Why Are Ultrasound Machines So Expensive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.maori.geek.nz/why-are-ultrasound-machines-so-expensive/ <comment><USER2> The cost of components is often not a big part of the cost of producing an imaging device like this. Building hardware and software in a regulated market where human safety is involved requires levels of validation, verification, process control, risk analysis and documentation that can easily dwarf component cost at the sort of run sizes we are taking about.

This isn't the only thing going on, but it is naive at best to think of the price of these units as a parts list.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you but it can still be frustrating and there's a lot of entrenched interests involved.

My story is that I broke my foot about 10 years ago (in the Grand Canyon no less). Long story short, when I eventually got the doctor, she told me that this kind of fracture always took a long time to heal and the literature suggested that electromagnetic stimulation had some benefit. Of course, the insurance company wouldn't pay until it was deemed a "problem fracture" in a few months (as my doctor thought it would be) but I did eventually get my $1000 stimulator at about 50% off.

It had the most horrible interface one could imagine. If it slipped off the foot, it apparently simply shut down for that day's stimulation. In any case, my foot eventually healed.

A few years later, a friend had a similar injury. I gave her my stimulator. Apparently the allowable stimulations had expired by then. She took it into a medical supply place and they were horrified by the idea that they might simply reset the device.

I'm not a big pharma hater but this sort of story is why people get really mad.

<comment><USER4> Those ridiculous pricing policies are necessary to recover the cost of regulatory compliance which is seriously huge component of anything medical in USA.

As a side note, I know a company in India that manufactured a state of art blood test device. They tried to market it in USA and eventually gave up. Currently the company has tie up with Singapore hospitals which send blood to India for testing via flight and reports are mailed electronically automatically. There is a rig of blood testing machines in Powai-Mumbai which tests thousands of blood samples each day. This machine clearly can not be sold in USA (last time I checked was 6 years ago) because the cost of regulatory compliance is prohibitive.

If the medical device manufacturers indeed made windfall profits I would love to invest in their stock but they don't seem to be doing as well as the hatred directed towards them.

<comment><USER5> My portfolio is about 50% medical supply and machinery manufacturers, and they're incredibly steady investments which pay strong dividends even and especially when the stock price is down. Furthermore, they're often able to make biotech plays and their guaranteed revenue means they're strong candidates for acquisition: [http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/HSP:US](http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/HSP:US)

Do you have any sources for your claim that regulatory compliance is hurting profits beyond a one-off anecdote? Because my experience has been that it's an industry rife with windfall profits.

Also, what's the name of this Indian company, and what's the brand name for the device? If it does what you say it does, you would be pretty foolish not to invest.

<comment><USER4> "More than three-quarters of the cost to bring a medical device from concept to the U.S. market is spent clearing regulatory hurdles, according to a Stanford University report."[1]

I am not saying the companies aren't profitable. They aren't profitable the way people make them out to be.

And if there are indeed windfall profits to be made what is preventing smart- ass entrepreneurs from jumping in and making those profits ?

Tim Cook says that the Apple Watch won't become a regulated medical device, but Apple might make another product that is. Cook made the comments earlier today in an interview with The Telegraph, stating that putting the Apple Watch through Food and Drug Administration testing would slow its release cycle down too much and "hold [Apple] back from innovating."

[1] [http://www.massdevice.com/study-fda-related-activities- cost-...](http://www.massdevice.com/study-fda-related-activities- cost-24-million-510k/)

<comment><USER5> "And if there are indeed windfall profits to be made what is preventing smart- ass entrepreneurs from jumping in and making those profits?"

Incredibly high barriers to entry and very large established players who have already cornered the market? Following your logic, oil companies must not be very profitable since there aren't very many entrepreneurs buying their own offshore drilling platforms.

"They aren't profitable the way people make them out to be."

Who are these people? What is this way?

What concrete assertion are you refuting? How do you explain the P/E ratios of the biggest medical device companies?

If the cost of regulation is such a drag on profits and innovation, why are medical supply companies that primarily serve the US market so much more profitable in the long term than their counterparts in other countries?

Are you alleging that there's a bubble, or that they're cooking their books, or that they're not one of the most consistently profitable industries?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> All medical technology is insanely expensive.

My wife is an ophthalmologist in private practice, and we've spent far too much money on diagnostic equipment.

My most frustrating single experience was spending $18,000 on a refurbished visual field last year (the machine where you see flashes of light in your peripheral vision and push the button), and having it show up running a custom version of Windows 3.1 and an actual honest-to-god 3.5" floppy drive.

My current project is trying to figure out how to get digital visual testing systems (e.g., eye charts on a monitor) setup in her exam rooms. If I were to buy a system from a medical distributor, I'd be spending something like $2,000 - $4,000 per room.

With an Atom-powered mini-PC, I could get Windows hardware and a monitor setup in every room for about $300/room. I was hoping I'd be able to find some open- source visual acuity software, but it doesn't seem to exist. Most software- only solutions are still over $1,000 per-license per-room. The best-looking and most reasonably priced Windows software I've found is $400/room. Bringing my total cost to a (somewhat painful) ~$700/room.

There is one piece of good Visual Acuity software in the Mac App Store[2] that we'd be able to deploy in all 4 of our exam rooms with a single $99 license. So with 4x Mac Minis plus monitors, our per-room price would be pretty close to $700/room going that way too. But it seems like such a waste to spend $500 on a Mac Mini that will do nothing besides display some letters and symbols.

What I'd love to see is industry associations working together to produce open source software that solves problems like this. Visual testing software isn't complex. A fairly reasonable investment could get something open source developed that would lower the cost of healthcare across the country, and worldwide.

There are about 58,000 Ophthalmologists and Optometrists practicing in the United States. If we assume they average 2-lanes each, and open source software could lower the cost of visual acuity testing in each lane from $2,000 to $300, that would save $98-million.

1\. [http://konanmedical.com/chart2020/](http://konanmedical.com/chart2020/) 2\. [http://www.kybervision.com/mac/visualacuity/](http://www.kybervision.com/mac/visualacuity/)

<comment><USER7> Fancy that, my current project is to create a low-cost, high-quality optical coherency tomograph for private practitioners. I am planning to open-source the software and, depending on how things turn out over the next few months, possibly also the hardware designs.

This device can immediately detect around 80% of the pathologies of the posterior eye segment. It's high time we made this part of first-line diagnostic exams.

<comment><USER8> I don't know if you have an organization around you or not, but be careful. If your software is actually producing some sort of a quantitative or even qualititative "you have this visual defect or not" then the FDA may very well consider you a Medical Device and you'll have to go through submission, etc.

There are a lot of small businesses out there that are unwittingly (and illegally) producing medical devices and don't even know it (yet!).

<comment><USER7> We will be going through the long and arduous FDA and CE approval process. This is a big part of the cost.

<comment><USER9> Best of luck with that. As someone who has taken medical imaging software through both, my preference would be to get CE marking first and allow the market and the device to become establish before going for a 510K. The FDA predicate device process together with the glacial speed of the agency means making modifications to a system is unnecessarily difficult which is something you will need to do when innovating in a market. I find the CE process to be a more pragmatic approach.

On some of the darker days with the FDA - and despite their 90 day target we had over 900 days between submission and final clearance - I found it helped to remember the famous Churchill quote; "When you are going through hell, keep going."

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the advice. We already have experience with the CE process, it's painful but doable. The manufacturing company has been cleared for FDA before, so for now I remain optimistic. (Famous last words...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A few years ago, my patellar tendon was getting sore from running, and I went to a sports medicine specialist. At that first visit, he did an ultrasound scan over the length of my patellar tendons, and it was very discouraging to see these "black" sections in the mid-core of my tendons. They were actually tissue that was a bit disrupted, but the way it scattered the sound, it appeared as "black". Kind of freaked me out that my tendon was "dead" in the middle. The actual diagnosis was patellar tendinopathy, previously referred to as patellar tendinitis, or "jumper's knee".

He gave me exercises to build up my tendons, mainly eccentric resistance exercise, but it was going to take a long time. I wondered how I could monitor the progress of the healing. The doctor visit and scan was at least $200/visit, and the healing could take a year. On AliBaba, I checked how much a low end machine would cost to use at home.

There were all sorts of machines available, and one manufacturer's rep latched onto me. I still get the occasional email checking if I'm ready to buy. I think these machines may require some doctor's approval, too, but I never went that far.

But they sure don't cost anything like the prices in this article. In 2013, for quantity 1, IIRC, I was quoted $1100/each for this SUN-806F laptop plus sensor plus software unit:

[http://www.cnsunbright.com/china/english/newshow.asp?Cid=108...](http://www.cnsunbright.com/china/english/newshow.asp?Cid=108&sid=149&PID=135)

Maybe I'm missing something critical in this price difference? As the OP was explaining, you can almost build one yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP/author here, I also have patella tendinitis since I dislocated my patella when I was 17.

This is the reason I started looking at ultrasounds, I figured that I could buy one for the $160 cost to get a scan from a doctor. I have looked around for a cheap ultrasound, but $1100 is far cheaper than I was able to find (I got to about $3k but looked like a dodgy dealer so didn't link to it). But 1k is still way more expensive than I think it should be.

It should be a sensor you just plug into and iphone for a few hundred. I mean there is the [http://www.thermal.com/thermal- cameras/](http://www.thermal.com/thermal-cameras/) thermal camera for only $250, why not ultrasound? Making a photo sensor must be thousands of times more complicated than ultrasounds sensors.

I just want to know why I can't buy one cheaper than my massively more complex iphone :)

<comment> semi-extrinsic With the math on transducer costs, you've basically answered the question. However, aliexpress will get you 2MHz transducers 10x cheaper if you buy them in bulk. Then of course you have to worry about dodgy chinese website component quality.

