Promising Covid-19 treatment using convalescent serum therapy fast-tracked - <AUTHOR> https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/04/08/arturo-casadevall-blood-sera-profile <comment><USER2> I read this last night: [https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coro...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coronavirus- low-antibody-levels-raise-questions-about) It's not peer reviewed so might not be valid or entirely accurate but worrying nevertheless.

<comment><USER3> Yes, it was already mentioned today in the update to parliament here. Apparently - as with other respiratory viral infections - if you don't get it really bad then you may not be immune. That's a pretty fine line there. This would explain some of the more puzzling positive / negative / positive test sequences.

<comment><USER4> Half-informed layman questions:

If this 30% recovered don't have antibodies, how _did_ they beat the infection?

Does the immune system have some other mechanism to defat a virus?

Or does the antibody production taper off very fast for some people?

Or can the virus just die out by itself somehow?

<comment><USER5> There is the innate immune system, and the adaptive immune system. If I understand correctly pathogen specific antibodies are created by the adaptive immune system, so maybe if the innate deals with the virus quickly the adaptive is not triggered.

There was a good TWIV podcast talking about this.

<comment><USER6> If your innate immune system beats it, does that mean you're effectively already "immune" and are unlikely to develop serious COVID-19 disease when you catch the virus again, or was it just luck?

<comment><USER7> Probably luck. Given a much more potent viral load, it is more than likely the same patient can be infected again.

<comment><USER6> There just doesn't seem to be any good news anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The New York Blood Center continues to appeal for plasma donors via a form on this page, "Convalescent Plasma COVID-19 Donor Request Form":

[https://www.nybloodcenter.org/donate-blood/convalescent- plas...](https://www.nybloodcenter.org/donate-blood/convalescent-plasma- covid-19-donor-request-form/)

<comment><USER9> Many in NYC were unable to get a test. I was extremely sick mid-march and was unable to get a test because it was before New York started ramping up capacity. NY blood center requires a positive test result before they'll consider you for plasma donation.

Mt Sinai's study also accepts people that did not get tested for covid-19 at the time of infection. They will accept plasma and then test it for antibodies, which has the handy side effect of telling you if you already had covid-19. I'm scheduled to donate there next week.

[https://redcap.mountsinai.org/redcap/surveys/?s=RCC7FNHK3Y](https://redcap.mountsinai.org/redcap/surveys/?s=RCC7FNHK3Y)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work at a publishing company and I have been seeing more researcher interest in this paper recently from 2010 - Zn2+ inhibits coronavirus and arterivirus RNA polymerase activity in vitro and zinc ionophores block the replication of these viruses in cell culture - [https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/j...](https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1001176)

———— [https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/a048aadd-e0c3-3870-bf5d-6...](https://www.mendeley.com/catalogue/a048aadd-e0c3-3870-bf5d-668abab26cf7/)

<comment><USER11> Have there been observed correlations with zinc deficient patients?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Damn. I was thinking just a couple days ago that serum therapy might be a potential treatment avenue. For whatever reason, the plot of a Dragonriders of Pern novel came to mind, and I realized the similarity of the situation to the COVID-19 pandemic, and found myself wondering if the solution there wouldn't be workable here in the real world.

<Spoilers>

In Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, a viral disease (a flu strain IIRC[1]) jumps from horses to people, and quickly begins spreading. A quarantine is implemented, but too late, and the illness becomes an epidemic. And this is Very Bad, because the dragonriders and everyone else find themselves with people falling ill and dying just in time for Thread to return.[2]

One of the master healers is infected in the line of treating others. Once he recovers, he realizes that his blood can be used to produce a serum to treat others. And so begins the work of producing the serum and logistical problems of getting it everywhere needed fast enough.

One thing we have over the fictional Pernese peoples is that we have a more advanced medical medical establishment that could probably produce a serum quicker and more precisely, with less secondary infection risk. (Although, a brief shortage of blood-work needles wouldn't surprise me.) And while Pernese dragons can teleport, they also tire, whereas our planes and trucks need only refueling, and each does not require a unique psychically-bonded pilot/driver to operate at all -- round-the-clock shift work is possible.

</Spoilers>

And I just realized, I recalled almost all of those details from memory without the aid of Wikipedia. I read that book back in middle school. Damn.

[1] I might be wrong about this detail. I know I am recalling this from an interview that I read, but I might be mis-remebering. The author might have been stating she took inspiration from the 1918 flu pandemic.

[2] If you're unfamiliar with the Dragonriders of Pern books, the general premise is that periodically, "Thread", a hostile organism which eats all organic matter it can reach, falls from the sky. The dragons and their riders protect everyone else by burning the Thread from the sky before it makes landfall.

</comment><comment><USER13> The Red Cross is soliciting potential plasma donors via a form at [https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/dlp/plasma- donati...](https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/dlp/plasma-donations- from-recovered-covid-19-patients.html)

They're currently working to establish antibody testing, and require potential donors to be at least 14 days from end of symptoms, but they will still accept your contact information and relevant details for later contact.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b Assuming this treatment is viable, hospitals should be sending discharged patients home with the website and number to call for donating after recovery. I think most people will not see this or even know about it.

<comment><USER4> They really should follow up with the patients 14 days later and badger them to donate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Dr. Peter Hotez has been proposing clinical trials of convalescent serum therapy for several weeks now. If it works it could potentially be used both to treat infected patients, and reduce the risk of infection for healthcare workers.

[https://twitter.com/peterhotez/status/1239387184681177090?la...](https://twitter.com/peterhotez/status/1239387184681177090?lang=en)

<comment><USER15> I don't know if Dr. Hotez is directly involved, but St. Luke's, which is a Houston-based hospital heavily affiliated with BCM/TCH (where Dr. Hotez works), started trialing this in patients a few days ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few questions on serum therapy:

1\. Do you need the same blood type as the donor?

2\. Can other infectious diseases spread via an infusion from an infected donor, ie. hiv, hepatitis?

<comment><USER17> bio undergrad so take w/grain of salt 1\. No, because serum does not contain any cells that have the markers of a bloodtype. You're just transferring the antibodies pretty much. When you spin down a blood sample in a centrifuge, the bottom pellet contains blood cells, the supernatant is plasma. From that supernatant, when you get rid of clotting factors, the remainder is just soluble molecules and antibodies. 2\. Maybe. Serum can also contain viruses, but I assume the serum will be treated with chemicals to "clean it up" and just isolate antibodies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I really, really wish there could be a clear answer on at least this one basic thing that one would think (as a layman) to be fairly understood about viruses and immune response: Having had a SARS COVID 2 infection and assuming the virus hasn't mutated in the way that influenza does periodically to keep needing new vaccines, does or does not your body gain bloody immunity for some time after recovery? From everything I've know to date, the absolute normal, standard thing is that yes, being sick with something viral that doesn't cause your death gives you at least a certain period of months or usually years of immunity to it unless it mutates enough to re-attack without being recognized immediately. Is this not correct? For smallpox it applied, for chicken pox it does, for measles it mostly does for many years, likewise for many viruses for which there are vaccines. We even get immunity from the flu once we've had it for at least some months to a year or two. So why would Covid 2 be different?

<comment> T-hawk Short answer: recovering from Covid-19 probably does give immunity, based on all the precedents you mention, but we can't prove it for sure yet because not enough time has elapsed and no sufficiently rigorous studies have been done.

Of course viral antibodies persist for some amount of time, they don't disappear immediately upon clearing the virus. What we don't know is anything about the shape of that persistence. Is it days or weeks or years? Does it decline linearly, or exponentially (as a half-life), or on some other schedule? What kind of variance between people is there? How much does it vary based on all the other factors, like other health and immunological conditions, or re-exposure to the virus? This is all what we don't know yet, but need to before we can make assumptions regarding herd immunity to start lifting lockdowns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> From episode 594 of _This Week in Virology_ [1]:

Vincent Racaniello: _We have a bunch of emails and correspondence about the use of convalescent sera, and Frank, for example, who 's a professor at Misericordia University, said "Why aren't we using antisera from recovered patients to treat infected people?" and we have some email from Ed Niles in a bit, but I want to just say that yesterday the FDA approved this kind of treatment for serious infections on an emergency basis. So if you have a very serious or life-threatening infection you can apply to the FDA for what's called emergency investigational drug application and you can get convalescent serum, which means serum from someone who's recovered from the infection, is checked to make sure there's nothing else -- no other viruses -- in it, and it can be given to you and we know from previous experience with other infections that this can work._

Rich Condit: _The idea here is that someone who has recovered from the disease has antibodies to the virus, in this particular case the SARS-CoV-2, and so if you give them intravenously this preparation that has these antibodies in it, presumably that can latch on to virus that 's infecting you and those pathogen antibody complexes will be disposed of appropriately in your body. This what's called, comes under the general umbrella of passive immunization, which you're giving antibodies from some other source which will last you for some period of time and it can be up to weeks or months, actually (we've been through this before), as opposed to active immunization where you mount your own._

Racaniello: _Rich, you had some correspondence with Ed Niles. Why don 't you..._

Condit: _Yeah, he 's obsessed with this. [laughter] Ah.. let me see here, we haven't highlighted this but I'll clip through it. This came to me, I forwarded it to everybody. "I listened to the first part of TWiV today, through the passive transfer comments," passive transfer being what we were just talking about, passive immunization, "It was claimed that passive transfer was first used in Lhasa in 1968. Smallpox docs shouldn't be short- changed in this regard. VIG, which is vaccinia immunoglobilin, was used a decade earlier. I went to a meeting in 2009 where several smallpox docs talked about their experiences trying a host of putative anti-pox drugs and the impact on their patients. One had tears recalling the impact treating sick patients with untested and unproven drugs. I understand the urge to try something, but there are limits."_

