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Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

> once they break, it's game over

This was on my mind the entire time I read the article. People are having their lives opened up by responsive pumps; some of them are even children who will grow up without ever having to manually manage each blood sugar swing. But the entire setup depends on scavenging outdated pumps and importing unapproved devices. It's deeply scary and depressing to think of where they'll be left if those pumps fail before an approved solution hits the market - or becomes similarly affordable.

Even if closed-loop pumps are approved and affordable at that point, the loss of control will represent a real step backwards for a lot of people. I don't have easy answers, but realizing that this is how things work is chilling.

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> It's deeply scary and depressing

Yes. You have no idea.

Being poor is waiting for biocapitalists to decide your condition is profitable enough.

Capitalists created all of the pieces of technology in use here. Bashing them seems really out of line.

Getting devices approved by the FDA is extremely expensive and time consuming. The DIY guys are doing great work, but they have not done this. An actual company such as Medtronic could not do what they have done as they would get shut down by the FDA.

The US is the only industrialized country that does not have the English Rule, which says that if you sue someone in court and lose, you pay their court costs. As a result, trial lawyers make a lot of hay suing medical companies. There's no strong disincentive to see what happens if you go to court. This is another reason medical companies are very conservative when releasing equipment for use.

So, we have capitalists producing technology despite all of these hurdles, and yet somehow you blame them when they take a while to get things into the market?

Contrary to your belief, the entire asset of technology known to mankind was not all invented due to capitalism. We had a lot of political systems throughout our past.

Patents, and copyright, are only in existence because of government's law. Without such, you could still live in a perfectly capable society (with capitalism as its political system, but not necessarily).

The pumps and monitors and smart phones being used by the DIYers in this case were all produced by capitalists. Without these things, the DIYers would not be able to do what they are doing.

The capitalists got these devices to market despite the regulatory processes of the FDA, which are expensive and time consuming.

What this story highlights is that the regulatory process has created a situation where only corporations with big pockets can generally play in this space legally. What the DIYers are doing is not legal. It is definitely moral, but not legal.

Your complaint falls on unsympathetic ears because these pumps are quite within the capability of open source to design and manufacture.

The fact that no one has done so speaks volumes.

.. but not within their capability to get approved for sale.

Can you please make your points substantively and not as flamebait, when posting to HN? Flamebait just leads to shitty threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's an ongoing reminder that the Silicon Valley point of view isn't the only—or best—one.

I grew up dirt poor in the Deep South. My wife is diabetic. People need the perspective. If that's flamebait, maybe I'm not the one who's in the wrong.

Also it seems like you're ignoring your own "don't post shallow dismissals" rule.

What kind of effort do you think it would take to make an open-source functional copy of one that you would trust? Presumably if doing that the reverse engineering may have to be black-boxed and the designs presented as research, to create some legal cover.

Honestly, I think this should be quite doable. These guys [1] built a pump based on a stepper motor and an arduino, in order to replace expensive peristaltic laboratory pumps.

[1] https://www.instructables.com/id/Open-Source-Peristaltic-Pum...

If you look at mikeselectricstuff’s teardown of an omnipod, its quite simple.

It can also quite easily kill you in your sleep if you mess up the implementation, so ymmv.

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