Obesity 'increases risks from Covid-19' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53921141 <comment> just-juan-post > They found that people with obesity and Covid-19 were twice as likely to end > up in hospital and 74% more likely to be admitted to intensive care. They > were also more at risk of dying from the disease caused by coronavirus.

I think data like this are a strong signal about why we are seeing so many deaths in the USA as compared to some other countries. The bellweather I look to is India. 60k deaths in a population thats 3-4x that of the USA.

These numbers don't point to lockdowns or mask wearing as being an effective action. They instead show the outcomes of culture and lifestyle choices (obesity and sedentary living).</comment>


DFJ's Draper: There's Nothing Wrong with Theranos [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-06-23/dfj-s-draper-there-s-nothing-wrong-with-theranos <comment><USER2> Unbelievable - even if he said Theranos is trying to get their shit together and there have been some mistakes, it would make sense. To say its just a smear campaign is ridiculous - what about the thousands of results they withdrew as they admitted it was wrong?

[http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years- of...](http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years-of-edison- blood-test-results-1463616976-lMyQjAxMTI2NTEzOTcxODkxWj)

It's even more ridiculous to call her one of the greatest female entrepreneurs!

I had a lot of respect for Draper but this is so disappointing. Just to make sure their investment does not hit a big ZERO value, they seem to be siding with an entrepreneur who has wronged everyone! What a shame!

<comment><USER3> >"I had a lot of respect for Draper but this is so disappointing."

Didn't you ever read _Founders at Work_ and what DFJ did to the Hotmail guys?

<comment><USER2> No, but can you give a gist?

<comment><USER4> [http://imgur.com/YgR3UG2](http://imgur.com/YgR3UG2)

<comment><USER2> thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The rights to the Theranos movie (Adam McKay, JLaw) have been picked up by Legendary Pictures[0]. Looks like the tentative title is _Bad Blood_. Too bad they didn't go with the HN-recommended title, _Unicorn Blood_ [1].

0: [http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/06/jennifer- lawrenc...](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/06/jennifer-lawrence- theranos-elizabeth-holmes)

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11876937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11876937)

<comment><USER6> From the Vanity Fair link:

> "They basically tell the story of how Elizabeth Holmes created these > fraudulent blood-testing machines, raised $9 billion through venture > capitalists in Silicon Valley, and refuses to admit they don't work even > when it is obvious the testing is inaccurate," says a studio source familiar > with how the project was pitched.

This old hat: they were _valued_ at $9 billion by VCs while _raising_ $400 million in 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Their top spokeswoman just resigned today:

[http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Theranos- spokesw...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Theranos-spokeswoman- Brooke-Buchanan-to-exit-8323546.php)

<comment><USER5> Full text: [https://notehub.org/iugbf](https://notehub.org/iugbf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tim Draper is, quite frankly, the Trump of Venture Capital. He's a great, nurturing guy though in terms of personality and affect.

<comment><USER2> I love his song though: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTrz6lMQGAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTrz6lMQGAs) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Something seems awfully wrong with HNs rating system - somehow this story is plummeting way soon down the list :)

Seems like a Google - Hilary thing :)

</comment><comment><USER9> Can you put [video] in the title?

</comment><comment><USER10> stockholm syndrome?

<comment><USER7> sunk-cost fallacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And you know what: we can't dismiss him.

The interesting thing here is that we can't just say that's not true.

I am not making a larger point about solipsism or our inability to know reality. I mean the much narrower point of not being able to tell -- from the press -- whether a company actually has a technology that works.

Think about the implications that has for investing in public stocks.

Let's ignore the cases of fraud like Enron etc., and focus on an ordinary company that honestly reports what it is doing.

EDIT: I have followed the Theranos story, so I know about the legal actions etc.

What I can't tell is if there is poor science at the heart of it, or it is a case of poor scaling and application of good science.

<comment><USER12> > _I mean the much narrower point of not being able to tell -- from the press > -- whether a company actually has a technology that works._

There has always been a simple solution to this: it is the company's _own job_ to clearly demonstrate that it has a working technology.

If you view it that way, then the press's inability to prove it one way or the other doesn't matter because the responsibility lies with the company. In fact, Theranos was quite unusual among lab companies from the beginning in that it didn't follow the path other companies followed in showing they had a working technology. Anything less than a clear proof by the company, and the subsequent confusion is the company's own fault.

<comment><USER11> To demonstrate it to whom?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Theranos technology is more like typical startup tech. How many bugs did Facebook's feed algorithm suffer before it finally got stable? How many pages of sub-optimal search results has Google returned? How many major security bugs have been found in Windows, Chrome, Linux, etc?

Healthcare is one area where many people (particularly Americans) have the absurd idea that everything has to work perfectly.

Think of the level of indignation people feel when a surgeon who spent 15 years beyond college doing advanced training (for little pay) makes a small mistake that costs someone's life. Or an OB misjudges something and ends up in a major lawsuit.

But for other jobs, mistakes are a part of life. In software we are proud to decrease our bugs through testing and improved techniques and processes, but nobody expects perfection. Even mass market products like TurboTax ship with tons of bugs. Lawyers routinely let innocent people wind up in jail out of pure incompetence.

We need to get over it. Theranos is doing something very smart and while it needs some additional refinement, it is pretty clear that doing large scale blood testing/monitoring is the future of diagnostic medicine.

The irrationality we have about healthcare being perfect is a) false (mistakes get swept under the rug all the time) and b) counterproductive because it gives us a sense of mastery over our destiny that we simply do not (yet) have.

Let's also not forget that medicine is plagued by a very irrational risk aversion, which is why many useful treatments are available around the world but not in the US.

