Roche releases Covid-19 test recipe, after EC considers intervention - <AUTHOR> https://www.ftm.nl/artikelen/roche-releases-recipe-after-public-pressure-while-european-commission-considers-intervention-due-to-coronavirus-test <comment><USER2> Roche have a legal problem. Their lysis buffer is completely unpatentable, it's a standard reagent whose composition has been published many times over and is obvious to any biochemist. And once you disclose the makeup you can't claim trade secret either.

The sanest way for Roche would be to price accordingly, buying your own kit saves technician labour, but we can't have than, can we?

<comment><USER3> Seems the key issue is that they can't supply enough which creates a shortage for the Netherlands as the machines (?) rely on this specific product. It's called lock-in and is every company's dream. But the situation is severe enough that a strong government like NL and the EU won't let them get away with it. If you're a big company one the things you really want to avoid is the European Commission coming after you for antitrust rules, that's where for once legislation has teeth and the price tag for abuse can be steep.

<comment> the-dude Your parent claims it is a generic solution.

I am confused what the problem actually is.

<comment><USER4> Even though it is a generic solution, they apparently use a slight modification in the recipe (not which components, but the amounts) on which the machines are calibrated. You could reproduce this, but it costs time and you need specialized equipment that only a few labs have. With this disclosure, labs can produce their own without that research.

<comment> the-dude Thanks so much for the clarification.

Couldn't you just put the solution through a gas chromatography machine?

<comment><USER2> There is an epidemic going on, and personnel have better things to do than optimizing a buffer to play nice with your thermocycler.

Any time there is a monopoly, prices have nothing to do with the cost of production and everything with what the market is going to bear, and no one but the monopolist benefits. And then the monopolist comes and wants to suborn the power monopoly of the government to sustain its profits. Come again, why should the European Union put the financial wellbeing of Roche above the health of Dutch citizens? We used to have antitrust, but nowadays even right- to-repair is controversial.

<comment> the-dude I wasn't saying that at all. I was just wondering about 'how hard can it be?'.

It just needs to be analysed once. And there is a ton of researchers available who are not medical personnel.

But if you want to argue : this whole Roche saga conveniently diverts the attention away from the lack of action of our government.

<comment><USER5> If I am not mistaken, gas chromatography gives you composition, not proportions. That's not a minor hurdle in this discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> " Pharmaceutical company Roche announced Friday afternoon that it will release the recipe for its lysis buffer if Dutch laboratories ask for it. "

Is what the article says. What it doesn't say is whether Roche will actually do so, or use stalling tactics. One shouldn't count their chickens before they hatch.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's great that finally EU is doing something. It's better late then never.

Companies are doing their best to be profitable, but it can mean trillions of dollars of damage to economies, and many people dying. Governments are meant to step up in these situations.

<comment><USER7> No opinion on this exact story, but in general there's a bit of a balance to be struck here.

Early on in this thing, there were lots of stories about companies reluctant to fully commit (e.g. to manufacturing masks, or to dropping everything else to work on a vaccine) because they did that for SARS, and then when it fizzled out felt they weren't sufficiently compensated. Had they worked on their usual business, they would have had their usual profits instead. But this year... it would have been nice if they had worked hard in February!

<comment><USER8> Why "early on"? Just yesterday GM tried to price-gouge the US federal government, and restrict the number of ventilators they will produce, prompting Trump to actually use the DPA for the first time in this ordeal, something he's very reluctant to do other than as leverage in negotiations.

<comment><USER9> But I thought Trump said there wasn't a ventilator shortage, or something along those lines. Didn't he accuse New York of asking for more than they needed?

Now, all of a sudden, ventilators are very important to Trump. Odd.

<comment><USER6> He doesn't understand exponential function, neither most of the people in the world. It's counterintuitive, as the brain is heavily biased to linear thinking. Also in western world generally math is not cool, people have a strong bias against it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health;

In Paragraphs 4 to 6 of the Doha Declaration, governments agreed that:

"4\. The TRIPS Agreement does not and should not prevent Members from taking measures to protect public health. Accordingly, while reiterating our commitment to the TRIPS Agreement, we affirm that the Agreement can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO Members' right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all. In this connection, we reaffirm the right of WTO Members to use, to the full, the provisions in the TRIPS Agreement, which provide flexibility for this purpose.

5\. Accordingly and in the light of paragraph 4 above, while maintaining our commitments in the TRIPS Agreement, we recognize that these flexibilities include:

(a) In applying the customary rules of interpretation of public international law, each provision of the TRIPS Agreement shall be read in the light of the object and purpose of the Agreement as expressed, in particular, in its objectives and principles.

(b) Each Member has the right to grant compulsory licenses and the freedom to determine the grounds upon which such licenses are granted.

(c) Each Member has the right to determine what constitutes a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency, it being understood that public health crises, including those relating to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and other epidemics, can represent a national emergency or other circumstances of extreme urgency. (d) The effect of the provisions in the TRIPS Agreement that are relevant to the exhaustion of intellectual property rights is to leave each Member free to establish its own regime for such exhaustion without challenge, subject to the MFN and national treatment provisions of Articles 3 and 4\. 6\. We recognize that WTO Members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector could face difficulties in making effective use of compulsory licensing under the TRIPS Agreement. We instruct the Council for TRIPS to find an expeditious solution to this problem and to report to the General Council before the end of 2002." These provisions in the Declaration ensure that governments may issue compulsory licenses on patents for medicines, or take other steps to protect public health.

/!\ All countries of weight signed this already, but not enough countries for the treaty to be in effect and the deadline is in sight. /!\

Pressure this information & save lifes.

<comment><USER11> Sure, but there is a cost one way or the other.

TANSTAAFL (there ain't no such thing as a free lunch)

If its really important, then working out a deal that protects all parties is far better than threatening to give the business to someone else by fiat.

Roche has invested a lot into these machines and processes. Ensuring that they are adequately compensated and adequately protected from their competitors is important. Not just for fairness, but for also ensuring that companies don't decide in the future that the risks outweigh the rewards.

What will happen, for example, if some local lab starts putting together tests for these machines and ends up putting the machines out of commission? Who's doing the QA to make sure this is not a problem? Will Roche be on the hook for this? And how will the people who are depending on this machine benefit if it taken off line?

These are very complicated machines, and a lot can go wrong.

<comment><USER12> Saving the economy which will then be able to afford multiple Roche products is a pretty good payment, methinks.

<comment><USER13> That logic makes no sense. It's like the government taking your home from you to build a new stadium saying "well, I think the ability to enjoy the new stadium is payment enough!".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I might be misunderstanding the situation, but it feels like Roche has been acting like a printer manufacturer: capture the market with underpriced devices, but having those devices only work with a specific variation of an otherwise not that special input material that only they can produce, and then charging a premium for that.

</comment><comment><USER15> Swedish healthcare workers have discovered that chlamydia tests they have in stock are also effective at detecting corona. News (in Swedish) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706874](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706874)

<comment><USER16> A commenter in that thread indicates it's just the swabs being used, which makes much more sense to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't the reagents for similar commercial lab rtPCR tests typically have to be kept hard frozen too?

CMIIAW: this doesn't seem like a readily DIY biohacking-possible project without some significant infrastructure, procedural knowledge, and expenses.

Also is there a low-volume, open source rtPCR procedure with cheaper equipment and consumables?

<comment><USER18> [https://forum.openhardware.science/t/pocketpcr-low-cost- usb-...](https://forum.openhardware.science/t/pocketpcr-low-cost-usb-powered- open-source-pcr/2187)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Also this news that reagent is no longer required:

[https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/03-ssi-loeser- stort-...](https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/03-ssi-loeser-stort- mangelproblem-ved-test-for-covid19-27032020)

</comment><comment><USER20> This is reminiscent of what happened in 2008, when Roche was the only manufacturer of Tamiflu (Oseltamivir)[1] and the Indian drug company Cipla managed to get legal approval to release a generic clone of it called Antiflu in India. And the rest of the world followed soon enough.

Governments can and do lift up patent protections in times of emergencies.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseltamivir](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oseltamivir)</comment>


Ask HN: How to estimate financial health of new company before joining? - <AUTHOR> My first job was at a startup 15 years ago (<30 people). I was employee number #1 and knew the co-founders pretty well. Because of that, I either had access to financial information other employees didn't have or I could tell if something was going wrong.
Since then I have been working for larger companies and never had to worry if they were going bankrupt. I survived layoffs and other cost cutting measures without much stress.
Fast forward to today, I'm thinking about getting a job at a startup again. It seems "startups" now can have 200-300 employees and be only 1-2 years old. I get a bit scared because they could be burning money fast and I'd be out of a job.
What signs would you look for to determine the startup you're considering joining isn't in financial trouble? <comment><USER2> Ask them the following in their interview:

\- how much runway they have? \- how much have they raised so far? \- what is the attrition rate?

