An example: being mentioned on Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://blog.socialsci.com/the-value-of-your-start-up-being-mentioned-on

<comment><USER2> We had a user post a Wormwall (a quick one page webpage service we offer) on Reddit that made the front page. We hit 130 thousand page requests in 2 hours. A pretty intense day.

It was also our largest moneymaking day ever (ads), eclipsing an entire week in the top 10 hot stories on Lifehacker.

While reddit was intense, it was over by basically the end of the day. Lifehacker on the other hand hit pretty hard, but the burn was much slower. We were still seeing effects from it weeks later (mostly from second hand sites that carried the story).

I wrote up a blog post about the LH event, but haven't had a chance to write one up about reddit yet. [http://kymalabs.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-its-like- to-make-f...](http://kymalabs.blogspot.com/2011/04/what-its-like-to-make- front-page-of.html)

<comment><USER3> Reddit is like an enormous spotlight. They have so much traffic, but it's focused on just 25 spots on the front page each day. As a result, whatever gets on the front page receives a truly astonishing burst of traffic. And this effect only increases as Reddit grows — for even as their size has doubled and quadrupled over the years, all that traffic is still focused on the same 25 spots.

It's true that you can make your own subreddits, and of course you can keep loading more pages, but the cutoff rate is pretty severe. A few non-default subreddits (like /r/Frugal) do have sizable power since they're well targeted, essentially functioning like mini-reddits.

HN is similar, but since they go out of they way to stay obscure, any increase in traffic is practically accidental.

<comment><USER2> Part of the problem is getting people to come to new reddits, even if they might be generally interesting. One of the reason some of the bigger ones _are_ so big is that they come as default subscriptions with every new account. But yeah, it's a very intense spotlight at this point.

I'm wondering if they've ever thought of just building up pseudo-random front pages for different visitors. So _everybody_ doesn't just see the same 25 links (which to be honest are mostly imgur at this point). Reddit almost suffers from a critical mass problem. New submissions, if timed poorly will go nowhere, while others will fly to the moon simply because other people have upvoted them.

<comment><USER4> I like the psuedo-random subreddit idea--maybe a stochastic process that gives you a new set of subscribed subreddits, taking into account submissions you've upvoted. Have a button somewhere that'll do it, and another one to revert to your previous subreddits.

That would help people get past the "I've been here three months and reddit is boring now" phase, and on to customizing their experience with the worthier subreddits.

<comment><USER2> reddit is becoming abysmally boring in certain ways.

For example, a great majority of posts these days are simply links to imgur, of pictures that already exist elsewhere. Linking to the source would have provided greater access to a wider scope of content. You could probably get much of the "reddit experience" just going to imgur and browsing recent uploads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A few months ago I posted a writeup about displaying a Gameboy video signal on an oscilloscope (<http://www.flashingleds.wordpress.com>). It did the rounds for a few days (kotaku, HN, hackaday, slashdot etc.), and I was slightly surprised at which sites generated the biggest numbers. Reddit was at the top by far, something like 25k in 24 hours without having even made their front page, followed by slashdot (7k) then HN (3k). For a site that usually ambles along at ~80 hits a day it was pretty crazy.

<comment><USER6> I was one of those views. That was a cool project!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now compare your numbers to what I got by running a sponsored post just few days ago -

      8K+ impressions
      120+ clicks         ( 1.50% )
      40+ comments        ( 15 are mine )
      20+ subscriptions   ( for project updates )
      post score of 8-11  ( changes with every reload )

Run time - 3 days, cost - $130.

I suspect that we all here read Gabriel's mega-praise for reddit's self-serve ads [1], but YMMV and it appears that natural mentions are far more effective than promoted stuff... which is not that surprising really.

[1] [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck- go-...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/my-duck-duck-go-reddit-ad- by-the-numbers.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> One thing to point out in this specific case is that the demographic to which SocialSci directly benefits (i.e., survey participants) resonates with a (rather large) subset of Reddit users, contributing to their surge in sign- ups.

I'd even go as far as saying this kind of "organic" discovery by a more diverse community trumps the spike in traffic generated by being frontpaged on HN, whose user base is admittedly a little more technically minded and bourgeois in nature, and consequently reflects poorly on long term growth potential.

<comment><USER9> We experienced something very similar when drumming up interest in my startup, Fitocracy, on the r/fitness section of Reddit. The key here, which should be quite obvious, is to find your target audience and then get your message to them.

<comment><USER8> Exactly the point I was driving across. I've actually signed up and followed media coverage of your site for while- you guys are building an incredible product (I'm a real advocate of the whole gamification concept).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very interesting to see the detailed stats on the impact this had.

I'm hopeful we get to see the follow-up post soon: "Being frontpaged on Hacker News"

<comment><USER11> A few articles along those lines:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2733866>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2452178>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2228000>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298501>

<comment><USER12> Another (mine) [http://www.kevinohashi.com/20/04/2011/24000-domains- article-...](http://www.kevinohashi.com/20/04/2011/24000-domains-article- postmortem-traffic-revenue-business-models)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Might be worth even buying an ad on reddit (the ones up the top) and targeting it at that subreddit. Being open and immersive with your customers (especially the denizens of reddit) pays off from what I've seen.

</comment><comment><USER14> 404?

<comment><USER15> They fixed it, apparently.</comment></comment>


Freedom of Thought Requires Free Media Require Free Technology - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKOk4Y4inVY <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this! It was fascinating and thought-provoking.

 _Zoowar_ : email me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Plastic surgery will soon evolve stealth like technology to thwart privacy invading facial recognition applications. This is why aliens all look the same.

<comment><USER2> I wanted to talk to you about something I'm thinking about. The idea is to make a small app that does direct P2P communication. Each person stores encrypted their contacts routing information. You can direct-message (server- less) if the person is online, or if not, send it encrypted to others who are online, and when the person logs in, it's routed on to them. You could do micro-blogging like this, where messages pulse out to two or three degrees of separation, and only if they are validated (i.e. liked), do they push on further. This lets spam die soon (or sooner if it's marked as such) but important messages will make their way through the system. What do you think?</comment></comment></comment>


Jeff Bezos-blackmailing David Pecker out as CEO of National Enquirer Company - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/David-Pecker-out-as-CEO-of-National-Enquirer-15506482.php <comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to somehow include the context from 2019 in the headline. (2,444 Hacker News readers upvoted Bezo's "No Thank You, Mr. Pecker" post on Medium.)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19109474)

This seemed like an appropriate follow-up.

</comment><comment><USER2> True! But this article doesn't even mention Jeff Bezos name anywhere. You should perhaps avoid putting such misleading titles.

</comment><comment><USER3> Actual title:

David Pecker out as CEO of National Enquirer parent company

No trace of Jeff Bezos nor of blackmailing in the (short) article that I can see.</comment>


The world's longest burning fires: China's unseen story (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://chinadialogue.net/en/energy/6296-the-world-s-longest-burning-fires-china-s-unseen-story/ <comment><USER2> The worlds oldest underground fire has been burning for 6000 years!