<comment><USER2> Not when your bug can kill a person or damage his organs due to wrong medication give because of a wrong test result.

[http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years- of...](http://www.wsj.com/article_email/theranos-voids-two-years-of-edison- blood-test-results-1463616976-lMyQjAxMTI2NTEzOTcxODkxWj)

There is a reason Healthcare is regulated and required multiple degrees of testing before it can be released to the general public -- imagine every new "health startup" pushing new drugs and then saying they'll "fix a bug" when a couple of folks die. The comparison is immature.

<comment><USER13> > The comparison is immature

Quite the opposite. Health regulations suffer from a number of perverse incentives that economists have studied extensively:

Drugs are needlessly delayed in getting to market. Doctors and patients are perfectly capable of assessing the risk/reward of an unproven treatment by looking at scientific studies. The FDA adds a layer of false-security... in spite of its sluggish process, the FDA is often quite wrong and drugs that were approved get taken off the market. For other drugs, they are delayed for several years and much harm is caused. Economists have studied this and found that regulators cause much needless suffering and death by being excessively risk-averse.

Consider too illegal drugs. Our regulators criminalize many substances, resulting in black market behavior and significant crime and other negative effects. Here too, backward regulations cause much unnecessary suffering, death (and crime too).

For people who do not understand healthcare, the world appears quite black and white. In reality no treatment works all of the time, and no test is without its share of inaccurate results. Doctors are equipped with enough Bayesian reasoning ability to use the available information wisely.

Also, a physician should not base any decisions on a single blood test result. That is not the proper way to use such tests. If it were, doctors and medical training would not be necessary. Most tests have a significant probability of false positive and false negative results, so docs are trained to consider the results only in the context of other diagnostic clues.</comment></comment></comment>


Azure IoT Loves Open Source - <AUTHOR> https://azure.microsoft.com/blog/azure-iot-loves-open-source <comment><USER2> This post was very short and specific but in regards to what Microsoft (Where I work) contributes to open source, well there is a lot of traction in the last few years with Satya at the helm, who has helped really enable a lot of this.

So just in case anyone is curious here are a bunch of links to just how much we're doing in the open now:

(1) Azure repo collection: [https://github.com/Azure](https://github.com/Azure) (2) Microsoft general repo collection: [https://github.com/microsoft](https://github.com/microsoft) (3) .NET Core open source repo: [https://github.com/microsoft/dotnet](https://github.com/microsoft/dotnet)

</comment><comment><USER3> Here we go again.. Just like the post in Github ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12558053](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12558053) ) some people are so hatefull on companies because they had some bad press ( github vs gitlab ( github didn't do anything new for a long time and then gitlab came in) and the past of Microsoft vs linux.

For all the haters here below, who "actually" blame one developer, who shares his code ( because he posts a project) and he hasn't got another contribution on his new account...

Let me remind you, Microsoft is the #1 contributer on Github now, topping Google and Facebook together. [https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/15/2255241/microsoft-h...](https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/09/15/2255241/microsoft- has-more-open-source-contributors-on-github-than-facebook-and-google)

Please, now let's go back to IoT and ontopic. Too bad i don't know a lot of IoT on Azure, but i have viewed some projects about IoT of Microsoft on Hackster, their project page: [https://www.hackster.io/microsoft/products/microsoft- azure](https://www.hackster.io/microsoft/products/microsoft-azure)

Thanks dluc for sharing, i hope i have topic worthy stuff to contribute next time ;) - one point of discussion would be to link to the project page instead next time - [https://github.com/azure/toketi- iothubreact](https://github.com/azure/toketi-iothubreact) or [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/developer-s- introduct...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/developer-s-introduction- to-azure-iot/), it would probably fuse some less discussion - we like code :p

<comment><USER4> I just finished a prototype IoT node project for a customer using Azure.

Azure was their choice, not mine, but by the end of the development I was pretty pleased with the level of security they built into the data acquisition side.

Before the Azure project I worked with some other IoT/Cloud providers and it was a lot shakier. As in, am HTTP GET with the device serial ID in the URL and that's it.

My customer showed me the dashboarding they've already built with BI on the backend, it was even more advanced than the stuff I've seen from the others. Azure is no cakewalk to set up, but it seems to work really well once it is.

<comment><USER3> Any insights, blog post about this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Slightly tangental, however I've been waiting for months for an Azure IoT thread to post this mini rant on...

My team and I spent a few weeks working with Azure IoT before instigating a switch to an alternative.

The problem with Azure IoT as a platform is that they provide SDK documentation (which is relatively good for languages they like), but not API documentation for the AMQP interface which is their preferred method of connecting devices. Their support for python clients and servers (in particular servers) left me and my team spending circa 10 days digging through AMQP logs and wireshark in ever more desperate attempts to integrate our existing python server with Azure IoT. Eventually it became clear that our only option was to wrap the C library for a really brittle integration and that we could switch to a different platform with far less effort! Both Amazon IoT and Watson IoT have been far smoother to integrate with since they provide both SDK and API docs!

The tough thing about it is that on the surface it looks as though it's really well documented and it's not until you hit your first big problem that you start looking around for API docs to try and debug what exactly it is that's wrong!

Currently really fond of Watson IoT for the decent python SDK's (we've only got 2-3 patches in a fork!) and the really handy device management features which can make rebooting etc much easier from the server side. The MQTT implementation they've worked on is great too.

</comment><comment><USER6> So they open sourced, a client ? who cares?

Good example: [https://github.com/BitFunnel](https://github.com/BitFunnel) (full-text-seach from bing)

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there any compromise about Microsoft not going to sue Open Source projects anymore? (FAT patents, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER8> When I thought about MS could potentially buy Redhat and Canonical and such and swallow the major open source companies with cash, I woke up sweating.

