "development" stage

DTC ads would be in the marketing budget under SG&A

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The situation described in the article doesn't seem to be related to patents. Rather this appears to be a generic drug with a very small market.

There is only one producer of an approved formulation and they are charging too much.

The article mentions that the compound (lutetium octreotate) has been in use for a long time, suggesting that any patent term on the compound has lapsed. Novartis' specific preparation has been approved for this use by the EMA. Compounding pharmacies have the right to prepare the drug without this approval, which they could not do if the compound was subject to a patent.

Theoretically another company could make a generic version of this but the market is probably too small to justify the approval costs.

</comment><comment><USER14> Strange that the article doesn't mention Oncode institute [1], which has specific goals of repurposing generic and patent-expired drugs in combinations to lower costs and there were some discussions about making the drugs themselves

[1] [https://www.oncode.nl/research/programs](https://www.oncode.nl/research/programs)

</comment><comment><USER15> This reminded me of an incident in which the Netherlands intercepted generic drugs en route to Brazil from India.

[https://www.kff.org/news-summary/india-brazil-launch- trade-d...](https://www.kff.org/news-summary/india-brazil-launch-trade- dispute-against-eu-netherlands-over-seizures-of-generic-drugs/)

<comment><USER16> That's strange. Reading your comment, my first thought was WTF is the Dutch Navy doing intercepting shipments from India to Brazil.

Then, I read your link and had another WTF moment: why is a shipment from India to Brazil travelling through the Netherlands and thus subject to their customs? India->Netherlands->Brazil seems like an incredibly inefficient trade route.

<comment><USER15> Central economies gain a lot from simply being in the centre. That's why there has been an effort to promote South-South relations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's worth noting that pharmacists in The Netherlands have a doctorate and the same training requirements as MDs (the study last until 24/25 with no skip years). The requirements are considerably lower in other countries (in the UK for example they just need a BSc).

Source: my wife is a pharmacist and could have worked in the UK after only completing 1/3rd of her study.

<comment><USER18> In the US it takes:

* 4 years undergrad, of which 90 credit hours must be a specific series of courses * 4 years PharmD, doctorate program * 1800 hours of internship

At this point a student has met all requirements to sit for the two license exams (NAPLEX and MPJE[^1]):).

Many students will elect for an additional period of education due to the competitive nature of pharmacist jobs in the USA. Those two extra opportunities are:

* 2 years of residency; followed by, * 2-3 years of fellowship

Most pharmacists at a common drug store will not have the last 4 or 5 years of study. However most pharmacists in research or synthesis (including at both manufacturers and pharmacies) will have these two final steps of education due to just how competitive these jobs are.

Briefly there was also a 6 year accelerated pharmacy track (BS+) however this is no longer allowed and any practicing pharmacists with these credentials have to take a non-degree PharmD program to meet the new requirements. At this point in time I don't know if any practicing pharmacists still only hold the accelerated credentials.

[^1]: AK, CA, and VA have their own jurisprudence exams and do not accept the Multistate Pharmacy Jurisprudence Exam

<comment><USER6> 12 years of training... does that even make economic sense? Do pharmacists get paid a lot?

<comment><USER18> Yes. The ones at local pharmacies make probably low six figures, that's the 8 year track. The 12 year guys are probably making high six to low seven. I used to live in Connecticut near Pfizer and that place was densely packed with large salaries. Granted, I think they invented Viagra so lots of money there

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think it would be better to have bounties for cures rather than patents for drugs you have to take forever. Pay a fixed price that is easy for innovators to understand and maybe the energy will focus on what we really want.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is exactly the kind of excellent initiative that can save lives and benefit lots of patients, that could also, in principle, be completely obliterated by ISDS rulings.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDS)

</comment><comment><USER21> Majority of Big Pharma expanses are not R&D but sales and marketing.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's really depressing knowing that no matter what policies other countries adopt to bring drug prices down it will never happen here in the US because there's too much money to be made from bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H donations from the pharmaceutical companies.

<comment><USER18> I agree, but it should be added that most other countries can have cheaper drugs because most drug R&D costs are eaten up by US drug makers and the US and state governments. Even if we cut out all the bad eggs rebranding old drugs at huge markup and/or selling generics are ridiculous prices, the US prices will always be higher because the US market is paying for 90%+ of all drug research.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there countries where drug research and production isn't privatized? I would naively consider it ideal if research and "recipes" were made in the open, shared between countries and the production wouldn't be the job of for- profits… what am I missing?

<comment><USER24> Cuba maybe?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The killer detail (in the article) is that 1/3 of the (small) development cost of 40 million were borne by the Dutch tax payer. How did that patent end up in a big pharma portfolio?

Who funds this and what kind of shit lawyers and economists draw up the funding schemes that give away full intellectual property, only with a (historic) backstop for individual preparation?

We need risked based co-funding, co-profiting (irregardless of wether it's governments or, say, insurers investing), a backstop on prices via qualy-s, relatively short patents, no gaming of patents via arbitrarily small changes, governments creating generics, ... And now I wake up.

<comment><USER26> > How did that patent end up in a big pharma portfolio?

While it may sound strange put that way, most universities spend a lot of time thinking about how spin off profitable companies from their research. It's a huge deal and public spending on research is often motivated like this. Universities and R&D companies have a codependent relationship and this is generally regarded as a good thing.

The morally dubious outcome of this is that a lot of research ends up locked away as intellectual property of some private entity, but it's not easy to question.

<comment><USER27> > Universities and R&D companies have a codependent relationship and this is > generally regarded as a good thing.

Is it? At best, I'd say it's seen as a "necessary evil," where "evil" is much more certain than "necessary."

