Ask HN: Is it time to start an apolitical, decentralized version of WHO? - <AUTHOR> There has been a lot of red flags on the WHO recently, from misreporting data [1, 2] to confusing guidance on masks [3] to the controversial case of Taiwan [4, 5].
Does anyone here feel that such bureaucracies wouldn't/shouldn't survive long? And that they could be easily replaced by an efficiently-operated, software-powered non-profit (something similar to Our World in Data)?
One starting point that I could get couple universities and hospitals behind is a simple portal for any medical staff around the world to report severe flu or whatnot cases (with anonymized record/evidence) that they suspect to be a stem for a new disease outbreak.
Would anyone here be interested in helping to build such initiative? Or any thoughts? Suggestions? Counter-arguments?
--
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data#world-health-organization-who-situation-reports-our-previous-data-source
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/14/asia/coronavirus-who-china-intl-hnk/index.html
[3] https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2020/03/11/whos-confusing-guidance-masks-covid-19-epidemic/
[4] https://in.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-taiwan-who/taiwan-says-who-not-sharing-coronavirus-information-it-provides-pressing-complaints-idINKBN21H1BS
[5] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/14/asia/coronavirus-who-china-intl-hnk/index.html <comment><USER3> I can only speak for myself, but the "red flags" that you speak of [1-5] aren't very convincing to me. That there are errors in WHOs data isn't surprising, nor that it needs to make pragmatic decisions in trying to get authoritarian regimes to cooperate. That WHOs guidance sometimes is confusing is what you'd expect from a world-wide organization in large part made up of volunteers run on a relatively tiny budget.

Unless you are an expert in epidemology or international humanitarian politics, I don't think the organization you would form would do a better job than WHO. Therefore I'm not interested in helping you.

If you want to help improve worldwide health then you could enroll in one of its many volunteer programs. That way, you would gain valuable experience in how the organization operates which would help you if you decide to create an alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think we should just give up to the fact that it's normal to have errors coming from these big Orgs operating at such a sensitive front. Look what some small errors and delays are doing.

If an organisation gets too big to keep its act together, perhaps it's time to make it more decentralized and dynamic (the original proposition).

I also honestly don't think working as a volunteer would really get you to understand how something like the WHO is being actually run.

I'm not an expert (would never say otherwise). But the world is full of experts locked in dogmas and lacks those couragious enough to break free, look stupid and try new things.

<comment><USER4> > perhaps it's time to make it more decentralized and dynamic (the original > proposition)

Honestly, what does that even mean? Wouldn't it be even _more_ chaotic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > easily replaced by an efficiently-operated, software-powered non-profit

No, one of the biggest problems I see in our industry is startups jumping into problem spaces they do not fully understand, and flailing around for a year or so, maybe getting enough people talking to them to refine their product, learn their own market, and finally get "product/market fit". Maybe.

I don't feel that we should try to replace the WHO with such a failure-prone process just because they have some problems. I do feel that you can certainly start down that path with a long-term goal to learn that space and improve upon it... but it will be a journey, not a quick fix.

It cannot be simplified down to: "bureaucracy is broken, lets replace it with some code."

<comment><USER4> I think a lot of people in our industry think the solution to an inherently human problem (not to mention one as complex and delicate as health!) is to throw code at it and demand billions of dollars in return.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What WHO does is intergovernmental public health coordination. It is inherently a political function. The decentralized version is just local public health authorities acting without the WHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> > What WHO does is intergovernmental public health coordination

I'm afraid that's a normative and oversimplistic statement.

Have you seen, at least, the WHO Twitter/FB feeds? It's acting as a teacher for the global public. So "intergovernmental public health coordination" is definitely not its only job, which it doesn't seem to be doing well. There's no disagreement that it's inherently political but in any case, that wasn't a function I proposed to replace in the first place.

> The decentralized version is just local public health authorities acting > without the WHO.

That actually goes with the original proposition and that's the way to go. But the early warning system for these authorities is broken - they got their intel too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How do you propose to keep it apolitical? Even Wikipedia has a political slant.

I agree with your concerns, but I don't know if what you propose can keep politics out. It is still probably worth a shot either way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not entirely sure yet. However, that's exactly why verified, anonymous data reporting would be a good starting point. But I assume your concerns are more about [the difficulty of] neutral funding?

<comment><USER7> Exactly, state sponsored universities could create some of the same conflicts of interest we've seen with COVID-19.

<comment><AUTHOR> True. How do you think this could be overcome? Crowdfunding? Donations?

<comment><USER7> Allow competing voices to coexist without presuming to act as an arbiter of 'truth'. Politics would remain, but the end user could choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sounds great. I love it. Sadly I fear that's not really how humans work. Very motivated, intelligent, and well meaning humans have been trying for centuries to decouple function from politics. It's not going to be solved by any technology or technique we have today.

But that's only my ignorant opinion.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's an ignorant opinion. How do you imagine it being solved?

<comment><USER8> I don't have the hubris to suggest anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What would this organization's apolitical policy be regarding Taiwan?

<comment><AUTHOR> Close coordination with the Chinese government :)

No, there would (almost) be no policy. That's the point. It's one planet - <USER2> health. Which country it is shouldn't matter much.

If a severe case was reported by medical staff in Taiwan, North Korea or where ever it would/should instantly show as potential breakout warning signal on some webpage or dashboard, without having to travel weeks through broken bureaucracies and press.

<comment><USER9> There has to be a policy. Either you deal with Taiwan though China and on China's terms, which is a political position, or you deal with Taiwan on its own terms, which is a political position, or you ignore Taiwan altogether because of the controversy around its status, which is a political position. Choosing to ignore bureacuracies and the press is a political decision. Choosing which data to post and what sources to trust is a political decision.

There's no such thing as an organization which operates internationally and is also apolitical.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the broad definition of what makes something "political", that is definitely the case. No disagreement.

However, to not drift this discussion into definitions, I'll agree on your definition of "politics", which - correct me if I'm wrong - is any activity that involves decision making.

Let's assume, in that or any case, every decision and action to be political. Then the important question here becomes: how do we make political decisions that would ensure the most transparent, decentralised, instant and honest reporting? Would that mean trusting all medical facilities/staff of any kind or excluding some?

Point is: if every decision is political, then let's make the good ones with the best possible outcome, regardless of their nature/definition.

<comment><USER9> >I'll agree on your definition of "politics", which - correct me if I'm wrong - is any activity that involves decision making.

I'm actually trying to imply something more realpolitik - that China defines what's political in this case.

Because understand, anything less than fully recognizing that Taiwan is a province under the lawful control of the Chinese government and submitting to that authority means this organization would be recognized by China as extremist and any Taiwanese involved with it would be considered enemies of the state, and censored at best, or arrested at worst. And the more popular and useful this organization became, the harder China would crack down on it.

This is why I'm saying an organization like this can't be apolitical - that's not something the world recognizes or allows.

<comment><AUTHOR> Data/reporting scope could be made anonymous and more local; on a city/town level (e.g. "Dec 22, 2019 | Severe flu case reported in X district of Wuhan (30°34'21.2"N 114°12'30.0"E) - potential for outbreak").

At high level of exposure, as you said, the Chinese gov may track down anyone behind such report, despite the anonymity. It may even block investigative entry/inquiry to the entire city. How do we solve that? I don't know but I suppose that, in the grand order of things and following this pandemic, we shouldn't be living in a world where any government is allowed to work against such public health efforts and get us into another quagmire that we could have simply avoided, which again rolls back to international relations, politics and trade and is tricky to solve but shouldn't stand in the way of trying these things out. We can't simply give up to the way the world is set up at any point in time.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Launch HN: Trexo Robotics (YC W19) – Robotic Legs for Kids with Cerebral Palsy - <AUTHOR> Hi HN community! We're Rahul and Manmeet, co-founders of Trexo Robotics (https://trexorobotics.com) At Trexo Robotics, we're building wearable robotic devices to help children with disabilities learn to walk, in many cases for the first time in their lives.
Video: https://youtu.be/3LW4LJIpa2o
We are both Mechatronics undergrads from the University of Waterloo. Rahul later completed a Master's in Robotics at the University of Toronto and I've done my MBA at Rotman.
We started this a few years ago when I (Manmeet) found out that my nephew, Praneit, has Cerebral Palsy, and that he would not be able to walk. Not walking can lead to contractures, hip subluxation, and many physiological and psychological issues for kids. We wanted to change that. We decided to use our robotics background, along with help from friends and the top rehabilitation researchers in North America, and in 2016,  watched my nephew take his first steps using our device. Watching Praneit walk is definitely the proudest moment of my life, and we realized that there are families all over the world that can benefit from this, so we started Trexo Robotics.
The Trexo device is available for $899 per month (via financing) or can be purchased outright for $29,900.
It is an exercise and therapy tool, allowing children to get the benefits of daily walking at their homes. We decided to design it so that it attaches onto an existing walker. Currently, it only works with Rifton's Dynamic Pacer, but hopefully, we can add other walkers later on as well. Our controller allows you to modify the gait pattern to adapt to the needs of different kids and adjust the amount of force/assistance that the robot provides on each joint. We are already launched, with kids using it to walk thousands of steps daily. It has been amazing to see the interest of families. Our device is available for pre-order. Our 2019 production is already fully reserved, and we are now taking reservations for next year.
Really interested to hear the HN community's thoughts on our approach, and experiences families or others have had in this space. <comment><USER2> Fantastic product! Really great that you have been able to help people become empowered for themselves.

