Some of the specific examples in the article seemed off to me too. However, I did love the book Scale by Geoffrey West who is one of the authors of the paper discussed in the article.
At the very least, the book is a great introduction to the many different aspects that scale up with city size.
Congratulations on the launch! I’ve hoped for a service like this to help with documentation related tasks, for simple things like delivering gifts and often timers to support friends and family in need.
One thing as a US immigrant I have to do pretty often is return to my home country for a visa renewal which includes various tasks including documentation collection, payments in home currency, transportation when I go back to the embassy, photocopies, printing etc. Supporting visa processes could be an good package to offer.
A few things I could not learn in my cursory look:
- How does pricing work? Given that being misuse of funds is one of the primary problems you’re solving I’d want to know how the payments process works, what is the platform cost, and how is misuse prevented.
- The top call to action on your website is “Post a request” which is great! The secondary action for me is “remember this website” for when I need it. Love the fact that I can install the app, but the ability to quickly add an email/WhatsApp number to my contacts is probably the best recall value for your service. Offering users a way to start a thread without needing to post a request would solve the same need.
As for the payments process, a customer would simply pay through a credit card. The payment is held in escrow until the vendor has completed the assigned task and the customer confirms that it is complete. The payment is then released to the vendor. If the task is not completed or not up to quality, the customer gets a full refund.
So the customer has the confidence that his/her money is safe and will only be released once the task is complete. The vendor is motivated to do a good job and has the guarantee that once the task is complete payment will be received.
This whole process is automated and happens within the app.
Wow! Looking forward for you to succeed. Filling out security and privacy questionnaires, especially when growing fast leads to so much wasted time.
More importantly, because of the rush the knowledge generated during the answering of questions is not captured in a reusable format.
I'm curious if could generate Security and Privacy white papers for companies that need to arm their sales/marketing teams using the information collected while fill out incoming questionnaires.
Thanks! This is the only piece of information I needed before giving Beeper a chance. I could not find it on the Beeper home page as a callout or in the FAQs, and it would probably be good to add.
Ideally I would not want to run the whole stack if I understand how the E2E encryption is managed.
A slightly tangential question I'd love to get more perspective on is the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament. Even assuming that the virus was not naturally evolved, and its characteristics are partly caused due to human interventions we're still stuck finding a vaccine, medication and ways of reducing transmission.
Is there still a thread here that this virus is evidence that humans can possibly create chimeric viruses? In my limited understanding, using protein sequences to modify viruses is generally believed to be possible.
In the article, the authors say that, in 2015, US researchers created a chimeric virus from a bat coronavirus to infect mice lung cells. They tested the virus on human lung cells and predicted that it would be very dangerous to humans. They stopped doing research on it because it would break the US rules against making human viruses more powerful. They were working with virus researchers from Wuhan. The authors conjecture that the Wuhan researchers used the same techniques and made Sars-cov-2 and it accidentally got out.
What do you mean by this? I heard that it has incredible affinity to ACE receptors, which is why it sprrads so quickly (combined with asymptomatic infection)
Yes, it binds to ACE2 receptors more strongly, but once you're infected it's about one order of magnitude less severe.
To note, receptor affinity is not the only mechanism by which infectivity is modulated. You would already expect that a virus that is ten times less severe would spread more easily, and SARS was already able to spread efficiently through air at great distances, so it seems likely that me that receptor affinity is stronger but that other mechanism are weaker. This would explain the fact that it is less severe and not much more infectious.
Modifying a sample genome is easy. It has been done routinely in industry and academia for decades.
Alternatively, they can inexpensively “print” entire virus genomes from scratch from a digital copy, but the “printer” is pricey.
(I’m being intentionally vague here, and skipped a few steps. I accidentally wrote a tutorial for starting your own biological weapons lab, then edited it down.)
>the impact of the virus being "man made" on our current predicament
One good aspect could be the lack of an animal reservoir would make it less likely to come back. So far minks seem to be the only animals to catch it in a major way.
Having lived with various points between the 'awesome to read' and 'simplest to parse' I currently favor simpler parsing and investing in tooling that makes manual parsing of logs easier.
Of course the decision should include the scale of the microservices. There would be no benefit in optimizing too much for readability if the number of requests to your services is so high that you would need complex filtering before you can look at them.
Another way to cut down the bike shedding is to go with a library that wraps around the format you choose. We built GitHub.com/clever/Kayvee and have changed the format a few times. However since everyone uses the kayvee libraries at Clever it's not too crazy to change the format.
Hopefully this was useful. Apologies for the disconnected paragraphs - on public transit :)