I also think you're seriously underestimating the computational cost of converting the measured signal to a usable image. No way is an RPi fast enough to produce a live image with decent quality. There are quite a few papers in the literature about using high-end GPUs to speed up ultrasound imaging and denoising, for commercial vendors I'm guessing it's custom ASIC territory.

<comment><USER11> > I also think you're seriously underestimating the computational cost of > converting the measured signal to a usable image. No way is an RPi fast > enough to produce a live image with decent quality. There are quite a few > papers in the literature about using high-end GPUs to speed up ultrasound > imaging and denoising, for commercial vendors I'm guessing it's custom ASIC > territory.

Really? Medical ultrasound has a long history predating high-end GPUs. Maybe that kind of computing power is required for modern high-resolution/low-lag devices, but my guess is you could get something usable with a computer as powerful as a RPi.

[http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/history1.html](http://www.ob- ultrasound.net/history1.html)

<comment><USER12> I can confirm that you can turn ultrasound data into a 2D image using a simple mid 2000's era ARM processor and an FPGA. So a RPi can even be overkill for that purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The current heavy hitter in the ultrasound industry is Zonare and the Zonare Technology page ([http://www.zonare.com/technology/](http://www.zonare.com/technology/)) indicates that they are providing state of the art ultrasound that is much faster and higher resolution than earlier systems by combining variable sets of observations. This indicates that the technology that is currently being purchased and used is substantially more complex than a mere sensor.

Additionally medical markets have very complex purchasing processes and criteria that require specific marketing strategies to market. Most startups are used to going for cheap or fast or both, but medical markets want good and are not nearly as sensitive to price or delivery time. To sell to medical markets it is necessary to convince medical equipment purchasers that an option is better and less risky than other possibilities.

Overall this thread is a shameful display of the shallowness and shortsightedness of startup engineering today. The answers to most of the questions raised here can be answered by the technology page of the dominant supplier, but no one bothered to look up any of that. Instead we get irrelevant broken foot anecdotes. Conversationally that may make sense, but realistically making the kind of ultrasound machine offering that doctors might want to use and be able to buy is a very different and more complicated problem than is suggested by most of this thread.

</comment><comment><USER14> I designed an opthalmic ultrasound in the late '80s. The article describes "b-mode" ultrasound which actually creates an image (in some fraction of a circle like you see when someone shows you their unborn child). Back then, the electronics to electrically steer the beam were very hard to create (20MHz was a fast clock back then) and so the b-mode transducers were often mechanically steered. there was one transducer that was moved in an arc by the steering motor and coupled to an acoustically transparent housing by some gel.

Central Pennsylvania (from whence I'm writing tonight) played a key role in the creation of ultrasound systems - and Johnson and Johnson still manufacturers their transducers about 15 miles from where I'm sitting. The technology originally developed for SONAR came to the Pennsylvania State University where some of the engineers though of cool other ways to use transducers. Good thing the human body has so much water (or other components with a similar density and propagation speed.

When you get a b-mode ultrasound, you see the interface between two types of tissue (or bones) due to reflection. If you look at an image, it takes some practice to even "see" what the picture is.

So back to the cost issue - the biggest single expense in creating an ultrasound unit was getting through the FDA approval process. It was grueling - requiring a lot of testing by outside laboratories and a lot of internal engineering time for paperwork. Once you start to manufacture them, you're making (for a small company like ours) hundreds of units and even the large manufactures aren't making them like the Coca-Cola company spits out cans of soda. You're amortizing a lot more development costs into each unit.

And then, once you start selling to hospitals and doctors offices, the mark-up is huge. They in turn pass a large chunk of the cost of the machine to the insurance companies. If you were charging $500 per scan 20 times a day, you'd pay for your $8000 machine pretty quickly).

</comment><comment><USER15> There are Chinese made 3D machines for sale on EBay for less than $1000:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Portable-Digital-Ultrasound- Machine-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Portable-Digital-Ultrasound-Machine- Scanner-System-3-5-Mhz-Convex-Probe-Free-3D-/331342708500)

<comment> c-slice There is 0 chance that a US hospital or clinician will risk using an off-label ultrasound machine from china on a single patient. It's almost guaranteed to not be FDA/CE approved. That's how you get a malpractice suit.

<comment><USER16> But the article also talks about the many other potential uses of ultrasound machines. For hobby use $1000 is still a bit steep, but for classroom use that might be doable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Philips got a device called Lumify, starts at $199 but requires monthly subscription to use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers, that is awesome. Here is a video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLHtnza2jM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRLHtnza2jM)

It seems very limited for purchase, but would be cool to get my hands on one. I added it to the post :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> If you're patient, you might just find old machines (in some form of working order) show up on eBay and other marketplaces for old gear.

There is a video series of a teardown/repair of an old baggage x-ray machine that was acquired this very way:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPyE29ABmoA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPyE29ABmoA)

In fact, looking through the other videos by the same guy, he seems to have a fair number of xray machines..

<comment><AUTHOR> How is that legal? :)

<comment><USER19> Our (US) legal system doesn't work that way. If something isn't explicitly prohibited, it's permitted. This is a feature, not a bug.

While it's not illegal to purchase and use an x-ray machine itself, it would be illegal to use one on human subjects without the proper training and licensing. (Unless, of course, you work for the TSA.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think the answer is simply NRE is amortized over a small number of units. This is the case for a lot of test equipment.

</comment><comment><USER12> So my first job out of University was for a medical device startup, where the aim was to create a basic but inexpensive ultrasound (compared to huge "portable" ultrasound machines). They are still in business (I have friends still working there, 10+ years now) but for some reason they are not mentioned in any articles such as these, even though the product fits a lot of the requirements listed.

<comment><USER21> Startup name please?

<comment><USER12> A little company in Adelaide, Australia called Signostics (pronounced Sig - nostics).

[http://www.signostics.com.au/](http://www.signostics.com.au/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> c-slice Here are a few more reasons:

1) High touch sales process, slow sales cycles - ultrasounds take a long time to sell to hospitals/clinics so the sales process is very high touch and requires a significant number of demos and in person time. Those sales reps are usually paid on commission. Cheap products don't make sense to sell this way.

2) Lack of competition and high development cost - Ultrasound machines are a Class II medical device and so are regulated by the FDA. FDA requires compliance with most relevant ISO standards, and there would probably be a dozen relevant standards for an ultrasound machine.

3) Liability - complex medical devices that are used for critical diagnoses create big liability problems for the hospitals/clinicians. They have no incentive to choose the low-cost model sold by a startup. No one ever got sued for choosing GE/Philips/etc.

4) Lack of price transparency - its often hard to find prices for big ticket medical devices, so the natural pressure to reduce costs through competition isn't as effective, especially with a high touch/high cost sales process.

<comment><USER22> When I hear excuses about how some diagnostic test is expensive because the machines are expensive I think of airplanes and rental cars.

So you say your ten year old ultrasound costs $50k? I can rent a $50k automobile for $150 a day, not for just ten minutes. And rent a space on a 120 million dollar airplane for a few hundred. And seriously, mom was an accountant. The capital cost of a $50,000 ultrasound machine is about $20/day.

Meanwhile I have about $50,000 worth of test equipment sitting in my office. I'd never think of charging a customer a $2500 spectrum analyzer fee. Or a $400 oscilloscope diagnostic fee.

Please.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ultrasound machines of some sort is also pretty popular startup idea. I've heard at least of 3 people through personal connection who were building some sort of "ultrasound" device based startups. All have had proof of concepts and all have failed. I am guessing failing to deal with regulation, and other such red tape.

</comment><comment><USER24> When I was in the training business I was thinking of buying an ultrasound device. Yes, they are expensive, but the hardest part is you need a lot of training, even if you know your anatomy by heart, it's hard to make something out of the image.

I think it can be greatly improved by better software, so it get's closer to an MRI.

</comment><comment><USER25> To answer the question, it is because OP (Graham) hasn't created a startup to solve this problem.

When my wife was pregnant we went to a lot of ultrasounds, and I observed those big Phillips machines very closely, they definitely have room to improve on multiple dimensions.

<comment><USER26> Like a "post image to Facebook" or tweet this image button on the console? /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> They could just as well be asking, "Why is Salesforce so expensive when the marginal cost of each additional user is negligible?"

The answer is that the market price reflects a lot of other costs than just parts for adding an incremental user.

</comment><comment><USER28> 10 years ago when my wife was pregnant, a dianostic ultrasound cost $800, took 15 minutes, and the machine looked ancient. A 3D "fun scan" was $150, took 1 hour, and the machine was state of the art. Go figure.

<comment><USER22> Thing I harp on is that the medical industry is used to just charging whatever they can get away with. Since they have a generally naive and captive customer base, there is generally nothing to keep things real. My small experience with business is that when you have that situation you're set up to totally lose control of your costs. Because a lot of excess expenses are hidden in high margin products and services. Example, you make something for $5600 and sell it for $15,340. Could be that with a small amount of work you could produce the thing for $4200 ea. But because the margin is 'good' no one feels the need.

<comment><USER8> Actually my experience with the medical industry is that products get "value engineered" to oblivion. They are acutely aware of their margins and are constantly trying to improve them by reducing costs where it doesn't affect performance.

<comment><USER22> In some parts of the device industry there is actual competition though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2203114/Pregnant-w...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2203114/Pregnant- wife-inspires-engineer-build-affordable-hand-held-baby-scanner-save-thousands- lives.html)

[https://vimeo.com/49436607](https://vimeo.com/49436607)

Looks like they use one or just a few transducer and move it manually to reduce the cost.

