How a Reporter Pierced the Hype Behind Theranos - <AUTHOR> http://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-a-reporter-pierced-the-hype-behind-theranos/ <comment><USER2> The point about needing a doctor's order to get a blood test seems pretty irrelevant to the rest of the situation. I don't know why they included it.

I'd love to get a simple blood test without needing to talk to my doctor (plenty of people would). I would _not_ love to get a blood test misrepresenting its accuracy (nobody would).

<comment><USER3> The reason is the same as why you require higher standards of statistical evidence when you don't have a strictly defined hypothesis before an experiment: if you go looking for something in noisy data, you'll probably find it.

Lab tests have significant margins of error. Just by chance, if you go out and get a bunch of lab tests, you'll probably find something "wrong". Unless you're knowledgable about interpreting the results -- and unless you are a practicing medical doctor, you are _highly unlikely_ to be knowledgable, even if you think you are -- this can/does lead to catastrophically bad outcomes.

(And now, for an ironic aside: the median HN user is extremely quick to attack valid science for the reason that "most results are wrong", while also complaining loudly when the medical establishment wants to restrict access to clinical tests with a large margin of error. Go figure.)

<comment><USER4> For things like STD tests it raises the barrier and cost of frequent testing. We need a more fine grained policy than all blood tests require a physician.

<comment><USER3> They don't. You can get cheap/free STD tests from non-physician providers. You can also buy STD tests at the drugstore, over the counter. But like it or not, anyone who collects biological samples from strangers' is going to require some training and licensing.

Moreover, the interpretation of an STD test is not as straightforward as you might think. False positive rates can be high for the cheaper tests, and there's natural variability in things like antibody titers. People also neglect that timing matters -- if you test too soon after infection, even the most sensitive tests won't work. Or they fixate on one particular scary illness (e.g. HIV), and neglect testing for others that are less well-known, but more common (e.g. Chlamydia). Some of these problems can be mitigated. Others can't.

Regardless, having someone trained to interpret tests is a good idea for just about everyone. Even the cheap/free/OTC tests come with that service, at a minimum. It's a bad idea to just allow people to pick and interpret their own tests, even for the "simple" ones, like STD tests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Lab test, or medical practice in general, is a well protected industry here in States. The public wasn't educated well enough to understand lab tests at all so that professional opinion IS REQUIRED to understand your own health.

I might be over cynical here, but I blame that both medical education and health care industry are restricted and protected to cause a very inefficient public health system in US. Thus normal people without a MD has no clue to judge good product vs bad product. In the case of Theranos, I don't think most of understand what's going on with the test. How the test works, how to judge whether it's effective, how to compare pros and cons between different products. We have no idea. I doubt whether the report himself understands the real deal behind the scene, or even investors of Theranos understands it.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure it wasn't the "doctors get to be gatekeepers" problem that held back Theranos here. Rather, it was the "they don't have an actual working finger-prick test and have avoided numerous cheap ways to prove they have one" problem.

In contrast, 23andme can legitimately claim to have been held up in that respect. They did have a working product, which correctly identified the patient's genes, and correctly reported the state of the literature on each gene; no one claimed otherwise. It's just that the combination of those two services counts as a medical device under current law, and they didn't get regulatory approval first.

<comment><USER5> I tend to agree with you on Theranos. I wasn't trying to say that Theranos is doomed from the beginning because they are about to disrupt a well protected industry. Instead, I feel the problem is that we as general public are not educated well enough to make a reasonable judge on whether Theranos is actually working.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Someone asked about a transcript. There's no official transcript as far as I can tell so I sent it up to IBM Watson:

[https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6](https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6)

First part (rather than paste the entire thing, you can just check out the gist: [https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6#raw-t...](https://gist.github.com/dannguyen/71d49ff62e9f9eb51ac6#raw- txt-md)

and nbsp walking to the ProPublica podcast I'm Charlie Orenstein and I cover healthcare here at ProPublica

today we're gonna be talking about laboratory testing

it's no secret to many that lab testing has been caught in the dark ages of medicine

or you have to go to your doctor to get a prescription for a lab test

and then your doctor gets the results of the lab test if you're lucky will share with you

and then you'll be back to going to your doctor again if you need a follow up

a company called their in house aim to change that

founded in two thousand and three by Elisabeth homes

a nineteen year old drop out of Stanford University this company and to really shake up laboratory testing

it received fawning coverage from many mainstream media outlets including The New York Times

but John Kerry Roo a reporter at the Wall Street journal took a more critical look at their in house

and found that behind this glossy surface there were a lot of questions about both its effectiveness and the science that underlie its main products

John is joining us here on the podcast John Markham hi thanks for having so how did you decide to take a look at their house

well I had read Ken Auletta as profile of Elizabeth homes in the New Yorker in which I think came out in December of two thousand fourteen and

I found it interesting there were some brief critical %HESITATION sections in there that raised questions for me but I don't think all that much more of it and then as the calendar year turned to %HESITATION two thousand fifteen a couple weeks later mid two thousand fifteen I got a tip from someone not a primary source who had any primary information but someone who is a relating to me

some you know third hand information that that things might not be exactly as they seemed at this company thoroughness

so it's interesting because I think a number of reporters got tips along the way and and you were the one to pursue them I personally heard from somebody who said that his lab results didn't match the lab results he got from a different lab so it doesn't seem like this was a huge secret that there were questions out

right and shortly after I began looking into the company in and looking into this tip a Stanford on a medical school professor I believe %HESITATION put out a critical opinion piece in the journal of the American medical association

and he didn't really have any any information other than the say this is a company that was

making very bold statements about its breakthroughs in the science of laboratory testing saying that it could test for a number of conditions off just a drop of blood ____from the finger and yet it hadn 't really done what you usually do in medicine which is a peer review

and he was questioning %HESITATION this new trend of making all these assertions about what you've invented without really proving it and having it vetted by your peers and then there was another %HESITATION professor in Toronto I believe a couple weeks or couple months later who who came out with a critical medical journal and I editorial as well so people are beginning to speak out in the scientific community as I was doing my reporting

so let's just take a step back and put the science aside for a second what is the hope of fairness what it promised people

so the the fair knows invention as Elizabeth homes are

you know announced it in magazines and at conferences was that %HESITATION with a tiny drop of blood ____from a finger with the lancet

they could run the full range of laboratory tests and get you back results on all these tests within hours

and at a low cost to the latter part is true they charge very low prices and then when you look at the assertion that they can do the full range you you ask laboratory experts what that means and they say can mean anywhere from several hundred to several thousand tests

so the claim was quite bold in this hadn't been done before from just a drop of blood being able to run the full gamut of tests and get results back to the patient's very quickly %HESITATION it did sound like a real scientific breakthrough and third for listeners who may not be aware of what is it usually take as far as blood to run that gamut of test what weirdest blood come from and how much blood is needed

well if you get tested for say a a comprehensive metabolic panel which is a typical panel that you might not get a prescription for your doctor for which is about a half dozen tests

you'll go to request or a lab Corp or a hospital lab in they will draw your blood with a needle odd that they put in your arm and they'll draw about five tubes of blood so quite a bit of blood is typically %HESITATION required to to run you know half dozen tests

so Liz with homes was incredibly successful I think getting it hundreds of millions of dollars four hundred million dollars %HESITATION of invest more money and more than us more than that so that value the company at nine billion dollars or so

yeah we we went back and found some %HESITATION some regular

for filings and were able to calculate that they raised at least seven hundred and fifty million dollars most of it more than six hundred million dollars was raised in two thousand fourteen and that last fundraising round valued the company at about nine billion dollars

which is a a huge of valuation that that's our moral less what quest and LabCorp are each valued at and these companies have been around for a long time and they have a huge revenues in huge profits

are in this laboratory upstart that was founded by a college drop out ten years ago suddenly valued at at the

the same valuation as those two huge companies alright let's stop there because I think listeners Arabic %HESITATION why like how did this unicorn

get so much money what did people see it

that isn't clear what people saw in it other than %HESITATION Elizabeth homes as pitch

that she had made this scientific breakthrough is not clear because I've heard that and and pretty much ascertained during my reporting that the company did not offer really any information

about the science and about how the technology works about how it's

laboratory %HESITATION instrument worked

or about its financials so are investors who were putting up this money were for the most part going in blind

but at a star studded board right

they did they had %HESITATION Henry Kissinger

and now George Shultz and Sam Nunn and %HESITATION

Phil frets they had a bunch of older statesman some exit some retired military commanders

it was a %HESITATION heavy duty board a lot of big names

in %HESITATION the military and and former cabinet members

%HESITATION incident seemed impressive at first glance

so your first piece ran last year and you began raising questions what were the key questions that you found

so the first thing was to

look at whether they were or were not running the full range of laboratory tests

on other proprietary technology

and after a lot of reporting in talking to former employees who were in a position to know exactly what the reality of that was

I was able to determine dead of the more than two hundred and forty blood tests that they offered consumers at their blood draw centers in Walgreens stores

that at the very most at the end of two thousand fourteen fifteen of them were run on their

pride Terry lab instrument which by the way they called the Edison after the inventor Thomas Edison pretty clever out why does it matter though that who cares which instrument that tests were run

well

if you're asserting that you that you made a scientific breakthrough that it enables you

to run the full range of laboratory tests off just

a drop of blood and it turns out that you can only do fifteen tests then

you're you're probably hyping where you are in and your ability and so then the question arises whether you've told the truth to investors whether you've told the truth to the public

but then there's the the other issue that I discussed in my first piece which was published in October which is what whether or not

the testing for those fifteen tests and and that the testing for all the other test

was accurate and produced good results and and I had ex employees telling me

that %HESITATION they questioned the accuracy of the Edison machine and that their endless was also doing things like diluting small blood samples in order to create a bigger volume to run them on commercial analyzers

that also created problems with accuracy

and I would travel to Arizona and talk to patients and doctors there and came up with anecdotal evidence of

a test that didn't seem to square with comparative tests done at other laboratories and so all of that made me realize that it wasn't just about potentially company that it over hyped

<comment><USER7> I can forgive Watson for not understanding proper nouns, but not for confusing it's and its (given plenty of context).