<comment><USER28> It stinks, I agree. What economic/social arrangement has done a better job in drug innovation?

<comment><USER29> Has there ever been made an effort with any other approach/arrangement, in modern times?

Any sources on this, anyone?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Making Games the Hacker Way - Tonc GBA - <AUTHOR> http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/toc.htm <comment><AUTHOR> I realized it's time to learn how a computer really works. I actually know how they work in theory but now I want get my hands dirty working close to hardware. And, because I love games, love making games and love the GBA, I haven't found better way to do that. =)</comment>


643 megapixel image of our galaxy. Zoom, pan, play. Wow.  - <AUTHOR> http://18.104.22.168/~axel/mwpan2/

<comment><USER2> Very nice! (Although I think the interface needs a little work.)

For those wanting some pointers: The two prominent blobs below the Milky Way in the right half of the image are the Large & Small Magellanic Clouds. Orion is near the right edge of the image, just below the Milky Way. The Big Dipper is in the upper-left portion of the image, more left than up. The Andromeda Galaxy is not too hard to find: straight below the Big Dipper, a bit below the Milky Way.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat. Kind of reminds me of Stellarium, a free open-source digital planetarium ( <http://www.stellarium.org/> ). Great way to spend a few hours zooming in and out on all of the various stars in the heavens.</comment>


Why I Left Yahoo for a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://richter.paletteswap.com/why-i-left-yahoo-for-a-startup/

<comment><USER2> Good on you for taking the plunge and getting something produced.

But is anyone else strongly opposed to automated Twittering and all other automated status updates?</comment>


Show HN: Find Profitable Keywords for Your Website - <AUTHOR> http://metrics11.com/

<comment><USER2> A bookmarklet would be cool.

Visit the page, click the bookmarklet. Most profitable terms on the page highlight in green. Darker green means more profitable.

If some keywords are net-negative, highlight them in red.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it is good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting.

Where/how are you getting your data, especially CPC estimates? I also like the report and parallel terms you make available.

I'm interested in giving this a go, but also have some specific requirements to really get moving, such as an API. Do you have plans for API access in the near future?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are getting data from many different sources, one of those sources is semrush.com, we mostly focus on competitors metrics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The text on this page is almost unreadable: [http://metrics11.com/analytics/keyword_trial/](http://metrics11.com/analytics/keyword_trial/)

<comment><USER5> Yep, the combination of 'Lato' and font-weight: 300; makes most of the text illegible for me too.

It's also not clear if the UK price is actually in dollars or is a GBP price with a dollar sign next to it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The trial limit was pretty annoying. I tried putting in several obvious and already recommended keywords and it said that they weren't found. Then I reached the trial limit. Sigh...

<comment><USER7> I agree. I think a tool like this could be useful if it allowed you to go from general area of interest like "backcountry skiing" to specific items/terms/products that are generating a lot of search traffic from shoppers at the moment "black diamond carbon megawatt ski." Such a tool could be used to suggest topics for affiliate blog posts or even items that should be stocked in online stores.

Instead I got terms like "backcountry gear".

The combination of only three test searches and a limited number of search results left me with the impression that it really just mapped general terms to related general terms which isn't particularly useful.

Perhaps focusing the ranking more on conversion would bias it more towards specific terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Moz has something similar: [https://moz.com/researchtools/keyword- difficulty](https://moz.com/researchtools/keyword-difficulty)

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks really interesting.

Anyone using this or similar tools they can vouch for?

</comment><comment><USER10> where do you get your data from?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is based on many different sources. One of those sources is semrush.com

<comment><USER11> Would it be possible to have french language?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now we do not support that, but we will soon</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using gpg-agent Effectively - <AUTHOR> https://eklitzke.org/using-gpg-agent-effectively <comment><USER2> I just started using gpg-agent recently [1] when I had to figure out how to store secrets in Ansible's Vault without entering the vault passphrase every time. Here's the guide I used:

[https://blog.erincall.com/p/using-pgp-to-encrypt-the- ansible...](https://blog.erincall.com/p/using-pgp-to-encrypt-the-ansible- vault)

It works really well! I open a terminal, use ssh-agent to get access to the master SSH key, and do my Ansible stuff, which then uses gpg-agent to access the Vault. I basically end up with a terminal session with elevated privileges.

[1] other than Emacs's built-in support for working with encrypted files, I guess

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very informative, thanks.

While I haven't investigated the additional benefits of running gpg-agent as a service as you've shown here, I did want to mention Keychain [0] which has been great for managing ssh-agent and gpg-agent for console use.

[0] [https://www.funtoo.org/Keychain](https://www.funtoo.org/Keychain)</comment>


Ask HN: Recommended external Hard Drive - <AUTHOR> I have had a couple of external dives fail on me over the years.  Before I purchase the next, I was wondering if there are any units that you would highly recommend. <comment><USER2> Generally speaking don't buy a packaged external hard drive. Getting an enclosure is your best bet. This means you'll actually be able to select the class of the hard drive, its size, and specs via consumer research. Not buying some black box.

The second thing to look into is an external power supply. While this seems bulky, extra cords, etc. It will help extend the life of your drive since you'll be less prone to rapid plug/unplug/plug cycles that are better left for USB drives, not spinning hard drivers, and keep its power up allowing for it to end writes, park heads, close file system, etc. On actual power. Not power derived from the disk slowly spinning down.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had a really great experience with the WD Elements line. It seems like WD is phasing them out in favor of the Passport slim / ultra line though. And before moving to the Elements product, I had purchased numerous of their my book line without any failures across several years and being on 24/7.