[https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/03/the-worlds-oldest- undergr...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/03/the-worlds-oldest-underground- fire-has-been-burning-for-6000-years/)</comment>


The three second rule - fact or fiction? - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2138777/The-second-rule-fact-fiction-Scientists-reveal-food-dropped-floor-safe-eat.html

<comment><USER2> A perennial topic. See [http://news.aces.illinois.edu/news/if-you-drop-it- should-you...](http://news.aces.illinois.edu/news/if-you-drop-it-should-you- eat-it-scientists-weigh-5-second-rule) , which won the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in public health.

Jillian Clarke's full report referenced a similar rule from the time of Genghis Khan. (I think it was a 24 hour rule for meat.)

It was explored more by a Clemson project [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17381737](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17381737) .

This work from Manchester Metropolitan University is mentioned at [http://www.staff.mmu.ac.uk/manmetlife/news/view/food- researc...](http://www.staff.mmu.ac.uk/manmetlife/news/view/food-research-is- media-smash) but I can't find the actual research.

("Technician Kathy Lees was commissioned by cleaning manufacturers Vileda to research how safe it is to eat food which has been dropped on the floor. She tested five food items for 3, 5, and 10 seconds - cooked pasta, ham, a plain biscuit, drief fruit and bread and jam - and discovered that the higher the salt of sugar content the less chance of the survival of any harmful bacteria.")</comment>


Cache Is King: The Inevitability of L4 - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/01/16/cache-is-king/ <comment><USER2> Why don't we have two sets of memory - the main, slow, cached memory, and a smaller set of super fast low latency memory, like cache, but that the programmer and compiler can use explicitly?

Sort of like special purpose performance instructions like SIMD but on the memory side

<comment><USER3> Special instructions won't help latency. There are prefetch instructions that basically just do loads. Each load in x64 (at least on Intel) grabs 128 bytes (two cache lines) from memory to cache minimum.

The Cell from Sony did have explicit cache control (I think) and it was notoriously difficult to program for.

The real reason cache isn't handled explicitly though is because it isn't necessary. Getting good performance and cache usage can be done at the C++ level, you just have to know how the CPU works and access memory linearly so it can be prefetched. I've tried to use prefetch instructions and beating the out of order buffer in the CPU is actually very difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We already have L4 cache, but we call it RAM. It caches our shared libraries, and swap. Its line size is 4k (8k on POWER).

This was all understood perfectly even in the original von Neumann paper in 1948. There, registers cached RAM which cached drum, which cached tape.

<comment><USER3> This article is specifically about another level of cache between L3 and main memory becoming standard in modern PC architectures.

It has already happened in a few places not mentioned in the article, Xeon Phi with high bandwidth memory and broadwell CPUs that could embedded ram as either video memory or a level 4 cache.

<comment><USER4> The _point_ is that there is nothing at all special about cache vs any other kind of memory. There are purely practical distinctions made according to relative timing vs bus cycles and, at times, interrupt latency and head-arm settling time, that dictate the mechanism for faulting in misses. All these times have varied by many orders of magnitude over the years without producing any fundamental change in the principles involved. It's all _just_ memory hierarchy, and has been for fully seven decades, since the very beginning.

It takes a very small time window, and very limited historical awareness, to see Ln, for _any_ n, as indicating anything special. In this case, it indicates what we have lately called "RAM" will now be called "L4" \-- just as what was so recently RAM is now L3 -- as persistent phase-change memory moves into the place lately occupied by disks and, more recently, SSDs, and the distinction between "RAM" and "storage" gets fuzzy once again.

Even persistence across power loss has phased in and out, over the decades. The slowest memory happens to now be both random-access and persistent, again, and pretty darn fast this time.

<comment><USER3> Not only is that not true, that's not the point of this article at all. It is only talking about speculation for when a L4 cache will be added to modern architectures.

> It takes a very small time window, and very limited historical awareness, to > see Ln, for any n, as indicating anything special.

This article actually goes through the history of cache additions and talks about how it isn't special and more a matter of evolution. You seem to be arguing against points no one is making.

> it indicates what we have lately called "RAM" will now be called "L4"

This is a bizarre semantic game to play, since cache is fundamentally about a heirarchy of locality and main memory is a way for the entire computer to communicate through storage that may or may not use the CPU.

<comment><USER4> What is bizarre is pretending to understand what you read better than other people, while supporting your argument by directly contradicting what it actually says right there in black and white.

<comment><USER3> Your replies had nothing to do with the article at all. Respond with actual information or not at all please.

<comment><USER5> Please don't be a jerk in HN comments, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Professor who rang vix alarm says tether used to boost Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-13/professor-who-rang-vix-alarm-says-tether-used-to-boost-bitcoin <comment><USER2> I feel like this comes up every time bitcoin drops a lot.</comment>


The Plumbing Revolution: Developers' Improving Toolbox - <AUTHOR> http://graysky.org/2010/06/developer-plumbing/

<comment><USER2> I'm still missing a crucial piece of plumbing: billing (especially recurring) as I'm outside the US.</comment>


Every Tesla Accident Resulting in Death - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesladeaths.com/ <comment><USER2> It's too bad they don't list competitor cars. Without such a comparison, this list really doesn't mean anything except "some people die in and around cars." How is one to know if 41 fatalities is an urgent issue, or the safest among the competing car models? What are the stats for say, Nissan Leaf or BMW i3? And of course, the numbers should be taken in context with how many of each model is on the road, and also how many accidents were not fatal. How about an estimate of how many of them suffered no accident at all?

The number increasing by year is surely more to do with more people driving Teslas each year, so that would be expected. Without correlating data, I can only take this to mean Tesla's sales increase yearly. That's something the stock holders can be happy about, although not a very nice way to measure sales success.

It seems the only intent of this site is to discredit Tesla. The lack of comparative data is highly suspicious.

</comment><comment><USER3> 100 accidents in 6 years is insane</comment>


When will banks fix their insecure systems? - <AUTHOR> http://twitpic.com/1lm72k/full

<comment><USER2> Oh, come on, who is ever going to guess your 6 letter password?

After all, nobody in their right mind would use a dictionary word that is only 6 letters long, now would they?

And it's great they allow only letters and numbers (case sensitive?), all those special characters would only lead to confusion.</comment>


Expand Your Concept of Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.stationarywaves.com/2018/12/expand-your-concept-of-success.html <comment><USER2> I felt the author's definition of success in this article was ironically narrow. His thesis is that your success is determined by how well you do perform at your particular job. He also seemed to have some misplaced angst towards management and salesmen. I do not believe success should be tied to your work, but rather to your relationships and contributions to humanity as a whole.

<comment><USER3> I actually intended to write a blog post about having a more expansive concept of success than just career success; but I found that I had so much to say about career success specifically, that I didn't bother to write anything about other aspects of success. I certainly agree with you that success is more than just what happens at work! There are relationships, creative projects, community involvement, and so on.