The insertion of %HESITATION to denote pauses of speech is an unexpected delight.

A long time ago, as work-study, I transcribed several audio recordings of descendants of the first non-Native settlers of Santa Clara Valley. There were many ellipses in my transcriptions, and I wonder if future researchers will question if they represent hesitation, ums or uhs, or periods where the recording was unintelligible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hmm. Is there a transcript?

</comment><comment><USER9> > ...Theranos also played a role in the passage of an Arizona law that allows > people to get blood tests without a doctor's order. Carreyrou: That was > controversial, because there are many in the medical profession [...] who > say, "Well, how is that progress?" [...] more likely than not, they're going > to need a doctor's opinion to decipher them.

This is a good point. Diabetics usually go to the doctor 1-3 times a day to have bloodwork done. Surprisingly, despite how open the medical field is from a regulatory, technological and informational standpoint we have done almost nothing to combat the complexity of tests taken regularly by most of the population. I would have overlooked this and I am glad the author brought this up, maybe it would be possible for users to be trained on some of the newer technology being rolled out in the medical field like the Facsimile Machine (often called FAX or sometimes by the synecdoche XeroX) to communicate with highly skilled professionals, to interpret the data. It is likely that every person would fall outside of a standard bell curve so it would be impossible to teach anyone how to interpret the test, but we could set our sites on leveraging FAX in the future.

> How a Reporter Pierced the Hype ...

This is great reporting and a perfectionist usecase for new media. The journalist was able to quickly go on wikipedia to create a paragraph of color, and then link to the interview so that readers would be able to immeadiately hear how this reporter had broken the hype machine over a 20 minute interview at an offsite location. Maybe, unlike everyone else, you actualy don't have 20 minutes to listen to this interview, perfect contingency here 3 bullet points.

Much like the author, I skipped around through the clip pulling random qoutes, the reporter is asked:

 _A number of reports got tips and yoiu were the one to purse this. Other reporters got tips as well but you pursued this?_

Not knowing much about how the Peer review system, I called my colleague G. oog LeSearch Barr who confirmed peer review is basically the only important thing about conducting science, and the system is renowned for it's perfection.

The reporter did say 2 people in the community had spoken out, which to be fair, is quite reasonable. He was pragmatic about waiting to fully engage with the story until, and I am paraphrasing but editorializing much less than one would think:

The 9 Billion in 2014 is a big valuation.

How did this unicorn get money?

What people saw other than Holme's pitch isn't clear. I have _heard_ the company didn't offer anything about how the technology worked.

After a lot of reporting, I talked to a lot of employees who were in a position to know, I determined that 350 blood samples 15 were run on their machine.

\---

Now it is important to realize, Theranos didn't use the AMA standard bootstrap medical breakthrough CDN and while not much is known about the internals of the company, it is believed they didn't spin up a AWS Full Scale Research Labratory, they may have not even _considered_ using GO.

Now, all that can be forgiven, right? But it is such a shame they didn't just roll this out overnight. It is fucking trivial to build this, you can just use Crimson on Beaker for the front arm and then persist your regularatory data to the USFDADEAFBI?SOMESENATOR.gov/api and get approval.

750 million dollars to basically build a crud app seems like a lot of investment. Obviously Holmes, much like her predecessor Alexander the great, had to hire Michael R. Taylor the Head of the FDA to follow her around saying "You are just a human, only a mortal". Notably, this actually should have helped Theranos as Taylor is a renowned scientist who has won a nobel peace prize. He graduated with a degree in political science doing pretty serious research as a staff attorney at the FDA, and working with the private firm that represents the worlds biggest provider of open source seeds, Monsanto.

As an aside, Taylor is a New York Times best selling author for his riveting 1988 article entitled "The De Minimis Interpretation of the Delaney Clause: Legal and Policy Rationale", where his interpretation of a 1958 law about the ppm of chemicals, is considered truly breathtaking when read.

\----

She may not succeed, she may (we DO NOT KNOW) have cheated, but what fucking world do we live in if we can preach "Fail Fast" to the 40th uberPetBNBPariscopeAOLtimewarnerTwitterBlockchain-#NOBACKDOOR-google-earth- for-mars-but-with-instagram-filters

and tell the people who are fucking trying to push forward the most highly regulated industry forward, which requires not only innovation but capex, and a strong board (Kissinger/etc are there to lobby because you CAN"T EVEN COMPETE without someone connected, much less succeed).

So you can question her ethics, her strategy, etc, and if she committed fraud I certainly wouldn't defend that, but if it ends up she took a shot at something big and missed, I vote we let the next guy or girl take a similar shot.

</comment><comment><USER10> posted yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11128535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11128535)</comment>


Windows 95 booting on a Nintendo 3DS - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2016/01/03/windows-95-on-nintendo-3ds/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of Doom on a printer: [http://www.contextis.com/resources/blog/hacking-canon- pixma-...](http://www.contextis.com/resources/blog/hacking-canon-pixma- printers-doomed-encryption/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Submitted Engadget article rather than original forum thread because the thread has a low signal-to-noise ratio.

Did not retain title of Engadget article because it's so clickbaity.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat!

<comment><USER4> Yes, but whenever I see these things, I'm always in a bit of a quandary over them - the technical challenge element is obviously impressive, but the flipside is that there's probably nothing worthwhile that can be done with it. I've done the same myself - I spent days resurrecting a Zenith Minisport (including getting round the BIOS lock), but at a time when it was of no functional use at all. There must be something in our psyche that makes us perform such acts of folly!</comment></comment>


For Big Tech to retain government protections, they must stop the censorship - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/html/platform-or-publisher-15888.html <comment><USER2> Yeah, government needs to remove the protections from youtube and the like. They are trying to have their cake and eat it too. They are not like telcos.</comment>


Nobel Prize goes to modest woman who beat malaria for China - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228382-000-the-modest-woman-who-beat-malaria-for-china/ <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu- youyou](http://www.vox.com/2015/10/6/9461471/nobel-malaria-tu-youyou), which points to this, which is actually from 2011 but has an update (and a headline, of course) about the Nobel Prize.

There was also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10338213) earlier today, which turns out to have been her 2011 paper, though few of us seem to have recognized it.

Edit: there's also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10342856).

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope this prize leads to a more systematic (re)look at traditional medicine - both Chinese and Indian. It would be important (and exciting) to understand what thousands of years of 'wisdom' can offer modern science and the drug industry.

Can we discover new active ingredients by studying 'traditional' medicine? Should there be a branch of study dedicated to this?

<comment><USER4> There already is; it's called organic chemistry. Completely synthetic medicines are a relatively new thing; for hundreds of years chemists have tested everything they could get their hands on for everything they could think of. Even so, novel natural products are discovered every year, and new uses for them likewise. Even those are usually synthesized, however, for cost reasons. If you find something interesting by grinding up sea sponges or something then you'd better hope you can synthesize it, or you'll never have enough to be useful. Also, if you can synthesize it then you can try a bunch of different modifications to it, and possibly find something similar which works even better. Evolution gives you random scatter-shot of chemicals; it's as likely to miss a really good one as it is to find it. (Plus the sea sponges and algae and so on are all optimizing for their own survival, not biocompatibility with humans.)

The only difference between medicine and "traditional" medicine is that "traditional" medicines are never discarded once they're proven to be ineffective.

<comment> semi-extrinsic The cool thing about the modern way of approaching natural products is that it's reaching far beyond what traditional herbal medicine is able to. Case in point, I heard of a promising new antibiotic that originated from a soil bacterium found in a random grassy field in the US somewhere. The latest edition of Foreign Policy has a good piece on these things.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teixobactin)

The origin of that antibiotic is notable for the new method of culturing the soil bacteria in situ, but antibiotics from soil bacteria are not new. Most antibiotics with a name ending in "mycin" were isolated from soil bacteria.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who didn't get recognition. In other words, it was a team effort and there were others whose work figured more into the discovery but who didn't get recognized.

Who knows, its possible the objectors are being political, or biased, but some people contest her getting all the recognition when there was a team with other prominent researchers, and that's unfortunate.

<comment><USER7> _There are some who say there were more deserving members on that team who didn 't get recognition._

This seems to be the standard call for every science prize these days. I wonder if the Nobel committee will ever change their rules so they can start giving prizes to teams rather than 2-3 individuals.

<comment><USER8> That defeats the purpose of the prize, which is to inspire individuals (among other things). Fairness per se isn't the point.

Why not give the prize to a whole university, since the researchers couldn't do it without the admin staff and the students? Or to the whole country of taxpayers?