That should give you a decent picture of the health of the company.</comment>


Ask HN: What have you learned recently? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Software dev environment management and the art of reading documentation.

The first had me go through a near complete understanding of git, followed by vagrant and then docker. What would previously take me a full day to do (that too with possible mistakes) now takes me just an hour (depending on download speeds) on a fresh wibdows machine. I carry everything I need in a folder on my pen drive. This includes installations for virtual box, vim, cygwin (and its packages), and the config files: vimrc, minttyrc, vagrantfile, and dockerfile. The best part, I know it will work.

As for documentation, the art of it is simple. Read Every Word, Follow Every Example. Simple but difficult to practice. Doing this means disciplining yourself to switch off distractions, being patient to read through the mundane examples because the mundane can hold the most important details sometimes like why a flag works the way it does. Reading documentation is something that takes practice and I've now come to a point where if I have two libraries that serve the same purpose, I pick the better tested and better documented one (tests are a great starting point for source code readings).

</comment><comment><USER3> Good refresh on inner-self development and mental toughness, the Mind Gym concept by Mark Divine very solid. Here's a podcast interview> [http://life- longlearner.com/mark-divine-interview/](http://life-longlearner.com/mark- divine-interview/)

</comment><comment><USER4> We respond to ads (of brands primarily) not because it strikes an emotion inside us, but because we want to conform to the image presented by that ad.</comment>


VoiceBunny: Fast and professional voiceovers (with an API). - <AUTHOR> http://voicebunny.com/

<comment><USER2> I've been using Voice123 for professional voiceovers for a few years now (podcast intros, bumpers, IDs, etc). The talent on there is top-notch, and I always get a large number of responses very quickly.

As much as I like the design of VoiceBunny, I feel compelled by a sense of loyalty to the hard workers who created Voice123 to point out what an outstanding company they've been for a very long time.

<http://voice123.com/>

<comment><USER3> Thank you Jayson! You made my day (and the day of our team!) I'm one of the co-founders of Voice123 (and now also co-founder of VoiceBunny). Some of the great talent you can find in Voice123 is also available in VoiceBunny. While Voice123 continues to focus on its online casting service (we're rewriting the Voice123 codebase from scratch!), VoiceBunny is meant to allow you to automate the process of getting voices via its API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could see implementing this for Appointment Reminder just to avoid all the overhead that goes into organizing some Fiverr voice actress (who, contrary to what you would expect from the price, typically deliver work perfectly adequate for a telephone call) and getting their .mp3s into the system for a new client. Otherwise I was literally going to have to hire a VA just to push buttons to make that happen.

<comment><USER5> I use Fiverr for all of our phone message / voiceover work and it really did impress - to think that these guys can make money doing 100 words for $4 (after fiverr's cut) is pretty crazy.

The only thing that could be more desired is a faster turn around time, although I'm not willing to pay 10 times the amount that this is estimating.

<comment><USER3> Hello Mat. VoiceBunny co-founder her. We tried to identify good talent at Fiverr to invite them over to VoiceBunny, but we found only a handful of good voices out of over 300 people that were offering their voiceover services there. How did you find good voices there? We would like to invite them to VoiceBunny so that you get the same low Fiverr prices with the added benefits of the API and VoiceBunny's 100% money-back guarantee.

<comment><USER6> Dude, not cool at all.

There's a massive difference between highlighting your USP and insulting your competitors.

<comment><USER7> I don´t see how he insulted, he´s just pointing a fact. Voiceover quality is not exceptional.

Fiverr is not a direct competitor either, you can get all sorts of things there apart from voiceovers, for example you can get book covers, video recordings of people writing whatever you want on their body, pictures of your logo in front of the taj mahal... its quite cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> For those of you interested this is an API that interacts with a VoiceOver crowd. You send the text and, for a fee, it gets turned into a professional voiceover in a matter of minutes.

What you can do with it is things like this --> <http://avc.fm> , turn Fred Wilson´s blog into a podcast almost in real time.

<comment><USER8> Submitting that first post (The Engineer's Brain), the 459 words are quoted as $61.2 (+20% service fee) = $73.44

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Talents need a Facebook account to identify on VoiceBunny -- and there are no other options.

How many blog posts explaining why this is wrong do we need before this crazyness stops?

<comment><USER10> All those posts have been wrong though. Just because it rockets on HN doesn't mean it's true.

<comment><USER11> Yeah. It seems if people are forced into doing something to be able to earn money that's enough incentive. It's a little silly, but maybe it allows them to better curate people / review applications?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if an economically sound business could be made in taking top web content and "converting" it into podcasts.

My thoughts on the subject (from March 2011): [http://www.yarone.com/2011/03/recording-top-web-content- plai...](http://www.yarone.com/2011/03/recording-top-web-content-plain- text.html)

<comment><USER13> There was a site called hearablog.com (<https://twitter.com/#!/hearablog>) which narrated some of the more famous tech blogs. Jason discussed it on This Week in Startups: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTn5qNeHny4>

I personally think that this is a neat idea but VoiceBunny isn't the ideal tool. You pay about $70 for 400 words which is about the length of a short-mid sized blog post. If you just cover 5 posts per day, you will need to invest about $10k per month in VoiceBunny. At this point, looking for your own voice actors is probably cheaper.

<comment><USER3> Hi! VoiceBunny co-founder here. Our marketplace is new and the median prices are coming down on a weekly basis as more talents compete for work. Also, you are free to set the prices you want to pay. For ideas like hearablog.com, we are also implementing a royalty-based system, where talents get paid as the recording makes money for our client.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> On Fiverr you can find many gigs by people who can give Professional Voice overs for just 5$

<comment><USER2> Professional voiceovers should cost more than five dollars.

I wouldn't expect quality from anyone that would do a $5 voiceover, and I'd be insulting a professional to ask them to work for that price.

<comment><USER15> That's free market economics for you. You also get what you pay for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At Typecaster, we're working on a similar service: providing blogs, newspapers, and other websites with professional audio recordings of their content.

If you're interested, visit <http://www.typecaster.net> or email email@example.com and we'll be in touch.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow this is expensive. Over a dollar a word. "what time is it" costs 6$.

I actually looked into their other company, voice123 to do some audio corpus building for a speech recognition project but it was way cheaper(though painful) to just use amazon turk.

<comment><USER18> Smaller jobs imply larger overhead; you're testing an edge case.

Estimating "quick recordings" of some random strings in their calculator I see roughly: 5 words for $8, 100 words for $35, 200 words for $45, 800 words for $70, 3200 words for $160 (~$0.05/word).

<comment><USER11> Sexy. Thanks - I was wondering this. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I like the competition idea. For those who can cover the price, being able to choose from a few options presented to you might feel like a better option. And, unlike 99designs it seems, the talent is rewarded whether they're selected or not.

</comment><comment><USER20> You can only register / "verify your identity" by logging on by Facebook from what I can tell (for talents). A Facebook profile can easily be faked just like any other.

<comment><USER21> Yeah. I run a home recording studio and everything, and I got to the facebook login page and went... pffftttt. CLOSE. Why not just have user accounts?

<comment><USER3> Hello! VoiceBunny co-founder here. We're trying to figure out a way to avoid some talents from abusing the system by having multiple accounts. Forcing them to login with Facebook helped us reduce the abuse. We'll remove the Facebook requirement soon as we come up with new solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Very interesting idea. We have a real estate photography platform and people ask us about voice all the time. Interestingly, almost no one does it due to the expense and the PITA factor.

The idea of an API to attempt to automate that is interesting. Will have to check it out!

[Edit] Question: if I have a single "tour" but want it in 10-20 chunks by the same talent is that possible? We would tie each chunk to a single picture.

<comment><USER3> Hello! We would love to tweak our API for this kind of project. When you post a project, we could allow you to submit an array of scripts, thus allowing you to get an individual MP3 file for each entry. Email us at firstname.lastname@example.com when you have a chance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> On the issue of 'contest' based content; It's am incredible waste of good quality work. I hope everybody who submits good work is compensated in some manner.