Scale: Do you need help reducing the BOM costs? You could go for economies of scale (and reuse 75% of the same BOM) and build a variant for adult rehabilitation for injured soldiers, car accident victims or others with leg injuries.

Or how about a variant that allows for anyone to use to strengthen imbalances in muscle training/development? It could be gym equipment that you get on, it takes measurements of your leg strength by putting you through its paces, then it gives you a customized workout to balance your muscles for optimum strength. These exercises for imbalance measurement aren't an exact fit to the machine but can give you an idea: [https://dailyburn.com/life/fitness/muscle- imbalances-functio...](https://dailyburn.com/life/fitness/muscle-imbalances- functional-movement-screen/)

<comment><AUTHOR> We are still producing at low quantities, but we have a pathway to bring down BOM costs with scale. In terms of other applications, the technology that we are building can evolve for other uses over time, but its not a straight replacement. We wanted to target an immediate need that we saw in the world today.

<comment><USER2> Great! Keep it up!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations, this looks fantastic! I'm afraid I don't have anything useful to contribute from medical standpoint, but I have a couple of technical questions if you don't mind.

What kind of actuators are you using (motors/transmission/motor controller)? Are they off-the-shelf parts or developed in-house? What is approximate power/torque?

How did you approach the motion control aspect from the user-safety standpoint? I don't know if the device is powerful enough to cause injury, but if it is - how do you go about development/QA to minimize chance of harm?

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> The base actuator is an off the shelf maxon, with our custom sensors and custom motor controller. In terms of motion control, safety was the most important piece when designing our system. There are safety checks in the mechanical, electrical and the software sub system. There is a maximum force that the controller exerts on the child, which can be lowered or increased for each child. In addition to the child resisting, we also had to account for spasticity and sudden tone while walking. The controller detects high resistance and caps off the max force it sends to the motor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks pretty amazing, and it's exciting to see this technology applied to an area that is likely overlooked but extremely important.

I noticed that the full purchase option only comes with a 2 year warranty. That seems a bit short, no? Given that this costs as much as a car, I'd expect a warranty similar to what you'd find on a Honda, for example.

I'm not your target audience, so take that with a few grains of salt.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. Perhaps we can build a similar model to a car warranty where the actuators are covered for a longer period, but other components are not. Atleast it gives people a peace of mind regarding the most expensive items.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just want to congratulate you on launching a product that I hope will have an incredibly positive impact for numerous families. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's a great video. Are the users expected to regain some of the walking ability in the future by using these machines ?

Btw, what kind of motors go into these ? they look funky :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We have done some case studies where we have found improvements in walking. However, the primary case is that by using this device to walk at home everyday, kids can avoid many of the complications that may arise from sitting, i.e contractures, hip subluxation and other issues.

We will be conducting clinical studies to evaluate the effectiveness of our device in helping reduce some of these complications.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Could you make some comparison with ReWalk ?

<comment><USER8> The ReWalk is a great device for adults with spinal cord injury as an example. The Trexo is specifically designed for children as a therapeutic device. Compared to adults who might have had spinal cord injury, children generally do not have upper body strength and in many cases have low bone densities. By building around a walker that many children already have and use we have eliminated the risk of falling and also have the ability to increase the weight bearing over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> how did you determine the cost of 29K?

<comment><AUTHOR> This price is based on our current costs of producing and servicing these units at our projected quantities. It is still quite expensive for most families, unfortunately. Our goal is to engage with insurance companies to make this more affordable and accessible for the larger population, based on the early adopters that are buying and the clinical studies we are doing.

<comment><USER10> The thing that pisses me off is that there are so many startups or companies where insurance companies would benefit from providing service to product mappings much more smoothly and efficiently.

You should have to "think about wngaging with insurance companies"

There should be a fucking marketplace and a brokering system already in place that your products can be submitted to and that system gets you engaged with the insurance companies and thus your ultimate customers.

<comment><USER11> That marketplace sounds like a startup idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How do you justify the price of $1k/mo? -- isn't that a bit too much?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have made significant progress towards lowering the price of our system, considering that similar devices up until now cost $75k-$150k. But it is still quite expensive for the vast majority. Our price will continue to reduce over time, making it more accessible for both families and insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> wow do i wish i could afford this... I adopted a child from a bulgarian orphanage 2 years ago who has CP and this seems like it would be a game changer for her.

Great work !</comment>


Show HN: CoreUI Icons – open-source icons with marks in SVG, Webfont and raster - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/coreui/coreui-icons/tree/1.0.0 <comment><USER2> Not related to this specific set of icons (they look great)... but I'm _really_ wondering when the pendulum is going to swing back from line art to actual colors and solids again.

I've found toolbars so much harder to read for the last decade than they were before, ever since flat design removed all color and solids and made everything look like squiggles of the same weight.

Toolbar icons used to be much more easily distinguishable by color and shape and weight and shading. [1] How long is the ultra-flat design trend going to last...?!

Is it a technological issue on the web at this point? Once we get complete browser support for color fonts [2], is that going to give us rich-color icon fonts? Because I just cannot wait.

[1] [http://www.mswordhelp.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/toolbar...](http://www.mswordhelp.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/07/toolbar-in-word-2010.png)

[2] [https://www.colorfonts.wtf/](https://www.colorfonts.wtf/)

<comment><USER3> Something that makes color icons harder to support is the presence of dark modes and sometimes choice of themes within light mode and dark mode. Where a single set of glyphic icons they can simply be tinted appropriately, but with full color icons you'll need at minimum a base set for light mode and secondary subset with problematic icons adjusted to work under dark mode. It's easy to solve from a technical perspective (in CSS there's media queries, on Apple OSes Xcode has built in variant handling for images) but there's still the extra overhead of creating the required resources.

<comment><USER2> That's true, but most sites don't support dark mode anyways, and it's still not clear that dark mode will be widely adopted web designers. In any case, you're right there would just be a second font file for dark mode, so at least a user wouldn't have to download both.

In any case, as of two months ago Chrome still explicitly has no plans to implement SVG in OpenType (despite support in every other major browser, and the request being 3 years old), so color icon fonts don't appear to be coming to the web as a whole anytime soon. :( [1]

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations.

I was using similar project 'feathericons'[1] in my website, but later went on to use just the requisite couple of svg's directly with href.

Reasons being,

1\. JS, although OP project doesn't seem to need one.

2\. Missing icons, e.g. Reddit was missing in feather icons.

3\. Only few icons were utmost needed and that doesn't justify a library.

I think the real use case for such libraries are websites were there are user generated content and they are allowed use such icons; then again with emoji's I don't know how many prefer this. On second thought, themes for CMS may be the prominent use case.

[1][https://github.com/feathericons/feather](https://github.com/feathericons/feather)

<comment><AUTHOR> We deliver our icons with all the build tools, so you can remove unnecessary icons and build your own set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lovely icons, but I have been finding it so much simpler to just use unicode characters when I need icons. I can't always find exactly what I want, but I can usually get close enough and the simplicity is sublime.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. [A-Za-z] are all the icons I need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> See also: Feather Icons[1].

[1] [https://feathericons.com/](https://feathericons.com/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Does anybody have some font suggestions for matching this style? My ideal would have the following:

1\. Even line thickness within each character (this matches the icon style).

2\. This is a tough one: looks good with the same line thickness at different font sizes (i.e. if you increase font size, you decrease font weight). This allows you to match the line thickness of your icons with the same font at different font sizes. I'm not opposed to using a variety of fonts for different sizes, but that of course means I have to find different fonts that fit my criteria.

3\. Serif. This significantly improves character differentiation in my experience. It is arguably a departure from the flat style, but sans-serif fonts are both harder to read, and also stale IMO--too much of the internet is Helvetica/Arial.

4\. Available on most machines. I don't necessary mean pre-loaded, but availability from CDNs and common enough to be likely already cached would be nice. However, given I can serve this up from a CDN or include in apps myself, this is probably the least important criteria.

