Software development: do good manners matter? - <AUTHOR> https://peerj.com/preprints/1515v1/ <comment><USER3> People are less creative when they feel disrespected. If you're running a military or places like UPS, where your work value can be boiled down to time and motion studies, it makes a ton of sense to break down people's sense of self: they are being asked to become machines, after all.

Torvald's recent screed on _Management via perkele_ , where rudeness is encouraged, interestingly, was born from his time serving in the Finnish military. Could Linux be even better if he dropped this mentality? Maybe. He insists that by being rude you stop tacit political behavior which would undermine technical excellence. But this seems contradictory. _Management by perkele_ is by definition a form of tacit politics.

Torvalds position: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ017D_JOPY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ017D_JOPY)

Other points of interest:

[https://hbr.org/2013/01/the-high-cost-of-rudeness- at-w/](https://hbr.org/2013/01/the-high-cost-of-rudeness-at-w/)

[https://hbr.org/2013/01/the-price-of-incivility](https://hbr.org/2013/01/the- price-of-incivility)

<comment><USER4> The Linux project is probably not the best place to look for this sort of thing. It's _huge_. It's completely plausible that a project big enough to have multiple layers may have different optimal levels of politeness in those different layers.

It's also plausible that larger projects may simply not be able to function with total politeness, as they face threats that smaller projects can only dream of facing. Even if you've only followed the kernel development via HN over the years, you've heard of any number of instances of someone who has a very strong opinion about where the kernel should go, and basically can only be fended off with a flamethrower. Sometimes the fault lies not in the person wielding the flamethrower, but in the person who would not be dissuaded by anything less. (That's a general comment, not about any specific controversy.)

It's also possible that Linus' attitude is a complete disaster, that the only reason the project is successful is a major case of right-place-at-the-right- time, and in the parallel universe where Linus is a perfectly polite person Linux is much farther along.

Again, my real point is that the outlier projects may not be the best places to look, because they intrinsically live in environments very unlike the environments most open source projects live in.

<comment><USER3> I think your point is valid (and I agree).

However, your argument is _not_ what Linus himself has emphasized. He emphasizes that his abrasiveness comes from the idea that _people must earn respect._ Which is more than just wrong, it's completely idiotic. If life were about _earning_ respect, what are you supposed to do if people disrespect you? Aren't we right back to marching from Selma to Montgomery?

<comment><USER5> It occurs to me that you might be touching on the difference between "earn respect" and "earn freedom from disrespect".

Also, the need to distinguish what different respects mean. There is respect as a person, versus respect as a knowledgeable kernel developer.

(They are not always easy to separate. If someone keeps pushing their bad development ideas even though they have been thoroughly debunked, just because of their ego, I think my respect for them as a person will drop somewhat not only as a developer.)

Still, the default toward some new person should be: basic respect as a person, neutral as a developer. I think that this is the case in the OSS project model; but then where it breaks down is that if the latter respect tanks, then the former does also. I.e. you're a good person if you're a good hacker (in particular one with mostly the same opinions as me), otherwise you're _non grata_ scum.

<comment><USER3> Yes of course. I would prefer if Linus made the distinction you're making by actually saying something like "respect _as a programmer_ " But he didn't do that.

When you program something correctly, it's expected to be correct _to the keystroke._ Here I think we should be able to expect correct _to the point of distinct idea_ which is not what's coming across. It's almost to the point where Linus appears as an old man from pre civil rights days about things.

<comment><USER6> > When you program something correctly, it's expected to be correct _to the > keystroke_.

Are you saying that this is the philosophy Torvalds holds? If you are not, then please disregard the rest of this paragraph (and, if you have the time, please let me know what you _did_ mean.). If you are, then I'mma slap a big [citation needed] on that comment. While searching for that citation, do keep in mind that writing code for OS kernel is usually going to require _much_ more in-depth knowledge of _how_ a compiler optimizes things and the like than writing code for some CRUD application. This means that -not infrequently- single-character errors _do_ have substantial significance.

<comment><USER3> Uh, It sounds like we're in violent agreement? What I'm saying is that if you code it wrong it's completely wrong, even if it's only off by one keystroke. There's no guessing. Computers aren't flexible in interpreting what you're writing. I don't think this requires a citation from Torvalds. It's just a fact.

<comment><USER6> > Uh, It sounds like we're in violent agreement?

So we are! I -somehow- _completely_ failed to understand the subtext in your statement. :(

Mea maxima culpa. Please disregard my stupidity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In this thread I see a few comments assuming that polite VS blatantly rude are the only options. If for "polite" we mean, accepting bad contributions, ideas, code, yep that's a problem, but to refuse contribs that don't match the idea of the person in charge of a project does _not need_ to be as bad as we see in certain cases. It is possible to say negative things about ideas or code in a decent way and very firmly at the same time, without attaching persons, and without creating an environment where new ideas are limited since, well, you are going to be insulted if your idea is less than excellent. A couple examples:

Behavior A: This code is a good example about _how you should never write code_ , it's going to explode in the hand of users, it's going to make our project a piece of crap. Please don't do that, how many times I've to repeat that... you are a long time contrib, it is unacceptable you send me such a crap of stupid patch.

Behavior B: Sorry, I think the patch is not good because it does not test correctly for <some-technical-reason-here>. Without this check the code works today but may fail tomorrow. Because our project needs an high level of stability, we can't merge such a contribution. Please could you review it or perhaps even rewrite it in a way that's going to be very stable? Thanks.

I think both A and B send the same message, but with "A" the problem is that the contributor may never return back or may be offended. Life is already tough, there is no need to be offended randomly because you are trying to give code for free.

<comment><USER8> How about C:

We have a tight deadline. Why don't you approach this by doing x and y. After we're finished and have production code deployed, you can refactor into z.

In the process of implementing x and y, the developer will soon learn that z is inferior. If he doesn't, you need to get rid of him because he's incapable of learning.

<comment><USER9> antirez is approaching it from the open source point of view - businesses are different in many ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of comments are voicing opinions about politeness, but I'd like to focus on the study. In particular, I'd like to disagree with the conclusion. If you look at their stats and box plots, its a mess. They should run the Wilson test on all their data, not split it up by project. Also, the effect size is miniscule. In a couple of cases, it's negative, though p > 0.05 for those.

Before reading this study, I thought politeness helped fix issues faster. Now, I'm of the opinion that it has little or no effect. Of course, polite discourse is more pleasant, so I'll continue to be nice when communicating.

<comment><USER11> Well done.

<comment><USER11> I should go further. There is a significant amount of data that doesn't work well with their conclusions. I also find the example of "impolite" comments hilarious. It seems to be detecting the imperative vs. detecting impoliteness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There are people out there who will take your politeness and use it against you like a weapon. Telemarketers, for one. The only way to get off the phone is to interrupt them and unilaterally end the conversation.

Fake monks are another good example. They ask you a question, like "what do you want most in the world," which you answer just to be polite. They then write your answer on a token, and give it to you. You feel obligated to accept it because they made it just for you. Then, they ask for a donation in return for the gift you just accepted. Again you feel obligated, this time because you accepted their gift.

The entire thing depends on your polite response to each of their actions. Unless you know where they're going with this, it's impossible to politely escape. By the time I was handing over the money, I _knew_ it was a scam and I still gave them $10 because I felt stupid.

While I have never personally had cause to be impolite during my professional work, sometimes politeness is an improper response.

<comment><USER13> Influence scams are no reason to skip on politeness. The scams use a few well known psychological switches. Once you realize you are being under a dishonest influence attempt it is very easy to disconnect from the process - <USER2> politely, if firmly. I suggest "Influence" by Robert Cialdini as a well written general survival guide against the influence artists of the world and as a guidebook as well..

<comment><USER14> I think the more useful way to look at his comment is that similar tactics as these "influence scams" can be used within projects. I've personally found it difficult sometimes to walk the line between bluntness and rudeness. There are going to be instances where a co-worker will continue down the wrong path or make the same mistakes or just not conform to the proper design philosophies or decisions, but things will keep stalling during any polite discussion as they keep walking around the issues while you try to come to the correct decision that they don't want to do (either through ignorance or perceived excessive effort required). At the end of the day, you can't always rely on your manager to step up and say "you are wrong, do it the other way", and informing a stubborn co-worker that their work/decision is stupid can be difficult to do politely if they engage in delaying or obstructive tactics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it really shocking that people's feelings about things are closely tied to motivation? My level of motivation absolutely plummets when someone is mean to me. It doesn't matter if they were right or whether it was deserved or not. People need to take people's feelings into consideration when they are making comments on other's work.