</comment><comment><USER4> are you wanting external or portable? if your looking for an external that is just going to sit on a desk. I'd just buy internal drives and a usb/sata "toaster" dock.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seagate</comment>


A Billion NYC Taxi and Uber Rides in AWS Redshift - <AUTHOR> http://tech.marksblogg.com/billion-nyc-taxi-rides-redshift.html <comment><USER2> Quite frankly, for data of this scale, PostgreSQL is more than adequate on a modern machine (although the OP's step-by-step guide is surely help for those new to Redshift)

For those interested in funny and insight analyses of the data, check out this blog: [http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc- ta...](http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-taxi-and- uber-trips-with-a-vengeance/)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I would want to try analyzing a 267 GB database on most modern machine. Redshift, on the other hand, is optimized quite well for rapidly querying flat sets like this.

On the other hand, since Redshift is PostgreSQL 8.0.2 under the hood, any code you write for analysis should be easy to move over (with the exception of having to add dist and sort keys).

<comment><USER4> > I'm not sure I would want to try analyzing a 267 GB database on most modern > machine.

Why? Modern servers come with more RAM than that. Even multi-terabyte datasets are not a problem. Today's hardware is way better than most think.

<comment><USER5> Could not agree more. Production data needs to be bigger than a petabyte or three before my default response is anything other than 'let's load it into RAM.' :-)

<comment><USER6> You mean terabyte, right?

<comment><USER5> Well shucks, this is why I try not to HN at 3am on the regular... Yes, terabyte, not petabyte. And I'm well past the edit interval at this point; how embarrassing, mea culpa :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really interesting article but I wish there was more data on the speed/performance of the Redshift queries. It seems to cover everything but the actual performance metrics!

<comment><USER3> From my experience analysing similar sized datasets, it really comes down to the structure of the query and dataset. If you nail your dist keys and your queries don't have many large joins, it's incredibly quick. If your dist keys aren't great and you have many joins, it will take a long long time.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. You have to keep in mind that other than distkeys / sortkeys, there are no indexes. So all you can do to speed things up is organize your data better.

For a ballpark figure, we work with a ~ 500million rows / 12 columns data set, and complex queries with a lot of joins typically take around 10 - 20 minutes to complete on Redshift's smallest cluster ($250/m).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been curious whether this dataset could be exploited to invade privacy, e.g. by targeting rides to/from from a sensitive address (medical-related, a strip club). Or by cross-checking it with other data, like a private detective comparing a pick-up recorded on a security camera and looking up where they went to in this database. I guess this makes it easier to find out.

<comment><USER10> Addresses are indeed anonymised somewhat, so it might be difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> really wish the AWS tutorials were this clean and a smiling photo of the author on the left menu and it gives a super human feel and it was easier to understand for me.</comment>


Babylonians developed trigonometry superior to modern version 3,700 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/babylonians-trigonometry-develop-more-advanced-modern-mathematics-3700-years-ago-ancient-a7910936.html <comment><USER2> i read the article but couldn't actually find source for the claim (I mean,a scientist says it, but it doesn't seem true). The argument seems to be that because they used a base number system that permits even division by 2, 3, and 5 (base 30 or base 60), their table doesn't contain any decimals or fractions. Not clear why that would be superior to what we have today. Anybody could produce such a table today without any additional or superior trig.

<comment><USER3> The paper isn't cited, but I was able to find it in less than 5 minutes.

Cite: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086017...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086017300691)

I think the reason they're calling it superior, is because it uses fractions/ratios instead of decimal numbers. Ours are rounded (usually to to 4-7 digits), but if they didn't have to round it and could resolve division afterward it may have been more accurate.

> Babylonian exact sexagesimal trigonometry uses exact ratios and square > ratios instead of approximation and angles.

But I'm not a mathematician and cannot verify these claims.

<comment><USER4> Mathematician here. I skimmed the article, I hope I get most of the details right.

The press article is totally overhyped. Just ignore it.

In the original tablet they (some Babylonians) cherrypick a few interesting angles (~50 values?) that are like 360°/(2^x 3^y 5^z). You can´t use 40°, you must use 40°15'. This angles have the nice property that tan^2(angle) is a nice rational number. [I'm not sure, please check the exact property.] So they have a table that uses fractions instead of decimal numbers.

So for some angles you get exact representations, but operating with a long fractions is painful. The current method of using floating points calculation is better 99% of the time. (Using fractions for the trigonometric values is nice for some theoretical results in algebra, and is a well known trick in that area.)

Unless I'm missing something, this is a nice historical result but it's not an improvement for the current calculations.

<comment><USER5> Your summary isn't quite right. There are no degrees (or angle measures) involved here. Instead, we have the lengths of the short side of various rectangles and the lengths of the corresponding diagonals, along with (what the author's claim is) the squared ratio between the diagonal and the long side of each rectangle – the squared secant – each of which happens to be a sexagesimally regular number with the rows organized in order based on this squared ratio (and which can conveniently also be interpreted as the squared ratio between the short side and the long side – the squared cotangent – by subtracting 1). The authors claim that such a table can be used (along with linear interpolation) as a very effective tool for solving trigonometry problems.

I thought the paper was quite interesting and worth studying for anyone interested in number theory, metrical geometry, high school level math education, or mathematical history.

I'll agree that the press is a bit ridiculous though. Nobody is seriously suggesting that we should give up on computers and do all of our arithmetic in base sixty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two words: Norman Wildberger.</comment>


Safe Deposit Boxes Aren't Safe - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html <comment><USER2> There's a bigger problem than stated here. In the 1930s, the feds were confiscating gold. They were forcing people to sell their gold to them at a low fixed price.

FDR put out an executive order forcing people to open their safety deposit boxes in the presence of IRS agents.

Here's the order:

By Executive Order Of The President of The United States, March 9, 1933.