Condit: _Ok. So Ed, as background, worked for BARDA for a while. I forget what the acronym stands for, but it 's a government agency that was born out of the..._

Alan Dove: _I think it was Biodefense Advanced Research and Development Agency, or something like that._

Condit: _There you go. And, he, so he saw a lot of grants having to do with smallpox, anti-pox viral drugs and etc, so he 's pretty up on this, and the vaccinia immunoglobilin would be part of that. He's referring to the 60's and before when the global smallpox eradication campaign went forward, and one of the things that was used was the vaccinia immunoglobilin. VIG is, was, prepared by two companies under contract with the US government from pooled serum taken from vaccinies, mostly military at this point. We have 100,000 doses in the stockpile. However, 25 doses have been used in some cases to clear vaccination complications. Provides a link to an article which provides some background for the practicalities of preparing and using coronavirus immunoglobilin if we get to that. "It helped remind me of what we were thinking about 15 years ago. Seems like a lifetime. On another note, pooled monoclonal antibodies have proven to be effective against pox viruses in animal models. Unfortunately this is an expensive way to go," and suggest contacting our friend Mike Bershlinsky (sp?) for looking in more detail. He attached an article from an old friend of ours, Rico Wittick (sp?), since deceased. It summarizes the prep and use of vaccinia immunoglobilin over the decades. Ok. So this is like a review. He correctly refers to a handful of reported anecdotal applications of vaccinia immunoglobilin against smallpox. "I don't know that true controlled studies have been done at this point. By 2011 there were none, even with the compassionate uses of vaccinia immunoglobilin ST-246," which is, was, an experimental anti-pox drug, now approved, "and Senovavir. It was never clear which, if any of them had a positive effect. You need controlled trials. In each case the patient cleared and survived. Controlled studies are hard to come by. So I'm not a big fan of VIG, vaccinia immunoglobilin, and if anyone wants an antibody approach to SARS-CoV-2 they may as well go directly to monoclonals and do the right set of studies. Of course this will take time. Alternatively, if you have other tools in the toolbox, maybe a convalescent serum study is warranted. Any volunteers? Keep the faith."_

Racaniello: _Well, that 's exactly what the FDA is doing. They are doing a convalescent antibody study in case, for prevention. The emergency use is not for prevention, it's for very sick people._

Dove: _Right._

Racaniello: _Because.. So, Brianne, what could go wrong if you gave someone anti... SARS-CoV-2 antibodies?_

Brianne Barker: _Well, if we are imagining that there are no other viruses and nothing else there, there are some situations where antibodies and antigens can bind together and get sort of stuck in places, like in some cappilaries and some areas of the skin and kidney and lead to something that in class I call a type-3 hypersensitivity reaction, but really it 's something called serum sickness or it's kind of similar to farmer's lung that we see in a few different people. So sometimes we can see some issues there where people will make a response to those antibodies that they're getting from other people, because they are technically foreign proteins that you are injecting in to someone._

[1] - [http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-594/](http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-594/) (about 23 minutes in to the program)

</comment><comment><USER20> Post this again when it's not on a university PR site.</comment>


The effect of  size on sexual attractiveness - <AUTHOR> http://cartesianproduct.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/its-official-size-does-matter-yes-the-size-of-that/

<comment><USER2> These folks showed women a bunch of pictures of naked men and asked them which they liked best. This is beyond cargo-cult science.

<comment><USER3> Why?

Is attraction something that science shouldn't investigate?

<comment><USER4> It is, but Evo-Psych methodology leaves a lot to be desired.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The abstract is here:

<http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/04/03/1219361110>

...on PNAS.

/smirk

</comment><comment><USER6> |----> O:</comment>


Mac Pro petition gaining steam on Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57441468-37/mac-pro-petition-gaining-steam-on-facebook/?tag=rtcol;dis <comment><USER2> Wow, they have 6300 likes!?</comment>


Prosthetic Fingers That Grab Gracefully - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/business/11novel.html

<comment><USER2> I think another reason why robotic limbs have a tendency to look unnatural is that often they'll move at a constant rate of speed - unlike an actual limbs that accelerate, move at X speed, then decelerate.

This is important for UI designers/developers to keep in mind because the same thing will make any animation look unnatural. Most UI frameworks have animation support for the penner easing equations and you should definitely use them. Its something that it is easy to tell that something "isn't right", but its hard to tell exactly what it is.</comment>


RIM to support iPhones, Androids; opens up its secure network - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/04/03/rim-opens-network.html

<comment><USER2> Here are more specifics from another article.

"BlackBerry Mobile Fusion includes RIM's software for managing, securing, and updating BlackBerry devices as well as tools for managing Android and iOS devices running RIM's BlackBerry Fusion Client app. After a 60-day trial, the software starts at $99 per user, or $4 per user per day, with volume discounts availabe [sic]." \- [http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/04/03/blackb...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/04/03/blackberry- maker-to-manage-iphones-ipads-android-devices/)

This is definitely an interesting strategy, although I seriously wonder if the same trust that's put into a full Blackberry stack will translate to _just_ some software, regardless of the technology behind it.

<comment><AUTHOR> It wasn't really what I was hoping for but it's a start. My expectations are for BlackBerry to open their BBM network for other companies.</comment></comment>


What I learned by bringing down LinkedIn.com - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/13/what-i-learned-by-bringing-down-linkedin-com/ <comment><USER2> A great read, thanks for sharing. I've been a junior front-ender for two and a half months now, it's not much but I've been working extra hours daily and on weekends and already had to taste some stressful situations. A lot of us juniors are writing bad code and it helps a lot not to put the blame on one person but look for ways how to help each other and fix the problems. I didn't think teamwork is so important in coding.</comment>


Ask HN: Trying to understand a high latency scenario - <AUTHOR>

This is a personal issue, but I'm hoping you guys can share some more general principles:
I recently moved to San Diego and it took a while to unpack the router, so we hooked a laptop directly to the cable modem, and, as promised, enjoyed a blazing fast 30 mbps connection. After a few days, I found the router, and plugged it in. The connection suddenly took forever. 20 seconds on average to load a page. Speedtest showed 20 mbps a latency of 1.1 seconds. When I ran mtr, the ping times were consistently between 0.9 and 1.6 seconds.
I was using an overclocked WRT54G v 5 (250 MHz) with DDWRT firmware, so I changed to a factory WRT54G v8 (240 MHz), which did no better. I went back to a direct connection, and the problem resolved (latency by mtr: 50-90 ms). I bought an AirPort Extreme last week (1.2 GHz), and ping times are still super slow (about 1 second). Changing DNS servers (internal, Time Warner, Google, Level 3) did nothing.
The modem is a Motorola surfboard 5101.
I'm not asking for troubleshooting (although Time Warner's folks have proven useless), but I am curious: why would my network latency as measured by mtr skyrocket with a router inserted, regardless of which router it is? <comment><USER2> Do you know that these routers work fine on other people's networks?

Did you see different results in router latency when you connected via wired, vice wireless? (Sorry if you answered it -- your question had a lot of info in it, and I couldn't see if this was addressed)

<comment><AUTHOR> The routers worked fine on Cox in Virginia and Louisiana. Wired and wireless are essentially the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The first thing that I would check would be the cables. Do you always use the same cable when plugging the laptop into the cable modem? Because when you're adding the router in you're also adding a second cable.

<comment><USER4> Also, if you use the modem with cable and the router wireless, it is effectively the same thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have run mtr from wired and wireless clients, no difference.</comment></comment></comment>


Watchdog: FAA failing to ensure pilots are trained to fly manually - <AUTHOR> http://thehill.com/policy/transportation/265527-study-faa-failing-to-make-sure-pilots-are-trained-to-fly-manually <comment><USER2> They're too busy fighting tooth and nail against letting people who are on drugs like Lexapro fly without a long and expensive fight. Why yes, I am bitter.

<comment><USER3> And forcing student pilots to get background checks (by the TSA, what could possibly go wrong) before flying solo.

<comment><USER4> Is this requirement only applies to international students or to everyone?

<comment><USER5> It currently applies to international students, but will apply to everyone starting on April 1, 2016.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Air France 447 is another example of when an unexpected transition to manual controls caused a crash. There's a good story on autopilot and automation more generally at: [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/29/427467598/episo...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/29/427467598/episode-642-the- big-red-button)

There are pros to automation - even if the transition to manual causes problems, overall autopilot can be safer than manual.

<comment><USER7> Interesting you should mention that, as today I just watched Gerald Jay Sussman's NYCLisp talk, in which he discusses it starting at 29:00.

[https://vimeo.com/151465912](https://vimeo.com/151465912)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Url changed from [http://gizmodo.com/u-s-pilots-forget-how-to-fly-manually- say...](http://gizmodo.com/u-s-pilots-forget-how-to-fly-manually-says- department-1752668219), which points to this.</comment>


If you're not rich, your bank probably wants you to overdraft - <AUTHOR> http://rippedenvelope.com/post/59401107079/if-youre-not-rich-your-bank-probably-wants-you-to

<comment><USER2> While I think overdraft fees are gross and exorbitant (and I fell at their mercy a few times before I finally wizened up and got overdraft protection), I don't really think this is that big of an issue (at least, compared to other issues in the banking system.) It's a pretty solvable problem from the consumer end -- don't spend money on a card if you're not sure you have at least X in your account.