<comment><USER9> If they bought RH or Canonical at least we would have one less vendor to add to the fragmentation. At least in my eyes, the moment something like this happens it would be like a black hole vanished with that entire "distro" ecosystem.

<comment><USER10> And then they will have killed Linux. Don't let they read this.

<comment><USER9> What do you mean? I don't see how that can happen. Maybe a few "power moves" here and there, and companies already poach OS devs anyway. There's also licenses, CLAs.

Worst-case scenario people would just rewrite parts of the stack to move around it. There's people salivating at this very moment just thinking about rewritting core stuff in Go, Rust, or something else, and making a blog post about it. Imagine if they had an actual motive to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What they actually love here is to crab as much data as possible.

<comment><USER12> So kind of like almost every other large outfit out there?

Not sure there is a solution where that isn't the case, but it'd be nice to be wrong.

<comment><USER11> Hard to say. Naturally this is growing cynicism in me that is talking.

I believe that in most cases data from smart device should not leave their local network.

Making a product that leaks data, especially from people homes is dangerous for the their users (I do not say owners, as who owns the data is an actual owner in my opinion) and even more dangerous for the society as whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Microsoft PR arm again on HN. We all known what Microsoft loves.

<comment><USER14> You weren't kidding. OP's profile:

> Working on Microsoft Azure iot

and this post is his only contribution.

<comment><AUTHOR> @soared, sorry if I gave that impression. I'm actually a software engineer, enthusiast HN reader. I thought this was a good opportunity to join the community and share some work :-)

<comment><USER14> Not holding it against you, but generally you'll want to follow some sort of 80-20 or 90-10 rule. Share/contribute 90%, promote your [employer's] stuff 10%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now M$ loves open source? What a joke. Most developers still don't like it and the fresh ones almost don't need to pay much attention. Farewell, M$. Now it's time to make Google and Facebook to "loves privacy", in regrets.</comment>


Samsung confirms Tizen-based (Linux) handsets for 2013 - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57561773-94/samsung-confirms-tizen-based-handsets-for-2013/

<comment><AUTHOR> Excerpt: "Tizen is a Linux-based operating system that arose out of the demise of Nokia's MeeGo platform. Intel and Samsung have taken over the development of Tizen, and the Linux Foundation is overseeing the project."</comment>


How much is your startup stock worth? - <AUTHOR> http://jdmaturen.github.io/2013/how-much-is-your-startup-stock-worth.html

<comment><USER2> The easiest way to earn a $1M payout is to take a decade or so at publicly- traded companies (i.e., one where your stock grants / options are liquid) and save an average of $100k/yr via a combination of stock grants, salary, and investment appreciation.</comment>


Rands in Repose: How to Run a Meeting - <AUTHOR> http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/08/19/how_to_run_a_meeting.html

<comment><USER2> There's a lot of useful advice in that article. Having organised my fair share of meetings, I offer the following related thoughts...

GOALS

There are only two useful goals for most meetings:

1\. Make a specific decision.

2\. Determine the answer to a specific question.

If a decision is that something will be done, it should also state who will do it, and any relevant extra details such as a timescale or who else needs to be notified when the action is complete.

Before any formal meeting, an agenda should _always_ be circulated, stating the decisions to be made and questions to be answered during the meeting. Agendas should be provided far enough in advance for attendees to organise their contributions, and to identify any agenda points that could be better addressed in a different forum.

After any formal meeting, minutes should _always_ be circulated, stating the decisions and answers. Minutes should be available as soon as possible after the meeting, and placed somewhere they will be easy to find later. Sending the minutes for last month's meeting around the day before this month's meeting is about as useful as sending the agenda around after the meeting has started: better than nothing, but not by much.

Anything on the agenda that does not have one of the two specific goals above is probably a waste of time. In particular, agendas consisting only of vague topic headings are the kiss of death for meetings.

There is little value in holding a meeting to announce answers that are already known or decisions that have already been made. Just send the information to the relevant people to consider in their own time. If you're ever chairing a meeting and feel yourself about to utter the words "Let's go round the table...", you are probably about to make a mistake.

ATTENDEES

The participants in a meeting should be precisely those who are required to make the decisions and determine the answers.

There should also be someone to lead the meeting, and someone to take the minutes. These should preferably be separate people, so neither of them is trying to organise the meeting and participate in the discussion at the same time.

If a decision or question does not require at least the majority of the participants in the meeting, it should probably be dealt with on another occasion.

If a decision or question can be dealt with by a single person on their own authority, see "holding a meeting to announce answers that are already known or decisions that have already been made" above.

BRIEFINGS

Sometimes, it _is_ useful for one person to share some information with a whole group, possibly with some degree of interaction or taking questions afterwards. This is fine, but if there are going to be mostly one-way briefings like this, they should be scheduled, prepared by the briefer, and presented to the group as such.

<comment><USER3> 3\. Review a subject with stakeholders to turn up issues and questions you didn't know about before.

A release meeting is a good example of this. You might plan a code deployment to the production site. Before you execute it, you might have a meeting with all the stakeholders, giving them a chance to see what you're going to do. Maybe there's a person there whose only role will be to say: "hey, wait, if you deploy content before updating this other component then the images on the cdn will get screwed up." He can play iPhone games for the rest of the meeting, he potentially just prevented a partial service outage.

There's a nice theory that this could be done with email, but the reality is that having meetings and reviewing documents via email tends to turn up different issues. So doing both is helpful.

<comment><USER2> > There's a nice theory that this could be done with email, but the reality is > that having meetings and reviewing documents via email tends to turn up > different issues.