The best I've found is Zilla Slab[1]. To me that looks great in the range of (weight:400, size: 24px) to (weight: 300, size: 40px), but smaller/larger than that, it becomes blurry/too "spindly", respectively on my screen. That's big enough for most applications, but for tooltips, icon labels, placeholders, etc. I'd like a smaller size.

One consideration here is that serifs just aren't visible at smaller sizes, so maybe I need to relax that requirement.

[1] [https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Zilla+Slab](https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Zilla+Slab)

</comment><comment><USER8> Oh, this is just the freemium offer for the "pro" version which is $99/$39 per user.

Wish somebody would donate to the Tango iconset for a remake and a whole load of new icons.

</comment><comment><USER9> As someone who disables webfont downloading, I hate when fonts are used for icons.

<comment><USER10> Why do you disable webfont downloading?

<comment><USER11> Why do you think Google hosts all these fonts for free? Nearly every webpage today has a request to fonts.googleapis.com. Most adblockers don't even blacklist it.

<comment><USER12> Not to get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, but Google Font requests don't include any tracking cookies.

<comment><USER13> You don't need cookies to track user activity across the web. If Google is using Etags for example for handling the caching of their web fonts, and if the user doesn't have the referer headers disabled, then Google can see who is visiting which page and when. There are other ways to achieve this too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good to see more variety to things like Font Awesome and Feather, nice work!

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like our icons. We're doing our best!</comment></comment>


Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/google-donates-2-million-to-wikimedia-foundation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> I'm really happy about that, but I wanted to point out it's not completely disinterested - Wikipedia is the top search result for an absurd amount of queries, so Google benefits from its continued existence (not to mention it's aligned with their stated goal).

Edit: Someone posted in the original article about similar grants - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Grants> , including a recent $2 million potential "grant" funding from the Omidyar Network.

<comment><USER3> How does that work? Wikipedia appears equally in the competitors' results - it's not like the Bing or Yahoo developers don't know of this obscure Wikipedia thing - so that's not it; and Google benefits from users spending more time on search pages, since they will see more adds, so providing results that instantly solve their problem isn't very helpful either (and targeted ads are well-targeted independently of the search results); and users going into Wikipedia don't add anything to the bottom-line since Wikipedias don't run ads (Google's or otherwise).

<comment><USER4> Wikipedia provides valuable content which increases the usefulness of Google (and all other search engines).

If Wikipedia were to go under and nothing similar were to replace it (unlikely, but who knows) people might go back to using encyclopedias on dead wood or walled garden online encyclopedias both of which would lead to people spending less time searching.

<comment><USER5> The trick is that Wikimedia provides little valuable content, beyond the web hosting and software updates they do on Mediawiki.

I'm not sure how much of the money will go towards full time "wikipedia editors", for example.

So, if we believe the wikipedia marketing that most of the editors are "largely anonymous internet users who write without pay", what exactly are they spending the money on ?

If it's hosting and such, I'd rather see them not manage their own infrastructure and try to move towards the cloud (no matter how corny it sounds). Putting Wikipedia on EC2 or AppEngine should be transparent for users and might allow them to focus on their core competency (which would be what, btw -- crowd sourcing management ?)

Not trying to be snarky but I fail to see how this money is helping that much.

<comment><USER6> Are you friggin' kidding me. Wikipedia hosts so many sites and serves so many requests that they are their partially their own cloud. They would not gain much from switching to some other cloud, not to mention the probability that there is no other 'cloud' that could handle them ad hock. I'm sure Amazon would swallow big if Wikimedia came to them with such a request, then probably laugh out loud. Get real..

<comment><USER5> Yes, my reply wasn't as smart in retrospect. They seem to have about 350 machines [1] so maybe moving to the cloud isn't as easy as it seems.

My remark was mostly triggered by the fact that here you had Google with a big cluster, a cloud offering and tons of bandwidth paying money to Wikimedia so they could buy their own hardware and bandwidth at a worse price probably. A direct deal would have looked better.

1\. <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ..and Google continues doing less evil than most. Despite having the deadweight that is Knol in their kitty.

<comment><USER8> donating $2M is not doing no evil. If donating money to a nonprofit unevils you, then why do people still claim microsoft / bill gates are evil? They've donated billions to charity.

If this is your metric, then Google is way more evil than Microsoft.

<comment><USER9> Wikimedia is not only a non-profit, but also Google's more sucessful competitor in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, albeit with some factual errors and unsourced statements.

Google benefits from Wikipedia articles in that they make Google more useful, but if Wikipedia is always the first result, people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia to get information, just like they go directly to Facebook or to Twitter, even though Google also benefits from their public information.

<comment><USER10> _people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia_

I doubt it. All people I know use Google as their URL entry field, as the concept of URL is too machine-oriented to be comfortably used by the average guy, when good search is available. Given that, Google donating to Wikipedia is a pure win-win situation.

<comment><USER9> People don't need to type the url. Wikipedia is already installed as a search engine on Firefox's search box (and maybe in IE?). Eventually users will learn to use it.

Crome's omnibox search also takes users to wikipedia without visiting google. They could show ads in the omnibox, but the space and user experience is more limited.

And don't forget that most sites don't get all their referrers from Google, so users are getting there via another way. Some of those are indeed direct traffic, without an intermediary.

<comment><USER11> I still usually type what I want into google followed by wiki to get the relevant Wikipedia entry first. Google is also better at finding the page you want that Wikipedia itself, such as if you type in The Simpsons wiki, but you really want the episode list page, it will be the second result indented under the main page.

It may not really save to much time, but if a tech guy like myself does it that way, average internet users would probably be even more inclined to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is good for Wikipedia, and nice of Google, but I'm also reminded of Nicholas Carr's observation:

 _The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?_

(From <[http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.ph...](http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.php>.))

</comment><comment><USER13> Good news as long as the deal has no strings attached...</comment>


Ask HN: Searching for information with fine granularity - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I've been a regular reader here and I just registered today to ask my first question to hopefully get some feedback about the problem that my startup is trying to tackle.
The Problem: Wouldn't it be nice if web searchers have the ability to find information with fine granularity?
E.g. Let's say you're looking for a person, then you would be able to do a search such as:
I want to find a single 21 year old pasta-loving female with green eyes who graduated with a Bachelor's Degree from Harvard in 2010 and is working as a Software Engineer from 1 January 2011 to April 2011 under the supervision of a 30 year old be-spectacled married male, of three siblings, who has been working there since year 2000.
Is this a real problem?  Are there any startups already doing this? <comment><USER2> I suspect that such a service provider will be hit by an avalanche of lawsuits.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would that be true even if such information are provided by the users themselves? "Person" info is just an example, though. Users can search for other things as well such as jobs and what have you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> That sounds creepy.</comment>


Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2242937-universal-basic-income-seems-to-improve-employment-and-well-being/ <comment><USER2> > The findings suggest that basic income doesn't seem to provide a > disincentive for people to work.

Do they? The findings suggest that a monthly stipend _with an established expiration date_ doesn't provide a disincentive for people to work.

But the policy that this experiment is supposed to bolster--a real UBI--is a guaranteed monthly payment _for life_. I'm not convinced that these temporary experiments--in which the participants would be fools to 'retire', since the payments are temporary--are any indication of how people would behave when given a a real UBI.

<comment><USER3> It's impossible to fully prove a negative (e.g. prove this code has no bugs, prove there isn't a teacup hiding behind mars), but each study gives us tentative confidence to do larger and larger studies.

If we really are nearing an automation revolution which requires us to become a demand-constrained society, then we will want to understand how people behave with UBI.

If not, then it's still good to understand the nature of unconditional cash transfer programs (even if temporary), for scenarios like the pandemic in the US or as an alternative to other forms of aid in developing economies.

<comment><USER2> Who said they need to prove a negative? I'm saying these guys are citing a study about apples while making claims about oranges.

They studied the impact of a temporary stipend. Yet the title of the article ("Universal basic income seems to improve employment and well-being") is not a claim about the impact of temporary stipends. It is a claim about UBI.

You cannot honestly infer anything about UBI or the incentives created by UBI from a study of something that is fundamentally different than UBI.

I agree that the results of the study should give us confidence to do larger studies. If studies of UBI result in the same findings, it would likely win me over to the pro-UBI camp.

But for now, I find it irksome that the article claims a study of apples has taught us something about oranges.

<comment><USER3> I guess the article should be called "2 year unconditional cash transfer program to 2000 people seemed to improve employment and wellbeing".

But I disagree that this doesn't allow us to infer anything about UBI. It tells us something about unconditional cash transfer over a 2 year period, which is a subset of UBI. Baby apples, if you will.

There are of course other facets that aren't tested here, like the duration of the study not being a lifetime, or the fact that not everyone in the society is getting it, or the taxes not manifesting.

Ultimately, no study can fully prove the duration effects of UBI in a useful amount of time. We could do lifetime studies and we still wouldn't know about multi-generational effects. And we could do multi-generational studies, but do we really have 200 years?