<comment><USER24> It looks like they do since the cost of the project goes up considerably when it's a contest.*

* Source: <http://voicebunny.com/projects/pricing>

[edit: added source page]

<comment><USER25> Actually, it's a bit more expensive than buying N single recordings of the same text. Strange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Okay, I'm loving the idea. I can see this being great for indi stuff. Probably less hassle than hiring VO talent and a studio.

</comment><comment><USER27> How do you pay the voiceover providers? I mean, how does it work legal-wise? Are they considered sole proprietors? Employees? Something completely different?

<comment><USER7> sole proprietors, they are a crowd of freelancers

<comment><USER27> I don't know how that works in the US, but here in the Sweden becoming a sole proprietor can be somewhat of a hassle. You have to sign forms, talk to the "IRS", pay a certain amount of preliminary taxes each month, do book-keeping, keep track of inbound/outbound VAT on invoices, etc. It doesn't deter someone who really wants to be an entrepreneur, but it does stop people who would just like to do some casual work on the side for a few bucks here and there.

I have quite a few business ideas involving paying the crowd to do stuff, but the legal issue is a barrier.

<comment><USER28> It's MUCH easier in the US.

<comment><USER27> What's a good solution for me then? Incorporate in the US?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is anyone else reminded of The Diamond Age?</comment>


Bay Area mass exodus of residents leading to a shortage of U-Haul trucks - <AUTHOR> https://www.aei.org/publication/san-francisco-bay-area-experiences-mass-exodus-of-residents-reflected-in-one-way-u-haul-truck-rental-rates/ <comment><USER2> There can't be a significant net decrease in number of households unless housing is sitting empty. There could be a net decrease in population if the people arriving are younger than the people leaving, and don't have kids yet. But that doesn't seem a sign of decline.

Similarly, there could well be a shortage of U-Haul trucks if the people arriving are young ones with no more than a car full of possessions, and the people leaving are older ones who've accumulated lots of stuff. But that doesn't seem a sign of decline either.

<comment><USER3> There can be net decrease in population if housing gets less intensively used. If I used to share an apartment in San Jose with a roommate, but that roommate moves out to go to Austin and I decide I'd rather have the extra space to myself, then the local population has gone down.

And as I understand it, there's room for quite a bit of this to happen in the Bay Area. There are plenty of stories about really dramatic numbers of people cramming into two-bedroom apartments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The U-Haul place here in KS advertised free gas to CA.

<comment><USER5> Have a link? Would love a free road trip. Might even make a few bucks if I can catch a load of cargo that needs to head that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Peak clown car.</comment>


New restriction in iPhone 4 OS license agreement - <AUTHOR>

Read the second sentence.  This seems to be a means to focus developers to the platform, and away from code generators that allow developers to target multiple platforms.<p>3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited). <comment><USER3> This is pretty bad. No more MonoTouch, nor any language innovation in software tools targeting iPhone etc. permitted.

To be frank, as an employee of a tools vendor which sells an IDE (Delphi) whose language is not one of Objective C, C or C++, this is pretty scummy - <USER2> low blow.

(I speak for myself, not for the company. of course.)</comment>


First water plume seen firing from Jupiter moon Europa - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24743-first-water-plume-seen-firing-from-jupiter-moon-europa.html#.Uqnkrd-dmal <comment><USER2> For those expecting to see an actual image, this is the closest thing to a photo from NASA: [http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/water-vapor-over- europa/](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/water-vapor-over-europa/)

They note: "Hubble didn't photograph plumes, but spectroscopically detected auroral emissions from oxygen and hydrogen."

Full press release from NASA: [http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble- europa-water-vapo...](http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-europa-water- vapor/)

For an amazing photo of Europa with Io's volcanic plumes in view, see this older photo from 2007: [http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10103.jpg](http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA10103.jpg)

Full description here: [http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10103](http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA10103)

<comment><USER3> does this mean it's pure conjecture that it was a water plume? my idea of a water plume would say that it's sub surface ocean water getting ejected out of the surface. this evidence seems like it could have been water knocked up by a meteor impact or some other mechanism to get the surface ice into orbit.

<comment><USER4> it's my understanding that the gravitational "torsion" from Jupiter alone is enough to do all sorts of things (like keep a planet thermally active)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please forgive my ignorance. What makes Europa more likely to contain life than other moons thought to contain oceans like Callisto, Ganymede, Titan, Enceladus ... ? [1]

[1] [http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lqil4sqeremjpg/original.jp...](http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18lqil4sqeremjpg/original.jpg) [2]

[2] [http://io9.com/5827649/a-map-of-all-the-water-in-the- solar-s...](http://io9.com/5827649/a-map-of-all-the-water-in-the-solar-system)

<comment><USER6> Enormous oceans of liquid water, with internal tidal heat and protection from harsh surface environment?

<comment><USER7> And lets not forget the large black monolith.

<comment><USER8> All joking aside, the guy who wrote those kind of knew what the hell he was talking about.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is an awesome phenomenon. Yesterday we had a post re panspermia:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6888412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6888412)

Now think of an Europa with simple bacteria living in the water under the ice. These events are like cosmic sporulation: long strings of frozen droplets that could contain organisms, ejaculated into space like spores in the wind.

<comment><USER6> And promptly sterilized. Unfortunately most plausible life forms require meters of soil/rock surrounding them to survive the harsh space environment (probably more in the vicinity of Jupiter).

<comment><USER10> You obviously didn't read anything about the research. The analysis was focused on the likelihood of large chunks of rock being ejected during an impact, large enough to provide sufficient protection from the interplanetary radiation environment for geologically significant periods of time.

<comment><USER6> While I am not a biologist myself, I did work 2 years at the NASA Astrobiology Institute in a supporting role, where I learned all about the science surrounding this stuff. I don't know any astrobiologist who seriously believes that whatever microbes might exist in the comfort of Europa's inner ocean might survive free-floating in the harsh Jupiter radiation belts, where it takes hours or days (not millions of years) to sterilize all but the most extreme life forms.

<comment><USER10> Which is why it's far from a sure thing, only a possibility. However, if an object impacts Europa directly from a heliocentric orbit it won't spend much time in Jupiter's radiation belts. With enough luck maybe it would hit just the right patch of Europa to be captured in the ice and make its way down into the ocean without much exposure to radiation. Certainly that's a very unlikely event, as is simply getting a rock containing life from Earth to Europa in the first place. However, the Solar System is very, very old and in such stretches of time unlikely events can and do happen.

Ultimately the possibility cannot be conclusively ruled out, and given the implications it's worth considering.

<comment><USER6> The GP was about life from the ocean surviving the geyser into space, as "long string of frozen droplets that could contain organisms" in orbit around Jupiter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Checkout the movie Europa Report to feed your SciFi fantasies.

<comment><USER12> Second this. Excellent random movie selection on Netflix.

<comment><USER13> Third it. The movie starts out looking like it's going to be pretty cheesy, but stick with it. This is a unique film.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If I was an "ocean under an ice layer" based civilization this might be my best way to get an object into orbit.

Was the plume aimed at anything in particular?

<comment><USER8> The fascinating aspect of your post is that scientifically we continue to think of 'life' as 'life as we know it'

A civilization that evolves completely underwater (and in Europa's case divided from one underwater oasis to the next) might be possible even if it means the absence of fire.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> If I take a wild guess (into the next 50 years), we probably will be able to land on Europa. After collecting dirt and water, we found nothing. However, scientists didn't give up on it and debate life could be existed in deep ocean, which is way deeper than what we can go even on Earth. There you go: we have to go far across space and end up swimming really deep. Too many technological barriers. It'd be even more disappointing when we actually find out living organisms, then they look so similar to what we already have on Earth. Again, my "wild guess"

<comment><USER9> Would be cool if they got there and found layer upon layer of carcasses resembling whales, fish, trilobites ... seasoned with smaller organisms. A record of evolution, deposited over thousands of years of geyser activity, perfectly preserved and documenting every evolutionary bifurcation that ever swam too close to one of these blowholes.

I can dream, can't I?

<comment><USER16> That's unlikely because ice is fairly dynamic. These geysers are proof that new ice is constantly being formed, and over the timescale needed to see any sort of evolution, the ice layer would have been reformed countless times.

It'd be like finding fossils around Kilauea in Hawaii. You don't because there's new land being formed all the time, and there's not enough time for fossils to be formed.