Why?

I have worked on developing technical review processes in more than one organisation, and spent many hours reading the books, studying the research and conducting practical trials. I have never encountered any evidence to suggest that everyone-sitting-there meetings are more productive than sending people copies of the material to check over in their own time and providing a sensible tool to record the findings.

On the contrary, my experience is that technical review processes often make fine examples of how to get meetings wrong. Calling a multi-hour, all-hands meeting every time something comes up for review seems to be as sure a guarantee as anything in life that your review process will fail and your staff will wind up with a permanent grudge against the very idea of reviews as a worthwhile use of their time.

That is because many issues raised during reviews are simple, and can be resolved simply and quickly between the reviewer who found the issue, the author of whatever is being reviewed, and possibly a small number of other reviewers who made the same or related observations. Making a wider group sit through dozens of typically short and bilateral discussions as you work down a list of every little point is enough to induce sleep even in the most dedicated and conscientious of participants.

Of course, there may be some issues that can't be resolved easily in this way. Perhaps discussion via e-mail/review tool/document comments/whatever is too inefficient for the number of reviewers/comments involved, or there are multiple people making related but subtly different points. _This_ can lead to a productive meeting, but now you have both a specific point where a decision is needed and a clear list of interested parties to invite.

<comment><USER3> > I have worked on developing technical review processes in more than one > organisation, and spent many hours reading the books, studying the research > and conducting practical trials.

So have I, although perhaps I've read fewer books and run more releases.

> I have never encountered any evidence to suggest that everyone-sitting-there > meetings are more productive than sending people copies of the material to > check over in their own time and providing a sensible tool to record the > findings.

My experience differs. I did not suggest that meetings are _more_ productive. They are just different. Whether they will be useful to you, in particular, almost certainly depends on exactly how your organization is put together and how your software is built. And now that I think about it-- the physical layout probably matters, too.

But the pattern I've observed (for the release meeting in particular) is the following: Send out the materials in an email and get feedback. Call the meeting and review the materials-- usually about 5-10 people for 30-60 minutes. There will be completely different feedback. Both will be helpful, and both will help reduce the need for SysAdmins to escalate issues and prolong downtime.

There will be crosstalk, there will be issue resolved via discussion that everyone can understand. Sometimes, the nature of confusion about a something is best observed through tone of voice and body language. Sometimes it's all useless-- the plan was right from the beginning, and nobody has any issues.

 _Calling a multi-hour, all-hands meeting every time_

For the example I mentioned, 30 minutes to 1 hour is usually sufficient. If the meeting goes longer than that, usually it's for a good reason and people who clearly don't need to be there will leave anyway.

<comment><USER2> It seems our experiences have been quite different, but such is life. I'm certainly not claiming that there is _no_ other valuable use for meetings than making specific decisions or determining the answers to specific questions. The briefing-style meeting I mentioned before is another kind of event entirely, and so is a review meeting of the kind you're describing. They should be conducted accordingly.

That said, FWIW, I found that there is a serious danger of groupthink in a review meeting if the participants haven't each taken a pass at the material independently before that meeting. There are always "loud" people and "quiet" people, and a good chairperson will be able to moderate that effect, but almost everyone seems to latch onto a trail of thought easily once the suggestion is there. That is the last thing you want, if you're trying to get multiple points of view on something during a review. In practice, I've found that can reduce review meetings to finding essentially those basic issues that a subset of the attendees would have found independently anyway, but lose the input from others. The upside is that sometimes you will explore the issues you do find more deeply, but you could do that either way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My own pro-tip (just because it isn't stated explicitly elsewhere): be very careful to limit your audience. Even inviting one extra person can "break" a meeting. Coincidentally, it also costs more $ in lost productivity.

If you're ever wondering whether a meeting is worthwhile, do a back-of-napkin calculation to balance the reason for the meeting versus the actual cost of the meeting ("Hmmm... I have 10 people here who probably avg cost $75/hr. Is this meeting really worth $500?").

<comment><USER5> Tom DeMarco in "The Deadline" presents the idea that for each meeting you could look round the room and excuse someone to get back to work. Whoever would most benefit from getting back to work rather than being at the meeting - let them go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> 100% of the material presented here is also totally relevant for user group organizers. Nothing sucks worse than watching from the sidelines while a couple of kooks turn a developer group meetup about community building into an hour long rant-fest about how Salesforce integration is a rampaging pain in the ass.

I've learned that one of the most important skills a group organizer can have is that uncanny ability to discern when to let the group go off on a tangent and when to reign things back in.

</comment><comment><USER7> Lots of meetings should have at least a minimal "G-PP-AA" sync-up discussion on the agenda:

* Goal(s) being pursued in the project or relationship - it's amazing how often there's a disconnect on this subject.

* Progress since last update.

* Problems encountered.

* Action plan(s) for the future (near-term or otherwise).

* Assumptions on which these plans rest.

This G-PP-AA discussion could be occur multiple times in a meeting for different agenda items or sub-items.

<comment><USER8> Sounds smart, but looks like mainly apply to status meetings, not to all meetings. But good stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Btw, if you don't want people to disconnect, plan breaks regularly. I've been in 3h+ meetings, given no break, and sooner or later someone disconnects.

<comment><USER10> Good grief, 3+ meetings aren't meetings, they are work sessions. Not only you need physical breaks, but you do need mental breaks as well (like allowing the conversation to drift to some light-hearted off topic banter for a bit).