By virtue of the authority vested in me by Section 5 (b) of the Act of October 6, 1917, as amended by Section 2 of the Act of March 9, 1933, in which Congress declared that a serious emergency exists, I as President, do declare that the national emergency still exists; that the continued private hoarding of gold and silver by subjects of the United States poses a grave threat to the peace, equal justice, and well-being of the United States; and that appropriate measures must be taken immediately to protect the interests of our people. Therefore, pursuant to the above authority, I hereby proclaim that such gold and silver holdings are prohibited, and that all such coin, bullion or other possessions of gold and silver be tendered within fourteen days to agents of the Government of the United States for compensation at the official price, in the legal tender of the Government. All safe deposit boxes in banks or financial institutions have been sealed, pending action in the due course of the law. All sales or purchases or movements of such gold and silver within the borders of the United States and its territories and all foreign exchange transactions or movements of such metals across the border are hereby prohibited. Your possession of these proscribed metals and/or your maintenance of a safe deposit box to store them is known by the government from bank and insurance records. Therefore, be advised that your vault box must remain sealed, and may only be opened in the presence of an agent of the Internal Revenue Service. By lawful order given this day, the President of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt – March 9, 1933

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems like they're about as secure as self-storage companies.</comment>


Boeing 787 Suffers Rare Dual Engine Failure on Landing - <AUTHOR> https://thepointsguy.com/news/boeing-787-suffers-rare-dual-engine-failure-on-landing/ <comment><USER4> I think the auto shutdown of engines in flight, in case it senses reverse thrust, is a great design.

The 787 is a replacement for my 767 (currently a pilot on the aircraft) and in 1991 a Lauda Air 767 suffered a failure in one of its thrust reverser and it became activated during cruise. The aircraft was destroyed in flight.

The thrust reversers should not activate during flight (a air/ground sensors prevents that) but as it is a catastrophic failure, having the engine shut down automatically seems like a great fail safe device.

In this case it seems that the 787 engines were reversed before the air/ground sensor had sensed ground and it is a potential problem.

<comment><USER5> I am very scared of flying (although I still do it, although it's not fun). Any advice/rationalism you can convey? I am a person that became sweaty and anxious reading your post.

<comment><USER6> My advice is to look at the statistics. Commercial flying is much, _much_ safer than any other mode of transport.

Do you get scared when you drive to work? Or take a train? Both are more risky. (Driving significantly so.)

More specifically... The pilots have extensive training, modern airliners have fail safes everywhere, and the amount of research and engineering spent on aviation safety is mind boggling.

See: [http://airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air- carrier...](http://airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/)

<comment><USER7> An accident during flight is pretty much a binary event when it comes down to whether you live or not, but with cars there is a whole slew of different types of accidents and vast majority of them don't cause instant death preceded by 45 seconds of absolute terror. Before you downvote what I said in no way discounts the statistics. It is much safer to fly of course than to drive, but when we think of accidents which is an inevitable fact of any mode of travel one mode is binary you live or die and another not. To our mammalian brains the statistics is a very hard sell.

<comment><USER8> Aircraft accidents aren't binary at all. Many crashes have few or some casualties, e.g. landing gear failure, running off the runway or hitting another aircraft on the ground. Ditto with in-flight failures that don't impact the flight (there's only one major thing that fails, picked up by the redundancies), engine failures that lead to emergency landings, extreme unexpected turbulence or ditchings etc. that might cause injuries and in some cases deaths. It's only the worst crashes (termed "air disasters" or similar) that lead to everybody on board dying. Of course, these get the most attention. I blame the news.

<comment><USER7> How can you argue against what I said, it takes profound willingness to ignore precise words to accomplish that. I did not say all accidents I said majority are. If you consider a mosquito hitting the windshield of an airplane when it's parked on the ground and no passenger in it an accident that's your problem. Of course I meant an accident that happens during flight as that's the vast majority of the time that people are in an airplane and when they're worrying about dying.

<comment><USER8> I don't think that's a super fair assessment of my comment. If we're just disagreeing on the definition of an in-flight accident, or what percentage between 30% and 90% of accidents constitute a vast majority, we should probably leave it at that, because that's not really disagreement :)

My point is, there's plenty of accidents caused by things that happened while the plane was in the air, that has many survivors or just some injuries. The news article at [0] has some examples, and it's possible to search for more. Granted, if you exclude the cases where the injuries or casualties were caused during an attempted landing or a forced landing due to malfunction, the picture would probably look much more bleak, but then you would also have ruled out a large portion of the accidents that happened.

It's thankfully _extremely_ rare that it's been impossible to make an honest attempt at a controlled landing or ditching during an accident, and in a large part of the cases where this was possible, things turned out okay for most passengers.

[0]: [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-air-accidents- sur...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/after-air-accidents-survivors- grapple-flying-again-n868086)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is really strange. Not only did they have a dual engine failure, they couldn't restart while stuck on the runway. After 40 minutes, the aircraft had to be towed in. Then maintenance couldn't find a fault.

This is an ANA aircraft, which means it's probably maintained well and flown by competent pilots. Looking forward to a good analysis on this.

Most large aircraft have a "weight on wheels" switch, activated when the aircraft is on the ground. There might be some bad interaction between the "weight on wheels" sensing and the thrust reverser protection. Pure speculation: initial touchdown, pilots deploy reversers, small bounce into the air, weight on wheels switches open, engine controller detects flight condition with thrust reversers deployed and shuts down engines.

The other side of this kind of failure is dealing with unintended thrust reverser deployment in flight. Here's an overview.[1] Historically, it wasn't a big deal at altitude, but on some newer aircraft, it is, and so stronger steps have been taken to avoid it.