<comment><USER16> My motivation rises when people piss me off. I have something to prove, the best way I can say "fuck off" is by working hard and proving you wrong.

Telling me the truth might hurt my feeling but that is not disrespectful or rude. If I fuck up, tell me so. If you work with me, I'm not going to take your feelings into consideration when making comment's about your work. I'm going to take your experience tho. If you are new, I'll be gentle. But if you have doing this for a long time and should know better or/and like to act like you know it all, you have it coming!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you have a problem with someone's code, tell them about it, and be an adult about it. I've read Linus' numerous public outings of what he thinks are less talented developers, and it's childish, end of story. Nobody works well in that environment.

It's a simple cost/benefit thing for me; the costs are you lose talented developers who may be more sensitive to criticism, which people like Linus say is a good thing because apparently the quality of your work is partially determined by your ability to handle assholes. The benefit side is you get to act like a child publicly and not be treated like one. The cost doesn't come close to justifying the benefit.

In short: Linus and everyone like him need to grow up.

<comment><USER18> _I 've read Linus' numerous public outings of what he thinks are less talented developers, and it's childish, end of story._

Not the end of story.

I've read many of the same articles. Carefully. And most of the time I've learned something good about software development.

Not necessarily about how to express myself to co-workers. But about software development.

<comment><USER17> I've never once questioned his competence, he's clearly great at what he does. But you could be the best software dev on the planet, you act like that toward me, there isn't enough money on the planet to make me work with you. I'd sooner change careers.

<comment><USER19> Interesting. I guess it comes down to personal preference. Would you rather work with somebody exceptional but abrasive, as opposed to somebody average but nice? I think many people would choose the former.

I think the reason exceptional people are abrasive is that they are primarily harsh to themselves, and that's the reason of their success. Being harsh to others is merely a side effect.

And there are people like that in every profession, for example in modern magic Dai Vernon (one of the most respected magicians that ever lived), who was also infamous for being very critical to bad magicians.

<comment><USER17> Abrasive and abusive are too very different things. Linus frequently slides into the latter. Abrasive, to me, means if you do something stupid you'll be called out and told what's wrong. Abusive is when that conversation turns into name calling.

You can be as hard on yourself as you please, and we are often our own worst critic. When those complaints let fly to other ears, they should be phrased a little better.

Again, your preference may vary. Me? I work with adults, I don't care how good the other kids are.

<comment><USER19> > Abusive is when that conversation turns into name calling.

I don't think so; it depends on context. If someone calls you names in context of you doing something stupid, then it's not abuse, it's just being abrasive. Abuse would be had he done it without you giving a reason. And I think we should save the word abuse for the latter (and also perhaps for something where is a profit motive).

I mean, every post from Linus where he uses harsh words has some context like that. He just doesn't randomly throws insults to his colleagues. You can read the insults as an abuse or you can read them as a big yellow warning signs - your choice.

> When those complaints let fly to other ears, they should be phrased a little > better.

Here the "should" is a cultural choice. It's a universal, safe option. It's like being polite to people you don't know, or being diplomatic in diplomacy.

But in the cultural context of kernel development, you're already part of the in-group. And in that particular in-group, being called names is normal and accepted by the insiders. That it happens on the Internet, for the outsiders to see, doesn't change the fact that the cultural choice was made _freely_ by insiders.

And people who prefer the former to the latter (as per my previous post) probably don't care to much about being called names when they do stupid thing (being abused, as you call it, but they actually don't want to be really abused or tolerate it either) - because with that mentality, it's results or your own improvement that matters, not so much who is polite. I think Linus would be OK if other people called him names when he does something stupid, however it doesn't happen mostly because people respect him and he doesn't do stupid things very often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How to be a delightful open source contributor:

* Of course you are not obligated to respond at all or in a timely manner, but if you do, it's a real treat for the person filing an issue.

* Respect the other person's abilities and skills. When troubleshooting, use language that recognizes the abilities of the other person. For example, instead of "Did you read the documentation?" say "Can you double-check the documentation, especially the section on ____?"

* Keep issues open until the person who filed the issue feels like their problem is resolved. Of course, if the person does not respond for a long time, then there's no harm in closing the issue.

* Get invested in the user's use case. Perhaps this is a "won't fix" scenario, but to truly understand that the issue is out of scope, you should understand exactly what the user needs, up to and including suggesting an alternative solution that is not your software. Sometimes when doing this you realize that in fact the user was correct and their problem _is_ in the scope of your software.

* Be ready to embrace humility. It is common for a user to stop by and drop a piece of information that makes you realize you made a design choice long ago that would be costly to change, both in time and emotionally. At this point you have two choices: humbly admit that you made a mistake and that your software has a limitation due to the mistake, or, humbly admit that you made a mistake and that you'll be working on fixing this mistake in the next major version bump.

* Don't leave code rotting in the main development branch for a long time. Release that code!

* When someone submits a patch, don't nitpick the code conventions. How hard is it to change tabs to spaces and rename a few variables? If the idea behind the code is sound, just merge it and fix the conventions yourself. Style conventions are arbitrary and meaningless. Reduce the friction here for people who bother to look at your source code.

* When you feel you do not have the resources to continue maintaining one of your projects, but users are still filing issues and sending patches, try to hand off the maintainer hat to someone competent. Keep the project alive!

* If your software has a bug, but it's the fault of one of your dependencies, keep a bug report open in your bug tracker too, with a link to the dependency's open bug. Your dependencies' bugs are your bugs too.

I'm sure there are more; that's just what I thought of off the top of my head.

</comment><comment><USER21> This study doesn't account for the "good cop bad cop" tactic many projects run.

Politeness is maintained on the mailing list, but undesirable posters are tracked down and bullied behind the scenes where proof who's doing it is difficult. This happened to me 10 yrs ago when I started posting casually on a mailing list for a new programming language. I've found overall (not by statistical analysis, but by personal impression) that this tends to happen more when the project leader has a management rather than technical background. Many open source contributors learn their skills in paid employment first so the political skills of online project managers are often more developed than what you find on the job. And because open source contribution is far more global and with a more permanent record than a local job somewhere, the effects are often long-lasting for those involved.

In such good cop bad cop behavior, maybe the real situation tends to show itself over time, just as shown in the study. That project I was trying to politely join has evolved into a blatant "smoke and mirrors" environment that few people trust.

<comment><USER22> You're right, and they do acknowledge this to some degree in section 5 ("Threats to Validity"). The projects they monitored were unaware of having been so, therefore the authors would have had no way to observe much nuance. They could only what was publicly visible.

<comment><USER23> Even though they weren't able to see the offline arguments, it's still telling about a project when the arguments are brought out into the open.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The results don't surprise me but I do think there is more than one way to have a thriving development culture. While not mutually exclusive, I think blunt/transparent environments are just as, if not more effective, than polite environments.

A blunt environment requires a certain level of professionalism but actively knowing you will be challenged when its called for and knowing everyone is simply striving to do whats best for the cause can be really refreshing.

I'm known to request that people tell me when I'm full of shit. I'd much rather have a moment of subtle hostility than a stretch of time where I operate under false assumptions. Once people acknowledge it's not personal, it allows everyone to move much faster.

<comment><USER25> I can appreciate the need for gut checks, and have asked people for feedback so I can get a better idea of how I'm being perceived. But the burden of knowing when you're full of shit should really fall on the individual. So to that end I think we should all strive to be conscious of how our words and actions affect those around us and the task at hand, instead of relying on someone else to rein us in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Politeness is a nice thing to have, in theory, but any attempt at enforcing politeness is a tax on creativity.

Human processes are extremely imperfect and subject to all kinds of biases and conflicts of interest. The cost of attempts at enforcement will be huge and not immediately obvious to everyone. It will silence dissent. It will create chilling effects. It will alter the balance of power towards the rules-lawyers and away from those that just want to get their work done.

I am against any sort of standard here for the same reason I am against government censorship: because it will be turned around and used against us as a weapon, for reasons that will have nothing to do with improving productivity and everything to do with some petty squabble for territory and influence.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think it may be a good thing to agree on what good manners are. I almost wish there was some sort of standard practice on this.

