Donations won't offset the dev time, but can be significant with a few thousand players. I briefly tried two PBBGs recently (idlescape.com + avabur.com) and could see from the chat that both were bringing in at least thousands a month. The former hasn't been around very long, though, and the latter had microtransactions and somewhat cheap dopamine mechanics.
It's kind of a shame that he's wound-up writing an article like this. It certainly discredits him in my eyes and it seems utterly opposed to stated principles of evidence based medicine.
As others have noted here, the article calls for action based on very little data and lots of ad-hoc speculation. It also cheery picks its and falsely claims we don't have enough data.
I wonder if thinking all research is false too much lets jump to the idea you dream any opinion that's convenient.
Moreover, Ioannidιs has absolutely jumped into advocating this position from a partisan political position, with his positions picked up by partisan political sites such as the dailywire.com;
Headline: "Stanford Professor: Data Indicates We’re Severely Overreacting To Coronavirus"
https://www.dailywire.com/news/stanford-professor-data-indic...
The usefulness instantly clicked when I saw this - awesome work, and I wish it were government promoted.
I'm no good at writing copy, but I'd work on the homepage's phrasing. Link to https://healthweather.us/ as well as the NYT article on them, rather than making a reference to Maddow elsewhere (it'd be dumb for someone to be turned away by that, but someone will be.) Explain that CDC data lags three weeks behind historically, and point out all the counties without data. Say all this on the front page, and run A/B tests once you have enough visitors.
It's not a personal attack if it's a factual truth. Nobody will ban me for that.
Someone who suggests that the government promotes a website that is wanting to make unverified healthcare related data available to healthcare professionals during a global pandemic is stupid.
Showing poor judgment or little intelligence.
In this case stupid = very poor judgement as a decision made on this data by healthcare officials could cost actual lifes.
Personal attacks and "factual truth" are orthogonal, and we certainly will ban you for the former (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) so please don't do it again. In practice, people underestimate how much of the former they're doing (by at least 10x) and overestimate how much of the latter they possess, so the distinction isn't generally useful.
It's easy to make your substantive points without declaring others to be stupid, so please do that instead.
If you say you ban people for telling the truth I'll consider to not post on this platform and contribute in the future. Because we are getting close to censorship if you despite someone explaining himself threatening with banning them for a personal attack which it wasn't in this case and even the OP agrees to that if you follow the course of this discussion.
>It's easy to make your substantive points without declaring others to be stupid, so please do that instead.
I agree with you on that point, instead of calling someone else stupid for poor judgement I'll instead call their argument stupid or to not cause any friction "poor judgement" instead and explain why I think that to keep room for a discussion on the argument and not the author.
We don't ban people for telling the truth, we ban them for breaking the site guidelines. Fortunately, it's possible to tell the truth without breaking the site guidelines, so there need be no conflict.
I'm the last to disagree with your assessment of myself, but I'll defend the idea. Aggregating data during a global pandemic isn't a stupid thing to do. Rather - and stay with me here - it's a smart thing.
Edit: Oh you were calling me stupid because you thought researchers wouldn't understand the concept of self-reported medical data. Give them some credit.
I can also give you a real life example on how unverified data actually hurt people.
There is no scientific evidence and proper data yet that Plaquenil ( hydroxychloroquine ) is actually helping most covid patients to beat the illness or get better.
The President mentioned the drug in his press conference without getting interrupted immediately by Dr.Fauci, who is director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US.
After the Press conference people in Africa started raiding the pharmacies for Plaquenil which is widely available in Africa because some people have complications with the newer Malaria meds and it's dirt cheap.
It was even worse after the President tweeted about this new wonder drug. Again neither Dr. Fauci or Dr. Birx immediately published a statement that the president is false and not a physician.
Multiple people ended up in the Hospital with Plaquenil poisoning because of that.
People got hurt because experts did not shut down the presidents false claims that were only based on anecdotal data immediately.This is how easy unverified data can hurt or potentially kill people.
I am sorry if you took this as a personal attack and will apologize if i hurt your feelings, i forget that words sometimes mean something different for people than what they were intended for.