Regarding the OP (with which I completely agree) - I think the problem is that some people are really talented "referees" but in some organisational structures the meeting is "run" by the senior person in the room or the person who called the meeting, who may very well be poor referees. It would be great if people recognised that So-And-So is really good at meeting herding (as I think of it) so let them run the meeting even if it isn't "theirs".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What I like most about a meeting is when it's with a customer of mine and they have an opportunity to explain verbally what's important to them and why. Often I will have a number of requests, a few of which may be critically important for reasons I would never think to ask or make an item on an agenda.

</comment><comment><USER8> Like many other things in life the #1 rule of meetings is to try hard to not have meetings.

Works also for: concurrent modification of shared memory, parallel programming, distributed computing, government, laws, politics, debates, rules, exceptions-to-rules, paperwork, forms and warfare.</comment>


Getting US Google Books onto a UK Kindle - <AUTHOR> http://blog.thestateofme.com/2010/12/06/getting-us-google-books-onto-a-uk-kindle/

<comment><USER2> I keep wondering when some public spirited (and probably anonymous) hacker is going to come up with software to automate this whole process of cross-region purchasing of e-books, iTunes, etc.

<comment><USER3> In for a penny... If you're going to break the rules you might as well do it fully. None of the ebook DRM is unbreakable, the obvious choice is to break it completely rather than try to find one specific workaround for a problem with the DRM.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Buzzer Server – Apartment Intercom? Buzz People in with Phone - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/maciejzukowski/BuzzerServer

<comment><USER2> No sockpuppet or astroturf votes or comments on HN, please.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'll have a play with this, this weekend. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cool, I will try to get this setup in my apartment. There is zero security from what I see though. That will need to change.

</comment><comment><USER5> cool, looks simple to setup. I have the same intercom.</comment>


Designing the Packaging-Free Future - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/packages-without-packaging/

<comment><USER2> Was just thinking about this today, what a coincidence.

I think the real question is how to deliver store-bought items more effectively to your home. For example, instead of teabags there's already loose-leaf tea, but most people can't be bothered to mess with getting the right volume of tea leaves and then steeping it etc. How do we make this easier, such that it would be actually welcomed? And how do we make such delivery systems work in general, for other products -- I already felt bad throwing away (recycled!) my milk jugs today. All that unnecessary energy used (wasted) in transporting waste products, even if it's recycled.

Less packaging is welcome but it doesn't really solve the underlying problem of a better delivery system.

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't this, in the case of the soap, detergent, and containers just shifting the burden of dealing with packaging from waste management companies to the water system?

I hope I'm not being too much of a killjoy by bringing this concern in, because the products are, frankly, really beautifully designed, and eliminate a lot of packaging mass right off the bat.</comment>


Show HN: Gibbon – peer-to-peer learning, now also on the iPad - <AUTHOR> https://gibbon.co/ios

<comment><USER2> Looks pretty cool. Don't have an iPad though... waiting for the iPhone app!

<comment><AUTHOR> iPhone app is coming soon! We developed it as an universal app, only need to redesign some of the screens.</comment></comment>


Improving Inception and Image Classification in TensorFlow - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2016/08/improving-inception-and-image.html <comment><USER2> Which model is the fastest to compute? Not a lot of people have TPUs, and when it comes to serving the models I've seen ResNet-16 to be favorable for real- time. Is there a better trade-off?</comment>


In DevOps, Dev Is Killing Ops - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/devops-dev-killing-ops-arvind-soni?trk=v-feed&lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ap_flagship3_detail_base%3BgiYMQRJp0NEXKMgmNCbTIg%3D%3D <comment><USER2> I'll leave this here: [https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/what-every-data- programm...](https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/what-every-data-programmer- needs-to-know-about-disks) [https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-data- sess...](https://www.safaribooksonline.com/library/view/the-data- sessions/9781449315054/oreillyvideos886685.html)

TL;DR Disk IO is pretty much a black box in virtualized environments. All the cool stuff you can do with disks (and memory, and tmpfs) to improve performance seems worth hosting your own hardware.

Personally I'd just read everything Ted Dziuba wrote and rethink how much "Ops" is dying. [http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/archives.html](http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/archives.html)

Maybe it's just being replaced by a bunch of code to fix problems caused by "cloud" hosting performance bottlenecks. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, but you should be aware that you're probably trading time managing and picking hardware that suits your needs for additional coding time.

<comment><USER3> You sure? At Google, network storage has been faster and more reliable than local disks, for years. See bradfitz' talks about the dl.google.com rewrite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've had this argument so many times: DevOps has the common problem of, when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

We live in an economy of specializations, and it's optimized that way for a reason. Every time I've worked with a DevOps team they've done a piss-poor job dealing with Adult problems (aka negotiating with vendors, migrating cloud architecture, evaluating contracts and SLAs, bringing on contractors, etc) They are also generally mediocre when developing software on time and without bugs, compared with career software engineers. Why do we have this obsession with combining the two fields?

<comment><USER5> It's the result of people getting creative to save money.

This kind of thing happens in all industries if it goes unchecked.

Not that I particularly advocate for it but in other disciplines regulation, unions and certification bodies and similar structures collectively put the brakes on things like this.

In software it's the wild west.

The hypocrisy of the modern software management is that they demand the outcome of a precise engineering effort but they don't want to pay the bill for such an effort.

So you end up creating this environment and culture that kind of on the surface pretends to be science and engineering but in practice zero effort is put into stuff beyond "now it works".

In other disciplines, say if you want to build a bridge, you can't put an ad on Upwork and be like "budget is tight ... just modify this existing bridge plugin ... shouldn't take more than a few hours".