I know when I was starting out my career I had no idea what good manners were. One time at a milestone review I simply said: "I had to rewrite X's first pass he was using some older tech and there's better ways of doing it now." and it really blew up. My boss took me in his office afterwards and told me that probably wasn't the right thing to say that I had in fact insulted the other guy and he was hurt. Believe me it was never my intention to hurt anyone I was just stating what I did and what I knew. I apologized and we got along afterwards no harm in the long run.

That incident taught me to always be wary of corrections or talking about someone else's work. They put their heart and soul into what they do and I should respect their code and them.

<comment><USER6> > I simply said: "I had to rewrite X's first pass he was using some older tech > and there's better ways of doing it now." ... My boss ... told me that ... I > had in fact insulted the other guy...

...what? The other guy is too attached to his code.

> [People] put their heart and soul into what they do and I should respect > their code and them.

One thing that _every_ good programmer _has_ to learn to do is to be able to disentangle one's ego from one's code. It's _very_ _good_ to be proud of one's accomplishments. It's _bad_ to become so attached to one's work that one suffers injury from criticism of or attempts to improve the work.

If you love your code too much, it'll be harder for you to see (or let others help you see) where it needs improvement and when it needs to be thrown away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Intuition on this issue is not that politeness in itself matters, but that politeness would be correlated with patience. Patient development schedules are likely to result in less technical debt, fewer defects, and greater long- term throughput.

</comment><comment><USER29> The article is an methodological disaster. Calculating p multiple times and declaring that in most cases the result is significant? Just wow.

</comment><comment><USER30> This result is going to be abused by people whose ideas of good manners a) don't cover themselves because hello important work and b) are essentially a demand for deference.

<comment><USER31> Unfortunately true. A lot of the people talking the most about good manners and civility in software development turn out to themselves spend a lot of time bullying and insulting those they disagree with, and a lot of the requests for politeness are actually thinly disguised demands for political litmus tests, backed up with threats of online mobs for those who don't fall into line.

This is a pity, as I'm open to being convinced that a more polite and pleasant environment is also better for productivity, but that well has been thoroughly poisoned by its loudest advocates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The effect doesn't seem that clear. That it varies from project to project makes me believe it's just some weak correlation.

They should have tracked developer retention to those projects. People might still contribute and fix issues if someone's being a jerk, but are they going to stick around and contribute further? That's the real question to me.

Someone actively contributing for a project for years is much more desirable than someone doing drive-by PRs.

</comment><comment><USER33> How does this explain communities where there is a lot of rudeness and bullying, and yet the projects themselves are successful?

Are those projects successes despite their manners?

<comment><USER34> If you had bothered to at least read the abstract, you might have found that there is no claim that projects like that will always fail, as you insinuate. The authors merely claim that politeness is positively correlated with with a number of key metrics like time required to fix an issue and duration of project participation.

<comment><USER35> Speaking of being polite...

<comment><USER36> I tend to draw a distinction between "impoliteness on its own" and "impoliteness in response to impoliteness". Not reading TFA is, to me, the latter, and a mildly sharpish response isn't the worst thing in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Summary of answer from both common sense and the article: Yes. I suspect the answer would be the same if the question were simply "do good manners matter?", but that is probably much harder to study. This is not meant to diminish the study; confirming seemingly obvious things is important.

<comment><USER38> It's not necessarily an obvious conclusion. Many people look at the success of Linux and of Apple under Steve Jobs and conclude that a rude leader is a positive.

<comment> rm_-rf_slash One wildly successful rude leader gets thousands of times more attention and consideration than the thousands of amiable managers who do their jobs well without hurting people's feelings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I don't think it's about the surface politeness factor, but about what kind of discussion is conducted.

The ideal for an intellectual discourse is to have questions be responded to with more questions. If question is met with answer, then old ground was covered, there was nothing new to see. If answer is met with answer, you're just ramming into each other. (And yes, there are disingenuous questions, but those tend to be "Jeopardy answers".)

Politeness/rudeness does factor into that in that it "bulks up" the rhetoric. You can be a polite bullshitter or an insulting truth-seeker. You can use rhetoric tactically to goad the other person into the questioning mode, or you can use it to shut down the discussion.

</comment><comment><USER40> sometimes people get away with being assholish when they are the best at something in a group. but to combat that tendency in yourself, just remember what you would look like if someone showed up who was better than you, and not an asshole.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yes.

Thinking that you have "politeness capital" that you can "spend down" by being occasionally impolite is very wrong.

I've run into people that I refuse to work with, ranging from choosing not to do projects with them to trying really, really hard not to ever have contact with them again, by any means.

I have probably _been_ a guy that people avoided. It sucked. My advice is that, in the long game of doing stuff with other people, being professional and polite is worth it.

</comment><comment><USER42> Stick to the facts. Be respectful.

What else is there?

</comment><comment><USER43> Serious question here: Of those who have led the development of hugely successful OS in the past generation, who had the best manners when giving feedback?

Was it Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds or Steve Jobs?

<comment><USER44> It would be useful to learn if the BSD folks and their successors, or the original Bell Labs/Unix folks share these personality traits. Has anybody dealt with Bob Cutler, who had much to do with VMS and NT? Bill Joy? Fred Brooks seems to have a different reputation, and he helped create an OS as well. Is it generational?

Being unable to alter one's personal-interaction style to reflect the interaction will shed talent, so it's only safe to do in a talent-rich environment (or an environment where the talent's constrained in some way). People working in what they consider hostile environments act to minimize stress, which results in fewer ideas, fewer discussions, way less criticism and crappier products. Or they walk.

Yeah, Linux development "works". It has sufficient talent to continue. Until it's displaced, we won't be able to tell whether it was run as well as it could have been.

<comment><USER43> There was a lot less competition back in the Bell Labs days.

From what I've heard of people working at MS in the 80s and 90s, feedback was possibly _more_ searing than it is on the linux mailing lists. I hope it's not the case, but based on available evidence it looks like there may be advantages to hostile environments. Maybe some people channel the stress into more ideas, fiercer discussions and better products (as Amazon does).

I've never been in one of those environments first hand though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Looking at the names being named, rudeness seems to come with being foreign. I guess Steve Jobs is a counterpoint in that he is at least second generation.

</comment><comment><USER46> Yes.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'll let Job's ghost know about the results. It will change everything.</comment>


Silicon Intersectionality–Big Biz claims progress defending status, privilege - <AUTHOR> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/silicon-intersectionality <comment><USER2> >"85% of tech jobs at the company were held by men, and women engineers at the company experienced a deeply unpleasant environment."

But many women have come out to defend the company and say their experiences at Uber were positive. Yet that doesn't fit in with the narrative, so it's ignored.</comment>


Ask HN: Which BSD do you use and why? - <AUTHOR> Which BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) do you use and why do you use it? I am hoping for a discussion around the operating system's source code quality, documentation, and community around these BSDs in this thread. <comment><USER2> I use OpenBSD because

1) it's the most secure operating system available, under any license agreement. 2) their community is the quickest to respond to resolving security issues (see this year's Defcon talk about BSD vulnerabilities - OpenBSD is at present the only one to have resolved all open issues and it took only a couple of weeks) 3) the community writes the best tools. 4) it has the best documentation I've seen for a project this large, similar, but superior to the Arch Wiki.</comment>


Lucidchart debuts Chrome/Firefox extension for viewing Microsoft Visio files - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/04/18/lucidchart-debuts-chrome-extension-firefox-add-on-for-viewing-and-editing-microsoft-visio-files/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=share%2Bbutton&utm_content=LucidChart%20debuts%20Chrome%20extension%2C%20Firefox%20add-on%20for%20viewing%20and%20editing%20Microsoft%20Visio%20files&utm_campaign=social%2Bmedia <comment><USER2> Lucidcharts has promise but their subscription model isn't working out for business use in large organisations.

Lucidchart seems to target large accounts but their business model seems tuned for small businesses.

      Companies wants to centralize licensing and not add yet another vendor. Since you can't subscribe through normal licensing channels, the tool isn't widely adopted.

For personal use, I can't justify the subscription cost and I tend to avoid subscriptions for anything for better budget management.

<comment><USER3> One competitor ( <http://Draw.io> ) is free forever if installed as a Google App before May 01, 2013.