\---

That said I agree longer term studies are a good idea, maybe 5+ years which would give people time to do career changes. That this study has worked out hopefully gives someone justification to undertake the next.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm cautiously in favour of UBI, but this is such a flimsy study and there's absolutely no reason to think these results generalize to an entire country of people being offered UBI permanently.

These sorts of articles where they claim to have scientific evidence that UBI helps just feels sleezy and disingenuous. I doubt something like this would ever change the mind of someone who is skeptical of the idea, and might actually have the opposite effect.

<comment><USER5> > These sorts of articles where they claim to have scientific evidence that > UBI helps just feels sleezy and disingenuous.

Why? This article states what they did, and what the results were. Hardly sleazy, unless, of course you have a predefined axe to grind against UBI as the results certainly show no significant _negative_ effect. Claimed "disincentives" are part of the anti-UBI talking points much like they were in the "oppose raising minimum wage" talking points. In both of these cases, the claimed negative effect has never appeared.

In addition, UBI seems to have an especial effect on families with children, and that should _absolutely_ be followed up. It probably indicates that families with unemployed members are less likely to be there due to inherent issues like drug addiction and mental health and more likely to be there due to path dependence (teen pregnancy--for example).

For those of us who are pro-UBI, this is a welcome study but hardly definitive. In addition, since UBI experiments are always severely limited in scope in these trials, it may be more effective to target families to get the most benefit.

As always in these situations, I ask what experiment and evidence _would_ you accept that UBI works? Being dismissive is different from being a skeptic. A skeptic also has an experiment and hypothesis that could _disprove_ their position. If you don't have a position that can be disproven, you're just an annoying gadfly.

<comment><USER4> > As always in these situations, I ask what experiment and evidence would you > accept that UBI works? Being dismissive is different from being a skeptic. A > skeptic also has an experiment and hypothesis that could disprove their > position.

That's exactly the problem. I'm not sure a small scale study is actually capable of showing that UBI works or doesn't work. I worry that the only way we're going to find out is actually implementing it.

> If you don't have a position that can be disproven, you're just an annoying > gadfly.

Again, I'm pro-UBI. I just don't think that people's claims about UBI can be proven or disproven without it actually being done at scale, both in terms of the number of people given money and the length of time the money is provided.

I'm a physicist. I'm not anti-science. However, I am against the mis-use of science in performing experiments that _cannot_ show what they aim to show.

There is no law of nature saying that for any system you wish to study, there is a simpler, easier to understand system you can study instead which should roughly replicate the results in your bigger messier system. Human economies are complex.

<comment><USER5> > There is no law of nature saying that for any system you wish to study, > there is a simpler, easier to understand system you can study instead which > should roughly replicate the results in your bigger messier system. Human > economies are complex.

Perhaps true, but you don't have any evidence to support this assertion either. Physicists didn't launch ITER before doing a _lot_ of experiments at a lower scale that they thought might scale up. Human economies _do_ have models and rules--and often fairly simple ones model behavior quite well.

From my point of view, the first hurdle is making sure that UBI doesn't do active harm. A lot of "means-based" support _DOES_ do active harm. The hard cutoffs have fairly severe perverse incentives that are now well-documented. Most of the UBI experiments seem to be indicating that they don't cause similar perverse incentives (that is the whole _point_ of UBI but it's nice to have some evidence).

That's important because then the argument can be made that current "means- based" systems should be transitioned to either having a _much_ larger limit or toward a UBI-like mechanism. Those have much more staying power than a UBI experiment.

I don't do this to "prove" that UBI works to the dog-whistlers--they will shout "welfare queens" until doomsday and simply can't be reached by logical arguments.

However, I would like to have some evidence that we are allocating the money that exists relatively effectively and that there isn't a _better_ choice for doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think a lot of people who haven't been down and out, are vastly underestimating bad financial stress is - or how fast small paltry sums/debt can grow. As the saying goes, it's very expensive to be poor.

When there's no safety net to catch you, you'll have to make some hard choices. Is going to be the rent? or food? or medication? Pick one, and the rest will keep on compounding until the next round.

If UBI can work as a foundation to remove that stress, well, then I can absolutely understand how it improves the well-being of someone.</comment>


How India's sex workers prevented an Aids epidemic - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/dec/13/the-untold-story-of-how-india-sex-workers-prevented-an-aids-epidemic-ashok-alexander-a-stranger-truth <comment><USER2> While I applaud the success of this program, this specific article is a good reminder of why it's important to read critically.

> The programme, which cost $375m (£297m), is credited with an important role > in the subsequent decline in India's HIV status.

Why passive voice here? What authority credited the organization's work in this way?

On a closer read, it becomes obvious that there are no primary or secondary sources quoted except the author of this book and anecdotes presented therein; essentially, this is no more than a book review. Is there a larger story here? Are there any suggestions or criticisms that suggest this may not be an optimal approach?

As submarines [0] go, this is a pretty harmless and feel-good one. But keep an eye out for articles with similar structure that seek to shape your opinions.

[0] [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><USER3> It would be of tremendous benefit (and of course an opportunity for appropriate praise) to learn who coughed up a pretty chunk of money to help people who aren't very popular.

As far as I can tell it is primarily the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: [https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press- Releases/...](https://www.gatesfoundation.org/Media-Center/Press- Releases/2009/07/Avahan-AIDS-Initiative-Commitment-Increased-to-$338-Million)

<comment><USER4> Thanks.

And there's an interesting juxtaposition with another front-page submission. From this article:

> Alexander, 64, was born into India's elite. His father, PC Alexander, was > principal secretary to Indira Gandhi. In leaving his career as senior > director in the India office of McKinsey & Company to join the campaign to > stop the spread of HIV, Alexander swapped a life of plush boardrooms and > fine dining with CEOs for sitting on mud floors with sex workers, gay and > transgender people and intravenous drug users. In short, a world of which he > had little knowledge.

The other one criticizes McKinsey & Company: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18691413)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who's extremely pissed off by the subtitle?

> Beating Aids is India's greatest public health achievement. A new book says > it wouldn't have happened without women

Replace this with "it wouldn't have happened without men" and you would feel how ridiculous this subtitle is.

<comment><USER6> The thing is - if the premise is true that sex workers had an active role in preventing aids, then it's pretty easy to see that sex workers are predominantly low-status women and hence that their role and status make this a more extraordinary achievement.

<comment><USER7> The fine article mentions that gays, transgenders, and IV drug users were involved as well.

<comment><USER8> "Transgender" is an adjective, not a noun. Try "trans people" instead.

<comment><USER9> Calling a transgender person "a transgender" and a group of transgender people "transgenders" is similar to calling an Indian person "an Indian" and a group of Indian people "Indians".

<comment><USER10> There are differences in usage. For example, it is not correct usage to call someone "a French". The adjective "transgender" seems to work similarly.

<comment><USER9> > For example, it is not correct usage to call someone "a French".

Only because the established term was "a Frenchman". There is no such established term for the group under discussion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New li-ion battery retains 85% of capacity after 10,000/cycles - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/cars/german-researchers-create-lithium-ion-battery-retains-85-its-capacity-after-10000-charges.html

<comment><USER2> I love technology more and more every day. First the kid that invented the 20 second cell phone charger, now this. I look forward to the (hopefully) commercialization of this and I now have yet another reason to take the plunge and get myself a Tesla Model S.

Exciting times we're living in.</comment>


Ask PG: Why not show comment up and down vote count separately? - <AUTHOR>

At the moment it's hard to distinguish evenly contentious comments from ones which receive few reactions. <comment><USER2> Are you seeing comment karma totals at all? I see your account is old enough that you date back to before the current practice of not showing comment karma scores by default (except the scores of each participant's own comments are visible to that participant when logged in). So are you asking for a feature that would be visible to each participant, to see up and down votes on that participant's own comments?

The site founder, pg, asked for suggestions on how to "stave off decline of HN" in a thread he opened 233 days ago

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

He then announced an experiment with the current practice of not showing comment karma scores in general 224 days ago,

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2434333>

noting that he might change settings back and forth as the experiment continued. About two days later he opened a simple yes/no poll about the experiment

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2445039>

and 216 days ago he replied to a question with a preliminary report on how voting behavior has changed.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2465271>

As I recall, and as I just tried to verify by using HN search, the site founder pg and most of the other high-karma, long-time users here are reasonably well pleased with the results of not showing comment scores except to the participant who posts each comment.</comment>


Hacking smartphones with ease - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/11/iphone_cracking_wifi.html <comment><USER2> Many of these weaknesses aren't inherent to smartphones. The same could be said of laptops or netbooks. For example, the article makes some thinly discussed remarks about connecting to networks by SSID only, and not checking for the "address". As I understand it, this is necessary to support enterprise AP configurations where an many APs share a single SSID. The entire Facebook segment is an HTTP vulnerability, not a smartphone vulnerability.