In software this is the norm, not the exception.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> i'm pretty sure devops is killing dev too

<comment><USER7> it surely is: [https://jeffknupp.com/blog/2014/04/15/how-devops-is- killing-...](https://jeffknupp.com/blog/2014/04/15/how-devops-is-killing-the- developer/)</comment></comment>


Secret Service Warns of Chip Card Scheme - <AUTHOR> https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/secret-service-warns-of-chip-card-scheme/ <comment><USER2> To those asking "Why doesn't the US use chip+PIN?" there is a good article from the same source: [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/chip-pin-vs-chip- signatu...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/chip-pin-vs-chip-signature/)

Basically: the form of fraud it protects against is very rare in the US, and consumers find memorizing another number painful. Europe adopted chip+PIN not because anyone really wanted it but because it was mandated by law. It's unclear that it has actually been effective.

<comment><USER3> > Europe adopted chip+PIN not because anyone really wanted it but because it > was mandated by law. It's unclear that it has actually been effective.

At least in UK it was a sort of anti-consumer Trojan horse. Theft decreased by 80% or more, but now the responsibility of the remaining part lays on the user instead of the bank. I remember UK consumer groups quite upset about this ~12 years ago.

<comment><USER4> But in the UK banks still cover fraudulent transactions at no cost to the consumer.

<comment><USER5> Not the banks, the vendors. It's a great coup that banks have convinced customers they cover credit card fraud when really visa/MasterCard go and take the money back from the seller.

<comment><USER6> That's with credit cards which are owned and run by VISA/MasterCard. If your debit card is used to take money from your bank, then the bank pays.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder why they chose a system or workflow that breaks with what we are pretty much doing everywhere else in the world: chip + PIN. It works, it's fast and reliable. And with optional NFC it's even faster.

While people can always make up arguments for some edge case where it wouldn't work for them, that is anecdotal at best. Resisting change it only going to hurt (economically, technically, knowledge-wise) in the long run. I know that learning from history is not humanity's greatest skill, but actively working against what turned out to be a bad practise seems rather.. strange.

And at the same time, some commercial services jump in to fill the void, which is not something you probably want either due to the risk of monopoly, data sharing and other privacy concerns.

<comment><USER8> It's interesting because according to my understanding, the U.S. is actually using a pretty good system for dealing with credit card fraud in general...which sadly seems to be the rare exception in regards to consumer protections in the U.S.

Basically -- again, as I understand it -- the losses due to credit card fraud is either on the merchant or the card-issuer -- generally the two groups most equipped to deal with the issue. If Visa thinks it's losing too much money due to fraud, they have the control to influence change on the system, put more resources into detecting or preventing it, etc. But they can generally view it as a cost-profit analysis, and handle it appropriately. Of course there's side effects, it costs all of us involving the courts or police, to some degree, but in the absence of a perfect solution in an ideal world, that's something that was going to happen anyway.

Which isn't to say the future couldn't change; money-ed lobbyists, such as Visa, can get the laws in the U.S. system modified to put the onus on the consumer, or on the business (which could drastically damage small businesses), but for the time being, the system does seem, to me, to be working well ... here.

<comment><USER9> Yup, that's essentially how the system works.

One reason that can work in the US is because there is so much money slopping around in the system from high interchange/network fees. An issuing financial institution may bear most of the risk of fraudulent transactions, but the revenue of interchange fees is easily 10x that of fraud.

So, there are aligned incentives to keep the system secure which ends up being friendly to the individual consumer, but it comes at a cost because consumers bear this cost in the form of opaque fees in everything they buy.

<comment><USER10> Get a good cashback card and it's not that much. Use your personal cashback card for billable business expense and you probably make money.

One thing it does do is incentivize the banks to monitor transactions. They know my card # has been stolen before I have a clue, calling me nearly immediately.

<comment><USER11> Consumer incentives are paid by the merchant, who will adjust prices to compensate.

<comment><USER10> Merchant fee - cash back = net cost to consumer

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >The reason the crooks don't just use the debit cards when intercepting them via the mail is that they need the cards to be activated first, and presumably they lack the privileged information needed to do that.

I guess I'm a little confused as to how this works. In the case of my two card issuers "activating" the card means performing at least one fully online transaction at a chip-enabled merchant. (e.g: card present, chip used, pin entered.) If the card's chip were replaced in transit then I wouldn't be able to activate the new card. I'm guessing they are targeting card issuers that have a different activation scheme; but I'm a bit surprised that my extremely small midwestern bank is actually ahead of the curve on card security.

<comment><USER13> That is the 'non US' view sadly. You see we didn't get "chip AND PIN" in the US. We got "chip to send the magnetic stripe". If you use a US chipped credit card in a terminal it doesn't ask for a pin, it just wants an unintelligible signature and you're done.

I'm more than a bit irritated with this since without the pin you can 'skim' chip cards just as easily as you can magnetic cards.

<comment><USER7> But then what's the point? The whole signature scheme is not making much sense anyway, and pretending that no change is better because it is cheaper just gives you technical debt in the long run.

Would probably be better if at some point it was decided that using a signature is stupid and a deadline for using a PIN was set. But then again, the US hasn't been able to fix the date naming scheme, the measurement system or the temperature system (and it's just 4% of the world that is still using the old ones). I doubt this will ever be fixed.

<comment><USER14> > the US hasn't been able to fix the date naming scheme, the measurement > system or the temperature system

That's exactly equivalent to proclaiming that the three dozen major languages still used in Europe should all be abolished, except for English. More than half of all Europeans share no common language. The most widely understood language in the EU, English, only has about 1/2 coverage.

Language is far more important than measurement, and it should be standardized just the same as measurement.

Now see what kind of response you get when you tell the Swedish, Germans, Greeks, Romanians, French, Hungarians, Italians, Dutch, etc. that they all have to abandon their languages for superior efficiency of communication.

