Ask HN: Homebrew RFID/IoT solution to monitor an Alzheimer's patient location? - <AUTHOR> I have a parent suffering from Alzheimer's who has been brought home by the police twice this week, so I'm researching solutions to notify a caregiver when he leaves the house.  It seems like an ideal solution would be a little dongle on his keychain that uses RFID/IoT type functionality to trigger some behavior (e.g. an SMS) whenever it leaves his home's wifi signal, presumably via dead man's switch.  I'm having trouble figuring out which devices might work, so I thought I'd ask if anyone has built anything like this already.<p>I've done some research and have some ideas, which due to the character limit I'll add in a comment. <comment><USER2> You can not rely on anything the person is supposed to have with them.

I'd tell you to look into sensors on doors that alert if a button isn't pressed within the home in a short span of time (so you don't get false alarms when you or a caregiver enters - and it can't be triggered outside or with the door open).

<comment><AUTHOR> > look into sensors

I am doing that already thanks, this is the backstop. Though if you have a brand/model of door sensor you used and were happy with I'd like to hear about that too.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ideas so far:

* There are "notify you when your child/parent/dog leaves a certain area" commercial solutions, but they all seem to rely on GPS, and hence include hefty ($20-$40) monthly charges. They are essentially just little screen-less mobile phones, with all that entails (SIM, data plan, frequent recharging). Since this use case doesn't need GPS, these seem like overkill.

* Some articles[0] seem to suggest that there is such a thing as an active RFID tag that broadcasts a beacon signal over WIFI. That would be perfect - unfortunately, all I can find on "wifi rfid rtls" is sales brochures from the manufacturers of big integrated solutions for industrial applications. Active RFID tags can be bought in small batches from Alibaba, but I haven't figured out how to figure out which ones can use wifi, what equipment is used to program them, or whether they require custom wifi APs or not.

* Another option would be a non-RFID IoT device, like the Amazon IoT button[1]. I have one of those, it works great, but it's predicated on the idea of "you click the button, it does something" functionality. I don't think it's possible to give it beacon type behavior (hitting an endpoint every X seconds instead of only when the button is pressed). A similar but more hackable competitor to the Amazon button might work, but I haven't found one.

* I guess the last option would be a miniature general purpose computer, like a Raspberry Pi, which would definitely work but also seems like overkill in terms of complexity, power usage, and size. If this is the only viable option I will probably just hope the alarms on the doors are enough.

Thanks in advance for any ideas or info!

0: [https://www.technologyfirst.org/magazines/2015/21-august/106...](https://www.technologyfirst.org/magazines/2015/21-august/1065-rfid- over-wi-fi.html) \- "A beaconing active tag is most often used in RFID over Wi-Fi for Real-Time Location System, RTLS. This type of tag sends a short message at a pre-programmed interval to provide location updates"

1: [https://www.amazon.com/AWS-IoT-Button-2nd- Generation/dp/B01K...](https://www.amazon.com/AWS-IoT-Button-2nd- Generation/dp/B01KW6YCIM)</comment>


Ask HN: How to calculate best subscription fee - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to determine which is a better membership pricing structure; $20 / year versus $50 / year.
The lower price will increase the number of subscribers but lower the revenue per customer (obviously). The higher number will do the opposite.
Is there some information somewhere (not many good search engine results) on ways to compare these two pricing structures? Perhaps some graphs and mathematical explanation of what the advantage of the lower price with more members is versus the higher price with fewer members?
Thanks to any responders. <comment><USER2> $50/year is too low. It's less than $5/month. I spend roughly that _per day_ on coffee... and yet I'd still hesitate to sign up for something on the Internet for $5/month, just as much as I'd hesitate if it was $10 or $15 or $30/month.

<comment><USER3> Don't undervalue your daily coffee. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Charge 9.99$/month instead of 50$/year. You'll likely get more subscribers, and make more money.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you could find some way to model the price vs demand you could then figure out how elastic the price is (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand>) then that would tell you which price is better.

</comment><comment><USER6> I believe a better pricing model in many cases is to offer your product as a monthly subscription with discounts for longer subscriptions, e.g. $5 per month, $10 per quarter, $30 per year. The drawbacks to this model are that managing subscriptions may require more effort, and you need to be sure that your service provides enough value to get people coming back.

I also think your pricing plans are too low. If your service is for businesses (even small businesses) and it provides an obvious value to them, you should be able to charge more; like $10 - $20 per month (or more), again with discounts for longer terms. Even if your service is for individuals, $10 per month is not excessive. People pay $60 - $100 or more per month for cell phone service; $10 - $20 per month is not excessive for a valuable service.

</comment><comment><USER7> Joel Spolsky wrote about this exact subject (with graphs, etc. as requested). very worthwhile read: [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's a website subscription service that I'm trying to pack as much value as possible into.

I think it's worth $50.

My question is what are the best resources on this topic?

I suppose i need 2.5 as many times the members at the $20 rate to make generate the same revenue. I've got 100 users @ $50, but will I get 250 @ $20 ? If I did get 250 at $20, the revenue hasn't gone up.

$50 seems like the better plan to me. Ofcourse, if I ask the users who haven't subscribed and still use the free model, they think $50 is too much and they would be more likely to pay $20.

I'm sure there's lots of discussion on this topic out there, but as soon as you type in "membership subscription" at google you get garbage like pay pal and netflix, and not any nerdy discussion on the topic.

<comment><USER8> _$50 seems like the better plan to me. Ofcourse, if I ask the users who haven't subscribed and still use the free model, they think $50 is too much and they would be more likely to pay $20_

Of course they would rather pay less! But you also have to consider that when people start paying, they usually expect a higher level of service. If you can keep the number of people with high expectations to a minimum and still turn a profit, you'll be in better shape.

Start with the higher price, and see how it goes. If you aren't getting enough customers, you can always offer limited-time discounts (e.g. "Regularly $50/yr, but sign up during December and get your account at $40/yr for life!").

<comment><USER2> _Danger_ : This has been the polar opposite of Patrick McKenzie's experience. Charge people one shiny nickel and they'll come to you with high expectations. In fact, lowering your prices pessimizes your customer base with the most high-drama customers.

<comment><USER8> I meant that when they start paying vs being free customers they start to have expectations. You're right, when they pay less, they seem to expect more. The lower price just attracts that kind of customer. I saw this at Kaplan Test Prep. The most demanding students were the NCLEX students who only paid $400-600, while the USMLE students who paid $6000-10000 never asked for anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Pricing is more art than science. It is based on many factors such as:

\- perceived value

\- competitor pricing

\- your target market

\- how directly your service let's people save mone or generate income (ie if your service does either it is more easily justifiable than a pure luxury)

\- customer loyalty (eg some people are paying Dropbox when they don't need the space just because they love the service and want to support the company)

\- supply (including the illusion of scarcity)

\- cost structure

\- luck

\- etc

There is some theory and psychology around this but like all the social sciencesnit isn't exact.

</comment><comment><USER10> Please don't just do yearly subscriptions, I will rarely (if ever) sign up for a yearly subscription at first. If you _do_ offer only yearly, make sure you also have some sort of trial.

Also StavrosK talked about subscription fees here: <http://blog.historio.us/>

<comment><USER11> For me, there isn't much difference in friction between a <$5/month subscription and a <$20/year subscription. Both fall below the impulse-buy threshold for an interesting-looking service.

More than $20/year, however, and there has to be a compelling discount or a solid trial before I'll shell out for a whole year.

<comment><USER10> The price isn't really the issue, if I can spend $20 I can spend $50, it's the perceived value. To me spending $50 upfront without any guarantee I'll use the product is bad, whereas $5/m seems much better even if it works out more in the long run.

I'd have no problem spending $20/m on a good product I _like_ but I would have a problem spending $20/year on something I haven't tried, because I "feel" like I'm spending more and committing to a longer term with the product.

Maybe that doesn't make sense, but the issue for me isn't the money but how I see the value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pricing without knowing what you are selling is hard, but I guess you are charging too little.

<comment><USER13> There's a lot of history for so-called term subscription license (TSL's) in the business literature. I agree with the general comments about offering 3- or 6-month TSL's but price your fees around a 12-month TSL and _charge more_ for shorter commitment periods. The 12-month TSL price calculation is as much a feature of your estimated churn and resulting life time contract value as market forces. In our market, salesforce.com is the benchmark and we price accordingly. Hopefully you can find a public TSL rate to compare, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> read this: <http://www.neildavidson.com/dontjustrollthedice.html>

on the flip side of that coin, i've read that and i'm still struggling to come up with a good pricing structure.

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's a good search that may help you: [http://www.google.com/search?q=site:ycombinator.com+customer...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site:ycombinator.com+customer+acquisition+cost)

</comment><comment><USER15> don't guess. split test.

i.e. for me at $50, I sold X. at $40, I sold 2X, at $30 I sold 2X and at $20 I sold X.

Placing value on your product is important, if you charge too little, people will think you are selling crap and won't buy as much.

Your price is pretty much the single most important thing you can split test.

