We Made One Gram Of Remdesivir - <AUTHOR> https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/03/26/problem-remdesivir-making-it-14665 <comment><USER3> Remdesivir is an analog of adenosine, one of the four building blocks of RNA. Just look at the main structure and you'll agree they look similar. It turns out the mechanism of action of this drug is that it's supposed to be confused with adenosine, so that the viral RNA replication process uses remdesivir instead of adenosine, which later breaks the RNA†.

Our body, or really, all biological processes can synthesize incredibly complicated molecules that can take human chemists a huge amount of effort to synthesize. It really is amazing how awesome our body is.

†: My description here is a dumbed down description. For a more precise description see section 2 of _Arguments in favour of remdesivir for treating SARS-CoV-2 infections_ , Wen-Chien Ko et al, [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092485792...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924857920300832)

<comment><USER4> This is such a great description. Compare how Wikipedia describes the same process [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine#Research](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine#Research)]:

> The adenosine analog NITD008 has been reported to directly inhibit the > recombinant RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of the dengue virus by terminating > its RNA chain synthesis. This interaction suppresses peak viremia and rise > in cytokines and prevents lethality in infected animals, raising the > possibility of a new treatment for this flavivirus.

Absolute gibberish to someone with limited knowledge of biology.

<comment><USER5> Scientific articles on Wikipedia aren't written for laymen, although some could be understood by laymen as a side effect. For example as a physicist/mathematician I expect precise and physically/mathematically accurate statements rather than hand-wavy analogues that the average Joe might be able to make sense of, and that's how I edit. Now, it's okay to also include more approachable explanations, but they're not a must.

<comment><USER6> I know Wikipedia has evolved considerably from its original intent, but isn't one of the quintessential goals of an encyclopedia to have an approachable summary of every topic?

<comment><USER7> Wikipedia isn't quite like a traditional encyclopedia in this regard. it covers many technical topics that would be too niche to include in the latter.

random example: take a look at the Wikipedia article for "currying". [0] while quite accessible to someone with a math/cs background, this would be pretty much unintelligible to someone who wasn't familiar with the notion of a mathematical function. perhaps it could be rewritten to be even more accessible, but what would be the point of explaining currying to someone who doesn't know about functions and arguments in the first place? brittannica doesn't even cover this topic.

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

<comment><USER6> The concept of partial specialization can be useful in many ways. I could see the concept of applying a process to one process and getting a new process for creating processes as somewhat applicable to business analysis, process engineering, analysis and design of government, etc.

I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having a more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could help all uses:

\- Specialists would more easily be able to refresh their memories of topics they use infrequently before diving into the details.

\- People in neighboring specialties can more easily branch out.

\- Informed laypeople (e.g. experts in other industries) could more easily find new ideas for cross-pollination into their own field.

As one random example I have recently found application for an algorithm mainly reserved for use in geophysics and cartography to audio signal processing, but learning and applying it took way more research than it really should have.

<comment><USER8> > I know Wikipedia isn't supposed to be a textbook, but I'd argue that having > a more accessible first paragraph or summary section on every topic could > help all uses

I'm curious how you would rewrite that first paragraph then:

"In mathematics and computer science, currying is the technique of translating the evaluation of a function that takes multiple arguments into evaluating a sequence of functions, each with a single argument. For example, a function that takes two arguments, one from X and one from Y, and produces outputs in Z, by currying is translated into a function that takes a single argument from X and produces as outputs functions from Y to Z. Currying is related to, but not the same as, partial application."

BTW I don't like that paragraph, it looks to me that it completely "misses the point" because as far as I understand currying is not about the sets but about the arguments. If it would be about the sets it would be just "a rewrite to a function that accepts the subset of the previous input set" and it's not about that.

<comment><USER7> from a certain perspective, it's hard to talk about currying without talking about sets. "function" itself is defined as a special type of relation between sets. imo, the first paragraph does a good job introducing both the formal and practical meaning of currying to people who have enough background to find the topic useful.

simple wikipedia does take your approach though:

> Currying is a technique used in mathematics and computer science that > consists of changing a function that takes several arguments into a number > of functions that each take one argument. Mathematicians Moses Schönfinkel > and Gottlob Frege laid the groundwork for this technique, which is named > after Haskell Brooks Curry. Currying is used in Lambda calculus. Some > programming languages, such as ML and Haskell say that functions can only > have one argument. [0]

that's actually the entire article. not sure how useful it is, but at least they tried.

[0] [https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying](https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currying)

<comment><USER8> I still believe that naming the sets in the paragraph I've quoted is completely superfluous in the sentence I've quoted. It just sounds more "mathy" but I'm quote sure that either it doesn't convey more useful information or it is not formal enough to be exact enough, so to me it looks it fails both ways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article really reinforces my choice to drop ochem in college. It's funny how deciphering assembly code seems downright mundane compared to this jargon. Like, I get how given the process you could recreate things, or you could devise possible reactions based on electron shells and bonding tendencies, but how do researchers even figure out how to make these reactions happen? Especially when they require -100C, or +5atm of pressure.

<comment><USER10> Isn't there analytical chemistry software?

<comment><USER11> Yes, but good luck interpreting the output if you aren't an accomplished synthetic organic chemist.

<comment><USER12> Analysts can benefit tremendously from better knowledge of research, synthesis or process work, and vice versa.

But great professionalism can also be developed without as much cross- functionality between subdisciplines.

Like many things, detailed efforts unique to the subprofession can be the most essential.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really interesting getting a window into the world of professional chemistry. So impactful on all of us but so much more opaque. We see CS jokes/memes all over the place, even if only those who program get them, but we never see chem jokes, or only sparingly and rarely beyond a high school level.

<comment><USER14> I wish I knew the havkernews equivalent for chemistry, finance, etc. The closest thing I've found was [https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news](https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news) for nutrition.

<comment><USER15> Nuclear Phynance is your best bet for a HN like community in quant finance.

<comment><USER16> That community has been pretty dead for years. Used to love it.

<comment><USER10> Is there a successor to this forum? I'm a CS undergrad and kind of want to explore this field.

<comment><USER17> No, there isn't really. There is a treasure of info on that site though. I also have a CS background before I moved to the quant area.

Things that might help pique your interest:

\- For both academic and practical problems: [http://quant.stackexchange.com/](http://quant.stackexchange.com/)

\- For keeping tabs on new ideas in the blogosphere (generally average, occasionally something useful): [https://quantocracy.com/](https://quantocracy.com/)

\- Useful information on getting started in the field: [http://quantstart.com/articles](http://quantstart.com/articles)

Outside of the academic literature, it is quite an insular field, so you have to work to find interesting ideas. If you can make money, you probably won't be sharing much with anyone. A notable exception might be Rob Carver's blog ([https://qoppac.blogspot.com/](https://qoppac.blogspot.com/)).

From a CS background, a simple path to see if you might enjoy "quant investing" is to read some old papers from e.g. AQR about factor investing (Momentum, Value) and try to implement it with Interactive Brokers or similar. You should be able to roll something together with very little capital.

On the "quant trading" side of things, try the Avellaneda paper for statistical arbitrage, do some digging about RenTech, read the LTCM book, etc etc. Not something you can do without a lot of infrastructure behind you, but there's enough information around to work out if it's interesting.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for the list of resources. Given the current situation, this will make interesting reading/study material.

If you're comfortable, could you please share how you made the transition to quant from a programming/SWE background?

<comment><USER17> I'll give the paths that I saw available to someone with a usual CS background. Not hard rules, but the distinction between developer (support) & trader (revenue generation) will be harder to overcome the later on in a career that it happens. Trading/research roles are typically compensated as a direct function of the money you generate, which is where the real upside is.

1) Quant Developer: Trading infrastructure, working on research platforms, taking algorithms created by researchers & deploying into production. Wouldn't want to do this at a bank, but at a hedge fund or proprietary trading firm it'd be fun. Compensation is good, lower variability, but somewhat more limited upside. DE Shaw, 2 sigma, Jane Street, etc.

2) Quant Researcher: A high quality quant masters degree at a minimum (think Baruch MFE), but often a PhD. Working on systematic trading research, market making algorithms, optimal hedging for large books of derivatives, etc. Usually a decent salary, but total compensation varies wildly based on performance.

3) Trader: More and more similar to #2 these days, but more focus on execution of strategies and real-time action rather than research, and more directly responsible for PnL. Optiver, IMC, SIG, etc. A quant masters degree probably isn't required to get a foot in the door, but I think it would help in the long term (e.g. helps build more rigorous understandings of why what you're doing might be working).

<comment><USER10> This was very helpful. Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In my former life I was a graduate organic chemist, but I "quit" with a Masters. I loved Synthetic Chemistry as an undergrad and thought I wanted a PhD in. There were three lousy things (for me) about the career that made me bail.

1). So many syntheses have horrible yields just like this one. You'd start with grams of material to end up with micrograms. I loved solving these problems as an undergrad in books, but reality was far different. You don't think much about side products until you start doing novel chemistry.