<comment><USER9> Because that would be wonderful. And we don't want things to be wonderful, right?

<comment><USER10> The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to organizations: [http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.h...](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/organizations.html)

Awarding the prize in chemistry or physics or medicine to a country seems like it would dilute the award beyond recognition.

<comment><USER9> I'm sure you appreciated the sarcasm anyways. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I usually balk at herbal cures, but it's actually a really dumb thing for me to do, eh? Perhaps it's just the egoist in me that wants to think there's nothing nature or a random plant can figure out or has figured out, that we can't figure out synthetically in the lab.

I should probably stop - there is something to be said for herbal cures, meditation, etc., I think.

<comment><USER12> People say that traditional herbal medicine is unscientific, and to a degree they are correct. But just because no one has published a paper with a controlled experiment doesn't mean they don't work. Some of them does work because of trial and error.

Consider how the original discovery of a poison is made the hard way. It's morbid to think, but someone probably died to figure out that some plants are poisonous. Now extend that to thousands of herbs that may treat pain such as weed or may treat gout. Its not an efficient process but there was an observer that recorded the data when someone took a herb. That observer may not have recorded the data but s/he may spread it by word. This is sort of like an expert that gives small weights to its neighbors in a training group. So over time and through many iterations (sort of like a training group that iterates through many cycles), some final accumulated "common truth" is collected. That is analogous to a fuzzy logic or probability in whether a herbal medicine may work.

But that's with only 1 herb. Even with just 1000 herbs, a 2 herb combination is already half a million. You see how inefficient that is? Even with over 6000 years of human history, the trial and error is still very limited in drug exploration. So just because theres no recorded data of the tests that it doesn't mean it can't work.

<comment><USER13> Except we have no idea that traditional medicines were developed by effective trial and error. It's more likely that some mystic just declared some arbitrary potion to be medicine for some arbitrary disease and the placebo effect, appeal to authority and the desperation of sick people did the rest of the work popularizing them. The ancient Chinese used the positions of the stars to help choose their medicines. This ineffectiveness is shown by the fact that the traditional recipe Tu found actually involved destroying the active ingredient by boiling it! Clearly the original authors didn't know if it worked or not, since it didn't but they still recommended it to patients anyway.

Today in China, almost everyone still uses traditional medicines. It's a massive national problem. They use them for minor diseases like colds and coughs and continue to believe they're effective because "I took the medicine and a few days later I recovered". The medicine companies are ripping off uneducated poor people and the "medicine" doesn't deserve any respect other than as a source of compounds to test using actual science. The scam is reinforced by doctors in hospitals who often prescribe a combination of traditional and modern medicine so that the modern medicine does the work while the (sometimes more expensive) traditional medicine leaves an opportunity for the patient to credit it instead.

<comment><USER14> if you read the article, the extract from the traditional recipe says to squeeze and drink with water. It doesn't need a boiling process.

<comment><USER13> Oh yes. I misread it. Doesn't change the point though that traditional medicine is about as good as homeopathy or praying.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How should I invest $200K in this market? - buy-the-dip Investment horizon: long term to forever<p>Risk appetite: If I lost this money, my lifestyle would only slightly be impacted. <comment><AUTHOR> The market will rebound and a few years from now we will be wishing we had invested. We will see stocks that doubled or tripled. The big problem is that there's really no way to know now what those winners will be.

The best advice is to pick a broad index, S&P 500, and invest the money over a period of time, maybe 6 months. You won't hit a homerun but you'll do better than most.

<comment><USER2> There are considerably safer bets than S&P500, with similar returns, including a classic 60/40.

[https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/portfolio- matrix/](https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/portfolio-matrix/)

[https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/risk-and- return/](https://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/risk-and-return/)

<comment><USER3> The risk is less important when OP says

> Investment horizon: long term to forever

Total market ranks 1 on average return, which arguably matters most assuming OP is gonna wait 30-40 years before using this money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is just my feeling from watching the markets for a while, is not financial advice, isn't necessarily the best, etc., etc.. I still think we have further to fall, but when we do, I'm looking to put money to work. It's hard to time a bottom, so maybe buy in a few lots over a while as each drop happens.

Of course you should probably buy at least some index fund at some point. I also think the tech chip stocks are being pounded: Intel is in the DJIA, and has been brought down a lot I think rather unfairly because of the index. Taiwan Semiconductor is top of class and TSMC has also been pretty pounded. Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Western Digital. All down, and all have really pretty reasonable dividends. Their moat is the IP as well as the manufacturing facilities. Tech isn't going to just stop, if anything it will end up in everything even more than now.

Be careful on the airlines. They'll get a bailout almost certainly, and maybe will merge down. Warren Buffet, who recently bought a lot of airlines was known for saying:

"Now if I get the urge to invest in airlines, I call an 800 number, and I say: 'Hello, my name is Warren, and I'm an air-o-holic,'" he has said in the past.

He got burned in US Air in 1989. He relapsed in 2016.

<comment><USER5> If you are so confident with how the market will move you should put your money where your mouth is and trade options accordingly. Hint: you shouldn't be so confident.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like generalpass's answer, "Not based on information obtained here." And yet I'm going to give a genuine answer.

I'd use [dollar cost averaging]([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging)) and invest in a index funds. I would personally try to wait out the freefall so you can start investing closer to the bottom, but you will never know when the bottom is, only when the bottom was, so I wouldn't get too fancy with waiting.

</comment><comment> f-maga Hedge your bet.

Buy stocks in Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Apple. (F-MAGA).

If they go up, you make a lot of money.

If they go down, the world has become a better place.

</comment><comment><USER7> It might be prudent to ask more simpler questions, such as: will humans ever take a cruise again? Will they ever take planes again? Will they ever go back to restaurants?

There, now go invest.

</comment><comment><USER8> First of all, ignore the news. Most news is there to sell ads, clicks, etc. Nobody really knows what the market will do in the next minute/hour/day. Nobody.

Also, price is always leading the news, not the other way around.

And, a lot of fund managers (who already entered the long positions) will go on TV and start suggesting their own version on how to handle the crisis and why this is an opportunity of a lifetime. Assume that everyone is talking the book.

So a bear market is lower lows/lower highs. The SP is still in this bear market. As long as this bear trend continues, do not enter.

However, there will be one day in the future when the market will reach capitulation. The news will be so bad and panic so high, that the market will fall hard, but then you would see very high volume of buyer, and the market would end positively for the day.

At that day you can start to gradually enter.

</comment><comment><USER9> Berkshire (BRK-B)

[https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/brk-b/](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/brk-b/)

\- Buy it now.

\- Check in on it every quarter.

\- You might lose money in the short term.

\- But not participating in the eventual rebound would be a huge missed opportunity.

<comment><USER10> In a way, BRK-B is an index on it's own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My strat is this: (not baked on historical testing so take a free strat for what it is, free) I am buying stocks again hat are at half or less of their 52 week highs and only large cap companies. I'm in Boeing now and United Airlines and Ally bank to name a few. The thesis is: this will pass and large core companies that make up a big portion of the economy will come back and will either be acquired or buy up smaller players (remember these larger companies with large bank reserves...).

My time horizon is the same as yours.

</comment><comment><USER12> I won't tell you how to invest, as who knows, other than that if Buffet buys then that is probably a good time to buy.

I will ponder a question though, will the flight from markets drive more money into other assets asides cash?

For instance, we are selling a farm property right now (in a small city, not a hot market) and don't yet know if it will be impacted by the overall economic climate. Part of me thinks more people might move their assets into farm/raw/rural land as another "hard" asset during these times. But there's no way to really know without observing.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is not advice and I am not a financial advisor.

That said, I noticed that put options for Delta airlines with a strike price of 18 were trading at $4.10 which is $410 per contract, so I wrote (sold) 10 of them. That means that either I'm going to get to keep $4100 in a month or I'm going to get 1000 shares at an effective price of $13.90 per share. If that happens I'll sell for a profit if I can or otherwise hold for a couple years and hope to profit off the bailout. Worst case is a net loss of $13900, which I can absorb if need be.

<comment><USER14> I must be missing something - that looks like a horribly asymmetric payoff. Why would you ever do that?

<comment><USER15> Some people make concave bets in high vol markets, most of such people are suckers.

<comment><USER13> There is absolutely nothing wrong with making bets where the payoff is smaller than the money risked, so long as the bet has positive expected value and the bettor's risk management is sound. It's the idiots who lever up too high or otherwise disregard bankroll management who get ruined when a "sure thing" doesn't go their way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Don't take investment advice from overconfident folks on HN.

Try www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets if you really need it

<comment><USER17> Because overconfident Reddittors >> HNers

<comment><USER18> I think you missed the sarcasm

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So, you have 200K you can lose without being impacted and you decide to take advice from an Internet forum instead of a financial advisor ?

Can't you lobby for a better world or something instead ?

<comment><USER20> Is a Financial Advisor really better than random opinions from here?

<comment><USER19> He has knees that break so I'd say yes.

(/s, don't do that)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yes - if you want to speculate. Buy puts or calls. No - if you want to invest. This is not a rational market.

I still see a long way to fall. Wait months until the market is dead before buying.

</comment><comment><USER22> VGT, because you're on HN. I would just put it all in now and not look at it for a few months.

Long term, it probably doesn't matter if you buy it $200 or $150.