I don't have misplaced angst against managers or salespeople, and I respect people who are good at those things. I simply wanted to call attention to other kinds of success.</comment></comment>


Microscaling containers to maintain queue length using control theory - <AUTHOR> http://blog.microscaling.com/2016/04/microscaling-with-nsq-queue.html <comment><USER2> I haven't used control theory to scale services up & down, but I have used it to regulate requests from a batch process to a production service, scaling the request rate up and down in order to avoid overloading the service.

Philip Janert's book "Feedback Control for Computer Systems" had everything I needed to know to understand control theory & implement it for my particular scenario. Great book.</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you find good freelancers? - <AUTHOR> I have only ever hired from Upwork (formerly Elance/Ondesk), but they seem to have a very limited palette of offerings. If you need someone who is a skilled C coder for instance (which is what I need), they don't really have much. They are mostly web devs and data science, it seems.<p>Where do you find your consultants and free-lancers? <comment><AUTHOR> Side note, I figure I may as well mention my need here-- I have a Node.js desktop app which I am using to run various other scripts and binaries, and I need a man-in-the-middle C program to receive the stdout/stderr from those programs and relay it to the parent node program.

In theory this is as easy as piping, but in practice it's difficult to tell the difference between consecutive multi-line outputs. `echo 1\n2; echo 3` is indistinguishable from `echo 1; echo 2\n3;`

So I'm hoping to have a program fast enough to detect timing differences, which is the best that can be hoped for. This is why I'm looking for something written in C-- it's the fastest option and speed is crucial for this use case. I am not knowledgeable about systems programming and if I'm wrong I welcome a rebuttal.

I need this to A.) work on Linux/Mac, B.) maintain color information in program output, and C.) be used in the following manner: runnable on command line with the name of the program being run BY it as a command line argument, e.g. `scriptRunner "./gradlew run"`.</comment>


Startup feeds on Alltop, including News.YC - <AUTHOR> http://startups.alltop.com/

<comment><USER2> I'm probably missing something, but I don't see what's the big deal with alltop.com? OK, it is Guy Kawasaki, but the site -- yet another basic RSS aggregator.

<comment><USER3> Thats what I thought at first, but some of it is actually useful as a feed discovery tool.

Also, I found a bunch of cool people to follow in the twitterati section.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wonder what they think their target market is... Who do they think would be interested in tech startups and would want to use an aggregator like theirs?

<comment><USER3> it probably took Guy 5 minutes to add startups.alltop.com, so might as well I guess

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Could use a larger font size.</comment>


Everything You Need to Know About SVG - <AUTHOR> https://css-tricks.com/lodge/svg/ <comment><USER2> CSS-Tricks is a great website.

Also, this "SVG Can Do That??" presentation[1] is "old" by internet standards but is still (to me, at least) somewhere between eye-opening and mind-blowing:

1\. [http://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do- that#/](http://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do-that#/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish I had read this earlier today. I wrote my own mini-Cliff-notes on how to do things in SVG that covers a lot of silly SVG things in a Stack Overflow answer...

[https://stackoverflow.com/a/54462467/3917602](https://stackoverflow.com/a/54462467/3917602)

The real problem with SVG is that you need to be a techie type rather than a paintbrush wielding type to get the most out of SVG. In companies this is forbidden. You can't have a techie do design. So you have to have off the shelf bloated 'assets' because that is how they come out of Illustrator. I find I always have to roll my own even for the simplest things such as the 'moon' icon that I thought worthy of putting in to a Stack Overflow answer for 'future reference'.

Clearly I will be watching every CSS-Tricks video on this series and I hope that this gets mentioned in it:

[https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/](https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/)

This allows you to spot 'obvious' optimisations.

<comment><USER4> I made a SVG shape in Vectr for a typographic logo I was creating (not a designer). The SVG included some text, for which I used one of the Google fonts included in Vectr. When I exported it, the graphic was 400KB or something ridiculous.

I put it into SVGOMg, and it quickly identified the font as the culprit. I removed the font and the file size went to 0.6KB.

Does Illustrator include the file size of the font when it exports to SVG?

<comment><USER5> In Inkscape there is an option to convert text to paths. This would make the text shapes and then it won't export the font. This is what you want for anything that has fixed text.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Every time I dig a little deeper into svg's I'm amazed at what they can do. Latest exploration - path animations. eg being able to morph one shape into another.

I'm surprised though that a Flash-like software tool doesn't exist for composing complex SVGs w/ animations and interactions. Given how accessible svg outputs are, people could be creating some amazing Flash-like things that can be run just about anywhere. Admittedly, coding svg's can be pretty tricky to learn.

<comment><USER7> > _I 'm surprised though that a Flash-like software tool doesn't exist for > composing complex SVGs w/ animations and interactions._

It does! [https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html)

<comment><USER6> Thanks! As per this (really good) article [https://medium.com/@fmuaddib/the- following-are-the-possible-...](https://medium.com/@fmuaddib/the-following- are-the-possible-ways-to-create-professional-animations-in-svg-9d4caca5f4ec)

> The former Adobe Flash Pro was fully rewritten by Adobe to migrate from the > now obsolete flash animations to the modern SVG animations. You can export > the resulting SVG animations along with a custom javascript library, or > choose to save in SVG+SMIL using plugins like "flash2svg".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an aside, the CSS on this website somehow makes it so that there are two scrollbars, one being the styled one and one from desktop Safari, and the they don't seem to line up.

<comment><USER9> Not in Brave on Windows

<comment><USER10> Haven't used Brave, how do you like it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Was hoping this would have a section titled "how to manage around missing z-index functionality."

<comment><USER7> TIL, thank you. Just so I understand, you're looking for workarounds like [1]?

[1] [https://codepen.io/osublake/pen/YXoEQe](https://codepen.io/osublake/pen/YXoEQe)

<comment><USER11> TIL that appendChild will take existing nodes out of their existing spot in a document (as well as the more obvious action of appending them to another node). :)

This is a good start, but it's limited to "move to front." If you wanted to move something between two intermediate planes, you'd have to reshuffle the whole stack.

<comment><USER12> You could use <g> tags for this, e.g.

<svg> <g id="z-order-0"></g> <g id="z-order-1"></g> <g id="z-order-2"></g> </g>

Then you can change the z-order by moving the element to the appropriate group. Elements are rendered in the order of an inorder traversal which is why this works.

<comment><USER11> I like this -- I'm sure there's some annoying corner cases, but at first glance I think it covers most of the use cases I've worried about. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's. Not. Flash. And that's too bad. Flash's vector graphics make SVG look bad, but they flew too close to the sun.

<comment><USER14> SVG supports a lot more than Flash did. Flash only supported quadratic Bézier curves, for instance.

(On the other hand, I very much appreciate the simplicity of the Flash approach from a performance point of view. Performance wasn't really a concern when SVG was being developed. Opera's overriding concern with SVG was trying to compete with Flash on features.)

<comment><USER13> Yep, always downvotes for Flash. But the editor to create those curves was second to none.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At this point it's probably just worth waiting for SVG 2.0 to come out.