Finnish, Lithuanian and Danish are a mere 1% of the EU language base. Estonian is less than 1%. Globally it's that much worse. Why are they persisted generation after generation? It's wildly inefficient and backwards to force them upon children. Where are the widespread calls for abolishing them in favor of English as the primary language, in the name of gaining efficiency?

<comment><USER15> Possibly because in a lot of Europe most people learn their native language AND english, and this isn't that much more difficult.

Plus, langauge preserves a culture (literature, etc), which isn't really the same as measurement systems. I wish the UK (where I live) would hurry up and ditch it's remaining imperial units (e.g. miles). It would make life easier.

<comment><USER14> People in the US learn the metric system as well.

It's no more difficult to learn two measurement systems, as it is to learn two languages. I'd argue it's dramatically easier to learn two measurement systems.

To learn the metric system, how many concepts do you need to memorize? Not many, it's quite easy. Now try learning Estonian or Russian as a native English or Mandarin speaker. People spend years of effort just to become mediocre at speaking Mandardin as an example.

Now consider, you're born in Finland, and few other people globally or in the EU use Finnish. To communicate well with other foreigners (the other seven billion people), you need a common language (typically English in Finland). The effort involved in learning English at even a moderate proficiency, means you're going to practice and use English for perhaps six to ten years growing up to just become decent at it. Then it further requires that you use it on an on-going / never-ending basis to stay proficient at it. That's because language is radically more complex and difficult than eg the metric system. That need to adopt and maintain a popular common language in addition to the scarce first/primary language, comes at a great time cost when added up across a lifetime.

By contrast, you can teach someone the metric system (someone entirely unfamiliar with it) in a _very_ small amount of time.

More people in the US as a percentage know the metric system than know Finnish or Estonian in the EU.

The cultural explanation for languages, which is common, is no more valid than claiming culture for the imperial system clinging-on that you see in the US. In fact, that's precisely why it hasn't gone away in the US (otherwise it'd have been trivial to abandon). You can explain cultural concepts just as well in English and you can make subtle adoptions into English for phrases or cultural concepts as necessary, without needing to learn an entire other language.

In the US a tall person may be six feet six inches. That's an example of cultural embedding.

In the US, a fast car might go 180 or 200 miles per hour. The speed limit might be 70 miles per hour. That's embedded into the culture.

The three point line in basketball might be at 22 feet. That's culture. The pitchers mound is 60 feet six inches, that's culture.

A first down is ten yards, not 9.1 meters. That's culture. There are dozens of other common, equally valid examples from across US life.

If someone claims those things are not part of US culture (whereas an obscure language phrase is culture), they're simply guilty of arbitrary - and rather comical - snobbery.

<comment><USER16> Measurement systems affect culture but they are not culture in and of themselves. Countries have changed systems, but their cultures clearly have not. In fact I think the fact that many countries have switched demonstrates that it's not something cultural, rather one of practicality. There's a strong school of thought in the US that the government creating standards is "interferring" etc, that's possibly a reason why they haven't changed. Your argument reads that there's no need for change because it's cultural and easier just to keep things the way are. However if things were really like that, languages would have never evolved. People change, we get new ideas, and move on.

In every language you'll have phrases that relate to things from a long time ago, that doesn't mean they have a right to stay. The US has kept to the imperial system, which is your decision, but it's just few other people can understand your steadfastness.

In the UK we have phrases similar to what you mentioned regarding basketball rules, etc. They've stayed and quite rightly; also in russian and french we still have some of these words. But our general attitude to measurement systems has changed, for practical reasons, and quite rightly too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, aside from the fact that this is screaming for chip + pin, isn't this a failure on the cardmaker's part to make a card that you can remove the chip without destroying the card?

<comment><USER18> I keep saying this but the we in the US really screwed up in the transition to chips. We had a chance to change behavior but we went ahead and ignored pins.

I simply don't understand why, apart from too many retailers complaining.

<comment><USER19> If cost of fraud is less than the cost of pins. Then nobody will push for pins.

Adding pins to checkout process adds friction and checkout time. It might be a minor amount per transaction. However if you add it up across all transactions, it's a significant amount.

<comment><USER20> More friction than printing out a receipt and asking me to sign it?

BTW, if you want to see just how efficient chip-and-pin can be, go to a bar in a nordic country. In Helsinki I can pay with chip-and-pin as quickly as cash (assuming change). The bartenders won't even hold a tab open for you, they just charge you every time. I've experienced the same efficiency in Sweden.

<comment><USER21> I only sign paper at restaurants. If a signature is needed at a retail store, I usually sign a digital pad.

<comment><USER22> Increasingly you sign (or in my case scrawl a wiggly line) a pad but I still sign paper fairly regularly. One of the issues with PIN in the US is likely that you'd have needed a whole new workflow and mobile devices at sit-down restaurants. It would arguably be a better system to move to settling up at the table, but it would still be a big and expensive change.

<comment><USER23> You needed new devices anyway to switch to chip, but I think it is a cultural issue with tipping. Some people really like that the server doesn't know how much you tipped until you leave.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, that may be part of it. It's not really rational but I don't especially like someone waiting for me to enter a tip amount into a keypad. I imagine others feel similarly. The US isn't unique in having tips but in the UK, for example, they tend to put 10% onto the bill automatically.

ADDED: And you needed new devices but not mobile systems to bring to the table.

<comment><USER15> However the US is unique in not paying waiting staff minimum wage, which makes tips a whole other thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The Secret Service memo doesn't specify at what point in the mail process > the crooks are intercepting the cards. It could well involve _U.S. Postal > Service_ employees (or another delivery service), or perhaps the thieves are > somehow gaining access to company mailboxes directly. Either way, this alert > shows the extent to which some thieves will go to target high-value > customers.