Do not forget to reinvest the dividends.

<comment><USER23> VGT is still far from "good" price. My yard stick is crash of Dec 2018 which is not too far in past. If price hasn't fallen below that then the stock is holding up still well. Also, instead of VGT, why not QQQ? I like to go for ETFs that have the biggest assets because they track prices well and are "too big to fail".

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> One-sixth per month in VTWAX, for the next six months.

</comment><comment><USER25> Cash until 2021.

<comment><USER26> This is the worst suggestion. Cash will be eroded by inflation faster than you think,

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> A lot of people won't give you actual suggestions. I will. I'll offer my opinion. All of these are meant to be held for years, not played short-term.

Square (SQ) as close to $30 or under as you can get. I was buying today below $35. I'll keep buying if it wants to keep going down. At a $14-$15 billion market cap, it was a comical steal to hold long-term. It's a future $100b market cap company.

Pinterest (PINS) here (below ~$12), to be held for a minimum of five years.

Grab some financials, the stronger companies. These are not going to collapse, short of the US collapsing. They're classic too big to let fail. They survived the great recession, the Fed will inject whatever it has to in order to prop them up. I'd suggest a basket of JPM, WFC, BAC, GS, MS.

IBM (IBM). Below $100 ideally. Their future will be brighter with the new management and they're trading for 9-10 times earnings with a good dividend. It was cheap before the crash, it's very cheap now.

Micron (MU), particularly if you can grab it below $30.

Beyond Meat (BYND). I like their valuation at this point, it has been crushed. They've demonstrated strong operational controls on costs and they have plenty of cash. I think they'll be fine coming through this.

I'd like to suggest Cloudflare (NET), I don't love their valuation here though, it hasn't gotten beaten down enough. It was briefly down a few days ago, but it's back up again. If you can get it below ~$15-$16, I like it there for a long-term hold.

Buy some silver (small position), however you prefer to go about that. The recent shock plunge is an opportunity to be taken advantage of. The same is true about a few other commodities. People are in panic mode, dumping most everything.

Luckin Coffee (LK). Big coin flip on the situation in China and the physical space in general with the virus. However, if they survive (presently burning plenty of red ink) they have a decent shot at being the Starbucks of China. They raised some capital in January, they'll certainly need it. It had held up well, but cracked today and dropped 13%, rolling back to November's prices. Stalk it for the low $20s or below.

Medifast (MED). To be held for several years minimum.

In the energy industry, Schlumberger (SLB) maybe. Their valuation has gotten very tempting here. $36 to $12 in a month. I don't like most of the energy industry, including XOM, CVX, much less OXY or APA or CLR. It's an amazing double smashing, from Covid and the oil war.

John Deere (DE) is getting close to interesting. I'd like it below $100. $180 to $106 in the past month, it's getting there. I like them a lot more than companies such as Caterpillar (CAT) or 3M (MMM).

iRobot (IRBT) has my attention here. They got hammered first from the China trade war concerns previously, then later from Covid as China went down. Their most recent quarter had popped the stock, until they got smacked again by Covid. I might like it below $30 at this point, we'll see if it gets there in the coming days or weeks. Plenty of competitive risks with the company, however the value proposition is very interesting now (below one times 2019 sales, 11x operating income).

Companies to avoid: retailers (too much risk, not enough upside); airlines (who knows what's about to happen to them); the classic FAANGS etc (AAPL, NFLX, GOOGL, MSFT, AMZN, FB - they haven't gotten cheap enough yet to warrant buying); avoid Tesla, GM, Ford; I don't like UBER or LYFT here; I don't like PayPal, Visa or Mastercard, they were all stupidly overvalued before and still are; I dislike Shopify, they're worth $60-$80 / share, trading for $336. At current valuations, I'd avoid Intel, AMD, Cisco, Oracle, nVidia and numerous other larger tech companies (not beaten down enough). I don't like most of the classic bluechips at all here, including KO, JNJ, PG, XOM, MCD, CVX, PFE, PEP, MMM, and so on, they're just not cheap enough. Give me MCD at a ~9 PE ratio and I'll consider it. I'd avoid the telecoms, including T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, not cheap enough vs growth (plus I just plain dislike them as investments, unless they're being given away), they haven't been pounded in this. I don't like a lot of the more recent class of tech stocks, the Workday generation, their valuations aren't crushed enough (stocks like Twilio, ServiceNow, Splunk, Atlassian, etc) and most are either bleeding red ink or barely making money along with having extreme valuations (most still have the bulk of their epic gains from years of running).

Delta (DAL) and Southwest (LUV) would both be interesting to track on an intricate basis (you have to stay on top of every little detail about what's happening to them and the industry here). DAL is trading for three times 2019 earnings now, LUV is at eight times. If they're going to remain independent, survive and get back to normal (whether it takes two years or five etc), this is a steal, and their stock prices will plausibly go lower yet. I'd stalk them for a cheaper entry yet if I were going to bother.

And if I had Berkshire's $130 billion in cash, I'd eat Kraft Heinz, refurbish Kraft, keep Heinz for myself, and then spin Kraft off or sell it in a few years to a peer in the segment. Most companies in that segment aren't worth touching here though (that includes KHC), not unless they get a lot cheaper yet.

<comment><USER28> Just curious about your statements regarding SQ. Their entire model is that they're a bank (I think they got approved a day or two ago) based on credit- card transaction volumes in retail business. Retail businesses are the shadow of SEARS and it is likely to be the slowest segment to recover after this pandemic. So, I am not so sure about SQ - their credit-card gateway isn't as successful as Stripe & Braintree. Personally, I would stay away from any business that depends on retail foot traffic.

Also, I would add:

EA/ATVI/TTWO: They're outperforming relative to the SPY

Innovo/Moderna/etc. : Any of the Cov vaccine companies, a pot pourry of them

OLED/LG: LCD/OLED semiconductors

And, I would disagree:

AMD/INTC/AMAT/KLAC/NVDA/MU: Semiconductors are a _solid_ investment, not beaten down enough because the demand of semiconductors will soar in the future.

<comment><USER27> SQ will grow much faster than physical retail will decline. Overall physical retail isn't going to vanish. Some parts of it will disappear; some physical retailers will do much worse than others.

Their growth over the past three years disputes the concerns on their growth re physical retail. They're not mirroring damage in physical retail: sales, $1.7b -> $2.2b -> $3.3b -> $4.7b. Their operating profit has gone from -$170m -> -$54m -> -$36m -> +$153m. They have a clean path from here to over $10b-$12b in sales (Covid will roll them backwards and or slow their growth dramatically for a while, which of course is why the stock is being priced as it is).

NVDA with an optimistic 30 to 40 PE is far beyond a reasonable valuation in this climate. Half that range would be reasonable given their growth potential for the next few years and the market conditions now. So far NVDA is only back to Dec & Nov prices.

I love what AMD is doing on the product front and obviously investors are optimistic. Buying them at ~100 times earnings - with modest growth against that valuation - I consider a bad value in this market after the upside run they've had (since ~mar 2018). They still haven't been adjusted with much of a discount (and of course I have no idea if they will be or not at some point), they've merely been priced back to December. A normalization of AMD's valuation to the semi industry requires they earn ~$2 billion in net income at some point to justify their present valuation. They've pulled a lot of future gains forward here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> IMO, the biggest unknown right know is that we don't know how long this pandemic is going to last or when the new case curve will start to flatten. This creates uncertainty and markets HATE uncertainty. I think once we get a sense of this, the market will be able to price in the overall impact and thus bottom out. Other things that would accelerate this understanding of the timeline would be things like a vaccine, cure, etc. Obviously, a big risk is that we continue to see infection rates rise.

Some interesting statistics I found regarding US Economy, According to the BEA, Housing and Heath account for more than 50% of services spending in the United States. Transportation, restaurants and recreation account for a bit more than 20%.

The other issue the market is trying to digest is the Oil shock brought on by Saudi/Russia price war. I almost want to say that I'd wait for some sort of agreement on this as well before I even attempt to invest in the sector.

In terms of what I'm investing in, I don't currently try to pick individual stocks, something I did for nearly a decade for Institutional Investment funds, instead I prefer to diversify across market cap, so a large cap (Russell 1000, IWB), mid cap (Russell Mid Cap, IWR), and small cap (russell 2000, IWM) index to diversify.

</comment><comment><USER30> If you haven't already done so, you could invest some of that in your local food bank.

<comment><USER31> Is that an investment? I.e. is there a monitory return?

What you're saying is charity right? (Which I'm not against, it's just I didn't think you _could_ invest in food banks)

<comment><USER30> There is a payoff, but it's in the satisfaction of helping, rather than in money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Investing is a very personal matter. A financial advisor is the best person to discuss this with. If I were pursuing this for myself I would build a Permanent Portfolio [1]. If I was looking for a financial advisor I would talk to Andrew Horowitz [2]. I would also recommend you look a small allocation in something such as Bitcoin, Zcash or Ethereum as they have a lot of upside potential still.

Permanent Portfolio Allocation: 25% Cash 25% Long Term Bonds 25% Stocks 25% Gold

[1]: [https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/the- world...](https://assetbuilder.com/knowledge-center/articles/the-worlds-best- investment-strategy-that-nobody-seems-to-like) [2]: [http://thedisciplinedinvestor.com/blog/dhunplugged/](http://thedisciplinedinvestor.com/blog/dhunplugged/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Right now, stuffing it under your mattress is probably at least reasonable.