[https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?pr...](https://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/viewListing?productListingId=18806+14512935155953175632&pli=1&src=hn)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I bet this became possible because of the recent progress in the past months with this great library: <http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/contrib/libvisio>

Or they embed Libre Office directly in order to convert visio to svg. So far there seems to be no documentation at all about the binary Visio file format and that library is the only thing out there!

<comment><USER5> Actually Lucidchart has imported and exported Visio documents for a couple years, and we don't use the LibreOffice library at all.

We reverse engineered the binary format!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone know of an open source web based SVG editor with Visio compatibility than can be embedded into applications?

<comment><USER5> Lucidchart isn't open source but it does have a public API allowing the editor to be embedded in other applications.

<https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/api_documentation>

Or it has a simpler Visio API which allows other applications to use Lucidchart as a Visio viewer.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Impalette, extract color matches from images for predefined palettes - <AUTHOR> https://impalette.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Impalette is an Azure hosted web app that allows users to upload images to find the nearest neighbors of dominant and related colors to predefined color palettes. Currently, Impalette has Pantone C, Sherwin Williams, and Dunn Edwards. I plan on adding more as I find palettes. Additionally, you get back the color names from the respective palettes as well as the hex values.

There's also an API that allows 1000 requests per day. It's one endpoint and pretty easy to use. There's some light documentation on the landing page (just create an account to get access to the API). The API returns Hex, HSV, RGB, and the color's palette specific name.

I made this in my spare time because I often work with clients who are small and lack a style guide, but have images that contain colors they would like in their final product. This is a quick way for me to figure out colors that will look good on print or paint and get their actual color names.

Thanks for your interest and I hope someone finds it useful! If you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Technologies used: -Redis -ASP.NET MVC -jQuery -Azure

</comment><comment><USER2> Seems pretty cool. For a tool like this though it did confuse me why I'd register for an account. Is this for API access or something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Purely for API access. It's totally free and unnecessary to register otherwise. Your API key will be on your home page when you log in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Haha I like that detail in the logo.</comment>


Why winners become cheaters - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/08/why-winners-become-cheaters/ <comment><USER2> Related HN post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065661](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11065661)

Related Ars link: [http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/winners-act-as- thick-...](http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/winners-act-as-thick-as- thieves/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Armstrong was a true champion. It's the public that wasn't made aware of what the real game was. All the cyclists knew it as did the organization and everyone professionally close to pro cycling. It was a doping game. And out of all that doped, Armstrong won 7 years in a row. He was a true champion.

The more accurate statement here is "cheaters become winners" and not the other way around. Cheating implies rules, and most rules are stupid, especially in sports. Doping of course changes the "sport" in many ways, and is illegal for good reason, but in a true competition of life and death, of success and failure, of rags to riches, of maintaining a family legacy, or of simply "winning" in today's "winner's society", the upside of cheating easily surpasses the downside. And for those who figure out how to cheat, it becomes easy, and part of the game. Then as they see everyone else cheat, the moral and ethical burden is easily nullified.

Rules in society are also pretty stupid. Drug dealers know this. Wall Street for sure knows this. And the smartest people who win, most often than not, do so by cheating, because it's all just a game. And it's okay to cheat in a game as long as you don't get caught. "Play dirty" is the western mantra that embodies this sentiment nicely, and it's a positive sentiment. It's antiestablishmentarianism, it's rock n' roll, it's Bruce Willis in Die Hard.

Regardless of what anyone thinks of Lance Armstrong, you have to hand it to the guy. He certainly made the most out of his cheating win streak through one of the greatest charities of all time. Cheating in sports is one thing. His true legacy was doing whatever he could to help others cheat death as he did.

Devils don't save lives (people do).

<comment><USER4> Relevant: [https://xkcd.com/1173/](https://xkcd.com/1173/)

You can get better a lot of ways in sport. Why is performance-enhancing drugs the way that is singled out as not acceptable?

<comment><USER5> There are thousands of rules in any sport, anti-doping is just on of them. Anyone trying to get around the rules is just cheating, so why should doping be excused?

<comment><USER6> > Anyone trying to get around the rules is just cheating, so why should doping > be excused?

Perhaps a better question is: why are there rules against doping in the first place? As the xkcd notes, 'some performance enhancements are ok, some are bad', and the line is rather arbitrary at this point.

<comment><USER7> Sports/games rules are inherently arbitrary. This is like asking why you can move while dribbling but not while just holding the ball in basketball. There is no why. There only is.

Can you move while tossing the ball in the air repeatedly (dribbling against the sky)?

No.

Wait why? It's just like dribbling except upside down.

It's just the rule.

It's just the rule, man. The rules are what define the game. Why can't I start the bishop where the queen is? It's just the rule. Why can't I have an under inflated ball? Just the rule. Why can't I use a cricket bat in soccer? Just the rule.

<comment><USER6> In American Football, can you throw a forward pass? Or in Basketball, can you shoot three point shots? Both were not originally in those respective games, and were added. The rules of all sports are evolving, and will continue to do so.

I'm not aware of any sport that restricts your diet, or the amount of exercise or training you can perform. Yet some chemical substances are arbitrarily banned. It is anti-science!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Faster, Higher, Stronger" book showed a study where athletes were asked what they would give up for an Olympic gold medal and from what I remember a good portion would give up their lives in 5 years for that (or some other crazy time), the pressure and willing to win for professional and aspiring professional athletes is incredible.

</comment><comment><USER9> Might explain why winners of free market capitalism want to institute measures (laws, regulations) to keep others from achieving the same level of winning.

<comment><USER10> > Might explain why winners of free market capitalism want to institute > measures (laws, regulations) to keep others from achieving the same level of > winning.

I don't think that's an accurate description of reality. My take is that _everybody_ wants to institute measures that benefit them and hinder others... but the "winners" (i.e. the rich) have comparatively more political power and thus also more success forcing these measures through.

<comment><USER11> _My take is that everybody wants to institute measures that benefit them and hinder others_

Maybe I'm not living in the real world, but I sincerely doubt that most people would like to _hinder others_.

<comment><USER12> Most people probably don't think of the things they support as "hindering others" \- they think of it as "making the market take externalities into account" or "preserving the character of the neighbourhood" or "ensuring safety for customers of our industry" or "bringing our short-term incentives in line with our long-term incentives"

<comment><USER13> Taking externalities into account isn't hindering others, since the externality is by definition an unwanted imposition pf costs on a third party that didn't exist prior to the economic activity that generated it. I fail to see how this is different from an unpaid bill, and Nobel laureate Ronald Coase has rather convincingly argued* that the costs of mitigation in advance or in arrears ends up being the same, but that the transaction costs of enforcing property rights against externalities are a sufficient barrier to many pollutees that polluters are often willing to gamble on others' inability to adequately enforce their rights and pocket the resulting savings.

* in _The Problem of Social Cost_ , an unusually readable essay for the field of economics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does someone know if this research has been published and is freely accessible? The difference of the losers of -0.5 compared to the expected value gives me the feeling N is not pretty high...

<comment><USER15> Yes, the article links to the study, from where you can download the PDF.

<comment><USER14> Thanks, reading it more carefully I see I missed more info... Anyway, 86 participants, divided in two equal groups. Let's say the 43 participants in the loser group all threw the dice once you'll end up with a ~9% chance of the groups average to be below 6.5. So that might well be possible. The winners group throwing on average above 9 is highly unlikely purely by chance. Quite interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very interesting article. Makes me think this is a tendency that we should all look for in ourselves since it could be we start pushing harder to maintain our new 'status' of winning.

It also seems a bit sad that we tend to get so wrapped up in our successes that we will start cheating to maintain our new self identity.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is a very interesting interview with Lance where he talks about the whole cheating thing and living with a lie: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEfSdPz1WtA)

</comment><comment><USER13> Stories like this greatly depress me. I've been aware of the phenomenon since a young age, when my identically-aged first cousin and I were assigned to count yellow cars in the street in exchange for a small cash reward for each one we identified so as to temporarily relieve the adults of our company at the time. My cousin (whose parents are pretty jolly and easygoing) professed to detect three times as many yellow cars as I did. I'm pathologically honest (probably because I grew up in an abusive environment where even a small transgression was liable to result in a severe beating) and I was simply astonished at my cousin's willingness to maximize his reward at what seemed to me to be an insanely high level of risk. I learned much later in life that my father had bullied my uncle growing up and that the uncle's response was to develop peer-teaming strategies while my father went on to a successful but rather lonely and extremely competitive executive career.

