Indian Government uses special powers to slash cancer drug price by 97% - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Govt-uses-special-powers-to-slash-cancer-drug-price-by-97/articleshow/12240143.cms <comment><USER2> I worked in the drug R&D business for over 8 years. I still follow the industry closely. Some things always get lost in these discussions. First, _manufacturing_ an existing drug is absurdly cheap. Modern industrial chemistry ensures this for all small molecule drugs (note that this is not the same case for the "biologics" which are often fiendishly difficult to make). Almost all the cost in a drug is the manufacturer recouping R&D costs. These costs have been spiraling out of control for 10 years. They are astronomical. A recent Forbes analysis pegs the cost of a new drug with failures of drugs in development folded in anywhere from $3 billion to $12 billion depending on the manufacturer (excellent context and discussion here: [http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/10/the_terrifyi...](http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/02/10/the_terrifying_cost_of_a_new_drug.php)).

You don't need to be an industry expert to grok that those numbers are wildly unsustainable. It is not possible to keep spending the amount companies spend to make new drugs. In the past, companies would inflate the price in the USA to make up for reduced prices elsewhere. But with all the recent healthcare reform in the USA, that strategy is ending.

To add insult to injury, the vast majority of the most commonly used drugs will lose patent protection in the next couple of years. In the industry they call this the patent cliff. There will not be enough new drugs to offset all the ones that go generic.

This move by India is a symptom of the wider drug industry problems. There will be more of these kinds of moves in the future. The industry has been searching for ways to more effectively make drugs and have it not be so expensive. But so far they have been striking out for 10 years running. The current strategy is to lay off most of their r&d workforce and offshore and outsource this part of the business.

Somewhere out there, a business model is waiting to be found. Whoever cracks that nut and becomes the Southwest of the drug industry is going to make a fortune.

<comment><USER3> > _Almost all the cost in a drug is the manufacturer recouping R &D costs._

Actually that's not true. Big pharma spends twice as much on advertising as they do on R&D:

[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080105140107.htm)

They also spend a significant amount of money on government fines due to corrupt practices (i.e. killing people). They are now the single most corrupt industry, paying significantly more fines per year than the entire military industrial complex:

<http://www.citizen.org/hrg1924>

<comment><USER2> If you took the time to look at the link I posted that talks about the Forbes piece, you'd see that they specifically _excluded_ the cost of marketing from the analysis of how much it costs to put out a new drug. When companies do marketing, they expect it to more than pay for itself, clearly it is, or they wouldn't be spending so much on it. I know people don't like to hear it, but marketing products _does_ lead to more sales.

Trust me, having worked in an R&D organization, there was no want for more funding. There was an incredible level of funding. If the problem in the drug industry is simply that not enough is being spent on R&D, that is easily correctable. Unfortunately for all of us, that's not the problem.

<comment><USER4> Of course one expects marketing mental diseases to be effective! 'Its not your fault, take a pill and it will all go away' certainly has mass emotional appeal. However, the article is not too convincing about the methodology of excluding marketing expenses.

        First - and I know that I'm going to hear about this from some people - you might assume that different companies are putting different things under the banner of R&D for accounting purposes. But there's a limit to how much of that you can do. Remember, there's a separate sales and marketing budget, too, of course, and people never get tired of pointing out that it's even larger than the R&D one. So how inflated can these figures be?

Not particularly powerful evidence here: a vague notion of a limit, and a rhetorical question. Corporate accounting statements are generally only accountable to the board of directors, who might be perfectly happy with pushing the limit on creative accounting while the stock goes up. When aimed at investors other than the board, and especially when used by citizens attempting to assess the social value of institutions, accounting statements are better treated as marketing materials themselves.

We can discuss _evidence_ when the CFOs of these corporations open their daily work to a public VNC session.

<comment><USER5> Mental disease drugs are only a part of industry. The drugs for physical problems are still marketed heavily too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone else find it appalling that the American government and American companies have the gall to complain about intellectual property violations in developing countries like China and India? Until the late 1800s, American IP law _explicitly excluded_ foreigners from IP rights. That's right, forget about lax enforcement (like you often see in developing nations nowadays) - you could violate foreign IP rights in public view and _not a thing would be done about it_.

And that's exactly what Americans and American companies did - they went to Europe, took the latest IP, brought it back to America, and copied it. Charles Dickens went on a tour of America to try to get people to buy legitimate copies of his books, which no Americans were doing at that point. By the end of his tour, he realized this was a pointless venture, referring to America as a "nation of pirates". Doesn't sound that different from what contemporary American industry trade groups call China and India, does it?

And it wasn't just international - domestic IP rights violations were endemic as well. The reason the movie industry developed in California was because the movie studios (the _same people_ that are now crying foul about copyright violations) were trying to escape Thomas Edison and his patents on moving picture technology. Not only was Edison's lab in New Jersey, distancing them geographically, but the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers California) took a more "relaxed" view of IP rights.

<comment><USER7> No one else finds it appalling that things in the 1800s are not the same as in the 2000s.

It is a bit appalling that you expect nothing to change in 200 years though.

<comment><USER6> Read my comment here: <http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3699868>

It has nothing to do with the year, it has to do with the position of the US (as developing or developed) changing its viewpoint vis-à-vis IP rights.

<comment><USER7> In the 1800's the US was considered developed in comparison to other countries. (For example the Cotton gin was invented in the US.)

You can't compare developed vs developing using 2000s definitions and at the same time using 1800s definitions for IP laws.

You have to be consistent, pick one era and compare everything using the same definitions.

<comment><USER6> > In the 1800's the US was considered developed in comparison to other > countries.

Not compared to Europe. There might have been some American inventions, but those paled in comparison to inventions from Europe. It wasn't until the late 1800s that things started to change.

> You can't compare developed vs developing using 2000s definitions and at the > same time using 1800s definitions for IP laws.

> You have to be consistent, pick one era and compare everything using the > same definitions.

For any sort of historical analysis, scientific levels of rigidity are impractical, because there isn't a large enough data set, so your point is moot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think few people would argue that drug companies' prices are reasonable, and when it comes to life vs. death I no longer care much about the "they're a business, they're allowed to make a profit" line - of course it's still true, and of course they are, but there's a (subjective) line between "making a good profit" and killing people through greed.

That said, what pricing _would_ be fair? When people claim that these pills cost bugger all to make, the answer is (perfectly validly) that the second pill costs bugger all, the first one costs $$$$ in R&D. So I don't know how cheap they would have to be to be considered a fairer price, and I've no idea if it's possible for anyone outside the companies to work out - even if you ignore the fact that what's fair is so subjective.

<comment><USER9> Truth is, clinical trials are mind-bogglingly expensive and takes years for turnover. Also some newer drugs (I'm not sure about Nexavar) are rightfully expensive to manufacture due to requirements in equipment, sterile conditions, etc.