<comment><USER30> Indeed! That was a solution used 30 years back =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> They wanted $600 to ultrasound me when I had gallstones, it's a racket.

Had to skip on that and just ate more fiber instead which thankfully solved that (pain was unbelievable).

<comment><USER32> More fiber will not help you with gallstones at all (had to deal with them, too); it's fats you've to be carefull about. The problem is not fat in itself, but which other foods you combine it with.

> They wanted $600 to ultrasound

Well, they were asking that for the procedure, not for the device. The problem you had is, that you're probably living in a country with a laughable healthcare system. Guess what I did pay for my ultrasounds? Nothing, because it's covered by our mandatory insurance system. In fact most general practitioners have ultrasound machines (quite modern ones, too, I'd like to add).

<comment><USER31> would beg to disagree with you about fiber (you are right about the healthcare, if anything the price is only higher now that more people have insurance rather than price reform)

after a few bad attacks over a couple years, it finally dawned on me to radically increase my fiber intake after reading up on it online

no attacks for years now

initially I had reduced my fat intake but now far less careful without any downsides

cannot imagine anything worse than gallstone attacks, I literally thought I was dying the first time it ever happened

<comment><USER32> > cannot imagine anything worse than gallstone attacks, I literally thought I > was dying the first time it ever happened

I know that just too well. In case one ever happens to hit you again, I found out that a hot bath will give you instant relief. Don't ask me how it works exactly, I just found out, that it works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> " computer that can run a MHz frequency transducer is easy and cheap these days, e.g. a raspberry pi's GPIO pins can run that frequency."

Yeah, but actually you need an ADC that runs at MHz frequencies and a frontend amplifier to capture the signal and put it into the ADC

Definitely this falls into the "not expensive" category, but not in the "trivially cheap" one

<comment><USER30> Agreed, for a single element one there's a project on hackaday : [https://hackaday.io/project/9281-murgen](https://hackaday.io/project/9281-murgen) =)

160$ cost for a single electronic board, not cheap, not so expensive..

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a phenomenal article outlining how the regulatory environment essentially causes these devices to be far more expensive than they really ought to be:

[http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/paper...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/papers/after_aca.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER35> Can anybody who is knowledgeable in this area tell me if it is possible to use later interference to build ultrasound transducer? Similar to how gravity wave detector works but for 2 dimensions?

</comment><comment><USER32> Actually "Ultrasounds" are among the cheapest medical devices around. Practically "everybody" makes them and the market is oversaturated.

The processing software is actually the least problematic thing; it's all well documented and somebody with the right background (electronics, digital signal processing and computer graphics) could hack it in a single weekend (that's not an exaggeration: When I got invited to the group where I'm currently doing my PhD they were giving me a few datasets of raw, unprocessed Swept-Source OCT fringe data and said "have fun". A day later, using liberal application of NumPy I got pictures; another day and the quality was pretty good.

"Ultrasounds" cost more than consumer goods, because, at the moment, they are not consumer goods. Compare this to the cost of "personal computers" in the 1980-ies. Just about as expensive, and "Ultrasounds" are kind of the medical imaging "PC" counterpart for general practitioners.

So can "Ultrasounds" be made consumer goods? Difficult, because some parts of them must be built at very high quality standards, not to put the patient at risk. Also some of the electronics involved is challenging, even by todays standards. For example driving the transducers requires driving amplifiers capable of outputting >1kV against a highly complex and poorly matched impedance at bandwidths above 1MHz. That's a really tough problem, that, luckily, has been solved but still requires fairly complex electronics; you can buy appropriate driver amplifier ICs, but those are not cheap, often >10$ per Unit and you need several of them. But that's only half the story: You also need to receive the reflected signal. Here's the problem that the transducers tend to ring after emitting the pulse, causing signal artifacts. And the waves coming back will produce only a few µV of signal. So you've got a 180dB dynamic range between sending and receiving and TX and RX share parts of the signal path; either your RX amplifier can cope with the 1kV sending signal and quickly enough recovers, or you have to add some fairly quick, high insulation signal path switches to quickly switch between TX and RX.

And finally you need a whole array of medium speed ADCs (each with a sampling rate of about 10MHz to allow for some oversampling) one for each channel; and of course the interface to the computer. A single 10MHz ADC is cheap. But as soon as we enter the multiple channel interfaces domain things get pricey quick. Just look at audio which operates at most at nimble 96kHz, yet "pro- sumer" (enthusiast consumer) audio interfaces with 16 or more channels go over 1000$; And we need 100 times the sampling rate for ultrasound. So actually the about 3000$ you pay for the ADCs is pretty cheap, if you compare the MHz/$.

So you've solved all these essential problems. Now you have to make sure, that a mechanical failure doesn't expose the 1kV driving signal to the transducer to the patient. Here's the challenge: The transducers are separated by the thinnest possible layer of isolation material from the patient's skin, there's a pulsed >1kV amplitude AC signal right behind it, and between the probe and the patient you have conductor gel, which is essentially water jelly, that gives a nice acoustic impedance match, but also does a very good electrical match; we're talking body resistivity model in the two-digit ohms right now. Or in other words: A single manufacturing failure in your scanhead probe and you're going to electrocute the patient. Oh, you're thinking about just floating the whole transducer driver electronics. Smartass, that won't work, because you're operating with MHz AC here, so we're talking RF coupling, driving transducers with significant pulse power; you'll giving your "victim" RF burns, which are nasty.

Come to think about it: 8000$ for a ultrasound imaging unit sounds pretty cheap.

</comment><comment><USER36> Buy it from unregulated Chinese providers for personal use?

</comment><comment><USER37> Compared to an MRI machine it's very cheap

<comment><USER32> The funny thing about this is, that technologically an MRI is much simpler compared to an ultrasonic imager:

\- Field coil \- Gradient coils + coil driver \- RF transceiver (essentially n SDR)

The single most expensive part is the cryostat for the field coil. If there were high temperature superconductors that would retain their properties within strong magnetic fields you could build and operate MRI scanners much cheaper.

A few years ago I did build a very crude and simplistic MRI scanner in my shack; it had a piss poor resolution of about 10mm³ took "ages" to scan a single plane and would dissipate huge amounts of heat in the (normal conducting) field coil; the gradient coils were driven by a regular HiFi audio amplifier. But it is definitely possible to build such a thing DIY and have it produce images (of poor quality).

<comment><USER37> Wow that's really amazing. The super conductors are annoying in that they self distruct. I wonder if there is a cheap way to make one and gracefully shut it down when finished with it.

I met one of the original engineers for ultrasound. The original design was 3d through mechanical scanning of the body

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> "Why is custom software so expensive to produce? Open-source components are _free_ , so the final product should be, too!"</comment>


After 1 minute on my modem - <AUTHOR> https://1-minute-modem.branchable.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> _" Remember dialup?

From time to time when still being on it is getting me down, I take screenshots of some of the horribleness seen after trying to load one website for a minute.

Which is about enough time to download all of War And Peace over dialup."_

A series of screen shots of what appears after one minute on the 21st Century Web at dial-up speeds</comment>


A personal appeal from Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> http://rufoa.com/billg/I%20love%20hn.jpg

<comment><USER2> i remember seeing this exact angle in a reddit AMA!!!</comment>


Xi Editor - <AUTHOR> https://xi-editor.io/ <comment><USER2> Just spent some time looking through the source, and I must say it's refreshing to see a well-documented project for once.</comment>


Show HN: Omnitor, mobile phone consumption tracker on Android - <AUTHOR> http://mattquiros.github.com/omnitor-android/

<comment><USER2> A link that actually works: <https://github.com/mattquiros/omnitor-android/></comment>


Ask HN: Where do you look for jobs? - <AUTHOR> Other than informally in your network. Specifically interested in jobs with smaller companies, but I'm open to all sources. <comment><USER2> I found my last job through Angellist ([http://angel.co](http://angel.co)) Give it a try. Also, depending upon your technology, there might be niche job boards. For example, for laravel jobs there's [http://larajobs.com](http://larajobs.com)

</comment><comment><USER3> Just search for new startups in your area on google. Send them an email directly saying you want to help them and love what they do. It's that simple...

</comment><comment><USER4> Twitter might be a good option, either engage with people working in the company or with the community manager.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really don't. Every job I've ever actually taken has come through my network somehow.

</comment><comment><USER6> Hn who's hiring thread

Stack overflow

Local meet up mailing lists

Google search: city plus tech keyword</comment>


Here is why nobody has succeeded at running IoT on the blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/04/05/nobody-succeeded-running-iot-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> What happens to those 10 year batterylife IOT devices when they start doing blockchaining and maybe even needing to get info from server to just send the damn temperature data. Also these kind of devices might use wireless networks like LoRa with very limited bandwidths[1] and usually extremely low data caps(50 bytes per minute anyone?)

IMHO biggest problem with blockchain hypers is the denial of current status of the blockchain technology in regards of the number of transactions. For example bitcoin get around 2000 transactions per second and median confirmation time sitting in somewhere 8-9 minutes[2]. Would you like to wait 8 minutes at counter for them to confirm your payment? Likewise in IOT applications for critical temperature monitoring, would you like to know only after some time find out that your subject(person/machine) has overheaten?

Granted not all blockchain tech is equal in performance and compromises can be achieved to avoid those performance pitfalls. But at what point it would just be better to use basic signing and leave it at that(crypto engines are more or less standard features in microcontrollers).

[1] [https://www.lora-alliance.org/technology](https://www.lora- alliance.org/technology) [2] [https://blockchain.info/charts](https://blockchain.info/charts)

<comment><USER3> While I'm not sure what IOT blockchain is supposed to do - I guess it's a bit hypothetical at the moment - it might make sense for payments. For example your smart light socket could send some currency to order a new bulb when it goes. Or your router could charge some passer by a few cents to supply data service. While bitcoin is slow other stuff like Stellar take approx 5 secs and cost like 0.001 cents per transaction.