<comment><USER3> This is needlessly burdening the customer, which in my opinion is the textbook definition of bad customer service. The days of hand-written checks in the consumer space are largely gone; and the bank knows at any given moment what the customer's current account balance is and which transactions are pending. Permitting a card-based withdrawal or debit request that the bank already knows is likely to result in an NSF at settlement time is both misleading and adversarial to the customer.

This entire issue would grind to a halt immediately if banks properly denied debit requests when permitting them would yield an NSF.

<comment><USER4> I agree that this would work for debit transactions, but, my understanding is that the way ACH works, it would be rather difficult to accomplish this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Overdraft fees are absurd, but so is complaining about them. Just go to your bank and ask them to disable overdraft. If you don't have the money and overdraft is disabled, the transaction will simply be declined. If you want to spend money you don't have yet, you can do it the normal way, by borrowing.

(Also, flagging the article.)

<comment><USER6> So, that seems like a reasonable answer, but historically that wasn't sufficient for me. When I was an HSBC customer in college a few years back, I had disabled overdrafting because I did not want to receive overdraft fees and, in a pinch, I could use a credit card if my charge was declined.

One day I checked my account and discovered that I had accrued a number of overdraft fees. Apparently sometimes merchants (namely gas stations) will put a temporary charge of a dollar against your credit card, then later correct the charge to the correct price. This caused my account to overdraft as HSBC didn't deny the correction, then with my account overdrafted as of the date in question, all subsequent valid charges I had done against the account assuming a one dollar gas charge were made as overdraft charges. Contacting customer service and reminding them that I had in fact disabled overdraft was not enough to convince them of anything other than giving me a one-time partial credit of fees, so I switched banks.

I don't know if that is still how things are done over at HSBC, but ultimately the point is that disabling overdrafting is not some panacea for the problem, as ultimately there are situations that can still get you in trouble.

<comment><USER4> Also, sometimes ACH debits will cause unpreventable overdrafts for you.

What I do now (I realize this isn't really an option for a lot of people) is basically mentally subtract $500 off of my checking account balance, and would never spend any money if there's less than that in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The graph in the article suggests the bank's cost for a checking account per year is $250. Wow. That seems like a huge opportunity to provide better banking service. Driving that cost down to $100 or so would be a very big deal.

<comment><USER8> _According to the CFPB, The banking industry charged a total of $32 billion in overdraft fees to consumers in 2012, an increase of more than 60% from $19.9B in 1990. Part of this increase is that banks have been turning the screws on consumers, increasing the average overdraft fee from $27 in 2007 to $34 today.

Those fee increases would be more acceptable if they went to cover the costs associated with those transactions. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Only 14% of the average fee goes toward the cost over covering the overdraft, meaning that 86% of the average overdraft fee is pure profit for the bank._

Collusion sucks and keeps the amount that consumers shell out unnaturally high. Anybody that _would_ compete on price gets bought, eventually, by one the big banks (Chase, BoA, Wells Fargo, etc) because they're just buying customers. Your small-town bank that offered cheap checking gets bought by big bad Chase and now you _have_ to pay $35.00 for overdrafts, ad nauseum.

Something similar is happening right now with collusion between payments processors (like WePay, Stripe, Balanced) and those same big banks regarding Interchange, "processing fees", etc. The Durbin Amendment, which the author mentioned briefly (but with an outdated reference) was a start in the right direction but there's still a long way to go. More on the Durbin Amendment: [http://ink.hackeress.com/2013/08/its-time-for-price-war- in-p...](http://ink.hackeress.com/2013/08/its-time-for-price-war-in- payments.html)

<comment><USER9> On the other hand, the big banks are creating a market opportunity for retail banking services that do not profit from fees. I chose to work at Simple [1] in part because I believe competition in this space will improve the industry as a whole.

The best weapon against predatory banking is giving customers the tools to understand their own finances. Because fees comprise an ever-growing portion of profits, it is not in the big banks' interest to provide these tools, thus they will always be a poorer experience than the services that do.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _Fact 1: If you don't keep several thousands of dollars in your checking account, overdrafting is near the only way your bank makes money on your account._

I thought the bank could make money by lending out a multiple of all the money deposited, such that if I deposit 1000 dollars, they can now lend out on the order of 30000 (i.e. thirty times) that. If they lend that out at, say, 10% interest, they can make 3000 a year because I have 1000 in my account.

The magic of fractional reserve banking. If I've misunderstood this, I'd very much like to be corrected, please.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it quite works this way... if you deposit $1000, the bank isn't required to keep $1000 on hand, so with your 1/30 ratio, it means they would hold onto about $34 and loan out the rest with interest.

I am definitely not an expert on banking.

<comment><USER10> You're right in the first step; we can only end up with the 30000 dollars if the money is deposited and relent several times ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking#Exam...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_reserve_banking#Example_of_deposit_multiplication) ). The example uses a single bank, but given that all the money goes through various banks as people borrow it and put it somewhere, I could still expect my 1000 dollar deposit to end up in aggregate as a 30000 dollar loan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yes, and to add to that, credit card companies _do not_ want you to pay your balance off in full every month, because even though they get a 2-3% cut of every credit transaction from the merchant, interest is still how they make most of their money. I have heard that within the credit card industry, they even colloquially refer to such responsible cardholders as "deadbeats!"

<comment><USER13> Interchange fees would have to be much higher if they were a larger percentage of a credit card company's revenue (as they are for AMEX). This would end up resulting in higher costs for consumers.

<comment><USER12> That's a circular argument--there are obviously two ways that the share of revenue from interchange fees could become higher than they are now--increase the interchange fees, or decrease the interest rates, membership fees, and other revenue sources (or both).

Higher interchange fees would necessarily "end up resulting in higher costs for consumers" _only_ if the interest rates didn't also decrease. Are you assuming the credit card company's total revenue is a fixed constant?

Or are you just suggesting that if a very large group of cardholders collectively decided to pay off their credit card balances in full every month so that credit card companies didn't make a cent in interest off them, that credit card companies would simply increase their interchange fees to compensate? Perhaps. But then a lot of merchants would stop accepting credit cards. They could face antitrust litigation again. Perhaps they would just add/increase yearly card membership fees, cut back on rewards, lay off customer service staff, etc. Who knows? They make their money in several different ways, and each of those they are already squeezing as much money as they possibly can out of consumers and merchants.

The way I see it, as a responsible cardholder who pays my bill in full every month, merchants and irresponsible users of credit are just subsidizing my free 30-day loans, cash back rewards, and frequent flyer miles, and I'd prefer that they keep doing so.

<comment><USER14> >>> Higher interchange fees would necessarily "end up resulting in higher costs for consumers" only if the interest rates didn't also decrease.

Businesses do not pass on interchange fees directly to the customer. It is not a line item that appears on your receipt after you make a purchase. This is largely because credit card companies forbid merchants from charging an additional fee to customers for using credit cards.

This means the only way for merchants to recoup interchange fees is to raise the prices of their goods across the board. This means prices go up for everyone, even those without credit cards. So a non-credit card user would see their prices go up as a whole, without the potential offset of reduced interest costs.

<comment><USER12> This is true in most cases, but merchants have a lot of tricks they use to try to reduce the amount of credit card interchange fees they pay. A lot of businesses actually do charge a "convenience fee" for using a credit card, or offer a discount for paying in cash, or they set a minimum purchase amount at which they will accept a credit card, etc. A lot of businesses also flat out refuse to accept cards like AMEX and Discover because of their higher interchange fees.

It would be interesting to see how this equilibrium might change if CC companies tried to increase interchange fees across the board. I think they would see a lot of resistance from merchants and possibly even government scrutiny and lawsuits. Don't forget that the CC companies have to compete with each other, and cannot collude to raise interchange fees.

Anyway, my point was not that higher interchange fees wouldn't get passed on to consumers somehow, it was more that if most cardholders stopped carrying a balance and paid much less interest to CC companies, and CC companies then increased their interchange fees to try to compensate for the decline in interest revenue, consumers as a whole might still be better off than they are now. There's more than one variable in the equation here, and right now credit card interest is probably a much bigger cost to consumers in the economy as a whole, than interchange fees are.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fine Bros – Live subscriber count after trying to trademark the word "REACT" - <AUTHOR> https://tfbsubscribers.github.io/ <comment><USER2> The Fine Bros do seem like lawyered-up scumbags, but that graph is a classic example of how to lie with statistics. Thanks to the Y-axis range, the drop off appears to be substantial, but it's only a 1% drop.</comment>


Frienda - <AUTHOR> http://www.friendda.org/

<comment><USER2> Cute. But, no.

</comment><comment><USER3> Only slightly less insane than normal NDA's. :P

</comment><comment><USER4> Aside from the parody, this kind of "plain English" contract always backfires.

While most contracts are written by people who secretly wish we still spoke Latin, the real purpose of contracts is to write down expectations with _extreme precision_ so that the parties have some guidance when it comes to worst-case scenarios.

When you try to use "handshake deal" language in a contract, it still needs to be as _precise_ as possible.