<comment><USER16> Can you ELI5 Why?

<comment><USER17> That's a good question.

On the one hand, the W3C has this listed under new features for SVG 2.0:

"Allowed <paint> values and marker properties to take the child keyword and <child-selector> values to support ID-less referencing."[1]

That would mean you could have multiple inline SVGs on the same web page and avoid potential nameclashes from gradients and/or patterns having the same id.

On the other hand, that same page lists mesh gradients as a feature of SVG 2.0. I vaguely remember on the SVG archive that the browser vendors said they weren't going to implement that.

[1] [https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/CR- SVG2-20180807/changes.html](https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/CR- SVG2-20180807/changes.html)

<comment><USER18> Could you create an SVG viewer custom element? All contents will be independent.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Kodak's First Digital Moment - <AUTHOR> http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/kodaks-first-digital-moment/

<comment><USER2> I spent 7 years (02-09) working for Kodak in their Windsor, CO manufacturing plant. It was an incredible lesson in [not] taking risks that I'll never forget.

The writing was certainly on the wall about the digital photography revolution when I started but nevertheless every year the story was the same as the losses continued to mount: "Digital continues to eat into our film business faster than we have predicted. We've accelerated our plans [to switch to digital] for next year."

Meanwhile, in the middle of all that I remember picking up the WSJ and reading an interview with Netflix's Reed Hastings. They had just debuted streaming and were fielding questions from reporters asking if they were worried about cannibalizing their successful DVD business. Reed's response was "We have to obsolete ourselves before someone else does."

I cut the article out and hung it in my office at Kodak with that quote highlighted. It was pretty well faded when I finally took it down, laid off as a part of another "digital transformation" restructuring.

</comment><comment><USER3> Kodak could have owned this market, Xerox could have owned personal computing, etc, there are stories like this all over where a big dominant company invents the next generation of technology, but because of internal company forces cant (or wont) actually bring it in a meaningful way.

Kodak couldn't deal with cannibalizing their existing business (for film, and less extent, printing supplies) and Xerox sales couldn't wean itself off the 'click' (per imprint commission) enough to figure out how to sell the PC.

<comment><USER4> _Kodak could have owned this market_

People keep saying that, but it doesn't check out. Look at who owns the camera market: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus and Apple.

None of these companies are new, two thirds of them had huge analog camera businesses 30 years ago. The major shift in digital photography was people going from spending $500 on a camera and $1000 on film and $1000 on processing, to spending $1000 on a camera and $500 on a computer.

Now, I bet Kodak could have done very well as a sensor supplier (like Sony or Samsung), but thinking that they could've somehow "owned this market"... It's been 15 years since Nikon released the first pro DSLR (D1) and Canon released the first affordable DSLR (the Canon D30), and look how many competitors are chomping at their heels. That's because Nikon and Canon both have lens systems with a huge range of glass, much of it designed before 1999. If you bought a D1 or D30, you could go to your local camera store and pick up everything from a super-wide to a long telephoto. Kodak had none of that.

<comment><USER3> Kodak did have a near monopoly in consumer cameras though, and they could have had a monopoly in sensors too - what they could have done by leading it rather than playing catchup is changing how adoption worked.

Had Kodak led it, we for example might print a ton more digital photography than we do now, because the charge was instead lead by Sony (in my opinion) and their early mavica - and for a long time you couldn't print digital photos onto real photo paper using a lasting process - because kodak controlled something like 70% of the processing market, they could have led the ability to print in store.

As it was, high quality printing from digital didn't come until much later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Kodak did lead in digital cameras. Their $17K digital camera for news photographers in 1994 was the first digital camera that took good pictures and was reasonably compact. (Kodak's 1991 model required a backpack for data storage.)

But Kodak didn't get the price down. Casio, Sony, and Kyocera did. In 1999, Nikon came out with the D1, the first good DLSR, and the beginning of the end of pro film photography. It's the five years between 1994 and 1999 that Kodak blew it.

</comment><comment><USER6> This story is the precise reason why innovation usually comes from outside, from the startup. Why did Mercedes see value in Tesla's technology while the Big 3 did not? It pains me greatly to see the tech leadership mantle in automobiles slowly pass from Michigan to California.

<comment><USER7> Nikon is a startup?

The camera market is dominated by big companies. And not only that, many of those companies were actually also big film camera companies. Obviously there's Nikon and Canon. Sony (which has been coming out with some wickedly cool and innovative digital cameras and certainly worked its way up to become a huge digital camera company) is not an analoge camera company, but it's also not a small company.

The biggest disruption to the (low end of the) camera market have probably been smartphones and their cameras. (The market segment of cheap point and shoot cameras is practically dead and camera makers have already moved on to new and certainly more exciting products, targeting a very different audience.) That's chiefly Apple and Samsung (as the biggest drivers of bringing smartphones with good enough cameras to everyone), certainly not small startups.

Even the hippest of the hip current digital cameras tend to be made by some really, really old companies that have been making cameras (and analog film!) for ages, namely Fujifilm (it's right in the name!) and Olympus.

Selling cameras is still dangerous terrain and I think it pays off to have great ideas and to know your audience, but some very old and very big companies have been quite excellent at doing that, actually. Of course, all around them there has been lots of death and destruction (including Kodak), but that doesn't mean no one made it.

<comment><USER8> > Sony (which has been coming out with some wickedly cool and innovative > digital cameras and certainly worked its way up to become a huge digital > camera company) is not an analoge camera company

It's not, but it did buy one of the (fading) high-end camera businesses to get access to an SLR system and lens portfolio that they used grant them the credibility they needed to base their current charge on.

<comment><USER7> I know! (I didn't mention it because my comment was getting long enough already.) It seems if you can't sell to the low end you absolutely need to show off your analog film chops in some way to be really taken seriously. Or at least you had to. (I mean, Sony's current cameras are certainly thoroughly modern and you can't really accuse them of nostalgia.)

<comment><USER8> Yeah, although their lens strategy seems a bit of a mess - Minolta, Alpha, and Alpha Full-Frame.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Prisoner of iTunes - the iPad file transfer horror - <AUTHOR> http://www.reghardware.com/2010/06/07/ipad_file_transfer/

<comment><USER2> > _Apple won't let you anywhere near the iPad file system..._

Actually, Apple lets developers right in, so they can release solutions like PadSync:

 _Enter Ecamm. The company, well known for its Mac and iPhone utilities, has released the first version of its PadSync tool. PadSync, which retails for $9.95, offers direct access to your iPad Documents folders from a desktop Mac application. As the gallery here shows, your shared files are accessible on an app-by-app basis. Double-click on a Word file, and you can open it in Microsoft Word, edit it, and save it back._

 _Updates on the Mac instantly sync back to the iPad -- with one exception. Ecamm is still working on subfolder support, such as the Inbox that's created by the 3.2-and-later document sharing classes. Beyond that, PadSync offers all the instant synchronization you could wish for. Oh, and don't forget my favorite feature: since files are mirrored as well as synced on the Mac, you can access those files and queue up new ones even when the iPad is not connected to the Mac._

[http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/07/ecamm-introduces-ipad- documen...](http://www.tuaw.com/2010/06/07/ecamm-introduces-ipad-document- management-with-padsync/)</comment>


Donald Daters, a dating app for Trump supporters, leaked its users' data - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/15/donald-daters-a-dating-app-for-trump-supporters-leaked-its-users-data/ <comment><USER2> Not calling this app Covfefe Meets Bagel seems like a bit of a missed opportunity to me. Not making the Firebase instance private seems like a bigger missed opportunity though.