2). So much trial and error. There were happy go lucky chemists that fell into projects that were smooth as butter, while brilliant chemists would toil 12 hour days to try and something to write up as a thesis. I was neither brilliant nor lucky and took 4 different projects over two years before finally landing on something marginally MS worthy. They need a journal of failed chemistry because only the working stuff gets published. So many failures could be logged so I didn't waste my time doing non-working or poor yielding reactions.

3). Suspicious results in journals. I would read about a reaction and someone would put a 75% yield as their result and I could barely get 20. I always thought I was just bad, but a really smart chemist challenged me one day and tried to do it himself and couldn't do much better. He tried it 30 different ways over the year as he did other stuff. He never could get a good yield. We talked to our advisor and we wanted to challenge the result, but the advisor didn't want to start trouble. It was past the time I decided to leave with a masters, but made me feel a little better about my lousy abilities. No one could ever possibly doublecheck every result from every publication anyways.

All this said, there are some brilliant and patient scientists out there that drive the field forward. Just a few rough around the edge items I'd love to see change.

<comment><USER19> As an IT guy, I am wondering why this is still a mostly manual and rather dangerous process. Surely programmable machines can be built to process reagents in a safe and flexible way?

<comment><USER20> I'm a controls engineer. We're very good at making machines that will do a single process over and over. It's insanely difficult to do arbitrary processes with one machine.

<comment><USER21> Hi,

That is a very good question. In my PhD I built, among other things, a very primitive parallel stirring system in order to speed up the synthesis of test batches. Although a very crude device, there was tons of stuff that I needed to optimize.

There are many steps in the practical work that is chemical synthesis. It might be removing air, adding reagents in different elemental states, cooling/heating/keeping and certain temperature, observing the reaction, taking aliquots, terminating reaction, and the many steps of purification.

I'd argue that while automation is possible to a certain degree (continuous reactor systems are the most the most interesting IMHO), the resulting mashines are always problem (reagent, reaction, etc) specific. And here lies the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Here are the real numbers for the reactions in Scheme 1: 0.25 x 0.58 x 0.74 > x 0.21 x 0.23 = .005 (0.5%)

This reminds me of the problems to scale up EUV lithography which are bottlenecked on producing strong enough EUV light. They put in 20 kW of power to get out 200 W at the target wavelength of 13.5 nm, so light generation itself only has 1% efficiency, and then you need to reflect it at mirrors etc. to focus it (lenses don't work at those wavelength) and that makes only 2% of the light actually reach the waver [2].

[1]: [https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/16569161/the-s...](https://www.laserfocusworld.com/blogs/article/16569161/the- secret-of-euv-generation)

[2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithograph...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ultraviolet_lithography#Light_source_power,_throughput,_and_uptime)

</comment><comment><USER23> The writing is so good, I had to double check that it wasn't written by Derek Lowe.

<comment><USER24> Here's his most famous article on FOOF (Dioxygen Diflouride)

[https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...](https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride)

It seems there are multiple chemist-author hybrids out there!

<comment><USER25> _At seven hundred freaking degrees, fluorine starts to dissociate into monoatomic radicals, thereby losing its gentle and forgiving nature._

Gentle and Forgiving nature...

<comment><USER26> The inimitable Martin Poliakoff demonstrates it here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtWp45Eewtw)

<comment><USER23> "It was much more exciting than I thought" is a great opening line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I want to make remark about organic synthesis from the perspective of person who is engineer of chemistry by training as did his fair share of organic synthesis (and eventually moved to computational atomic and molecular physics).

It is one of the oldest and very established fields. Unfortunately practices aren't great. The preparation formulas are often vogue, imprecise and difficult to reproduce. This comes from the fact that often the sizes and types of glassware are not specified, some informations are omitted (how quickly something is changed not only to what value e.g. heat up to 100 degrees but it does not say over what time) etc. Chemists usually (except some theoretical/computational specialisations) don't have any training in algorithms or programming.

There are novel developments such as [https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2018/november/headl...](https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2018/november/headline_624196_en.html) and references therein. I'm optimistic about them but I expect strong opposition from older faculty. They see synthesis as more than art and think that one has to have "good hand" in order to be a good organic chemist.

I think some generational shift will be necessary in order to change this discipline to more reproducible, strict and reliable. It will come but not that soon :)

</comment><comment><USER28> One too many zeroes here:

        0.25 x 0.58 x 0.74 x 0.21 x 0.23  = .005 (0.05%)

The 0.005 seems to be correct, so that should be 0.5%. The rest of the article also uses "0.5%" correctly.

<comment><USER29> It's a running joke between my readers and me. EVERY SINGLE TIME I have done even the simplest of math (n= more than 20) I've screwed it up and been corrected by a reader. I don't know how I made it out of high school.

<comment><USER28> No problem! Basic math mistakes are dangerous because they might take credibility out of the rest of the article, but this one seemed very well written and it shows that you know what you are writing about so I don't think it's a big deal.

I noticed only because something ticked on me when I read "0.005 (0.05%)", it "felt wrong" so I double checked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This was a lot of fun to read and quite accessible. I remember that I was horrible at chemistry in high school, but the right things were ELI5'ed.

I like HN in general, but this particular article gave me the same feeling that I had when I first discovered HN a couple of years ago.

</comment><comment><USER31> Although very interesting, this article isn't a great introduction because a critical part of the picture is missing - the availability of the inputs.

Sticking to simple stuff; mines produce iron at a rate measured in thousand- tonnes per hour with yields of potentially sub-30% compared to volume of earth moved. Ammonia and many acids are presumably measured in tonnes or kilograms produced per day. Low yields make the process-oriented sad, but what matters is absolute ability to produce; not yield.

All that doesn't take anything away from this article; it just makes it hard to interpret what 'royal pain to synthesize' means in practice. The process isn't basic chemistry; but that isn't really saying much.

<comment><USER32> Exaxtly this. Are the inputs available and we can spend just a few tens of billions on building gigafactories to make this process parallel and controlled? Then it's like making microchips from silicon or gold from ore. Terrible yield but cheap inputs and a scalable process.

If the inputs are expensive or the process can't scale (to a billion doses in 12 months, say) then that's worrying and perhaps indicates this isn't a good candidate vaccine.

<comment><USER32> Edit: remdesivir is a therapeutic, not a vaccine, so it is useful in much smaller quantities than a vaccine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Chemistry is absolutely fascinating. One of my long-time goals has been to make a learning chemistry game of some sort. Players building bonds and molecules, solving problems by creating reactions, etc. Orbits and ions and quantum states.

Something truly educational, and of course one of the people I wanted to educate was myself by forcing myself to learn much more than my high-school level of chemistry.

I've gone down this road a few times, each time giving up on the absolutely scale of even the most rudimentary understanding.

</comment><comment><USER34> This brings me back to orgo lab. A six step synthesis was torture when you were graded by your final yield exactly bc of the compounding nature of small mistakes in each step. Even if you get fairly good yields of 80 to 90% per step, you'd end up with a 53% at best and hope to god that everyone else did equally badly so the curve would save you.

</comment><comment><USER35> Quote: "Fortunately, there are creatures called "process chemists" – guys who laugh at the discovery synthesis, insult as many of us as possible, and then make it better so that the yields are higher and some of the most dangerous chemical reagents and solvents – ones you really don't want to use on a large scale – are replaced by others. They are generally a bunch of mutants, but they do a great job in "fixing" the synthesis used by the discovery chemists."

This really cracked me up. In my IT world the equivalent for "mutant" would be refactoring, right? I did "mutated" this way a few times in the past to much of the horrors of my boss(es)/manager(s) when they learned the next day.

</comment><comment><USER36> ML is useful to design the reaction pathways to make these chemicals. If we find safer/better/cheaper ways to make medicines like Remdesivir with deep learning, and publish them, then chemists may have an easier time of it.

If Remdesivir data looks good this month, there will be a rush to produce it, and if there's only one published way to do that, then the ingredients for that one approach will potentially be hard to find. Thus we can benefit from different approaches which start from different raw materials.

Lots of cool Arxiv papers on this and Graph Neural Nets, Soft actor-critic, or Transformers can be interesting approaches. The transport theory seems like a good way to make a value function. How much time and money does it take to produce a given chemical by a given set of reactions? That's a gajillion dollar question.

I spent way too much time last year looking at permutation-invariant distance metrics similar to Fused Gromov Wasserstein to invent an Atom Mover Distance, please let me know if you figure that out! DeepChem library is a solid framework, as are Tensorflow and Pytorch...

If anyone's looking for a way to contribute to the COVID-19 response, open source data/algorithms to design synthesis pathways can be a strong approach. Everyone loves to use Deep Learning to design drugs, but it is valuable to design ways to make drugs, too!

</comment><comment><USER37> Very funny writing style while being incredibly informative. Read from top to bottom with glee. I had a feeling organic synthesis was difficult but not _this difficult_.