To this day I have a very hard time dealing with any sort of economic activity that has more than a whiff of subjective advantage and am deeply uncomfortable accepting any sort of unexpected windfall, to the point of refusing well- earned and freely-offered promotions and having great difficulty enjoying gifts. I have literally gone hungry and been late on my rent because of an unwillingness to deposit a check (in payment for work) for an amount greater than I had expected to receive. Needless to say, this has had a pretty dire and cumulative effect on my career, material wellbeing etc. :-/

I forgot to add that the one context where this does pay off for me, although I rarely indulge in it, is playing Poker - since elaborate bluffing and systematic dishonesty is actually a legitimate play strategy in that game I'm able to manufacture tells and run a 'slow loser' strategy with ease and frequently walk off with the entire pot. I've never had the resources or risk tolerance to try it against professionals, though.

</comment><comment><USER18> > When Lance Armstrong was found guilty of doping a few years ago, the sports > world was aghast. For almost a decade, he had dominated cycling so > thoroughly that the thought of anyone else winning bordered on ridiculous. > Few had guessed that he had done it by cheating, and many found it hard to > believe, even after Armstrong himself owned up to his dishonesty.

Huh. I was just barely a young adult when Armstrong began his period of dominance, and this doesn't match my recollection. Most people I spoke with who had any familiarity with cycling were utterly convinced he was cheating. Maybe this wasn't true outside the bubble of my peers?

</comment><comment><USER19> Driving Uber; its pretty predictable that wealthier people are less likely to rate you well.

</comment><comment><USER20> so...best strategy is to cheat.

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how much of the first experiment described is not due to causation, but is instead from certain kinds of people being both more likely to win and to cheat.

Some of the other ones do point to causation, but it would be interesting to see an experiment where people _thought_ it was skill, but the actual winners were chosen randomly (e.g. you get points, and they tell you who wins at the end, but you don't see the actual calculation, so you won't be suspicious.)

<comment><USER22> The first game was designed so that cheating was impossible.

<comment><USER21> That doesn't have anything to do with my point above, which is that the alternative hypothesis "people with some property X are better at game Y, and separately, people with property X are more likely to cheat" is not ruled out by experiment 1 as described.

Edit: you could also differentiate between "winning->cheating" and the confounder possibility by having the cheatable game first.</comment></comment></comment>


Game Programming Patterns - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns <comment><USER2> This book is really good and taught me many things I didn't know, the fact that it is free is even better.</comment>


Ask HN: What's the acceptance rate after YC interview? - <AUTHOR> We got an invite to an in-person interview with YC at mountain-view. do you know how many companies pass this stage usually? <comment><USER2> 25-30%

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, any source?

<comment><USER2> Michael, the Ceo mentioned that in a youtube video i watched the other day. Sorry I can't remember which one it was.</comment></comment></comment>


Gamers create recipes for protein-folding algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/11/gamers-create-recipes-for-protein-folding-algorithms.ars <comment><USER2> Does more compact folding mean better? Or does faster folding mean better? What is meant by better folding? Does is look like what they can get from x-ray crystallography ?</comment>


Johns Hopkins CSSE Covid-19 Global Case Dashboard - <AUTHOR> https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/85320e2ea5424dfaaa75ae62e5c06e61 <comment><USER2> Non-mobile version: [https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...](https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

<comment><USER3> Yes, the non-mobile version has a great layout and much more density of information on a single page (unsurprisingly).

Does anyone know what the sources are for the data shown here?

<comment><USER4> The sources are listed in the bottom center section of the dashboard.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! From the blog post linked there posted on January 23: "Our primary data source is DXY, an online platform run by members of the Chinese medical community, which aggregates local media and government reports to provide COVID-19 cumulative case totals in near real-time at the province level in China and country level otherwise."

I'd surmise that it was the primary source since, at the time, the spread of the virus was still contained within China for the most part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Unfortunately garbage-in -> garbage-out.

That chart shows US at 233 confirmed cases.

According to NYT, over 10x that number are self-quarantined in NYC alone [1].

Now it's technically true that those cases aren't medically 100% factually confirmed, because NYC has only performed 35 tests total so far. But it gives a very inaccurate picture of reality. Garbage in, garbage out.

1\. [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/nyregion/coronavirus- new-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/05/nyregion/coronavirus-new-york- cases.html)

<comment><USER6> This dashboard is not intended to visualize computed estimates from models. It tracks the official confirmed cases, which is a very different and useful piece of data.

You are unfair by stating it is garbage and misrepresenting what it shows (confirmed cases vs. estimated cases).

<comment><USER7> What's garbage is the US response to it.

Italy is running 2500 tests a day.

Oregon has the capacity to run a total of about 40.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. Seems like people in Oregon choose to mostly ignore the issue

<comment><USER7> It's not just Oregon; that's just a number I saw this morning in the local paper, but I suspect it's similar everywhere. The US did not use the advance warning we had to prepare.

<comment><USER9> Georgia ran 50 tests yesterday. And that's after only 3 positive results so far. All states not equally dysfunctional.

<comment><USER7> Let's do some numbers:

Georgia, with 50 tests/day and 10,000,000 people is at 0.005 per 1K people.

Oregon, with 40 tests/day and 4,200,000 people, is at 0.0095 per 1K people.

Italy, with about 2500 tests/day and about 60,000,000 people, is doing around 0.04 per thousand people. It's about an order of magnitude more.

The point isn't a pissing match between states, it's that the entire US has not responded well so far. Hopefully things ramp up, so that we stop seeing these situations where people get exposed and have no idea what's going on.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how- many-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many- americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/)

I do not know why this is, just that it's not going well so far.

<comment><USER9> More testing != useful testing.

The fact that Georgia and Oregon are testing at virtually equivalent rates is what's wrong.

I feel like ~50/day is an appropriate number for GA. I feel like ~50/day is not an appropriate number for Oregon (sandwiched in-between Washington and California).

The federal goverent should be doing a stronger job of quarterbacking this to allocate scarce resources.

If Oregon needs surge capacity of testing labs across the Midwest, then by god make that happen.

Some amount of testing likely needs to happen in every state in order to prevent panic, but the most resources should flow towards the places with the most known infections.

<comment><USER7> This is a decent article explaining how things have gone wrong in various ways:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/what-went-wrong- with-t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/what-went-wrong-with-the- coronavirus-tests/2020/03/07/915f5dea-5d82-11ea-b29b-9db42f7803a7_story.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really dislike these maps that use circles. The circles overlap, are hard to reason about spatially and the size seems to be an arbitrary scale without meaning.

<comment><USER11> The thing that drives my OCD nuts is that in Europe, all of the circles are centered the centroid of the country, except Germany.

<comment><USER12> Weird. Is Germany's circle at the centroid of West Germany, maybe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish they also separated European countries by subnational jurisdiction. In the US they do it by cities, surely they should be able to separate Italian provinces, French departments and German states. They are reported like that in the news.

I mention this because it's particularly northern Italy that's hard hit, not southern Italy. I am still planning on travelling to southern France (by car!) around Easter, and I kind of want a more precise map to know which areas to avoid.

(I also think travelling by car is a safer option, both for me and others around me. The plan is to stay at a house in the country, not a hotel.)

<comment><USER14> > I also think travelling by car is a safer option, both for me and others > around me.

I thought about it because I'll need to drive a long drive in two days (across France). I'm taking throwaway gloves with me...

Inside the car I'll be fine (and people outside the car too) but...

A gas station has to be one of the riskiest place to catch the virus because you are forced to touch the gas pump. And that's the same for everybody who just filled his car. Same with electric chargers for EVs. Anyone with the virus would cough, while driving, and the virus would be on one of his hand. Then that person would fill the car. Then the virus would stay there for hours?

It's a combination of two things: a great many people passing there and all these people being forced to touch something hundreds of people recently touched too. Hence the throwaway gloves.

Not to mention that if anyone in a car has the virus, it's likely that the one driving may have it on its hands (even if he's not infected ?).