</comment><comment><USER3> I suppose this could be an interesting attack vector on folks. Pick a group you hate, create a website specifically targeted at that group, get their personal information, and then have a "data breach". Just being part of some groups could seriously impact people in certain circles.

Its not like there is much risk for the website owners given past breaches. At worst you fold the company and even that isn't very certain since TOS seems to be king.

<comment><USER4> "Emily Moreno, the app's founder and a former aide to Sen. Marco Rubio"

Seems unlikely in this case.

<comment><USER3> Sen. Marco Rubio is not a Trump fan (now that is an understatement), so I'm not sure that makes it less likely. I have doubts in this case and chalk it up to crappy developers unless something more comes of it.

It still seems like an attack vector that has a really good risk / reward ratio. Thinking about it, it also seems like an interesting way to feed an election campaigns big data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Politics aside, is the person who found this exploit really a "security researcher" if they sent the data to a news publisher instead of responsibly disclosing the issue?

<comment><USER6> Yes. This way the users know to protect themselves as quickly as possible. It's not like they made the app easier to hack with the information in the article, anyone who looks at the app will see the data.

<comment><USER7> I don't agree. Maybe if they just reported it instead of sending the data. That implies malicious intent.

<comment><USER6> Downloading the data is always harder to defend than just discovering it. But unless and until they do something malicious, or sell the data to the highest bidder, I'm going to say it's fair game. Really we don't know how many independent copies were made while the data was live, and however much blame I assign to the hacker has got to be tiny compared to the responsibility of the app maker.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Minimal Viable Products strike again.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone with half a brain could tell this was a bare-minimum effort that you shouldn't trust with your information.

</comment><comment><USER10> The best people.

</comment><comment><USER11> Both the people that use the app and attack the app need to reevaluate what's important in life

</comment><comment><USER12> Why does everyone seem to make the same mistake? DO NOT roll your own crypto.

<comment><USER13> The article mentions it was because their Firebase database was unsecured - meaning anyone who knew the url could get access to all the data. That was the default for a long time, and Firebase will send you email reminders if you keep it unsecured. The developer ignored the best practices mentioned in the Firebase documentation and the email reminders that come out once a week (I think).</comment></comment>


Pandemic Ventilator Project - <AUTHOR> https://panvent.blogspot.com/ <comment> semi-extrinsic I've been looking over the designs being put forward in the various places now, and I cannot understand why people aren't just planning to copy the Manley ventilator.

This was the standard ventilator in Europe for decades. It is simple to design, does not even require electricity (mechanical solution driven by air from central compressed air system) so all parts can be sourced locally, and the design has a clinically proven track record.

Here is a video with schematic showing how it works:

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=CrUfblki6Zs](https://youtube.com/watch?v=CrUfblki6Zs)

<comment><USER2> The issue is that with the kind of ventilation required you need to sedate the patient with gasses and you need to recycle those gasses and unused oxygen. With the length of time patients have to be on this you don't want to lose those gasses and also pump it out into the atmosphere. The Manley design could be a good starting point I suppose, you just have to replace the weight system with controllers and add a carbon scrubbing stage to feed back the gasses. The carbon scrubbing stage is the tricky one, it's something that requires good chemistry and not mechanics and electronics.

<comment><USER3> Physician here; this isn't true for the ventilation of COVID patients, or ICU patients in general.

There's a difference between simple ventilator [1], and an anesthesia machine [2] that adds gas mixing, scavenging, etc.

ICU patients are anesthetized using IV sedation (a common regimen in the US is fentanyl/propofol), not inhalational anesthetics. Most vents only have simple inline filters to reduce contamination.

[1] A classic vent in the US is the Puritan Bennett 840. Here's its manual showing filters: [https://www.medtronic.com/content/dam/covidien/library/us/en...](https://www.medtronic.com/content/dam/covidien/library/us/en/product/acute- care-ventilation/PB840_Technical_Reference_Manual_EN_10067720D00.pdf)

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

<comment><USER2> I suppose that's good news then for potential emergency use of unapproved makeshift alternatives to ventilators, I guess it also makes hand ventilation viable if you have enough volunteers available to do the bagging.

<comment><USER4> Bagging is hard to do for extended periods.

<comment><USER5> Anesthesiologist here - true, I was a Stanford medical student on an ICU rotation when a Tesla employee crashed his plane into high voltage power lines while attempting to land at San Carlos airport. Electrical power on the peninsula was out for an extended period of time. Battery backups eventually failed, then gas powered generators started failing so everyone with a pair of hands took turns manually ventilating the patients. If push comes to shove, we could get by with a Jackson-Reese circuit and a pair of hands. Obviously we don't want to find ourselves in this situation.

<comment><USER6> Why is it relevant he was a Tesla employee?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an anesthesiologist and hacker, I love the enthusiasm here. I'm less concerned about the hospital use-case. It would be helpful to crowdsource solutions to address the need for ventilators _after_ patients leave the ICU. Based on current practice patterns, some patients will undergo tracheostomy tube placement, and then need to be discharged to respiratory rehab facilities. We will need to increase capacity in this setting, and I'm not seeing or hearing anyone address this area. If we don't solve this problem, we will find ourselves with a backlog of patients who could be discharged from the ICU, but with nowhere to go.

<comment><USER7> Anecdotally:

My mother is a retired RN with an "inactive" license in Washington state. She does elder care as a side gig for individual clients.

She recently had to turn someone down because the patient was intubated; it's not legal for her to care for such a patient. If anything went wrong she could be both at risk of a lawsuit and in trouble with the state for practicing medicine without a license.

(She's also in her seventies herself, putting her in the high-risk category, but that's a different issue.)

I'm at a loss as to how our legal and licensing institutions can be adapted to allow for a quick increase in the number of personnel who can care for intubated patients.

<comment><USER5> You raise a related issue, which is critical to address as well. That is, we need people to help manage patients before, during, and after their hospital stay. I'm less concerned about the licensing issues because public health emergency declarations make it possible for state officials to clear the way for someone like your mom.

Where you, and fellow hackers can help, is by offering tech solutions that solve the issue of coordinating/figuring out _where_ your mom's skills could be most helpful. We will also need to collect information, such as _when_ your mom is available to help. Could be a good time to revisit the concept of an Uber-like platform for healthcare delivery, assuming that it can be up an running in a few days. Hack-a-thon, anyone?

<comment><USER7> Count me in!