Missed a trick not titling it:

"(1OO)OMG we made one gram..." :)

</comment><comment><USER38> This makes the biological chemistry so awe-inspiring. Everything is done at about the same body temperature and at the same pressure, just with right catalysts.

</comment><comment><USER39> It's been almost two decades since I took a chemistry class, looks more foreign to me than code to a non-programmer.

<comment><USER40> To be fair organic chemistry is its own beast and far messier than normal chemistry classes.

<comment><USER26> Yes, there's a difference between pushing electrons on paper and making compounds behave in the lab as they do on paper.

Scaleup from lab to pilot plant to production is another different beast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I was able to create several small molecule candidates which achieved docking scores of almost -18 but they still need to be assessed for their synthetic feasibility. (Docking scores of leading existing drugs (HIV inhibitors) are around -10 to -11 (the more negative the score the better), Remdesivir drug is around -13 which already entered clinical testing.

I know that binding affinity has been shown not to be the best indicator of efficacy always, but I want to know if it's feasible, if someone can help

<comment><USER42> Are you a chemist?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Press release from Gilead published yesterday says they aim to have 500,000 treatment courses by October (they reduced a 12 month production process to 6 months): [https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles/an-update-on- covid-1...](https://www.gilead.com/stories/articles/an-update-on- covid-19-from-our-chairman-and-ceo)

</comment><comment><USER44> Oh the pain of biochemistry! Thanks to the author for making this available to everyone, and reminding these of us who ran screaming from the labs why our decision is not among the ones we might regret. Joking aside, I hope this molecule can be synthesized efficiently, and that it can be preempted from Gilead somehow, as this company has a history of price gouging of the worst kind. They are down there with the oxy makers, the worst of the worst, causing deaths through their pricing policies, and resulting lack of affordable treatment. The ideals of medicine mean nothing to these, and public health should take precedence over the interests of such despicable companies.

</comment><comment><USER45> I've never learned a bit of Chemistry. I assume there are formulas to determine how substrates and reagents will react with each other? And the process chemists understand these formulas better than most?

Apologies for the assumptions in these question, but are there many reactions in organic chemistry that are completely unknown?

This actually seems pretty fun. I'd love to have a reason to study it and a means to do something with my studies.

<comment><USER46> Which country's education system doesn't have any chemistry at all?

Chemical formulae are required study for 11-14 year olds in England, for what it's worth. (Probably starting with words: methane + oxygen → carbon dioxide, and later writing a balanced equation: CH₄ + 2O₂ → CO₂ + 2H₂O.) The reaction presented is obviously much, much more complicated, but the same concept.

Edit: catalysts are covered too, although I don't know if the notation of putting them above the → is introduced at this age. [https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqd2mp3/revision/6](https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zqd2mp3/revision/6)

<comment><USER45> This was in California. I had to take a science class but there were many options and I just took other things besides chemistry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > remdesivir, possibly the most promising candidate

Is there any evidence of this? It was a highly anticipated drug, but the first studies it was in showed only slight improvement over expected outcomes, far less than was seen with the chloroquine/zinc/antibiotic combo treatment.

I mean I think it's still interesting as a possible drug to add to the cocktail for maximum effectiveness. But let's not oversell it.

</comment><comment><USER48> "liquid chromatography, is frequently used. On a small scale this is fine, but when kilograms of material are required the process becomes unwieldy."

I did not understand this. liquid chromatography scales up quite well. There are other methods like Electorphoresis, salt precipitations etc., that don't.

<comment><USER49> >liquid chromatography scales up quite well

Not compared to recrystallization or distillation. Try running a column on 10kg scale and get back to me.

(I worked in an o-chem lab for 2 years in undergrad, and the biggest we could do was ~20 grams at once)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > n-BuLi is short for n-butyllithium, which bursts into flame if exposed to > oxygen or water.

It looks like the author is overselling some of the dangers here.

While you really don't want to dump n-BuLi into water, you have no reason to either.

The problem child of the class to which n-BuLi belongs is t-BuLi. That will spontaneously ignite in air, whereas n-BuLi will not. There was a very high- profile case I believe at UCLA a few years back in which a student using t-BuLi in the lab caused a fire with it and ended up dying.

[https://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i31/Learning- UCLA.html](https://cen.acs.org/articles/87/i31/Learning-UCLA.html)

Also, I find this article confusing in the way it's written. Take the title, for example. It gives the impression that the author is describing his own efforts to make remdesivir ("we").

What he's really describing is some preps he found in the literature. And with a little too much hyperbole for my taste.

<comment><USER49> nBuLi is tame compared to tBuLi, I agree. But on large scale the reaction with air can generate enough heat to ignite. (And with humid air it's worse.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> "(2) The one-gram dose is a guess based on the doses of other antiviral medicines."

You're in luck, the first dose is 200mg, and then 100 mg daily after that.

Unfortunately, it's also IV, so you have a number of extra steps after synthesis to ensure sterility.

</comment><comment><USER52> LOL at the way process chemists were introduced

</comment><comment><USER53> favipiravir is alot cheaper to synthesize and is used as a drop in replacement for remdesivir all over asia...

Good things to have on hand during this covid-19 pandemic (because you can't rely on hospitals to give it to you) are:

1) hydroxychloroquine sulfate taken orally 400 mg per day for a week ($180/kg on alibaba)

2) azithromycin taken orally 500 mg per day for a week ($150/kg on alibaba)

3) Camostat mesilate taking orally 200 mg three times a day for a week [1] ($50/g on alibaba)

4) favipiravir one dose of 1600mg two times on the first day, and then 600mg twice per day after that for a week [2]. ($40/g on alibaba)

5) covid-19 rapid test kits that use blood antibody tests and produce results between 3 to 10 minutes and cost about $1.50 per kit [3] .... although it looks like in the last week or so Alibaba has been blocking searches for these kits for some reason... although the search below does work but you have to look at the suppliers to find the ones that are actually selling it.

all this stuff can be bought on Alibaba and delivered in a week

[1] [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04321096](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04321096)

[2] [https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/anti-flu-drug- effe...](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/anti-flu-drug-effective-in- treating-covid-19#Favipiravir-maycombat-SARS-CoV-2)

[3] [https://m.alibaba.com/products/covid-19_rapid_test_kit.html](https://m.alibaba.com/products/covid-19_rapid_test_kit.html)

<comment><USER54> A drop-in replacement for something that barely just finished clinical trials. Ok.

Stop suggesting people buy dangerous drugs from Alibaba. This should be bannable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> That's some really complex mess. How much do these chemists get paid?

<comment><USER56> If they don't have grants, $0. If they work in a lab for someone who has a grant, $0, but with credit on the papers (that's why there's 35 authors on the paper, 1 person got paid, the rest got name credit in the hopes that they get noticed by a commercial company wanting to monetize this process, so in the future they get their own gig). If they work in a commercial lab, maybe they make a little.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h So... Why does anyone do it? We're talking about throwing years of your life at this work; how on earth is it pulling people in if it can't pay bills?

<comment><USER57> That's why I'm clueless at all the politicians and journalists claiming we have a STEM shortage, we need to boost STEM education, need more kids interested in STEM careers...

STEM = science technology engineering math

CS/software has huge demand and salaries to go with it (yay, ads)

Traditional (civil/mech/ee/chem/etc) engineering is OK. You'll never be rich but you'll always be comfortable. (I've had plumbers claim theye make more than me).

Science and math have really bleak career outlooks. Tenure track faculty jobs are a crapshoot. Industry jobs are scarce. Most people I know from college that went into the sciences are either still stuck in PhD or postdocs, or quit after BS/MS and now working as lab technicians or equivalent. Not even glorified, just plain old overqualified lab techs in QC departments and such.

Edit: As a final note, here's a 2015 report from OSPE, an organization representing engineering professionals in Ontario, Canada: [https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2015-crisis...](https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2015-crisis- in-engineering-labour-market.pdf) An except:

"Information referred to in this report is derived from the Canadian National Census 2011 National Household Survey (NHS). According to the 2011 NHS1, only about 30 per cent of employed individuals in Ontario who held a bachelor's degree or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers. Fully two-thirds of engineering-degree holders were not working in engineering at all. Many had jobs that didn't necessarily require a university degree."

<comment><USER56> To be fair, plumbers do make more than the average code jockey doing maintenance type programming at regular computer jobs (outside of the faang universe, there are a lot of average paying computing/coding jobs - <USER2> programming forms for web stores, coming up with fillable pdf forms for ordering, etc)

Plumbing is an essential service, and in emergencies, hourly rates can go into $300+/hour. So why don't everyone go into plumbing? Cause it's a shit job (/s)

Jokes aside, my take on the science job contradiction is that current American society does not respect nor want the products of science.

Think vaccines - when we have an emergency, everyone wants one, but in "normal times", think about where the pockets of the anti-vaccination movement have taken hold: rich communities in California where science should have had the best chance of surviving, but is struggling.