</comment><comment><USER26> Head on over to [https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/](https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/)

</comment><comment><USER34> My tuppence: by some long-term LEAP calls and perhaps write some OTM puts on SPY. Due to current volatility premiums are insane.

</comment><comment><USER35> TeamViewer and other companies positioned to make zillions off the work from home movement.

White collar employees won't want to go back to work.

<comment><USER5> You don't know if that's already priced in. The key to investment is timing (alpha). If others figured it out before you it's priced in.

That's why insider information is highly regulated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are to many variables to consider.

It's too early

</comment><comment><USER37> Not based on information obtained here.

</comment><comment><USER23> General philosophy: Buy ETF that is (1) below at least 52-week lows _and_ below Dec 2018 price point (2) too big to fail (i.e. large market caps), preferably with investments from big wall street+political influencers (3) diversified, and (4) you have reasonable assurance of rebound in 1 year time frame.

With this, I think good buys are XLE, SPY, VFH, VNQ.

<comment><USER38> Many people would argue that your fourth criterion rules out all options. We're in historically unprecedented territory - there is no reasonable assurance of anything. The broad market is 30% off recently-set all-time highs. Whether it will go down a lot more or not is unknown. If the damage to the economy is sufficient it could take years to recoup a broad market investment made even at today's 30% off ATH level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> BRK-B

<comment><USER23> Not too sure how they would do. Their major assets are getting crushed right now. I also worry about Buffet retiring and see as single point of failure for long term term investing.

<comment><USER26> Ye of no faith. Buffet has planned succession for practically his whole life. He has many capable managers. One recently bought a position in Kroger (KR). Go take a look at it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Buy call options on volatility ETFs like UVXY or VXX.

</comment><comment><USER41> duh, BTC. John McAfee told me so.

</comment><comment><USER17> 1\. Invest 50% in an index fund

2\. For the short term gains, Gilead sciences, and other antiviral makers, even generic chloroquine & friends, are likely to gain FDA approval for CV.

3\. Ventilator makers and even CPAP manufacturers are likely to see a massive spike in demand

Donate your gains from #2, #3 to needy CV patients/health Care centres

</comment><comment><USER5> I have _no idea_. But I can tell none of the commenters here have any clue. Source: I worked in finance for years and like to keep informed.

The level of Dunning-Kruger in this thread is appalling.

</comment><comment><USER42> TSLA

</comment><comment><USER43> Yeah sure. Cause HN is full of people that can read the future.

</comment><comment><USER44> Donate it to local charities or order a lot of takeout food and tip extraordinarily well.

</comment><comment><USER45> Help fund iPad Pro tool for remote workers [https://animationcpu.herokuapp.com/](https://animationcpu.herokuapp.com/) :)</comment>


Verizon's good unlimited data plan is now three bad unlimited plans - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/22/16181362/verizon-new-unlimited-data-plan-video-throttling-net-neutrality <comment><USER2> Carriers must be having such a wonderful time with this new FCC.

Uhhh unlimited but it'll never be fast! Uhhh we can re-encode your video, unless it's streamed from Verizon (you know this part's coming...), deal with it!

Can't wait for VPN technology to become more widespread, so we can keep these crooks from altering our traffic.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by "new FCC" and what do they have to do with it?

Also, was the old unlimited truly unlimited in all ways? If so, how can every single customer of any company actually get unlimited data, all the time without unlimited hardware appearing from nowhere and radio wave spectrum that expands to unlimited use for unlimited people?

<comment><USER4> I think the 'new FCC' comment is a reference to the current FCC Commissioner being a former general council at Verizon (though it was awhile ago). Additionally, he's been strongly opposed regulation of the telecoms and opposed net neutrality for awhile. It's not all him, but the FCC has sharply changed course on net neutrality since December.

<comment><USER5> > I think the 'new FCC' comment is a reference to the current FCC Commissioner > being a former general council at Verizon

This is a somewhat silly argument. I remember the same concern over Wheeler; everyone was tripping over themselves to praise him when he turned out to be pro-net neutrality.

<comment><USER2> While many of us were delighted to be wrong about Wheeler, Ajit Pai has ended up being exactly the kind of spineless corporate shill that you'd expect him to be.

Wheeler was the exception.

Pai will be handsomely rewarded for all the billions he's generated for the telcos.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I'm not questioning if Pai is/will continue to be a shill. Let's call him that for being a spineless shill, not because he worked at Verizon once. Sorry if I'm nitpicking, but it's an important distinction to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So no carrier anywhere offers true unlimited? It all comes with some form of slowdowns, either right off the bat or at certain usage thresholds, and throttles video to some arbitrary max resolution?

<comment><USER7> That's what a monopoly brings. It won't take very long for other countries to eclipse the US in tech.

<comment><USER8> What monopoly? There are four major nationwide carriers. That's more competition than in: search, mobile operating systems, package delivery, and many other markets we think of as competitive.

<comment><USER6> I don't think anyone on HN thinks those are competitive markets, they're all oligopolies

<comment><USER9> Whatever else they are, they're also the expected outcome for capital- intensive markets with difficult-to-differentiate products. It would be weird if we had 10 competing nationwide carriers.

(Not "bad". Weird.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Didnt verizon already lose a court case saying they couldnt do throttling and still call it unlimited?

</comment><comment><USER11> The "unlimited" in Verizon's unlimited plans refer to the number of exceptions in their "unlimited" plans.

</comment><comment><USER12> Lovely. I just signed up for the unlimited plan on Verizon about a week or two ago.

Now I have NO IDEA what my situation is or which tier I'm effectively in.

<comment><USER13> You stay in the same plan, none of the new tiers. They don't morph into new plans magically.

However, you're still restricted to the 720p video cap.

So it's still pretty shitty.

<comment><USER12> Given that I'm pretty sure I've been experiencing their "test" that's an improvement.

I was more worried I was going to be stuck in the 480p tier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> By default, AT&T also throttles video playback to 480p, but it is an option that can be disabled: [https://www.att.com/offers/streamsaver.html](https://www.att.com/offers/streamsaver.html) (instructions listed in the middle/FAQ).

</comment><comment><USER15> Routing traffic through a VPN should circumvent this malarkey, right?

<comment><USER16> For now and as long as not too many people do it.

<comment><USER17> Also, Netflix blocks "proxies" which generally include VPNs.

<comment><USER15> Learned this the hard way when we moved abroad for a few months and wanted to get our American Netflix on.

No biggie, now we VPN into my home and use that connection to check out US Netflix: their blocking is entirely IP-based.

<comment><USER18> Exactly what I said in my comment and yet it was downvoted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How can they detect the video if it's over ssl? Are they just detecting big streams of data and throttling it? If so that's bad because it will certainly have false positives and throttle those.

<comment><USER16> AFAIK they're detecting IP addresses of major video services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> >> Unlimited mobile hotspot, but hotspot speeds are capped at a maximum of 600kbps

I see this as a bright spot - unlimited hotspot is great, 6mb isn't 'fast' but it's enough to be usable. And the other plan has the first 15GB on LTE speed.

<comment><USER21> Well, that's not 6Mb. It's 600Kbps == 0.6Mbps

<comment><USER22> So that's fast enough for ssh. I wonder if it is good enough for RDP, VNC, or NX protocol. I don't think it would be good for raw uncompressed X11. Also, is that available as a standalone hotspot plan, or just with a phone hotspot?

<comment><USER23> RDP is absolutely fine at 600kbps, in fact it's just fine at 128kbps and still pretty decent at 56kbps.

Bear in mind that it's not magic, so even with the improvements in newer versions that make video and audio suck less it's not going to let you stream any better than your base connection speed would allow anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Anyone know if MVNOs like Ting get the same throttling?

<comment><USER25> Ting is not on Verizon. Verizon doesn't have many MVNOs, last I checked all Verizon MVNOs came with lots of caveats that made them unsable for me at the time. FWIW, I chose Ting, no traffic shaping whatsoever and no artificial limits of any kind. Of course, T-Mobile and Sprint might do their own traffic shaping, but as a previous T-Mobile customer, this doesn't seem to be the case. It works better for me now on Ting than it used to work before on T-Mobile. No throttling, no video degradation, no bullshit. Definitely recommended.

Unfortunately worse coverage then Verizon though, at least where I need it.

<comment><USER24> The article claims that all major carriers do something similar, so I'm wondering whether MVNOs are exempt.

<comment><USER25> Possibly depends on the MVNO and the type of contract they got with the MNO. On Ting you are definitely exempt, other MVNOs, not so sure. However, my understanding is that MVNO traffic has lower priority in the MNO traffic shaping, so you get affected if there's congestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Are they transcoding video down to 480p?</comment>


Why do colleges cost so much? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304561004579135293814151928

<comment><USER2> I agree with the first answer. There is not a whole lot of difference between college and a resort these days.