If I were to say anything negative about this it would be that this sets a bad precedent for any new drugs coming to India -- knowing that the government can effectively void out drug patents after certain number of years, the big pharmas probably would not want to set up shop in the country altogether. Does that sound familiar?

This town is no longer friendly for business.

<comment><USER10> On principle, you are right. However, Rs 2.8 lakh for 1 month of pills is inordinately expensive. It's something that no one but aristocrats will be able to afford. By the standards of the Indian society, I fall in the upper middle class category, and that amount is almost half of my annual salary (more than half after tax deductions). To get an idea about how expensive it is, just think whether you could afford to buy a new car (even a cheap one) every month. Another point worth noting is that most Indians don't have medical insurance, since typical healthcare is quite cheap in India.

Under the new forced licensing terms, Bayer will still be making money. In fact, it might end up making pretty much the same as before, since volume will increase dramatically thanks to the 97% price cut.

<comment><USER11> Bayer doesn't have a problem with selling cheaper drugs to poor people, they do have a problem when those drugs go onto the grey market and get purchased by those who could afford Bayer's regular price.

That's why drug companies don't do differential pricing, because they can't stop the cannibalization of their wealthier markets.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. It's very similar to how content companies try to control the release of content and pricing around the world (region codes ugh). If any pharm company sells drug A in the US for $100 and sells the same drug in Africa for $1 then it's an obvious arbitration opportunity. They are trying to prevent the 'flat world' from eating sales by simply pricing it the same everywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "The Bayer price of Rs 34,11,898 per year ($69,000) is more than 41 times the projected average per capita income for India in 2012, shattering any measure of affordability." This is good enough for any govt to act so and rightly done as well!

Also "6% royalty on net sales every quarter to Bayer" that isnt all unfair

<comment><USER14> Bayer is in it to make money, so presumably the reason the Indian government forced this deal is that Bayer would lose money under it.

So no, it isn't fair.

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind that the government did NOT force Bayer to manufacture the drug, only to license it. I don't believe Bayer had any interest in pursuing the Indian market whatsoever since it was priced well beyond what the average person could afford.

On the question of fairness: Is it fair for people to die because they can't afford a life-saving drug? I'm sure that's what it boiled down to for the Indian government.

According to my math if Bayer priced the drug over here the same way they did in India relative to average per-capita income the drug would cost around $1.5 million per year. Would that change your perspective?

<comment><USER13> Maybe, who knows. Bayer reported the price as part of Research Costs etc, maybe true! But at the end Question stands - "Was the price fair?" I dont think so!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So wait- am I reading this right? Essentially Bayer didn't sell the drug cheap enough, so the Indian Gov't gives an Indian company the 'right' to copy the drug and send Bayer checks for 6% of the proceeds?

And on the flip side of intellectual property, the US is able to extradite a kid over piracy of TV shows? (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3699325>)

Neither seems right to me. Maybe they aren't the same thing, but if ThePirateBay was sending the MPAA checks for 6% of what they made on the site, and saying "This should make it right, you weren't cheap enough so we distributed it ourselves" then the US would be trying to seize and detain people involved.

Hasn't India signed some intellectual property treaty with... well pretty much the rest of the world? How in the world can they do this?

And totally on the flip side- props to India for sticking it to the man. Kinda...

</comment><comment><USER17> This may end up hurting India not helping.

In order to get a drug approved in India, you need to run clinical trial on Indians. You also need to go to through the regulatory process, which isn't cheap.

If drug companies fear that the millions they spend on getting a drug approved in India won't be recouped because the gov't issues a compulsory license, then they simply won't do it.

I mean think about it... if introducing your product to a new market resulted in a net loss, would you do it?

<comment><USER15> The really simple argument is that at the previous price very, very few people in India could afford it. So in the end it is more than likely that the revenue that is gained is higher than it would have been at the very high price.

<comment><USER17> No, I can't argue that's not true. We don't really know what Bayer's strategy was here. For all we know they could have told the Indian gov't to shove it. In that case, they gambled and lost.

Or, they could have offered the drug at 25% of the original cost and the gov't could have told them to shove it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be interesting to see how much money was lost or gained by Bayer based on this. I assume that usage might go up by at least a factor 20 in India (and their production costs go down) so those 6% might actually be a fair deal in the long run.

<comment><USER19> remember that Bayer won't have to manufactor it, someone else does. They get a cut (6%) without having to do any work

<comment> Tuna-Fish As others put it, the manufacture of simple chemicals in the quantities involved in pharmaceuticals is effectively free. As in, give me 100k and I'll be able to make enough of the drug for the whole world for the next hundred years. The packaging of most pharmaceuticals is more expensive than the manufacture of their contents.

The cost is overwhelmingly in R&D -- finding the chemicals, proving it doesn't kill people, and proving it actually does something useful.

<comment><USER20> Don't forget a huge expense: Battling lawsuits (mostly frivolous) from users of the drug and potentially paying out huge settlements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I propose the following solution.

R&D stays in private sector. All successful drugs are bought by the government at the cost of R&D and a sizable profit. The government, then, distributes it. Government can control the distribution and Pvt. markets can control the invention.

Government can then tie up with other govts. and allow sales of the said medicine in those countries.

It's not an ideal solution, but it has best of both capitalist and socialist ideologies.

<comment><USER20> So the government then picks "successful drugs" and hands out massive amounts of money to those companies based on the definition of success as determined by politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists.

Sounds like a nonstarter to me.

<comment><USER22> I'm not advocating for the proposal necessarily, but it's worth pointing out that a solution could be all kinds of bad yet still better than the mess we have today.

<comment><USER20> I don't agree with that.

We could really screw up an industry that has been phenomenally successful at producing drugs that everyone agrees have provided incomparable and vital life-saving solutions.

We should be extremely sober and careful about messing with it and mindful of our ability to destroy the benefits that we already get today. I've seen too many comments in this thread along the lines of "They make too much money" or "The Government should take over the industry" or "Something radical needs to be done right away because 'lives are at stake'".

Statements and positions like those set off my warning alarms.

<comment><USER22> How about, "they spend more money on ads and sending hot 23-yos to doctors' offices with free schwag than they'll ever spend on R&D".

Again, I'm inclined to agree with your criticism of that particular proposal. And I'll agree that there are things that are worse than the current state. But the current state is pretty bad, and imperfection is not a disqualifier for "better".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Excuse me for not being cut up about how the BigPharma companies will be pulling in a few less dollars. Thinking about some of the corrupt and downright unethical practices employed by these companies - this would almost seem like just payback.

\- They use Drug trials in lightly regulated developing countries to get FDA approvals for medicines. There was a famous case in India last year I think where 10-12 children died due to an experimental vaccine. The company involved was one of the biggest vaccine manufacturers in US. That case got hushed up quick.