Communities in the American Southern states who are having trouble keeping evolution and science curriculums in tact are another example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> @ebg13 Thank you! That may be the biggest compliment I've ever gotten. Derek is the god of carbon as far as I'm concerned. Josh

<comment><USER58> You missed the reply, but I hope ebg13 finds this! Great writing.

<comment><USER59> I briefly moved the comment, then saw that Josh_Bloom had posted another copy of this reply to the right place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Does anyone know what's the probability that Remdesivir is indeed a solution against Coronavirus?

</comment><comment><USER61> Strange that there's not one mention of Avigan / Favipiravir.

</comment><comment><USER62> Funny just saw this comment on reddit. Related [https://www.reddit.com/r/Political_Revolution/comments/fuuuy...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Political_Revolution/comments/fuuuyw/im_meredith_mattlin_a_24yearold_cancer/fmeu2pp)</comment>


Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed - <AUTHOR> https://mashable.com/article/amazon-eero-wifi-router-sale/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand what people expect in this kind of situation. The company was bought for around the amount of money that they took in investment, or less. Why would the employees get anything? If preference didn't exist, and I could take $10M in investment at $100M in valuation, and then the next day liquidate the company, return $1M, and keep $9M, obviously that would just mean that nobody would invest in startups any more.

Does it piss people off that the execs got retention bonuses? You've got to give the execs some incentive to stay around if you want to keep operating the company. Do people expect execs to work out of the goodness of their hearts?

The company failed. That means the stock isn't valuable. What is hard about this?

<comment><USER3> Honestly confused: why do you want to pay bonuses to retain execs of a failed company? Weren't they responsible for that failure?

<comment><USER4> Not necessarily. Companies fail for any number of reasons, not just executive incompetence. Eero is a hardware company, and hardware companies are require significant capital to operate. Its a very difficult space to operate in, especially pre-launch.

> Hardware startups require a lot of cash, and technological progress can > render a product obsolete before it has a chance to take off. Nearly all (97 > percent) of the 400 hardware startups tracked in a 2017 report from CB > Insights either died or became "zombies," companies that survive for awhile > with VC money, but eventually fizzle out.

Amazon purchased this company for its technology and people. Having the entire executive team leave immediately would make the transition exceedingly difficult. They want to incentivize these people to stay to assist in the transition, hence the payout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For what it's worth, this is what a fire sale / acqui-hire looks like for a large-ish hardware company.

Were investors and early employees screwed? Sure. But these execs could likely have gotten similar payouts over similar timeframes by simply jumping ship. As for Eero the company? Sounds like it was dead.

I don't want to sound like I'm justifying this kind of behavior. But the main deceptive thing is calling this acquisition a "successful exit" — it was far from that!

<comment><USER6> The issue is founders won regardless of which side the coin landed on and the employees got screwed.

I hope stories like this continue to break, and potential startup employees internalize the economic reality of working at a startup.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's the right way to think about it. Everyone got "screwed" on equity, including the founders. Separately Amazon decided to set up packages for employees they thought were to valuable to lose. If an early employee was valuable enough they were probably included in the 10 who received it.

<comment><USER6> I have been involved in M&A activity, and when we (owners) bought a failed competitor for clients and assets, we wiped out the owners (who had misstated some financial factors of importance) and made the employees whole (who had all been stiffed on pay). We didn't have to, _but it was the right thing to do_.

Everyone has different morals and ethics I suppose.

<comment><USER8> But if you're the guy doing M&A at Amazon how do you sell that to your boss, who has to sell it to Bezos, who at the end of the day has to sell it to stakeholders.

<comment><USER6> Good PR is cheap and people talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Again, if your offer includes a stock grant/option/whatever stake that doesn't have the same priority as those owned by the executive team then you need to treat it as having zero value.

If a company believe its stock is sufficiently valuable to be worth being used as compensation then it shouldn't feel the need to give pre-IPO employees low- priority "equity".

I recognize people argue that you're taking a lower salary because the _potential_ return, but it fails to acknowledge that there is additional risk and cost to the employee:

* the potential to suddenly have no employment or insurance

* vastly inferior insurance and benefits

* significantly reduced job mobility - often this "equity" is surrendered when you leave a company, but that equity is ostensibly to make up for a reduced _salary_. It's earned income that can be stolen from people who earned it.

The first also has a future cost as well, because subsequent salary negotiations will happen with your prospective employer knowing that you _need_ your job.

So rather than trying to pretend that "equity" justifies a lower salary, employers need to recognize that equity is being granted to compensate for the risk their employees are taking on. The more risky the stock, the more stock needs to be granted - so if the equity is structured to put employees at the end of the spectrum of exercisable equity needs to represent vastly more of the post-investor-payouts equity.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand why you think such black-and-white thinking is needed. The correct thing should be to appropriately discount the options to account for these things instead of saying it's zero.

Sure, walking in with the naive approach will lead most people to vastly overvalue options, but I feel like the counter movement you're championing here acts as if no early employee has ever earned money on options no matter the outcome.

<comment><USER9> As the amount of risk in the equity increases, the expected value of the equity reduces to zero.

So anything that reduces the priority of employee equity vs that of the original employees and investors implicitly increases the risk in addition to the explicit reduction in face value.

The real problem to me has been the absurd notion that someone explicitly investing cash is somehow investing more on a dollar for dollar basis than regular employees.

* VC or whatever invests a dollar amount: they write a cheque.

* Employee invests a dollar amount: Employees at startups are expected to work 80 hours a week, so if we're assuming a regular job is 40 hours a week, then their salary should be twice their regular market rate salary. So in that case, an employee is making an annually recurring investment of (2 * market rate salary - actual salary).

In spite of this a VC or whatever gets priority on getting that money back, gets a say in the running of the company, ownership/dollar lower than "equity" grants to employees. The employee gets no voting rights, has a reduced payout priority, and on top of all of that even if the equity grants were equal, the employee is _still_ taking more risk than the cash investors because the company is also their source of employment: if the company fails every one loses their investment, but employees have also lost their jobs.

So if anyone should get higher priority for divestment opportunities it should be employees - think of it this way: if you have 10 developers working for 100k, vs. a market rate of 150k, and they're working 80 hours a week, you are looking at a per-employee annual investment of 200k. If you have 10 employees, they are collectively investing $2million a year. That's getting super close to the "big" funding rounds (and for many cases more than) from various startups.

In response to the claim that they're not providing cash flow: if you were paying market rates, you would need to find a separate investor to raise cash for twice as many employees, all being paid more. That sounds like they're providing cashflow.

<comment><USER7> That all startup employees work 80 hour weeks for 50% below market salary is not something I think is true at all. I would like to see a source on that start-up employees (not founders) work significantly longer hours than other tech workers in the area. While I understand your mental math I also think it's a weird way to think about things, because it is very clear going in that working extra hours is not going to give you any extra stake in the company, so any employee who chooses to do so are obviously doing it for other reasons.

Finally, $2M (which is for 10 employees in your example, not 1) would be considered a small round today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sounds like the company failed and Amazon paid the people they wanted to keep. The headline is pretty misleading, as the story details that Eero received > $100M in investment before the sale, so investors lost money too.

</comment><comment><USER11> In these type of situations, all employees receive cash bonuses and "parachute payment" (total comp). I'm willing to bet the executives' compensation packages from Amazon are roughly 1 order of magnitude more than the _average_ employee received. Foundational employees are likely sitting near 11-20 on the list getting remarkably fair packages that don't look too different form 1-10. If you stacked up all the employees total comp, it would most likely follow a normal distribution and probably aligns pretty closely to employee tenure and level.

I believe the article presents a false dichotomy: execs did well while early employees got shit. In reality, employees who were with the company at the time of the sale all fared similarly and comp looks essentially like it would if you dropped them all into similar roles at <big tech shop> independently.

The people that lost out were _investors_.

The dichotomy is actually: people who invested money vs people who didn't. If you bought into eero, in this case, you lost money across the board. The only factor affecting investors was the liquidation preference between preferred and common stock, and the first-in-last-out payout priority for preferred stock (both of which are absolutely standard). Buying stock options has always been a lottery ticket. I don't _think_ anything insidious happened here... not all companies are unicorns.

</comment><comment><USER12> Regardless of acquisition price point, this is almost always what happens when employees take these third-rate shares.

The solution is employees need to insist on the exact same class of shares as founders. Furthermore, more startup workplaces need to closer to co-ops than these pseudo-meritocratic corporations out to exploit labor with impunity. Maybe it wouldn't have helped in this instance, but that's not the point... the point is being treated fairly regardless of exit outcome.

</comment><comment><USER13> Even the "Head of People Operations" gets $827,000. Rank and file? $0.03 cents per share.

<comment><USER14> I wonder if that's the person who "disabled group emailing and prohibited employees from sending out goodbye emails to say they were leaving."

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Eero may have been first to mesh WiFi, but competition came fast. Multiple > companies including Luma and NetGear launched similar products in the next > year.

Huh? Meraki had a mesh WiFi product out at least five years before this. How am I supposed to trust the rest of the article if the author can't do basic fact checking?

