Hacker News: jrabone

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 21:31:35 +0000

You get to fight my bacteria, and every humans bacteria, every day of your life.

Not to a significant extent. In cases where people are exposed to other people's bacteria in quantity, they generally become (mildy) ill quite quickly while developing immunity - see fresher's flu etc.

If you had read the article, you would know that they're supplementing personal flora with Nitrosomonas eutropha.

And HOPING that N.Eutropha will out-compete their dangerous-to-others bacteria.

And hurting all of us just to help you, denying us the necessary and amazing flora that makes our lives possible, is selfish and Darwinian in it's own way.

I'm not suggesting you shower in bleach, just that you wash yourself with something more effective than fairy dust.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 21:05:07 +0000

No, it's standard UK practice, especially for the first 2 years after splenectomy. It does seem to vary around the world though.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 20:56:53 +0000

For hopefully the last time, I'm not talking about the bacteria in the product. All human beings defecate. Many (most?) clean themselves afterwards with their hands. If you do not practise adequate hygiene with a surfactant-based cleanser, those faecal bacteria are still stuck to the skin afterwards and transfer to anything you touch, where they may be picked up by someone else who is not in a position to deal with them. This is not an appeal to emotion, it is a fact which I happen to have had personal experience of.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 20:39:03 +0000

We provide them a home, and in return they protect and clean us. They don't want to destroy their home, they would die, too.

Sorry but that is absolute, unmitigated rubbish. I spent 2 weeks in intensive care, with a surgical scar from my sternum to my groin which de-hisced (burst open) because my own bacteria tried to kill me.

While they might be symbiotic in the right place (eg. the gut), they'll kill you pretty quickly if they get out.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 20:08:57 +0000

Not talking about the bacteria in the product, I'm talking about the faecal bacteria (your own personal gut microbes) that are still stuck to the skin afterwards due to not using a surfactant-based washing product. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7785997 further down the thread.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 19:45:20 +0000

Soap and water is very good at removing faecal contamination. In the absence of small children and pets, and the taking of a prophylactic dose of antibiotics daily, my main concern is whether the people I share work and living space with are spreading their own faeces over surfaces I interact with. If their cleansing regime is as effective as soap and hot water, all is well.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 19:37:33 +0000

TFA doesn't contain enough detail about hand-washing as opposed to body & hair, in much the same way that most people don't like talking about wiping their backsides vs washing them after defecating.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 19:34:31 +0000

Thank you (I'm not religious either). I'm sorry you feel uncomfortable, that's not my intent at all. In purely objective terms, there's obviously a benefit to culling the weak.

I wouldn't necessarily advocate for _increased_ use of soap and shampoo (and certainly not for antibiotics). I also believe there is an argument that partial disinfection is much worse than nothing, when viewed in terms of selection pressure on a microbial population, and I don't think daily use of antibiotic soap is a good idea (although Triclosan is actually pretty useless anyway).

However, I definitely don't think we should be encouraging _less_ hygiene, even though I'm obviously biased.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 19:19:35 +0000

I can't reply directly to "rosser" due to max comment depth, but fecal transplants don't generally involve introducing gut bacteria to anywhere other than the gut.

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 19:01:03 +0000

Your fecal coliforms will kill other people, simply because they're yours, not theirs. They'll kill you if they don't stay in the gut (mine tried, along with a carbapenem-resistant strain of streptococcus introduced via a central line).

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 18:57:04 +0000

I'm still alive, that's as far as it goes. 30% + chance of recurrence and it's not like I can have those organs removed a second time. However, it's an improvement on the initial diagnosis which was stage 4 adenocarcinoma with peritoneal metastasis (ie. a Kaplan-Meyer survival of about 5 years max).

It's not just immuno-suppressed people, it's everyone, and a risk/benefit comparison with peanut allergies is spurious. If everyone smeared themselves in peanut butter before they left the house each morning, you'd have a closer comparison.

Plenty of studies at http://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/publications-data-stats.html - click on "Improved Health".

New comment by jrabone in "My No-Soap, No-Shampoo, Bacteria-Rich Hygiene Experiment"

jrabone — Thu, 22 May 2014 18:26:30 +0000

So anybody who happens to have a compromised immune system gets to fight your personalised microbes, perhaps fatally? How very ... Darwinian ... of you.

Soap and water have saved more lives than any medication, ever. I now have no spleen (6 months ago I lost spleen, gallbladder and half my stomach as well as sundry peritoneal membranes to cancer) and nearly died as a result of post-operative infections. I take daily antibiotics, possibly forever. As a society, we don't just cleanse ourselves for our own well-being, we wash for others.

New comment by jrabone in "Show HN: Where Adblock+ injects 20K CSS rules, HTTPSB injects one"

jrabone — Mon, 19 May 2014 09:50:15 +0000

Yep. I run Privoxy and a DNS resolver configured to be authoritative for the worst 5000 or so ad farms. Zips along nicely, and works for every machine on the LAN or via remote VPN.

Fuck ads. Find a different business model.

New comment by jrabone in "An Introduction to Programming in Go"

jrabone — Thu, 15 May 2014 12:12:20 +0000

It's UTF-8 being interpreted as raw bytes: "a-hat" is the 0x80 marker byte. A common fail is forgetting that Microsoft Word auto-corrects straight quotes (which are in ASCII) to curly double quotes (which need Unicode), and serving the resulting text as CP1252 or ASCII or some such.

UTF-8 / GMT / ISO8601 people. It's (should be) law.

New comment by jrabone in "The Power of Fat"

jrabone — Tue, 13 May 2014 10:28:58 +0000

Anecdotally, tests for skin-contact carcinogens can be skewed because the lab mice are prone to develop skin cancers anyway.

New comment by jrabone in "The Power of Fat"

jrabone — Tue, 13 May 2014 10:27:15 +0000

I think OP meant, "Why does the experiment always succeed on mice", not "Why do we perform experiments on mice".

New comment by jrabone in "Why is asbestos still killing people?"

jrabone — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 10:06:08 +0000

Presumably not ones assembled with lead-free solder? (not that the plastics are likely much safer by Californian standards, but still)

New comment by jrabone in "The Machine Stops (1909)"

jrabone — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 10:01:32 +0000

I find it quite ironic that the 'machine' has failed dismally to reproduce this text correctly, by making the usual pigs ear of character encodings and rendering Ælfrid as �lfrid in my browser, the latter being corrupted beyond trivial machine recovery.

We (or at least speakers of languages that don't fit into ASCII) are doomed.

New comment by jrabone in "Dev-Metal Shows Ads to Adblockers"

jrabone — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 15:24:58 +0000

No, no they won't. Not my users, anyway, because I block your ads at the DNS resolver level by redirecting queries to my own Apache instance, which serves single pixel images or empty JS as necessary.

Despite protestations in TFA to the contrary, publishers CAN'T be trusted not to create a tunnel for bad actors via adservers. They don't have the level of control required to do so. If you want the $$$, change your business model. If it turns out that no-one wants to pay for your content, perhaps it's not worth anything?

New comment by jrabone in "Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself."

jrabone — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 16:31:28 +0000

...right up to about 20 kHz, whereafter YOU CAN'T HEAR THEM. Hence 44 kHz sampling.

Seriously, A/B test this, you might be surprised.

Also if you think that's anything like a square wave coming out of a guitar speaker (or that that is even desirable in the most case), I've got a bridge to sell you. And yes, I do play.