\- Drugs that get banned in US/Europe get dumped in Developing countries where the science/regulation may not have caught up yet. So even when the deadly consequences are known, these companies push dangerous medicines.

\- Medical Reps employed by these companies routinely pressure doctors to over-prescribe expensive medicines. for a uneducated public this ends up costing them more for the same effects.

Against the backdrop of these practices an occasional such judgement is indeed good news against these companies.

</comment><comment><USER24> Stanford has a set of awesome podcasts called Entrepreneurial thought leaders (<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/podcasts.html>).

One of the more recent ones was from a serial entrepreneur in the medial space.

He said the reason that drugs take so long to produce is the FDA process. Now the FDA is housed by smart people but you have to look at it from their prespective.

They can accept or reject drugs. If they reject a drug then there is no serious problem that can come back and bite them.

If they accept a drug, there is no real upside to them.

They get no bonus for accepting the drug, however if the drug turns out to actually harm people then they are squarely in the cross hairs.

This leads to the question of why would the FDA accept any drug without being 100% sure, and with medicine there is no such thing as 100% sure.

</comment><comment><USER25> My guess is that this is not so much about saving patients from cancer than it is about saving polititians during the next elections.

</comment><comment><USER26> Government was forced to make such decision because Bayer sold these drugs at a price unaffordable to most Indians. This to me seems like a very stupid decision from Bayer's management. The shareholders must act against the board now.

however because of such decisions companies will find it risky to invest in life saving drug research. I think government should also take some steps to win their confidence.

<comment><USER27> >> _however because of such decisions companies will find it risky to invest in life saving drug research._

I disagree. That mentality is precisely the reason that they are overpricing now (and always have done so) as much as they can. People will always need life saving drugs, and ordinary drugs as well. Terminal and cronical patients will always try both traditional and new drugs (or the state will provide it to them in case there is health care). There is absolutely no need to overprice because any price will eventually give a fair ROI for them.

What they do instead is maximize profit at the cost of human life.

On a different light, a lot of research is funded by government entities worldwide, and even if pharmaceutical companies do their own research, they certainly reference other research that is also publicly funded. Thankfully some states do care a lot about their people and will challenge them. India is doing so now, Brazil has also broken HIV drug patents (they cover the full cost of treatment through Health Care) and I hope to hear more of it from different places.

<comment><USER28> You're talking about an infinite timeline where they are the sole seller of a drug that is used indefinitely.

This is false.

When patents expire the drug is also made by generic drug making companies for cheap. So upper bound of getting a ROI is the lifetime of a patent (30 years for drugs iirc, 10 years longer because it takes about 10 years to develop, so still effectively 20 years).

For every drug that is successful, they pour tons of money into drugs that are eventually considered useless. So the R&D isn't solely for the one successful drug, but also for the losses.

A competitor might come in 5 years with a drug for the same problem, that works better. Now the timespan for any ROI has been cut short to 5 years.

Looking at the profits of pharmaceutical companies: sure, most medicine is probably overpriced. But saying that they can get a good ROI at any price is false. They will need to recoup the billions spent on R&D.

<comment><USER27> Ok, I might have exagerated.

The thing is, when a company chooses to manufacture pharmaceuticals, it shouldn't just be 'business as usual' for them. They must realize that they have a social responsability to undertake besides making a profit, and that is even without a proper regulamentory agency or something of the sort.

Most countries have some kind of social welfare, so maybe these companies could have differentiated deals with those programs and still price whatever for those can afford it. It would both cover a market they wouldn't otherwise reach and not jeopardize those that imperatively need treatment and can't afford it otherwise.

<comment><USER29> But surely the social responsibility to help people isn't just limited to pharmaceutical companies? I mean, if you tell rich people that they don't have any responsibility to help sick people in India until they invest in a medicine company, and then suddenly they have to spend huge amounts of their investment helping those people then I think that's a bit unfair, and more importantly saying that will cause a lot of people to avoid investing in medicine.

Ultimately, matters of social responsibility ought to be governed by the government, using taxation to spread the burden equally among everyone who can pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The reason why it's expensive to develop drugs is in large parts because of the process involved to get the approval.

Couldn't you turn this on it's head?

What if the companies could expense the cost of getting the approval. I.e. the tax payers pay for drugtesting and approval process.

Wouldn't this make sense? Since it's in the publics interest to get safe medicin, shouldn't they/we pay for that part.

<comment><USER31> because drugs are a hit based business. a large number don't get through the approval process. your proposal would socialize and subsidize the downsides of an already very profitable drug industry while privatizing the upside

<comment><USER30> But the downsides are largely due to government demands of safe drugs no?

The prices of the drug includes the cost of development. So if you remove that cost you would decrease the price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I have no idea when it was first public knowledge that the Indian Govt were considering this option and when it was finalised. But since Bayer AG's share price in part the markets sentiment of their potential future earnings, and their share price has done reasonable well over recent years, I suspect the market doesn't see this as a major issue.

Bayer's current market cap is a fairly significant EUR45.93bn. So even with the "patent cliff" that JunkDNA discusses, it seems people still expect big pharma to be profitable.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a late stage cancer drug, delays death by 6 months to 5 years for liver and kidney cancer patient. Even after 97% reduction most Indian households may not be able to afford it .

Government wants to buy it and distribute through government and aided hospitals, that is the principal reason behind it.

According to statistics there about 200 Indians using it, even if can save a additional thousand lives it is worth passing this compulsory licensing

</comment><comment><USER34> Bayer shareholders should hold the senior management accountable for not caring enough to bring the drug to more than 2% of the Indian market.

<comment><USER20> And if they lower the price drastically in India and then are accused of gouging their customers in other countries?

When they lower the price of the drug in India, a gray market arises that resells the drugs to other countries. The presence of the gray market creates yet more opportunities for scam artists to sell fake versions of the drug, creating yet more victims.

My point is that this isn't as cut and dry of an issue as you imply.

<comment><USER35> Human lives are at stake, there's nothing more cut and dry than that. We need to stop trying to make our reality fit our models and start adapting our models to fit reality. This whole business is backwards.

<comment><USER20> Human lives are at stake if we screw up the drive to discover new drugs that will save future lives.

Imagine if you had eliminated Bayer's incentive for even creating this cancer- saving drug in the first place. How many lives would you have ended prematurely? Imagine all the new drug research that depends upon Bayer's initial research that will save yet more lives.

Like I said, it's not so cut and dry. The pharmaceutical industry has had quantifiable and demostrable success at a level that is almost unparalleled in history. But your claim is that it's backwards.

I think your statement is inherently backwards. The "reality" is that the pharmaceutical industry produces something that society has found to be extraordinarily valuable. The people I see warping models that don't reflect reality are the ones that disregard the cost of keeping the pharmaceutical rate of discovery going.