<comment><USER16> meraki is subscription service, not a product that people own. Once your subscription is over, its a paperweight.

<comment><USER15> No, I owned four Meraki mesh APs. This was before they got bought by Cisco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It just shows that the real risk takers in a startup are not the founders but the early employees.

</comment><comment><USER18> I mean I joined a unicorn as a very employee and barely netted $1.3m. I'm not complaining, but there are far more certain ways to make that amount of money.

<comment><USER19> How early?

<comment><USER18> First 20

<comment><USER20> How long were you there before the exit/payday?

<comment><USER18> Few years. Left now. I sold a portion through a tender offer but the company has not IPO'd.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> How did the employees get screwed? Hardware is expensive and the company was sold for basically pennies. If anything is screwed here is people's expectations of how employment works.

<comment><USER22> If you create a company that fails, and then take 100% of an 8 figure bonus while your employees get nothing, then yes your employees got screwed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Calling it "still got screwed" is a bit dishonest. The story goes "a company got sold at a huge loss" and sure execs and founders still made some money even though it was at a loss, but apparently Amazon feels that these people are a large part of the remaining value in the company, so without those bonuses to retain key employees, the company wouldn't even have gotten the 97Mil.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious what deals were given to Eero engineers who survived the transition to Amazon, if any did. Did they get a better Amazon package than a random new-hire with their experience? I know of cases elsewhere where aqui- hires have gotten more options/units, shorter vesting, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> I still don't understand why the last investor is the first one to be able to cash out. Is this common in startup?

I was thinking the first investor is the one that took the big risk investing in the company, shouldn't they have the rights to cash out first when there is a liquidation event?

<comment><USER14> LIFO is designed to prevent Ponzification (for lack of a better term). Imagine if earlier investors could just vote to issue dividends after a later round, effectively taking money from later investors that was supposed to fund company operations and putting in their own pockets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This really makes me feel for the employees and extremely distrustful of stock-option focused payouts.

<comment><USER27> I think Delaware can further help here. They've been very willing to expand their securities laws in favor of disclosures for employees compensated in securities of private companies. And VC backed companies still incorporate there (even though none of these companies ever really need the court of chancery), but it is nice that the legislature is expanding their own regulations.

Right now employees are offered stock options at arbitrary fractions of a percent, and forced to put a smile on their face because of the "generous offer" "bigger than others" that you got. And not everyone gets options, and not every industry gives routinely gives you ANY exposure to the success of the company. SO SMILE AND DON'T COMPLAIN. But the employee has no transparency into:

The liquidation preferences of existing shareholders

The valuation of the company per round, if the company decided not to brag about it

How that relates to the strike price of the option

What the option pool even looks like, dilution necessary to support it if at all

and of course, has to consider coming up with the actual money to purchase their exposure to the company, even without any of this transparency

If you issue the right or interest in a security to employees, they should have transparency. Delaware can do that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This begs the question: did the employees negotiate a market-rate salary upon employment? If so, then they did not get screwed... they just didn't get a large bonus, which is the gamble of joining a startup - most of the time you don't get the big bonus.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting case.

Exec team got a bit of $$$.

I think however, knowing that story how many people would like have any of that 10 people as their bosses?

Say they decide to build another start-up, who of sound sense will join them?</comment>


Microsoft Said to Be in Talks to Acquire Yammer Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-14/microsoft-said-to-be-in-talks-to-acquire-yammer-social-network.html

<comment><USER2> Are many out there using this product effectively. We have one for our coworking space and I mostly only check the weekly update emails.

On one end of usage spectrum it is probably easier just to have a Facebook page, on the other end of usage you are probably better of with something designed more around project management.

The product is fine but for me has become yet another social tool to try and find time for.

<comment><USER3> We use it on a daily basis. It's... well, let's say its better than any of its competitors. We tried using Salesforce Chatter, as well as Jabber-based solutions, none worked as well as Yammer does.

Still, Yammer has plenty of problems. Their iPhone/iPad apps suck badly (as an example, getting rid of a notification requires 3-4 actions within the app), but at least they exist. Their desktop app is Adobe AIR based, which means all kinds of bloat, slowness, annoyances and bugs.

Let's put it this way: if I could get Yammer with a mobile interface like Tweetbot or at least Twitter, I'd be happy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what Yammer's revenues are.

<comment><USER5> They've raised $142M, and selling for $1B, so... probably not much in revenues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jive is doing $50M in annual revenues and their public value is $1B. How come these guys are valued at a billion dollars with only $10M rumored annual revenue. bs.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if the recent integration into Microsoft Dynamics (CRM) had anything to do with this deal? Great result for Yammer.

There was a great 'On this week in Startups' podcast interview earlier this year with David Sacks (Yammer CEO). Interesting business.

[http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Yammer-Integrates- Wi...](http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Yammer-Integrates-With- Microsoft-Dynamics-1647925.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> Give me $100K and I'll rewrite it to you in node.js - this is bs.

<comment><USER8> The value is not the code. It's the customers.

<comment><USER9> Supporting your point is the fact that Yammer runs on the JVM.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Launch Heroku web dynos on faster infrastructure - <AUTHOR> https://fly.io/heroku <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN! This is the most fun thing I've worked on in a long time. We basically figured out how to pull down Heroku slugs, turn them into Docker Images, and then deploy them as Firecracker MicroVMs on our servers. All to make a "turboku" button.

What's crazy is how much faster is makes things. This is more a testament to Heroku being slow and 10 years stagnant than us being all that special, but it's still pretty neat to see stuff you think might work well actually pay off.

Incidentally, you can deploy containers directly to this same platform pretty quickly: [https://fly.io/docs/speedrun/](https://fly.io/docs/speedrun/)

<comment><USER2> Just want to say I've been following you guys since you launched and I think you've got a great product! It's a bummer that the big CDN players have caught up to your original features, but you're still alive with what looks to be an awesome iteration. IIRC you're co-locating your servers and have a fast network too. (Do you peer at exchanges?)

I haven't seen fly.io in a while but it looks like you've reframed it to app hosting (in addition to delivery)? I like that move, and this is a really cool hack you've got here. It's a nice onboard ramp for Heroku expats who otherwise have no reason to leave. The "one click" is crucial and reminds me of Cloudflare's initial foothold ("just change your DNS").

Do you have any plans to replicate this for other PaaS providers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thanks! It's pretty cool you noticed some of this stuff. :D

It's partially that the big CDNs caught up, and partially that we have the luxury of not having to worry about a big legacy CDN. This iteration in particular has felt really right, but would have been infinitely hard to pull off if we were Fastly/Cloudflare.

We are focusing a ton on how to make app servers fast, basically bringing some infrastructure tooling to "boring" server apps (which are my favorite).

We definitely have plans for other PaaS providers. If you have requests I'd love to talk to you about it: email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One click and now I have global dynos deployed all over the world!

</comment><comment><USER4> What will it do with my environment variables? I've just tried with an Heroku app and I get nothing, Firefox cannot find the myherokuappname.fly.dev address.

<comment><AUTHOR> It syncs heroku config variables into our secrets mechanism: [https://fly.io/docs/secrets/](https://fly.io/docs/secrets/)

We're troubleshooting your app right now! I'll send you an email shortly.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Sway, a tiling window manager and compositor for Wayland - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway <comment><USER2> I'm a big fan of i3, and I'm really glad someone has built a similar WM for Wayland. And it's compatible?? Amazing. /g/ would be proud.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using Sway for a few months now, and I think it's great. I'd recommend it to anyone who uses i3 and wants to try Wayland.

<comment><USER4> Using Wayland and i3 equals _huge_ Geek Cred on the street. How bad is life in Wayland currently for desktop Linux?

<comment><USER5> Better than you think. Every other time or so I log in in Gnome Shell in Wayland mode.

Thanks to xwayland you can run the majority of X.org applications without much problems in Wayland. The major problem with Wayland nowadays is bugs (I remember crashing my desktop trying to run mpv with Wayland native output, however OpenGL+GLX backend seems to work) and missing features (mainly touchpad support that is still treated as a mouse, or no touch support at all).

However running a Wayland setup has its advantages too, mainly improved composite performance in Gnome. No more screen tearing or skip frames of animation.

<comment><USER6> Doesn't wayland require KMS drivers? I've never had any luck with nouveau doing anything but forcing me to reboot every few days.

<comment><USER3> I'm using nouveau without having to reboot that often, although I do sometimes have to ssh into the machine to convince it to unstick itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> from HACKING.md:

      IPC

      i3 has an IPC interface (it creates a socket that applications can connect to and issue commands or queries via its protocol), and sway replicates that protocol (so e.g. i3-msg can be used with sway by simply changing the socket, e.g. i3-msg -s $(sway --get-socketpath)). The code for that lies in sway/ipc.

No D-Bus in this day and age?

(not to undermine the otherwise impressive achievement, I was just a little surprised about this little backward bit. But then, I guess it's required for compatibility?)