P.S. NDAs between friends is a bad idea to begin with.</comment>


Code.org 2016 Annual Report - <AUTHOR> https://code.org/about/2016 <comment><USER2> Why do all organizations like these have such an incredible focus on how the parents and the teachers feel ? Then as a distant second priority there seems to be how the kids feel. Actual evaluation of ability is nowhere in there.

In that way it feels a bit like all the maths initiatives from when I was young. But while they got lots of attention, they never lead to effective mathematicians. And these courses have the same problem : they're too refined, and it's actually preventing my daughters from having a real interest in programming. The problem is that this means nothing the kids can hope to do is either useful or impressive (the non-faked kind of impressive).

They write a game ? Cool. Does it match the examples ? Not even close. Can they play it ? Host it ? Show it widely ? No. Do they, at the end, have any ability to produce anything ? No.

Two problems: one is that this works on the cloud. The issue with that is spelled out in the right to read: nothing works without the walled garden, and that walled garden is specifically designed to draw attention of everyone away from you, and to prevent you from doing anything even remotely creative for fear of allowing offensive/"dangerous" material.

Secondly, there is no followup. This increases the number of "intro to programming" courses available online and offline from 849579287 to 849579288. That's great and all, how about advanced ones ? Well, there's VERY few of those. Even just advanced android/ios programming, or C++ for desktop apps, or ... Dozens, at best. Up to date ? Maybe 2. This material is exactly what is not needed to improve technology knowledge.

This is, quite simply, not going to produce people enthusiastic about what can be accomplished with technology. It'll produce people happy with an afternoon's entertainment and basic notions of what a for loop is.</comment>


Puzzling limitations in Adobe Air - perhaps Steve Jobs is right? - <AUTHOR>

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/403/kb403128.html<p>Adobe Air does not support gzip compressed HTTP responses from web servers, nor does Adobe Air support HTTP 1.1 persistent connections.  So if you build an app using Adobe Air you can expect it to only accept large chunks of uncompressed data and you can expect it to establish a new connection any time it needs to talk to a server.  That's gonna make any Adobe Air super slow.   Why would Adobe's flagship technology platform not support basic internet functionality?  And why would they release an application development platform that isn't engineered for responsiveness and performance?  Adobe Air is now years old and these issues don't ever seem likely to be addressed. Who knows - seems Steve Jobs may be right. <comment><USER2> Ah, but Air _does_ support RTMP.</comment>


The Coddling of the American Mind - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> There is another piece linked on HN today with many of the same sound bites. I haven't spent any time to speak of on college campuses in many years, and I wonder how much of this is a steady problem and how much conspicuous cases mentioned over and over.

</comment><comment><USER3> I see similar behavior on this website. First read the article before you start firing salvos.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it is worthwhile to point out one specific section, which this web 2.0 has certainly intensified -- "If you want this woman to retain her fear for life, you should help her avoid elevators.

But if you want to help her return to normalcy, you should take your cues from Ivan Pavlov and guide her through a process known as exposure therapy."

Which applied online might mean that dissenting opinions and implementations are important and not to be shied away from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Man, all this shitting on young people is getting tiresome.</comment>


Let's Talk About Innovation - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@marlonribunal/lets-talk-about-innovation-627ead5c66ad#.ku3mk9uhi <comment><USER2> Motivation to innovate is going to based on the desire to produce value. That value is going to be based on the enduring value of whatever it replaces. So, to do good at innovation, one ought to have an appreciation of what came before, both its positives and its negatives. Young people do this intuitively by forming negative critiques, but also by finding what is good and adhering to that. Older people do less of this, even though they have the ability, because they often feel like they must be in agreement with others.</comment>


Mac OS X 10.7 Lion - the death knell of the Mac as we know it - <AUTHOR> http://www.viewshound.com/technology/2011/6/mac-os-x-107-lion-the-death-knell-of-the-mac-as-we?utm_campaign=article&utm_medium=post&utm_source=HackerNews

<comment><USER3> You can't go one step without falling down the slope? When was there ever a slippery slope? Sufficient research and consumner use of touch screens came up with some interesting features also controllable by a mouse (which optionally can be a touchpad/trackpad), so we were all allowed to benefit.

We went into space. Why didn't we move off the planet? But we did get Velcro.

</comment><comment><USER4> "I predict that Mac OS X 10.8 or 11 – whichever number they choose – will also remove this, and all Apple devices will only ship with touch screens." - <USER2> does not make sense.

There was a quite recent keynote where Steve said this precise solution is impossible for usability reasons, and won't be implemented. You can't comfortably operate a vertically aligned touchscreen. That's why they went with huge trackpads.

<comment><USER5> > Steve said this precise solution is impossible for usability reasons, and > won't be implemented.

Just like third-party native apps, "multitasking", notifications, "the large screen iphone form-factor", etc, etc ad nauseum. Experience tells us: when Jobs says "we won't be doing that," it often means: "we're actively researching a way to do _exactly_ that."

Additionally, there's a lot of momentum headed in this direction, already: recent Windows 8 demos show a heavily touch-influenced design (almost to the point of _perhaps_ implying that touchscreens will be required, but who knows.. microsoft tends to scale back their ambitions when it comes to actual releases). Also, GNOME 3's UX centerpiece (gnome-shell) is, while not-at-all there yet, heavily built around the design concept of integrating touchscreen capabilities into the core workflow. Ditto for Ubuntu's Unity, which has already integrated gestures on touchscreen capable interfaces/trackpads (something they've been chasing down since, oh, 10.04).

With the above in mind, the tl;dr from this article (OSX goes mandatory touchscreen at some point in the future) is not _that_ crazy to imagine.

<comment><USER4> Optional touch-based interface is possible. A mandatory and exclusive one - highly unlikely.

And if we're to bring about the Experience, it also tells us that Apple doesn't really care about any surrounding momentum. They set the trends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I moved from Windows to Mac about 3 years ago and I still miss an easy way to maximise a window to full screen. I prefer to see only one thing at a time, I find it much less distracting. Full screen mode, if done right, would be great for me. At least the choice of full screen or how it is now would be good.

<comment><USER6> I use an app called Divvy. I don't think I could ever go back to life without it.</comment></comment>


Conditions for the possibility of exit - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@enkiv2/conditions-for-the-possibility-of-exit-c38ea186abf1 <comment><USER2> Is "enkiv2" a spammer? It seems like they only post posts from Tedium.</comment>


Which programming languages have the happiest (and angriest) commenters? - <AUTHOR> https://hackernoon.com/which-programming-languages-have-the-happiest-and-angriest-commenters-ebe91b3852ed#.xje3pou0f <comment><USER2> This article started off interesting, but didn't really go anywhere IMHO. I don't think saying "thanks|thank you|awesome|:)" is a good metric for being "happy". It seems like a much better metric for "thankfulness". And "wrong|horrible|stupid|:(" seems like a better metric for lack of agreement than for angriness.</comment>


Coffee may reduce risk for type 2 diabetes – The Chart Blogs - <AUTHOR> http://thechart.blogs.cnn.com/2014/04/24/coffee-may-reduce-risk-for-type-2-diabetes/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.whale.to/a/diabetes_shame.html](http://www.whale.to/a/diabetes_shame.html)</comment>


Cargo Cult Science (1974) - <AUTHOR> http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm <comment><USER2> > there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, > and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very > interesting one.

Has anyone found this paper? I searched a few years ago and couldn't find anything.

<comment><USER3> Me neither, and for this reason I tend to use this paper to see who pays attention. Best case: someone tracks down the missing paper(s).

I suspect it may be a joke Feynman played on us to prove a point. :)

Good catch.

<comment><USER3> As for "good catch": I think it took me at least 6 months from I first read the paper before I actually tried to find the research in question. Not finding even a single credible reference was a humiliating and humbling experience. I've looked for it several times over the year since and stille come up empty-handed.

I was giving a talk where I was going to refer to Feynman's speech and I felt I needed to fact-check it.

(I ended up using the speech in the talk I was giving, but I did give a hint at the end that perhaps this speech might possibly contain a joke at our expense, or something along those lines. So as to not look like a total idiot if someone else did a better job of checking the speech faster than I had done :-))

So kudos to you @killjoywashere :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Out of all the experiments in the soft sciences that captured society's imagination, one of the most egregious is "Power Posing".[0] The idea is that you stand like a superhero in front of a mirror and all of these measurable chemical changes happen that improve your abilities.

The professor that discovered this phenomena had a famous TED talk, a bestselling book, switched her faculty position to Harvard, and basically rode that to success in her professional and public life.[1]

All of this came crashing down when no one could replicate her experiments. It's absolutely incredible that things got this far in science, or at least the soft sciences. Shameful

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

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Cuddy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Cuddy)

<comment><USER5> I dislike this usage of "soft" sciences. I think it helps to be specific about the field, the journal, or the community.

People use the word "soft" to describe any kind of scientific research that makes them uncomfortable, no matter the legitimacy. The social sciences are soft, psychology is soft, economics is soft, etc. It's a moving goal-post, when there are social scientists and psychologists who do very "hard" scientific research (and vice-versa).

<comment><USER4> Mathematics is "hard" because there is a provably right and wrong answer. Moving away from mathematics, subjects become much more malleable and open to interpretation. For example the fuzziness of psychology allows something like the "Power Pose" to exist, while in math there would be no "Power Matrix" or some such.