I went to college in the 80's. Rooms were shared, walls were cinderblock, the student center consisted of a dowdy cafeteria, a punk rock radio station, rooms for concerts/lectures/films, and small stinky rooms for student-run clubs. That same campus is now sprawling with extravagant architecture, new buildings, and a student center that dwarfs the old one which it replaced. It is a bit over the top.</comment>


Work and rest in a startup - <AUTHOR> http://joel.is/post/4491003987/work-and-rest-in-a-startup <comment><USER2> A bit of personal experience to relate to the article: in recent years there were certain obligations that _demands_ distraction from my normal startup duties (in my case a part-time teaching job). I didn't really need that money, and at first I feel disturbed because most advices here tells you to put 24x7 into your startup, and I felt like a mother separated from her baby. But soon I find that when I come back from these short distractions I find myself more efficient and more energetic in what I really love to do. When I was doing startup-work completely full-time before, I will often hit those days when I am totally unmotivated and get nothing done the whole day. I never hit such a day since I "distracted" myself. I always find myself thinking "wow I can finally work on the startup again!". I think the magic is that I used some external obligations to "pull" myself away from startup to rest and recharge, rather than (wrongly) expecting myself to take breaks voluntarily.

Of course, I believe some people can really work 24x7 on ONE THING without any burnouts. But clearly not me.

<comment><USER3> I have been training for a marathon while doing a startup. It is a substantial time commitment each week and while you might think running would be a great time to ponder startup problems, I tend to focus completely on the run. This break also let's me come back more efficient and more energetic.

<comment><USER2> I believe our cases strikes a counter-intuitive point about what constitutes 'rest': despite the fact a distractive teaching job or marathon training can be taxing mentally and/or physically, they have shown to be good type of 'rest' for the entrepreneur. Strange creatures we are.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. I think the word "renewal" is probably better then. I used both in the article, but "renewal" really makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I see 2 nice ideas in thinking about productivity - which are novel at least to me: managing energy instead of time and being able to disengage from your main project (it being a startup or s.th. else).

Does anybody has ideas on how to measure energy [what gets measured, gets managed -T.Ferris]?

<comment><USER3> FYI that is typically attributed to Peter Drucker quote, not Tim Ferris :)

<comment><USER4> You're right, sorry about the wrong information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great piece. Your write ups are educative. Keep it up

<comment><USER6> Note: this account was created for the above comment only.

<comment><USER7> Hmm, ok, I can totally understand where you are coming from with your comment and I do believe that these things happen in a negative form, which is what you are hinting at I think.

I think this is also not a bad approach though. If you sign up for a service because you wanted to comment somewhere, than yes it is for the first time and starting out somewhere always happens like that.

If it is done in a spammy manner I agree it's not cool, the above comment seems fine to me as a first time comment on a platform you just discovered. No? Would love to hear what you think about that :).

<comment><USER6> I intentionally gave only the facts earlier, but I'll expand a bit here. Note that this has nothing to do with the particular comment(er) I replied to. (So if I'm wrong, please don't feel too insulted!)

New members really are welcome; however, HN frowns on content-less comments (including "you rock, great article"), and someone interested in HN would soon discover that.

On the other hand, the article author Tweeted "My latest blog post is live - "Work and rest in a startup". I'd love your thoughts! - <http://t.co/pdE3cpy> (HN: <http://t.co/lYEbjnI)>. Suppose some Twitter follower decided to help the HN submission out a little. Doesn't that seem more likely to produce the comment I replied to?

I'm not accusing anyone of being evil: I just think the commenter almost certainly cares more for the article author than for HN, and that pointing this out - on HN - may help keep the comment section clean. Note that, given the apparent importance of Twitter etc in getting the first few upvotes quickly, informally asking authors not to Tweet HN links may well result in most of the compliant ones never getting anything to the front page again.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Wal-Mart You Don't Know - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/77/walmart.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting article. I was tempted to start boycotting Wal-Mart, but that is the nature of business.

I'm currently reading The Prize and there are many similarities between Wal- Mart and Standard Oil. I wonder if the government will ever break up Wal-Mart.

Is there a limit to how big a company can get?</comment>


How Thalamus Gobbled Up the Biggest Names in Advertising Within a Year - <AUTHOR> http://thinkapps.com/blog/post-launch/thalamus-advertising-success/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing, Becky!</comment>


Internet Archive addresses housing crisis with "Foundation Housing" project - <AUTHOR> http://richmondsfblog.com/2015/03/19/internet-archive-addresses-housing-crisis-with-foundation-housing-project/ <comment><USER2> I don't understand this, I guess. Is it more cost-effective for the IA to buy a house and rent it to its employees at low rates, than it would be for the IA to increase its workers' salaries who would then pay market rates for housing?

If it is more cost-effective this way, why don't all companies do it?

<comment><USER3> As an employee, I'd be wary of this -- does leaving/losing your job mean losing your home at the same time? 100-150 years ago, corporations used to do this a lot, and along with the "company store" there's a reason they got a bad reputation.

<comment><USER4> As long as it has COBRA-esq provisions, where you can pay the same rate for 3-6 months after your employment is terminated or you quit, and as an employee you know of this lease provision, I don't believe it poses a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't shake the feeling that this is a micro-optimization at the expense of making the larger problems worse by taking even more housing off the market.

<comment><USER6> It only takes housing off the market if those employees would have otherwise commuted or not accepted the job offers.

<comment><USER5> It's "permanently affordable" housing. These units won't be on the general market again any time soon.

<comment><USER6> Neither would the residents

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure what will happen with this particular attempt at bringing affordable housing in SF to within reach of people. But I am grateful to organizations out there such as the Internet Archive that are trying different experiments.

</comment><comment><USER8> with less than 20m depth ocean going for like 10 miles into the ocean, somebody should just build a Millenium Gate few miles off the Ocean beach and end the crisis (or may it will fuel it even more?)

<comment><USER9> There is no LAND crisis. There is a crisis of failure to build adequate number of multi-family multi-story structures. Replace all the decrepit almost dead 2 story apartments in SF with 10 story apartments and there would be no crisis whatsoever.

<comment><USER8> >Replace all the decrepit almost dead 2 story apartments in SF with ...

that's was doable back in the USSR and doable today in China. In US it may be easier to build right in the ocean :) For building huge structures 10-20m depth is almost like land and you get added benefit of being able to plan and build all the infrastructure from scratch instead of trying to upgrade and be constricted by the limits of the old. You can build another San Francisco sized city near by just at the cost of the steel and concrete it takes. Smaller number of square miles with 100+ stories high interconnected structure(s) - of any shape/form one can come up with as without historic parcelization you wouldn't be limited to the narrow tall buildings of the standard cities.

>10 story apartments and there would be no crisis whatsoever.

how about infrastructure? water/sewer/electricity/roads?

<comment><USER10> NIMBYs won't allow building in the bay anyway since it would block their view.

<comment><USER8> i meant out in the ocean, not in the Bay. Of course many people would oppose it while i'm sure that many would like a view of a Millenium Gate style tower or some other tall structure(s) rising majestically from ocean several miles off the coast. Anyway, it would require state and federal political will to deal with the opposition. Of course it isn't realistic, i was just talking about it as a benchmark to compare other efforts against.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish there were more details on the project. Do employees sign a lease? Do they have normal SF tenant rights?

<comment><USER12> _Do they have normal SF tenant rights?_

This part's a definite yes ... even a squatter can get tenant rights by staying somewhere long enough.</comment></comment>


The macho sperm myth - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/the-idea-that-sperm-race-to-the-egg-is-just-another-macho-myth <comment><USER2> The author seems confused:

> Sperm passage up the female tract is more like an extremely challenging > military obstacle course than a standard sprint-style swimming race. Sperm > numbers are progressively whittled down as they migrate up the female tract, > so that less than one in a million from the original ejaculate will surround > the egg at the time of fertilisation. Any sperm with physical abnormalities > are progressively eliminated along the way, but survivors surrounding the > egg are a random sample of intact sperm.

> The entrenched idea that 'the best sperm wins' has elicited various > suggestions that some kind of selection occurs, but it is difficult to > imagine how this could possibly happen. The DNA in a sperm head is tightly > bound and virtually crystalline, so how could its properties be detected > from outside?</comment>


Have You Disabled Extensions? - <AUTHOR> http://chrismorris.co/2012/02/11/have-you-disabled-extensions-a-story-of-javascript-debugging-with-a-shocking-twist/

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured this may help as I had also seen a fair few results for people who couldn't figure out what was causing the issue.</comment>


Facebook asks to share "complete picture of the government requests we receive" - <AUTHOR> http://newsroom.fb.com/Fact-Check

<comment> o0-0o This seems like a case of, 'easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission'.

</comment><comment><USER2> This suggests that the story about moles is true.</comment>


Genetically Engineered Wheat Found in Unplanted Washington Field - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-08/genetically-engineered-wheat-found-in-unplanted-washington-field <comment><USER2> There is a good documentary about that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsant...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Monsanto)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJiIuQyStr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJiIuQyStr4)

The fuzz is absolutely warranted.

 _Added_ : Monsanto licenses you seeds, you are not even allowed to grow them _once_ (i. e. you are not allowed to use next-generation seeds). And GM plants might be more adapted, and start displace the "natural" ones. And they are all owned by Monsanto.

<comment><USER3> Good sci-fi on this topic: "The wind-up girl".

<comment><USER4> That is an amazing and disturbing story. Seconding the recommendation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If I was to guess someone who grew a sample field for Monsanto was careless and didn't completely clean out his wagon. It either got mixed with regular wheat at a seed plant or at the grain elevator where it was later used for seed.

<comment><USER6> What about animal vectors like birds?