<comment><USER8> Not using dbus for its ipc is a feature of i3 for me. What it has works perfectly compared to every interaction I've ever had with dbus, which is always pain.

<comment><USER9> Yeah i can't help wonder if dbus is one contribution element to making bluetooth painful on Linux.

This because the tray side client talks to the daemons over dbus to get anything done. And i have seen file transfer after file transfer get lost in dbus limbo.

By this i mean that i initiate a transfer from pc to phone via the gui. Everything checks out on both ends, but no data gets transferred.

So i hit abort, and try over, but now nothing happens at all.

And no restarting of the relevant daemons or clients change a thing.

Only by restarting dbus, and thus restarting my desktop along with it, will i be able to initiate a new file transfer (that may again get stuck in limbo).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remembered this name from some place, then I looked at his github account and remembered he was the guy doing a cleanroom rewrite of minecraft. Amazing to go from that to working on this.

Good luck.

<comment> Syrup-tan Seems to have a pretty interesting attitude.

[https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft/issues/230](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/TrueCraft/issues/230)

<comment><USER11> Considering the goal, which is stated very clearly in the README that's shown on the project page, that's not an out of line reply. Here's the first two paragraphs.

 _A completely clean-room implementation of Minecraft beta 1.7.3 (circa September 2011). No decompiled code has been used in the development of this software. This is an implementation - not a clone. TrueCraft is compatible with Minecraft beta 1.7.3 clients and servers.

I miss the old days of Minecraft, when it was a simple game. It was nearly perfect. Most of what Mojang has added since beta 1.7.3 is fluff, life support for a game that was "done" years ago. This is my attempt to get back to the original spirit of Minecraft, before there were things like the End, or all- in-one redstone devices, or village gift shops. A simple sandbox where you can build and explore and fight with your friends. I miss that._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Be careful googling for "Sway" and "Wayland" while at work... You might not get the screenshots you're expecting, although they will probably be shiny.

<comment><USER13> I don't know what Google thinks you are interested in but for me, I didn't see anything other than mentions of Linux system software.

I'm feeling left out and perhaps a bit boring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How usable is wayland at the moment?

<comment><USER15> I did yet another quick search for "wayland remoting" and there still does not appear to be a well-supported story, so for me it's not even worth trying yet. In the age of IaaS and containers, who has just one computer?

<comment><USER6> It seems to me that something like xpra should be fairly easy to port to wayland. (For those who don't know, xpra installs itself as a compositing window manager, and then can render each window either locally or remotely).

<comment><USER15> A lot of people say "remoting wayland should be straightforward" but it keeps not happening. Either it's actually hard, or nobody on the project cares, which makes me question their judgment. Imagine how a display system would be received if it didn't support color on day one.

<comment><USER6> I think part of it is that the remoting situation on X is _so bad_ that a lot of linux users just avoid it in favor of something like tmux or screen for remote work.

Remote desktop from the mid XP era just blows away anything that X has up to now.

<comment><USER16> What's so bad about it? I sometimes do "ssh -Y" from OSX to use some GUI tools on a server and it works pretty much to my expectations.

<comment><USER6> ssh -Y will work find on a LAN, but higher latency links are a really bad experience; X11 is a very chatty protocol with a lot of round-trip delays. On top of that, you cannot detach from such sessions. If e.g. your ssh connection gets reset, you lose any unsaved work in the program.

Traditional VNC servers allow detachable sessions, but the local use is kind of crummy.

Tools like x11vnc are closer, but they lack options to lock the display on the local machine, which is something remote desktop has done by default since at least windows 2000.

<comment><USER16> Yes, I can see that. It certainly isn't ideal and I wouldn't do something crazy like running a web service based on this technology. However at least within a LAN it's good enough and I wouldn't want to loose this capability for the sake of 'moving with the times' (wayland).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So glad this is to make i3 work under Wayland. I jumped around with Tiled Window Managers for several years and it stopped 3 years ago when I started using i3. i3 has the best config system out (it reminds me of the old Arch rc file).

</comment><comment><USER17> Once I saw this, I tried to use Wayland on an Arch Linux install. It worked great (apart from the really gross default cursor), until I tried to use gdm as my login screen. I have a two-screen setup (which worked fine with Sway if I just started it by itself). But if I start sway through gdm, the two screens would fuse into one screen. Is there any way to fix that? I'm guessing it's not a Sway issue, it's either an issue with the compositor Sway uses or just gdm.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think it did some harm to have "i3way" announcing a port to wayland and even phrasing it like it already is a thing, when it seems like there has nothing been done yet for years. My bet is if this would not have been the case there probably already would have been much more development to port i3 to wayland... Anyhow great work :)

</comment><comment><USER19> Ha, well, thanks HN to make me aware of that project that was already discussed months ago but went under my radar.

\-- a i3 user

</comment><comment><USER20> Awesome. I have a reason to try Wayland now. Thanks SirCmpwn!

</comment><comment><USER21> What advantage does this have over traditional i3(gaps)? i3 seems to perform well on older hardware and in VMs.

<comment><USER22> According to people in the know[1], X is severely bloated in terms of CPU usage, interface complexity, and useless code. X spends a lot of time performing useless actions, such as drawing a gray rectangle even when it knows that part of the screen is going to be rewritten by something useful. Going full-Wayland is bound to be lighter on the system. But traditional X clients run within XWayland. I don't know if XWayland offers anything more than compatibility, but going forward, as more and more toolkits and window managers wean themselves off X, "weaker" computers will have more resources to spend on doing useful stuff.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44)

<comment><USER9> Funny, i have no trouble running X on a "weak" computer. What was bogging it down was never X, but KDE or Gnome. Going for a lighter DE, or stripping down to just a WM, greatly improves performance.

Frankly, the very thought that X is bloated seem insane, given that it originated in a time when servers had less resources to go on than many smartphones today.

No, what is "bloated" is the DE thinking that everything has to happen via the OGL pathway.

This makes X "bloated" in that it sits to a side and takes certain commands, while most of the UI work happens outside X.

<comment><USER22> > i have no trouble running X on a "weak" computer.

Well, obviously, your "weak" computer is powerful enough to handle X. Remember that not all computers are desktops, laptops, or phones. We have Linux running on industrial PLC's, CNC machines, and so many other things that are not thought of as "computers". There are buyers of these at even extremely low price-points, so it's not uncommon to host everything on one processor.

> Frankly, the very thought that X is bloated seem insane

Quit the empty snark. Have you actually compared X and VNC for remote access? Try running Firefox from a remote desktop. To understand what's going on, watch the talk I linked to in my previous comment.

<comment><USER9> Yeah i have seen it, and it was a whole lot of preaching to the choir and snark.

As for running a GUI on a PLC, wtf?

Then again, i should not be surprised. Wayland and the rest seems to have come out of the nuttier side of Nokia's Maemo project.

<comment><USER22> > As for running a GUI on a PLC, wtf?

Seriously? You find this[2] surprising?

People have real needs, and they are working on solutions, be it Wayland, Mir, Freon, running GUI on a PLC, or whatever else. I get that you don't have these needs, but can't you even understand that other people do? Have you compared X and VNC yet?

[2] [http://www.omega.com/pptst/EZSerTouchPLC.html](http://www.omega.com/pptst/EZSerTouchPLC.html)

<comment><USER9> A 32-bit variant of the 68000? Heh, didn't think that lineage was still around.

That said, i can't say i see what Wayland will bring to it thats not already satisfied by the Linux framebuffer.

<comment><USER23> Wayland gives you a formal system for efficiently drawing multiple windows and roles. A framebuffer is only usable by one process for its UI.

Also: [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_waylan...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=x_wayland_situation&num=1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> OT interesting note: the video in the screenshot is Maeda Jun's _Angel Beats_

<comment><USER25> It seems obscuring the filename / sub group tags is probably necessary in this world where everything is recorded forever. Especially when the author has public name and employment record.

I watched a few episodes of Angel Beats, ultimately it didn't keep my attention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> building this for gentoo right now. It's pretty funny (positive) that you don't include .deb or .rpm packages. This isn't for any of them.

<comment><USER27> > It's pretty funny (positive) that you don't include .deb or .rpm packages. > This isn't for any of them.

Is it particularly common for projects to provide .deb or .rpm packages? Given the dependency hell of out-of-repo packages, I've found it's much easier to simply:

        ./configure; make; sudo checkinstall

<comment><USER26> maybe not on github, but usually on their websites, a project will provide packages. Sometimes, these are donated by users. Often, they're provided by the developers themselves.

The lack of deb/rpm is refreshing.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Guide for OpenFaaS with Linkerd2 and mTLS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openfaas-incubator/openfaas-linkerd2 <comment><USER2> Very cool!</comment>


Ask HN: Late co-founder after a year and small traction - <AUTHOR> I know it's a common question. But every topic I have seen assumes that funding arrives direclty with traction.
After a year, we have : 50k$ ARR traction for a B2B Saas, with a real disruptive technology, one patent, 4 co-founders (2 tech). No investors yet, but investment might follow in one or two months.
One more engineer wants to join, but we can only pay 1/4 of market salary. He's a real AAA engineer like me, so I really want him in, but giving equal split with others seems unfair.
I want to propose him 8%, what do you think ?
Thanks ! <comment><USER2> How did you arrive at the 8%? Let's not judge that by it self, that could be a great deal, or it might not be. You've had some success, and are expecting more. How closely have you tracked to your current plan? How large is the market, how long will it take you to get there, and will the 8% of an $X target comany be enough for the developer?