IMO, the piece would have been better had it educated users that the danger doesn't apply only to smartphones, but to their laptops and netbooks as well.</comment>


Linux is Most Used OS in Microsoft Azure – over 50 percent of VM cores - <AUTHOR> https://build5nines.com/linux-is-most-used-os-in-microsoft-azure-over-50-percent-fo-vm-cores/ <comment><USER2> I'm interested to know what the majority of the Windows machines are used for.

I can't think it'd be anything other than 'big enterprise' applications, where there seems to be a lot of bespoke stuff built specifically for Windows Server (e.g. finance software, healthcare systems, marriage registration, taxi licensing, nursing home management, etc).

Unfortunately this sort of stuff is fairly rare to be available in the open- source world, because there is such little demand for it by individuals.

The wackiest one I've come across is a CMS (Crematorium Management System). If anyone wants to create an open-source one with me, please get in touch...!

<comment><USER3> You don't see it on HN much but the Windows world is still massive, and there are still plenty of ASP.NET folk around. I'd suppose you only have to take half a footstep outside the "pure Internet services" sphere to start bumping into lots of Windows, in pretty much any direction you happen to step.

There are also whole industries where Windows has a particularly strong influence, e.g. (from experience) some parts of finance, petroleum, television, and I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work that might have grown out of a once Windows-only desktop software cottage industry.

I guess it's also important to say, much as you might find a zealous love for UNIX inside many (computer) engineering-led organizations, similar loyalty to Windows exists in many more (locally under-represented) industries for reasons that are less likely to be understood around here.

<comment><USER4> I think its a SMB thing. Basically windows owns organizations with less than 10-30 people. And there are a _LOT_ of those, and they do a _LOT_ of custom development for their little specialization. Its the excel sheets that grow into full blown applications, or the vm.net one off utilities someone hacked together that grow into the backbone of a thriving small business. Even the generic catagory SMBs (dentists, car repair, etc) end up mostly being windows shops because the owner gets quickbooks or whatever and runs the whole thing from a windows pc in the office.

<comment><USER5> No way around using windows as a private medical practice. Too much bespoke software.

<comment><USER6> Yep. I don't think I've ever seen a computer at any of the healthcare services I've used that wasn't either ancient and running some really old bespoke software, or wasn't some flavour of Windows running slightly less old bespoke software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is hardly surprising.

Not to crap on MS, but I do think Linux has traditionally just been a better operating system for servers, probably due to the fact that that's where most of the funding for Linux ends up going, with the desktop versions of Linux being sort of secondary.

It doesn't help that a lot of serverey software is kind of designed with POSIX-ey stuff in mind. Node.js took awhile to get Windows support and ZeroMQ's Windows support doesn't support IPC sockets. Hell, in the little bit of testing that I've done with this, .NET Core is _faster_ on Linux than Windows.

This isn't to say Windows is "bad". I'm personally not a fan but plenty of smart people I know like Windows better than Linux. It's just to say that, for the domain that Azure fills, Linux is often a better fit, and if MS wants to compete with AWS, it would be borderline-idiotic not to support Linux.

<comment><USER8> I've always got the feeling that MS specific developers are highly visual studio oriented. They have their connection string built into the IDE. In fact, if you asked them to make something that builds from the command line, and runs, they would probably be scratching their head for a while.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to find some windows based companies that have classic windows VMs in the cloud, running Visual Studio, and production deployments are: RDP in, stopping with the little red button, updating the codebase (with a copy over a network share), and then re-running the code on the production server with the little green play button. Database changes are done by hand in SQL Server Manager.

I know this isn't at all related to the post here - but it's just an interesting phenomenon - the fact that Azure is about 50 percent windows means it's mostly running things like Office backend products, crazy running copies of Visual Studio. It is probably a total mess if half of Azure goes down for 5 minutes. Linux servers would come back up and continue running whatever. All the Windows companies get a call, have to RDP in and do shit.

<comment><USER9> I'm one "visual studio Dev"

I have also build in Go, nodejs, Php, RoR.

But VS is truelly the best IDE experience I have witnessed.

Database changes are automatically migrated and deployed using entity framework fyi.

The big deployment button changes the connection string per deployment, deploys with feature flags directly and automatically migrates the db to the latest version

<comment><USER10> It's kind of funny to see the disdain for VS based deployment here, while all the current rage right now is declarative deployment systems.

Something VS based development, build and deployment based workflows have been doing for over a decade through the largely Web. _.config files and_.csproj files.

<comment><USER9> Indeed, it's really powerfull.

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and- deploy...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/host-and- deploy/iis/transform-webconfig?view=aspnetcore-3.1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I bought books such as Linux Programming Interface to learn linux so that I can apply for jobs. Later I discovered that when the companies say Linux, they don't mean writing native applications on Linux, but that they are actually talking about java applications on app servers such as JBoss. Does anyone write native applications like thick client native applications on Windows which is also rare these days.

<comment><USER12> I am very interested in the book you mention, simply out of passion. How do you find it?

<comment><USER13> Assuming this... [https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System- Ha...](https://www.amazon.com/Linux-Programming-Interface-System- Handbook/dp/1593272200)

<comment><USER12> I see my question was rather daft.

<comment><USER11> no, it wasn't. i have responded to your previous question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I found it funny when in Azure you create a resource and you can pick between Windows and Linux for the host and Windows is the default option... like bro, I'm not gonna run my shit on Windows walled and heavily licensed garden. What if tomorrow I have to migrate my stuff somewhere else. Are you crazy?

P.S: I know there are legitimate reasons for running something on Windows but for any generic project that shouldn't be the default at all. Linux is the de facto cloud OS.

<comment><USER15> I've been working with Linux and BSD for so long, I don't even know of any Microsoft-only cloud applications. I'm completely *nix bubbled. I cannot imagine cloud programming on windows, probably because I only write user-space native apps. Is there a Puppet or Ansible for windows? I'd be completely lost.

<comment><USER16> Yes, there are things like Puppet and Ansible for Windows. Two good examples are Puppet and Ansible.

[https://puppet.com/use-cases/windows-infrastructure- automati...](https://puppet.com/use-cases/windows-infrastructure-automation/)

[https://www.ansible.com/integrations/infrastructure/windows](https://www.ansible.com/integrations/infrastructure/windows)

There's also Desired State Configuration

[https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/powershell/scripting/dsc/ov...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/powershell/scripting/dsc/overview/overview?view=powershell-7)

There's also Group Policy.

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

There's probably a thousand different ways to automatically deploy and manage Windows servers. Its been a thing since at least NT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 50%?! That's surprisingly low.

<comment><USER18> It is more that the percentage of workloads that are running Windows that are hosted on Azure (vs. GCP or Amazon) is very high.

<comment><USER19> I would like to know what percentage of those core hours are servers (Windows Svr, Nano vs Unix) vs desktops (Azure virtual desktop). I know there has been a huge scale up in cloud desktops in the last few months.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is this surprising to anyone? Microsoft has been competing head-to-head with AWS as a VM/ cloud provider for quite a while now and Linux is by far the largest platform people deploy to.

I know there is some demand for Windows VMs in the enterprise, but even that seems to be shrinking.

</comment><comment><USER21> I think Microsoft figured one thing out; you can't fire a man who get things done especially if there is little documentation. And you can't avoid writing things down if you can't remember it. And you can't remember it if it isn't visual.

I am way more productive on Linux, but I can see that this also put you in a position to easily be replaced.

</comment><comment><USER22> This might be short sighted of me, I dont have a ton of cloud experience but I imagine its as obvious as Linux scales orders of magnitude better than Windows, the projects that need massive scale go cloud. Conversely sql server can demand massive scaling, I wonder what percent of Win Server are for sql server workloads.

</comment><comment><USER23> Between this and their Azure Sphere product, Microsoft may very well be the largest Linux vendor today.

As someone who discovered Unix in the early 00s, this makes me chuckle. What a world!

<comment><USER24> Between Azure and WSL Microsoft might be shipping more Linux kernels than any other company out there.

<comment><USER25> There are so many crappy IoT devices running unpatched Linux, that I doubt it. That is why Azure Sphere was invented, actually...but still there are so many gadgets out there running unmaintained Linux that it's insane.

<comment><USER24> Most likely but I was thinking of shipments made by a single company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Worked on XenServer for Citrix (XenSource) for a couple of years (fun ride), I was told / also discovered that most XenServer pools were used to run Windows infra to support XenDesktop / ICA based remote access;-)

Now Linux has won over 50% of server market share in MicroSoft Azure, where I believe Hyper-V running on Windows is the hypervisor (Hyper-V is closely related to Xen).

\- Linux has won (in the cloud).