As an aside I wonder if your ccvt's AI system detected a party was happening and ordered some recreational drugs using some currency it came with when bought, who would be guilty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aside from the exponential increase of data traffic the devices would need an similar increase in processing power. A central hub in a location would help. But the you're partially defeat the idea of a universal block chain.

</comment><comment><USER5> > all of the which would need to go through the blockchain

wat

</comment><comment><USER6> What about IOTA, its trying to implement IOTish solution on blockchain. There are some security issues but its well backed...

<comment><USER7> Not on blockchain. Blockchain technology is just not efficient enough (scaling, throughput, fees, processing power) to support IoT use cases. It uses a different approach based on Direct Acyclic Graphs (DAG) that they decided to rename "Tangle" (a pretty poor marketing decision imho)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I did not read the article but the fact it does not even mention iota (even to say it is not based on blockchain but on DAG technology) indicates it is probably very poorly researched and/or very biased

<comment><USER8> Iota isn't actually a crypto currency - there's a server run by the iota team that "coordinates" all transactions. See previous discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457120](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16457120)

<comment><USER7> The plan is to shut down the coordinator when network will be big enough. Even with the coordinator running, to say that Iota is not a crypto currency is quite wrong (also it is much more than a currency). In any case, to not mention Iota in an article about "IoT and blockchains" is just plain dumb considering this is the certainly the major project in this field (even if it only to mention that Iota is not running a blockchain but a DAG, and that it is not currently fully decentralized)</comment></comment></comment>


Why Immigrants, Students and U.S. Companies Are Going to Canada - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2019/04/22/why-immigrants-students-and-u-s-companies-are-going-to-canada/ <comment><USER2> Tech salaries in Toronto and Vancouver are almost half of what I get paid in the US. It's no wonder companies are flocking there.

I don't know how people can live in either of these cities with salaries that are so low and the cost of living still comparable to a big city.</comment>


ProcessWire PHP framework/CMS version 2.4 released - <AUTHOR> http://processwire.com/about/news/introducing-processwire-2.4/ <comment><USER2> Excellent release. That this is a "point" release amazes me. It adds so much functionality to an already amazing CMS, it blows my mind more people don't use this day-to-day.</comment>


Thou shalt not depend on me: analysing the use of outdated JavaScript libraries - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/03/07/thou-shalt-not-depend-on-me-analysing-the-use-of-outdated-javascript-libraries-on-the-web/ <comment><USER2> Title should be updated to state that the article was published in 2017.</comment>


Why Facebook is losing the war on hate speech in Myanmar - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-facebook-hate/ <comment><USER2> I really don't see why Facebook is blamed for this. That ethnic tension was present way before Facebook even existed. It was kept in check by an authoritarian military dictatorship and then bubbled up in the transition to more democracy, which really shouldn't have been unexpected. Facebook was just there at the wrong time, and happened to be the way people were communicating at that time; Aung San Suu Kyi has also gotten a lot of criticism for being in this even though she has been mostly powerless to do anything about it either.

All Facebook can do is stop the propagation on their network. Even with China- level censorship, they would probably need serious manual effort or even a complete network shutdown to stop being a medium. But the same problems will still occur using other channels, maybe the hate won't move as fast, but it will still be fast enough to cause plenty of damage.

<comment><USER3> Facebook is riding in on its royal horses trying to connect (read: own the primary means of communication) the world like all the classically imperialist westerners before them.

The first thing they teach you in international business and/or marketing is that cultural considerations will destroy you if you do not devote effort to addressing them. If, in building a hyperlocal product (like facebook), you do not take the time to understand your local markets, then they will move in ways that you don't understand and you may not be able to control. Usually at your peril.

edit: as an example.. an international trade professor told us a story about how one of his expat factory managers had an affair with a local girl in a small town in a strongly Buddhist east-asian country. When word of this got out the woman's family raised royal hell for the factory and their operations and the situation was threatening to run the company out of town. Professor said the manager was given a choice: either marry the girl to assuage the locals or leave. (He chose to leave)

<comment><USER4> I mean, they do some pretty distasteful stuff but saying that providing an international communications platform is imperialist is just beyond silly.

<comment><USER3> Facebook trying to build an international (business) empire is not "imperialist"? When I used the word I was thinking of Dutch East Indies Co., etc.

<comment><USER4> you're playing games with words. The various East India companies were imperialist because they dominated the countries they "traded" with. It was more of a militant occupation than an act of mutually beneficial exchange.

<comment><USER3> But those were different times, when companies could get away with militant operations. To say nothing of strike-breakers, African rubber plantations, or what-have-you. Most companies we know of (esp. American) can't get away with those sorts of things now, at least not in the public eye.

Soft power is the new militant occupation. Facebook is taking cues from Pablo Escobar (minus the violence, we hope).

<comment><USER4> so in this new world where "soft power" (which I assume means any power imbalance) across borders is imperialism, how can a company be international and not be "imperialist"? Because if they can't then that's the kind of "imperialism" I couldn't care less about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook sees this as a cost center and will therefore do the minimum it can get away with to address this.

They have shown no real concern for the negative effects they have on communities and society.

Their leadership has displayed a lust for power that would make most politicians blush, IMO.

<comment><USER6> "Daily active users in developing countries" is, in all probability, a KPI at Facebook.

"People killed as the result of rumors spread on our platform" is probably not. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There has been a big problem in India with lynch mobs being formed in Whatsapp groups, over various unsubstantiated rumours, including apparent child snatchers travelling through villages [1].

This raises an interesting cross section of moral issues. Obviously end-to-end encryption is good for a lot of reasons. But end-to-end encryption is one of the reasons that these lynchings have been able to happen. These kinds of lynchings have been going on forever, but Whatsapp and mobile phones have allowed these rumours to spread faster than ever before, and for mobs to form so much easier.

Does the right to privacy outweigh people's right to travel without fear of being lynched?

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia- india-44856910](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44856910)

<comment><USER8> >But end-to-end encryption is one of the reasons that these lynchings have been able to happen

Have all participants of the lynchings being prosecuted? Enforcing civil and criminal codes is enough to stop them.

There's no need to blame end-to-end encryption. It's not the tool, it's the people.

<comment><USER9> No, because the rule of law has largely collapsed and, like lynchings everywhere, they happen with the complicity of local law enforcement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interestingly, this article is written from the perspective that Facebook is responsible for everything posted on its website.

<comment><USER2> This is actually an interesting question, from a legal standpoint anyways. I don't think Myanmar has a safe harbor exemption like the US does, they actually have some pretty heavy handed censorship laws on the books. However, Facebook doesn't even have an office in Myanmar, they aren't officially there, and without a GFW Myanmar can't really block Facebook (nor would the people be ok with that, as Facebook has already become the internet to many).

Probably why Facebook won't be opening an office in Myanmar anytime soon, at least until they can sort these issues out and have some strong legs to stand on.

<comment><USER11> Linking this explicitly to safe harbour like you've done is important -- the knee-jerk response online is often to condemn Facebook for not policing content but to defend content hosters for not being able to filter out all instances of copyright violations.

Maybe those positions are held by different people, and maybe there's some good-faith "make an effort" middleground, and maybe the standards should be different because nobody dies when someone pirates Westworld, but they're clearly analogous.

If we do have different standards we should be able to back it up with argument, and try hard not to let how much we like the companies colour our judgement.

<comment><USER12> The middle ground is a great place to be if you want to take fire from _everyone_. In terms of legal and regulatory risk, it's an incredibly hazardous place to be because it has few defenders and many attackers.

Personally, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of demanding that megacorporations do censorship for us on whatever arbitrary standards they can be convinced are good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting that the project codename is "Honey Badger." To me that connotes not caring less — you might remember this YouTube viral video from a few years ago:

[https://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg](https://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg)

</comment><comment><USER14> Blah title, but article is quite good. Referenced Reuters article is even better.</comment>


Paralyzed by Choice in Front-end Development - <AUTHOR> http://flippinawesome.org/2014/03/31/paralyzed-by-choice-in-front-end-development/ <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, we've set up a lottery where the biggest winners are the ones who write the Great American Framework, and the way people play is by making a new framework/front-end/library/yet-another-thing and fragmenting the ecosystem ever more.

Oh, and then employers will say "we demand two years experience in the thing that came out two years ago -- we need you to hit the ground running!!"

<comment><USER3> I've had people expect > X years in a technology that was only < X years old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://html5weekly.com/](http://html5weekly.com/) is one quality newsletter. Then there is [http://tinyletter.com/webaudioweekly](http://tinyletter.com/webaudioweekly) which I have been subscribed to for around 3 weeks now; some really interesting links there.

From the list in the OP, [http://webtoolsweekly.com/](http://webtoolsweekly.com/) and [http://tympanus.net/codrops/](http://tympanus.net/codrops/) looks very very interesting. Thanks for sharing this.

Edit: Unfortunately, codrops doesn't seem to have a subscribe by email option. Oh well.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the complaints about "too much choice" are overstated. People are not simply reinventing the wheel over and over, we have legitimate innovations happening due to "too much choice".

React came out less than a year ago and there are already alternatives built on the virtual DOM concept, and attempts to port to other libraries.

X-Tag and then later Polymer came out which has acted as test beds for the Web Components standard.

Those are just two examples off the top of my head. Innovation is unlikely to happen if we all throw out hands up and agree to just use Framework X.

<comment><USER6>
       React came out less than a year ago and there are already
     alternatives built on the virtual DOM concept

How is it a bad thing?the virtual DOM should be a library by itself i believe. So should be angular injector , so is Sizzle ,etc...