<comment><USER9> I imagined that such a geyser has a limited lifespan. Same mechanism as why islands like Hawaii or the super volcano in Yellowstone come in chains. Same thing could be happening on Europa: the icy crust moves and the "hot spot" is fairly fixed. Or a local vent collapses after x years and another weak spot opens. In those scenarios the area surrounding a geyser could preserve a chapter of the planet's history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As warm as the word vapor may sound it is actually really cold. Europa's oceans, if they exist, are -50°C and lower.

<comment><USER18> Hmm. I did not think that the temperature of Europa's oceans (below their probable icy crust) has been well-constrained. To the extent that it has, I think the subsurface temperature is expected to be much greater than -50C in many places (the mechanism is tidal heating).

There is a general belief that Europa is likely to have significant liquid water below its icy surface. The phase diagram for water (first image at [http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html](http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/phase.html)) does not allow liquid water at -50C = 223K, no matter what the pressure.

Atmospheric pressure on Earth is about 0.1 MPa, and gravity on Europa is about 1/6 of Earth. The highest pressure in Earth's oceans is about 1000x atmospheric pressure (100 MPa). Across this range (3 orders of magnitude), the melting point of H2O is pretty constant, 0C or a little below (see the linked phase diagram).

My conclusion: liquid water implies temperatures of at least 0C in the relevant pressure range.

<comment><USER17> Not really. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fot3m7kyLn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fot3m7kyLn4)

Also. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercooling)

<comment><USER19> From your link: A liquid below its standard freezing point will crystallize _in the presence of a seed crystal or nucleus_ around which a crystal structure can form creating a solid.

Europa's ocean is surrounded by a vast sheet of actual ice. You can't keep such an ocean at supercooled state.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is Universal Basic Income Here? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2020/07/27/895674685/-600-a-week-poverty-remedy-or-job-slayer <comment><AUTHOR> If I didn't have car payments, $2400/month would be enough to cover my mortgage and leave plenty for food and even some entertainment. And adjusting down to a cheaper part of the country, I could live quite comfortably there. It'd be nice if this could supplement additional income though. Make the $2400 in addition to whatever you earn up to a certain amount (it'd have to be a graduated scale).</comment>


This Day Will Be Remembered: Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/08/this-day-will-be-remembered-facebook-google-and-plaxo-join-the-dataportability-workgroup/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like Microsoft joining the web standards committee, at least in Facebook's case. They have no incentive whatsoever to make the data on their servers portable.

<comment><USER3> That's precisely what I was thinking. Until I see an actual implementation, I'm assuming this is just a token gesture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yup, if I was Facebook, I would join the Workgroup too if only to keep track of or keep good relations with a group that may affect my business. The article seems to exaggerate the importance of the move though.

</comment><comment><USER5> If I were Microsoft, I'd try to come up with some way to get Passport (aka Windows Live ID) into to the data portability effort.</comment>


Boeing issues warning after Indonesian 737 Max Crash - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-07/boeing-issues-bulletin-for-737-max-after-indonesia-jet-crash <comment><USER2> This article is hard to parse, and I'm a pilot, but my approximate summary:

-Angle of attack sensor was faulty, twice. It was replaced the day before the accident. -Malfunctioning angle of attack sensor can confuse the plane when the autopilot is off. -Even when the autopilot is off, confused computers can still try to (erroneously) correct for erroneous sensor input. -Human pilots are expected to recognize sensor failure and computer confusion and disconnect affected systems and fly manually.

Back to back failing sensors? That's really bad. Planes don't get confused, but computer software obviously can, and did, but there's a whole ergonomics and user interface aspect that to this day still thrusts a lot of competing information for pilots to sort out. There's no contiguous start to finish automation in aviation, something that should be easier in many ways than automobiles due to high degrees of standardization, and it's that, on top of how rapidly confused automation systems get when fed erroneous information that makes me think the idea of replacing pilots in planes or cars is still a fairy tale.</comment>


If I Had a Hammer - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/opinion/sunday/friedman-if-i-had-a-hammer.html <comment><USER2> If "average is over," why is Thomas L. Friedman still writing for the NY Times?

A year ago, TLF wrote this about MOOCs:

 _Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity._

Then Sebastian Thrun admitted that Udacity had a "lousy product" in this interview:

[http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian- thrun-u...](http://www.fastcompany.com/3021473/udacity-sebastian-thrun-uphill- climb)

Friedman is a cheerleader for employers. Employees are warned that average isn't good enough. One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers--if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.

<comment><USER3> >>> One stupendously glaring omission in this kind of talk is that good managers are a dime a dozen. If anyone should be warned, it should be managers --if there is no reason to hire employees displaced by automation, then there is absolutely no excuse not to hire the very best managers.

It has occurred to me that management is basically an information processing task. Why shouldn't it be automated? I think a reason is that managers are kept around to manage information that can't be committed to a stored record. An example would be details of the decision making process for who gets laid off during a downturn.

<comment><USER4> The hardest part about management is not the rote processes of information collection and distribution. It's all the human elements of the team that you're managing. A good manager is a cheerleader, coach, and scorekeeper all in one. This requires individually tailored approaches to each member of the team and doesn't strike me as something easily automated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always liked Thomas Friedman's writing on foreign policy issues back in the day, but his work on globalization and technology always sounds incomplete and amateurish. I think Mr. Friedman would do himself a favor if he actually spent some time learning to code and hacking on an Arduino board or something so that he could start to develop more intuition on what can and cannot easily be done with technology, and where globalization fits in and where it doesn't.

<comment><USER6> His writings on foreign policy and economics is also incompetent garbage. One datapoint is his support for the Iraq war. But really why he still has a column in the NYT is a mystery.

<comment><USER7> I do not want to be in the business of defending Thomas Friedman, but I think his opinions on the Iraq might have been more nuanced than he is usually given credit for. For example:

 _NEW YORK TIMES COLUMNIST THOMAS FRIEDMAN_

 _THEN: "Let's start with one simple fact: Iraq is a black box that has been sealed shut since Saddam came to dominate Iraqi politics in the late 1960s. Therefore, one needs to have a great deal of humility when it comes to predicting what sorts of bats and demons may fly out if the U. S. and its allies remove the lid. Think of it this way: If and when we take the lid off Iraq, we will find an envelope inside. It will tell us what we have won, and it will say one of two things._

 _" It could say, 'Congratulations! You've just won the Arab Germany--a country with enormous human talent, enormous natural resources, but with an evil dictator, whom you've just removed.'_

 _" Or the envelope could say, 'You've just won the Arab Yugoslavia--an artificial country congenitally divided among Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, Nasserites, leftists, and a host of tribes and clans that can only be held together with a Saddam-like iron fist. Congratulations, you're the new Saddam.'_

 _" In the first scenario, Iraq is the way it is today because Saddam is the way he is. In the second scenario, Saddam is the way he is because Iraq is what it is. Those are two very different problems. And we will know which we've won only when we take off the lid. The conservatives and neocons, who have been pounding the table for war, should be a lot more humble about this question, because they don't know, either."_

 _\--The New York Times, January 26, 2003_

(See [http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220](http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0306IRAQQUOTES_220))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Automation bashing had become so boring. "Us vs them" its a go to media cliche. Machines, automated or otherwise, are made to help us. We want every thing to be automated. The purpose of business and technology is to improve lives, not to employ people. No one starts a company with the intention of creating jobs. People want to solve problems, make money or bring useful new ideas to life. Startup founders want to do whatever has to be done in order to execute their vision, with humans, machines, trained animals or whatever. Automation improves our position as species and we need to get behind it instead of viewing it a competitive threat. As they say in pickup basketball, "Same team!"

It's true that automation has a disproportionate effect on different levels of society. But that's more about humans than it its about machines. There are a lot of people working on technical solutions now and sooner or later people will get to work on social solutions that address some of Friedman's concerns. We're a long way from a fully automated society and we have time to prepare for the inevitable changes.

<comment><USER2> _No one sta[r]ts a company with the intention of creating jobs._

Sure they do. Many founders would like their companies to pay them at least a working wage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> _In the Second Machine Age, though, argues Brynjolfsson, "we are beginning to automate a lot more cognitive tasks, a lot more of the control systems that determine what to use that power for._

Automation is what I love most about programming. Most of the time, when you encounter a tedious, dull process, you can come up with creative ways to make your machine do the work.

It's one of the few occupations in which boredom represents opportunity.