<comment><USER5> Not impossible but doubtful. Every single time I know of that an investigation has been done it's traced to human carelessness.

I'm unable to find a link online but around fifteen years ago a farmer accidentally let a very small amount of some experimental GMO soybeans he was growing for a seed company as a test get into a truck headed to the local elevator.

Routine government testing resulted in a very large bin of soybeans getting purchased and destroyed. The financial hit caused the seed company to go bankrupt.

<comment><USER7> Human carelessness like allowing this crap in the first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What's the big deal? It's a plant. Plants spread seed and grow?

I don't understand why GE food works people up?

<comment><USER9> Would it bother you if someone generically engineered wild animals as they pleased and released them to procreate? Could you imagine any possible negative consequences?

Having said that I would purchase GE bananas and tomatoes that had a longer shelf life.

<comment><USER10> > Having said that I would purchase GE bananas and tomatoes

you already do

<comment><USER9> It doesn't seem to be working for me...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dMjQ3hA9mEA](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dMjQ3hA9mEA)

</comment><comment><USER12> Ok, it's clear that I'm going to get a shit load of downvotes for what I am about to say but the level of ignorance on GE technology and the contracts around patented seeds here on HN is horrendous. I just keep seeing anti-GMO sound bytes that have no basis in reality so here it is.

Farmers don't get sued for natural contamination. Do you really think Monsanto goes around looking for single plants in millions and millions of acres all around the world just so they can try to make a flimsy case before a judge. Monsanto sues people who have significant portions of their seed in their grain stores without a license, because the only way to get that much is by purchasing it from some other farmer who is growing and selling it or by growing it and storing seed for later, which is directly contrary to the license and contract they signed and agreed to. If you can prove farmer John down the road sold it to you and you thought it was natural, then you sue him for your losses on an unlicensed product.

No one said GMO had 0% chance of spreading. What was said was that it was easy to contain because food crops don't thrive in the wild and have very high nutritional needs. So please stop spreading the "they said that it could never escape..." boogeyman sci-fi horror line. No one invested in the development of GMOs has said that to my knowledge and if they have, yes they are idiots or lying, but no it's not a big deal if some are in the wild, because they will die quickly.

Monsanto, along with the other agritech companies, don't field study crops they just whipped up in a lab last night. In the lab they go through several sequencing and single plant trials, not to mention the genes are tested before they even enter the target plant species, THEN they produce enough seeds or plantlings to test in a field. Any significant potential health problems are screened out before it even gets to the field, so no this test case is not a danger to the public. Also the article literally says they have to get permits for new trial plants, so steps are already taken to ensure the plants are a deadly threat to nature or humans.

Lastly, you may not like the whole "not even allowed to regrow them once" stipulation in the farmer contracts, but clearly farmers don't mind it because they line up to buy the stuff. As a farmer, you are either one that grows seed, one that grows product, or in some cases you grow both. They are separate business a lot of the time though. Monsanto's licensing and contract is to stop farmers thinking they can just become a competitor with Monsanto by spending a season farming seed crops and reselling to other farmers. Monsanto and others value come from the fact farmers can increase profits from using their product, if another farmer can grow and resell their product, they have no more business. The fact is, most farmers are fine with the contract and abide by it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Life finds a way.

— Dr Malcolm, Jurassic Park

</comment><comment><USER14> How high is the possibility that this is the result of a random mutation?

<comment><USER15> So low as to be impossible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's still life, why wouldn't it do this?

</comment><comment><USER17> We find unplanted weeds all the time, it's just a fact of life that plants spread.

Unless they pose any danger to anyone (which would surprise me), I don't see why all of this fuzz is being made.

<comment><USER18> Because we have very little feedback on the long term effect of new bio techs. Because they have the potential to have a cascading effect on human healt and the entire ecosystem. Because the people selling them have no incentive to make sure they are safe on the long run since corporations almost never pay anything for their mistakes, and when they do it's a small percent of what they gained from them. Because the only decent thing we got out of them was the assurance, and a lie, that they can contain it.

It took 80 years from finding out asbestos killed people to banning it. Cigarets were sold as healthy, then opponents were fought to the bones. The pharmaceutical companies are making sure the US is becomming addict to opioid and prepare to sell people drugs to get out of addiction as well. Because we are talking about a country that had a president that lied about WMD to get to invade another country, and another one that govern using tweets, and they are in charge of keeping things in check. Because humans already have to face war, global warming and heavy pollution thanks to their careless nature.

It's not about morality. It's not about conviction. It's just not wanting to jump without a parachute. Powerful techs, all of them, be it AI, nanobots or GMO, should be under amazing scrutiny and people using them in a constant state of audit for the next 50 years.

That this is even questionable is beyond me.

<comment><USER19> Literally everything you're talking about applies to selective breeding of crops as much as it does transgenic crops (what people typically mean by GMO). It applies even more so to irradiated seeds, which - strangely - no one seems to mind or want labels on.

Randomly changing millions of base pairs: good. Precisely cutting a gene from one crop and putting it in another: bad. Baffling.

<comment><USER18> One is using a self-safe system that has been tuned for balance for 1000000 of years and have a proven track record and no agenda. The second one is made by a few smart people for only 20 years for money.

The second one has to prove to be safe. It's funny that all of HN hold boing so responsible for demonstrating things are safe when it affect only a few hundred people. But we have to be taking the word of people playing with new high tech toys for their own benefit that have the potential to affect the entire humanity because... ?

<comment><USER19> How do you figure it's self-safe? That implies that selectively bred crops can't be harmful, but that's nonsensical. Many selectively bred crops carry higher than natural carcinogen quantities, for instance (potatoes). And that's ignoring plants that are straight-up deadly.

And which category does seed irradiation fall into? If exposing seeds to high radiation in order to randomly mutate them is an acceptable "non-GMO" mechanism, clearly something is wrong.

<comment><USER18> Because it worked for a lot longer than 20 years. In 100 years, without GMO problems, we can label them safe too.

Plus evolution doesn't have an agenda that would make it creates things like the terminator gene. We are in a very peculiar situation.

I'm open to see how it plays out, as long as we don't arrogantly pretend we know for sure everything will be ok. Because we heard this one before, and it was always stated by people that wanted to sound trustworthy or smart, never the ones that wanted to make sure we are all happy.

Besides, how asking for severe and regular audits is even a bad thing ? If one is against that, I trust their judgment even less.

<comment><USER19> Seed irradiation hasn't yet been in use for 100 years -- the first commercial crop to use it was ~80 years ago -- but we consider it safe, despite that it consists of forcing completely random changes to occur. Why? Because we don't talk about the safety of the process; we talk about the safety of the result.

There's no way we can ever say "GMOs are safe" because it's like saying "crops grown during the 14th week of the year are safe". It's a technique, not a product.

<comment><USER18> Food irradiation in general is yet another issue, that deserves a different threat.

<comment><USER20> The parent isn't talking about food irradiation, they're talking about atomic gardening: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ironic that so much caution is given to the harmless genetically modified plant, when the real danger is with the Roundup chemical itself.

<comment> bjelkeman-again I think one concern is horizontal gene transfer, from one species of plant to another. We may end up with a weed that is resistant to roundup.

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

[https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/58/1/1/515544](https://academic.oup.com/jxb/article/58/1/1/515544)

<comment><USER22> I don't understand why that is a reasonable concern but I'm not an expert so would like to learn if there is a reason.

My logic is that Monsanto got the gene that gives the wheat its resistance to RoundUp (aka glyphosate) from Agrobacterium (see 1) which is perfectly capable of horizontal gene transfer into plants itself, without Monsanto helping (see 2). Also, there are plenty of weed species that are already glyphosate resistant (see 3). I suspect that a greater problem is that widespread and frequent use of glyphosate will increase the prevalence of resistance in weeds.

1 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready#Genetic_engineer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready#Genetic_engineering)

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

3 [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29024306](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29024306)

<comment><USER12> Your understanding is close, they sourced bacteria from puddles that had glyphosate resistant bacteria, then they modify agrobacterium that are specific to whatever crop they are trying to modify. Every cell in a plant has to be able to fend off disease because there is no central immune system. So agrobacterium inject their DNA into plant DNA so the cells think they are not a threat. So, if you have an altered agrobacterium, then those altered genes are passed on as well. BUT, to grow a whole new plant, you have to cut the infected cells out, grow a callus, then grow an actual plant from the callus before it can even produce seeds. Very few plants can grow from clones like that in the wild AND you need to have enough cells that have the same modification for any significant chance of growing a modified plant. So the odds of a single aphid injecting agrobacterium in a cell, then that cell somehow falling off, growing in a medium that can support callus development, then also somehow developing roots in an auxin rich environment, all before the seasons kill it off so it can spread seeds are very slim indeed.

Being that all of the techniques used in the industry are based off of nature anyways, if it is plausible for GMOs to do it, then normal plants have been doing it before GMOs even existed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Reeducation of Blackboard, Everyone's Classroom Pariah - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/blackboard-reinvention/ <comment><USER2> Blackboard is also known for harassing and suing its competitors based on frivolous patents, and for fixing prices. A mobile app and a UX redesign are nice, but hardly sufficient, when they're funded by those kinds of practices.