> _revisit the concept of an Uber-like platform for healthcare delivery_

Where has this been discussed before? There are lots of referral services, some of them charities, some of them private businesses. For example, in Washington state there's the Korean Women's Association: [https://www.kwacares.org/](https://www.kwacares.org/)

<comment><USER5> Sweet. Looked into the KWA's site, seems like a clear use-case. If we were to break down the build into achievable chunks we may have more success, and have a bigger impact along the way.

There's an immediate need for a single source of truth for all the locations where COVID-19 testing is available. Trump said Google was building it, but turns out they are weeks away from an MVP that would only cover the SF Bay Area. I propose we start by solving that problem.

Building on this, we can answer the question: what is the scope of the problem? Today, the CDC doesn't have an accurate count of the # of COVID-19 tests that have been performed because they don't have a way to collect that info from the growing number of labs that are performing the tests. Moreover, there's no way for anybody to know how many _people_ have actually been tested, because the same person can be tested multiple times. We could solve this problem by crowdsourcing that information directly from individuals.

Building on this, we need to know where the sickest people are _right now_ , and predict where they _could be_ in the near future. This is crucial information for healthcare providers (like me) and public health officials alike. Without this information in hand, it's virtually impossible to know where to direct resources (like doctors, nurses, ventilators, medical supplies, testing equipment, etc.). We need to be able to track demand _AND_ supply in real-time --> this is the point at which the project starts shaping itself into an Uber-like platform.

Building on this, we could enable individuals to post offers to help and for others to request assistance. This would allow people like your mom to lend a hand where it is a) safe for her and b) most needed.

The ultimate goal would be to build an open-source platform that could be used by communities around the world with little-to-no deployment overhead. Ideally, it would be possible to clone the repo, customize a few parameters, and deploy instances in less than an hour.

I'll flesh this out a bit more, and submit the idea as an Ask HN topic.

<comment><USER7> > _There 's an immediate need for a single source of truth for all the > locations where COVID-19 testing is available._

Seems like that could be achieved with a static HTML website, possibly augmented with a REST API.

I doubt that information is changing very quickly. It could theoretically even be committed to a Git repo in a CSV file. However, although that would work for generating a website, it wouldn't be clone-able. So perhaps consider some canonical datastore in the cloud somewhere.

Also: I propose Apache/MIT licensing to minimize the friction of collaboration with both commercial entities and charities.

Technology wise, I don't care: it should just be something mainstream, popular and easy.

> _Moreover, there 's no way for anybody to know how many people have actually > been tested, because the same person can be tested multiple times._

That seems like a harder problem because of patient privacy issues.

<comment><USER5> > _That seems like a harder problem because of patient privacy issues._

Agreed, but even a simple honor system would be better than the current situation. Perhaps verified via a simple browser-based cookie?

Separately: just dawned on me that HN has no obvious way for users to communicate directly. Any suggestions on how to share contact info without begging for spam/bots?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm an anaesthetics and intensive care trainee, so I know something about ventilation. The reason COVID-19 patients need to get ventilated is due to a failure of oxygenation - the infection causes direct lung injury (ARDS) which impairs oxygen absorption in the lung tissue. Normally we breathe room air, which is 21% oxygen, this drops to around 10% oxygen in the arterial blood due to inefficiencies in the absorption in the lungs. In a normal healthy patient breathing 100% Oxygen, their arterial oxygen content would be around 90%. ARDS significantly impairs oxygen uptake by the lungs, in severe cases patients breathing 100% oxygen may have arterial oxygen concentrations of just 8-10%.

The purpose of ventilation in these severe ARDS patients is to augment oxygenation of the blood, using a combination of techniques including end- expiatory positive pressure and inverse-ratio ventilation, among others, and support the fatiguing respiratory muscles. Because the lungs of COVID-19 patients are already injured by the infection, they are very prone to further ventilator-associated injury. Modern intensive care ventilators have complicated computer-controlled 'modes', which allow precise regulation of ventilatory volumes, pressures, rates, timing, and gas blending. The ARDSnet trials in the early 2000s demonstrated the importance of carefully managed 'lung protective' ventilation, poor quality ventilation is likely to cause further lung injury and make the patient worse, not better. Therefore amateur ventilators are unlikely to be beneficial in COVID-19 unless they can provide similar lung protective ventilation, which would make them quite complicated.

Additionally, ventilation is just one component of the management of sick COVID-19 patients. First you need to pass a breathing tube into their trachea, which is a challenging and risky procedure when performed by a skilled operative in a otherwise well patient, let alone someone on the brink of respiratory failure. Once intubated you will need to keep them deeply sedated, otherwise they will strain against the ventilator and make effective ventilatory care impossible. This requires equipment, drugs, and skilled staff, all of which are going to be in short supply.

<comment><USER9> Any thoughts as to the early treatment with a medical BiPAP when full-function respirator therapy is not available?

<comment><USER8> Doesn't seem to be very helpful - In a multicenter cohort of 302 patients with MERS coronavirus, 92% of patients treated with BiPAP failed this modality and required intubation (Alraddadi 2019)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great idea. Simultaneous to these types of home-brew projects...we also need someone (President? eCelebs? etc) to promote and organize fund raising efforts to simply buy and distribute cheap but effective ventilators.

Imagine a WWII style "war bonds" effort, but instead to build and distribute say 5M ventilators over the next 6 weeks.

In addition to this, we must re-purpose closed schools (gyms, cafeterias, etc) into make-shift CoVid19 triage centers where affected patients can be put on cots with saline drip, drugs, and ventilation. This is doable, but we need to do it.

<comment><USER11> "we also need someone (President? eCelebs? etc) to promote and organize fund raising"

Fund raising won't help if too many people get infected. What you need right now is for those in charge to stop playing Rambo and pretend they have it in control (they don't) then grow up, tell people to stop behaving like there is nothing going on. Schools, stadiums, all non vital businesses should close and people should stay home. This virus propagates at very high speed; as for now there is no cure, and I'm sorry for believers but prayers won't work (ironically, "healing" pools at Lourdes are already closed since days). This is serious, folks. We can only slow infections to a level in which people recover at faster pace than those who get infected, otherwise ICU numbers won't be enough and a lot more people will die.

<comment><USER12> Plan for the big peak, hope for the small one. There is no indication that leadership in the US is going to suddenly start behaving sensibly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I posted directly via the contact form on the blog, not sure if it made it through.

I'm way out of my lane even commenting on this, but maybe you can dramatically simplify the air delivery side of this design, if you're willing to under- engineer. A single air chamber with an inlet (blower in) and two outlets (patient out and return out). Low rpm motor slow rotating a sealed disc with holes in it balancing outflow between feed-to-patient and return. Put a blowoff mechanism inline around the flow meter. If the capacity is there and there's such a thing as a common or global delivery 'frequency', maybe it could support more than one person.

Again, I might as well be from another planet in terms of knowledge in this domain. I'm just confused at the apparent complexity around the servo, linkage, and waste-gating. I DO get that delivery can be tailored nearly entirely in software with this design. That's cool.