<comment><AUTHOR> So how would one go about split testing a subscription service on a website without alienating some users? In my case I'm selling to a small (about 5k-15k people). Inevitably someone would realize that they were paying as much as half price as some others ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> No matter what you do, I recommend you have a clear grandfathering policy in place.

I am particularly generous in that department "Should you decide to return, we will reactivate your account at last billing tier even if that tier is no longer published on our site."

There are some conditions to that, such as material change of control events (all bets are off if you have been acquired).

Failure to do so results in upset customers and negative press coverage. Competitors love that. If you decide to lower prices, be sure to apply decreases to your existing customers. That's positive press.

I am experimenting with pricing as well and prefer my customers to be protected from effects of such experiments.

Annual subscriptions work great when they are a discount over monthly billing. The pattern tends to be that the user subscribes for a few months of month-to- month billing, realizes she is in love, and renews at annual level to save money.

I haven't seen the research, but I think you will find more annual subscriptions tend to be renewals rather than initial purchases. An annual subscription for $50 is below my pain threshold.

Let me illustrate my point. I pay some small amount for <http://eventid.net>. I don't ever remember what it is, but I pay it annually. It's $29 and I had to look that up. It's just not material to bother with quarterly $12 payments when I can simply pay $29 and ignore this for the rest of the year.

Eventid is a useful service and all my subscription does is speed up Microsoft knowledge base searches. When I am billing my client for time spent figuring out the problem, the speed of research matters and so I pay for this service.

Another example: I pay for <http://usaip.eu> on a monthly basis $9. This actually just got lowered to $7.99. I primarily use the service to watch Formula 1 on BBC live and without commercials, but it also comes in handy for on-demand VPN connectivity that ALWAYS works when dealing with insecure WiFi networks (have you heard of firesheep? :)). I used to pay by the day, then by the week, now I pay by the month, and pretty soon I'll just pay for it once a year ($74.99) and again be done with it. That service also happens to bill me for European Union VAT, which I am technically not subject to, but again the cost is just not material enough for me to bother with.

I personally do not have free accounts at all. I have plenty of competitors who have free option. The fact is that should the customer decide to pay my competitor, they will likely re-evaluate the market anyway. My software integrates with too many things and simply delivers too much value. You get either 100 transactions or 14 days, whichever comes first. For most people, it pays for itself in one extra transaction as what my software does is maximize revenue per staff member. I do not yet have transaction-based pricing unlike say Recurly, but I will likely add that after we sign up enough customers.

I am guessing this is in regards to your water skiing log site? Determine the value and price accordingly. From what I know, water skiing is not a sport for poor people, so you may have price elasticity due to customer affluence. My snow ski equipment is quite expensive.

I'd probably keep the site free with a limit on how many entries can be made in a year and make a paid mobile interface as a subscription. As a skier, I would probably want to enter my data, complete with picture attachments, right after I am done with my run instead of when I get home. In essence, charge for usability. :)

One last thing - check out Wepay for subscription billing. Much cheaper than Paypal. They do not advertise that feature yet, but I spent some time with the team at the hackathon and was pleasantly surprised it was there. :)

Then again, I am just beginning with offering a SaaS solution. I could very well be wrong. I am easy enough to find on Twitter if you want to chat more. :)</comment>


BT Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Valve - <AUTHOR> https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/08/31/bt-valve-patent-infringement-lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> "an intended audience in a reliable and predictable manner. Messages are stored as files at a server for retrieval by the intended clients. Each client transmits requests for messages to the server at automatic and periodic intervals."

I don't pretend to know anything about this but aren't these software patents ridiculously vague? The above could apply to pretty much anything!

<comment><USER3> Not just that, but it's a fucking obvious design decision that any half- competent intern would've come up with.

"Hm, message needs to be reliable, so I guess we need to store it until the client confirms receipt. The server should probably be the place to store it."

"Hm, the client should ask the server for messages whenever it is ready, so let's poll. We should probably only do that every so often to avoid load, so maybe like every 30 seconds or something."

"Well, if I'm chatting, a delay of 30 seconds is annoying. Maybe I should poll more frequently if I'm in a conversation. I could just cool that off as messages dribble in slower."

One of the most frustrating parts about software patents is that the actual techniques are usually pretty fucking obvious to anybody who actually does it for a living.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Oh boy, here we go again. At least this time it's with people who have pockets deep enough on both sides to make a proper show.

Let's watch the usual hivemind folks come out in defense of software patents. Folks, software patents are stupid and counterproductive, and this is just one more example of the same.</comment>


Happening Platform: develop group apps for instant use on Android, iOS and the web - <AUTHOR> https://dev.happening.im/?hn <comment><AUTHOR> Happening is a group messenger that allows third-parties to create plugins using CoffeeScript and HTML5. These plugins vary from useful tools to fun addictive games. As our platform does most of the work (accounts, groups, data sync, notifications, distribution, etc), plugins can be created very rapidly and deployed to iOS, Android and the web instantly.

We're inviting you to have a look - and are really interested in your feedback. Thanks!

<comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good "Show HN".

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks like a complex proposition, but it surely looks interesting.

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome! Seems easy enough :)

</comment><comment><USER5> nice</comment>


Pomoflow – The Marriage of Pomodoro and Flow - <AUTHOR> https://jakkaps.com/pomoflow-the-marriage-of-pomodoro-and-flow/ <comment><USER2> Or maybe you should just take breaks at natural stopping points and stop trying to turn coding into clock-punching assembly-line work.

I've tried pomodoros many times. 25 minutes is not enough time to get anything useful done, and taking a 5-minute break every 25 minutes is a great way to blow out your mental stack. That's why people frequently ignore them and keep working.

This is an app designed to "solve" a problem of its own making.</comment>


Why Windows lost to Mac - <AUTHOR> http://threads2.scripting.com/2013/march/whyWindowsLostToMac <comment><USER2> TL;DR: viruses.

Does not discuss that fact that the dominant platform will inherently encourage malware creators to write for that platform. Implies that Mac is inherently more secure with no evidence.

<comment><USER3> The Mac is inherently more secure than Windows was back when viruses were endemic.

Funny thing is, so is Windows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flagged. Submitted by author, a blogpost designed to fan the flames."

First, understand that this is a blog post, a highly prejudiced thing, completely determined by one self-important person's experiences."

Which literally amounts to, uh, "take a vacation from viruses" (no, this really is about 20% of the essay)...

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually that first paragraph was designed to defend against flames, and it appears to have worked. The piece also talks about the fog of war, as it applies to tech. Two pundits both wrote long pieces about the Mac's apparent victory over Windows, and neither mentioned malware.</comment></comment>


Cloth masks do protect the wearer - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/cloth-masks-do-protect-the-wearer-breathing-in-less-coronavirus-means-you-get-less-sick-143726 <comment><USER2> This article speaks in a very authoritative tone, but the assertions aren't fully backed by the research it links to.

And it bothers me that the quote, "dramatically less likely" is not a quote from the linked research, but seemingly just a pull quote of the article itself.

I support people wearing masks, even if it turned out to only be marginally better than not wearing one, but this article is borderline overreaching.

<comment><USER3> The linked article seems to back it up: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8)

> In a more recent report from a different cruise ship outbreak, all > passengers were issued surgical masks and all staff provided N95 masks after > the initial case of COVID-19 on the ship was detected. In this closed > setting with masking, where 128 of 217 passengers and staff eventually > tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 via RT-PCR, the majority of infected patients > on the ship (81%) remained asymptomatic, compared with 18% in the cruise > ship outbreak without masking.

> A report from a pediatric hemodialysis unit in Indiana, where all patients > and staff were masked, demonstrated that staff rapidly developed antibodies > to SARS-CoV-2 after exposure to a single symptomatic patient with COVID-19. > In the setting of masking, however, none of the new infections was > symptomatic. And in a recent outbreak in a seafood processing plant in > Oregon where all workers were issued masks each day at work, the rate of > asymptomatic infection among the 124 infected was 95%. An outbreak in a > Tyson chicken plant in Arkansas with masking also showed a 95% asymptomatic > rate of infection.

<comment><USER4> It makes intuitive sense that a face covering would reduce the viral load one is exposed to. I've heard of other studies that have shown that the degree of virus exposure affects outcomes. Those involved exposure time and exposure distance to symptomatic patients with COVID-19. If a face covering reduces the viral load you get exposed to, seems like it would have the same effect as getting a lower dose exposure due to being a greater distance away or because of a reduced exposure time with a contagious individual. I hope more research supports the benefits of masks as it sounds like good news.

<comment><USER5> The viral load thing came up in some podcast I was listening too. So experiments were done with the flu Or cold virus and a smaller load resulted in a less severe infection.

They obviously can't repeat the experiment with COVID. They suspect the same thing happens but they aren't sure.

Oh the off chance it really is true, I'm wearing a mask!