The idea that employees of delivery companies might be conspiring to do these large scale scams is terrifying.

<comment><USER25> Oh, this is nothing. You don't realize just how much stuff 'drops off the docks' or is 'beyond economical repair' in logistics.

I remember when a ton of Sony stuff disappeared from the repair depot I worked at. Boy that was a fun day. 300 laptops, freshly repaired that week, gone from the warehouse. Never even made it to the shipping lanes on the other side of the warehouse. And no camera footage despite every angle being covered from the repair store cage to the shipping lanes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sounds like credit cards need to come with some sort of "tampered with" mechanism covering the chip, sort of like scratch off to reveal numbers on gift cards.

<comment><USER27> That's very easily circumvented:

1) Remove scratch off tape

2) Tamper with card

3) Replace scratch off tape

You can get scratch off tape from here: [https://www.amazon.com/Security- Evident-Scratch-Stickers-Scr...](https://www.amazon.com/Security-Evident- Scratch-Stickers-Scratch-Off/dp/B00MW1ZCJE)

People tamper with giftcards this way too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> In US, chip cards are activated on phone/web.

A simple way to solve this issue is ask for a pin only for first use (provided at the time of activation). That way users will have to use pin only once, after which it can be used like a regular chip card.

Ideally, pin should be asked for each transaction. But I'm the land of the free, PIN is an outcast.

<comment><USER29> I don't understand how this can be implemented so badly. It's like someone looked at a European system, said "that Chip+PIN system sure looks great. What if we copied it, but then removed the security and increased the hassle."

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm getting a redirect loop. Here's a mirror from the Internet Archive: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180405160113/https://krebsonse...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180405160113/https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/04/secret- service-warns-of-chip-card-scheme/)

<comment><USER31> You have to enable cookies. I assume it's some sort of anti-DOS defense (e.g., send cookie & redirect; dumb scripts will just uselessly loop instead of causing a server render), but man is it annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Activating a card usually involves using it in a machine reading the chip and asking the pin (typically an ATM).

<comment><USER18> Not in the US – we just have to go to a website or call a number and that activates the card.

<comment><USER33> All of the debit cards I've gotten from traditional B&M banks have let me activate them at an ATM. Only my current bank, which does not have physical locations, doesn't give me that option. I assume it's because they let you use ATMs from partner banks but don't have their own.

<comment><USER18> Ah I just want to clarify, we aren't "required" to activate at an ATM. I'm just saying that we are able to activate a card without having to go to an ATM. I'm sure going to an ATM is an option as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Some banks now have new activation procedures now include using your card to do a transaction or just use with correct pin.

</comment><comment><USER35> This seems like it would need someone on the inside. How do you know the corps about to get new cards?

</comment><comment><USER36> the physical man in the middle attack

</comment><comment><USER37> From the article:

> It could well involve U.S. Postal Service employees (or another delivery > service)

I find older generations put a lot of faith in the post office. For instance, one of my investment banks, "in order to securely reset your online password", literally snail-mailed me a new pin number.

Some day, I'd like to be able to able to register public keys with my bank's blockchain and have them only authorize purchases if the itemized invoice is signed by an active private key. One can dream.

</comment><comment><USER38> Problem: Chips are too easily removed from and transferred between cards.

Solution: Put chips in humans instead.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQLzlRcX0AABygD.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQLzlRcX0AABygD.jpg)

<comment><USER39> Next problem: Chips are too easily removed from and transferred between humans.

Solution: ???</comment></comment>


Show HN: my weekend project, Good Old Google Reader  - <AUTHOR> http://oldgreader.appspot.com

<comment><USER2> I honestly don't miss the old design that much, but I direly miss the shared aspect of it. This looks interesting though, maybe I"ll give it a try, I'd like to move away from google stuff if I can these days...

<comment><USER3> See, I'm the opposite; I dislike the new UI (even though I like what they've done with the redesign of Gmail).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone know if there is a Greasemonkey script or user stylesheet that lets you get the old Google Reader UI back? I didn't use the sharing features much, but I hate the visual aspect of the new redesign.

<comment><USER5> I've had a shot at fixing the worst parts of the new UI (shrinking the massive button bars and bringing blue titles back). The instructions are for Safari, but the included CSS should work in any browser that can eat a user style sheet:

[https://plus.google.com/114301087219148980063/posts/L96Nt6Dv...](https://plus.google.com/114301087219148980063/posts/L96Nt6DvGsQ)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, but it looks like we have different gripes. I've put my changes up in a gist as well; check it out to see if they help you too:

<https://gist.github.com/1343945>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sure, I'd love to check this out!

Could you please run a demo with a link on your main page(did I miss it?) I don't think having users upload their info just to see a demo is good practice.

<comment><AUTHOR> I added a little preview of how the output looks like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I submitted nothing to the landing page and got:

      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "/base/python_runtime/python_lib/versions/1/google/appengine/ext/webapp/_webapp25.py", line 703, in __call__
          handler.post(*groups)
        File "/base/data/home/apps/s~oldgreader/1.354495002931951805/main.py", line 25, in post
          blob_info = upload_files[0]
      IndexError: list index out of range

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, It's a known bug. Thanks for reporting it anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought some people would be interested in a way to get the data out of all those ugly JSON files where Google put all your old social data from Google Reader, so here's Good Old Google Reader. Still alpha, but this is what I've got so far. Any thoughts? I made most of it yesterday, so there's still a lot of room for improvement.

</comment><comment><USER8> I switched from bloglines.com to google reader years ago. I went back and checked it out after the redesign disaster and it looks quite good. I think I'm switching back to that.</comment>