I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights.
If you look at how the US handled the Covid-19 crisis until now, especially at the CDC and the Expert level that the president assigned to guide him, that is really troubling evidence that not every researcher or healthcare official understood the concept of self-reported data or properly verified data at all.
There is a good reason why no other country in the world during this crisis suggested citizens to self test or go on a website to enter data there and based on that get tested.
That's what we have doctors and lab work for. You call the doctor tell him you might have an infectious disease, he looks at you and your symptoms. He makes the decision that you need to get tested. This is also good advise for the regular flu. And especially with Covid-19 it's important that people get tested early and hospitalized with risk factors before they turn into severe ICU cases. Many people end up in the ICU right now because they go to the hospital while already dying. A lot of the reports you read from Hospitals in the US and in other countries where people don't have universal healthcare is they already arrive with blue lips and fingers in the emergency room and do not any longer have a fighting chance to beat the virus.
I have also seen this before, I have been one of the PMCs training a lot of the military repsonse teams to the Ebola Outbreak in 2014 in west africa and it was very frightening to see on who's advise and what data the governments were basing decisions on. So excuse me when I get a bit temperamental about this topic.
Stupid people or let's say people with poor judgement are at all levels of society, sometimes in positions that they shouldn't be in a crisis.
And I understand that the guy who made the website probably has good intentions. But if you do something, do it right or not at all.
I've had my moments during all this too, no worries.
> I should have made clear that I think you have poor judgement if you think this is a good idea to use unverified healthcare data to base any decisions on that could cause people severe harm or the restriction of their rights.
> Just last Saturday, Kinsa’s data indicated an unusual rise in fevers in South Florida, even though it was not known to be a Covid-19 epicenter. Within days, testing showed that South Florida had indeed become an epicenter.
You buried the lede a bit on your prior experience (that's significant context!) but I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots.
I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that.
I'll check out the article. Thanks for providing that additional information.
>But I'm not advocating anything more than data collection in the interest of identifying mass trends and hotspots
If you word it like that that is a legit goal yes. We just need to be aware that when something is on the Internet people are going to abuse it. There are also state actors who could be interested in manipulating data like that in the worst case. Imagine you got a country to shut down or divert ressources to certain places by feeding them false data. This is not something too far fetched these days.
>I also disagree that the US' current inept response means software engineers have a moral duty not to hand them any complicated information (if I understood you correctly) but am having a harder time phrasing that.
I understand what you want to say and yes it's the governments obligation to verify the accuracy of the data they want to act on and not the software engineers, but it does help if they already get data that they can work with.
From years of working for governments, if you work with/for the Government always pretend they have no clue what they are doing and prepare for the worst.
I'm one of the guys who made the website, and I thought a lot about these things too. You have good concerns. My group talked to doctors and epidemiologists before starting this project and we proceeded with these thoughts in mind.
If it were actually possible to go to your doctor or get tested for COVID-19, I would agree that this is not the best way to collect medical information. The reality is we don't have that fortune right now, and this is the best fallback we can propose.
If you have specific criticism that we can take to improve the form, I'd be happy to implement it.
We're biased towards action, not sitting on our hands.
Thank you for your effort, and apologies for being a bit hot headed about this.
Like I said I am sure you just have the best intentions. If you could add some kind of geo restriction/verification so that people are not able to enter at least ZIP codes outside the country they live that would probably be helpful already
That's not how Google works. She mentions in the Gizmodo article that she had ownership over these files, which isn't given out casually. Creating these policy notifications would have been a core part of her work.
As someone who has been catatonically depressed for a couple years now, I'm not so sure about this! People with chronic pain also often can't identify any physical source, but obviously you would never start posting "is this really an illness though?" or "aren't we distracting and misleading people??" in a thread about that.
The undercurrent of your post is that depressed people need to snap out of it, and falling back on the "illness" label reduces personal responsibility. Trust me, many people feel like imposters claiming they have depression, despite being completely non-functional. Thanks but no thanks to this proposed contribution to the discourse.
Are you really here to understand, or is it just to judge? Want some MRIs and EKGs of depressed brains?