<comment><USER14> Not by any means an expert here either, but my impression is that, to call something a "ventilator" in a medical context, it has to have a software- controlled rate of flow. "Ventilator" is to "air pump" as "CNC router" is to "regular router." It needs to be integrated as part of a control system, feeding out forced air-pressure (thrust?) data, and getting fed back a PWM control signal. (Sort of like a CPU fan, but with air pressure in place of on- die temperature.)

Keep in mind, the use of these things is that you hook this up to a patient and then leave them in a room while you go handle other emergencies. _It_ needs to tell _you_ if it's having a problem (through hookups to monitoring equipment.)

I _think_ it also needs to not try to force air into a blocked airway (i.e. to blow open the patient's larynx the moment they try to swallow), and/or needs to let up on the air pressure in a sinusoid pattern so the patient can exhale—though I might be wrong about either/both of those, given that they're not really problems doctors encounter with hand-pumped ventilation. But either of those, in combination with the flywheel-like momentum of a big blower fan, would explain the waste gate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Some related submissions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573926](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573926) "Low-cost portable ventilator (2010)"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22573656) "Low-cost ventilator wins Sloan health care prize (2019)"

<comment><USER16> Is there some way HN can bend to support the pandemic? A flag or something?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am working on one now.

The problem is that ventilators require tubes to be inserted into the patients lung. This requires a very skilled doctor and has a risk of infection and injury.

So I am making an wooden lung - like an iron lung but made from plywood. I can share the plans and sourcing for the parts if you want

<comment><USER18> Make it like a turtle shell, hooked up to something like this:

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

That lets you use both positive and negative pressure. You could even support fast pulses for clearing out gunk from the lungs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any thoughts about using a regular sleep apnea CPAP device for this type of situation, where one has access to the pressure settings?

<comment><USER20> Someone dear to me needs a ventilator per tracheostomy (Trilogy 100). Her Consultant Aenesthesist who was in Italy four weeks ago and works on an Intensive Care Unit told me that 6 out 10 Covid-19 affected ITU patients require an ECMO ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxyg...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extracorporeal_membrane_oxygenation)). This is very bad. I could sense his unease, these are machines you don't come by easily. His ITU is preparing for war, Brexit and the conservative's austerity program has put the NHS to breaking point.

<comment><USER21> Most hospitals have just a handful of ECMO machines, if any. And most of them are talking about not providing ECMO to COViD-19 patients because of this.

<comment><USER22> This article says an ECMO machine costs less than $50k: [https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- xpm-2000-03-13-000314...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct- xpm-2000-03-13-0003140069-story.html)

That seems low relative to US medical costs in general. I'm sure the average Bay Area software engineer would happily pay that much to save a dying family member.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would imagine an epidemic of ventilator associated lung injury if people started rolling out homemade ventilators in quantity.

<comment><USER24> Please don't take this as a personal address to your specific comment. Yours was simply the last drop of water that tipped the scales in me to comment on an overall trend I'm seeing. What I'm beginning to see in a lot of these types of discussions is those calling for caution/compliance are missing the term "in extremis".

I've seen no one is suggesting that these DIY/hacking efforts of all stripes replace the existing healthcare infrastructure. What I see is concern the existing infrastructure is not scaled to handle what we anticipate will happen even in a moderate scenario. We have in this very thread a real MD who confirms that post-ICU ventilation is not being addressed but still needs to be, yet that confirmation seems to fly by those who say that DIY isn't advisable.

My position on the mitigation however, starts from these two premises:

In Extremis, any action is better than no action at all.

In Extremis, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

When asked, I believe many will opt for a 1% chance of living on a DIY ventilator intubated by recently-out-of-license nurses emergency-authorized during the pandemic when no other intubation staff are available in the time required to attempt saving a life, than a 100% chance of dying with no ventilation option whatsoever.

What I'm not seeing are any alternative solutions offered by those who want to stick to the "official" script. Let's in about 6-8 weeks from now our healthcare infrastructure is overwhelmed by severe respiratory distress cases, starting in the June timeframe. What do you suggest we do to prepare for that starting now instead of any of the DIY efforts you deem too risky/non- compliant?

I'm honestly asking in response your specific post, now. Even an answer like "triage non-comorbid over comorbid patients, let the comorbid patients die" is acceptable. Even if your response is, "I'm no domain expert, I'm leaving it all up to the experts", that works for me, too. I'm just trying to figure out what your mitigation angle is.

What doesn't help improve our probabilities nor mesh with my personal philosophy is giving criticisms with either no alternatives or no position statement of what you believe is an acceptable protocol going forward. It's in my nature to seek answers and address my curiosity, even if it only leads to a partial answer. If that's not you, then you live your best life, and thanks for the note of caution, it is definitely a concern to manage as best as we can.

<comment><USER25> Yeah but there is a non-zero portion of the population that may choose to use a home-brew solution instead of seeking proper medical care. Sure, we want to give people tools to be self-sufficient, but we don't want billybob hooking grandma up to the vacuum cleaner to save money.

<comment><USER26> > What doesn't help improve our probabilities nor mesh with my personal > philosophy is giving criticisms with either no alternatives or no position > statement of what you believe is an acceptable protocol going forward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> My parents both have lung conditions. If this were Italy, and they got infected and needed ICU, they would not get treatment at the moment.

What is the most promising home made gear I might be able to scrap together in the worst case scenario?

</comment><comment><USER28> This whole sticking a tube down someone's throat without proper qualifications or equipment seems pretty dicey. Would an old fashion wooden iron lung work better? It's pretty primitive technology that doesn't seem too difficult to build. [https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/a-wooden-iron- lung/](https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/a-wooden-iron-lung/)

</comment><comment><USER29> There is a working open source ventilator prototype called VentilAid made in Poland: [http://www.ventilaid.org](http://www.ventilaid.org)

</comment><comment> pcj-github I'm surprised we haven't seen anything detailing the supply chain involving O2. This is as important than the actual machine.

<comment><USER5> Anesthesiologist here: yes and no. It depends on whether the patient is having difficulty clearing CO2, in which case ventilation is more important. If the patient's lungs are unable to extract sufficient oxygen from the air such that the blood oxygen levels drop below a certain threshold, then supplemental oxygen becomes important. In fact, excessively high oxygen concentrations in inhaled gas has the potential to damage lung tissue. Hopefully this helps to explain why the ability to titrate oxygen flows is important. If we can do that effectively, we can conserve our oxygen supply for those who need it.

<comment><USER30> Where do hospitals get their O2 supply from out of curiosity? Do they buy it from one of the major gas suppliers like praxair or airliquide and store it in the back as GOX/LOX or can it also be produced on site?

<comment><USER31> In the past they had large tanks of liquid O2.

More recently, many have a large oxygen concentrator machine on site which just takes it from the air.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Good idea using a large AC blower. I would think a small brand new or very clean wet dry shop, vac using the blower attachment might be even better.

It would be noisy but would allow the design to incorporate negative pressure of the vacuum side to assist with exhaling.