<comment><USER10> [http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php](http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/about.php)

<comment><USER9> That app is pretty clever, and it plays off of valid criticisms of the author. :)

Friedman has a talent for writing as well as glueing together disparate concepts to support his arguments. It's fair to say that in some articles, he says very little, very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm going to vote this up, but Friedman to me always seemed like a bit of a hack. The kind of guy who would go outside, see that it was raining, then write a 3-part book series on the coming flood, the power of water, and the wondrous new water-world awaiting all of us. A bit breathless, a bit over- done, a bit over-cooked, and a bit over-hyped.

But he has a point. We _are_ on the verge of some new golden age. Perhaps a new machine age. I tend to think we're seeing the beginnings of a transition to a machine lifeform-dominated Earth. Probably take 200-400 years to fully play out. People aren't just going to become obsolete -- they're going to become irrelevant and non-existent. Seeing pictures of an old-fashioned plain human like us, in another 400 years, will be as quaint to future man as seeing pictures of neanderthals in a science magazine is to us.

The interesting thing is just how awake the average person is to the amount of change happening. When the Industrial Age happened, there were huge factories, great cities being built, and all sorts of physically giant things to look at and note that yes, something new was happening. With the new age, we're looking at changes in Silicon, machine learning, maybe robotics. There aren't going to be giant robots leveling cities in the near future (thankfully!) or anti-gravity machines taking us to Mars in a few hours (sadly!). Instead we're seeing massive changes, on a tiny scale, about what it means to be human.

This article is for the cheerleaders. HN is for the cheerleaders, like us. But I wonder if the average person is even going to notice.

<comment><USER12> A bit of a hack? I find that this article has "self-irony" if there's such a thing - the fact that the writer works for the preeminent American newspaper completely refutes the premise of the article. Mediocrity will forever have a place in this world, if Thomas Friedman still has a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _Dutch chess grandmaster Jan Hein Donner was asked how he'd prepare for a > chess match against a computer, like I.B.M.'s Deep Blue. Donner replied: "I > would bring a hammer."_

Okay, but why not bring a gun to a chess match against a human? That would be an excellent winning strategy (cf. the Gordian Knot).

<comment><USER14> I think a hammer would be sufficient in that case as well, unless of course your opponent brings the gun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I read the article and skimmed the comments and all of the economic comments almost intentionally avoided discussing monetary velocity as a concept. Oh they'd dance around it but never directly discuss it. Its not terribly controversial, so I don't see why. The modern numbers are utterly dismal, maybe thats why? Too much of a downer?

During an economic depression, a growing fraction of the population is removed from the "real" economic system and market, they start to use Tide detergent, lotto tickets, drugs, cases of cola as their new economic system and currency.

In a similar way, as the fraction of the population still involved in the interchange of information decreases, despite all the article hand wringing, its pretty simple, they'll just drop out. Hard/impossible to say what the new system and currency will be. People will just stop. The future of the "knowledge worker" looks a lot like ... travel agent.

So, put it together, and in a post-knowledge worker economy, they'll always be a small number of elite knowledge workers, and always be some jobs that are not financially viable to automate away (not many, of course), but overall society will just wander on over to something else and look at knowledge work / service work as something from the past... thats what grandpa used to do before all of them got downsized, or whatever.

The article is much ado about nothing, in the long run. Currently there exists a service / knowledge economy, at least for a small segment of the population, and its going away, just like every other segment eventually mostly goes away. OK.

That and watching the political ax grinding was moderately entertaining. "If we all just held our hands around the campfire and sang, then ..."

</comment><comment><USER16> Golly gee, things are changing too fast for Thomas Friedman and his readers!

</comment><comment><USER17> _because employers now have so much easier, cheaper access to above-average software_

Yet they consistently don't choose it. Much as in the following case...

 _All this data means we can instantly discover and analyze patterns, instantly replicate what is working on a global scale and instantly improve what isn't working — whether it is eye surgery techniques..._

That's an excellent example of another thing that won't happen, mainly because it already doesn't happen; medicine is a field where there are many, many examples of hard-data demonstrating better techniques, well-known, that nonetheless don't spread. Atul Gawande discusses it, amongst other interesting things, in his book "Better"; I namechecked that book mainly because, as well as discussing this, it's quite a fun read and a good starting point for principles that carry across all fields, but it's by no means the only source.

</comment><comment><USER18> > ...labor is so important to a person's identity and dignity and to societal > stability

> ...lowering taxes on human labor to make it cheaper relative to digital > labor

> ...guaranteeing every American a basic income

What all these say to me is a an unwillingness to actually advance the social dynamic that has been in place for 100s of the years. The hierarchy of serfdom.

Why when you have the possibility of removing drudge like work with automation would you actually want to actively retain it.

Why when a society of plenty is possible would you want to limit it's benefits for a few and give only a basic income to the rest.

Why would you try to define someone with a menial task when you could aim to help them bring more worth to society and themselves with a more fulfilling and beneficial activity.

Not saying there are easy answers to any these questions but trying to maintain the status quo is not an approach that benefits everyone.

</comment><comment><USER19> I often wonder when the tipping point for white-collar specialists being replaced by machines will occur. Watson replacing doctors in making diagnoses has received a lot of attention, but there are many other fields. The big one for me is when will we trust software to analyze contracts instead of lawyers? We already have moved to replacing lawyers with computers for discovery, I would be even more pleased in negotiations to only have to change items flagged by machines than the sometimes incompetent lawyers I've had to deal with.

<comment><USER15> I was recently informed by an acquaintance that "lawyer work" decades ago was mostly about being a low to mid level manager over a herd of paralegals who did all the work by hand. As the market has collapsed, lawyers do all their own electronic searching and often data entry by themselves... The market has crushed the profession.

Most likely that will eventually play out with doctors, probably economically enforced. Sure, doc, do whatever your medical judgement thinks best, if you want to work for free... but we're only paying on claims if your medical judgment matches "watson". So overproduce new docs for awhile to crater salaries, only pay claims if their work matches a computer model, and what we used to call a "nurse" will be the new "doctor". This also helps with doc-in- a-box facilities, which could now literally be a doc-in-a-box instead of a nurse-in-a-box or PA as implemented now.

Eventually, being a "pharmacist" will mean being the minimum wage drone who stocks a semi-smart vending machine, or maybe it'll mean being the minimum wage drone answering the 800-number support line outsourced to the Philippines.

I could see the same thing happening with accountants and HR and perhaps marketing.

<comment> grey-area I find this sort of bravado about replacing other professions really unconvincing - if you think you can replace lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, accountants, Marketing, and HR with software, why not the programmers themselves?

If you think on why you can't replace programmers with software written by experts who know nothing about the domain (or even by those who do), it will tell you why the professions you've listed would be very hard to automate.

I think software and the hardware it controls is going to be pervasive and take over a lot of formerly human functions in our society in the next century, but the professions you've listed above, along with programming, will be some of the last work to be completely automated, after manual labour, farming, cleaning, data-entry, call-centres, technical support, etc etc. It'd require strong AI to do replace those professions, expert systems don't come close, and if you think your profession is uniquely immune to these changes, why is that?

<comment><USER15> "why you can't replace programmers"

Oh I'd disagree with that... If you'd like an example, note how "Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system. Its buzzword compliant, being NoSQL, and scales to tens of thousands of records, which despite claims to the contrary is almost always enough for most real world problems. The world of the future is not having a DBA and CRUD developer cooperate to write your shopping list, its one untrained dude with a spreadsheet.

Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced by one marketing guy with photoshop. Its already happened. Its not bravado but observation.

Rows and rows of desks of junior accountants replaced by one accountant with quickbooks. Another observation, not bravado.

And what, exactly, are pharmacists doing 99% of the time beyond being a very high item value / high risk vending machine? Realizing my mom worked as a pharm-tech part time when I was a kid, so you're not going to fool me... Very highly priced customer service and team lead and thats about it.

The mechanical steam shovel never quite eliminated the use or sales of hand shovels. Its just that "digging ditches" isn't a viable career path anymore for almost anyone, anymore. Or "manual metal lathe operator" or any number of other tasks. I'm not saying there will never be another accountant hired or dr. or lawyer. Just a whole heck of a lot less of them. At least one, two, maybe three orders of magnitude fewer.

Much like the first industrial revolution... there's people right now, out there, being paid to use a hand shovel... the story is, its now probably hundreds of people right at this moment, not 5% of the population or whatever like in 1850.