<comment><USER6> You tell that to the geometers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Optimising software has frequently been very cargo cult-ish. No measurements at all or measurements that tell you nothing have been pretty common. It seems it's more common to take it seriously now, also tools are better and techniques get written up on blogs and shared, some of the good ones catch on, some of the bad ones eventually fall over. "If experiment doesn't match theory the theory is wrong." Feynman has been the source of a good bit of wisdom in my career and life. Re-post and re-discuss often. If you haven't, "Surely you're joking..." It's worth your time and will also entertain. I should read it again, it's been a while.

</comment><comment><USER8> Many previous submissions; the ones with comments:

2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13290107)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11669004)

2013: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6543791)

2010: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629571)

2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993150)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=723140)

</comment><comment><USER9> Experiments that attempt to create AGI singularities by just making huge neural networks strike me as cargo cult science.

<comment><USER10> I've never seen that before but I have seen businesses:

* Use hadoop/latest distributed computing with data that fits on one machine

* Use way higher variance models than necessary for the problem at hand

And in general just cargo cult what the big players are doing when it's unnecessarily complex for the size of the business.

<comment><USER11> s/businesses/engineers looking for resume items for FAANG applications/ and it's completely rational.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Related: [https://meaningness.com/metablog/upgrade-your-cargo- cult](https://meaningness.com/metablog/upgrade-your-cargo-cult)

</comment><comment><USER13> "We obviously have made no progress—lots of theory, but no progress—in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals."

Not sure that's obvious. Crime has steadily fallen. Particular practices may not stand up to scrutiny, but I'm guessing a lot of it does kind of work.

<comment><USER14> In the US crime rose steadily from 1960 to 1990, and that's using the official statistics that don't even try to include things like the Iran–Contra scandal, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, CREEP, the Kent State murders, and the CIA protecting crack kingpins. Feynman was speaking in 1974, right in the middle of this period.</comment></comment>


Npm v3 Dependency Resolution - <AUTHOR> https://docs.npmjs.com/how-npm-works/npm3 <comment><USER2> We re-upped this post (described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10705926) and earlier posts linked from there). But [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10817978](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10817978) was posted in the meantime, so we'll treat this one as a dupe even though it wasn't.</comment>


50 Apps in 50 Weeks Challenge - <AUTHOR> http://www.50apps.org/

<comment><USER2> How about: 5 apps in 50 weeks challenge? Write 5 useful, stable, well designed and tested apps in 50 weeks. Use whatever language/database seems easiest and most productive.

I understand the desire to learn a lot of new things, but the hard part of coding is not the first week. Practicing the first week over and over won't get you many useful skills.

The hard parts of development are the marathon (keeping your focus/motivation), and making everything actually perfect.

In the first week you can just get it to 'good enough'.

Subsequent weeks, you enhance things... this is where the flaws in what you wrote in the first week really come out.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is interesting but the thought of installing and configuring all of the underlying platforms, languages, frameworks and databases (assuming we all have hardware to run them) gives me a headache.

I'd much rather see a 50 apps in 50 weeks with a much smaller base number of languages. Almost like a 50 design patterns/recipes in 50 weeks for a few languages.

<comment><USER4> I agree that the context switching costs are quite high, reducing the time actually spent on coding. It might be better to focus on one language/framework for five straight weeks, for example, while still changing specific design patterns/recipes per week. It reduces switching costs, gives devs time to grok new languages if need be, and should result in higher quality code for each weekly project.

You might also let devs post fragments of their code as they work on it, and links to their github repos. The reason is that a dev who is really learning a lot, not just exercising existing skills, might get far off track if working in isolation, like a plane that takes off at a heading that is slightly off, and ends up hundreds of kilometers from its target. Plus, it would give more time for people to discuss/debate alternate implementations, and that debate itself would also be a great source of learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks like its a very expensive project.

iphone, ipad, android, win mobile, windows, embedded, mac even 3D..

not everyone has those toys already, i dont have the iphone and ipad for example (not even an ios developer account)

<comment><USER6> _not everyone has those toys already, i dont have the iphone and ipad for example (not even an ios developer account)_

FWIW, if you have a Mac, you can get the iOS development environment from Apple for free, and just run your apps on a simulator.

<comment><USER7> But Oracle and Windows development then are issues, since last I checked much the Microsoft development stuff isn't free.

<comment><USER8> Dunno about oracle (i heard about XE edition or something with limited memory?), but MS Visual Studio has Express edition, which is free

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Will the ideas for each week be suggested, along with what language to code in? Or is it completely up to the participant what and when they want to make?

I think a well-defined plan that everyone follows would be more useful, since we won't waste a lot of time trying to think of ideas, and we'll be more likely to hit all the points. Plus, it'll keep everyone on the same page, allowing people to share resources while trying to set up and learn the platforms each week.

</comment><comment><USER10> They included Visual Basic but left out Haskell :(

All the Windows and Apple stuff isn't really an option for me either.

Overall, it's a good idea, but I'm not going to bother. Good luck to anyone who does!

</comment><comment><USER11> Not sure if I'll manage to code for all these different plattforms, but what the hell. Other people will have the same problem and we'll all learn together.

Challenge accepted :)</comment>


How a podcaster managed to confront his tech support scammer, in person - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/how-the-reply-all-podcast-tracked-down-a-man-behind-a-tech-support-scam/ <comment><USER2> This is so creepy! I am sure there are plenty of such companies across globe scamming no so tech savvy tech people! There should be a global crack down against them. Also, big computer farms like Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, Acer should educate their customers about such scams.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Part two will be here (also the audio from part one): [http://replyall.limo/](http://replyall.limo/)</comment>


Get Curious - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/aa7/get_curious/ <comment><USER2> Some good suggestions here, but I have the feeling that the author did not get to the deepest consequences of this "curiosity". For example, let's take Fengshui (a Chinese geomantic practice). A superficial knowledge will tell you it tries to avoid straight lines for your alleys in your garden, because ghosts like straight lines. And if you can't avoid a straight line, you may add a mirror or other reflecting plane at one end of the line, because ghost, who are obviously ugly, don't like to see their face.

All this is not very likely to be the cup of tea of a well-bred rationalist. But if you are curious enough and keep your mind open, you might discover that Fengshui is, for some part, a string of ancient wisdom pearls disguised behind mnemotechnic tips. Maybe the real original reason was that the most fearful warriors were the archers at that time, and the ghost explanation stayed because it was easier to remember.

And digging in this direction you might find teaching that are still very useful today. An example could be acupuncture and Chinese medicine: the fact that it seems to be in continuous use since so long time and still used by very informed people in some of the most developed East-Asian countries might be a sign that this practice is useful, sometime, even if no proof pro or contra has been brought to the debate (to my knowledge).

So with a bit of real curiosity, not only the one that feeds you with suspicions whenever you read an articles with figures in it, but with the kind of curiosity that is a real openness to the "strange" and the "strangers", you might find out that pure cold rationalism is not a silver bullet, and that in fact curiosity is a value to be placed above.

After all, rationalism is not able to tell us why one should not pee every evening on one's neighbors fence, right?

<comment><USER3> _you might find out that pure cold rationalism is not a silver bullet, and that in fact curiosity is a value to be placed above._

you're presenting a rational argument for your point, which implies you think it's rational to place curiosity higher. That implies "pure cold rationalism" is a kind of strawman.

 _After all, rationalism is not able to tell us why one should not pee every evening on one's neighbors fence, right?_

you sound serious, so: because they might not like the smell, because they might able to see it, and not like the sight...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Did this come off as pseudoscientific to anyone else? It seems to be inviting me to see that the procedure works by personal experience, not to question whether or not it works.

If it doesn't seem to work for me, I haven't practiced it enough. How long should I try? 10000 trials. Of course the game is already up before I begin.

Kind of ironic considering the subject matter.

<comment><USER5> Why?

To quote from the article,

> Below, I propose a process for how to "get curious." I think we are only > just beginning to learn how to create curious people, so please don't take > this method as Science or Gospel but instead as an attempt to Just Try It.

Nowhere is the author suggestng that this procedure has been scientificaly tested.

Also, the author raises two very important points that can be applied to other things in life:

1) to train a skill _before_ it is needed, so that it's available when the time comes.

2) to train it enough many times for it to become a habit.</comment></comment>


Black Hat hacker details lethal wireless attack on insulin pumps - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/92054-black-hat-hacker-details-wireless-attack-on-insulin-pumps

<comment><USER4> The parent article is doing it's round on the internet at the moment. It's linkbait.

Scott Hanselman has a better rational breakdown of the article - [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HackersCanKillDiabeticsWithIns...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HackersCanKillDiabeticsWithInsulinPumpsFromAHalfMileAwayUmNoFactsVsJournalisticFearMongering.aspx)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the clarification. I hate it when I fall for this stuff.

<comment><USER6> Tl;dr

Scott's most relevant points:

1\. "This is a key fob that looks like a car alarm beeper that some pump users use to discretely give themselves insulin doses. However, I feel the need to point out as a pump wearer myself that:

Not every Insulin Pump has a remote control feature. Not every remote- controllable insulin pump has that feature turned on. Mine does not, for example."

2\. "all he requires to perpetrate the hack is the target pump's serial number. This is like saying "I can open your garage door with a 3rd party garage door opener. Just give me the numbers off the side of your unit..."