I'd love to see improvements to the industry, but "human lives are at stake! It's all backwards!" along with the "senior management should be held accountable" just don't seem to be statements that head is a direction of improvement.

<comment><USER36> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk>

<comment><USER20> I don't want to make assumptions. What's your argument?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why not just do what the Greeks did? Pay for all the drugs with government bonds that are worth nothing. That'll work just as well.

</comment><comment><USER38> Special powers? They mean by force or arms. There is nothing special about theft except when a government does it they are pretty much immune to counter actions.

This is little different that Greece having passed laws allowing them to retroactively change bond agreements and then implement said changes they claimed were now legal under their laws.

Now if India decided to pay a reasonable fee to Bayer for the ability to have a national drug company manufacture them then I would see little issue here.

Instead they are simply passing the costs to other countries. As in, let those "rich" countries pay for the development of medicines and countries like India will simply steal what they want with impunity. How different is that from what the Chinese do to manufacturers of cars, electronics, and other technology not developed at home.

The cost is simply borne by people they don't have to see or care about. Yes I know the drugs are expensive but development of new medicines is not a cheap endeavor. To have government arbitrarily decide who can charge what and when will simply trade a few lives today for a potentially larger number in the future, that larger number arises because potential treatments may be deemed to risky to research under the threat of confiscation.

</comment><comment><USER39> Related NYT article with some more facts & insights

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/business/global/india- over...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/business/global/india-overrules- bayer-allowing-generic-drug.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> Perhaps making drug companies non proffit to ensure all money went back into developing new drugs and perhaps less proffitable drugs (i.e. Drugs targeted at the developing world).

</comment><comment><USER41> finally atleast 1 government has the common sense i was waiting for!

</comment><comment><USER42> That "special power" is commonly referred to as _theft._

<comment><USER42> Would love for any down-voters to tell me how I'm wrong...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> $5500 a month per person? Bayer are scumbags, serious, serious scumbags.

Do they think cancer is just going to stop happening so their profit will dry up?

Kudos to India for doing the right thing, I think the 6% royalty is a nice offering.

</comment><comment><USER44> _Bayer said it was "disappointed" and would "evaluate options to defend intellectual property rights" in the country._

Down-vote me if you like, but I get sick to my stomach when I read sentences like this. If someone is able to deliver and sell the anti-cancer drug by 97% cheaper than you, then in my eyes you have no right to interfere. I am starting to dislike the whole concept of intellectual property and patents and copyright. These are tools of greedy people and bring nothing to the table for the wider audience. No one creates anything just by himself. You are always building on the work of others and merely deriving, combining, changing and mutating it. Whether you do it consciously or unconsciously. It is the principle of cultural evolution and it is why we are where we are. If intellectual property was always practiced the way it is today, I fear we would still be in the Middle Ages.

<comment><USER45> _If someone is able to deliver and sell the anti-cancer drug by 97% cheaper than you, then in my eyes you have no right to interfere_

... Provided that that "someone" also bears their fair share of the cost of discovery and clinical trials. THAT is the issue here.

<comment><USER46> also don't forget that for these companies the poor people in India are the subjects of clinial trials.

The mindset of these companies of treating the poor people as Guinea pigs is also disgusting

671 _reported_ deaths [http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/human- rights-pan...](http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/human-rights-panel- seeks-reportclinical-trial-deaths/447641/)

There is no count of no of people who get disabilities but don't die due to trials failing. Who will pay for these? These pharma companies are steered by greed

<comment><USER45> I am referring to FDA trials, in the US, which can take over a decade and cost 8- or 9-figure dollar sums. These are required before the drug even comes to market.

<comment><USER47> US clinical trials often involve a second, parallel clinical trial in India, because it's easy to find lots of poor patients in desperate need of treatment. I think that, at least in some cases, this probably works out well for everyone except the control group.

But if poor Indian patients are going to test these drugs, the GP can certainly argue that poor Indian patients should be able to afford them.

<comment><USER48> I think the recruitment rules are just more lax in India, than in the US.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Self-Organizing Is So Hard - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/nobl-collective/why-self-organizing-is-so-hard-247821591e67 <comment><USER2> Isn't the very point of self-organization and self-management that you can't read how to do it in a book? It has to arise organically and be built through shared interaction.

Especially for software companies, I've always found the idea of using external workflow and management software to be a little bit abhorrent, like wearing someone else's underwear.

It should be _your_ way of doing things, and software you use to help you is just a way of codifying and automating that. In the same way we customize our editors, we should customize our workplaces so that they reflect the unique sets of people and activities they contain.

And of course, other people have pointed out the irony of a hierarchical mandate for change to a non-hierarchical system. I am reminded of an apocryphal story of drug testing at a university. They had a sampling of senior executives, professors, and researchers go first, to prove that it applied to everyone. When a substantial number of them failed, the testing program was quietly shelved.

<comment><USER3> Decent forms of anarcho-syndicalism aim at advanced, complex industrial societies. Therefore there can be lots of lit on running effective self- managing teams, replacing today's managerial lit.

For example, how do you run a good consensus meeting? Start from scratch and probably make elementary blunders, leading to sullen participants? Or grab say Starhawk's book and arm oneself with common patterns?

A book is just transmission of info. Societies which do lots of consensus transmit lessons somehow. (Via book, oral and/or experiential ways.)

(Disclaimer: I'm not very familiar with "holacracy", outside my simple google search.)

<comment><USER2> > For example, how do you run a good consensus meeting? Start from scratch and > probably make elementary blunders, leading to sullen participants? Or grab > say Starhawk's book and arm oneself with common patterns?

I completely agree.

Where I diverge from the path I see a lot of people take is when you start _believing_ in those books with a fervency, without going through the process on your own. Use them to inform, not instruct.

A great example is the Toyota Production System book. People who go for 'kanban' and 'mura muda muri' and ape the terminology and methods have it all wrong - the whole point is that it's a system they built for themselves. It's great advice on _how to build such systems_ , but if you just take it off the shelf and try to use it as is, again, it'll feel like someone else's underwear since it wasn't built to fit _you_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Superb article!

Holacracy is clearly yet another in the very long list of attempts to synthesize a lot of great ideas into some ultimate solution which is then prescribed, trademarked, marketed, and _proprietary_ so that the company can authorize "official" trained people who take their official training courses etc. The list of organizations like this is vast, and most of them offer _some_ value and yet create fragmented and confusing overly-branded markets. For just one random set of examples: Alexander Technique vs Feldenkrais etc. etc.

Holacracy has some good ideas, but it is not a final end-point. It is just yet another place in the long history of organizational ideas. See the complex history of cooperative businesses for example.

Holacracy _must_ become entirely Open Source, i.e. the software and the writings are all freely-licensed. The developers need to stop trying to control ideas that are 95% not original anyway, just a branded spin on existing ideas.