[1] [https://lessonslearned.faa.gov/ll_main.cfm?TabID=3&LLID=34&L...](https://lessonslearned.faa.gov/ll_main.cfm?TabID=3&LLID=34&LLTypeID=2)

<comment><USER10> Your speculative scenario has actually happened, but on a significantly less computerized Boeing 737, in 1978.[1]

In that case, the aircraft touched down, reversers were deployed, a runway obstacle (a snowplow) appeared, and the pilots attempted to go around. They got airborne and cleared the obstacle, but as they lifted off, the "squat switches" on the main gear opened. One of the reversers was still deployed, and with the squat switches open, was no longer powered, and could not retract. The aircraft was uncontrollable, and crashed.

In that case, shutting down the reversed engine would likely have been preferable, although if we're doing counter-factuals, telling the snowplow driver about the airplane's revised arrival time is your go-to move, I think.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Western_Airlines_Fligh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Western_Airlines_Flight_314)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The Boeing 787 is now about nine years old. I wonder how much of this is operator proficiency triggering latent bugs (aka, "pilots got too good at pushing buttons quickly").

The bugs in the Therac 25 were only discovered after the machine had been in production for a while (you had to be typing "too quickly" in order to get the software to trigger the bug with the safety interlock).

<comment><USER12> It's not very typical for pilots to push buttons quickly. Especially not the thrustreversers and engine and flight controls.

But it is entirely possible that nobody pulled the reversers while still airborne in 9 years, because it's a very strange thing to do. A bit like opening your car door while still driving 60 mph... Nobody does that in normal operation.

<comment><USER13> _A bit like opening your car door while still driving 60 mph... Nobody does that in normal operation._

You don't open and shut a door when you notice it didn't fully close because you can hear the wind?

<comment><USER14> A better comparison might be putting the car in reverse at 60 MPH.

<comment><USER15> You never missed a gear, thinking you were driving a 6 speed rather than a 5 speed?

<comment><USER16> No, but for as long as I've been driving manual cars they've had gates to prevent that very action. (1995)

<comment><USER17> Not mine (Honda Jazz). But you physically can't do it, as the reverse gear has no synchro and won't mesh unless stationary.

<comment><USER18> It can be done, but it's neither easy nor a good idea: [https://youtube.com/watch?v=ARJENV0qGdY](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ARJENV0qGdY)

You'd certainly struggle to do it by accident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Boeing's answer seems to say if you accidentally pull the thrust reverser lever before the aircraft is on the ground it just force shuts down the engines.

That sounds like an odd safety override. Surely a better solution would be to just not activate reverse thrust. Unlike car engines a jet engine can't just be quickly restarted if it accidentally shuts down. It typically takes 30-60 seconds to get going.

This and earlier incidents are highlighting the dangers automation can add to mission critical systems. No pilot wants to hear notices about "hey, so in case you didn't know our programmers added some code that does this strange uncommanded thing when you push buttons a certain way"

<comment><USER20> Do you have experience with aircraft engine design, or landing protocols, or insight in to the meetings when the engines were designed?

If so, I'll take back my words but considering the manufacturer doesn't know exactly why this happened, and the engineers on the ground said it seems like a "software bug", it seems a bit presumptuous and frankly a bit comical to start saying things like:

"Surely a better solution would be to just"...

Ah well, glad a 5 sentence comment on the internet can resolve an issue in a hardware, software, and social engineering challenge decades in the making.

<comment><USER21> I always love it when you have worked on something for months and someone new comes by and says "Why don't you just X?".

<comment><USER22> It's worse when they are right though. I wish I could say that had not happened to me.

<comment><USER23> Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, or random people online?

What I find is you start with several viable approaches, pick one and go down the path enough to figure out the downsides. At which point you need to decide to backtrack or keep going. That's the hard part not simply coming up with a seemingly simple solution.

<comment><USER24> > Is that from other experts with a very close understanding of the specifics, > or random people online?

These groups are not mutually exclusive, membership can only be assigned by a domain expert and is finally irrelevant if the other is right.

<comment><USER23> Constraints define good decisions. A new team member making a viable suggestion is very different from a random person tossing out a wild ass guess that happens to be right. The difference is the random commentator has no real way to judge how viable something is, and thus is simply tossing out ideas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Professional Pilots Rumor Network (PPRUNE) is a pretty awesome forum full of aviation professionals discussing aviation at a high level, I always go there for aviation news commentary. The thread on this isn't very extensive yet, but has some interesting commentary [https://www.pprune.org/rumours- news/617426-ana-787-engines-s...](https://www.pprune.org/rumours- news/617426-ana-787-engines-shutdown-during-landing.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> "Boeing said that selecting full reverse too quickly upon landing before the aircraft has fully transitioned to ground mode could cause the system to activate."

That sounds like apple's "you are holding it wrong" when "antenagate" happened. Not something I want to hear from an aircraft company where people's lives depend on it working.

<comment><USER27> Reading between the lines, and having read other comments here, I can interpret Boeing's remark as _"if the pilots or the on-board software try to reverse engines when it still is really, really dangerous, the Thrust Control Malfunction Accommodation system (TCMA) will try to make matters less bad, in some cases by shutting down the engines instead"_.

They may have to fine-tune that system, but from a safety perspective, this event had a good ending, and making its decision system more complex also carries risks, so, maybe, nothing has to change.

<comment><USER28> > when it still is really, really dangerous

More apt would be "when the computer is not sure that isn't really, really dangerous".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sort of off topic, but reverse thrust sort of boggles my mind. If you're sucking air in from the front of the aircraft and ejecting it out the front, don't those forces counterbalance each other?