3\. If you are a diabetic on a pump who is concerned about this kind of thing, my suggestion is to turn off your pump's remote control feature (which is likely off anyway) and turn off your sensor radio when you are not wearing your CGM. Most of all, don't panic. Call the manufacturer and express your concern. In my experience, pump manufacturers do not mess around with this stuff. I'm not overly concerned.

<comment><USER7> _"2. "all he requires to perpetrate the hack is the target pump's serial number."_

Do we know how much entropy is in those? They could very well be sequential or date derived.

<comment><USER6> "Do we know how much entropy is in those? They could very well be sequential or date derived."

Even if entropy is low are - how are you going to randomly select a person, and know their serial ID ? Unless you know what units are distributed to what hospitals/doctors - at exact times - at exact shipments and then from the sample delivered know the exact unit given to any person at any particular time.

Sure, if you know a "set of id's" you could try each one sequentially until you finally get a hit - but even then, you must somehow ensure the person being targeted has remote connection turned on. I'm pretty sure walking up to them and saying "oh, hai 'dere! ... plz turn on ur remotz connetz'n 4 me?" [ said in this voice - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh_9QhRzJEs> ] - is going to make them pretty suspicious.

There's a lot of "ifs" in there and frankly - if your aim was kill them - <USER2> would be a lot faster to do it some other way because to actually get all these things to line up perfectly .... your chances are pretty slim.

<comment><USER7> _"how are you going to randomly select a person, and know their serial ID ? "_

You are missing the point, if the entropy is sufficiently low then _it is feasible to guess_.

Besides, presumably if you want to kill a particular person, you might know a bit about them.

Anyway, with _low_ entropy serial numbers is that _potentially_ it could be feasible to just create a device that runs through all of them in a matter of a couple of minutes or so. For example, you could check google news to get a guestimate of approximately when perhaps a high profile politician had one of these installed. If this is a friend or family member then that step just gets even easier. If part of the serial number is a year/month combo (a common way to do it) and the rest is sequential, then it will be pretty easy to figure out. Are there easier ways? Sure, I imagine so. A hands off wireless approach certainly is appealing though isn't it? Probably worth at least trying before you move on to more hands on techniques.

 _"it would be a lot faster to do it some other way "_

If you are taking the time to plan out a homicide, which is going to be more important: doing it fast. doing it so you don't get caught.

<comment><USER6> "You are missing the point, if the entropy is sufficiently low then it is feasible to guess."

not really - if entropy is low in a lot of things - it's feasible to implement a disaster scenario. wireless systems across lots of things are not encrypted and so the same logic applies.

"you might know a bit about them"

we'll you really 'would' have to know 'a lot' about them if these devices had high entropy. which - if a person was indeed killed by this method - <USER3> autopsy would show either a spike or lapse in delivery of insulin. such a lapse would immediately lead to an investigation as to why the unit did not respond ?

evidentiary burden then progresses.

i'm not disagreeing with you in the seriousness of the discovery - i just think that these devices live in a nano-constrained world. implementing increased data encryption increases cost, power usage and the like - it's a difficult balance. now this has world attention - even 'basic' encryption is really useless since even it could be hammered.

so do you implement serious encryption - but in doing so - reduce the utility of the device so that it lacks the means to do what it is designed to do ? deliver insulin.

On the basis of a huge number of "if's" involved. i'm not convinced.

<comment><USER7> _"we'll you really 'would' have to know 'a lot' about them if these devices had high entropy."_

That is why I'm asking what kind of entropy the serial numbers have.....

 _"which - if a person was indeed killed by this method - an autopsy would show either a spike or lapse in delivery of insulin. such a lapse would immediately lead to an investigation as to why the unit did not respond ?"_

I'm confused how that is related to the entropy of the serial numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Let's say you find out how to make planes safer. You can cut fatalities in half or something. And let's say doing that will drive up the cost of air travel by $100/ticket. Well, you did a good job and saved X lives, but you ended up killing X+k people that stopped flying planes and started driving cars. So you did a good thing, you made planes safer and then you ended up killing people. It would be great if somehow everytime planes got safer we made cars more expensive, but I don't know how that would work.

Anyway, for some reason I thought about that reading this article and I figured how tremendously interesting risk-management must be in the medical device industry for the same types of reasons.

</comment><comment><USER5> Incredible. As a minimum I would have expected all communication to be encrypted.

<comment><USER9> But how secure would that be? It's security through obscurity.

> _Ultimately, these wireless control devices must simply be built with the > assumption that hackers will eventually break in._ > _In the case of the > insulin pump, it should contain hardware-level sanity checking._

<comment><USER10> Encryption is security through obscurity? Seriously?

<comment><USER11> Yes. Tell me the algorithm you use and the bits from your decryption key, and we can decrypt everything.

By the same token, the lock on your door is security by obscurity. Tell me the type of lock and the position of the 5 pins, and you're in. Take 5 seconds to communicate that over the phone, if you know what you're talking about.

<comment><USER7> The phrase _"security through obscurity"_ is a term of art that is defined such that secrecy of private key material does not count. _By definition_ , you are incorrect.

Now, if your security relies upon the attacker not knowing your encryption _scheme_ , then yes. That is security through obscurity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is this a black hat hacker if all he did was expose the vulnerability, rather than exploit it?

<comment><USER12> "Black Hat" refers to the security conference, currently happening in Vegas.

<comment><USER13> Seems odd to call him a "black hat hacker" just for being at the conference. He could very well just attend all of the security-related conferences. The headline implies to me that he plans to use this exploit nefariously.

<comment><USER10> Ah, the conference is called "Black Hat". They mean "a hacker who was attending Black Hat".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've managed to hard-crash a generic infusion pump via its "output only, entirely isolated and secure" serial connection.

Not wireless, and at least the Oh God I'm Broken buzzer worked, but still.

</comment><comment><USER15> Can someone tell me why these devices have a range of more than just a few feet? The point of having a remote control is to avoid having a control cable poking through your skin. A control interface with a range of just a few inches would suffice.

<comment><USER16> There's no good way to reliably limit the range of a wireless signal like this. A sufficiently sensitive receiver will always be able to eavesdrop from a distance far greater than that in the design use-case. If we don't want the signal intercepted, the answer is stronger encryption.

That said, any potential vulnerability here appears to mostly spring from the remote control functionality, more than the remote reporting functionality. Here again, encryption is the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fortunately it is very difficult to pull of an attack with a medical device since you need to know the exact make and model and then find a way to exploit it.

<comment><USER18> Which then implies issues with replication and scale and consistency.

That many of the devices are different, with different UIs, different firmware, different sets of cryptic icons and different and obscure buttons.

Unfortunately, some of the underlying bugs can be common, due to code re-use; the same RT operating system might be used, for instance. Which means that the vendors might not even immediately know what's vulnerable to what.

"Fortunate" is not the word I'd use for the mess that is the medical device industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> If a person is intent on killing another, I don't think encrypted wireless for his insulin pump is going to stand in the way.

<comment><USER20> Well, if the only proof is a 'broken' pump...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why would anyone try to figure something like this out? I don't think any real hackers are going around trying to figure out how to kill people, they want money or something else of value (not to say a life doesn't have value).

Why as a community are we allowing things like this to happen, even worse, publicizing them and acting like its 733t and impressive. If something like this happened at anything other than the 'Black hat' security conference this wouldn't be alright.

<comment><USER22> People figure these things out because it's fun. Simple as that. It's the same motivation behind me hacking the various bits of hardware sitting around me, including a number of health-related devices. It's simple curiosity, and sometimes that leads down a path of "well, if I could do this, what could a malicious actor do?" Sometimes that answer isn't a good one.</comment></comment>


Startup Idea: TailSearch – Search for Retail Stores - <AUTHOR> http://www.abstract-living.com/tailsearch-search-for-retail-stores/

<comment><USER2> This would never work. "Medium-high switching barriers" is a fantasy. The barriers are insurmountable, and not just because big retailers like to use in-house technology.

Every retail store is carefully engineered to make you walk around more. They want you to walk past things you didn't intend to buy and then buy them.

Ever wonder why household necessities are always at opposite back corners of grocery stores? They want you to spend as much time there as possible and pass as many shelves as possible.

Yes, there is a "problem" here for consumers, but it's one they will generally solve by using Amazon or the online pick-up systems that stores already have. You can already browse the inventory of stores and have your items waiting for you when you arrive.

Furthermore, because every store creates this problem, no store has an incentive to fix it.

If Target, for example, were to spend money on "TailSearch" (a LOT of money) and minorly improve the user experience at the cost of much of their sales volume, they would be screwed.

And what would the real benefit for the user be? Do you go to stores because it's easy to find things or because they have what you want at the price you want?

This is simple technology, and it could easily piggyback on the databases that tech-savvy companies like Wal-Mart already have. There's a reason they haven't done anything like this yet.</comment>


What tool will accomplish this task? - <AUTHOR>

I am a sysadmin for a medium sized 'Internet' company.  I manage 30+ systems primarily running Debian with a few BSD boxes too. <comment><USER2> And you also failed to ask any question at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're talking about automating the configuration of those hosts - to make sure that all of them have password authentication disabled, all of them are running ntp, etc, etc, then you need to look at:

* Chef

* CFEngine

* Puppet

Or similar. You write "policies" (read "rules") describing the state you want your server to be in, and they do the necssary. Each of these has a master- host and all the managed-hosts talk to it, to arrange the execution of the policies.