Anyway, this article at Medium does great job of dealing with things, and the comments there are great too. Thanks

<comment><USER5> Holacracy seems to be taking some good ideas and packaging them with strange ideas, like saying that people should not talk about personal topics at work.

What about the Brazilian engineering firm Semco? Follows a non-hierarchical, self-organizing structure. Thousands of employees, very successful. Described in two books by CEO Ricardo Semler: The Seven-Day Weekend and Maverick. [http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing- Works/d...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Seven-Day-Weekend-Changing- Works/dp/1591840260)

<comment><USER6> He recently gave a very inspiring TED talk. That's how I've got to know about Semco. [http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a...](http://www.ted.com/talks/ricardo_semler_radical_wisdom_for_a_company_a_school_a_life?language=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That memo sounds exactly like each "we need to embrace change"-memos I have read in old-style enterprisey enterprise where some external consultants are called in and make serious money by selling the latest and greatest management methodologies.

And every two to five years, the circle starts again with a different approach because people become numb to the bullshit language in which change is mandated from above.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can somebody with some background explain why this Holacracy thing exists and what problems it hopes to solve? Also, what is this self-management etc?

The article seems to presuppose that we are in the loop of what is happening at Zappos - I for one have no idea.

<comment><USER9> Holocracy, as I've seen it defined, is supposed to be a non-hierarchical way of organizing a company. That is, teams are supposed to self-organize and independently do what is best for the business as a whole. Another prominent software company that practices holocracy is Valve Software, and their employee handbook [1] is one that I've seen mentioned by multiple people as a good implementation of holocracy.

The problem that holocracy is supposed to solve is that in a modern business environment, market conditions shift too quickly to allow management to have the sole responsibility for making decisions. Having self-organizing teams that take responsibility for advancing business goals, and allowing employees to shift between teams without getting permission from management first ("open allocation") allows the company to develop an internal "marketplace of ideas" which ensures that good ideas win out and bad ideas are killed before they consume too many resources.

Now does it work in practice? I would say that it's too soon to tell. Very few organizations have wholly embraced holocracy. Arguably the only one that's truly embraced the practice is Valve. While the idea of a non-hierarchical organization sounds great in theory, we must also remember that status hierarchies are one of the few things that are common to every human civilization. As a PM colleague of mine put it succinctly, "Middle school lunch rooms are holocracies too." I would say that a holocracy can work, so long as the corporate culture supports it... just like every other management strategy.

<comment><USER10> Disclaimer: I have no idea what holacracy is or how it works, this is the first time I heard the term.

But this:

> _market conditions shift too quickly to allow management to have the sole > responsibility for making decisions_

rubs me the wrong way.

Making decisions and bearing the responsibility and accepting the consequences of past decisions, is the sole task -- indeed the sole purpose of management. If they cease making decisions then what good are they?

Now, if "holacracy" means that there is no management anymore, it may be fine; however

\- the tone and the very existence of the memo seem to tell otherwise; there is something extremely funny about "mandatory self-organization"

\- salaried positions are (to me) a little like a deal with the devil: you give up freedom, in exchange for peace of mind and not having to make too many decisions. This holacracy thing sounds like a trick by the devil in order to not hold his end of the bargain.

<comment><USER11> A person or group playing the role of management would likely still exist. The point is that it arises organically through natural leadership within the organically self-assembling structure. In fact accepting the consequences is much more real to this version of management in that the effects of poor decisions are immediate. In a self-organizing structure, their power can be swiftly removed by the masses. Meanwhile poor management in more rigid structure can survive much longer and is frequently untouchable.

<comment><USER12> >In a self-organizing structure, their power can be swiftly removed by the masses. Meanwhile poor management in more rigid structure can survive much longer and is frequently untouchable.

Meanwhile in a self-organizing structure you can get the shaft, because a good decision did not turn out too well.

I also don't see how this system solves the "politics" problem. I actually think it makes it even worse. People will premeditate and ploy much more, if a consensus is the only thing standing between them and power. As e result many bad decisions will be made in the name of compromise and favors.

"A camel is a horse, designed by a committee."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Self-organizing isn't hard at all. As a species, humans automatically self- organize in any group great than about 4 or 5 people.

The problem is that people self-organize to optimize some instinctual pattern, not to optimize towards business goals. The moment you start organizing towards some other goal than what we naturally do, you are no longer "self- organizing", period.

Holacracy and other mumbo jumbo choose to ignore this simple fact, and pretend like anybody can do anybody else's job and you'll find that once you start to map out how "self-organizing" organizations always work, they aren't in fact self-organized at all.

It's actually quite maddening.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think this article highlights the real need for a managing layer. I know that many people, especially in this forum, will bristle and pop an artery just from reading that last sentence, but reality is that the problem does not lie in management, it lies with inappropriate management.

There is an interesting article, I believe from the HBR, which outlines the fallacy in today's perspective on management, especially in corporations, where the negative perspective of managers was incubated. The problem lies in that corporate culture sees management as a hierarchical and honorary title, rather than a specific task and function.

What that leads to is coders who would rather simply code and build being "promoted" to management, and hating it while also largely being unprepared for it's specific skill set, and you have managers, who, much like politicians, are more interested in the career and advancement than the actual function of managing. A managers function is to leverage, organize, and clear the path for the team they manage; their primary and sole purpose should be structure and lubrication, not micro-managing and strategic direction.

</comment><comment><USER15> The link to Blinkracy was especially useful for providing two things:

1\. A guide to introducing Holacracy to an existing organization

2\. A simplified form a Holacracy that doesn't turn off people who aren't used to reading board game instructions

I highly recommend it. [https://www.blinkist.com/page19/holacracy-ebook- download](https://www.blinkist.com/page19/holacracy-ebook-download)

</comment><comment><USER16> "While we've made decent progress on understanding the workings of the system of Holacracy and capturing work/accountabilities in Glass Frog..."

Sometimes I like to imagine how my grandparents would react to phrases like this.

</comment><comment><USER17> _> "People aren't ants (and organizations aren't immune systems)."_

Yes, see also "sociobiology", [http://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/01/against- sociobiol...](http://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/01/against-sociobiology)

 _"..the science correspondent of the New York Times , wrote a front page article for the newspaper, "Updating Darwin on Behavior," outlining sociobiology's principal claim. In the older view, Rensberger wrote, the insect societies of bees and ants and the hierarchies of monkeys were seen as "evidence for the remarkable variety of nature." Now, however, researchers were coming to a "more profound conclusion." Beneath the variety there lay "common behavioral patterns governed by the genes and shaped by Darwinian evolution.

..there is a book that cries out to be written -- a debunking of the whole "genomania" upon which sociobiology was largely based. Perhaps we should think of it as the astrology of the modern academy, with the fashionable microcosm now replacing the heavenly spheres. Just as mysterious emanations from celestial objects were once thought to shape character (with a role reserved for free will), so today mysterious emanations from molecular objects are thought to do the same (with a role reserved for the environment)._"

<comment><USER18> I never understood the "genomania" approach, it's pretty clear that in science and technology we don't limit ourselves to the information contained in our genes, I don't see why they should have any weight either in morals or social organization.