Maybe the shop vac could be plugged into a speed controller to improve duty cycle and reduce noise but controlling an AC motors speed is quite a bit more complicated(expensive) than controlling a DC one.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about using an air compressor? These should still be readily available and is an off-the-shelf air pressure solution. The air couldn't be used directly (oil in it) - there would need to be an isolation bellows or something similar.

<comment><USER32> Thats a good idea too, and they do make oil-less compressors they are typically smaller but years ago I came across many of these attached to dry sprinkler systems in small parkades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> [https://www.projectopenair.org/](https://www.projectopenair.org/)

<comment><USER34> > _[https://www.projectopenair.org/](https://www.projectopenair.org/) _

From [https://app.jogl.io/project/121#about](https://app.jogl.io/project/121#about)

>> _Current Status of the project_

>> _The main bottleneck currently (2020-03-13) is organization / management._

>> […] _This is an organization of experts and hobbyists from around the globe._

<comment><USER26> The link [https://app.jogl.io/project/121#about](https://app.jogl.io/project/121#about) doesn't go anywhere anymore. And there are no results for "ventilator" in the app.jogl.io search.

<comment><USER34> I see a "Ventilator Project" heading?

(edit) here's the link to their 'Ventilator' document: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RDihfZIOEYs60kPEIVDe7gms...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RDihfZIOEYs60kPEIVDe7gmsxdYgUosF9sr45mgFxY8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Do you guys have seen similar devices with embedded sanitizing modules ? heating wire, UVC led or plasma blade to clean air intake ?

the air version of that [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1RoEgxax60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1RoEgxax60)

</comment><comment><USER36> i am an anaesthetist i trained using a manley ventilator covid patients apparently are easy to ventilate the issue is their gas exchange not their compliance a manley ventilator will do just fine for many patients, not all i accept but many

<comment><USER36> BTW ICU doenst use volatile anaesthetics to sedate people we tend to use opioids & benzos to sedate

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> i recon you could build a manley in your shed with some decent mech eng skills and it could certainly be printed

</comment><comment><USER37> 4x resources delay a crisis by 2 doublings.

If a doubling takes 7 days, that's just 2 weeks.

R0 (reproduction rate) overwhelms everything. The only way out safely is to greatly reduce R0:

\- social distancing: 6-9 feet away from everyone

\- avoiding crowds

\- Never share utensils; no buffets

\- hygienic routines: wash hands, use wipes, close toilet lid before flushing (see Amoy Gardens), etc.

And _convince_ others to do the same.

Italy closed schools when they had just 150 confirmed cases but still in a tragic crisis because people kept socializing.

See a timeline & analysis here: [https://www.luca-dellanna.com/how- bad/](https://www.luca-dellanna.com/how-bad/)

<comment><USER38> I've got an idea for a way to reduce R0 with some voluntary people tracking. I could do with some other developers to plan it.

If anyone's interested, please drop me an email: rls at hwyl.org

<comment><USER38> Care to explain the downvote? It's a bit depressing trying to do something positive in the current climate.

<comment><USER39> I didn't downvote, but I can see why others did.

If you have an idea to share, share it. Don't make people jump through the hoop of sending email.

If you are concerned about others stealing your idea, then your comment is essentially spam, because you're using HN as a recruiting tool to build your team. Only YC companies can do that here.

Your motivation might be something other than either of these possibilities. It's easier to downvote and stop thinking about it than to figure out your true intentions.

<comment><USER38> Thanks for the explanation. Makes sense; I've actually posted the idea a few times (including as an Ask HN) and I was getting fatigued. I absolutely have no interest in making money out of this - just potentially saving lives.

Reposted:

Could a voluntary user-tracking app help reduce the R0 level of the COVID-19 virus?

One of the main challenges with this virus is that carriers of the virus become infectious well before they show symptoms. Consequently, they pass on the infection before they can be isolated.

Apps such as Google Maps already track users' movements to a high level of precision. A similar app could be created that tracked users' movements and notified people they had interacted with if they got infected.

It would work like this:

      - Users' movements are tracked
      - Upon developing a fever (etc.) the user notifies the app
      - The app checks their movements during the estimated period they could have been infectious
      - Every other user who was in their presence for X minutes gets notified and requested to isolate themselves
      - Recursively check those users' movements to see if they may have passed on the virus

Disadvantages I can think of off the top of my head:

      - Requires simultaneous voluntary use by a large proportion of a regional population
      - Possibility of false positives by bad actors (would an occasional false positive be so bad)?

I've had this idea checked with a leading epidemiologist, and he was enthusiastic.

I see this same or similar idea has been written up as a paper (which I've just submitted as a separate story): [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.08.20032946v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.08.20032946v1)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm surprised there's no emoji for Corina</comment>


I spent 16 months on this Bitcoin explainer. by Art of the Problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKwqNgG-Sv4 <comment><USER2> "Bitcoin isn't just a boring grey [precious] metal, it's a virtual coin taking the form of a number"

Precious metals are inherently valuable because they are extremely useful in a wide variety of applications in the physical world. An arbitrary number has 0 inherent value. It is a fiat commodity whose only backing is faith that a sufficiently high number of people are duped into giving its controllers real money in exchange for it.

<comment><USER3> Yea this is what I still don't understand. What's to stop someone from creating a new coin and entirely new supply of currency? And what keeps the original currency (btc, for example) still valuable? Is it solely because in the short term bitcoin has the markets attention/hype, and if the hype was not there, there is no reason to anyone to buy and hold bitcoin in comparison to a different crypto?

Is there EVER a non-privacy, government, or tax avoidance type reason to hold bitcoin? I'm thinking like gold / precious metals are used in electronics and industry, jewelry, etc. A coin can't be held and used for something. I suppose a company can use a blockchain internally for verifying things / ledger / whatever magic use they dream up, but that wouldn't really be using it as a currency.

I actually am bullish on crypto, overall, because I think people are not rational and will buy for many years into the hype. On a 20-30 year timeline, I think it is harder to predict and know what to expect. Lots of things change when you look more than a few years out.

Someone please convince me, in a concise fashion!

<comment><USER4> > What's to stop someone from creating a new coin and entirely new supply of > currency?

Nothing. Just like nothing stops anyone from printing out their own paper money. However, nobody will accept it, since the trust in your new paper money is next to nil, as no shop or services will accept it as a form of payment (perhaps except yourself).

Replacing paper money with a new cryptocoin of your own makes no changes to the above argument.

However, if you are able to produce goods or services which is needed by somebody, then you can price your goods/services in your own paper money, and setup an exchange rate yourself. If other people sees the exchange rate, and deem it worthy, they will exchange their existing currency with yours, in order to purchase your goods/services. This process is the one that gives any currency any real value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The first 30 seconds start a little boring. You just repeat what many people already know about bitcoin... But then it gets really interesting.

I wish you had started the video a little bit stronger.

Anyway, I just subscribed to your channel! Nicely done!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I actually had a different intro I chopped off - it's here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXB_j- _jPmU&t=1s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXB_j-_jPmU&t=1s)</comment></comment>