Instead of writing big frameworks that mashes up a lot of stuffs, these libraries should AND will be more modular no matter what, in the future. I want to be able to create my own library with building blocks ,like in any other language. The problem today is

1/ javascript lacks of a proper module spec

2/ libraries are too tightly coupled

ES6 module are the answer and will change things.fortunatly.

I dont want to use React,Angular or Vue or whatever. I want to use building blocks to create my own framework. JS lib maintainers will have to change the way they write libraries to make them extentable and pluggable.

<comment><USER5> > How is it a bad thing?

I don't. I think it's a great thing, I thought my comment was pretty clear that I think "too many options" is B.S.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To remotesynth (who I believe authored the post): Hey, how do I decide what is noise and what isn't?

Could you possible think about adding a section to the post with actionable steps similar to the ones you listed for side projects? Those were golden. But the main part of your article talks about 'finding if it's relevant to your work' and such.

Do you have a process you use for objectively evaluating a new tech for work purposes vs side project purposes? Or do you use a funnel such as: >try in side project >if good, try at work

I'm wondering because I do a lot of work with edutech, and I have a very specific set of criteria I use when evaluating the 'latest and greatest' new piece of learning software that crosses my desk. It helps me to weed out the chaff from the wheat.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't cover that because I think the criteria changes depending on your role and the type of company you work for. For instance, when I was at a large financial company, it needed to be something that was well established, with solid documentation and with professional support options (so, often this was something along the lines of professional open source). When I was with a consulting company, I was much more open to new frameworks as I might encounter clients using them or they might be suitable for some project.

When I am compiling my weekly update, it ends up being something that appears to have at least some decent documentation and the description sounds both useful and makes sense (you won't believe how many libraries/frameworks I come across that I simply have no idea what they actually do or how they are different).

Anyway, all that is to say, I don't know that there is one set of criteria that works for everyone and it is subjective anyway. Sorry if that sounds like a cop out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The list of mailing lists very well curated and useful, few of them I did not knew about. In my digests subscription I also have:

> Web Development Reading List (WDRL) > [http://tinyletter.com/wdrl](http://tinyletter.com/wdrl)

> Sidebar

and FountForge

<comment><USER8> reporting the links here in csv formats for easy processing -

Warning: the hn parser appends the quotes to the url when you click. sorry about this

"Collective by CoDrops","[http://tympanus.net/codrops/collective/"](http://tympanus.net/codrops/collective/")

"CSS Weekly","[http://css-weekly.com/"](http://css-weekly.com/")

"Web Design Weekly","[http://web-design-weekly.com/"](http://web-design- weekly.com/")

"Responsive Design Weekly","[http://responsivedesignweekly.com/"](http://responsivedesignweekly.com/")

"The Sass Way","[http://thesassway.com/"](http://thesassway.com/")

"Sass News","[http://t.co/j0fMGWu9ng"](http://t.co/j0fMGWu9ng")

"Web Standards Library Update by Flippin' Awesome","[http://flippinawesome.org/category/news/best- of/"](http://flippinawesome.org/category/news/best-of/")

"Best of JavaScript, HTML & CSS by Flippin' Awesome","[http://flippinawesome.org/category/news/best- of/"](http://flippinawesome.org/category/news/best-of/")

"HTML5 Weekly","[http://html5weekly.com/"](http://html5weekly.com/")

"JavaScript Weekly","[http://javascriptweekly.com/"](http://javascriptweekly.com/")

"Node Weekly","[http://nodeweekly.com/"](http://nodeweekly.com/")

"Web Tools Weekly","[http://webtoolsweekly.com/"](http://webtoolsweekly.com/")

"DailyJS","[http://dailyjs.com/"](http://dailyjs.com/")

"ng-newsletter","[http://www.ng-newsletter.com/"](http://www.ng- newsletter.com/")

"Ember Weekly","[http://emberweekly.com/"](http://emberweekly.com/")

"Today's Readings by Aaron T. Grogg","[http://aarontgrogg.com/blog/category/todays- readings/"](http://aarontgrogg.com/blog/category/todays-readings/")

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see a lot of complaints that employers want X years of experience in a framework that has been out only X years or even less than X years.

Also see complaints about having to keep up with too many new frameworks/libraries etc.

Hopefully both good developers and good employers/clients will realize that frameworks are like cars.

You might be a mechanic who specializes in Corvettes but that doesn't mean you can't change the tires, do the brakes, or diagnose the oxygen sensor on a another make or model.

The really valuable skills, in developers or mechanics are knowing your tools and how to choose the best one for the job, knowing the diagnostic/troubleshooting process and knowing the underlying systems that make a program/vehicle run.

Sure there will be little gotchas or time-savers that a specialist will have developed but those are usually mitigated by joining a team that can point them out to you or just by working with the new framework/library for a while. They certainly don't prevent you from being productive.

</comment><comment><USER10> Has anyone seen a tool or website that shows which technologies were used for which website or web app? I'm aware of BuiltWith but wondering if there is anything more framework-choosing oriented. How should I decide whether to use Angular, Meteor, Node, Backbone, Vanilla, Rails, etc

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes

Some developers have a tendency to overpick tools/frameworks, usually the latest ones, with incomplete/bad documentation

So there's a new something.js that came out yesterday and they already commit it into the project when it could be replaced by 3 lines of js in a less buggy way for what they need it in the project

</comment><comment><USER12> Paralysed by choice:

1) Which client-side scripting language should I choose? Let's see... Only one supported - JS it is.

2) Which client-side GUI layout language shoud I choose? Hmm... I will go with the only one supported - HTML.

<comment><USER7> I am about to dive head first into web/web app programming. Would you suggest I do it all through plain vanilla HTML/CSS/JS?

I mean I wanted to start with these (I first wrote web pages in the late 90s with just HTML) as I believe you do need a fundamental understanding of the foundations to be able to make a good choice regarding frameworks. But would you say just stay with those, and don't worry about SASS/LESS, Angular/JQuery/etc..?

Or can the right framework really make you more productive? (I really do wonder about this because all I see with a lot of frameworks is that they impose a way of thinking onto your coding)

<comment><USER13> > * But would you say just stay with those, and don't worry about SASS/LESS, > Angular/JQuery/etc..?*

What you use should ultimately be up to you, but I would approach it in the following way :

1\. start with what you _need_ to complete the project

2\. add new components / frameworks / libraries on a must-have basis

I'd be tempted to recommend ditching jQuery while learning JavaScript, but don't feel that strongly about it. A lot of Stack Overflow answers will be provided with jQuery syntax - so that's something to keep in mind.

Don't worry about SASS/LESS and client side "MVC" frameworks. Until you need them, those are just new fiddly things to learn that distract from the actual point of the exercise.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've looked into what it would take just to dump jQuery for DOM traversal and manipulation. It can be done in plain JS, but you end up rewriting a lot of methods to fill in the gaps already filled by jQuery. My conclusion was, it's still easier and more productive to use jQuery.

<comment><USER13> > _It can be done in plain JS, but you end up rewriting a lot of methods to > fill in the gaps already filled by jQuery. My conclusion was, it 's still > easier and more productive to use jQuery._

Of course. That's the entire point of jQuery :/

If your goal is to put up an application - jQuery is basically industry standard. If your goal is to develop a better intuition about how the DOM works - then stick to JavaScript.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember a client who wanted to use Node.js and Angular.js for a simple site that could've just used php, jQuery and ajax but to no avail, he already has rosy outlooks for this latest technology that will make his website scale like crazy and with a front end that will be easy to build on. It didn't help that he had another freelancer telling him that he is 'philosophically against php and uses javascript only'.

<comment><USER15> You could have advised the client to use the experimental technology that facebook uses to build their front-end, something called hhvm ;)

<comment><USER14> yeah at the time I didn't know it existed. I think hhvm is really important for php

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the paralyzed by choice meme is overstated in a lot of places. Sure there is a lot of new JavaScript libs and tools being developed but none of them are needed. A lot of them certainly make your job easier and it makes sense to learn about the new tools as they come but in general a ten to fifteen minute glance will tell if it should be in the pipeline or not.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is #e#x+e#s+e-e#l-e a valid number in Racket? - <AUTHOR> Eli Barzley pointed out that Racket reads #e#x+e#s+e-e#l-e as a number.[1]

  $ racket
  Welcome to Racket v6.10.
  > #e#x+e#s+e@-e#l-e
  16140901064495857664-50176i

 Why is it valid? According to https://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/reader.html, #s should be a structure literal.
I suppose this would be better as a StackOverflow question, but it's an interesting puzzle.
[1]
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3146771/building-lisp-sc... <comment><USER2> It's usually faster to submit it to the mailing list.

[spoiler alert]

The #s is brilliantly misleading. A shorter version is

      #x0#s0  ;==> 0.0f0 (almost like 0.0)

In this case, the second # means an unspecified digit in an inexact number. For example

      4## ;==> 400.0

(other scheme implementation may give a different result near 400, like 450.0)

The s is the exponent mark in a single precision number

      2s4 ;==> 20000.0f0

</comment><comment><USER3> First of all the `@` means we are dealing with a an inexact

        ‹inexact-complexn› ::= ‹inexact-realn› @ ‹inexact-realn›

Here is a short guide: #e means exact #x means hexadecimal

So `#e#x+e` means exact 14.

The last `#` in means an unknown number - Racket has chosen to use 0. Therefore `#e#x+e#` means 14 _16 = 224.

The `s0` is an exponent mark, which marks the precision of an inexact number. The `s0` means single-precision (in Scheme s means short - in many implementations short and single both use single precision).

Thus `#x+e#s0` means `224.0f` and `#e#x+e#s0` means 224.