Let's assume yes, the developer could have a nice $10m exit after 10 years (to keep numbers round and easy).

Let's also assume that the 1/4 pay will only last for two years and that after that, you'll be able to get the developer a full market rate. So, let's say he is forgoing $200k to work for the company. But he has the 8%. If the company gets acquired early (because you guys are awesome), a $30m exit after taking $1m in financing for 20% of the company. I'm not an expert at this, but your friend would be diluted to 0.54% so the $10m exit is still a good outcome for him.

However, a $10m outcome is only $540k, and he gave up a lot of security for that.

So, I think the real question, and the way you have to look at it is what will the developer be giving up, what is his potential upside. Is your company ever going to be big enough to make it worth his while.</comment>


Show HN: SaaS Business Model Calculator - <AUTHOR> https://www.saasyoulater.com <comment><USER2> I would love to have a percent growth (e.g.: 10% more customers each month is very different than 100 more customers each month)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback. I've added percent growths and I would like to encourage you to try the tool again. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> It's actually getting pretty accurate, nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, the creator here.

I've been playing around with a lot of SaaS ideas in my head and needed a tool that would allow me to play around with different pricing strategies. I hope this tool will help someone on their journey to creating a SaaS company.

<comment><USER3> This thing is really awesome! Bookmarked!

Modeling growth acceleration (and number of net adds expected at n% growth) would be very cool. I am also playing around with adding salaries and when, not sure how to add it in this UI, but that's about the only other thing I try and model at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice. A couple of thoughts:

\- Most businesses have fixed costs, like developer salaries.

\- Some products are paid for in arrears (e.g. 30/60 days after invoice)

\- Many SaaS businesses have multiple products with different characteristics. You could allow people to add multiple products, each with LTV/CAC/churn etc. If you're feeling ambitious you could even add a way to express 'x℅ of customers using product A this month will upgrade to product B from next month'. Like churn, but adding to a different income stream.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would love if this could show a growth of customers in percentage too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, great suggestion! I've added it a couple of hours ago. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> just saw it great!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hard part is LTV and churn are very hard to predict early. Extreme case everyone's LTV at month 1 is 1 months fee.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hi, great tool! Boils down SaaS modeling to the key metrics that matter.

I'm not sure if you've thought of this / have it in the works, but a way of saving a set of scenarios would be really nice :)

You could probably just store them using a permalink or something</comment>


Appleseed 1.8.0-beta - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/appleseedhq/appleseed/releases/tag/1.8.0-beta <comment><USER2> 1.8.0 Beta is really a good release. Lots of improvement and fixes been made. Kudos to whole Appleseed development team.

[https://show-box.ooo/](https://show-box.ooo/)</comment>


Write android apps / websites in plt scheme. - <AUTHOR> http://planet.plt-scheme.org/package-source/dyoo/moby.plt/2/30/planet-docs/manual/index.html

<comment><USER2> On a related note: since I consider writing my next Android App in Clojure, how feasible is it to port from Clojure to another LISP/Scheme? I think Gambit Scheme can be used to write iPhone apps.

<comment><USER3> I have been considering using Clojure for Android, too. My primary concerns are that it takes a long time to start up, and runs slowly. My understanding is that by default, Clojure depends heavily on a dynamic runtime, and Dalvik, the Android virtual machine, makes introspection quite expensive. See Remco van't Veer's posts on the clojure group. (He's the guy behind the clojure- android fork.)

<comment><USER4> What about using Kawa Scheme, like Hal Abelson did with App Inventor for Android?

<comment><USER3> I'm considering alternatives like that, but I am also quite excited about clojure generally (love the idea behind its concurrency semantics), and its interop with Java means that recoding the tight loops ought to be very easy...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi, I'm one of the primary developers of Moby-Scheme. If you have any questions, please let me know!

<comment><USER6> Are there any opengl bindings for Android in Moby-Scheme?

<comment><USER5> For the moment, we're focusing on providing support for 2d world-style programming. We haven't looked into OpenGL bindings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting. I wonder how this compares to writing such applications in Arc (also on plt scheme). Looks like the main difference would be all the side effects for phone hardware given here, plus DOM-oriented HTML/JS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Something completely different. Tables VS DOM and JS events.

<comment><USER7> You're right, that was dumb.</comment></comment></comment>


My husband is a programmer; I have no idea what that means. - <AUTHOR> http://www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/ <comment><USER2> My partner also had no clue what I do, so she asked to learn. Not to learn how to code, but what it involves. So we took a couple nights and we wrote a small program together just so she could understand what it means when I say 'function' or 'UI'. At each step I explained why we were doing things and what it entailed and what some of our options could be, but stopped short of actual code semantics. At the end we had a working program and she understood how it was put together and in turn, what my daily routine entails. To this day she doesn't get that blank look and is able to ask questions. The fact she took the time to do that meant a lot to me.

<comment><USER3> I think sharing passion is great. Perhaps it isn't reasonable to expect unless you met through that passion, but simply 'entering your world', just a bit, is oh so important. What you guys did is amazing. You surely have a strong foundation in your relationship.

Unfortunately I just broke off an engagement to a lady who does event planning for a museum. When I met her almost 4 years ago she was working clothing retail on a hiatus from school. I encouraged her to finish her degree and to apply for internships before graduating. She didn't know what she wanted to do and the museum gig fell into her lap thru an acquaintance, but she loves art and consequently loves her job.

I went to most events she hosted over the period of a year she had the job and we were still together. I chatted up dozens of her co-workers, hung out dutifully, walked thru the exhibits with her as she explained them. I enjoyed it even though it wasn't my thing, it was fun to learn and I was proud of her.

During this period I went to two Startup Weekends. I asked her to come visit. Esp. the second one where my pitch was selected and I built a team of 7. I wanted her to see the final demonstration, to simply be there - for nothing else I was presenting in front of a crowd of 100 people and I was nervous. She would not come. She did "not like computers, that's your thing", paraphrasing. That was the major turning point...

It's not about learning to program, or to even take a passing interest or understanding. It's simply, "this is my life's work, please support me." I think if you can't get that out of a relationship that's a major red flag.

<comment><USER4> People are afraid of being placed in a situation that's totally alien to them. It's not as alien -- it's not as big a deal for you to go through an art gallery and chat up yuppies as it is for her to go through a convention center being gawked at by nerds.

After my girlfriend and I had been going out for six months or so -- this was five or six years ago -- I got her a laptop and a wacom pad. She was a painter -- she'd never touched photoshop, illustrator, corel or anything. I tried to teach her how to use them. She got so frustrated, at one point she held the laptop out a window and threatened to throw it down six stories. But she's amazing with it now -- she's actually one of the highest-paid, most in-demand freelance illustrator/designers I know. I knew she had the skill.

But to this day when I talk about getting her to sit down and see something of the code I write, she gets a look on her face that I know not to mess with. I'd love to walk her through what I do, but I know she understands as much as she needs to, and it's not compatible with the way she thinks. It doesn't do anything for her. That's alright.

My point? It's easier for us to go back into their world than it is for them to understand ours.

<comment><USER5> I don't think presenting a business idea is any more alien to the average person than an art gallery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _And if you don't have even a basic understanding of what your spouse does with 40+ hours of his/her week, then you're not on a team._

That's quite the generalization. My wife has almost no knowledge of most areas of my work, but it's never been a negative or caused any friction in my non- work life. That said, I don't really have much interest in sharing it either, as there's more than enough to discuss and do as a family outside of my work hours.

<comment><USER7> I agree. Expanding your horizons is great, and if you get to do it with a loved one, that's even better, but it's not a necessary part of every relationship. I've dated guys who knew nothing about programming, and I wouldn't be ashamed to take them to company parties to mingle with my fellow programmers, and I don't look down on spouses I meet who don't program either, they're often interesting in a different way.

EDIT: Oops, typo.

<comment><USER8> I, too, agree... for me, at least, I don't care that my wife really understands what I do (although she gets it to a point). For me the important thing is that she isn't bored by me talking about it :)

That is to say, while she doesn't really understand it, she will let me talk/vent about it as much as I need to. Just as I don't really understand what she does, but I'm more than happy for her to talk about it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is something that I think about a lot, actually.

If you love writing and history and art and like talking about them with your friends, would it make sense to marry someone with no interest in those things?

Maybe! Obviously, some people marry complements, differences can attract, and so on. But please consider the other viewpoint.