<comment> grey-area _" Excel" is the industry wide corporate standard database management system_

Excel is not a database (I don't mean that as a trivial correction, it's quite distinct); many of the jobs done with it could conceivably have been done with databases but were not, so in a way it's opened up a whole market to store and manipulate more data than ever before on a small scale in businesses, and I suppose you could conceivably replace dbs with it in some cases. However I don't see it replacing databases in the businesses I work with — in my experience at least I see more data moving _from_ excel _over to_ databases and apps (with internal dbs) as it becomes complex or people want to share it than I see it moving the other way. For example imagine a CRM built in excel, scaling up to 1000s of customers and several users — eventually there comes a point where it is far easier to use a db and front-end than to try to manage that sort of data in excel by hand and share amongst several people.

Data manipulation is an excellent example of the complex changes wrought by technical progress — there is an argument for saying that as technology progresses, we discover more work we can do with it, and data and analysis become more complex, not less — more jobs are created which simply didn't exist before. Automation doesn't always lead to jobs becoming simpler or humans becoming redundant, quite the reverse in our recent experience.

 _Look at how many graphics artists using paper and pencil have been replaced by one marketing guy with photoshop._

Answer, zero. Graphic artists have become quicker, can do more work, and can produce work of higher quality in terms of resolution, type etc than before, but it's still quite a distinct job from marketing. One related example of a profession which has gone is typesetter though — they've been entirely supplanted by technology. Just to be clear I'm not saying technology never supplants anyone, but that the professions you listed are the farthest away from being supplanted and are not even on the horizon in most cases.

Customer service is still really important in many jobs, interfacing with humans is extremely hard, and expert systems are not an adequate replacement for most humans yet, esp. in creative or customer facing roles — that will require a _qualitative_ change in the nature of our software. Perhaps that will happen eventually (in some ways I hope it will), but we simply haven't made that leap yet.

<comment><USER15> "Excel is not a database"

It most certainly is used as one in the corporate world. That doesn't mean its a very good one, in the sense that a hammer isn't a very good substitute for a screwdriver.

None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a database.

I agree I LOL when I see people my hand doing the equivalent of an SQL JOIN. To some extent, the older I get, the more I see people using computers as a somewhat different form of manual labor, rather than a replacement for manual labor. Rather than typing this form by hand on the manual typewriter, you use Word and call it progress.

<comment> grey-area _None the less, where a businessman would have called IT to store a couple hundred records in 1970, now the businessman uses a spreadsheet as a database._

In 1970 the businessman would probably have used a rather more old fashioned method - a piece of paper and an assistant to write down the figures on a page which looked very like an excel spreadsheet!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The flaw in this argument is that although the power of the machines is making advances appear faster to make humans less important, the power of humans to use the advances for no good is increasing at the same rate. Thus Google knows when you are going on a trip but someone hacks Target for millions of credit cards in a way no one notices for weeks. Technology is a two edged sword.

<comment><USER21> I don't think this point contradicts anything Friedman said:

 _Put all these advances together, say the authors, and you can see that our generation will have more power to improve (or destroy) the world than any before ..._

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think he makes some interesting points. I do not think they are that amateurish. Like it or not, we're rapidly sliding into an era where human productivity is going off the charts. Unintended consequences are unavoidable. Nobody really knows what to do about it.

</comment><comment><USER22> Over 60 years ago Kurt Vonnegut wrote about the "man being replaced by machine" problem in his __* 1952 __* novel, "Player Piano."

<comment><USER23> The quote from Erik Brynjolfsson in this article is also right out of the Unabomber manifesto on the dystopian future where machines make our decisions for us, and the masses are ruled by a handful of elites who have access to the control of these systems.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What content format do you prefer for tech content - <AUTHOR> I run a boutique digital transformation company called NextLink Labs. Our goal is to help companies adopt best of breed DevOps related tooling and processes that can fundamentally change the way software is built and business is done. We have a few items up in our insights section, but education is such a big part of our goal here we want to make sure we are producing content others will enjoy consuming.
Right now a few options:
1. Short intro content on things like Terraform, Consul, Vault, k8s, Ansible, gitlab CI, github actions, helm, and security related to the above things
2. Extensive deep dives into the above topics features but done in a series of posts
3. Extensive deep dives into a topic all in one article
4. Short article paired with an extended twitch steaming session demonstrating how to make some reference architecture or ci/cd pipelines or other example
5. Tweet storm (ugh)
Im looking for any recommendations on format of content desired and also some topic requests relating to DevOps, Cybersecurity, and cloud architecture.
Ive been working in this consulting space a long time. But new to content and plan to be putting out a lot of it. Tell me what the people want! <comment><USER2> I'm also in Ed tech space so I guess I am biased...but essentially:

1\. Comprehensive curriculum. If I am going to spend time on your service I want to be able to get a working knowledge of the subject. Far too many Ed tech projects are simply an "intro" to the subject. The first chapter should be the intro while the rest is actually learning how to apply the knowledge or skill. Quality is key here. You are better off having the best online cyber security course rather than a collection of 10 average courses.

2\. Interesting content. The content needs to be interesting, entertaining or engaging. Video and interactive content is key her (codecademy and the math content on Khancademy nails this). Bonus points if your interactive content is custom written for the subject.

3\. A way for the learner to self-evalute skills or knowledge. Great, I read your chapter and learned a lot but did I really master the concepts in the chapter? I won't know unless I am able to take some exercises and get some feedback on my work. You would be surprised how many online courses have none of this or very poorly designed.

4\. Analytics on my performance. I need to know if I am mastering the content. Bonus points if the platform/course tells me how to improve or what to study next.

5\. Discussions. I need some way to discuss with others about the subject. Make sure trolls and spam are kept far away.

6\. Design needs to be logical and user friendly. I should be able to learn very quickly how to use the site. All advanced settings in a separate page (settings dashboard).

7\. Mobile friendly (especially for high end devices).

8\. No progress locking content.

9\. Prefer free over paid. Freemium model is also good. For any pay to use features or content you better bring serious value to the table.

10\. Prefer to give less personal information. Why exactly do you need my date of birth, home address, phone number, name of my first born etc. You get the point.

11\. Multiple paths to learning the content - textbook style (blocks of text), interactive video, interactive text efc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Regardless of length or target experience level, I prefer text. Text is indexable by search engines and easily searched in my browser.</comment>


Show HN: A mockup for my HN clone. - <AUTHOR> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16632318/submitfn.png

<comment><USER2> We have HN, why have a clone :)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because I'm trying to learn/understand Flask and SQLAlchemy?

<comment><USER3> Looks good I think, keep it up. I like the UI. Would like to see a live CSS mockup</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can there be another gmail? - <AUTHOR>

Since email service providers like gmail encourage not deleting any email, I am assuming there will be a point in time (rather in the size of the mean inbox of user-space) at which point it will become unviable to launch a new email service because u will have to offer migration as part of the package.<p>Will there be such a point or am I missing something? <comment><USER2> Remember that as time goes on drive space prices fall as well. If you build backblaze storage pods[1] a petabyte over 3 years costs you a little under 100k. If we assume the average email user uses around half a gigabyte[2], we can accommodate around 2.1 million accounts on the petabyte (more if you compress the data). Throw in another two petabytes for compressed backups and you've got a million email accounts for 150k, or $0.15 an account (over three years). If you show users ads that average more than 15 cents per user over the course of three years you're making money (less paying employees that don't operate the storage, etc.). The actual numbers may even be less. Combined with the fact that the price of storage seems to still be going down at a rate that most likely is faster than user inbox growth, and you'll never hit this particular singularity.

[1] [http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a- budget-v...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a- budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/)

[2] 200MB more than the amount currently in my gmail; I have email going back six years and I never delete emails, but I'm not a heavy email user.

EDIT: Formatting

</comment><comment><USER3> No, Gmail is a fermion. Therefore it is impossible for a second fermion with identical properties to occupy the same quantum state as per the Pauli exclusion principle.

Sorry, physics humor. Real answer:

Drive space is very cheap today. It is not hard to offer several GB per user. Email as it is currently implemented only supports messages of about 10MB each at max, while typical messages are text-only or include only a few low-res images as attachments. For typical users, it is therefore not probable that they will ever accumulate data at a rate faster than is currently the case since it is a protocol limit. Historical trends have also shown that larger file transfers are simply routed to other methods, so it is unlikely that email will be overhauled simply to increase the per-message size limit.

Monetizing it as a free service in a way which is not onerous to users and convincing users that they should use your service versus a more well-known and established provider are the hard parts. Solve that, and you've got a good competitor. Don't solve that, and you've got a money sink.