I understand the value as descriptive tools, but even in social behaviors that may be very influenced by genes, once you are aware of those patterns they are very easy to detect and choose whether you decide to follow them or not, so even if we were 100% determined by our genes, once we learn the way in which we are determined we would be in the position to move in a different direction. Genes can't help us decide what to do, we will have to make the choice by ourselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh, this "self-organize" reminds me of a company I worked at where the management insisted on "only hiring people who are self-managing."

I realized, much later, that it was because management was _completely horrible_ at management.

Why would a person who can manage and run themselves so well that they don't need management come to work for us?

I wasted many fewer years of my life there than some other people (including those management quacks) did, so I'm pretty happy about having escaped.</comment>


Announcing Apple IIgs System 6.0.2 - <AUTHOR> http://www.callapple.org/software/announcing-apple-iigs-system-6-0-2/

<comment><USER2> Actually, 6.0.3 was just released: [http://a2central.com/6499/the-source- awakens-system-6-0-3/](http://a2central.com/6499/the-source-awakens- system-6-0-3/)

Exciting times for IIgs hackers!

<comment><USER3> The turnaround for 6.0.3 was quite a bit better than 6.0.2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Q2b0VpW...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Q2b0VpWmZBQJ:www.callapple.org/software/announcing- apple-iigs-system-6-0-2/+&cd=1)

</comment><comment><USER5> My first Apple was a IIgs. We ran a bulletin board system (BBS) on a 2400 bps modem hooked up to a second phone line in the basement. The hard drive was 20 MB and was seriously the size of a large shoebox.

Good times on that machine.

<comment><USER6> Still got it? I bet its still good times.

(Old computers never die .. their users do!)

<comment><USER5> Yup. Sitting in my mom's basement. I'm sure it still works.

<comment><USER6> Would love to hear how you boot it up and crank up the fun times!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Grew up on these, my dad had a couple of em around the house. They were so far ahead of even the Performa machines we had at school in so many ways; it really instilled this notion that what you had to work with in terms of raw materials could sometimes take a second seat to ingenuity and drive. Super great system.

</comment><comment><USER8> Man, how cool would it be if Apple talked to the devs of this and officially released it as a nostalgia treat or something?

<comment><USER6> How cool would it be if we didn't abandon these old systems but rather put them to use again, in a new context?

Crazier things have happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's awesome to see old machines like this get a little love. The IIgs is obviously very limited in what it can do by today's standards, but these community updates make it that much more usable for what it can do.

Now if only a copy of the Classic Mac OS source would kindly surface itself…

<comment><USER10> The Mac OS System 7.1 source code was leaked a few years back.

<comment><USER11> Is System 7 considered abandonware yet?

<comment><USER12> >Is System 7 considered abandonware yet?

"Abondonware" isn't a real legal status, so it depends on who you ask. But considering Apple still exists, is litigious, and has had classic OS images on its ftp site as of a few years ago (and for all I know, still), I'm going to say no.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If at all possible, please consider building things like this as static websites. It makes them faster, cheaper and much more tolerant to load spikes like this.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had a friend when I was a kid with a IIgs. They were such cool computers.

I dont understand this though.. this is seriously a new release of the OS? That is awesome!

<comment><USER15> Out of curiosity, what made them different from e.g. a PC with 386 CPU? I guess price may be one thing, but other than that?

<comment><USER16> Mostly it is an "end-volution" of the Apple II. The CPU was the 16 bits version of the 6502 In addition, it has a really nice sound chip and nice graphics. It could play all the Apple // softwares. And the OS is "mac-ish"

<comment><USER17> My understanding is that the Apple IIG was designed by members of the Mac team. It's also worth noting that the IIGS had resolution, speed, memory and color that would not be matched on the Mac or PC for years more to come. It was an extraordinary machine. (disclosure: I created HyperStudio for the Apple IIGS in 1988, and the rest, as they say, is history).

<comment><USER18> Wow! I _loved_ HyperStudio. We learned so much using it in my school, and I still actually have a floppy disc in my collection with my HyperStudio stack. It's an honour to be able to tip my hat and raise a glass for your contribution. :)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31250/gifs/kudos.gif](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31250/gifs/kudos.gif)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Really need to dig my GS out of that box in my garage. Bit scared of things not working after 15 years...

</comment><comment><USER20> I assume I would need the original hardware for this?

My oldest Mac is a 1995 MacBook running 7.6.1, the nicest classic OS I've seen. The battery's long been dead, but the machine still runs on mains power.

<comment><USER2> It should run just fine on an emulator. If you've got a Mac, Sweet16 is the way to go: [http://www.sheppyware.net/software- mac/sweet16/](http://www.sheppyware.net/software-mac/sweet16/)

However, I get the feeling you are thinking of Mac OS - this is for the Apple IIgs - an entirely different beast. However, if you're interested in running old versions of Mac OS, give Basilisk II a try: [http://basilisk.cebix.net/](http://basilisk.cebix.net/)

Most Older OSes up to 7.5.5 can be downloaded directly from Apple last I checked. I particularly liked Mac OS 6.0.8 for it's simplicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Does anybody know if the fonts used on the old mac and IIgs are available somewhere?

<comment><USER22> Just copy them off a mac, there are TrueType versions of most of the original ones in System 7.5.

Starting at Susan Kare's Wikipedia page I was able to find links to public domain versions of Chicago [1] and Charcoal [2], which other ones do you want ?

EDIT: There are also bitmap versions of mac fonts in ET++ [3], an early X11 toolkit.

[1] [http://christtrekker.users.sourceforge.net/fnt/chicago.shtml](http://christtrekker.users.sourceforge.net/fnt/chicago.shtml) [2] [http://www.scootergraphics.com/virtue/](http://www.scootergraphics.com/virtue/) [3] [http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/lib...](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/c_plus_plus/library/et_plus_plus)

<comment><USER21> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> About time.

</comment><comment><USER23> Man, makes me wish I had a IIgs.</comment>


List of Curated Startup Resources - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q18eOlcaAD8&t=20s <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I am creating a list of curated resources that revolves around startups. Ideation, Growth, MVP, Validation, etc. The list entails articles, videos, books, podcasts.