<comment><USER30> Reverse thrust doesn't come directly out the front of the engine - it's vented out the side (or, in very old engines, redirected from the back exhaust):

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/F-GTAR_A...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/F-GTAR_Air_France_%283698209485%29.jpg)

<comment><USER31> That makes it even more surprisingly counterintuitive.

I think the important thing to consider is the relative velocities of the intake and exhaust air (the latter being much larger).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Oh Dreamliner, still[0] making me look bad 12 years later.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9477941)

<comment><USER33> I have never ever thought avionics software development would be in such a condition that you described in the link.

I am surprised to say the least.

I have always imagined avionics developers in a different way. Like having a thick rulebook to go through to add a new line to codebase etc.

<comment><USER32> Keep in mind my experience was almost exclusively with communications systems, which are important but nowhere near as vital as things like autopilot. Things could very likely be better there, or at a different company. And even many of the things I worked on were like you describe. There is a lot of red tape and testing to make certain changes, and the industry documents are often strict. But it wasn't always clear how much of that actually made things better/safer and how much was just fluff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How many easter eggs will emerge from Boeing. In last 2 months, we had similar incidents from Boeing where an undocumented software safety kicked in and causing trouble for everyone

<comment><USER35> _and causing trouble for everyone_

You mean killed 189 people, right? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610)

<comment><USER36> That aircraft was being knowingly flown with [edit: a broken sensor]. It was unsafe on takeoff.

The final problem that brought the aircraft down - the trim run-away - <USER2> _all the time_ in airliners you've flown in. When the run-away starts, the pilot is supposed to flip two switches to disable the trim system motors. In the Lion Air crash, it is indeed believed that a software bug from the misbehaving sensors started the run-away, but again, handling trim run-aways are something that pilots are supposed to train for and deal with.

737's are even safer here than many airliners, because after you disable the electric trim motors, you have manual wheels in the cockpit that you can rotate to set the trim back to what it should be. Some other airliners in common use don't have these manual trim controls - you have to disable a trim run-away in time, or it's game over.

<comment><USER37> > That aircraft was knowingly flown with multiple broken sensors. It was > unsafe on takeoff.

You'll need to cite that, since it contrary to any information I can find on the Lion Air accident e.g.:

> The chief executive officer of Lion Air, Edward Sirait, said the aircraft > had a "technical issue" on Sunday night, but this had been addressed in > accordance with maintenance manuals issued by the manufacturer. Engineers > had declared that the aircraft was ready for takeoff on the morning of the > accident

Your claim that it was "unsafe to takeoff" and had "multiple broken sensors" is pretty remarkable. So I'll definitely need to see a source backing up such remarkable claims.

<comment><USER38> From the same Wikipedia article that was just linked:

> "The aircraft suffered an airspeed indicator problem for its last four > flights, including the flight to Denpasar. Thinking that it would fix the > problem, the engineers in Bali then replaced one of the aircraft's AoA > sensors, but the problem persisted on the penultimate flight [...] [the > crew] recorded a twenty-degree difference between the readings of the left > AoA sensor and the right sensor."

> "On 28 November, Indonesia investigators said the Lion Air jet was not > airworthy on flight before crash."

<comment><USER37> Those are prior flights. The aircraft was fully repaired:

> The chief executive officer of Lion Air, Edward Sirait, said the aircraft > had a "technical issue" on Sunday night, but this had been addressed in > accordance with maintenance manuals issued by the manufacturer. Engineers > had declared that the aircraft was ready for takeoff on the morning of the > accident

So you still haven't supported your extraordinary claim that the aircraft was:

> unsafe on takeoff.

In fact we know it was safe on takeoff.

<comment><USER39> Quoting from the same comment you just replied to:

> "On 28 November, Indonesia investigators said the Lion Air jet was _not > airworthy_ on flight before crash."

"not airworthy" means that it was unsafe.

<comment><USER40> _on flight before the crash_. After which it was repaired, and sent on the fatal flight.

<comment><USER41> It was also repaired before the previous flight.

It goes like this:

several flights report problem

maintenance "fixes" the problem

next flight reports that another, worse problem has appeared - bad enough that regulators have now said that the plane was "not airworthy" during this flight

maintenance "fixes" the problem

final flight impacts ocean at high speed

Your assertion is that since maintenance cleared the plane after the second fix, the plane must have been fine. To that, I point to the previous time maintenance cleared the plane, when it was demonstrably not fine.

<comment><USER40> No, my claim merely was that the quote does not make the claim about the specific flight (although I didn't word it quite clearly). The findings about bad maintenance culture certainly suggest that the plane wasn't fixed properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The second high-profile potentially deadly software caused failure related to automated safety features in as many years (if that ends up being the cause, of course).

Very glad the touchdown went nominally. Had they pushed the point of touchdown just a bit further down the tarmac, they'd have skittered right off the pavement.

<comment><USER43> Skittered right into the arrestor bed:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineered_materials_arrestor_system)

<comment><USER42> If that particular tarmac is equipped with such a countermeasure, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Aviation professionals discussed this incident on the Aviation Herald website. [http://avherald.com/h?article=4c2fe53a](http://avherald.com/h?article=4c2fe53a)

</comment><comment><USER45> This is straight out of chapter 1 of Alan Cooper's "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum" (2004). What do you get when you cross a computer and an airplane? A computer!

</comment><comment><USER46> Seems like reasonable choice on the Boeing's part, the objective of the reverse thrust is to provide additional braking to the aircraft, if shutting down the engine has similar effect (albeit to a lesser extent), why not? Better than getting stuck in a dangerous situation if the reverse thrust was deployed prematurely.