Now since it is a hexadecimal number the following `+e` means 14. Therefore `#e#x+e#s0+e` means `224_16^14` which is 16140901064495857664.

Now we come the `@`. This means the first part was the real part of a complex number and what follows is the imaginary part.</comment>


Completed my SaaS project yesterday. Looking for the first thoughts - <AUTHOR> http://chatpage.co <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys,

I've been working on my new SaaS for about 3 months now, yesterday I finished testing it online. Now I'm looking for feedback and the first users.

It's a customer communication tool (chat) with nice features like sending surveys/polls during conversation. It's perfect for gathering feedback, lead generation, support etc so you don't have to waste time centralizing text answers or use separate survey tools which break the conversation flow with external links.

It's not a live-chat widget, instead you get a fully customizable page with a chat panel inside. If you want to get feedback or other details(like address) during conversation, you can easily send the form from the admin zone and your customer will see the form on the left of the chat panel. You can see the submission live and respond accordingly.

Some features it has * your own chatpage.co/your_business or custom domain * get links that enable certain forms before the conversation, to include in emails or other websites * easy-to-use form builder * export submitted data as excel/pdf * view data as charts for analysis * email fallback when you are offline * 8 themes, customize over 50 attributes(from background image to fonts and colors)

At this stage, feedback is critical so I appreciate any thought you have about this. It's free now so you can start using it right away to communicate with your clients.

<comment><USER2> on your example page I can't see any text, only images and text boxes:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/8hgvdkk2blxbt7t/Screenshot%202016-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/8hgvdkk2blxbt7t/Screenshot%202016-01-28%2012.45.22.png?dl=0)

Safari 9.0.3 (11601.4.4)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the screenshot.

That's very strange...probably is something with the font not being loaded. I'll debug this.

Thanks again

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This might make a good "Show HN."

I like that there is a demo to play with that does not require logging in or giving up anonymity.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.

I'm still working on it so I'll make one when it will be ready.

<comment><USER3> Show HN is intended for projects in process. Product announcements are fine, but I don't think it's meant as a Demo Day.

Guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why/when should I use it over Intercom?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1.It's a separate page instead of widget which allows the user to engage more in the conversations, no distractions.

2.It has the liveforms(survey/polls) during conversation to get better/faster feedback or include the link to chat + form into emails</comment></comment>


New study finds the best time to book a flight - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/11/whens-the-best-time-to-book-a-flight.html <comment><AUTHOR> TLDR: For internal flights - 3 weeks to 3.5 months before flight For international flights - 2 months before flight

Interestingly, it's often cheaper to order a ticket 2 months in advance than 10 months in advance.</comment>


WeWork's Adam Neumann offered package worth up to $1.7B to step down from board - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/22/weworks-adam-neumann-to-get-200-million-to-leave-board-report-says.html <comment><USER2> Mmm, it's interesting. There's really two options here:

Option A: Son is right, and the market is wrong. WeWork is a ~$50b company, and after a bit of hardball SoftBank will own 70% of it for a very affordable $15b (or whatever it is). And once the market catches on, WeWork's valuation will quintuple overnight, netting the Vision Fund a nice profit and Son the right to be very, very smug.

Option B: The market is right, and Son is wrong. WeWork is a ~$10b company, which through a fit of almost comic mismanagement Son has managed to pay ~$15b for (and still owns only a bare majority). With a lot of work (and thanks to getting rid of Neumann), it might one day be worth enough SoftBank/the Vision fund is (barely) not below water, but even that's iffy.

I'm no expert, and while on paper option B does look pretty compelling, let's say maybe option A is right after all. In which case...

...given that Son is just a uniquely talented visionary, and saw potential that nobody else (and especially not other potential investors) saw, uh...why in the hell did he keep investing at higher and higher valuations? Like, if the market is just dumb and can't see that WeWork is worth $50b, not $10b, then.... _why invest at a $50b valuation_? Unless it was just a glorified pump-and-dump all along (ie, Son never thought it was worth $50b, but he thought other people could be fooled into thinking it), in which case, why invest _now_? Does he think he's going to get a second bite at the apple? It's really hard to imagine us all being here in 18-36 months going "wow, WeWork sure has turned things around, I think their IPO will price at $60b!" Right? Isn't the WeWork hype irrevocably gone?

This whole thing is so odd. Is it really as simple as "we're just piling billions of dollars up and setting them on fire because we love expensive bonfires"? Is that it?

<comment><USER3> > given that Son is just a uniquely talented visionary

He's lost more money than anyone in history. And probably is about to do it a second time.

<comment><USER4> ?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's based on Son having a paper net worth of ~$85-$90 billion at the peak of the dotcom bubble and seeing all but about $3 billion of it vanish, peak to trough. You can move the numbers a bit (eg debate over the peak figure), however it still comes out in a similar way... he plausibly lost the most wealth - on paper - of any person that has ever lived.

Yasumitsu Shigeta, another Japanese dotcom super billionaire, lost around $41 billion on paper during the crash. He recovered somewhat and remains a billionaire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What an amazing twist if true. In my opinion, Neumann is a conman. That he got away with taking out $700 million pre-IPO, that We is close to bankcruptcy just weeks later, that he now gets an additional $1.7 billion … it's just jawdropping. I don't understand why he is not afraid for his safety.

<comment><USER6> Why do VCs let founders cash out pre-IPO?

AFAIK fiduciary self dealing is illegal in public companies but for whatever reason WeWork's investors evidently didn't seem to care. Why?

<comment><USER7> The founders have control of the company and hold it for ransom. They can destroy the company if they aren't kept happy.

<comment><USER6> Right, that's the part I'm a bit confused by.

If I'm understanding you right, it sounds like VCs choose to not require fiduciary-style obligations of the founders?

e.g. whatever the contract looks like, I'm a bit surprised it wouldn't have a term along the lines of 'by taking this money you promise not to self deal'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yet one more example that leads the average person to feel "The system is rigged, and grossly at that." I don't even think your average person minds that much when there are insanely wealthy people who built huge, successful companies, but here is another case of someone who has destroyed billions in wealth, and is paid yet more billions for the honor. It's this "heads I win, tails you lose" system that eventually brings people to want to tear the whole thing down.

<comment><USER9> The vulture-cannibalistic corporate capture of nearly everything leads to many vicious feedback loops including extinctions of species, destruction of the planet, grotesque income&property ownership inequality and deepening political capture (corruption). If the average person from the masses of people had any self-respect, they'd band together and form worker-owned co-ops to ensure livable wages AND fair remuneration from their work. They'll never get anything more than crumbs with this current, extremely unfair wealth transfer (e.g., slavery) arrangement.

<comment><USER10> But thats the crux - pressure and incentives. Capital is supposed to reward ingenuity and efficiency. Instead it is mainly used like you say, in a recursive way, so to protect itself even when there is no invention, no ingenuity, just pure oppression through disruption of communication, things like unions, independent candidates, etc

Crumbs from an abundance are pleasing to those who have comparisons to look at: nature's parasites or pangs of age or pangs of poverty or 1800s medicine.

The real issue was never equality. It has always been adequacy and comparative "neo-nostalgism."

Until the hinge breaks of fully, there are usually never any real revolutions. Maybe the internet can change that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone from inside WeWork able to give a sense of the impact on morale? Are people more worried about the coming layoffs, relieved that they won't extend to the entire company, or just pissed enough at Neumann to hope the whole thing implodes?

</comment><comment><USER12> A Japanese VC fund that funneled billions of Saudi Sovereign Fund money into American real estate owners pockets. The circle of life.

<comment><USER13> And somewhere in the center of that circle is the actual untold story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is an outrage when the employees are likely to get nothing for their options of common stock: [https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-employee- equity-ipo-b...](https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-employee-equity-ipo- bankruptcy-lesson-for-tech-startups-2019-10)

</comment><comment><USER15> "$185 million consulting fee"

Now that's a steep consulting rate, wonder what he bills per hour

<comment><USER16> Presumably about $370 million.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Given that WeWork has already raised $13B, and the new premoney is $8B, why isn't Adam wiped out by the preferences on the old investment?

Was Softbank buying common shares in some prior rounds?

<comment><USER18> As I understand it, Adam's shares have much higher voting rights. They may or may not be worth anything but they control the company.

<comment><USER19> They have 10-1 voting rights. There were talks of this being reduced to 3-1 during the IPO talks, but those broke down when the IPO was pulled.

<comment><USER20> Do you mean he would voluntarily agree to reduce his voting rights? Or was there some means to force him into that?

<comment><USER17> It's an interesting standoff because his only negotiating stance would be to refuse to accept the investment and key the company go bankrupt.

I guess avoiding that is worth $1.7B. Softbank would control the company after bankruptcy anyway, but the process would be messy

<comment><USER19> Presumably they may have opted for a very ominous debt package, which would have been senior to Softbank's equity, which is another thing SB would have liked to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A friend once commented about Skull and Bones [0]: "I don't know what's worse, the fact that it exists, or that I'm not a part of it." (Neither of us went to Yale :))

I wish there were a single word to capture this mix, because it's perfect for this story. This is absolutely repulsive, and also, why can't it happen to me?!

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

</comment><comment><USER22> It's getting harder and harder to see how there's ever going to be a liquidity event here. The steps being taken to become profitable, while necessary, are going to come at the expense of future growth. Without the hypergrowth fake tech unicorn story, they get valued like Regus. Neither SoftBank nor Neumann are incented to do an IPO with a Regus-like valuation. I doubt there are buyers for a private sale. How does this end?

</comment><comment><USER23> One of the best wealth redistribution agents in the world. He ll probably be very sought after , if he ever wants to work again.

