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Toenex

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In the UK people from Liverpool and Manchester are rivals until they meet someone from London when it becomes a North Vs South thing. That all changes again when they meet someone from Glasgow when it becomes England Vs Scotland and yet again when the British meet someone French. There is always a more foreign foe.

Absolutely. Another concern I have is the demonstrable incompetence of the UK government. If they have my data, which will only ever paint a partial picture of what I do, who knows what conclusions they may draw. I don't want to spend hours talking to nice policemen because my GPS data shows me regularly in the same park as some known terrorist just because they've never heard of a park run.

Yep. Many years ago I was a junior at an engineering consultancy that specialised in noise & vibration. I spent many a happy hour out in the sun replacing melted loudspeakers that were being used to feed 'anti noise' into the exhaust ports of a pair of RB211 jet engines. The engines were ground mounted vertically to introduce pressure into the gas network should an emergency loss arise. This was rural Cheshire (UK) and some of the local properties were very old and expensive and needed protection from the vibrations these things produced. In reality they were never used but they were tested twice a year, for a total of about 2 minutes. After that the speakers (yep lots of hi-fi cones) were mush. They did their job though. And I got to travel up to Cheshire, see my then girlfriend who lived in Manchester and spend a week up on a roof in the sunshine replacing them.

It's a while since I ran fMRI studies but my favourite analogy was to tell people that it was like trying to measure your electricity usage by watching your water meter.

I think the management point is a good one. A valuable generalist role is working at the interface between management and the specialists in the team. As an engineer I was much more of a generalist which lead me into product management.

Interesting read. I guess you can view what Amazon has done in this light. Provide the best solution to taking possession of things. The complement being the supply chain that marketplace aims to commoditize.

The half dose was an 'experimental endpoint'. Always planned but not seen as critical. FDA rules now stipulate you can only register on primary endpoints declared before the trial starts. I suspect AZ have argued that the accelerated nature of the process should take this into account.

Yes I think they only need to hit 50% for approval. Conservatively they were getting 62% as I recall and the 'experimental endpoint' dose got them to 90%.

The Oxford vaccine is far cheaper (15x) and easier to store so long term it has a lot of competitive advantages.

I suspect the bulk of the population will receive the 'Oxford' vaccine. It's still going through the approval process but the UK has ordered more of it. I believe the Pfizer vaccine is targeted to front line workers and the clinical vulnerable.

It always felt to me that startups are best for the under 25s and the over 45s. In between you have so many other commitments it's a challenging balance. I say this as someone who spent most of his 30's & 40's in startup land.

Yes this is one of those slightly annoying biases on HN. 90% of the time Product = SaaS. I'd like to hear some stories from folks who have adapted the techniques from this space to work in other markets. Iterating on hardware, embedded software, small number but high value customer markets etc.