<comment><USER3> I once worked for a startup in the education industry. One day, when Blackboard released a new product that directly competed with us, we noticed that their new logo was an obvious, clearly intentional rip-off of our own. It was actually gratifying, as a group of mostly recent graduates, to so clearly have threatened a billion dollar company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a teacher and tech-enthusiast, I've used countless pieces of software designed to "aid" me in my teaching and administration.

I've yet to use a Learning Platform or MIS that wasn't tortuous to use and ended up generating more work for me than if I had simply used pen and paper.

The trouble always seems to stem from a lack of understanding of what teachers actually go through in a given day, whether it be setting and assessing work for students, tracking and monitoring performance, or reporting back to students and parents.

It's telling that the most effective way I found of having students submit work to me and for me to provide feedback, targets and grades was using GitHub. This is a product that is used internally within the organisation that produces it, and so works (almost) seamlessly.

<comment><USER5> For fun (and because ilearn sucks), I taught a computer science class where the students helped create a learning management system based on git. Each student's grades are stored in a repo that they own, and the instructors use signed commits to update the students' grades. I offered an extra credit bounty to anyone who could write arbitrary grades to their repo without getting caught, and had a few students discover some clever loopholes.

The documentation is super unpolished, but you can find the repos here: [https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn](https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn)

The "how grades are stored" file in the docs is probably the most interesting: [https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn/blob/master/docs/gra...](https://github.com/mikeizbicki/gitlearn/blob/master/docs/grades.md), but there's also docs on how to start up and run a class using gitlearn.

<comment><USER6> Out of curiosity, how would the students actually go about making their grades private. Free github accounts don't actually get any private repo's, so aren't you effectively requiring a student who wants to maintain some secrecy to pay extra?

<comment><USER5> 1\. Github provides free educational accounts to students.

2\. The repos could be maintained on any git server, so bit bucket would work just fine.

3\. Even if the students had to pay for github private repos, the price would be far less than even the cheapest textbooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The problem with Blackboard is it's almost entirely based on acquisitions. It's not like they added any of that functionality to their core product. Instead it becomes just another link on their portal. The only asset shared across acquisitions is marketing material.

<comment><USER8> While acquisitions are indeed happened and continue to happen, thing released today is part of bigger effort to get everything under one roof and become solid system of many microservices, rather than disjointed products with a "another link in the portal". I work at Blackboard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What happened to Sakai? When I was starting undergrad my university had just switched to it and it was supposed to be the next big thing.

<comment><USER10> Sakai continues to put out releases on a fairly orderly schedule, but it's lost several of the core, founding institutions as their IT departments move away from customized FOSS software hosted in local datacenters to SAAS software hosted by commercial providers.

For example: Indiana University was a core member of the Sakai Foundation that was rumored to have a $1mm+ budget devoted to heavily customizing Sakai for IU purposes and for running the software. IU seems to have moved away from the customized open-source approach to a consortial "buying club" approach to try to have influence in the commercial, higher-ed market. 10+ higher-ed institutions (many of them public institutions) have put $1mm each in a pot to try to better control their software destiny:

[http://mfeldstein.com/unizin-indiana-universitys-secret- new-...](http://mfeldstein.com/unizin-indiana-universitys-secret-new-learning- ecosystem-coalition/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> These changes don't really seem to be addressing the real problems with blackboard which make it frustrating for instructors to do things. Too many clicks. Too many non-intuitive options.

<comment><USER8> These changes do address these issues. Not all of them in this release, but this is very first release and Blackboard switching to continuous deployment model vs one-release-a-year-deploy-at-schools-server-when-admin-have-time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Probably because they saw Canvas eating their lunch. Although I've heard rumblings that Canvas is turning into Blackboard by tacking on the very same useless bullshit they said no to in 2012.

<comment><USER13> You can only buck the IT dept requests for so long. Eventually you run out of enlightened and powerful users to sell to and you start having to cross all the t's and dot all the i's the all-powerful IT dept wants. In so many large institutions (edu, healthcare, enterprises) it is IT and not the end users that have final say.

<comment><USER14> Having had to clean up after "end users" a couple times, I certainly prefer to have the IT department have the final say.

What kind of "i's" and "t's" are you referring to as a bad thing?

<comment><USER13> From personal experience? Access control and integration with authentication platforms, logging / auditing, various layers of site-wide policies on all configurable features. Preferred platforms (i.e.: Windows servers and MS SQL these days, Solaris and/or Oracle 10-15 years ago.) Lots of reporting features and professional service to support all of that.

Support for antiquated web browsers, often combined with Citrix is a personal nightmare and a royal PITA to test for. I've had to deal with MSIE 6 compatibility as recently as last year. This, obviously, was on some rinky dink locked down 6 years old PC used by back-office low-ranking clerical staff... Who's main job is to use our software.

It really limits what you can do as far as responsive UI if it has to degrade gracefully in MSIE 6, 7 or even 8. And given how many Win XP clients are still out there in corporate desktops, MSIE8 support is still going to be a thing for at least another year or two.

Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a real pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now it's a capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.

<comment><USER14> > Access control and integration with authentication platforms, logging / > auditing, various layers of site-wide policies on all configurable features. > Preferred platforms (i.e.: Windows servers and MS SQL these days, Solaris > and/or Oracle 10-15 years ago.) Lots of reporting features and professional > service to support all of that.

From the sounds of it, you're running into how hard it is to balance security and usability. Personally, I prefer security, but I'm sure I'd say otherwise if someone was blocking me due to an old, outdated, policy.

As for antiquated web browsers, yeah, that's annoying. And it amazes me that there are companies out there who don't update their products, even when they're paid millions of dollars... Then there are the users who don't want to update....

> Another real annoyance is very slow deployment cycles. Getting client change > control approval for even bug fix releases, let alone major upgrades is a > real pain, doubly so if any hardware / resource requirements go up and now > it's a capex line item that needs CFO approval. I envy the cloud folks.

That's not something I have had experience with. Sounds painful. Makes me glad to work in a smaller community college where I get to do mostly whatever I need to.

<comment><USER13> > From the sounds of it, you're running into how hard it is to balance > security and usability. Personally, I prefer security, but I'm sure I'd say > otherwise if someone was blocking me due to an old, outdated, policy.

What happens is the application will end up requiring dozens of roles juggling easily a hundred (discrete) privileges.

The LDAP, AD, X.500 enterprise directory you have to integrate with will not have that granularity so a whole set of interfaces will be needed to map group(s) from the directory to role(s) and then you need an overlay to allow super users to customize the imported users.

And you somehow need to handle the case where user disappear from the directory without breaking auditing. And you need to grow bulk modification interfaces and import interfaces for those user/roles/privileges.

And then somehow make the UI human usable. And suddenly you'll need special "users" for anonymous session that are API launched, a whole API authentication layer and your load balancer now suddenly need to be session aware, and they want single-sign-on.

And we've not actually implemented any core functionality, just satisfied the security dude that this will be SoX/HIPPA/ISO-27001 compliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mobile is important to students, and I like the time planning focus.

OA managed not to mention that little issue about patents some years ago which made me smile...

[http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims- invali...](http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invalidated- by-uspto/)

UK: many colleges use the open source Moodle as a 'virtual learning environment'. A tad less clunky than classic Blackboard in my personal opinion. Universities mostly have _something_ and last time I checked the split was 50:50 Blackboard and Moodle. The acquisition of WebCT by Blackboard caused some annoyance in some HE circles I recollect. All ancient history now and I hope the new people can come up with something easier.

<comment><USER16> Somewhat confusingly, Blackboard now sell Moodle, via a subsidiary. For those not familiar with the sector, this is a bit like Microsoft's recent moves towards open source.

<comment><USER15> That would be a support contract they are selling I take it? I can see sense in that. Otherwise just...

[https://download.moodle.org/](https://download.moodle.org/)

<comment><USER14> Not just a support contract. MoodleRooms ([http://www.moodlerooms.com/](http://www.moodlerooms.com/)) was acquired by Blackboard a while back. They provide fully managed Moodle hosting. They provide a decent enough service. I certainly like not having to manage Moodle's backend...

<comment><USER15> Thanks for link. People are doing hosting in UK as well, it's quite a thing. One example...

[http://ulcc.ac.uk/](http://ulcc.ac.uk/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if they managed to update the forum software so it doesn't take about 40s to load when the rest of the installation my uni have is lightning fast.

They have a long way to go, but it's better than the internal system we have as well.

</comment><comment><USER18> If only they gave this much attention to their back-end APIs to Bb.

</comment><comment><USER19> I used blackboard throughout high school and university. It was never the software that was the problem, it was always teachers and professors who didn't know how or didn't want to use it. For the most part, it was a glorified dropbox; a way for the professor to share slides and notes in a time when dropbox and google docs didn't exist.

A fancy UI and increased analytics isn't going to change user apathy.</comment>


The new iPhone... - <AUTHOR> http://9to5mac.com/2011/09/26/the-new-iphone/

<comment><USER2> As cool as this sounds I still can't imagine using it in public at all.

I felt like I got enough unwanted attention as owner of the first iPhone, I can only imagine the sense of embarrassment I'd feel when using this.

"Siri, please remind me to pick up more preparation H when I get to Walgreens..."</comment>


(Rap) Genius still only 8 devs - <AUTHOR> http://meta.genius.com/Genius-engineering-jobs-at-genius-annotated

<comment><USER2> Thinking this will change soon as Genius recently hired away Warby Parker's Head of Talent...</comment>