<comment><USER47> You're joking right? The engine is required for nearly everything else including but not limited to applying thrust to abort the landing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> > Engineers inspected the engines and could find no reason for the dual > failure. With the post-inspection finding nothing to cause the engines to > fail, engineers are saying the likely cause for the shutdown is a software > issue onboard the aircraft.

Very interesting that

a) one of the first checks by engineers is not an evaluation of the software "log" or similar. either they have a specific checklist they MUST go by and that checklist doesn't include software log, and/or such log is simply not available to them.

b)"likely cause"? again, why don't engineers have easy access to a software event log?

I can very well imagine such instrumentation of software caused events not even existing for the shit apps we build, but for safety critical systems in an airplane? The log MUST exist. Why don't engineers on the ground have easy access to it. The software is integral these days.

<comment><USER49> And where would you store these logs ? I'm sure the engine stores its faults somewhere, but i'm not expecting more.

You have to realise that you can run safety critical software on certified microcontrollers, which have usually like 10 mb of flash. Moreover it is an aicraft, and worse it is an engine, so I guess that the mechanical requirements are insane (able to withstand a lot of vibrations, operate in -60 to 160 deg celsius, withstand cosmic rays). A samsung ssd does not fit the bill.

It's probable however that the aircraft communications lines are recorded in a black box, but you can only see the data exchanged by the ECUs, not the relevant internal variables telling you about the bug.

Mind you i'm not working in the aicraft industry, my assumptions may be false, but my guess is that the engine controller is on the engine itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> I wonder if it could be ice in the fuel line.

Ice doesn't leave trace by the time it melts. This has happened in the past on a different type of plane (Boeing 777).

[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1950444/Heathrow- cra...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1950444/Heathrow-crash- landing-caused-by-fuel-freeze.html)

</comment><comment><USER51> Does nobody remember the Lockheed aircraft that ran off the end of the runway because both the brakes and lift spoilers refused to deploy?

It was another case of misguided safety interlock. IIRC, they landed 20 knots fast because of storm conditions; the brakes wouldn't go with too little weight sensed, and the lift spoilers wouldn't go above a certain speed. Catch-22!

</comment><comment><USER52> I had expected this story was about a Rolls-Royce problem; their Trent 1000 engines are giving the 787 a bad name. But it looks like it was just a normal software interlock that would never cause a problem during flight.

</comment><comment><USER53> Well, Rolls Royce monitors those engines remotely and have access to their logs afaik. So, it should be clear by now whether it has been called from software or not.

<comment><USER54> That's not true. A full investigation will be required to reconstruct events from all data stored by the various Aircraft systems, including the engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> why a shutdown and not a denial of going to reverse thrust in the first place?

or does it shut down when you open throttle in reverse thrust and allow you to switch the engine configuration beforehand?

</comment><comment><USER56> Did anyone else find it odd that it took 40 minutes to get the plane towed back to the terminal?

<comment><USER57> The article is a bit ambiguous to me about whether it was 40 minutes after landing or 40 minutes after they failed to restart the engines. The former is sensible to me since it'd take time for them to try to restart the engines and make sure the plane is otherwise safe (probably some kind of checklist to do as well). Some other articles on this explicitly say it was 40 minutes after landing.

<comment><USER56> I wouldn't call it ambiguous:

> The pilots followed their checklists and worked with maintenance personnel > via phone to troubleshoot, but were unable to get the engines to relight. > This left the aircraft stranded and led to the closure of the runway. A tow > truck arrived some 40 minutes later to tow the aircraft off the runway.

<comment><USER57> It's ambiguous to me because the runway would presumably be closed as soon as the plane got stuck and not after waiting for the engines to restart. So the obvious reading of the sentence doesn't make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Wait, what - Rolls Royce?! The same company that makes the some of the most expensive and unreliable cars on the market? Boeing, Boeing, what were you thinking?

</comment><comment><USER59> How do you restart the Boeing 787 in mid-air? With the lack of an APU (they use li-on batteries, I think?), what's the mid-air engine restart procedure?

<comment><USER60> The 787 does have an APU and a ram air turbine (RAT) as well as the batteries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> It's likely software as they suspect.

Another possibility is that there was something wrong with the fuel.

<comment><USER62> The young 777 had a vaguely similar situation that was caused by a fuel filter freezing up

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_38](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_38)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> One engine should be iOS and the other Android to prevent simultaneous bugs in the future.

</comment><comment><USER64> I hope people are beginning to understand that the presence of software in any system is a liability.

<comment><USER65> I think software has existed in computer systems for 7 or 8 decades now - <USER3> the pitfalls are well understood.

I think the problem is one of simplicity vs complexity. New systems today rely on dozens - hundreds even - of packages and libraries - many of which are not written by the implementer. How can you ensure reliability in all these components?

This is why engineering from first principles - even in today's software development environment - is important. Unfortunately, the trends are in the other direction.

<comment><USER66> you would be wrong.

<comment><USER67> That's not a very useful reply. Can you explain _where_ anonu is wrong? Can you explain _why_? Can you give some _evidence_? A bare dismissal is like five-year-olds arguing: "Did too!" "Did not!" It's not useful to advance the conversation, and it's not effective at persuading people.

<comment><USER68> It's quite possible that software creates new failure modes (as programmers I'm sure we all feel that to be true some days) while at the same time preventing more.

When the software fails (if it did) we assume the software makes it more dangerous because we have a concrete example of what happened but not what could have happened in it's absence.

This is what may eventually stall self driving cars for many years, the first time one does the PR equivalent of smashing through the local orphanage.

We as a society are notoriously poor at assessing systemic risks.

Now to address your point about evidence, I'm curious how you could control for other confounding factors.

Airliners are safer today than ever before (based on passenger miles) but how do you control for better engines, material science, procedures if you compare say 1979 to 2019.