<comment><USER6> would be great if someone can find them, but pretty sure there was a study done during the SARS 1 outbreak in the Canadian hospital that attempted to demonstrate that physical proximity to severe cases (and highly symptomatic individuals?) was correlated to viral load and further correlated to severity of illness. At least I saw people early on in Novel Coronavirus days of Jan/Feb speculating about the meaning of said study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This study from 2010 is the only one I've ever seen which tests the effectiveness of masks being worn on a face:

[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/153567601001500...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/153567601001500204)

"The protective efficiencies were 33.3%, 11.3%, and 6.1% for the surgical, bandana, and dust masks, respectively. The N95 mask protective efficiency was 89.6%. In conclusion, the surgical mask protected the best of the three face masks tested. However, it is important to note that all three masks offer very little protection when compared to the N95, and wearing these face masks may produce a false sense of protection."

<comment><USER7> I'm also going to use this post to highlight how historical revisionism and censorship of opposing viewpoints is occurring regarding masking.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20200625094522/https://www.oralhe...](http://web.archive.org/web/20200625094522/https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/face- masks-dont-work-revealing-review/)

The article is called "Why Face Masks Don't Work: A Revealing Review", published October 18, 2016.

This is the webpage as of early July 2020: [https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/face-masks-dont- wor...](https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/face-masks-dont-work- revealing-review/)

"If you are looking for "Why Face Masks Don't Work: A Revealing Review" by John Hardie, BDS, MSc, PhD, FRCDC, it has been removed. The content was published in 2016 and is no longer relevant in our current climate."

"No longer relevant in our current climate."

<comment><USER8> The original paper was asking the question: Do surgical masks provide adequate protection against disease transmission for dentists and patients in a clinical context? And their conclusion was: no.

This is an entirely separate question from: Do masks provide _enough_ protection against disease transmission to be worth wearing/recommending in public places during a global pandemic, despite their imperfections? The answer to that, from many other studies, seems to be clearly yes. I can imagine that anti-mask folks started using this article as ammunition, due to the catchy headline ("see, this article says face masks don't work!"), and the publishers felt it was doing more harm than good and took it down for that reason.

<comment><USER9> > Do masks provide enough protection against disease transmission to be worth > wearing/recommending in public places during a global pandemic, despite > their imperfections? The answer to that, from many other studies, seems to > be clearly yes.

A randomized trial with surgical masks during Covid-19 will be published soon. Here are some quotes and commentary:

> "All these countries recommending face masks haven't made their decisions > based on new studies," Bundgaard said in an interview in Copenhagen.

> He says there's evidence to suggest that the only effective face covering > might be a visor, because the virus can spread through all mucous membranes, > including via the eyes. He worries a cloth covering that only protects the > nose and mouth provides a "false sense of security."

> Bundgaard says the simple rules that currently exist in Denmark -- hand- > washing, social distancing, self-isolating if you're sick -- are effective > because they're easy to remember. He worries that using face masks might > lead people to be "sloppy" in following the other guidelines.

> Bundgaard's study on masks is due to be published next month. In the > meantime, he says he hopes they don't become mandatory in Denmark.

[https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/face-mask-photo-op- adds...](https://www.bloombergquint.com/onweb/face-mask-photo-op-adds-to- bewilderment-over-non-use-in-denmark)

[https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32829745/](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32829745/)

<comment><USER10> So negative effect of masks seems to only be a social effect, that can be combatted by proper messaging and PR.

Seems like an easy problem to deal with.

<comment><USER11> Agree with your first sentence.

Unless you're being sarcastic (apologies if so, and no mean to offend if not), I take the opposite conclusion though, which seems borne out by reality. Public messaging and for social cohesion in service of the greater good is the _hardest_ problem affecting any large-scale coordinated response, especially with propaganda, doublethink, and flat-out unwillingness to learn being so common. I gather that the article the previous commenter mentioned was removed so that such propagandists couldn't willingly misinterpret it to pass on to their sycophants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Many, many links in that article, but in the only study I see, this is not an experiment, it's observational study.

There are lots of reasons to believe wearing masks might be correlated with other mitigating behaviours (hand washing, going out less, etc), which would also reduce contact with the infected.

Also, I see no mention of studying possible side-effects of universal, permanent mask wearing, which makes this study irresponsible at the least.

<comment><USER13> With you on considering the possible causation in other associated mitigating behaviors, but:

> studying possible side-effects of universal, permanent mask wearing

Can you suggest a model which would imply there are likely to be any side- effects?

I'm also sortof baffled by the suggestion that there's anyone doing "permanent" mask wearing. I've been pretty fastidious about face coverings since early on but I don't think I've ever kept one on for more than 6 hours at a time, and it's hard to imagine anyone doing so outside of a long shift at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is it possible that a very very low exposure can cause your body to ramp up an immunity response? I'm wondering if fatality rate has gone down because most people by now have had some exposure to the virus: not enough to get sick (not even asymptomatic), but enough for the immune system to prep that something is in the environment.

<comment><USER15> If only they made vaccines that way.

<comment><USER14> Vaccines are usually dead or mostly-dead or otherwise-modified things. It's not just low counts of live viruses.

<comment><USER16> See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attenuated_vaccine)

<comment><USER17> Your clarification was less correct than what you replied to.

Vaccines are not all attenuated. Often they are killed. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inactivated_vaccine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inactivated_vaccine) for more on that.

<comment><USER18> It's interesting that the word used for inactivated viruses is "killed" rather than, for instance, "destroyed". Destroyed might not be a better word choice because it may imply that the structure is completely taken apart but point being: (not to throw semantics into the mix just for kicks) does modern science consider viruses to be alive?

<comment><USER19> > does modern science consider viruses to be alive?

This is a (bad) philisophical question for people who do not understand the concept of "spectrum", not a scientific question.

<comment><USER18> I don't believe there is such a thing as a bad philosophical question. Perhaps some questions aren't yet worth the time investment to think about. When we engineer self-replicating machinery (or rather, before then) this caveat is worth defining.

<comment><USER17> I disagree.

Deciding where on the spectrum between non-life and life we declare something to be alive is endlessly debatable and non-actionable. The fact that in time technology will add more points on that spectrum does not change this fact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> \- U.S. Surgeon General Feb 6 > Americans should be more concerned about the flu than coronavirus [...] As surgeon general, I'm telling folks the number one way to protect ourselves is to get a flu shot.

\- U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29 > Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS!

> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching > #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick > patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

\- U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet] > Early am flight. No one with masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back into me before takeoff. :/

"Surgeon general says administration "trying to correct" earlier guidance against wearing masks" July 12 > We're trying to correct that messaging, but it's very hard to do.

So what do we call this? Criminal negligence?

The World Health Organization played World Trade Organization and warned against banning flights from China. The U.S. General cared more about hardware stores not running out of masks, so medics could still get the masks that the government neglected to store or produce in case of a pandemic. The greatest U.S. authorities (including Azar and Fauci) did not trust the intelligence of the general public enough to promote mask usage, as they were afraid we were going to infect ourself by licking the front the mask when discarding it. "Better to just avoid sick people" they said, completely ignoring the impossibility of identifying sick people with asymptomatic spread or avoiding other people in busy cities. "Only wear a mask when you are sick" they said, condemning people who thought for themselves and read the research, and wore a mask to protect themselves and their caretakers, to the status of Leprosy sufferers.

<comment><USER21> Let me play devil's advocate.

> U.S. Surgeon General Feb 6 > Americans should be more concerned about the > flu than coronavirus [...] As surgeon general, I'm telling folks the number > one way to protect ourselves is to get a flu shot.

On Feb 6, if you lived in the United States, your likelihood of catching and dying from the flu was very possibly higher than COVID19. It's very possible the US Surgeon General wasn't saying to never worry; rather, that it was too early to worry at that time. I got a very bad flu-like illness in late January in Las Vegas. My assumption is that it was very likely the flu, based on estimated base rates of the diseases at that time.

> U.S. Surgeon General @Surgeon_General Feb 29 > Seriously people- STOP BUYING > MASKS!

If masks have higher ROI for healthcare workers than average citizens, and there's a limited supply of masks, then telling average citizens to not buy masks makes perfect sense to me.

> They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching > #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can't get them to care for sick > patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

> U.S. Surgeon General, Mar 6 [Deleted Tweet] > Early am flight. No one with > masks (they aren't recommended for general public) but noticed several > people using antibacterial wipes on seats (I do this too). I'm not worried > about #COVID19 - I'm worried about #flu & the guy reclining all the way back > into me before takeoff.

Yeah, I cannot come up with any defense for these statements. These statements were clear mistakes by the US Surgeon General. I hope he regrets them and learns from them.

<comment><USER22> He can learn from his mistakes as he searches for a new job outside of public health.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Multiple citations, but this one seems to be what's referenced by the title: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8)

Interesting to note that it is a discussion of models and general implications, but is not actually a study of itself.

<comment><USER24> While I suspect that the hypothesis is correct, the article is in no way conclusive or authoritative. There is no attempt to control for other variables which could explain the observations.

For example, the seafood and chicken processing plants had a 95% asymptomatic rate among the infected.