</comment><comment><USER4> There's no need to close off an old account when you move to a new service, so you can leave your gmail as an archive - that makes for an easy spring clean too. My guess is that as cloud platforms evolve though, more and more will offer ways out - since people/companies will begin demand it before signing up as competition mounts. Those "ways out" will initially be bulk downloads (like Facebook's "download your info" feature), but over time will become more useful, offering filters on what's downloaded, pagination on downloading data, and migration APIs such that new services can pull data from the old ones without you needing to middle man the data. This isn't of benefit to providers though, which is why it relies on competition / user adoption based on ways out, and also why it will take time to become the norm.

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe so. Opera show cased this beta email design/feature set which was very appealing for anyone not interested in using Google's services. They do seem to be innovating though, the new Gmail design is much better in my opinion and if Google+ takes off it'll become even further integrated into your life.

I think Google really wants G+ to link all of the Google services we use together and bring people onto services they weren't previously using. For those which live in Google this is great but for those which only want to try G+ or use one service it puts more barriers in your way.

</comment><comment><USER6> Overall, I'm not very impressed with gmail. I'd like to think that a new email service could lure people away, simply by providing a better product.

(Not that the particulars matter, but I find gmail slow, ham-handed in its organization, ugly, and strangely lacking, given its origins, in the searches it supports. Not to mention the fact that the cursor periodically disappears when composing messages on one of the three machines I use it on.)

</comment><comment><USER7> Not only can the be another Gmail, but there's also a huge need for it. Gmail lags quite a lot (even on fast connections), and the price you have to pay to get it for free is the fact that Google builds a huge database on your person/interests, and that American authorities have easy access to your data because of the Patriot Act.

I'd much rather pay a small sum of money to a provider in Europe ( = better privacy laws).

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you _have_ to offer migration initially? I don't think it's something that every service has launched with. And there's a steady stream of new email users every year.

A few non-techy people have asked me if there are email services that _don't_ read your email for contextual ads, and they would be willing to pay. So I think there's a market there, albeit a smaller one that the free email provider one.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'd say so, if its features + spam protection are as good. People (not only me!) dislike having all their eggs in the Google basket.</comment>


Bill Gates: US 'not even close' to doing enough to fight pandemic - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/25/us/bill-gates-coronavirus-town-hall-us/index.html <comment><USER2> Why doesn't he help Andrew Yang run for 3rd party and help push UBI then? Its so easy to sit back and let others in your foundation give the illusion that Gates himself is the one doing all the legwork with favourable sound bites in the media. When the truth he is just the money.

I think M$ is evil, and it represents all that sucks about tech, not least of which is nepotism and theft; but also every time I'm forced to use a Windows box I still cannot see how Linux is not the standard as Windows OS may be the Industry standard but is a total POS system.

Its bloated and slow (16gb of ram feels entirely pedestrian in most cases in that ecosystem) as well just being aesthetically unappealing. I went all in with various Linux distros close to the latter end of XP in 2009ish and its like night and day, old(er) thinkpads can get a new chance at Life with a properly installed Linux distro.

<comment><USER3> Because third party runs are pointless in the US presidential election, and if anything would detract from the closest ideological candidate, making it more harmful than doing nothing

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Gates has a diplomatic opinion on America's failure to deal with corona, but I would go further and say that America lost to Mother Nature.

We either need to get in the fight (testing, tracing, isolation), or settle for herd immunity.

I've seen no evidence of the former.</comment>


Gab Vanishes, and the Internet Shrugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.lawfareblog.com/gab-vanishes-and-internet-shrugs <comment><USER2> There are psychos on all platforms. The double standard is horrible.

Basically, if you leave the reservation / aren't in the old boys club, you're toast. (Provided you become popular enough to get noticed)

<comment><USER3> I disagree, there is a real and significant difference between places with a few outliers that spew hateful awful rhetoric and places that primarily serve allow people to do that. And what does "leave the reservation" actually mean? Pick twitter or reddit - they have lots of people who just want to express ideas, share their views with similar people, but there are also some on there who want to threaten and express a desire to kill those they don't like. On reddit and twitter that will (eventually) get you banned.

I'm free to disagree with the govt, with the political views of any politician, to wish embarrassment for a celebrity, or financial ruin of a business person I don't like. But saying I was xyz to die, or someone to be attacked, or all people like whatever to perish, that's a different thing.

<comment><USER2> What I meant by "leave the reservation" was that Gab as a company was not in line or subservient to the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple). Apple banned their app a long time ago even. I believe this sets a precedent for other smaller companies that also do not fall in line. We've seen this many times now. Getting deplatformed is a scary thing and it only happens to those that don't fall into line. You never see extremists on the left that call for violence against conservatives get deplatformed. What we're seeing is one platform being taken down because they were vocally in support of free speech, which the others are not.

Gab had a lot of bad apples, yes. Their moderation could have been a lot better. I'm not even sure what their moderation was. I thought they didn't allow for calls of violence on their platform actually. But I guarantee if we count the amount of calls for violence on Twitter, it will be vastly higher than Gab. But I digress.

How long until Mastodon apps are taken out of app stores just because some bad people have Mastodon servers?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This does seem like the kind of news that recently would have generated quite a bit of discussion.

<comment><USER5> Right but in fact not so much. Despite government and tech becoming ever more important to one another it's often hard to discuss politics without revealing a position of some sort and political positions are generally downvote magnets. To me this is both good and bad...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This probably isn't the place to comment on it, but has anyone noticed how odd it is that people act shocked and/or complain that "anti-censorship" websites/services aren't actively removing content/users?

IMO, discourse would get a lot more reasonable if people thought of sites separately from the content on them. (e.g. like how people don't commonly complain about the US navy enabling darkweb lawbreaking)

</comment><comment><USER7> I can't wait for the day that a website that is anti-tech-giants gets no- platformed. I guess the internet will shrug then as well.</comment>


Hacking Business Reply Mail - <AUTHOR> http://denis.papathanasiou.org/2014/05/30/hacking-business-reply-mail-is-this-legal/ <comment><USER2> Nice one! Try this one. When I was living in NY, I'd always want to bring a magazine for the long subway ride downtown. So one day I took one of the magazines that get delivered to my home and enjoyed the read on the way downtown. When I got to my destination I'd just pop the magazine in the nearest mailbox. Usually a day later it would delivered back safely back home to be read another day. I've done this dozens of times without fail.

<comment><USER3> I moved from Austin to Houston almost ten years ago. Was good friends with my Austin mailman, who lived down the block.

About a month after we moved, I got a package in the mail - a cardboard mailing tube, containing a poster, that I'd bought online a couple of years before but never gotten around to putting up. But how did it end up back in the mail?

It turns out that during one of our move trips, the poster was left leaning against the outside wall on the front porch at the Austin house, next to the mailbox.

Our mailman saw it, assumed that it had been (recently) delivered by another postman on his day off, and he knew that we had a forwarding order in place. So he put the poster back in the system with our Houston address on it (being properly packaged and all) and I got it a few days later.

<comment><USER4> This story goes to show that sometimes the most important "hacking" of any system is to be in good graces with the people running it.

<comment><USER5> Or to be able to social engineer your way into making them think you're in the good graces.

<comment><USER6> Being honestly nice is easier than faking it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Back in the day, people would use business reply mail to get a small amount of revenge on companies that wronged them.

1\. Wrap a cinderblock in brown paper

2\. Tape a business reply envelope to the top of the package

3\. Drop off the package at a mailbox or post office

4\. Recipient pays first-class postage

I don't know if it's true, but I heard of people mailing used truck tires and big boxes of rocks or bricks this way.

Probably wouldn't work today, since anti-terror regulations require identification for packages above given dimensions.

<comment><USER8> It didn't work then either. You were just annoying the postal workers.

[http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/566/can-i-mail-a- br...](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/566/can-i-mail-a-brick-back- to-a-junk-mail-firm-using-the-business-reply-envelope)

<comment><USER9> But it'll still work if I stuff the envelope full of crap, right? Along with, of course, a politely worded request to take me off their list.

<comment><USER8> If your intent is just to stop getting junk mail, this will do it: [https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php](https://www.dmachoice.org/register.php)

<comment><USER10> Doesn't work when you have persistent companies who won't take the hint and stop mailing you even after being on that list and even after calling them and even after replying to the twelfth or so missive saying you're not interested.