<comment><USER67> Statistically? I don't know.

But I have a friend who's an airline pilot. He was telling me about hitting windshear while coming in for a landing. The plane has software that not only tells him that he hit windshear, but also tells him what angle to put the nose at for best results. (The problem is airspeed. So you go to full power, but pitching the nose _down_ also helps you gain airspeed. But the ground is down there, because you're coming in for landing. What angle is the best? The computer can figure it out and tell the pilot what to do.)

<comment><USER68> Aye, Things like that the G3000 (Garmin avionics suite for light aircraft) that now do real time 3D terrain generation so that less experienced pilots can avoid controlled flight into terrain (literally the way they describe when a pilot in control smashes into a mountain).

My suspicion is that modern computerised avionics are on balance a life saver but I'd love to know by how much.

I ended up watching videos of modern avionics in light aircraft on youtube a while back (as you do) and I find that kind of programming fascinating, couldn't find much out about the actual hardware/software side of things though I did gather it runs a custom OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Is there something special about the software in new Boeings? Dual engine failure is nothing to sneeze at, and should never happen. Airbus also had its fair share of software errors in history, but if we count the recent Lion air crash as software related, Boeing has had 2 serious software related incidents in a year and I haven't heard anything serious from airbus.

Is it because Airbus started its fly-by-wire development earlier?

<comment><USER70> The first Airbus FBW airliner was the A320, introduced in 1988 (31 years ago), while on Boeing side it was the 777, introduced in 1995 (24 years ago). By now I don't think it would make much of a difference, if any at all.

If anything quarterly reports to shareholders who only care about the very short-term would be the culprit (or management teams whose bonuses only depend on the next quarter revenues). But numbers are stubborn and don't tell that story: the more recent the plane the safer it is. As such 787 and A350 are probably the safest airliners currently flying, followed by 777 and A380.

<comment><USER71> > the more recent the plane the safer it is. As such 787 and A350 are probably > the safest airliners currently flying, followed by 777 and A380.

I'd argue that a new model of an old plane like the 737MAX would be safer, Lion Air incident notwithstanding.

<comment><USER72> Many actual pilots would likely disagree. Shoehorning vastly different planes into the same type certificate can be dangerous. Convenient for pilots due to certification and recurrency issues, but not necessarily a good idea.

Do you really want a pilot to jump into a 737MAX who only ever flew the -100? I bet the memory items are very different if not also all the speeds and weights.

(NB: jet pilot, not Boeing airliner pilot though)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I'm not sure this is a bug. It sounds like pilot-error to me (I am not a pilot):

"In the bulletin, Boeing said that selecting full reverse too quickly upon landing before the aircraft has fully transitioned to ground mode could cause the system to activate."

<comment><USER74> There should be manual override. What if this happened in-AIR?

<comment><USER75> You really, really do not want the reverse thrust to turn on in-AIR. That would be way worse then then engine shutting down.

<comment><USER74> I don't mean specifically reverse thrust. I am saying features such as this. The Pilot expects something and computer does something else.

<comment><USER76> There are usually failsafe modes that disable most of the additional software features. It is pretty rare though for pilots to switch into those modes though since those features are what fly the plan a majority of the time.

It is like the issue that are running into with self driving cars, there is a point where the flight controls become so good that pilots are less likely to intervene when something is going wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Security and Privacy in Google Allo - <AUTHOR> https://vnhacker.blogspot.com/2016/05/security-and-privacy-in-google-allo.html <comment><USER2> _> Basically with one touch you can tell Allo that you want to "Always chat in incognito mode going forward," and from that moment on all your messages will be end-to-end encrypted and auto-deleted. You can still interact with the AI, but only if you explicitly invoke it_

YES! That's the _minimum_ privacy level that all messengers should have. From my point of view, the "best of both worlds" would be with the Cloud AI _disabled by default_ , maybe with a one-tap enabling inside the chat window and a notification to the other people in the conversations.

But if for whatever reasons companies don't want to make that compromise, then we should _at least_ get an option so that each individual _could_ make end- to-end encryption the _default_ if they _want to_.

Again, this should be the _minimum_ , and not the fact that the messenger simply offers end-to-end encryption somewhere burried in the settings and only works when you explicitly enable it everytime you want to use it. That's not acceptable for an app that cares about privacy from my point of view because it's too _inconvenient_ even for those that actually care about their message privacy.

As for the future, homomorphic encryption could be one option (although who knows how long it will take to get here), but if you just want to offer your users "AI enhancements" and you don't just offer that as an excuse to _collect their data_ , then companies could also enable _client-side AI_ in the future. I think this could be a lot closer than many think. If the demand is there we could start seeing AI-accelerators as co-processor in our smartphone SoCs within the next 5 years, especially as Moore's Law slows down to a crawl and we start getting diminishing returns from the "faster 8-core CPUs" in our smartphones.

Such chips are already starting to pop-up, but because there's no current demand for them to be in smartphones yet, they are relegated to other more niche markets. In the next 5 years they could become a lot faster, too, especially that now Google is showing the way with ASICs as well.

[http://www.movidius.com/solutions/machine-vision- algorithms/...](http://www.movidius.com/solutions/machine-vision- algorithms/machine-learning)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, they say: "That's fine. We understand your concerns. Everybody including me has something to hide."

It is not an issue of having something to hide. It is an issue of knowing that your conversation is really just between you and your companion.</comment>


What systemd actually brings to the table: Interfaces - <AUTHOR> https://evaryont.me/blog/2015/02/what-systemd-actually-brings-to-the-table-interfaces.html <comment><USER2> Stuff like this really brings home the feel that systemd is by programmers, for programmers, and very little else.</comment>