I'm very mindful not to touch anything outside the house unless when I'm buying groceries (but at the grocery store when I pick, say, a thuna can, hopefully there haven't been a hundred people touching that on thuna can in the last x hours). At the gas station I know I'll have no choice.

<comment><USER15> SARS-CoV-2 has a viral envelope, which reduces the transmission possibility via objects[0]:

"The lipid bilayer envelope of these viruses is relatively sensitive to desiccation, heat, and detergents, therefore these viruses are easier to sterilize than non-enveloped viruses, have limited survival outside host environments, and typically must transfer directly from host to host."

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

<comment><USER16> Corona viruses can survive on surfaces for up to 9 days.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0195670120300463/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This ([https://ncov2019.live/map](https://ncov2019.live/map)) started as the best, most (practically, conveniently) informative and updated "dashboard" I've found. It was posted to HN several times (where I discovered it), but underwent some curious changes over the last few days. Initially, it showed all known events and included links for additional information. Then, peculiarly, all the cases in Florida disappeared with no trace, and now the southern US seems to have been scrubbed of accounts.

It was produced mostly by a highschool student in WA.

<comment><USER18> The data page seems to be more up to date than the map.

[https://ncov2019.live/data](https://ncov2019.live/data)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This map seems effectively useless in the US, given absence of meaningful testing. Frontline nurses, _treating COVID-19 patients_ , are having their tests stonewalled and delayed by the CDC:

[https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/N...](https://act.nationalnursesunited.org/page/-/files/graphics/NU- Quarantine-RN-press-conf-statement.pdf)

I've seen multiple people referencing it to prove the absence of real threat in the US, which seems beyond absurd at this point.

<comment><USER20> The problem with wide scale testing is that it makes the CFR incomparable to seasonal flu or previous outbreaks. CFR is by definition deaths/confirmed cases. It's _not_ a measure of infection lethality or mortality rate, even though that's what most of us think it is and what we're most curious about.

For crisis management and planning, you want a CFR that is comparable to something like the seasonal flu or previous outbreaks. "Confirmed" cases of respiratory illnesses are roughly equivalent to the number of people who present to a hospital with severe respiratory symptoms, minus the base rate. We don't go out and run an assay for any person suspected of having the flu, for example, _especially_ not asymptomatic people. If you do that for SARS- CoV-2, the number of "confirmed" cases will sky rocket and the CFR will drop. But that lower CFR can't be meaningfully compared to anything else, and is pretty much useless except as a curiosity.

So it's understandable that the CDC isn't keen on widespread testing; it'll ruin the data, or at least ruin the characteristics of the data most important for crisis management. What matters _now_ from a public health perspective is knowing whether SARS-CoV-2 is circulating. If you know it's circulating in an area, then you should just assume any respiratory illness is a SARS-CoV-2 and quarantine. Test if and only if it becomes severe and you need to know the cause for treatment.[1] You can calculate a more accurate and consistent CFR _later_ by subtracting the base rate of presented respiratory infections from the outbreak rate.

Identifying a local outbreak does request testing, but the major problem there was a temporary problem with getting assay kits out. But going forward, it doesn't help to test people who aren't presenting with severe symptoms. At least, it doesn't help from an epidemiological perspective.

[1] However, SARS-CoV-2 causes primary viral pneumonia. By contrast, severe symptoms from seasonal flu are caused by secondary, bacterial pneumonia. There's not much that can be done for the former; for the latter you can prescribe antibiotics. So for severe cases it might just make sense to prescribe antibiotics, which would be benign for the viral infection (COVID-19) and even possibly a prophylactic for secondary bacterial pneumonia. In other words, in terms of treating a severely ill patient with a clear case of pneumonia, positive or negative COVID-19 identification might not provide any benefit.

<comment><USER19> Nothing about what the CDC is doing is "understandable." They're stonewalling and delaying frontline responders testing puts the healthcare system more at risk of being overwhelmed and we've already seen cases of large numbers of nursing staff having to be quarantined once retroactive exposure was determined.

There was also not a "temporary delay" with the kits, there is still nowhere near the necessary testing capacity and they're throwing out absurd, false numbers like "1 million test kits" that then have to be walked back. And the whole absence of testing is because they rejected the WHO's test kit and donations of them! We could have began testing immediately.

I'm not sure where you're getting all this nonsense about the absence of testing being "good for the data". Every epidemiologist I've seen is saying the exact opposite, e.g.:

Michael Mina, Asst Professor of Epidemiology & Immunology & physician @ Harvard School of Public Health/Medicine

> 1 in 6 positive samples in China were asymptomatic and choice was made to > not report those. This information is crucial for epidemiological modeling > and developing appropriate mitigating strategies. Reporting all positives as > symptomatic or not should be standard reporting.

[https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/12343556205575454...](https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1234355620557545473)

Why are epidemiologists saying that testing and reporting asymptomatic cases is necessary for responding appropriately, counter to what you claim?

<comment><USER20> What value does knowing the total number of asymptomatic cases provide _today_? Such data is doubtlessly invaluable for studying the virus, but it's unnecessary _today_ for managing the outbreak.

Yes, the data can help us more accurately estimate the rate of infections, but that'll take months or years to pin down to the precision that such fine- grained data promises. In the mean time, you can roughly determine the spread of _impactful_ cases by the change in number of presentations of respiratory infections, just as we've done for _decades_.

You characterize what they're doing as stonewalling, but I'm charactering it as prioritizing. The biggest priority is collecting data on severe cases, and generally following established protocol to minimize unforced errors. The number of asymptomatic cases doesn't help you figure out how many ventilators you might need, at least not in a timely manner. The middle of an epidemic is not the time to revolutionize the practice and science of medicine. If you don't think things through carefully--i.e. the impact of false negatives and false positives of assay kits--you can easily fsck things up.

Researchers want data, but the primary concern right now is juggling medical resources and finding treatments. More data is not always helpful, especially data not directly relevant to the present task.

You're also assuming that hospitals and doctors are itching to run assay kits on every suspected case. Why, because some nurse's complaints went viral on social media? To out-do Singapore? Because "more data"? Doctors _not_ interested in running millions of assay kits aren't going to be the ones complaining, not unless you forced them to run the tests. An assay result won't change the way you treat a patient with characteristic signs of a severe respiratory infection in the middle of a global SARS outbreak.

<comment><USER19> This is just a series of counterfactuals to everything that's been reported and said is necessary by frontline healthcare staff, epidemiologists, and even the WHO.

You can keep making these evidence-free, self-justifying claims, but that's the sum total of what they are.

You can't even respond to an epidemiologist saying they're necessary to put in place appropriate mitigating strategies without espousing straw men like "outdoing Singapore" or "one nurse going viral."

I guess all these other doctors and nurses, describing chaos in California because of the lack of testing, are just trying to "go viral" too?

[https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-06/chaos-at- ho...](https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-06/chaos-at-hospitals- due-to-shortage-of-coronavirus-tests)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This reddit live thread post includes lots of links to various dashboards and sources:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/fcolqr/livethrea...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/fcolqr/livethread_global_covid19_outbreak/)

I personally also look at worldometer dashboard (as it usually gives source link for every count increase) from there and I find Hopkins dashboard to be lagging behind, on some countries for several days.

</comment><comment><USER22> If you prefer your WHO data in tabular form, some wikipedia volunteers have made this page

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_coron...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_outbreak_data/WHO_situation_reports)

It also shows the doubling rate, which seems to be about 4 days outside China.

<comment><USER23> Assuming a consistent growth rate, that's 84 days until U.S. population is infected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Deaths / Deaths + Recoveries gives a 5.7% death rate.

Obviously there are mild cases that are never diagnosed, but it seems if you get sick enough for a confirmed diagnosis, your risk is higher than generally reported.

<comment><USER25> The problem here is, from what doctors seem to be saying, there's a massive amount of the population that has or has had COVID-19 and will never know - since the symptoms in an otherwise healthy adult are similar to the common Flu.

So that death rate is likely far, far lower than what it seems. The flu kills between 15-60k people in the US every year, and it's around 1% fatality rate (and nobody seems overly concerned about that).

<comment><USER26> Per CDC numbers [0], in the US the death rate of the flu for the 2018-19 season was roughly 0.1%, an order of magnitude lower than the number quoted above.

[0] [https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past- seasons.html](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html)

<comment><USER25> That's interesting! Thanks for the link. It only proves my point further. From your link, 34,200 people died from the Flu in the US last year - and not a single person is panicked about those numbers.