If you would like to check it out visit [https://gumroad.com/products/KXuUaX](https://gumroad.com/products/KXuUaX)</comment>


Ask HN: BountySplit.com: UBER + Affiliate Marketing - <AUTHOR> Affiliate marketing for personal services? Earn 5-15% for referring others to post their project on bountysplit.com. Am I on to something? <comment><AUTHOR> would 2 tiers be better or worse?

visit [http://www.betterpro.net/](http://www.betterpro.net/) for an idea of the look and feel of the potential site.</comment>


Why American dental insurance is so unspeakably awful - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/03/30/why_american_dental_insurance_is_so_unspeakably_awful_partner/ <comment><USER2> The article doesn't really answer the question of _why_ U.S. dental insurance has such low yearly limits on coverage (compared to medical insurance). Or why dental procedures are insured separately from other medical procedures in the first place. After all, the teeth are as much a part of the body as the lungs or the appendix. How did this arbitrary division come to be?</comment>


How Amazon's Culture Enables Innovation - <AUTHOR> https://www.bri-associates.com/blog/2018/8/3/how-amazons-culture-enables-innovation-t3pls <comment><AUTHOR> Although the target audience for the post may be more medium to large'ish companies working on new business innovation (and the creative agencies trying to help them) - I particularly like the parts about focusing on free cash flow and self-service & service oriented platforms.</comment>


Improved Google Weather - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/#hl=en&sugexp=efis&gs_nf=1&tok=qIsX-i2vwC7EsElYKIydmA&cp=10&gs_id=12&xhr=t&q=weather+seattle&pf=p&safe=off&sclient=psy-ab&oq=weather+se&aq=&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=1616467a2fd62d6f&biw=1680&bih=929

<comment><USER2> Needs better wording. At first i thought it was a wiki-like effort to collect more accurate temperature information (far fetched, i know, but i 'm conditioned). I dismissed it without realizing its aprilfoolness

<comment><USER3> Also, after you set the weather it doesn't actually edit the weather display, there's just a "Dismiss" button.

It would have been so much cooler if it did that. Ooh! And then stored the result in a cookie so every time you go back it shows "your" weather. You could wow your friends by showing them how you can edit Google.*

Ah well.

* Actually, this could be an even better April Fool's joke: rearrange and edit the Google search results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> .. this is clearly an April Fools joke.. "do you agree to be responsible for the weather in Seattle?". I'd say yes, but I have a feel that Chuck Norris,who's actually in charge, might not like that.

</comment><comment><USER5> Can someone explain, please? I don't seem to get a much different result than before?

<comment><USER6> They added a feature to let you change the weather if you don't like it.

Screenshots if you're not seeing it: <http://imgb.mp/h8k.jpg> <http://imgb.mp/h8l.jpg>

<comment><USER7> Oh, I thought that Update Weather was something related to choosing a different city to look at the weather for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like they were a bit hasty in doing it. When I search "weather chicago" it breaks ... <http://flic.kr/p/bHDLKn>

</comment><comment><USER9> I've left my coffee on the window, then I changed the temperature to 100 Celsius. It's been a hour. It's getting colder and colder. Does not work!!

lol

<comment><USER10> You must be insane. Good thing it didn't work!

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Coming next year: self-driving weather machines!</comment>


The Rsync Algorithm from author Andrew Tridgell [2000] - <AUTHOR> http://olstrans.sourceforge.net/release/OLS2000-rsync/OLS2000-rsync.html

<comment><USER2> 'recent work on getting the rsync algorithm into a variety of everyday protocols, such as CVS and HTTP.'

Sadly a case of parallel invention means that the rsync algorithm was covered by someone else's patent, meaning it was never able to be integrated into HTTP 1.2.</comment>


Ask HN: Interesting Online Communities? - <AUTHOR> I love Telegram. In my opinion it's the best messaging application out there; but lately, I've found that a couple of my Telegram groups are just an endless stream of dumb gifs and stickers. Don't get me wrong, I love gifs and stickers, but the abuse of them just kill conversations. This is not a problem with the platform itself. It's more a problem of the members of such conversations. There's no more arguing anymore, if you want to make a point, just send a funny gif and that's it. No more writing. No more discussion. No more thought process beyond `@gif evil laugh`. And that's a shame.
Jim Rohn once said > You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with
So I'm trying to find an online community that is focused in discussing interesting topics and making new (online) friends. IRC, Slack, anything would do it. <comment><USER2> This is a niche interest that you may not share, but I enjoy this cyberpunk Facebook group: [https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/cyberpunkculture/)

I also find that my favorite online communities are really just loosely organized coalitions of Twitter acquaintances who share certain interests (e.g. Media Twitter). Tumblr is good for the same purpose. But it's not as simple as just dropping in -- you have to cultivate your circle.

Slate Star Codex commenters tend to be particularly thoughtful and interesting people. If you can stand to navigate a WordPress comments section, that's a good community.</comment>


Awesome perks for a Web Backend & Data Systems Engineer in SF - <AUTHOR> http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/1679215401.html

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised companies don't offer more perks, like massages and a stocked fridge. I worked for a company that provided lunch, and it turned out when the company paid and had food delivered, lunch only lasted 30 minutes. Leaving the office took at least an hour and a half. 1 more hour of productivity for $15 is a bargain when you're paying devs at least $50/hour when you add up all the benefits and taxes.</comment>


Austin's Fix for Homelessness: Tiny Houses, and Lots of Neighbors - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/11/community-first-village-homeless-tiny-homes-austin-texas/575611/ <comment><AUTHOR> It's as if building housing units for people will ameliorate the homelessness problem; perhaps SF and LA could consider a similar approach. For that matter, perhaps both cities could legalize building more housing units for non- homeless people too, thus ameliorating their housing crises.</comment>


Chrome Data Compression Proxy for Carriers and ISPs - <AUTHOR> https://developer.chrome.com/multidevice/data-compression-for-isps <comment><USER2> Interesting, I was expecting to see something about QUIC/UDP and was pleasantly disturbed by something different entirely.

First takeaway: SSL is optional? Let's the games begin! Better pay your ISPs on time, or God knows what they will accuse you of, extralegally or not, to get encryption turned off here.

Second takeaway: our company had major problems with upstream link from a local ISP to VPN across the Atlantic to the link on the other end and egress traffic out of our main office. It is really more than one, but you get the idea. The ISP in the US mentioned "caching problems" when we had many users with irritably high latency for Google servers: slow page loads, terribly syncing, crappy IMAP, but only for Google services we use. This data compression stuff seems limited. Does Google have boxes on-prem for ISPs a la Netflix that do the same thing or is improperly configuring this for an ISP enough to do damage?

[https://openconnect.netflix.com/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/)

<comment><USER3> Yes its called GGC. [https://peering.google.com/#/](https://peering.google.com/#/)

We got ours delivered about 6 months ago. It usually works fine but once in a while google services will act up, but most of the time the issue is at ISP end because even the GGC nodes needs BW to pull non-cached content, but if your ISP is overselling BW it will really hamper the performance on the GGC nodes. The GGC nodes themselves have capacity limitation, our 3 nodes has a total capacity of 19gbps, I am guessing if we were to saturate that throughput then the services will be affected.