I would love to see some studies which compared this against rates that are normally seen for the same age/gender/heath ect.

Similarly, how do these observations fit in to the greater picture. Are there other processing plants that used masks but had higher rates of symptoms?

Also, another way to view this data is that perhaps we are vastly underestimating total number of asymptomatic cases overall due to reporting and testing biases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> On the one hand, we don't know for sure if the number of virus particles one is exposed to correlates to severity of disease with SARS-CoV-2 in humans because we don't have rigorous studies that say so. On the other hand, it would be less surprising if it were true than if it isn't, and we should probably proceed on the assumption it's probably true. (Though I'm not an epidemiologist except to the extent that we've all become amateur epidemiologists these days, so don't take my word for it.)

<comment><USER26> As I understand it, it's always better to be infected with few viruses than with many.

Think of it like this: I you get infected with 10 instead of 1.000.000 of a virus that grows x10 each day, your immune system has 5 extra days to fight it.

 _[Disclaimer: I 'm a random software guy who reads a lot, not in any way a virus expert]_

<comment><USER27> The problem with severe COVID, as I understand it, is an immune system that did nothing until it was too late, at which point it overreacts and releases a cytokine storm.

The hamster study did not show a big difference in outcome with higher viral load, contrary to what the article suggests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > In an outbreak on an Australian cruise ship called the Greg Mortimer in late > March, the passengers were all given surgical masks and the staff was given > N95 masks after the first case of Covid-19 was identified. Mask usage was > apparently very high, and even though 128 of the 217 passengers and staff > eventually tested positive for the coronavirus, 81% of the infected people > remained asymptomatic.

Does anyone know what the baseline to compare with is? What was the rate of symptoms in Diamond Princess?

</comment><comment><USER29> COVID has really taught me the limitations of data journalism and data science. Both presume trust in the data collectors and data communicators, and many people simply do not.

I think it would be much better to let people "test it" for themselves. Let them be the scientists, ask them basic questions. You can do this with a kid:

1) Where is the virus in our body? (answer: in the lungs)

2) What does it feel like to wear a mask? (answer: hot/stuffy)

3) Why does it feel hot/stuffy? (answer: the mask is keeping your exhalation closer to you)

4) If masks block your breath, and your breath has the virus, does that not then mean that masks block the virus? (answer: yes)

Bonus) Suppose masks don't actually block the virus that well, say by only 10%. Will they still affect the chain of transmission (yes, its "multiplicative": 90-> 81%->72%->...)

This "psuedo-experiment" would not be up to snuff for a journal, but conversations are not publications. Its better to make assumptions and make deductive arguments, because then you don't need to rely on trust in scientific institutions.

<comment> GuB-42 Maybe suitable for small kids, but oversimplified.

1) The virus is not only in the lungs, but it is not important here, pass. Maybe insist on the fact it can be in the nose, to encourage people to put their mask on their nose.

2) Good observation

3) That the wrong part. Hot means that heat is trapped, but air definitely isn't, you wouldn't be able to breathe otherwise. That you can't breathe with masks is a common argument used by anti-maskers, and many times shown wrong. Masks can keep your breath closer to you in the sense that you don't project it as far because it makes it slower and more diffuse. It also has a chance to trap droplets containing the virus.

4) masks _don 't block your breath_ in fact surgical masks are more effective and more breathable than cotton masks. That's because surgical masks are optimized to stop viruses and let air through.

<comment><USER29> All of your points are true, and would be brought up by an informed adult or smart kid, but notice how none of them defeat the underlying deductive argument. Simplicity is its strength. If anything, letting them make it complicated by questioning assumptions and revising them will just convince them more, because now it's sort of their argument, not somebody else's.

1) It's not just in our lungs, but in our entire "breathing system". Still need to control the breath.

2) Masks don't block oxygen, but they block the wet part of the breath at least somewhat. The wet part is the dangerous part.

You could go back and forth with a so-called "anti-masker" and you'd prob be leagues ahead of where you'd be if you shared a masks article.

<comment><USER30> That's easy to turn around on you.

Here's a simple argument: death rates from COVID are about the same as a regular flu season in places that didn't do dumb things like close hospitals and send sick people into care homes. In many places they're around the level of flu.

But flu is always around. If we don't wear masks all the time, then why do we need to wear them now?

There is no logical answer to this except "you should wear masks permanently" which many people will never accept, as the benefits are simply too low to justify the consequent problems.

<comment><USER22> Death rates may not be the only problem though. There is evidence that covid damages the heart and sometimes even the brain. This damage might cause many deaths years from now.

<comment><USER30> There was also evidence COVID was a terribly deadly disease that would kill at minimum 500,000 healthy people (in the UK), thus requiring urgent and massive shutdowns. Turned out to all be completely false.

So my point stands. If you're going to make simple pro-mask arguments, be prepared for equally simple counterarguments. Excess death data says 2020 is for most countries an unremarkable basically normal year. Even in the few where it's not, it's still comparable to prior years when nobody noticed anything at the time, so hardly abnormal.

"Long COVID" may be the usual problem of slow recovery from viral infection that occasionally happens, or it may hardly be real given the broad array of vague symptoms that are now allowed to characterise the disease. Everything from a runny nose to a headache to full blown pneumonia is classifiable as COVID these days. That means many people with other issues will end up with spurious correlations of the form, "I had COVID symptoms and now I am fatigued" when the cause may not be "COVID". The apparent lack of consistency in these reports, the wildly varying time between infection and onset, etc, all suggests there's a lot of noise in these reports. Definitely not a part of any simple argument for mask wearing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Masks' efficacy at protecting the _wearer_ is not the only point; their primary purpose is to help protect _others_ , as in "my mask protects you; your mask protects me".

<comment><USER32> Sure, but being able to say that the mask protects you too will appeal to some people. If people's reasons are selfish but the outcome is the same it's fine with me... I do suspect that it protects the wearer as well though.

I don't know why that was even in serious question unless the only transmission method was putting your fingers in your mouth or something. Of course more filtering will be better.

<comment><USER19> It's a serious question because theoretically a mask can trap viral particles for later introduction into your membranes, instead of them just passing by in the air.

<comment><USER32> I've heard that, but where do these viral particles come from? The mask wearer? If so, that's the goal isn't it? And if it's from outside and gets trapped in the fabric... isn't that also a win?

The arguments against wearing a mask have always been weak, the arguments for wearing a mask didn't start so strong but were well established in March/April. Anyone arguing against them after that point was either parroting stuff they heard without understanding, or was making disingenuous arguments that have contributed to a lot of misery and death for no benefit.

I don't think I heard anyone with actual medical training suggest that wearing a mask might be _worse_ than nothing -- except for one scenario, that it might cause a false sense of security. Never once have I heard another reason from someone with actual medical training for why masks might make things worse, at least when it comes to COVID.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Mask use has been legally mandatory in Texas for 2 months now yet deaths are still high. Whatever this effect is it doesn't seem "dramatically less likely".

<comment><USER34> Not defending the article, but cocaine use has been legally forbidden in Texas for many, many years.

Laws != compliance with laws.

<comment><USER33> This says 85% wears masks in the Texas region.

[https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/27/more- americ...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/27/more-americans- say-they-are-regularly-wearing-masks-in-stores-and-other-businesses/)

<comment><USER35> That seems... low, if it's mandatory?

<comment><USER19> Have you seen anyone not wearing a mask? Did that person face legal consequences?

Do you think speed limits have >85% compliance?

<comment><USER35> I've seen full compliance in shops and things lately. Not letting the maskless in apparently helps.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> We changed the URL from [https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/masks-breathing-in- less-co...](https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/masks-breathing-in-less- coronavirus-means-you-get-less-sick) to the original source it points to. From the site guidelines: _Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter._

</comment><comment><USER19> > In 2015, researchers tested this concept in human volunteers using a > nonlethal flu virus and found the same result. The higher the flu virus dose > given to the volunteers, the sicker they became.

I didn't know that was ethical.

</comment><comment><USER37> placebo effect? just like putting stripes on your car makes it go faster. Putting on a mask, boosts the immune system, because there's an inner ninja inside all of us. Ready to kick ass.

<comment><USER38> That's fun. The same effect would amp up the inner ninja in those who decide to not wear masks.

<comment><USER37> well, if we can assume that a placebo effect is due to a state of mind. And a state of mind can be induced using a ritual. Putting on a mask, in a ritual way, might just work better to ready the mind for battle. Watch some old school Karate movies. There's often a ritual the hero undertakes, to steady and focus the mind, before a battle. Sometimes its a bandana on the head. That might work too! needs to be tried.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> In animal models, with hamsters.

</comment><comment><USER27> The hamster study shows only very minor difference between high and low viral load with Sars-CoV2.

The paper that the headline is based on does not really support the headline.

Other links are not specific to COVID.

</comment><comment><USER36> Url changed from [https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/masks-breathing-in-less- co...](https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/masks-breathing-in-less-coronavirus- means-you-get-less-sick), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER40> What's wrong with the design of the web site? It's borderline unreadable.