<comment><USER27> > and not a single person is panicked about those numbers.

That's for a very obvious reason. If 40 million people in the US get Covid, as with the flu, it will probably kill between 500k and 1m people.

That's unlikely to happen based on what we know so far. However if two million people get it, that will kill as many as the flu and produce ~200,000 ICU cases. That's far beyond what the US healthcare system can handle on top of routine circumstances.

Along with a drastically higher mortality rate, Covid also produces a far higher rate of ICU outcomes than flu does. It swamps healthcare systems, as we saw so dramatically in China.

<comment><USER25> > If 40 million people in the US get Covid, as with the flu, it will probably > kill between 500k and 1m people.

This is a greatly, greatly exaggerated number based on incomplete reporting.

We cannot yet estimate the number of unconfirmed COVID-19 cases in the US. In healthy adults, the COVID-19 symptoms are no worse than the flu. The CDC uses projections to estimate the fatality rate of the flu every year, since actual hard stats are impossible to generate. Time will tell, but this so far seems nothing more than a media frenzy.

Does anyone remember the Swine Flu? How about the West Nile Virus? What was the outcome of those media frenzies? How'd it turn out for all the people hoarding toilet paper and water bottles back then?

> It swamps healthcare systems, as we saw so dramatically in China

I don't think it's even remotely relatable to the US healthcare system, and the general health of the US population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I prefer this one: [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

</comment><comment><USER29> A Google sheet that's being kept up to date as well -

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z7VQ5xlf3BaTx_LBBbls...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Z7VQ5xlf3BaTx_LBBblsW4hLoGYWnZyog3jqsS9Dbgc/htmlview?usp=drivesdk&sle=true&pru=AAABcNSGaw8*HF6G74ZiPH3FihkzOxewgA#)

(Edit) I should note that this sheet's tracking data at the subregion level within affected countries.

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm not sure this is much superior to Worldometer's tracker. It's been running for weeks and seems to be lighter to load on my slow connection. The graphs are definitely a plus, though. [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

</comment><comment><USER31> If you are interested in looking directly at their source-data, CSSE's github repo is also quite interesting. We spent a bunch of time plotting it in various ways last night.

[https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19](https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19)

</comment><comment><USER32> I've found it helpful to view this data as time series (so that trends are more apparent). This site uses this same dataset but shows historical trends per country/region:

[https://www.covidstats.com](https://www.covidstats.com)

<comment><USER33> Instead of the accumulated total, a better metric for showing trends is the number of daily new cases, it shows whether the infection is accelerating or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Of those recovered, what condition are their lungs in? Currently the data isn't capturing this but it's been suggested that covid-19 has a permanent effect on the condition of many who are "recovered."

</comment><comment><USER35> Adding to the list, this one US and Canadian only:

[https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en](https://coronavirus.1point3acres.com/en)

</comment><comment><USER36> I find this one much more intelligible: [https://covid19info.live/](https://covid19info.live/)

<comment><USER37> Better presentation, but laggy: At this writing, no 03/06 data. Johns Hopkins is complete through 03/06:

[https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594...](https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Could they check to see if having Malaria inhibits infection by this virus?

</comment><comment><USER39> Something is wrong with the "Plots" tab. Two plots show different data points, without title, but comes with same legends. And the legend does not make much sense either. "Mainland China" and "Other Locations" make sense, but "Total Recovered" as the third group? I don't understand this.

<comment><USER40> Absolute versus logarithmic scale; the desktop version makes it clearer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> much of this data (particularly the statistics on 'China') is unreliable.

<comment><USER42> I believe that has now been addressed, hence the spike in cases as shown in the chart at the bottom rignt (on desktop).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> COVID-19 has probably saved more lives by reducing vehicle traffic than it has killed.

</comment><comment><USER44> The data is wrong for at least five or six cases near me, the county seems to be missing or just wrong.

Why present a splashy tool like this if it just has bad data? This is irresponsible.

</comment><comment><USER45> Whoever chose those graph colors (page 2: plots) needs to be taken to accessibility training! WTF. A full 6% of all males are red green colorblind. Who chooses yellow and green as graph colors?! Jeez

</Rant></comment>


Gun.io Debuts Free Group Funding for Open Source Projects - <AUTHOR> http://gun.io/blog/gunio-debuts-group-funding-for-open-source-projects/

<comment><USER2> Offtopic, but there's something really off about Gun.io

Looking at their listings under Freelance / Open Source, the prices offered for those gigs are not even laughable, but an insult, even for developers from third-world countries.

So am I missing anything? Do I need to be logged-in or something?

</comment><comment><USER3> Always happy to see projects coming out of my hometown. I like the idea, but I hope that there's good moderation for submitted bounties so it doesn't become another Rent-a-Coder like cess pool. It's also be neat if the bounties could be free form, so people could barter goods and services. Personally, being offered $50 is worse than not being offered money at all for something that I'd want to work on. On the other hand, for some tasks I wouldn't mind if someone were willing to trade me design work, or treat me to a lunch or a beer.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I'm actually a Berkeley transplant, only moved here 3 weeks ago from Boston!)

The bartering goods and services idea is interesting, but it seems to only work for local things. The one thing I think would be interesting to use that for is for tutoring. I'd teach somebody Django if they could teach me Node, etc..

<comment><USER3> Hope you enjoy the bay, if you haven't already, I highly recommend grabbing a slice at cheeseboard.

In my experience, even mentoring works better in person.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could see GitHub adding this in the future, e.g. instead of simply voting on/+1ing an issue, let people attach bounties. Is there proof, though, that this is something people want? It seems like Kickstarter has the "funding for big projects" thing nailed--I'm just wondering if there's really demand for "funding for small features"...

<comment><USER5> There are projects that Kickstarter does not accept.

<comment><USER4> Obviously, and my question is why? If they (or GitHub) could easily satisfy demand for this, why haven't they?

<comment><USER6> Github is famous for having employees only work on projects that interest them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Winner takes all" implies that many more people will lose out.

Don't get me wrong: I think that gun.io's approach is potentially a great way to get worthwhile stuff done on open source projects, but I'm also slightly sceptical that this might see a 99designs-style model infect people's mindshare more than it already does.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Gun.io creator posted several bounties previously, which are still up. Including several which are fixed or have fixes in his GitHub pull requests (for LightWrite).

They haven't been closed so I assume the bounties haven't been paid. I get bad feelings about this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Remedied! There was one pending claim which I was still testing. The other gigs have not had people actually submit claim requests for yet. I am a 'single founder' - lots of stuff to be done, that one didn't get sorted before you saw it.

The hang up is that the people who claimed them didn't realize that international payments aren't supported yet, unfortunately. (This is still is causing some communication problems. I wish I had a better payment solution. I have tried to make the language more clear.)

<comment><USER9> It took me a good 30 seconds _after_ reading this comment to find this on your site. It's important info that really needs to be way more prominent than it is, like on the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm. I'm retooling the copy on the frontpage anyway, I'll work that in somehow.

Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is the point of this to fund project like kickstarter? Because I think what the FOSS community needs are much smaller, less marketable fixes and bounties. Like 'port django to python3' not 'write a new FOSS video editor'.

<comment><USER11> The first subheader of the linked article is "Kickstarter for Open Source?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm glad something like this exists, but the ramp up time to learn each project seems way more effort than what it's worth for some of the bounties that are being posted.

<comment><USER13> Guess that's the perfect reason why it should exist: People who are already involved in existing projects could look out for low hanging fruits and that would be a win-win. The site could implement a project alert.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> They should multiple payment methods, such as BitCoin.</comment>


Square (phone based payment system) - <AUTHOR> http://www.squareup.com/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, Square is a bit late to this game (though not out of it yet); while at an Apple store a couple of months ago, I noticed that they were selling credit card readers for the iPhone already, in nice Apple-like packaging. It was probably Verifone's device [1].

I had a client that was interested in this for the various trade events she had, but Square never followed up and seemed to be turning into vaporware. When I saw these other devices on the shelf, I recommended them to her.

Square certainly doesn't have a lot of room for not getting it right the first time at this point, unfortunately; I really dislike Verifone and would like to see someone eat their lunch, but they've had a several-months head-start.