\- No one has ever thought one can use Linux desktop on windows via WSL one day.

\- The best tool (distro, etc.)is the one that does what you need at the best cost ;-)

As a long term Linux desktop user (since Fedora Core 1 Yarrow), MicroSoft used to be the public enemy of open source, used to disgust me, now (after vs code, WSL, GitHub, showed genuine love to Linux and the community, etc.) I turn neutral (AFAIR - unless that was a daydream, Linus said similar thing).

<comment><USER27> I really wish Citrix would still do a home-oriented XenApp/XenDesktop. I still find ICA weirdly better than RDP, it's so much smoother.

<comment><USER26> I think VDI is still Citrix's core competency. They merged XenApp with XenDesktop and later on turned into something called Citrix Workspace, I haven't been following Citrix products other than XenServer (my only interest joining back then).

It's not cheap to run and maintain XenDesktop based VDI infra for remote access. But I agree, ICA (improved RDP) and its client Receiver (works on Linux at least used to ;-) offers unique and seamless user experience working remotely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I find it really funny that it used to be peole would point to Linux usage in Microsoft as a "Hah! Look how crap Windows is!". In reality, this is just reflective of the fact that Microsoft is succeeding even without Windows, which in my opinion is quite an extraordinarily impressive manouvre. People think seem to cheer on the death of windows as if Microsoft were the same company as it was when people were booing Steve Jobs at the Macworld announcement.

</comment><comment><USER29> I had to move from Digital Ocean to Azure recently because my customers didn't know DO and thought they can't trust them. I was super happy with DO though. Azure is the ridiculously expensive without bringing any benefit. Sure, there are client tools but I don't need them. It seems to me every click I do on the Azure portal makes the costs increase by a few euros. I wish Digital Ocean would be accepted by more corporate clients.

<comment><USER30> Not just expensive but the Azure web interface is a huge maze that I cannot even simply find out last month's cost breakdown in minutes. That was so much like Windows messed up UI, it wasn't funny.

<comment><USER29> Yes, fun is something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm not surprised by this... I'm not sure what the actual raw numbers are, but would be surprised if it weren't. A lot of what I've worked on the past 5+ years targeted Linux and/or Linux Docker containers. Currently restructuring and migrating apps to .Net Core so that they can be containerized.

</comment><comment><USER32> At a startup back in 2017, we received a substantial amount of free Azure credit through the their innovation program. At the time, there was no way to run postgres with guaranteed iops. You had to run SQL server to get guaranteed iops.

We ended up deploying to AWS instead.

</comment><comment><USER33> I feel like it's inevitable that Microsoft will acquire Canonical at some point.

<comment><USER34> Why not RedHat? That's where the enterprise Linux server market seemingly is.

<comment><USER33> IBM already bought it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is great; a significant portion of potential growth to Microsoft's revenue tied to Linux is good for Linux and continued investment in Linux from Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER36> I'm not sure I understand why this is the case, is there some advantage Azure has for hosting Linux that the many other providers don't have?

<comment><USER37> I suspect Linux is the majority across all hosting services. No OS license nonsense to worry about and easy to remotely administer with a simple ssh connection.

<comment><USER36> I can see the benefits of Linux, I'm just wondering why host it on Azure.

<comment><USER38> Depends on your situation. If you're already in bed with Microsoft, the support you get is pretty damn nice, and surprised me a lot.

A client of mine, a large multinational's overall corporate IT is very much Microsoft oriented, but I was working together with an R&D division, setting up a Linux/k8s-based proof of concept project. Somehow, the Azure team got wind of this and asked if we could meet. I expected absolutely nothing, but they ended up sending very competent technical sales guy, together with 2 engineers, that could answer every single question I threw at them, and they offered to help designing and setting up the infrastructure part, without us ever asking, no strings or invoices attached.

I think this sped up the poc by about a month or 2, just because they backed my opinion pretty much all the time, and had very valuable feedback and proposals to tackle certain other things. It also removed a lot of political crap, which is always there in a multinational. Being able to show the department head that Microsoft agreed with my solutions carried quite a bit of weight, and it didn't hurt my position at all.

Now, one of the managers tried to get the same support from both AWS and Google. AWS could send us some engineers (which would just be some freelance AWS certified engineers), but they fully determined the schedule (first slot we could get was 3 months after us asking), and there was a quite hefty invoice attached. Google didn't even respond. Now I know that cloud providers don't work that way, but many businesses don't like that. They want to be able to call someone when shit hits the fan. MS just uses their "boots on the ground" to also push azure within such businesses, and I'm not surprised it's working.

But would I host stuff there myself? Doubt it. I think the top 3 cloud providers are just too expensive.

<comment><USER37> Which provider is best often comes down to your use case. Do you need tons of memory? Lots of disk I/O? Network bandwidth? Huge amounts of CPU? GPU cores? Pricing can vary a fair bit depending on the details of your workload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Makes sense. I can hardly think of anyone who doesn't use a Unix for servers.

<comment><USER40> But approximately 100% the people that use Windows in the cloud are going to be using Azure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> dog bites man</comment>


FBI Defends Disruptive Raids on Texas Data Centers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/data-centers-ra.html

<comment><USER2> That wasn't a defense, it was an acknowledgment of incompetence.

It looks like the FBI is due for a Judge delivered smack down like the SS got for [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._Un...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service)

<comment><USER3> Seems like there's a new branch of law or law enforcement that needs to be developed. People who have some expertise in IT need to advise law enforcement about raids like this.

<comment><USER4> One issue with this is that all of the FBI raids that go well and consist of competent decision making regardless of IT knowledge involvement will never make the news. No one wants to read that a raid went off without a hitch. Or that the field agents sent in to raid a data center were competent enough that no network other than the suspect's was interrupted. Those stories don't make the news.

* Admission of possible bias - I'm a member of the Chicago FBI InfraGard program that exists for information sharing between private industry and the government. I've met, talked to, and shaken hands with, many smart and knowledgeable people in the FBI working on computer crime cases.

<comment><USER5> _"Authorities also raided his home, where they seized eight iPods, some belonging to his three children, five XBoxes, a PlayStation3 system and a Wii gaming console, among other equipment. Agents also seized about $200,000 from the owner's business accounts, $1,000 from his teenage daughter's account and more than $10,000 in a personal bank account belonging to the elderly mother of his former comptroller."_

I'm sure no-one doubts there are numerous smart, knowledgable people working for the FBI. Unfortunately, looking at the above, there are obviously plenty of the opposite as well, and they have just as much power as the first.

The FBI has a duty to ensure that its overwhelming powers are wielded only by those competent to do so, in the same way that it has a duty to ensure that anyone it issues with a firearm is sufficiently trained in its use.

There is no room for such wild discrepancies in competence when the agency in question has such power to ruin lives. They are entirely at fault here, and "but it mostly goes well!" is no excuse at all.

<comment><USER4> "The FBI has a duty to ensure that its overwhelming powers are wielded only by those competent to do so, in the same way that it has a duty to ensure that anyone it issues with a firearm is sufficiently trained in its use. There is no room for such wild discrepancies in competence when the agency in question has such power to ruin lives."

Well said! You are absolutely correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So by this logic, they could raid Amazon's datacenters and seize everything because a few people were using EC2 to send spam?

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill How many companies are reading this and wondering if their next datacenter project should involve servers located outside US jurisdiction?

<comment><USER7> Do you seriously think that other countries have more respect for rule of law or knowledge of data centers than the FBI? It's not that I have any respect for the FBI when it comes to how they have handled this or other investigations but I have a hard time believing that this couldn't easily happen in any other country you might choose to house your servers in.

What this case tells me if I'm running a business or in charge of the operations group is to make the case for investing in a good disaster recovery strategy. Basically, this is the equivalent of your data center catching on fire, blowing up, falling into a sinkhole, etc.

You should always budget for and have plans to be able to be back up and running with 24 hours if your business depends on what's in the co-location facility. If you're big enough then probably already have multiple sites and can sustain the hit from one going down or being removed anyways.

<comment><USER8> A coordinated raid of multiple sites inside of the US wouldn't be that hard. A coordinated raid spanning multiple countries would be hard enough that you'd have to suspected of Really, Really, Bad Things for it to come off.

<comment><USER7> That wasn't my point. If you're suspected of enough that they are specifically targeting everywhere you're at and/or seizing your off-site DR assets you've most likely done something bad enough to warrant that closer look.

<comment> patrickg-zill Wow ... that is an attitude you should re-examine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [attitude=prudent]

I do not want my company's communications disrupted by an FBI raid on a service firm that turned out to be a criminal enterprise. I had best look for a service provider that has been _pre-investigated_ by the government. After all, I have a responsibility to my company's shareholders and customers.