If you prefer to run things over SSH instead of having a deamon, then you can look at Ansible, Fabric, or similar. Finally there is my own tool Slaughter which is closer to the first set of tools, but written in Perl and without the need for a deamon.

If you want more specific help please .. ask a specific question.

I could just as well say "A cheap student" for your question..

</comment><comment><USER4> Check out [http://www.scriptrock.com/](http://www.scriptrock.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Vim.

</comment><comment><USER6> Telnet?</comment>


Wordpress Site Owners Attention Fix ASAP - <AUTHOR> add the following to your URL. This accesses your entire content index. Call your hosting provider and GET THIS FIXED WITH YOUR WEBSITE. you may view mine at domain/wp-content/uploads CloudFlare is the only thing I've found that can fix the issue. <comment><USER2> This is an issue with an incorrectly configured server setup, not specifically about WordPress. A proper hosting provider that advertises WP sites as part of their service should have disabled directory listing by default.</comment>


Preventing snooping via power lines - <AUTHOR> http://alshain.fi/products-random-consumption.html

<comment><USER2> _> Problem: Computers are vulnerable to eavesdropping via power lines_

How much of a problem is this? Is this a merely theoretical possibility, is it actively being exploited? What are the information leakage risks as compared to e.g. internet advertising, NSA surveillance, malware?

 _> In order to prevent this kind of eavesdropping we have designed a USB device that dissipates energy with a carefully crafted spectrum..._

How much electricity does this use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is actually a quite problem because this is something you cannot counter with encryption or other similar means.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST)

The power usage is on average 100mA.</comment></comment>


Tell Dropbox: Please make $5/mth for 25gb. - <AUTHOR>

All of my friends have become big fans. There is a lot of interest. But $10/mth is too much. <comment><USER2> Flagged, no reason to post here rather than contact dropbox directly.

We already have enough 'Tell YC/PG/HN' posts, let's not open it up to other sites now.

</comment><comment><USER3> <https://www.getdropbox.com/forum></comment>


Display media content for your web site or app with Magneticmediajs - <AUTHOR> https://www.magneticmediajs.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Magneticmediajs is a JavaScript jQuery based library that allows media content (images, videos, maps, HTML & more) to be displayed in a memorable way. It includes several unique features like a magnifying glass tool, greatly eases the task of working with social media platforms like Youtube or Instagram and is bundled with a documented API to control your media.</comment>


Kiev, Ukraine: CloudFlare's 78th Data Center - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/kiev/ <comment><USER2> Very sad to see the name of the city being so painfully misspelled. [http://kyiv.of-cour.se](http://kyiv.of-cour.se)

<comment><USER3> "CIA refers to the city as Kyiv" Thats one reason to do it!</comment></comment>


Creating a Playable 12-Foot-Tall Electric Guitar - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@riebschlager/creating-a-playable-12-foot-tall-electric-guitar-f949ccc786d6 <comment><USER2> Nice project. I think it's too difficult to make the string vibrate at the correct frequency, they will need too much tension or will be too prone to break.

I was expecting some software that analyses the vibrations, and increases the frequency and create the sound. But it would be a much more difficult project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! And yes, having this work like an actual guitar would have been a nightmare. Plus, people were just MURDERING those strings. It would have been impossible to keep it in tune. Plus, there's no way you could actually fret a chord properly since the first fret was 10 feet off the ground.</comment></comment>


This is an ad targeted at Millennials - <AUTHOR> https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/this-is-an-ad-targeted-at-millennials <comment><USER2> I wonder if it isn't just, novelty, not anything more than that each generation wants?</comment>


Spanish actor detained after ridiculing 'God and the Virgin Mary' in FB post - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/sep/12/spanish-actor-detained-after-ridiculing-god-and-the-virgin-mary <comment><USER2> This is a shock. In modern times, this sort of enforcement is normally only done for other religions.

Try it in the UK, and also an equivalently offensive statement for the most popular alternative religion. The results will make clear who has power and who doesn't.

</comment><comment><USER3> What an idiot. He wanted to do the right thing but failed in the worst possible way: if you want to attack power abuse by the religious mafia do it rather the George Carlin way: make it creative, brilliant and choose wisely every word so that anyone who is feeling offended by them would also ridicule themselves just by replying with outrage.</comment>


TU Delft researchers design new material by using Artificial Intelligence only - <AUTHOR> https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2019/tu-delft/tu-delft-researchers-design-new-material-by-using-artificial-intelligence-only/ <comment><USER2> Very cool work. The paper is open access, the code is open on Github and he actively invites other researchers / interested laymen to participate in finding better materials. Terrific job of putting your money where your mouth is: "We are sharing the code so that you can work with it and improve it and I can't wait to see what the new discoveries will be."

This type of openness in research should serve as an example to many more!

Also, this guys CV is seriously impressive [pdf] [https://mabessa.github.io/Documents/CV_MiguelBessa.pdf](https://mabessa.github.io/Documents/CV_MiguelBessa.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for the kind words. The code is quite simple and it is very far from perfect... But hopefully with time we (in my group and outside it) can clean it up, convert it to Python only, and write a decent tutorial... We'll see what happens! Cheers, and thanks for your interest!

</comment><comment><USER4> Where's the meat for the article ?

Did they not use software other than "Artificial" "Intelligence" ? I doubt that.

<comment><USER5> There's a big blue link 2 paragraphs in next to "Read the publication"

And then in the first paragraph summary there's a link to the github code.

This is more than you get with most papers!

<comment><USER4> Cheers, I honestly missed both of them.</comment></comment></comment>


How Tinder could take back the White House - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/opinion/how-tinder-could-take-back-the-white-house.html <comment><USER3> I am definitely not pro-republican, but I think that crap like this really fuels the republican fire. It feels unethical. It feels like yet another attempt to jam politics down my throat at every turn.

"Congratulations you've got a match" \- Just kidding no one wants to date you, they just want to sway you to their political agenda.

Honestly I think that part of the problem with politics, is that it's become so repulsive. Partially from b.s. tactics like this.

<comment><USER4> _" Tinder is too casual a platform for users to feel hoodwinked by some political conversation. By and large, users surprised us with their receptiveness. Some people who received bot messages asked how they could join us."_

It seems that the data contradicts your own personal view of this practice.

I don't really see what's repulsive or b.s. about it tbh. It's just automating the initiation of a dialogue. People are volunteering for it. There's nothing sinister as the intent is upfront and above board, and in terms of the content of your average Tinder conversation, politics is as fair game as any other topic surely?

I don't live in the US though, like many on here, so perhaps the perception would be different in the political climate over there.

<comment><USER5> In the past we simply called this spamming, and it was pretty much universally reviled.

I find it somewhat ironic/interesting given my past that the current industry is effectively focused on spamming society to sell stuff. I find the e-mail spammers of old to be far more ethical than what is happening today backed by billions of dollars.

<comment><USER4> This isn't spamming though, by any definition.

Spamming is unsolicited contact. All contact on Tinder is solicited (and a good deal of the non-automated content is a lot more "scummy" than this).

I'm finding the sentiment on HN in response to this bizarre but I guess your reference to "industry" (and billions of dollars) may be a hint. US political campaigns are quite a different beast to elsewhere, and yes, a lot more comparable to campaigns of massive multinational corporations.

<comment><USER5> Huh? It's spamming by every definition.

When I swipe right on Tinder, it's not to get a political message. It's to (presumably) get laid. Bots that send me a political or commercial message on a service that specifically denies such contact is the definition spamming.

It's the same thing as giving your e-mail address to play a cool new game, the game not existing, and now you're being spammed to death. Or messaging that interesting/hot girl from the AIM chatroom, only to find it's a bot advertising a commercial site.

I'd say this is exactly the same line of thought, something I know for a fact since in a past life I've worked for folks who "marketed" in such a manner. The thought patterns are absolutely identical, and I'd be surprised if this political company didn't actually hire a SEO/chat spam company to implement such a feature.

All you have to do is s/politics/penny stocks/ and this turns into an entirely different story. The content of the message doesn't matter, it's still abusing a service to send an unwanted political or commercial message.

Edit: Typos

<comment><USER4> Swiping right on Tinder gets you contact with that person. Nothing more. No guarantee of content topic (or sex). You're swiping to talk to someone.

<comment><USER6> Nothing in life is "guaranteed". However, we often manage to form reasonable expectations about how things work. And when such reasonable expectations are broken, there are ramifications.

In this case, I would guess that unexpected political spam devalues Tinder and makes people less likely to use it. Imagine if large numbers of organizations started using Tinder to spread a message or support their cause. It would make finding a date on the app significantly more frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd be very surprised if the users who "lent" their profiles to allow the group to make political spambots aren't violating Tinder's TOS.

Regardless of your political leanings, this whole operation feels pretty scummy to me.

</comment><comment><USER4> The overwhelmingly negative response from the primarily US-based HN audience to this, in stark contrast to the very positive responses from actual recipients of contact in this initiative (and the subsequent extremely positive and progressive election turnout statistics) are surely symptomatic of some significant fundamental differences in the perception of politics in both countries.

I appear to be literally the only person in this thread who thinks this is OK. As someone who's largely opposed to advertising full stop, in any form, this doesn't seem the same to me in any way. Nor can I see any reason to find it objectionable.

What exactly is it about this that makes people uncomfortable?