[1]: [http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/09/smallbusiness/iphone_credit_...](http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/09/smallbusiness/iphone_credit_card_swipe_wars/index.htm)

</comment><comment><USER3> To me, why not just use IPC Linea Pro? <http://www.ipclineapro.com/>

It works with iOS, provides a ruggedized housing and extra battery, comes with a barcode scanner, and encrypts your credit card number, and has a toolkit already for use with Xcode. You can sign up with Braintree or TrustCommerce and use their RESTful APIs. No extra charge.

This device looks like it's easy to lose. I don't know. If I were a customer, I'd be sketched out by that thing. The ones at the Apple Retail stores (Linea Pro) look legit.

EDIT: Opportunity for someone to make a product with IPC Linea Pro. Verifone's the only player. Why not add some stress with the Linea Pro device?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is super old news. Why isn't this modded off the front page?

<comment><USER5> Agreed--these guys have been around for quite some time. I do think they are really just starting to take off though. I just got my reader about 3 weeks ago (It had been on order for almost 3 months).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those of us who don't need to do POS payment processing, the hardware can also be used to turn your iPhone into a reel-to-reel tape player.

(Reels not included.)

</comment><comment><USER7> They need to fix the card reader.. seriously takes at least 5 swipes to work properly, even with the recommended and annoying pinching of the reader.

<comment><USER8> Weird. I just got mine today and I have no issues with it. New batch, less problems?

<comment><USER7> sounds like it. the few early ones I played with were undeniably horrible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> looks like a neat tool for drug dealers?

<comment><USER9> Downvote all you want but I honestly don't see too many other use cases for this besides "peddlers" of things. Would you really ask a client to swipe their card into your phone like this instead of writing a check?

<comment><USER10> No downvote from me, but I doubt drug dealers will like this much. This thing creates email receipts, tracks date, time, and location of transactions, and holds your money in an online account that is connected to your bank account. I'm pretty sure that people doing illegal stuff will stick with cash.</comment></comment></comment>


A reply to: "I have an idea for a social iOS app, I just need funding" - <AUTHOR> http://www.iphonedevsdk.com/forum/business-legal-app-store/99766-request-app-business-startup-advise-very-unique-app-idea-2.html#post414472

<comment><USER2> This is the prototypical Whartonite Seeks Code Monkey scenario, except without the Whartonite. Also, good points made in merlin's post on that thread.</comment>


Intel, Lenovo spread foldable computer fever at CES - <AUTHOR> https://techxplore.com/news/2020-01-intel-lenovo-foldable-fever-ces.html <comment><USER2> I would have been extremely negative on this Lenovo machine if it didn't have the keyboard docking solution that it does have. I have to admit that it's clever and practical.

What the machine needs is a way for the fully folded out display to stand itself up at a comfortable viewing angle.

One thing I'm concerned about is the hardware-first mentality that OEMs have taken to foldable designs. The whole experience needs to make its advantages and use case more plainly obvious. To that end, you can tell by the demo video that Windows isn't customized nearly enough to make this a pleasant experience.

Windows still isn't a touch experience that I've seen anyone use in the wild because the bulk of its utility is with legacy style Windows applications that demand precise cursor movement and keyboard shortcuts. Every single person I've seen using a Surface Pro at coffee shops has been using it in "laptop mode."

To this end, this device should be answering the question of "Why should I buy this over a cheaper XPS 13 or MacBook Air that fits in my backpack just fine?" With this computer's minuscule keyboard and touchpad along with a digital drawing experience that can't be any good I'm just not sure who this product is meant to appeal to.

Products like this ask the question "What hardware can we build?" But the correct question is "How do we make something that people will love to use and want to own?"

Foldable devices are in danger of being the 3D or curved TV of the 2020s. I think the most likely outcome will be us sitting here in five years wondering why anyone thought that foldable devices were a good idea.

<comment><USER3> >You can tell by the demo video that a Windows isn't customized nearly enough to make this a pleasant experience.

A really cool demo would have been to show off this laptop form factor by using Linux with a tiling window manager such as i3wm. Having it automatically split or rearrange panes when a fold is detected would be really cool. Unfortunately, Lenovo seems to be quite a bit behind the likes of Dell, System76, Pureism, etc in creating developer editions (read: shipped with Linux).

<comment><USER2> Absolutely! When I saw the operating system making zero changes to the lock screen as it was unfolded, zero changes when the keyboard was placed on top of the magnetic mount, that's when I knew the product was dead in the water.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989049)

</comment><comment><USER3> Eh, I'm having a hard time finding what advantage this would actually give you.

<comment><USER5> In cramped quarters, a regular 12"ish laptop. When you have extra desk space, it's a desktop with a 17" display.

<comment><USER6> Now you have to ask yourself how many times in your life you had this exact problem. And if you did have this problem how big of a deal is it for your quality of life.

It's a solution looking for a problem, at least in that form / the consumer market.

<comment><USER7> Theoretically? Every time you hear someone talking about how they dock their laptop, you're hearing someone say they want a bigger screen than they're willing to carry.

Of course, a fold-out screen isn't a panacea: A 17" laptop isn't just heavy because of the big screen, but also because of the big battery to light up that screen. And of course there's the issue of reliability.

<comment><USER8> I dock my laptop because I want a large screen (17" is tiny from a desktop perspective), a secondary screen, and a decent keyboard to type on.

These foldable devices don't solve any of these problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't help but think, when I read things like this, that laptops are already foldable. I don't get why people want the _screen_ to be foldable too. I haven't seen a use case that's gelled for me, but perhaps I'm just missing the point and it's just about technojoy.

<comment><USER10> More screen real estate.

For example you could have a laptop screens that opens horizontally, a normally positioned keyboard, and almost double your usable screen real estate on the road. Akin to this: [https://odditymall.com/slidenjoy-laptop- slides](https://odditymall.com/slidenjoy-laptop-slides)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Finally they came up with the interactive book from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the one from the 2005 movie).

Only thing missing is the LCARS-esque interface to Wikipedia and custom case with the book cover look to it.

</comment><comment><USER12> I could definitely use that, you have a small laptop you can easily carry around (assuming that the magnetic keyboard thingy is actually half decent) and then when I'm somewhere with a little more room I can unfold it into a large monitor and use a proper keyboard.

That seems like a good compromise.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting I think it requires a lot of software changes to support such screen layouts and changes (in case of physical keyboard)

</comment><comment><USER14> I think a separate roll-up display would be nicer. Pull out a tube, unroll your 34" ultra-widescreen display and work.

<comment><USER15> I want an actual foldable display. These seem like they are merely bendable.

Think back to the time when people actually bought paper maps and newspapers. You would take the map, find the area of interest, then fold it up so that you could see what you needed.

Obviously a display can show anything anywhere, but the idea of being able to take a large display and fold it to the perfect size for the circumstances would be pretty neat.

<comment><USER16> I just don't see how bendable or foldable displays are in any way durable. Bending like this is one thing, but truly folding something damages it. Even simple paper starts to fall apart after a few times folding and unfolding. There's no way a complex display device would be able to survive 1000s of cycles.

<comment><USER15> Make it out of some type of fabrics. They stand up much better to folding than paper or plastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm over here just wanting a laptop that isn't so thin it feels like it's going to snap in half every time I pick it up and has a battery that lets it run for more than 5 hours. Maybe one day the future will bless us with computers that are portable _and_ usable.

<comment><USER18> That definitely exists. My laptop is an inch thick and lasts ten hours with a quad core CPU and a high resolution screen.

<comment><USER19> Don't leave us hanging! What laptop do you have?

<comment><USER18> It's a 15" MacBook Pro.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why would I ever want a laptop with a software keyboard?

</comment><comment><USER21> 15 years ago flexible displays were probably fantasy. Now there are consumer products (Edit: ah, the laptops are concepts, but Samsung and Motorola have phones!) using them. We do really live in the future...

<comment><USER22> Flexible and foldable products are so underwhelming. At this point they seem like something being developed just for the sake of demonstrating that it's possible. If the goal is to make attractive products, they're failing spectacularly.

<comment><USER23> The first generation iPhone was a bit clunky, a Nokia N95 could do so much more...

<comment><USER22> > The first generation iPhone was a bit clunky

No crowd has gasped at a foldable display the way people gasped when Jobs used his finger to scroll in the first iPhone keynote.</comment></comment></comment></comment>