> undercurrent of your post is that depressed people need to snap out of it,
Please point to where I say that. I explicitly do not say that. That's not an undercurrent because I don't believe it.
I do also believe that people don't have zero agency in this problem. There is SOME ability and necessity for people to work on these types of problems. That's what therapy with a therapist is right?
And that does differentiate depression from tuberculosis which cannot ever be improved by sitting down and talking about it.
Okay, my mistake for getting dragged into the archetypal HN argument. It's clear you cannot be convinced. Your original point - that depression has no biomarkers and is extremely subjective - has been proven wrong by a couple others and you've shown no gratitude or interest in this information. Only replying where you think there's an argument to be won.
Maybe you, some random person on Hacker News, are not in fact smarter than the medical consensus?
Uh no, sorry, it's the argument. You've been on this site for four years now - be honest, have you ever seen someone with a lazy armchair opinion enter a debate, receive strong pushback including scientific citations, and then refuse to change their opinion? It's literally every fifth thread here. Though imo, more fun when it's idiots telling tptacek he's wrong about security than when it's someone a dick to someone with depression (my victim mentality!!)
But sure, let me actually respond to you:
* At no point have you acknowledged or shown any awareness that depression is not "one thing". Like how people discuss "curing cancer" as if that's any sort of meaningful statement. How complex do you think depression is? What point of complexity does something need to reach before you defer to experts? Depression is still more or less a black box (watch the Sapolsky video I linked or look up some starslatecodex articles on ketamine.) Again, no sign of awareness of this on your part, which suggests you haven't done the most basic research.
* Yep, you never said there are no biomarkers. You said:
> Depression is a set of guidelines in a book that ask vague subjective questions about how someone perceives the world. And then if the person decides you have it you have it. If they don't you dont. This has very little to do with the first scenario."
This was your reason for stating that depression wasn't an illness. That it was based on a list of subjective questions. Sadly you didn't respond to the person saying that this was equally true for schizophrenia. Is schizophrenia an illness?
* I said it was an undercurrent, meaning subtext. Do you understand why subtext can't be quoted, and why that's work that you need to do for yourself? (If you somehow can quote subtext, though, immediately switch careers to political journalism, you'll be a wonder.)
* The only really offensive part was when you said "I do also believe that people don't have zero agency in this problem." Like, cool, a few sentences in and you've also added in a complete strawman to make yourself look reasonable. So this was just debate club to you.
The last point, combined with the fact that you're only responding when it might let you feel superior, leads me to believe you're not here in any sort of attempt to learn. How's your own mental health? You're clearly get some need fulfilled by arguing on the internet, which generally isn't the best sign. Watch that video, it's good, and absolutely full of things you do not know.
ah, also - are you cool with suicide? if so I think your hardline approach is fine, it's really just being forced to live + treated like shit (ref. your post) if you don't enjoy it enjoy it enough that I think is the real issue
Visiting a professional is generally a necessary step in recovering from tuberculosis. In that way it is not different from depression. In most forms of depression, talking with someone and doing nothing else is guaranteed to do no good. In that way they do not differ from tuberculosis.
Don't be baffled! No one thinks this. Everyone has seen a variation of this comment a million times by now, and everyone knows it, but companies will never be able to admit it. It's all about putting stress on the lie. If a corp won't solve its issues and employees quit because of it, "well duh of course they're gonna protect stakeholders' interest" isn't really helpful or new.
I think it's still good advice. The first thing big corporations do when you join is make you sit through a bunch of mandatory compliance videos that teach you that you're not allowed retaliate against people who report harassment or corruption. Then they make everyone sign an agreement to follow the code of conduct, which everyone does. I can certainly see how anyone who still any faith left in humanity could believe these claims to be true.
"Google is pretty bad at creating products so no one is willing to pay for them"
doesn't track when facebook switched to gmail after giving up on microsoft exchange.
edit: also I work in ads, but won't bother responding to the "google just wants to manipulate dumb people" point. if you're starting from the assumption of malice I don't think the discussion would lead anywhere. and probably don't want to say more anyway, will delegate that to PR.