I had to take this tack with Good Sam (an RV "services" company, insurance and maintenance and such) who wouldn't get lost. Once after about 3 or 4 instances of being told to GTFO, they sent me this large manilla-envelope thing with a similarly sized reply envelope.

I shredded everything but the reply envelope into confetti, emptied my shredder (few days worth of stuff) into the envelope, threw a few pennies in there to increase the weight, and wrote on a sheet of paper "TAKE ME OFF YOUR LIST".

Haven't received anything since then. Perhaps coincidental, perhaps not, but so very satisfying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A realtor I knew used this to send loan documents to the bank. She would just use clear tape and tape the envelope on top of the big fat manilla envelope of papers and drop it in the mail. Clearly the postage was different but the post office seemed to process it fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, the post office may have noticed, but they probably don't care, since I'm not really cheating them out of revenue; they just charge Fidelity as if the envelope were legitimate.

Only Fidelity might complain, but they created these postage-free envelopes so customers like me would send them deposits, so they probably don't care, either.

It was a just a fun thing to try, and great to see that it worked!

<comment><USER12> If anything, it's saving Fidelity the expense of buying, printing, and distributing envelopes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> jack-r-abbit I've wondered for a long time if one could "hack" (or more like "exploit" or "cheat") the "Return To Sender" feature of the USPS to get free postage. Suppose I want to send a letter to John Doe without paying postage. I address the envelope to my own address and use John's address as the from address. I don't put a stamp on it. Without postage, the USPS should not deliver it to me and should return it to the sender for proper postage. BAM! John gets my letter.

<comment><USER13> I believe that's referred to as "mail fraud".

<comment> jack-r-abbit LOL... you are probably right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Posting cheques! How quaint. Do your financial institutions not support electronic money transfers?

<comment><USER15> A lot of businesses in America transfer funds electronically with a "pull" type of system. You give the business the bank account number of _your_ account and they withdraw the funds. If the business does not offer this, then you need to send them the number on a piece of paper, such as a cheque.

This differs from European systems where businesses post incoming bank account numbers and customers "push" it from their banks to the business via a transfer form (which, if I recall correctly, you need to fill and deliver to the bank or post online, correct?)

<comment><USER16> Pull systems are THE WORST because you're putting 100% trust in the party you've given your account number to. I have multiple friends who have had various parties withdraw payments for loans in excess of what they were supposed to withdraw which put them in a serious financial predicament.

One in particular set all his bills up on auto-pay such that he didn't have to pay terribly close attention. His government-backed student loan payment took out something like 5x what it was supposed to and as a result he missed two months worth of payments (again because he didn't check regularly) and got quite a few other companies rather pissed off. And he had no recourse with the student loan folks.

After hearing about that kind of bullshit (I too am mostly setup for auto-pay) I got a second account with a totally separate bank which I occasionally deposit a few grand in for the companies that won't accept credit card payment for their services. This way even if one of them goes rogue and siphons the account dry they can't take me for more much more than is in the account. It doesn't protect me against someone going after my other accounts using judicial means, but it does provide a substantially higher barrier and gives me some peace of mind.

<comment><USER15> There are some other downsides to auto-debit, even when it's working 100%. Case in point: a woman was found dead in her home after six years. Her auto- debit kept the mortgage and all utilities paid...until the money ran out.

[http://wnep.com/2014/03/07/auto-pay-bills-hide-womans- death-...](http://wnep.com/2014/03/07/auto-pay-bills-hide-womans-death-for- six-years/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does it work if you send it to your own address?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, of course not.

The permit number corresponds to a specific address.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this guy is from the bay area. Because there's a Muji in SF and downtown San Jose.

</comment><comment><USER19> Not particularly unethical as described, but I'd imagine this is technically a federal crime.

</comment><comment><USER20> Link is dead.

</comment><comment><USER21> 404...

</comment><comment><USER22> This brings up an embarrassment I have, being an american that's moved to Europe. I've had colleagues that have worked short-term in the u.s. and when they receive a 'check' from their workplace they think it's the most fascinating, interesting thing. A check! It's almost like they're holding the money in their hands... (their words, not mine)

I don't think my bank even has checks - at least they're not a standard enough feature that they mention them.

Thinking about it though, they did let me deposit a check from the u.s. once. It took about three works for it to go through. Wire transfers to anywhere in the world (I regularly send money to the u.s. and India) go through in two or three days.

In fact, the check I deposited was about $50K, so it's understandable it took awhile, but a wire transfer I received from the u.s. for the same exact amount only took two days.

So, why use checks?

We have a system where every bill is payable by bank transfer, and the bill you receive only contains the bank transfer information.

<comment><USER23> I think the main charm of checks are a certain untraceability. E.g. I was once in the states and received a check. As I was not a customer of any bank there, there was no easy way for me to cash it in. Solution: go to a friend's bank with him in tow so that he'd essentially cash it in but giving me all the money.

<comment><USER24> This could easily get your friend in tax trouble. If you need to cash a check and you don't have a bank account you typically go to the bank that issued the check and cash it there.</comment></comment></comment>


Is 'Oumuamua Really an Alien Spacecraft? (PROBABLY NOT) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLJP5l7Yp3A <comment><USER2> Part of the problem with drawing conclusions about 'Oumuamua is that it's the first interstellar object we've detected in our solar system. Because of that, we don't really know if 'Oumuamua is a regular kind of interstellar object or a strange one. Presumably in the near future we'll be detecting more interstellar objects. If a lot of them look like 'Oumuamua, we can probably assume this type of object forms naturally. On the other hand, if we don't see any more that act like 'Oumuamua, then maybe it's worth looking at more unlikely possibilities (like it being an alien solar sail).</comment>


Microsoft's new Anti-Virus, 'Morro', revealed - <AUTHOR> http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/06/16/exclusive-microsofts-anti-virus-morro-revealed <comment><USER2> What's up with the Hyundai logo on the form backgrounds?

Compare <http://uploads.neowin.net/gallery/90_full_msmoro.png> and [http://images.google.com.au/images?&q=hyundai+badge](http://images.google.com.au/images?&q=hyundai+badge)

<comment><USER3> That is a watermark inserted by the site hosting the image.

<comment><USER2> Of course. I see it now

That's the great thing about the internet; it serves as a permanent reminder of all those early mornings where I post something before coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> According to the article, 'Morro' may be the name of a beach in Brazil, but it also means 'Moor' in Spanish. That's certainly what I first thought of when I saw the article - the Moors were certainly ferocious warriors, but I'm not sure that's the slant MS is looking for in hispanic countries :-)

<comment><USER5> Close, but Moor is Moro (one r).

<comment><USER4> Quite right, thanks :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure what to think of this. It's very anti-competitive but I'm not sure there should be competition to produce software that makes Windows safe enough to actually use in the first place.

<comment><USER7> Why is it anti-competetive? I don't see any claim that it will be bundled in with Windows.

<comment><USER8> Personally, I think it's a shame and a rather sad state of affairs that Microsoft won't or, more likely, can't bundle it with Windows. I think a lot of users would benefit from it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hope they port it to Linux and OSX

Oh, wait, we don't need antivirus, we're secure by design.

<comment><USER10> IIRC, Microsoft fixed a lot of the security issues with Vista/7. Modern Windows is a very different creature from old Windows, and even has features that many other OS's are missing (privledge levels).

<comment><USER11> Yet according to the article, "A full Internet security suite is what consumers require today to stay fully protected." I believe that.

However, an expensive, resource-intensive security suite is /not/ necessary on Linux/FreeBSD (I believe largely due to better design and open source), and also generally not needed on Mac platforms.

Linux and FreeBSD are tools for serious power users. Yes, they're "harder." But you get a lot more bang for your buck.

<comment><USER8> Almost all security problems associated with a modern Windows system aren't because of any inherent design problems but rather inexperienced users who run executables which contain malicious software. Linux/FreeBSD on the whole aren't popular enough and attract savvier users.

Currently, there's no perfect solution to this problem. By making is very easy to run any software, you also make it very easy to run malicious software as well. App store/package managers provide half a solution, but are still far from ideal for vendors who don't want to rely on the whims of those packaging, and the process may not guarantee safety or security. Forcing applications to operate in a sandboxed environment is probably the way forward in the long- term, but that's still some way off due to the overheads required to do that while still retaining backwards compatibility with existing software. I think the fact we're in this limbo is one of the reasons that has made web apps popular, because it is essentially providing a sandboxed environment of sorts.</comment></comment></comment></comment>