</comment><comment><USER24> I won't be surprised if WeWork comes out of this mess relatively strong. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste and I still believe that the idea of WeWork can be valuable.

A lot of ink has been spilled about how cooky Adam and his wife are but I really liked the WeGrow idea of providing schooling / daycare. Ask any parent of young kids how much they and spend on childcare and you'll be shocked. Combining the work space with childcare (providing everything is on the up and up) is an incredible bundling of convenience. Even some of WeWorks well criticised acquisitions seemed like great ideas to me. Leveraging Meetup.com with WeWork locations just seems natural.

It all hinges on Softbanks ability to eat shit for a few years while rebuilding the company but I do think that there is a still a very strong brand here that had some great ideas but got a bit too hooked on the Kool aid.

<comment><USER25> > _A lot of ink has been spilled about how cooky Adam and his wife are but I > really liked the WeGrow idea of providing schooling / daycare._

Yeah, and everyone likes the idea of self-driving, solar-powered Tesla robo- taxis, too. Finding things that people want is easy; providing that product or service at a profit is much harder.

At the end of the day, WeWork is a real-estate company. 25% of the world's wealth is tied up in this industry. It's old, and efficient. Borrowing long, lending short is a surefire way to get crushed in a recession. This is known.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If the majority of that is in loans against the stock he will be in trouble if (when) the stock doesn't realize the liquidity and price he needs to pay off those loans, right?

</comment><comment><USER27> Its too bad he truly wasn't as principled as the image he tried to cultivate.

He could bestow each employee of his company $80k, as a bonus for all the pain his mismanagement has caused.

</comment><comment><USER28> Headline: "WeWork's Adam Neumann will reportedly get a $1.7 billion deal to step down from board."

First paragraph: "Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann will get about $1.7 million in stock, cash and credit to walk away from the company and give up his voting rights."

Which is it: billion or million?

<comment><USER29> > SoftBank will pay Neumann $1 billion for his shares, a $185 million > consulting fee and will offer him $500 million in credit to help repay his > loans to JPMorgan, according to the report.

This is from the article and provides the breakdown. It does look like there are discrepancies in the article, though. Guess this is what happens when you rush to publish or don't have good editing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Stories like this make me feel stupid for caring about honesty in business/life.

:(

</comment><comment><USER31> And meanwhile they are not firing ppl because they can't afford their severance packages.

How is this not criminal?

<comment><USER32> Severance isnt required by law?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very golden parachute for such sloppy execution.

</comment><comment><USER33> It pays to be a liability...

</comment><comment><USER34> This is not going to work.

</comment><comment><USER35> IPO are the new ICO</comment>


Headless Architecture Is Changing the Way Companies Operate - <AUTHOR> https://www.contentstack.com/blog/all-about-headless/5-ways-headless-cms-architecture-advances-innovation <comment><USER2> "The scalable, interchangeable nature of headless CMS inspires innovation by integrating with new technology seamlessly."</comment>


Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/30/facebook-earnings-q4-2018/ <comment><USER2> Facebook is a weird mass-market product because the average American tech industry pundit has very little visibility into how it's actually used around the world.

Take Facebook Watch. Ask a journalist or HN commenter, and they'll tell you that it's a content wasteland, a flop, a waste of investment. Here's what Zuckerberg said about Watch on the earnings call:

 _" There are now 400 million people who use it every month, and people spend on average over 20 minutes on Watch daily."_

That's a lot more monthly active users than Snapchat has — for a part of the app which everyone automatically assumes to be a flop. That's what global 2.3 billion users looks like: your local anecdata doesn't tell anything.

<comment><USER3> I was super impressed on the recommendations from FB watch where I just kept it auto-playing the next and the next video. Their tech isn't as good, their videos are choppier than youtube and netflix, but their recommendations were insanely good.

<comment><USER4> I wonder how much of that has to do with how much FB knows about you and your interests, and your friends and their interests? With YouTube, I honestly don't get any sense that it uses what Google surely knows of me via Search and GMail, e.g. anything related to Chicago, or germane to my political inclinations or personality. Instead, it seems wholly based on my viewing history. Which has some benefits, of course (I get what I click on), except when it makes inferences on outlier activity. e.g. if I click-through to a flat earth conspiracy video for a few curious laughs, it naively thinks I must have an appetite for more.

<comment><USER5> > e.g. if I click-through to a flat earth conspiracy video for a few curious > laughs, it naively thinks I must have an appetite for more.

Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations - which are not great, but not too far off either. If the content is outside my core interests or music tastes I opt to watch in incognito mode.

I once made the mistake to play Peppa the Pig for my daughter while signed in, and my recommendations became a mess for weeks.

<comment><USER6> > Every time I'm about to click on a youtube link / watch an embedded video I > ask myself if it's worth influencing my future recommendations

I do this all the time. Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed". But it's hard to find high quality content, yet it's easy to find mindless dribble.

<comment><USER7> > it's hard to find high quality content, yet it's easy to find mindless > dribble.

+1 to this. I watched a few Super Smash Bros Ultimate compilations at around the time it was released, and got some recommendations. I don't own a Switch so I don't know the game, plus its a novelty, so they caught my curiosity.

I went down a such rabbit-hole of mindless dribble --endless videos of videogame characters punching each other-- I actually tired myself and am no longer considering buying the game/console. It's such mindless consumption.

> Often, I click on "smart" videos, which I have no intention of watching just > in the hope I get better quality content in my "feed".

I need to try this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pre: \- still 30% off highs

Numbers:

\- 4Q EPS $2.38, Est. $2.18

\- 4Q Rev. $16.91B, Est. $16.39B

\- 4Q Mobile Ad Rev. as % Ad Rev. 93%

\- Mobile represents 93% of ad revenue. Mark doesn't get enough credit for his big switch to mobile,

\- Cost of revenue up 74 percent year over year

\- Operating costs went up by 60%, Note this is more than their growth rate, really the only concerning thing from a good quarter

\- Annual capex is $13.9 billion, pretty close to what Microsoft spends

\- CFO is talking about phasing out Facebook only numbers and just disclosing total numbers(Insta, WhatsApp, and FB rolled into one)

-

Users:

\- 4Q MAU 2.32B, Est. 2.32B

\- 4Q DAU 1.52B, Est. 1.51B

\- DAU up in Europe for first time in 2-3 quarters, Flat in North America

\- instagram stories has 500M DAU

Misc:

\- Headcount was 35,587 at year end. Increase of 42% for the year!!

\- shares back up to Oct levels,

\- turns out the markets like companies who can mint money and both users and advertisers just don't care at all about facebooks scandals

\- [https://investor.fb.com/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4/Q4-2018...](https://investor.fb.com/files/doc_financials/2018/Q4/Q4-2018-Earnings- Presentation.pdf)

\- more after hours trading than alot of stocks get during the entire day

\- Zuckerberg saying that messaging growing faster than any other area. It will become more central to the social experience on Facebook's apps.

<comment><USER9> thanks for this and other breakdowns. what was the primary driver for operating costs rising so much?

<comment><USER10> I'm guessing most of increase are the "moderators/censors" the media and political groups pressured them to hire. The same thing happened with google a couple of years ago when they were forced to hire thousands of people to moderate/censor content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's hard not to look at this performance and take away from it that most people really don't care about privacy. As upsetting as the thought may be to some, Mark's hypothesis that privacy is no longer a social norm we value seems to be proven more and more right. Despite all the scandals and hearings, their DAU are more than the population of the largest countries on Earth. Short of serious legislation, what slows them down? Negative press seems to be nothing but pebbles thrown at steamroller...

<comment><USER12> Since there's no real life downside to FB using your data to show you more relevant ads, people are making the rational trade-off. Privacy issues with FB are ideology based in nature.

<comment><USER13> There is research being done on targeted advertisement, and apart from the obvious effect of altering your behaviour and your attention, there has been research shown that it can go as far as changing self-perception.[1]

So to claim that there is no downside to targeted marketing is simply false. We have very little understanding what sort of effects it has on consumers, and as far as we know they're not all good.

There is no reason to believe any deliberation on part of consumers here is rational. The relationship between self harm and social media usage in adolescents are well documented as well.

So it is quite ironic to assert that being concerned about facebook's behaviour is 'ideological', when in fact advocates seem to willfully ignore evidence that suggests that we're playing dice with people's psychology here.

[1][https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you- more...](https://hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more-likely- to-buy-they-can-change-how-you-think-about-yourself)

<comment><USER14> Fair enough, but it's up to each individual to learn about these details and then make a decision if they still want to use Facebook. The media is doing their job reporting on this, and everyone else can learn from this and decide that hey, maybe using Facebook products are not worth the harm. Or maybe they are fine with it and like the relevant ads and continue to use Facebook.

If social media makes you unhappy just stop using it.

<comment><USER15> Just like how it's up to each individual to decide whether they want to be a heroin a addict.

<comment><USER16> If you attribute so little agency to people that becoming a heroin addict becomes someone else's responsibility (barring physical addiction in the womb or being shot up at gunpoint repeatedly) then there's little in this world that we can control anyways.

<comment><USER17> Your conclusion is entirely consistent with the facts. There is little in this world that we can control. It's really important to stop the bad actors from taking the little away from us.

<comment><USER16> Curiously, what is that little we can control? One could come up with an argument about how we control exactly zero in life. However even if it's true in a way, it might not be so useful to believe that since having that belief will lead to worse decisions (and a lot of psychology research shows that a belief that you don't have control is highly correlated with depression).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Facebook is the only way a lot of people have to contact one another. I feel like only celebrities deleted FB accounts during the whole #DeleteFacebook thing. Furthermore, I think a lot of that campaign (and be honest, it was not organic. It was a purposeful campaign by news and media giants in an attempt to show they still dominated the minds of people in the world) was a battle of the old rich vs the nouveau riche as Gatsby would say.