</comment><comment><USER41> Can wearing or not wearing a mask to protect oneself from covid-19 be regarded as an example of natural selection at work? Where mask wearers are most adapted to survival in their environment and non-mask wearers are not?

<comment><USER9> Masks aren't evidence based medicine. There isn't enough research. There are no randomized trials on cloth masks that are running.

If evidence based medicine isn't an advantage then it's down to luck?

<comment><USER42> Isn't containing coughs and sneezes (along with hand washing, etc) one of the most fundemental parts of our understanding of how to prevent the spread of infectious diseases. The NHS has had the "catch it, bin it, kill it" motto for years as a way to prevent flu / common cold. There may not be studies specifically into covid-19 on this topic. But we do know that this is one of the primary spread vectors for basically every other similar respiritory disease. It's worth studying covid specifically just to be sure, but it would be bizarre if covid was different in this respect. And IMO it's completely wrong to say we have no evidence tht masks work.

<comment><USER9> > There may not be studies specifically into covid-19 on this topic.

There is only one study that looked at cloth masks and it was completed in 2015.

> And IMO it's completely wrong to say we have no evidence tht masks work.

I never said that. I'm saying that a high standard of evidence has not been met and there isn't much interest in running trials on cloth masks. The only one I could find is in Guinea-Bissau.

[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04471766](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04471766)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> haven't read the study, but i'm guessing it has to do with viral load

<comment><USER43> downvoted to oblivion for stating the obvious

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Except for "dramatically" we knew this in January.

It takes years to train a populous to wear masks. Asia didn't just turn it on.

So were is the reckoning to the medial experts who fought this all the way, who told us to just wash our hands with soap.

These same people chose our complex cancer treatments, yet after 100 years of disease control, masks are a medical argument in the West still.

</comment><comment><USER45> It will be interesting to see how we view this in the years to come. I was here, and had certain (once reviled) views, so I remember these closely:

1\. Masks don't work! -> Nope, they do.

2\. You need training to make masks work! -> Nope, you don't.

3\. If you don't wear your mask perfectly, you're going to get the disease. The outcome is binary. -> Doesn't look that way.

There are a few still in line to be determined, supposedly:

* This disease is novel in ways that no other disease is. So a large percentage of those who get it will experience life-long adverse effects causing substantial loss of QALYs. -> I don't think so, but we'll see. Sure, a few people here and there will have life-long breathing issues but nearly everyone will have practically identical QoL as they did before.

* Single group activities are the biggest determiners of whether there will be an increase in cases in America. -> I don't think so. I think it'll be whether we have large scale openings. i.e. protests are not as big a deal as letting people go to restaurants (the latter will dwarf the former)

* Outdoor activities are spreading the disease at a substantial rate in America. -> I don't think so. It's not the beach-goers. It's the guys mostly indoors.

We'll see. Ultimately, thinking in Bayesian terms, this virus is less likely to be novel in multiple ways than it is likely to be novel in one way. So far, that looks to have been a good assumption. Let's see what else it holds up on. There was always a lot of "We don't know enough. This could be the end of civilization" going around and I think we always knew enough. We did and we continue to.

<comment><USER46> Are you not aware of the high rates of cardiac issues seen longterm?

[https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-causes-heart-damage- hea...](https://www.livescience.com/covid-19-causes-heart-damage-healthy- people.html)

[https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns- about-l...](https://www.statnews.com/2020/07/27/covid19-concerns-about- lasting-heart-damage/)

<comment><USER47> From your first link: "However, exactly what these findings mean for patients' heart health in the long term is unclear, the authors said. The heart abnormalities seen in the study occasionally occur with other respiratory diseases such as influenza and may be temporary"

News has a motivation to sensationalize, i.e. only time will tell if this was a lot of panic over nothing or if 20% of the people who caught COVID will drop dead over the next 10 years.</comment></comment></comment>


Before patches were possible, how did console games deal with bugs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=976550

<comment><AUTHOR> Note that this thread was prompted by the massive QA issues in the biggest games last year (notably Assassin's Creed: Unity and Master Chief Collection).</comment>


Partnership agreement template for an LLC? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> So I've managed to get myself an LLC. I have a friend that is giving me $10,000 dollars. I'm giving him 2.5% of the company for an investment of $10,000. That's a valuation of $400,000, right?

We expect to be generating revenue pretty quickly. Does his 2.5% entitle him to 2.5% of the profits, after my partner and I draw salaries? Or does he get a a dividend that is 2.5% of the salaries we are drawing? We'd also like a clause for us to buy out his shares. What's a good price for that?

Googling for "partnership agreement" gives me a lot of results. Are any of these more suited to our situation? Thanks, I really appreciate the help.

I'll let you guys know as soon as we launch. In the meanwhile, I'm not comfortable sharing the idea because with a basic background in the medical/laboratory sciences anyone could duplicate what we're doing.

<comment><USER2> While you might get some good overall guidance here, I would recommend getting a consultation with a lawyer before acting on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Couple of points.

1\. Your valuation is correct and considering you only have an idea, its pretty darn good.

2\. The 2.5% of profits would come after the salaries. Salaries aren't profits. That said, you can't just pay all your profits out to you in salary. You will need to set that up ahead of time with his / her input.

3\. Lastly, just from an outsider perspective, your buyback clause comment makes it sound like you are being a bit greedy. You have an individual who you call your friend and who is giving you a good valuation and you are a) concerned about 2.5% share of the profits s/he will get (relative to your collective 97.5%) b) Trying to pull the shares out from under him whenever you like.

An investment is a partnership and it is, to say the least, bad karma to screw over a partner. He is risking his money for the upside. An upside comes at an acquisition or an IPO not a buyback from the founders.

If you don't want to give up equity, don't take money. If you need money, equity is what you trade. This will likely not be the last time you make this trade, so start getting comfortable with it. Still, it sounds like maybe you will be happier with all 100%.

All that said, get a lawyer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Quote: "Does his 2.5% entitle him to 2.5% of the profits, after my partner and I draw salaries?"

Sounds about right. However, with an LLC you can divide the profits anyway you like regardless of the ownership. For example, you can agree to have your investor get no profits at all for the first 2 years and then after that get, say, 10% of the profits (basically any percentage you agree on). Or, you can even be more creative such as having your investor get all the losses for the first two years (to offset his income from other sources and reduce his tax burden) and then get him to receive 2.5% of the profits after two years. You have full flexibility with an LLC, but consult a good attorney or accountant to make the best of it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Your friend is not automatically entitled to any cash just for being an investor. If he owns 2.5% of the company, it just means is that 2.5% of the business assets belong to him. If you operate the business for 50 years, he's won't _automatically_ get anything back, unless you structure the agreement that way. If you sell the business or close up shop, he is entitled to 2.5% of the (remaining) assets and cash.

Nolo Press has a bunch of great books to help you set up your organizational structure, and they include templates for your operating agreement. I was just browsing them in Borders last weekend. They are _awesome_. And they're like 20 or 30 bucks. :)</comment>


Wi-Fi Network Named "Al-Qaeda" Prompts LAX Plane to Make a U-Turn - <AUTHOR> http://m.laweekly.com/informer/2014/10/27/wi-fi-network-named-al-qaeda-prompts-lax-plane-to-make-a-u-turn

<comment><USER2> Non-mobile link: [http://www.laweekly.com/informer/2014/10/27/wi-fi-network- na...](http://www.laweekly.com/informer/2014/10/27/wi-fi-network-named-al- qaeda-prompts-lax-plane-to-make-a-u-turn)

Wow, that's just wow. Is this an overreaction, or are they just too afraid, that if something happens, then everyone will ask: "why did you start a plane, when there was a wifi network named Al-Qaeda"?</comment>


PayPal User Charged $4,000 for Mac OS X Lion Download - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389271,00.asp

<comment><USER2> sounds familiar: When I wanted to upgrade a SL Server and I already had a Lion client license, the App Store told me that I also need the Server License and whether I wanted to buy it.

That made sense like this and I said yes.

This gave me an error 500 and the recommendation to try again.

And again

And again

I got suspicious when the App Store told me that my credit card was declined and low and behold: Yes. Every error 500 charged me with a Lion client and a Lion server license until my Credit Card company's fraud detection locked my card.

The App Store has shown 7 instances of Lion and 6 instances of Lion Server in the purchased tab, but neither "Install" button actually worked (error 500).

To their credit, they refunded the purchases, but not without telling me in their ticket response that this is a very generous exception they are making this one time and that all app store purchases are final.

I guess they are just not quite there where they should be to sell an OS over only electronic means.

<comment><USER3> > this is a very generous exception they are making this one time and that all > app store purchases are final

Statements like this make me very glad I live in a country where such declarations are automatically fiction.

<comment><USER4> This can't be legal in many places. It certainly isn't here in the EU, and I find it hard to believe that most (if not all) US states don't have consumer protection regulations that cover this.

If the error is due to a fault in the system the customer should not be punished for that error.