<comment><USER4> That's interesting, mind expanding on your problems?

I know that as a BT (uk) ISP customer mostly I can ping google.com and it returns in 6ms from a BT IP, which would indicate they're using GGC. Sometimes it resolves to a Google IP in 12 ms.

Last month however it started resolving all the way to Amsterdam and subsequently to the US with a corresponding increase in ping time. Was this their way of saving energy by shutting down DCs, or was it a bigger problem like capacity or an outage? Either way despite the latency issues the fact it always works in a plus for their infrastructure team.

<comment><USER3> I am sorry I cant get in to specifics. But Routing for GGC is controlled by Google, it is not out of ordinary for your google traffic to not come directly from the GGC node of you ISP. Any internal routing change by your ISP might also cause your Google traffic not coming from your ISP GGC node.

There are too many variables its hard to tell what exactly caused your issues.

But generally speaking GGC nodes are very reliable, their support is responsive and knows what they are doing very well and most importantly it saves us insane amount of money (cause BW is expensive here), and our users are getting better service.

<comment><USER5> Are you able to disclose if it caches/proxies YouTube?

<comment><USER3> Yes of course, the main traffic is youtube bw, which I think its 95% of the total traffic going through ggc nodes. But the don't have a breakdown of their traffic on GGC dashboard. We know it because we know our traffic before we had GGC and after we had GGC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Because requests to destination websites are sent from Google's servers, the IP address of the client making the connection will reflect the location of Google's servers, not the user. The DCP sends the IP address of the client in the X-Forwarded-For header with each request, for example: X-Forwarded-For: 18.104.22.168"

Web servers shouldn't blindly respect this X-Forwarded-For header coming from any random server.

<comment><USER7> _Websites should use the X-Forwarded-For header to determine the IP address of the client for the purpose of IP geolocation._

I don't think they're suggesting you just assume that the IP is correct, only that if you are doing some kind of regional customisation that you can use that X-Forwarded-For header to help.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In an increasingly end-to-end encrypted world, wouldn't services like this be going away eventually?

<comment><USER9> Yeah honestly. You'd naively think that with increased bandwidth, we'd be playing fewer backwards games. But you'd be wrong, because more traffic actually means it's more enticing for providers to engage in such "optimization".

We're at the point where the end-to-end principle really _requires_ strong crypto to resist economic attacks such as this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> So how hard would it be for a user to bypass a network block on encryption? Just redirect the URL given to a server that returns the right page (or doesn't exist)?

<comment><USER11> Same thought here, wondering if it's deliberately easy to circumvent and they only implemented this due to force of hand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to self-host something like this (plus ad-blocking) to minimise my mobile traffic consumption, any recommendations for a lightweight Linux VPS system?

<comment><USER13> mod_pagespeed: [http://modpagespeed.com/](http://modpagespeed.com/)

[https://00f.net/2012/06/02/mod-pagespeed-as-a-proxy-for- your...](https://00f.net/2012/06/02/mod-pagespeed-as-a-proxy-for-your-phone/)

<comment><USER14> No security. Maybe binding it to localhost and using squid as a frontend with authentication would work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow Google is screwing encryption, nsa honey pot

<comment><USER16> No. According to this document, there is always _at least_ as much encryption with this proxy enabled as it is without.</comment></comment>


Can an App Be Too Successful? Ask 'Trivia Crack' - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/can-an-app-be-too-successful-ask-trivia-crack-1424458516

<comment><USER2> >Also bogging down the review process is a consistent glut of questions that are basically the same but posed in slightly different ways.

I will say that this should have been predicted. Most questions are going to be affected by current popular culture or knowledge gained in school. Almost everybody has easy access to that data and therefore is the most likely to be used data to generate questions.

Take stackexchange for example. Most questions that are asked these days are a rehash of a previously asked question.</comment>


Show HN: A free tool to monitor and implement DMARC - <AUTHOR> http://dmarc.postmarkapp.com/?utm_source=hn&utm_medium=board&utm_campaign=dmarc <comment><USER2> We used this and discovered that our "authenticated" Mailchimp campaigns were actually failing to be validated properly, and some email systems (especially corporate systems with spam filtering appliances like Barracuda) were not delivering our email. DMARC didn't help tell us that our mail wasn't being delivered, per se, but once we made a change (our own spf/dkim records, along with other DNS-related changes) and stopped using Mailchimp's authentication, our following campaigns have seen a higher deliver rate (evidenced by more opens, clicks, and OOF responses for campaigns that aren't fundamentally different).

I'd also recommend, in addition to Postmark's tool (not in place of), checking out [https://dmarcian.com](https://dmarcian.com). You can use both at once for DMARC aggregate reports, and additionally forward the forensic DMARC reports to _dmarcian_ for analysis.

It's been said before, but email deliverability is _hard_. Thank goodness tools like this are around to help us mere mortals understand more of it, and protect the repute to of our domains in the process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi spdustin. Thanks for the comment. Deliverability is crucial, and that's one reason we built our free DMARC tool. We want anyone sending transactional email to have their emails reliably delivered to the inbox. dmarcian looks like a great tool as well, so thanks for recommending it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all! I'm Jack and I work on the Postmark team at Wildbit. This is a free tool from Postmark to help you monitor and implement DMARC for your domain. DMARC is a standard that prevents hackers and spammers from using your domain to send spam without your permission. The tool helps you do this by processing reports from major ISPs about your domain's DMARC alignment and turns them into beautiful, human-readable weekly email digests, absolutely free. If you have any questions about this tool, I and one or two other members of the Postmark team will be around to answer your questions.

<comment><USER3> Does implementing DMARC help prevent normal email from your domain getting marked as spam?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi there Synergyse! It can. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like Google lets users set up DMARC for regular Gmail accounts. But, you can set up DMARC for Google Apps emails. First you need to set up DKIM and SPF for your Google Apps domain. Once DKIM and SPF are set up, you should start to implement DMARC slowly. Here's a good resource that will help you implement it: [https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563?hl=en](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2466563?hl=en). Thanks and let me know if you have any other questions!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should also add that the folks at Postmark who created this great tool were Chris Nagele, Artem Chistyakov, and Derek Rushforth.</comment>


Ask HN: What updates are you most excited about? - <AUTHOR> I feel like this is an incredible time for tech and software progress right now.
There will be a stable branch of Wine 4.0 not too long from now. The Halo Online team is gearing up to put out their 0.6 release of ElDewrito. Linux Mint 19 is due in the next 2 months. And apparently version 5.0 of the Linux kernel will also be rolling out this year.
https://www.winehq.org/news/ http://blog.eldewrito.com/ https://medium.com/@dylanamlinux/a-sneak-peak-at-linux-mint-19-d4a049d8efc7
Are there any significant updates that you have been eagerly anticipating? <comment><USER2> Ubuntu 18 is about yo come out!</comment>