[/attitude]

<comment><USER10> Perhaps you could convince AT&T to host your servers right next to the Echelon equipment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> shouldn't the people enforcing the rules, actually know what the hell they are doing? Is a bare minimum level of competency too much to ask?

</comment><comment><USER12> These events remind me of Operation Sundevil and the raid on Steve Jackson Games, described in Bruce Sterling's book "The Hacker Crackdown".

</comment><comment><USER13> This wasn't imcompetence--it was thuggery. They use the same "shock and awe" tactics as the police and military--crush your opponent with overwhelming force so that everyone else will be terrified of you and cower before you. This is a deliberate tactic on their part. All federal LEOs work this way-- DEA, FBI, etc.

</comment><comment><USER14> If Mike Faulkner truly was not involved with the alleged illegal actions, he and his family ought to do well, living off of a considerable settlement from the FBI. Hopefully enough to start a new business or two...

Unfortunately, that ultimately means I, as a tax payer, will be funding it. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER15> Weird. I fully expected to read the article and be able to figure out what the FBI was trying to do, and see their side of the story. But I'm more baffled (and frustrated) than ever.</comment>


The Visual Components of a Psychedelic Experience - <AUTHOR> http://disregardeverythingisay.com/post/9331287956/the-visual-components-of-a-psychedelic-experience <comment><AUTHOR> As a non-drug user, I've always wondered what people see on a 'trip' \- this site has some good explanations and simulated images.</comment>


A software for productivity analysis and spying on your employees - <AUTHOR> http://desktime.com/

<comment><USER2> Please companies and managers, move to a results-based mindset, don't ask for your employees to look busy and work under pressure all the time.</comment>


Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes 1.0 - <AUTHOR> https://www.elastic.co/blog/elastic-cloud-on-kubernetes-ECK-is-now-generally-available <comment><USER2> Open Source vs. Basic could not be more confusing. This seems to be a Basic licensed product, which I guess means hosting companies can't host ECK on behalf of anybody?

<comment><USER3> Correct, if you want their oss builds, they have docker containers with -oss in their name as wells tar.gz, rpm, deb, and other builds with similar naming conventions. You can also build these from source yourself of course.

If you know what you are doing, the OSS builds are completely fine for production usage and many companies that use their products should have all their needs covered by the OSS builds.

All this is documented and easy to figure out. There's nothing confusing, sneaky, or otherwise misleading about it. There's a tiny file called LICENSE.txt in their repository. I'd suggest reading it. Also their documentation helpfully labels features that are xpack only. Every source file states what license it is under.

Their cloud stuff is nice if you want to replicate their cloud offerings on premise and not pay them or reinvent a lot of wheels. But if you are going to compete with them, you are indeed going to have a conflict with the license terms.

If you are considering Amazon's open distro. It's fine but the added value over the -oss containers is very limited and grossly overstated by Amazon. And their track record supporting this in the field is pretty bad/non existent. You're on your own.

Also secure by default is a myth; I just joined a project that runs an AWS Elasticsearch setup a few weeks ago completely unprotected. When I say unsecured, I mean open port with full read write for both the cluster and kibana. No meaningful security whatsoever. Nothing. On an official AWS product running in their infrastructure.

And yes, we're fixing that (by ditching AWS Elasticsearch for something sane). The one thing they called out Elastic on is exactly what they ended up doing themselves: running completely unprotected Elasticsearch clusters in AWS. I'm shocked this is even allowed on their infrastructure. I'm even more shocked about the complete lack of warnings related to this after all the BS they gave Elastic last year when they launched opendistro.

<comment><USER4> AWS Elasticsearch is closed by default. You have to upload access policy first in order to access it. That port was open during configuration. You can use aws iam, cognito and sg in order to control access to ES instance.

<comment><USER3> If you click things together yes. However, most of the real world uses infrastructure as code type approaches involving things like terraform, cloudformation, etc. They give you plenty of ways to mess that up. Running unsecured should not be an option period. It's for sure not an option on elastic cloud.

<comment><USER5> I don't really like AWS ElasticSearch offering (it's subpar at the very least and I'm being kind) but what you are saying is completely unfair. If I'm using IaC then I'm a power-user and _I want to be able_ to open an ES cluster to the Internet if that makes sense to me. What should be protected by default is the point-and-click wizard configuration (which it is, indeed).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has 'day 2 operations' been a phrase for some time?

<comment><USER7> It got popularized a couple years ago to distinguish the few companies that had Kubernetes products added value beyond installation.</comment></comment>


Do you one of startup lovers and don't know how to become successful? - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140610190011-81337627-six-main-traits-for-startup-team-members?trk=prof-post

<comment><USER2> The embedded image in the article crystallizes everything. I wish I could repost it in the comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for comment.</comment></comment>


Show HN: App Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://www.objc.io/blog/2018/05/15/app-architecture-launch/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN,

After over a year of writing, we released our new book App Architecture. Very happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Should you be able to publish academic research under a pseudonym? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/09/19/scientists-published-climate-research-under-fake-names-then-they-were-caught/ <comment><AUTHOR> I found this to be an interesting article and I'm left with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it may be that the article that they published was lacking in scientific merit--however, if it had passed peer review and was to be published--to yank it because of the names of the people involved seems wrong. If there was a problem with the research, it seems like it should have been caught at the editorial or the review stage. Otherwise, it seems like it should have been published and if people found errors with it, then a comment could be made...

So, ignoring this particular scientific case, I'd be curious about what other people think--should publishing be double blind? In the past, I would have argued that it shouldn't...

<comment><USER2> First thought: yes, absolutely. The research should stand on its own.

Second thought: Hiding authorship potentially hides conflicts of interest.

Third thought: Publishing authorship does not reveal all conflicts of interest anyway.

Fourth thought: A paper that is explicitly pseudonymous will likely draw more attention and scrutiny. It's quite a step to take, for an academic - the whole point of writing papers is the benefit to one's reputation and career. Of course, one always has the option of claiming credit later...

Verdict: first impression was correct. You should be allowed to publish under whatever damn name you please.</comment></comment>


U.S. allows SoftBank-backed Nuro to deploy driverless delivery vehicles - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nuro-autonomous-regulations-idUSKBN20023T <comment><USER2> Here's it driving around [https://youtu.be/VFOisGUSDGk](https://youtu.be/VFOisGUSDGk)

also some earlier HN stuff [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19135917)</comment>


Google Stadia Input Lag Measured =~ 70 ms - <AUTHOR> I analysed the Google Stadia demo video frame by frame to measure the input lag. I checked how many frames are inbetween the moment when mouse starts moving and the camera on the screen begins to move. According to my calculations the demo lag on their cheap PC was about 70 milliseconds. This is a decent result, comparable with some of the HDTVs, but not good enough for pro gamers.<p>In the YouTube video I quickly explain how I measured this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaJnqfCtqZg <comment><AUTHOR> We can also assume that in reality the result will be a bit worse, since this was a demo in a controlled environment.

<comment><USER2> Probably not, as the Environment was using WiFi on the GDC showfloor. Because it's SF the internet is great, but WiFi and floor interference from several other booths should be a factor. So my guess if it should be comparable, but for different reasons.</comment></comment>


Mosh: the mobile shell - <AUTHOR> https://mosh.org/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819382)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11572146)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8928506)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8252093)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745)

</comment><comment><USER3> As a side note, Keith Winstein ([https://cs.stanford.edu/~keithw/](https://cs.stanford.edu/~keithw/)), the creator of mosh, is an interesting guy (e.g. he used to be a WSJ reporter among other things).

I had the pleasure of seeing him speak at a conference last year on the topic of TCP congestion control algorithms. I admit, I expected it to be a boring presentation, but was then thrilled as it was one of the most dynamic, informative, and funny technical talks I've ever seen.

That particular presentation isn't online, but he links to several others on similar topics. I would check them out. They're probably pretty good!

<comment><USER4> His presentation "Transport Architectures for an Evolving Internet" could be the one you're referring to? It's online and very interesting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsCOVF0vDe8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsCOVF0vDe8).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A great bit of kit, but totally unusable for me because of a lack of agent fowarding support[1]. :(

1: [https://github.com/mobile- shell/mosh/issues/120](https://github.com/mobile-shell/mosh/issues/120)

<comment><USER6> Why would you need agent forwarding? It's a really dangerous feature.

<comment><USER7> It's useful in a corporate environment where you have tens to hundreds of machines you need to use, and all of them are trusted.

EDIT: "a really dangerous feature" is accurate though. For example if all of the staff have root access on a staging machine, then anybody can steal the ssh-agent of another user on the staging machine, and use it to login as that user on production machines.

<comment><USER8> In such an environment you should be using Kerberos. Then you won't need agent forwarding, and you can maintain security.

I would argue that in such an environment you really should be using LDAP+Kerberos, but if you think LDAP is too much effort (it really isn't), plain Kerberos is comparatively trivial to administer, and adding Kerberos (unlike LDAP) doesn't really require any significant changes to your environment.