I'm not an iStuff user at all at the moment, but would consider an iDevice if it were ever the right tool for the job at the right price. If they are going to try make the customers pay for faults like this (forcing the customer to know and quote relevant law/regulations to get the right thing done) then my attitude will move to never touching an iProduct for as long as I live and recommending friends/family/other take a similar stance.

<comment><USER3> I don't mean just from a fault perspective - if I buy something online in general I can get a refund later if I merely change my mind (although I don't know if this applies to purely digital purchases). In the UK, most of the times you see "No refunds", the sign in question has zero effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ok so the problem here is not that there is a bug in the payment processing. That shouldn't happen, but it does. The problem is that neither of these multi-billion dollar companies cares about this customer enough to suck up a $4000 error until it gets straightened out.

I've been a long time customer of both Apple and PayPal. It seems like Apple did eventually refund the purchases, although I would have expected them to do it faster. PayPal, on the other hand, literally does not give a shit about you or the fact that you can't eat until your transaction goes through their absurdly slow system.

Ever notice that Bank of America's ATMs can scan and process a check and give you money in 10 seconds, but PayPal takes 10 days?

<comment><USER6> To be fair, everything in the banking & money transfer world takes 2-3 days, and Paypal acts as a middleman, so an in => out would take 4-6 (business) days.

The only reason Bank of America's ATM gives you cash on the spot is it scans the check, "thinks" it is good, and BoA credits you cash. Paypal is not in the business of crediting anyone anything, not in the least because anybody can sign up for an account with almost no identification.

<comment><USER7> The 2-3 day wait isn't the case in the UK anymore. UK banks - under pressure from the government via the Office of Fair Trading - now process money transfers in half a day.

The point is that the transfer never required that long to process, but if a Bank (or PayPal) can hold on to your money for a few extra days then it's a few more days of interest on the money for them.

[http://www.ukpayments.org.uk/faster_payments_service/backgro...](http://www.ukpayments.org.uk/faster_payments_service/background/)

<comment><USER8> In the US they also hold it that long so that if you overdraft they can retroactively reorder your transactions largest first so that you will get the maximum number of overdraft fees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I didn't realise Apple accepted PayPal, when did they get this integration?

<comment><USER10> The problem must be on Apple's side anyway. I was lucky and only got charged trice and I did not use Paypal, just my App Store account. I hope to get extra charges back without doing anything, because technically money are still on my CC account just "frozen". After some time they are "unfrozen" automatically if merchant does not claim them. I see Apple already took it's share (I had three entries with the same amount, now only two are left) so the rest should stay in the account and be unfrozen in a few days. Still not funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Wow.. Apple, you go, sometimes, a little too far in giving us "the user experience".

</comment><comment><USER12> 502 it went through, 504 try once more.

<comment><USER13> That's a reddit failure, not some kind of global rule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> PCmag.com = FoxNews of online reporting.

</comment><comment><USER14> Slightly similar to this: I recently jailbroke my iPad 2 and installed a cracked application through installous. When you do that, legitimate updates to your cracked applications appear in the app store. Somehow, through some sort of bug, I was actually charged for the app when I accidentally clicked "update all" in the app store. It never asked me for my password (possibly because I had input it recently enough) or asked for a confirmation on the purchase. I didn't even notice it had been purchased until the iTunes receipt came in my email the next day.

<comment><USER15> Piracy is not justification.You should not pirate apps in first place. you are breaking law here.

Now since you were using the app & enjoying all its benefits -- its developers are full rights to get paid for their labour & hard work.

<comment><USER16> So because he stole the app, the developer is allowed to steal money from him? What kind of logic is that?

<comment><USER17> The developer didn't steal anything. At most, Apple did. But there's probably wording in the agreement about services for payment and Apple taking the payment. Their reasoning likely being he took the service, so they took the money.

Legal? Probably not, but he has no recourse. But it reminds me of when people call the cops and say "arrest that person; they stole my drugs!"

<comment><USER14> I'm not demanding recourse, and I'm not even saying that I am justified in pirating an app. However, I often pirate apps to try them, and the vast majority that I try are terrible, and I uninstall them almost immediately. Therefore, legality aside, I'm not ethically concerned that I'm "stealing" potential revenue from the app developer if I only use their app for 5 minutes.

My point is, this was definitely a bug in the app store, because before any charge there should be a clear modal confirmation dialog (and there normally is).

<comment><USER17> Honestly I've got no problem with what you did. I'm just saying that they probably covered themselves in the legalese.

For instance, my cable company recently shut off my Internet due to excessive DMCA complaints. They told me they had a "four strike" policy. They cut me after three. I could threaten a lawsuit, even if it would be silly, but that would potentially open me up for other legal attacks, so I'm forced to walk away.

So all I'm saying is that they got you in a tight spot, and they've probably paid enough lawyers to make sure they're covered. Their hardware detected software, so they charged you for it. I find it hard to imagine they haven't written it up to cover themselves.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Remind HN: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/c1/wellkept_gardens_die_by_pacifism <comment><AUTHOR> I repost this because of obvious trolls like this getting upvotes - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2364884></comment>


Why Chef? - <AUTHOR> http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-chef.html <comment><USER2> I am a co-founder of a small SaaS company. We recently decided to make the investment of upgrading our infrastructure setup process from "Hey David go do that" to being 100% chef-based.

I managed the process, and consider it a success. However, here are some points I would make:

1\. It took a long time. Let's be generous and say it took 2-3 man-months of time to set up 4-5 different projects and roles. This was probably 10-20x what it would've taken to set up the servers directly. Why? Learning curve with chef for both our programmer and sysadmin. Figuring out how to make config changes automatable and idempotent.

2\. The scale you get from chef is bigger than managing production infrastructure. We now use chef for not only production deployment, but also dev. Once paired with Vagrant, we are able to get new devs up with a complete stack in about 10m of keyboard time. If we need to upgrade to some new version of something, only one person has to deal with the sysadmin; everyone else can just update their box.

3\. I think it will save money in the long-term. A good sysadmin is $100/hr+. Unfortunately you have to pay that rate whether they're doing architecture, security review, or just editing text files. With chef, a non-sysadmin resource can generate recipes with just architectural advice and review from a sysadmin. This is much more efficient, especially for small shops where a sysadmin is an expensive and not immediately available resource.

<comment><USER3> A good sysadmin costs $200k/year? Or do you have a contract sysadmin? Because that number sounds way, way, way high.

(We recently hired a sysadmin "+").

<comment><USER2> We've been in business for about 8 years and use about ~100 sysadmin hours a year.

I interviewed several sysadmins over the years and no one that I deemed competent charged less than $100/hour.

I did find people charging as low as $50/hour but they didn't seem that great, or that reliable, or that available.

For me as well, you pretty much need to trust your sysadmin more than almost anyone else in your company (except people that can sign checks).

Trust comes at a premium.

I will yield that I don't like working with substandard people. I hate having to manage people and am willing to pay a premium for people I trust to work on the right things with the right skills in a timely manner. Besides, it doesn't scale. One of my business goals is to never have middle management.

<comment><USER3> You'd be more convincing if you didn't imply that anyone who worked for less than $100/hr was "substandard". For full-time salaried, I assure you, $200k/yr is not the going rate for sysadmin.

<comment><USER4> You cant directly equate contract hourly rate with yearly salary. If you don't have the budget to hire a 100k a yr salary, you'll have to pay contract rates which could be over 100/hr

<comment><USER3> I buy that the valley is so hot right now that a sysadmin commands $100k/yr there, but they don't in Chicago, Seattle, or New York.

I'm not looking to argue so much as to inject some more data into the price point that was casually dropped on this thread earlier. I do not think the other guy overpaid for sysadmin; if he's got an amazing admin, great! I can see paying a premium for that.

Another point I'd like to raise is, if you're paying $100k/hr for sysadmin, and using them frequently, contracting instead of fulltiming sysadmin might be penny-wise-pound-foolish. But maybe not, if you're only paying $10,000/yr in sysadmin. We've used over 100 hours of admin in just the last couple weeks. A great hire; one we made "37signals-style", after realizing that doing all the sysadmin chores ourselves was subtly making us all miserable and ineffective.

Believe me, I know the difference between contracting rates and salary. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I agree with the author that Chef is an incredibly powerful tool and that it has numerous benefits over plain old bash. However, I'm reluctant to actually use it because of its dependencies. Chef relies on CouchDB, RabbitMQ, and Solr, and all of those have non-trivial dependencies as well. Then, with a stack like that, I worry about the overheard involved.

FWIW, Puppet's dependencies are much simpler. I don't know much about Chef vs Puppet, but I can say that from an installation and dependency maintenance POV, Puppet wins.

<comment><USER6> (disclosure, I work for Opscode.)

To be clear, those dependencies are required for running your own open source chef server.

You can use chef without the server, as chef-solo, or let Opscode run it for you in the form of Opscode Hosted Chef. We do make it easy to install Chef Server through Chef Solo itself, or with our Ubuntu/Debian apt repository.

<comment><USER7> I never understood what kind of person/company would trust a hosted chef.