I wrote more about this last year, specifically focusing on Zuckerberg's rumors of eyeing the presidency:

[https://fightthefuture.org/article/facebook-politics-and- orw...](https://fightthefuture.org/article/facebook-politics-and- orwells-24-7-hate/)

<comment><USER19> > I feel like only celebrities deleted FB accounts during the whole > #DeleteFacebook thing.

and after they deleted facebook, they went on their Instagrams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I hope this will pierce the HN anti-FB bubble somewhat. It's dangerous to believe one's own BS. FB is here to stay, although I do believe it will wither in the long term (5+ years).

<comment><USER21> It's really not a HN bubble. Facebook the site/app has peaked for the most part, both people I know who are currently in high school do not use it and have never made a "Facebook" page. Now Instagram is a completely different story of course.

<comment><USER20> I happen to have a son who is currently is high school. While it is true that he (and likely his peers) is not a heavy user of FB, he does use it to coordinate events, and he does use Instagram and WhatsApp a lot. "FB" is not just "FB the site". If you listen to their earnings calls, a lot of time is devoted to Instagram in particular at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Until this metric materially changes for the negative, nothing else with Facebook will change.

</comment><comment><USER23> While a good quarter for FB despite all the scandals, reporters have pointed out that there's potentially a lot of lag between Ad spend and user growth: [https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1090726978271903744](https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1090726978271903744)

<comment><USER16> But then later in the thread:

[https://twitter.com/EvanMcPhee/status/1090727957725818881](https://twitter.com/EvanMcPhee/status/1090727957725818881)

[https://twitter.com/HenryInnis/status/1090730656009617408](https://twitter.com/HenryInnis/status/1090730656009617408)

Past success no guarantee of future returns of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Just continues to show, privacy issues don't matter to companies because it doesn't affect profitability and the stock price. Even with barrage of constant #deletefb and "I deleted my facebook" posts, it didn't actually matter. Essentially no change to daily active users and advertising revenue.

<comment><USER25> Yes, that is why you need regulation to drive change.

<comment><USER26> So your point is that people must care about it, and if they don't it doesn't matter because we'll take away Facebook anyway?

<comment><USER25> If we went by majority and popular opinion all the time there would still be slavery, segregation would still be a thing, same-sex marriages would be illegal, there would be no abortion rights and so and so forth.

<comment><USER27> I'm not sure about this. At least for the same-sex marriage, seems that majority in US approves it in recent years. I don't think a regulation can or should make that kind of change while like 80% people don't agree with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Facebook's daily to monthly user ratio, or stickiness, held firm at 66 > percent where it's stayed for years, showing those still on Facebook aren't > using it much less.

What are the precise definitions of daily and monthly active users? To be a daily user, do you literally have to use Facebook every day for a month?

<comment><USER29> No, it's just the number of users who used it that day, no matter what each of them did on previous or subsequent days.

<comment><USER30> I am curious what 'used' means. e.g. Does logging into a third party service via facebook login count as 'used' since you technically hit their servers?

<comment><USER16> No, if it were that tangential, investors wouldn't be reporting it and using it to make buying / selling decisions.

<comment><USER30> I think you overestimate how deep investors dig. I did find this from a few years ago which contains a bunch of rather fuzzy language: [https://www.adweek.com/digital/monthly-active-users- definiti...](https://www.adweek.com/digital/monthly-active-users-definition- revised/)

My interpretation of that would be that if, prior to that change, you logged to spotify with facebook and didn't uncheck the 'share' button you would have been counted, but after you would not have been.

I do find it rather curious that they simply count any user that logs in and 'visited' facebook. i.e. that no 'actions' need to take place or there isn't any metric for time on site required. Seems rather easy to game that number by just not going after bot accounts.

<comment><USER16> True, numbers can be gamed.

But at the end of the day there's one number that matters: people click ads and buy products -> companies buy ads and pay fees. And it's been going up steadily for the past decade.

If you strongly believe that you've found an inefficiency in the market please feel free to short FB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Facebook is taking the opportunity to air some of their dirty laundry. They realize that it takes quite a bit for users to abandon the platform and are probably strategically, leaking some of this stuff.

<comment><USER32> What stuff are you refering to? They have to report earnings figures, they're a public company. And since they answer to investors they're going to share these stats that put them in a good light.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Facebook is kind of like smoking; we all know the company makes you ill but there is plenty of cash to be made doing that.

</comment><comment><USER34> I am happy that Facebook endure this organized media smearing attacks. It is very obvious to me someone wants to shape a narrative against Facebook, and it is distasteful to dress such intention under an altruistic disguise, like destroying Facebook could save the mankind. Utter nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER35> The media bias against Facebook has become outrageous and it worsened after the establishment in DC extended their witch hunt and made Facebook the scapegoat for the 2016 election.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm growing more and more convinced that the only real way for employees to enact real change at their company is for them to become a significant, united group of shareholders and force changes from the top. Unions sure as hell aren't being encouraged. Unfortunately this would not work in Facebook since Zuck still has a controlling interest but it might work for others. Does that make sense?

<comment><USER37> I'm afraid that this is just how capitalism works. People have to vote with their dollars, and right now they are voting for Facebook.

<comment><USER21> They aren't even voting for Facebook with their dollars. FB/Insta is something they use for free and they are "way too smart" to be affected by advertising because they "see ads all the time and don't want to run out and buy the product"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> The only thing that bothers me about Facebook anymore is the realization that I live on a planet with, literally, billions of people that do not care about their privacy.

</comment><comment><USER39> What data breach? Is this talking about CA? That was like two-three earnings ago? That's pretty click-baity title.

</comment><comment><USER40> In this era, the deeper you are able to see past the b.s that you are bombarded with, the more you will understand. Facebook has been bombarded with negative publicity for almost a year now, if you look past these articles, you will see that Facebook has not taken any sort of hit at all. Go see what the average person is like and you will understand why this is the case (This is also true for Donald Trump winning the election). We tech people live in a bubble.

</comment><comment><USER41> So the question might be; is Facebook too big to fail?

</comment><comment><USER42> Couple of points people are missing:

\- The biggest problem with Facebook in terms of immediate impact is not loss of privacy, though that's real. It's behavioural manipulation, which has lots of very negative outcomes for you as a user as well as society. Don't think you're not been manipulated, you are, and you are susceptible to it. Your behaviour and emotions are negatively impacted by the fact you use facebook.

\- This is not "capitalism" or "consumer voting with their money". Firstly, due to network effects Facebook has a monopoly on their kind of product. The choice is Facebook vs no facebook. Second, the currency is time and attention to sell ads. Finally, most people are addicted to social media by design and it's arguable whether they have a truly free choice. Is a gambling addict voting with their feet? The gambling addict knows they won't win and usually knows they're addicted; social media addicts people very subtly and manipulates you over time. Few people would admit to being addicted, but if you really think you're not - fine, if it's no big deal then just take a month off from social media and see what happens.

Good summary is Jaron Lanier's interview [https://youtu.be/kc_Jq42Og7Q](https://youtu.be/kc_Jq42Og7Q)

</comment><comment><USER42> Or... Zuckerberg is lying.

You certainly can't treat anything he says as ground truth - you need independent figures.

<comment><USER43> You honestly think that Facebook is lying to investors about key metrics?

Do you know how much of a field day of litigation the SEC would have if that were true?

<comment><USER44> they've lied about metrics before: [https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook- inaccu...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/17989712/facebook-inaccurate- video-metrics-inflation-lawsuit)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The whole market is up due to today's announcement of interest rates remaining the same, not any unique announcement to Facebook.

<comment><USER46> .. Are you serious?

<comment><USER45> Do you not look at facts backed by data? The whole market is up as of today. Heck, read the news: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-stocks-waver-ahead- of-th...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/global-stocks-waver-ahead-of-the- fed-11548839844)

The stock increase is _not_ unique to Facebook today. _ALL_ major tech stocks are up today.

<comment><USER43> The NYSE composite index is up by 1%. DOW by 2%. NASDAQ by 2%.

Facebook is up 4% in-hours, and 12% in after-hours trading.

Do _you_ look at facts backed by data? FB is beating the market with a whip.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SIMD at Insomniac Games [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://deplinenoise.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/gdc2015_afredriksson_simd.pdf

<comment><USER2> Wow, this is a great article, although fairly hard to read in this format. But it's worth at least skimming through if you are interested in this area. Some summary excerpts that give a sense of the trajectory:

"we were porting a lot of old SIMD code that we needed a new set of best practices to work better with SSE"

"auto-vectorization is the kind of cool idea"

"..if you bank on this and hope the compiler will always SIMD-ify your loops, you're making a fatal mistake."

"And this is the MAJOR problem with compiler auto-vectorization. It silently breaks during regular maintenance of the code."

"we should have this feature enabled, but it should be considered a small bonus if it works"

"So what do we use? We use intrinsic functions. All our SIMD code is currently written this way."

"To use intrinsics effectively we have to be familiar with how the CPU works. We need to know what its good at doing, and what its bad at doing."

" If you have a 64-bit build, you WILL have SSE2 instructions"

"don't spend time on trying to wrap up SSE functionality."

"doomed to run slowly and waste a lot of time trying to do this."

"Data layout is THE most important part of SIMD programming. If the data layout is poor, then no amount of SIMD is going to help."

Followed by some great specific examples...

And a useful chart at the bottom showing the percentage of targets that support SSE through AVX2.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this is definitely one of the better articles on practical real world SIMD programming I've seen. Recommended for anyone interested in optimising their code using SIMD, particularly on x86/x64.</comment></comment>