Isn't it often the case that people choose to be in a relationship with other people who can understand their passions? If your passion is starting a business, or political participation, or world travel, or teaching, or surfing, what would your friends tell you about getting into a relationship with someone who doesn't value those things, and whose expectations of a normal life frankly preclude you spending quality time with that passion?

My passion is programming. And I really enjoy doing it with others.

Is it unrealistic to want to end up with someone I can have an outside chance of sharing gists with?

I think the 'few women in tech' issue affects us personally a lot more than we let on. Writers can marry readers and speakers and thinkers, artists can marry people who appreciate art, entrepreneurs can make the business a family endeavor, but engineers are usually out of luck.

Edit: 'out of luck' if what we want to do is share our specific passion with the person we spend the rest of our life with. If that doesn't matter to you, or the definition of sharing your passion doesn't involve talking code or coding with your SO, then you're lucky!

<comment><USER10> Ah grasshopper, much to learn you have. :-)

Seriously, don't sweat this. While your logic is completely valid, one thing I've learned in personal relationships is that logic is, in-and-of-itself, rather useless in determining relationship success.

Unless you're a robot, people come with things like emotions and feelings and all kinds of other baggage that are impervious to logic. Not just your partner, but yourself. And you usually don't realize it until later.

Your expectations about spending time with someone who shares your passion isn't unrealistic at all. But in the end, a relationship is about people, not your passion. You may find a partner because of your passion, but he/she will stick around because of who you are -- not what you do.

<comment><USER11> Finding people who share your passions is relatively easy. We advertise them on our sleeves. There are, literally, catalogs and clubs and conferences and books and lecture circuits and cruises devoted to any given pastime, from Ethiopian funk music of the 1970s to small-scale software companies focused on order tracking.

Finding a romantic partner or a spouse is a wholly different problem which generally plays out on a completely different level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And the gcache'd version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHi...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:R5rVoHiyqmkJ:www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my- husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that- means/&hl=en&client=firefox-a&gl=us&strip=1)

<comment><USER13> Thanks a lot, I simple can't figure out how to get to Google Cache on touch screen devices as it looks like that their instant preview thingie is triggered by the mouse hover event.

<comment><USER14> Appending `cache:` to the url works. Example:

        cache:www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my-husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that-means/

<comment><USER12> That's 'prepending' (just so you know).

<comment><USER14> Yes. I noticed it after I had missed my edit window.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Discussion from last year: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595950>

</comment><comment><USER16> I think generally this might not be about relationships per se, but simply what kind of person you are.

It would seem weird to me to be in a relationship with a person and not get involved in their field; but that's just because I'm that kind of person. I view everyone as a potential teacher. When I dated a physicist, I got into physics; a computer scientist, computer science; a Go player, I learned to play Go; an epidemiologist, I learned epidemiology.

But not everyone is like that, in fact probably most people are not... so it probably has less to do with your relationship and more about personality type.

</comment><comment><USER17> Available in Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.renaebair.com/2010/08/11/my- husband-is-a-programmer-i-have-no-idea-what-that- means/&hl=en&biw=1882&bih=1243&strip=1)

</comment><comment><USER18> My Christmas present from my wife was a presentation of screenshots of her programming tutorial. She's been learning python in secret, to show me that she wants exactly what the article advises: to understand what it is that I do for a living. I feel privileged to have married her.

<comment><USER19> That's awesome.

<comment><USER18> That's what I thought!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> At a certain level I agree with the OP, but only where "basic understanding" is something that can be decided between two people.

Characterizing whether or not my wife has an appreciation for the tools I use in my job as a measure of the strength of our relationship is, for us, completely invalid. My wife can barely explain what I do for a living. But she knows that I love what I do, and she's supportive within the context of what she understands.

This post really just speaks to how this particular person measures her relationship with her partner. Anyone else drawing out this singular aspect of a relationship as a gauge for matrimonial harmony is on a fool's errand.

<comment><USER20> 100% agreed. My wife is a labor and delivery nurse. I ask her many questions about her job but I have no interest in learning to how give an IV or check for effacement.

If someone you're dating is not interested in learning your programming language, don't hold it against them. Most likely, there are other reasons why they are dating you in the first place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reading this makes me appreciate that my wife is also a software engineer and instantly understands things I talk about. We've been together for a long time (met near the end of college at RIT) but it's one of those life perks that I take for granted sometimes because I forget that it's definitely _not_ the norm.

</comment><comment><USER22> There's a subcontext here that is separate from the appalling notion of being not interested in what your husband/wife works on. Consider the statement: "My husband's specialty is comparative literature and I don't know what that means" or "My wife is an art historian and I don't know what that means". If I heard one of these statements I would think (to myself) "what an ignoramus!". Well, if it's not OK for those, why is it OK for engineering or science? This brings us to the classic _the two cultures_ debate, articulated simplistically by C. P. Snow but echoed by many, many other scientists. I think the gap has widened in the past decades.

</comment><comment><USER23> I just asked my wife and she said she just tells people I'm a spy. When I pressed her for why she said what I do is too technical therefore I'm keeping it hidden from her and that must mean I'm a spy.

</comment><comment><USER24> Great article and it goes both ways of course. Curiosity about another person is the only way to keep things fresh, regardless of how platonic the relationship is.

For geeks: remember that sometimes there are _much_ more interesting things in the analog world than whatever you're immersed in digitally. ;)

</comment><comment><USER25> My wife isn't a programmer, but understands some of the stuff I do at a high level. I think that it makes conversations much more efficient. I can come home bummed out a little, she asks "what's wrong?", and I tell her that my code keeps crashing, or that I can't get some library to build, etc - and she gets it - end of conversation about that. It also helps out when I have to put in extra hours to get some stuff done ... she knows that this work can sometimes require a great amount of effort.

</comment><comment><USER26> Really nice post. I'm a designer/developer and I'm lucky my wife understands the work I do.

<comment><USER27> In college, my girlfriend (at that point of two years) knew I was into incomprehensible theoretical math, but apparently I had never mentioned anything about computers or programming, which I was also pretty into.

One day we were both working in my room and a bunch of LexisNexis links she'd saved earlier just wouldn't work. She was on the verge of tears and panic — she'd spent days collecting these links, and now none of them worked. I said "lemme see" and sat down with her computer. I poked around with her saved links and tried some stuff on LexisNexis. Then I wrote a perl one-liner to munge her URLs. Voila: the munged URLs all just worked (the links had IP-based auth token that I just s///'d).

At no other point in my life have I been looked at with quite that degree of amazement and hero-worship.</comment></comment>


Mariposa botnet 'mastermind' jailed in Slovenia - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25506016

<comment><USER2> "The operator subsequently managed to take back control of the infected computers and then used them to attack Defence Intelligence, a Canadian security firm helping the FBI.

However, in doing so Netkairo appeared to have revealed his identity by accidentally connecting to the botnet directly from his home computer rather than the VPN."

You only have to slip up once.

</comment><comment><USER3> To be honest, it seems like he didn't get off too bad. I'm sure he made much more than was confiscated from him. The jail time isn't fun, but other 'hackers' have gotten much worse.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used to belong to a number of hacking(carding) forums a while back. I never participated in the activities, but did take an interest in their source codes, tools, etc. Its interesting to watch people such as Iserdo show up in new articles like this as they were well respected members on the forums and were looked up to. I remember Iserdo from one particular forum and its strange to think about the "off-topic" posts from Iserdo joking around. I can't help but feel I almost knew him

</comment><comment><USER5> Good. This is the kind of thing that law enforcement ought to be dealing with on the internet. Fraud, not spying and censorship.</comment>


Building Super Scalable Systems in the Ambient Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2009/12/16/building-super-scalable-systems-blade-runner-meets-autonomic.html

<comment><USER2> I regularly read High Scalability. The Ambient Cloud article is a manifesto/memoir.

An impressive review of scaling, the cloud, technology politics, etc. So comprehensive, there's too much to take issue with, yet also personal and reflective.

My opinion is that most of the ideas espoused in the article will come to fruition. Not because the technologies are best, but because they are the most economical. Economic pressures will force heterogeneity where it is needed, and force homogeneity where is needed.

Assuming the Ambient Cloud was built - what apps would you write that you can't now?</comment>


Ask HN: Website that maps addresses to unique tiles, for different zoom levels - <AUTHOR> There is something I remember seeing on HN a couple of years ago, and that was a website that, if I recall correctly, maps your address to unique tiles, and does this for different zoom levels.
Each tile gets a unique, relatively straightforward name/ID, and then you can map this name/ID to a specific lat/long (with the accuracy being determined by the zoom level you use)
I know there are tiling schemes used by Google Maps, Bing Maps, etc, but I seem to recall there was something unique in the approach of this website.
Unfortunately, my web search has been fruitless and I'm not able to find the relevant HN thread.
Do any of you remember this? <comment><USER2> I can only think of [http://what3words.com/](http://what3words.com/), but they don't do zoom level encoding.

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed them also, but they are not the one I had in mind. (what3words does have an interesting approach, I wonder if they are getting any traction)</comment></comment>