<comment><USER9> Why is Kerberos ticket forwarding better than agent forwarding? Either way, root (or a bad .bashrc) can use your credentials while you're logged in.

<comment><USER8> Sorry. You are absolutely right. Long day...

I disable Kerberos ticket forwarding here, for this exact same reason. But then you don't have ticket forwarding! I don't know what I was thinking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Testing mosh made me aware how much I am relying on the port forwarding feature in ssh in my daily work, and how hard it is to replace it.

Otherwise: Great tool.

</comment><comment><USER11> Mosh is possibly the most useful piece of software that I've seen: it makes remote links over slow, unreliable networks bearable for doing Real Work. Speaking as somebody who usually has two rubbish networks between the computer I'm on, and the conputer I'm connecting to, that's incredibly useful.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely. I'm using it for two or years or something by now and the very first thing I do when having a new host: install the mosh server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As I recall it needs a swath of nearly a thousand ports open. Getting one opened in a corporate environment is difficult enough.

<comment><USER6> That's a weird setup! Why wouldn't they use a single port?

<comment><USER14> Bunch of udp

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh, it's just a repost. I thought they released version 1.3 with scrollback support.

<comment><USER16> The lack of scrollback support has made mosh pretty useless to me. I like many of its other features, but in order for it to replace ssh for me it needs to look like it's just printing text to stdout. (Yes, this is why I also tend to avoid using screen and tmux for anything other than holding open a remote shell session.)

Will have to check out 1.3...

<comment><USER17> mosh $REMOTE -- tmux new -ADs $SESSION

</comment></comment></comment><comment> andrewl-hn I would really love to see an adapter layer on top of Mosh, so that it can be a drop-in replacement for an SSH client. Currently even after you install it on your servers you have to change your scripts and learn new CLI options. I know that there are reasons for these differences, but inability to alias `ssh` to `mosh` or hypothetical `mosh-ssh` hurts adoption.

<comment><USER18> What new CLI options? Mosh pretty much doesn't have any, you use SSH if you want to do what SSH does.

<comment><USER19> Stuff like connecting to different port, you need to do --ssh="ssh -p 1111"

<comment><USER18> Oh, that's because you're running SSH under the hood. I see what you mean, having the port be passed to SSH would be better from a UX standpoint, but the thing is that mosh doesn't do everything SSH does, so it would need to fake every SSH option and then pass them through. As it is, you only need to learn --ssh and you can do "\--ssh=ssh -D 8223 -L 1234:localhost:1234" etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One of the weirdest issues I've had with Mosh is when you resize a window (for example you open a new pane in tmux where you have a mosh session open). Mosh will just cut off parts of the scrollback (if you do something like return from vim). Is this a known issue, or should I file a new bug?

</comment><comment><USER21> mosh is really good when used from a tablet device, ie. with Blink: [https://twitter.com/BlinkShell](https://twitter.com/BlinkShell)

</comment><comment><USER22> Makes managing a cheap European vps from Australia bearable.

<comment><USER23> While on a train going through a tunnel :) At least that is what I use it for in Switzerland :)

<comment><USER24> No internet in swiss tunnels? I'm a bit disappointed now.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, the ISPs don't support tunnelling :(

<comment><USER25> That was a very. Bad. Joke. :)

Bravo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I love it but the clients I use don't support it. Winscp and serverauditor. I didn't like juicessh on Android

<comment><USER26> I personally quite like JuiceSSH. Mosh support being one of the reasons :) It's great for the odd scenario when something is down and I need to a quick fix over 3G.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There was a FreeBSD bug in mosh, which led to high CPU usage which prevented me from trying it twice in the past.

</comment><comment><USER28> mosh is fantastic for me when working remotely over vpn. I don't have to worry about reconnections, disconnections, packet lag (due to local echo feature). mosh in combination with screen (or tmux) gives scrollback support + other features

</comment><comment><USER29> I really don't get HN's new dedup algorithm.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12429203)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016745)

</comment><comment><USER30> With Chrome apps being phased out, is a native Windows app in the pipeline?</comment>


Elon Musk on why hydrogen fuel cell is dumb - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_e7rA4fBAo

<comment><USER2> Hydrogen is not dumb but it is very leaky, explosive and ultimately the water it creates when combing with oxygen is an indirect green house gas.

<comment><AUTHOR> Water is a green house gas? Totally disagree.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Gitr.io – It's how developers meet - <AUTHOR> https://gitr.io/

<comment><USER2> I have spent like 10 minutes approving everyone (as I am really social and have no problem meeting people whatever their interest are). So far, no matches. Got bored, but will come back in few hours to check it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I initially thought you guys were the ones who created gitter.im and you were just expanding its scope ... Might be worthwhile to reconsider the name.

</comment><comment><USER4> BUG: log in with github. see mostly empty profile of some random person. strip everything from the url except the domain in the address bar. hit enter. Page is now completely blank. Can't log out. Can't do anything. Dead.

Remove browsing history. reload. confirm there are no cookies in play. still dead.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For those that are interested, this was done as a 2 day hackathon project here at work :)

You can read more here: [https://medium.com/@Macropod/conceiving-building-and- launchi...](https://medium.com/@Macropod/conceiving-building-and-launching-an- app-in-just-2-days-25679a9c4eb2)

</comment><comment><USER5> What is this, a developer dating site with only men?

</comment><comment><USER6> Cool idea! Would be helpful to see their top languages as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> We desperately wanted to get this in before release, but it didn't make it :(

I think there's algorithm work being done on the matching for this as well. After christmas perhaps :)

<comment><USER6> What's the tech stack look like? I have some node.js code laying around that finds users top languages based on GitHub's own API.

<comment><USER7> The backend is Rails ([https://github.com/macropodhq/gitr- backend](https://github.com/macropodhq/gitr-backend)), and the frontend is React and Fluxxor ([https://github.com/macropodhq/gitr- client](https://github.com/macropodhq/gitr-client)).

I'd love to take a look at that code, if you have it online somewhere - it'd be awesome to show that kind of information and use it to rank suggestions!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Impossible to fix vulnerability (giving root) to all iPhones from 4s to X - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/axi0mX/ipwndfu/blob/master/checkm8.py <comment><USER2> I haven't jail broken a phone since the 3G, I just don't see a compelling reason to anymore. The reason I did it then was to get around the tethering restrictions that att had at the time, but now I can't really think of any features that I would want my phone to have that it doesn't already.

<comment><USER3> The main reason I want to jailbreak my ipad

-sideload apps that cant get to the app store, not just for piracy,example :file manager, adblocker, firewall ...

Sure its doable without a jailbreak, but its restricted and require paying apple a yearly $100 developer fee

And some few extra cydia tweaks can be really usefull

<comment><USER4> I thought you could sideload self-built apps onto an iPhone these days. I mean, it has some restrictions, but at least it doesn't require forking over $99.

<comment><USER5> Max of 3 apps at a time, side loaded apps expire after 7 days, sideloaded apps also have limitations on what they can / can't do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Since it's a bootrom exploit hopefully that means people can install an alternative OS.

<comment><USER7> I don't know how well that will work out for some of Apple's proprietary chips. Lots of off the shelf parts, yes, but not everything; maybe not some of the crucial components needed to boot properly.

<comment><USER6> Like people can reverse engineer things, but till there was a permanent exploit like this, I am sure the effort did not make as much sense. Like you first need an exploit that lets you load a non apple OS. Moreover you hope it effects enough devices that your efforts will be used by a lot people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21091219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21091219)

</comment><comment><USER9> A chance for postmarketOS to come for iPhones?</comment>


An Introduction to Startups in Synthetic Biology - <AUTHOR> https://synbiofieldreports.plos.org/an-introduction-to-start-ups-in-synthetic-biology-7417888e8c1b <comment><USER2> Hey Y'all if you are looking for a job at a SynthBio startup in the bay area let's talk. I work for Synthego, we have been around for about 3 years and are funder by the Founders Fund. Reach me at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER3> How do these synthetic biology startup valuations stack up against valuations in social media or information technology (cf HBO's SILICON VALLEY)? As a biochemist who performs computational protein design in order to achieve novel form or function in proteins, I have always been interested in new developments in the biotech startup land. However, I'm skeptical about the monetary rewards of synbio -- it appears to me that conventional chemical engineering is still much cheaper and more effective then new synbio approaches.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure. With proterro working on making sugar at 1/3 of the cost(5 cents/pound) using synthetic bio, with solazyme selling specialized food components to the food industry, and with genomatica's technologies already running what seems like competitive BDO plants - it seems that SynBio can compete on cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also tools companies: Transcriptic Emerald cloud lab Genome Compiler teselagen Benchling</comment>