The chef databags/cookbooks tend to contain rather sensitive information (ssh- keys, passwords). Handing all that stuff over to a third-party borders on criminal negligence to me.

<comment><USER8> So... should nobody use ec2? Or any host for that matter? Sooner or later you're going to have to trust some third-party.

<comment><USER7> There's a difference between trusting someone with your physical hardware and handing them your credentials on a silver plate.

There's also a pretty harsh difference between the security practices at Amazon and the practices that Opscode displays in their OSS-code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I have three fundamental issues with Chef;

1\. The node object ends up being two large, which leads to memory issues when a search returns more that 200 nodes (800MB of memory).

2\. Chef discourages declarative configuration.

3\. Chef lacks a remote trigger mechanism.

Issue one starts to kill you once you have a large number of nodes. Dedicating a quater of the available memory to configuration management seem like a poor financial choice. We've come up with work arounds at my company(generate files centrally, and distribute with chef remote_file syntax), but I still feel they are hacky.

Issue two is more serious. Reindexing on chef only occurs after a node has submitted its node object back to the chef server. This results in incomplete searches until a node successfully completes a run. If you wish to remove a node from a particular role or attribute from a host, you may have a hard time doing so until the next chef run completes.

Problem three is really a result of the expense of running chef. If the memory and CPU costs were lower, there wouldn't be any real issues running Chef more frequently. Some changes I need to go out immediately, some don't matter. I end up back in the world of the SSH loop too often with Chef.

<comment><USER6> 1\. We are working on making the search more performance and use less memory.

2\. Chef definitely does not discourage declarative configuration. Chef recipes include declarative resource for configuring your infrastructure. Since recipes _are_ an internal ruby dsl, there may be nondeclarative code in them.

3\. Chef itself doesn't have a remote trigger mechanism because the. Her run is all about configuring the local node. Nothing prevents you from using the ruby language in a recipe to hook up some kind of remote trigger though. People in the chef community are doing this with projects like Noah and Pylon.

Github.com/lusis/Noah Github.com/fujin/pylon

<comment><USER9> 1\. I understand that, and have heard that from you guys several times. The issue is the deserialization from JSON. The monkey patch solution I've see so far stores less data, essentially white listing the attributes for search. It sort of destroys the value of search.

2\. I should be more specific. Generally chef relies on the information that ohai provides, not with information enumerated by the administrator. There is a general assumption that the systems are properly configured, and chef is only furthering that, since the hosts provide most of the configuration details. (Yes, you could do stuff with data bags to address this issue.)

3\. Thanks for the links. I've not seen those projects previously. I've solved the issue for myself using a much lighter weight solution.

<comment><USER6> 1\. Yeah, the stop-gap "solution" is to white list a number of attributes in order to reduce the data set, because in the most common use case we see, there's only a few attributes that people _actually_ care about in the chef- client context. The node's run list, its IP address or FQDN. Really. That is the most common. For like, 90%+ of the use cases out there. Everyone has a unique snowflake and thats cool, but really, not that much.

2\. There's no assumption that systems are correctly configured other than they start from a baseline configuration in the most common use case. We have worked with several customers managing existing infrastructures of running systems that had an unknown baseline and Chef was able to automated the pieces they cared about.

Again with "most common use case."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this post should be titled Why Configuration Management?, with a subtext of using Chef as an example. The main points the author is making are true of CFEngine, Puppet, Chef, and other config management software. The question of Why Chef? can be answered very simply: because the author likes it. Which is a perfectly valid way to choose your tool chain, assuming the technical requirements are met.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote about that it the previous post, see her [http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.com/2011/10/puppet-vs-chef- fi...](http://devopsanywhere.blogspot.com/2011/10/puppet-vs-chef-fight.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Two reasons I'm wary of Chef wrt Puppet

1) the declarative vs imperative aspect

2) Chef's heavy dependencies

As a Ruby developer, I like Chef's Ruby DSL; but I somehow feel that its imperative DSL will lead to something similar to Bash Hell. I'd like to read more about the declarative properties of Puppet vs the imperative way of Chef, and why one should prefer one over the other.

Secondly, like some commenters before mention, Chef's dependencies seem quite excessive.

<comment><USER12> Chef is becoming more declarative as it grows.

The main difference with Chef is that it has imperative structure (i.e. ruby- based scripting) to fall back on, whereas Puppet forces you to go out to a script if you want to be imperative.

In the long run, it's arguable that a strict declarative structure has more interesting properties when dealing with query of status & handling changes or drifts rather than "stamping out a server".

Puppet has been great for me to detect and correct drift, for example, all the while ensuring pre-requisites are executed in the proper order. The tradeoff is that you have to think through the various dependencies at a detailed level, which can be difficult. An extreme analogy would be programming with a logic language vs. an imperative language.

My experience has been Puppet is growing in popularity with enterprises, not just web companies, and it seems Puppet Labs is targeting this audience more than Opscode is, comparing customer lists. I'm not quite sure why this is - could be attitude - Chef is more about "get it done now", Puppet more about "get it right for the long haul", but even that is a caricature.

<comment><USER13> (disclaimer - founder of Puppet)

We at Puppet Labs have always focused on building tools that anyone can use, not just the best hackers in the world. We've got some of the best sysadmins working with us, but we punish them by making them write software that even people who aren't the best sysadmins can use.

So yeah, we get a ton of enterprise adoption as a result, but we've also got a ton of web companies using Puppet. It's true that in the Rails web startup, we're not always the number 1 choice, though. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For < 50 servers, can anyone comment on my choice of fabric and cuisine as an alternative to chef?

<comment><USER15> The number of different configurations is far more important than the number of boxes, no? If you have 1000 completely identical boxes (e.g. big compute cluster), a shell script that sets up a freshly installed box to your requirements is quite possibly sufficient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been working with juju <https://juju.ubuntu.com/> (a new Ubuntu server tool) and been very happy with it. It does not directly compete with puppet/chef for enforcing a server configuration however. Juju operates at the higher level of "services" that can be deployed to a cloud, to hardware, or to local LXC containers! It's basically like "apt-get" except for servers. The dev team hangs out at #juju on freenode irc

</comment><comment><USER17> I cringe at CouchDB. Gimme good, old PostgreSQL.</comment>


What's Behind Technological Hype? - <AUTHOR> https://issues.org/behind-technological-hype/ <comment><USER2> I fear the article suffers from the myopia of pre-conceived notions of what constitutes innovation. Every generation imagines the future to be mere extension of the present. But innovation doesn't happen that way. Technological development is inherently fractal, the obvious directions of progress are not necessarily the most interesting ones. In the 1950s, the perceived future was all about nuclear power, and supersonic flight, turned out that while we didn't get supersonic passenger planes, air travel became affordable to a large fraction of the planet because of amazing advances in power efficiency of jet engines. In the late 60s the future was going to be in space. We didn't get a moon base, but we got a global computer network that changed how people lived and worked. We got containerized transport, that dramatically improved global trade and pulled millions out of poverty. Yes, the world as a whole is wealthier per capita than it was in the 70s. So innovation not just what some government think tank or corporate strategy group think it should be. It may well be that future developments in computation come from breakthroughs in mathematics rather than improvements in semi-conductors. Innovation comes from comes from many places and its a mugs game to predict how it will evolve. The best that any society can do is to encourage as much of it as can be sustained by its level of economic development. Let chaos and lady luck determine what comes next.

<comment><USER3> I like your idea of "technological development being fractal". Fractals get more complex by zooming in. On a high level we sat in front of a screen 20 years ago and probably will sit in front of a similar screen 20 years from now. But zooming in we have so much more content and abilities on a computer.

And I bet we will sit on chairs even in 200 years. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm somewhat qualified to talk about AI and to call it hype is itself hype. As in, it's looking at outliers and trying to understand the market based on them alone. It's deciding that because there's no glamorous reality shifting changes there must be no impact at all. For example, IBM failed but every pharma company has a decent bunch of PhDs building machine learning models for a variety of reasons. Those models aren't as headline catching but rather they improve certain unglamorous business processes by X%. Taken as a whole that adds up to a lot of value for those companies. Facebook probably makes tens of billions per year due to AI. In a way AI has become mundane and doesn't require specialized centralized companies to be implemented which makes fewer headlines.

edit: I also suspect it's a bias due to people being used to traditional industries. To make a new drug you need a lab, infrastructure, equipment, well trained experts and so on. Lot's of investment so it's centralized and visible. To make an AI model requires some data, a laptop and an internet connection.

<comment><USER5> > every pharma company has a decent bunch of PhDs building machine learning > models for a variety of reasons. Those models aren't as headline catching > but rather they improve certain unglamorous business processes by X%. Taken > as a whole that adds up to a lot of value for those companies.

This!

Although I am not an expert in AI field or AI-based methods, I have been working as an s/w engineer / plumber / fireman in projects deploying some AI- based methods and models in production. These methods are nothing catchy, that would unlikely get into headlines, nothing like self-driving cars, etc. But they are just pretty effective applied in a quite well defined scope improving parts of existing processes. These would be considered by many as 'boring' and are related e.g. with improving the data acquisition processes, such as, improving quality of text extraction from images or improving recognition of named entities from free text by using a tailored neural network model in the system. Nothing big nor fancy, but for the business it makes a significant difference.