<comment><USER6> Well, it would be much better if the article wasn't written by those who organized the efforts. They are likley to be heavily biased towards interpreting the outcome positively, especially in a public write up. They could have somewhat alleviated this concern with hard data, but unfortunately they did not do so.

For me, it's pretty simple. I don't like it for the same reason that I don't like door-to-door solicitors or activists.

<comment><USER4> This is a fair point. I would like to see hard data.

While I'm based in Ireland, I do know a good deal of people in the UK who voted and campaigned (and one who ran for LibDems), and we are also quite close and clued in to UK politics here in general. To me, their account seems plausible based on my own anecdotal knowledge of how campaigning during the election went.

The youth vote turnout was unprecedented, and there was a lot of people involved in various "weird", innovative grass-roots voluntary political campaigns for Corbyn.

In that sense, it felt very Sanders-esque, so the reference to Clinton in the article is bizarre. Particularly given the almost universal, blatant anti- Corbyn media bias. This may also be another reason it seems OK - Clinton/other political campaigns have big media behind them (and large financial interests), so I don't think it would work for them. People wouldn't be as willing to volunteer their time for such an industry-backed cause. Corbyn, like Sanders was very much demonized by the media (tbh, probably worse than for Sanders), so this may seem more like fighting back to people involved (both the senders and receivers of the messages).

Point taken on the door-to-door solicitors or activists, but that depends on the cause really too I think. Certainly most people despise commercial door- to-door calls, but I personally do door-to-door political canvassing here in Ireland, which is the norm here and in the UK, and the vast majority of feedback is positive. Nobody minds when its politics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I encourage them to try this. It will deliver amazing results - <USER2> republicans. It will virtually assure not just Trump 2020, but Schwarzenegger 2024; It will be a coup of epic proportions for the GOP.

Who are they targeting with this system? Angry young men. What have they identified as Angry Young Men's problem? Women won't have sex with them. What do they propose? Offer sex, then never deliver. If a chatbot delivers ridiculous political pandering, and gets in the way of the actual end goal (Sex) by delivering chaff and false-leads, where will the anger be concentrated? Certainly, fundamental attribution error will slough plenty of it off on women, further radicalizing them. But mostly, and correctly, their ire will fall towards the PACs who've set out to 'convince' them; By playing a game wrong and showing that they're untrustworthy, they'll become more jaded and resistant to whatever ideas they're proposing.

It's the evolutionarily correct response - Don't co-operate with those that are trying to trick you. The continued rise of cognitive science as a persuasion tactic, "gamification", and other means of non-subtle manipulation are significantly responsible for the national divide - It's not unreasonable to fight aggressively against those you believe are manipulating you. It's just that there are two camps to the manipulation, and it's much easier to see the manipulation in the other camp.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think HN has been majorly mis-reading this -- it sounds like the article describes a Tinder-mediated get out the vote campaign. It attempts to reach youth (vastly more likely to be progressives, statistically) and convince them to vote by using a marketing strategy that works very well on youth in other media, that is, convince them attractive eligible potential partners care about (whatever is being sold: voting, owning a particular car brand, using a particular kind of perfume or cosmetic). It does not specifically target conservatives and again, especially in the UK, a minority of people 18-25 vote conservative. But for what it's worth, I believe the electoral system in the US will make this less effective there. Telling all the young millenials in college towns to go vote by quirky social media means is unlikely to have an effect on the older rural population (The campaign only targets 18-25 and a lot of people in rural areas don't use Tinder), and a lot of states can't be won only through college towns.

</comment><comment><USER10> I suppose they think they are helping, like Hollywood actors spending an awards show spouting off. Really, they just feed into the "us vs them" mentality and help the politician they hate get a few more votes.

<comment><USER4> In this case, there's a lot to indicate that this initiative did in fact help.

<comment><USER10> I'm a bit unconvinced given all the other polling and election predictions that has failed in the last couple of years.

<comment><USER4> I was referring to results, not predictions. This election is in the past...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are no girls on the internet.

<comment><USER12> > With the help of two software engineers, Erika Pheby and Kyle Buttner,

There is at least one.

<comment><USER8> At least one who self-identifies with a feminine name. Did you just assume her gender? Or perhaps you know that Kyle is female-identifying.

<comment><USER13> I had actually thought Kyle was a girls' name due to only knowing a female Kyle (spelled Kyle, pronounced Kylie).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fieldbook is shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/the-fieldbook-blog/what-happened-at-fieldbook-d70bf25b3968?source=linkShare-5a719c162c16-1526095762 <comment><USER2> Very good post-mortem but left me with questions:

1\. Raised $2.9m, 4 employees, 5 years. Let's say 2/3 of overhead was salary, which seems reasonable. So that's 500k each, or 100k/yr. This seems excessive? Were the founders paying themselves too much? Or where did the money go?

2\. Difficulty in hiring. This seems very much attributable with the company's proximity to the SF black hole. Was relocation never even considered? And why was remote not considered? I would have liked to hear the reasons for those decisions.

All the points about potential recruits demanding "sexy" jobs or wanting to see high growth and large rounds seem pretty much exclusively SF problems. It seems like moving literally anywhere else would have solved this.

3\. What is the actual reason for closing down? Out of money, or out of confidence? If my salary numbers above are wrong - and I should hope they are - maybe they still have a mil or so left, which seems like enough runway to take a stab at least some of the problems.

There were two seemingly contradictory considerations: lack of ability to iterate fast enough, and a realisation that the product was not viable. I would have liked to hear more about this too - iterating faster on the wrong thing would not have helped.

4\. I know it's too late but even as an IT type when I look at the landing page I have very little idea what the product even does. A lot of features and use cases listed but what is the product and how does it solve any problem? There's a single screenshot four page heights down which looks like some kind of spreadsheet. It's not nearly enough.

Still, an honest, insightful and heartfelt piece and I wish the team good luck.

<comment><USER3> The actual reason for closing down was laid out in the article. They got a talent acquisition offer and took it.

<comment><USER4> Flexport is an interesting place for Fieldbook to land, but I do see some synergies. I wonder if the team will focus on improving Flexport's internal operations or building a platform for Flexport's customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > we recruited a head of growth quickly, but couldn't close a designer or > another engineer.

A company with two employees recruiting a head of growth while there is noone to do any of the work that needs to be done.

</comment><comment><USER6> > But at a time when every engineer wanted to work on AI, self-driving cars or > cryptocurrencies, a SaaS startup with modest, sporadic growth wasn't very > attractive.

Were they looking to hire in the SF/SV area only? I enjoy these kinds of projects (though wasn't & am not looking for a FT role), and I know a few others who do — but because we're not driven by the hype train, we don't live in the normal 'tech' areas.

Further down the article I see they were on the 'peninsula' (not sure where that is) and didn't want to become a remote team. But if they weren't in SF, there must be programmers around who enjoy data work, not buzzword-tech?

</comment><comment><USER7> Sad to see it go. I had professional interest to Fieldbook because I had been developing a similar "spreadsheet"-like application intended for radically changing the way table table is processed - [http://conceptoriented.com](http://conceptoriented.com) \- and failed. Finally, I decided to move this (quite unique) technology to completely different area and re-implement it as a kind of major alternative to MapReduce focused on general-purpose batch and stream processing (mainly IoT and edge analytics): [https://github.com/asavinov/bistro](https://github.com/asavinov/bistro)

I am curious to see what happens with other apps like airtable, rowshare or zenkit and the whole market. Will they be able to survive as independent companies (like Tableau or Qlik in self-service BI)?

</comment><comment><USER8> > The flagship feature was a way to link sheets of data to create a relational > structure.

It is also the most difficult feature to implement from the theoretical point of view and non-obvious feature for the users to understand. Therefore, we still have the relational world and the spreadsheet world existing separately almost in isolation.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm founder of [https://www.fundo.co/](https://www.fundo.co/) and some things sound terribly familiar. However, I think it starts with deciding who you make your product for in this case, as application of this kind of product is tremendous (imagine making a list of things you can do with Excel).

As mentioned here, I don't see this razor-sharp focus in Fieldbook, which could be the reason of missing traction?

Fundo is about to undergo a major transformation, exactly for the reason of simplicity..

</comment><comment><USER10> appreciate the openness. honestly being acquihired by flexport isn't the worst outcome. i think Jason's next venture, should he have one, will benefit a lot from his learnings from Fieldbook.

any users of airtable (i'm not one) can comment on what he thinks Airtable got right?

>In contrast, our closest competitor, Airtable, seems to be getting more traction. Early on, their product focus was subtly different, with more emphasis on mobile experience and collaboration features than on data modeling or formulas. These aren't the features that were most important to the users we talked to, but they're easier to understand, and I suspect they made both marketing and onboarding easier for Airtable—maybe just enough to make all the difference.

\---

Edit: here's their most successful Show HN from 3years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10752570)

and a month before that: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10508038)

</comment><comment><USER11> I miss the days when this would be a humble Shareware product

<comment><USER12> Give away all the value you create at home while you toil away creating value for someone else at work? Why do you miss that?

<comment><USER13> I think you're confusing shareware with freeware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, are they open sourcing this then? Or just burning this all down to make a point? Something notably unanswered.

<comment><USER15> I am curious as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The product could be improved, look at Monday.com for an example of what this product could have been. The difference is in the details ... small UI / UX details but very important.

</comment><comment><USER17> Too bad. I thought this product looked really great, but I didn't have a reason to use it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Damn it, I read that as "Facebook is shutting down".</comment>