So, on one hand, yes, there's a lot of hype for applying AI-based methods for just anything and wanting to show to investors using the keywords for getting more $$$. But on the other hand, having a well scoped use-case with clear understanding on what method and why, it can bring pretty good results. However, as a community, we are still trying to catch-up with all the recent advancements in AI-based field, and trying to understand when to use XYZ and why over well established 'classical' approaches. These are / will be another tools in our toolbox and this fact cannot be ignored.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A lot of this is vagueness and hand-waving, with few specific numbers. Solar technology, for example, has so consistently outpaced forecasts that it's almost a joke:

[https://16iwyl195vvfgoqu3136p2ly-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/wp-...](https://16iwyl195vvfgoqu3136p2ly-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp- content/uploads/2018/10/iea-prediction-2017-update4.png)

and costs continue to fall steadily:

[https://www.thesolarnerd.com/blog/solar- pricing-2019/images/...](https://www.thesolarnerd.com/blog/solar- pricing-2019/images/price-of-solar.png)

but this is handwaved away as "ignorant of underlying economics", even though the economics themselves have changed massively and continue to do so. (Anyone even vaguely familiar with the industry knows about the difference between baseload and peak power; a local newspaper might mess this up in their solar story, but it's hard to believe that any serious analyst would.)

<comment><USER7> The world's fossil fuel dependency is actually up from the early 2000s, and about 3% lower than in the 90s. (from roughly 91% to 88%).

So even though Solarpower is growing relatively fast, it's not having a big impact on the structure of the energy sector.

If you want more hard data you should actually pick up the book mentioned in the article, Gordon's excellent _The Rise and Fall of American Growth_. Otherwise, anemic economic growth around the world and diminishing returns on science actually very intuitively show that the author is right. Total factor productivity in the UK for example has not gone up at all in over 10 years.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it's like rating a hedge fund's performance -- doesn't matter how much its portfolio grew by but how much MORE it grew relative to the growth rate of the market. If solar is not outpacing the growth of coal, oil, and gas, then it's not helping.

<comment><USER9> True for the timeframe under-analysis, but not necessarily for long-term trends if there are changing fundamentals.

One of the interesting things that has happened with solar is that subsidy has decreased. So even if the composition is remaining static for new development, if we now have sustainable solar compared the the historically (economically) unsustainable version that required government intervention, that was an accomplishment. The counterfactual is not stable composition of generative sources but one with renewables decreasing because the political will waned to continue subsidy.

<comment><USER8> I suppose the glass is not completely half empty. It would be great if subsidies for fossil fuels were also decreased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like this article very much. As someone who makes a living from R&D funding into hyped technologies, this made me do some amount of introspection.

AI, however much we love it, and however good computers are at chess and go, has done relatively little to increase productivity in already existing processes. Yes, it's nice to tell apart cats from dogs with F1=0.98.. but, what bushiness actually added image classification into their processes and made money out of it? Furthermore, as any one searching for specific stuff on Google and being frustrated by synonyms being substituted or search terms being ranked in importance, can tell you, F1=0.98 isn't enough to really outsource human "intelligent" work onto computers.

The same goes for big data.. yes, we love our fancy Sparks and Airflows and Kafkas, yes, I've pushed to build "big data" pipelines several times.. yes, fancy dashboards can come up. But any increase in productivity or quality of life could have also been achieved with shell scripts and a bit of patience. Uber your say? they use big data to foo and to bar...yes, but not in real time, for real money making purposes: even if you ignore the fact that they are still in the negatives, the computations that have to be done real fast for their service to be usable, are all "small" as in, they-can-be-done-in-a- mobile-phone small.

<comment><USER11> > AI, however much we love it, and however good computers are at chess and go, > has done relatively little to increase productivity in already existing > processes.

Is that true?

Uber's ETA prediction is, to me, a very impactful and technologically impressive application of ML.

Recommendation engines--from Netflix/Spotify to paid advertising platforms-- seem to be pretty powerful.

Image classifiers, from automated tagging to monitoring solutions, seem to have made a big impact. This isn't just Facebook suggested tags or whatever, Wildlife Protection Services recently doubled their detection rates of poachers throughout nature reserves by introducing ML.

And what about smartphones? Speech interfaces and conversational assistants are a standard part of every flagship phone now. Mobile cameras use ML to improve images without upgrading hardware.

I agree that there is a lot of snake oil AI nonsense out there, but I think it's a bit of a false dilemma to deciding whether or not machine learning is "valuable" by evaluating the over-promises of sales teams. The reality is that almost all of the most popular apps on your phone (Uber, Lyft, Maps, Gmail, Spotify, Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) all incorporate ML.

<comment><USER10> Indeed, ML is vastly deployed, I do not doubt that. And maybe those "AI- powered" companies are making money, or making lives better.

But I was referring explicitly to _existing_ processes. Your poacher detection example is a good one, there was a process (based on some other tech/skill/k9 units?)and then it was improved with AI. My assertion is that there are very few such examples.

Contrast that to new enterprises that use AI/ML. Of course, if you create a whole new market and corner it, whatever technology you use might seem like the recipe of your success. But in the case of ride hailing apps, they created a brand new market of taxis-called-directly-by-the-user (and still not making money), Facebook created a whole new market of personalized matchmaking between people and ads, etc. Yes, they are kings in their markets, yes, they use "AI", but what portion of their market dominance is due to the use of that specific technology? I would say close to 0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Simple enough... because hype is what gets funded. You tell people about the vast engineering challenges that lie ahead, and they'll term you a downer and not fund you. Ironically, this policy ends people like working for such "haloed" geniuses.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Online tech-hyping articles are now driven by the same dynamics as fake > news.

Well that's something to think about. I do wonder how all the tech "trends" that i read here begin

</comment><comment><USER14> Good article. I feel like there are a few unstated "elephants" in the room that the author briefly outlined but could be explored more:

quote: "A comprehensive study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the number of researchers needed to develop new drugs, improved crop yields, and better microprocessors has risen substantially over the past 50 years. Other studies have found that research and development (R&D) productivity has fallen across a wide variety of industries, with lower growth in corporate revenues per research dollar than in the past, and that the impact of Nobel Prize–winning research has also declined. From a given amount of effort (or dollars), less knowledge and innovation arise. Our optimism about the economic prospects of new technologies and innovation should be going down, not up."

Is this, perhaps, also a product of system complexity? maturity and limits of certain processes? guidance and management seeking goals that are de-coupled from reality?

Declining VC investments in, what I read as, CORE TECH. We are so busy funding some website social convenience service that we forgot about the chips powering it, the power powering it, etc. and rapidly hit EOL on processes.

Perhaps real innovation requires

1) actual major efforts, efforts that our economic system doesn't prioritize enough. there's a million monkeys happy to use your platform for trivial mc- innovations, but you have to slog it out and build said platform first.

2) a deliberate plan, path, trajectory. (I hate to use the manhattan project as a good example for anything, perhaps Arpanet is a little less ugly of an example, in terms of impact.)

Favorite Quote: "The strategic management discipline places far more emphasis on capturing value through managing revenue streams (e.g., advertising versus subscriptions or product sales) and the scope of activities (e.g., the degree of vertical integration) than on creating value through high-performing, low- cost products that improve productivity in industries. Currently the most popular method of capturing value is with so-called platforms that organize an industry around a single product or service (think of Airbnb, for example, which offers a platform by which homeowners can rent out rooms), often enabling the platform provider to capture most of an industry's profits. Not only is value creation clearly more important for increasing productivity than is value capture, it is not a coincidence that most of the current money- losing start-ups (e.g., Uber and Lyft) emphasize platforms in their announcements and IPO filings, building from the hype that business schools created."

Which of course leads to me saying: "there's very little incentive to build a platform that's useful for other actors. there's very little incentive to respect and treat users like humans"

<comment><USER15> Hype comes from a promise to increase subjective well-being, while ultimately failing to do so, at least in the short term. But this definition should not discount the long term potential.

What is needed is an actual increase in subjective well-being, which is frustratingly diverse, subjective, and what you touched on in your last sentence. Hype does the opposite, it works to decouple capital from labor.

Unfortunately, until western society can find a better balance between capital, democracy, and global relations, entropy will outpace innovation, always.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Rational expectations?

I mean I can list a 100 points to prove what a stupid article this is but I am too busy picking out parts to build this super computer for like $1200...

People with the mindset of this article need to get some antidepressants and try working out. You are obviously not putting things in the proper context.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a bubble bubble going on? - <AUTHOR>

I am sick of hearing of 'Tech bubble', 'Education bubble', 'this bubble', 'that bubble'. When will the bubble bubble break and we return back to the normal use of the word for only true bubbles? <comment><USER2> Most economists agree that a bubble can only be identified in hindsight. So the only true bubble is one that's been popped.</comment>