Live data from Hacker News

Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

twitter.com

91–100 of 161 posts

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#91
post #87
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that whoever made the test, if it's a reasonably competent enterprise, made it with human capacities in mind. Are you sure they weren't just constrained by technological limitations when they designed the paper test? Maybe the reason the digital test exists is that a competent enterprise wanted to adapt the paper technology to better fit human capacities?

Maybe, although I doubt it. It would mean that they put in extra research to, for example, plot an ROC curve and see what the optimal threshold for the test would be. Even if that was the case, you can still frame the question in terms of cost/benefits. The electronic test is, let's say, 10 times more expensive than a basic one. Is it more reliable than taking 10 basic tests (maybe at different times) and averaging t…

> Even if that was the case, you can still frame the question in terms of cost/benefits. The electronic test is, let's say, 10 times more expensive than a basic one. Is it more reliable than taking 10 basic tests (maybe at different times) and averaging the results? Probably not.

Food that costs ten times more usually doesn't taste ten times as good. Perhaps twice as good.

It can still be worth it.

Convenience and time have value, too.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#92
post #68
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage is the UX. On a regular stripe test you are responsible to conduct the experiment and interpret the outcome which can be intimidating. "Is there a line? I think I see a line? But it's fainter from the last time? What does it mean?" This is replaced by an algorithm that's written by people who know what are they doing to save you from analysing a chemical reaction and have a straight answer. edit: Just G…

> The advantage is the UX. The UX in this case is bad. Unnecessary and expensive fluff that obfuscates reality and gives a false sense of certainty to the user. > On a regular stripe test you are responsible to conduct the experiment and interpret the outcome The part of conducting the experiment is identical, I think, regardless of the type of test. You pee on it. Interpreting the results is not an issue. You simply…

For the old fashioned test, you still have to observe timing. I assume the digital test has a timer built-in?

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#94
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage is the UX. On a regular stripe test you are responsible to conduct the experiment and interpret the outcome which can be intimidating. "Is there a line? I think I see a line? But it's fainter from the last time? What does it mean?" This is replaced by an algorithm that's written by people who know what are they doing to save you from analysing a chemical reaction and have a straight answer. edit: Just G…

Your link actually shows you why there is no UX advantage. OP is only two cycles into their pregnancy. A paper test can pick up on this tiny HCG measurement and show something. A digital test cannot because it's going to pick a higher threshold if it only wants to give you a binary result. A digital test will tell you that you're pregnant when you're far enough along for a paper test to be obvious. There are so many…

This is correct except the 0-2 months. Even if you accept dating a pregnancy as starting at the start of your previous cycle, these tests will be positive before your next cycle would have started. The typical “is this a positive test” is around 8-10 days post ovulation and a few days before their period is due. They’d get a definitive test 1-3 days later. So the period of “it’s positive but I can’t be sure” is something like 0.9-0.97 cycles into a pregnancy (again, with the weird dating from your last period’s start and complicated by the fact that most people don’t know ovulation dates & cycle lengths frequently vary).

If you’re well into a pregnancy, tests will actually start getting lighter due to how the tests work. It’s called the Hook Effect and can start happening around 5 weeks of pregnancy (https://www.captodayonline.com/Archives/0612/0612f_not_so_ob...).

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#95
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. I wager you couldn't empty a boot of excrement were the instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus.

And what meaning do you expect your delusional self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have to us who think and reason? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake? You are a waste of flesh.

You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed , drooling meatslapper. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on.

This is an epiphany of stupid for me. After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half-baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective.

True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult. If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

You're an idiot. A moron of the highest order. You're so stupid it's a wonder and a pity you can remember to breath. Intelligent ideas bounce off your head as if it were coated with teflon. Creative thoughts take alternate transportation in order to avoid even being in the same state as you. If you had an original thought it would die of loneliness before the hour was out. On an intelligence scale of 1 to 10 (10 corresponding to the highest attainable IQ) you're rating is so far into negative numbers that one would need to travel into another quantum reality in order to even catch a distant glimpse of it.

Your personality is that of a rabid Chihuahua intent on destroying its own tail. Your powers of observation are akin to those of the bird that keeps slamming into the picture window trying to get that other bird it keeps seeing. You are walking, talking proof that you don't have to be sentient to survive, and that Barnum was thinking of you when he uttered his immortal phrase regarding the birth of a sucker. You are, at varying times, tedious, boring, and even occasionally earth shatteringly hilarious in your idiocy, routinely childish, moronic, pathetic, wretched, disgusting and pitiful.

You are wholly without any redeeming social grace or value. If God ever decides to give the planet an enema you'd better run like the wind because anywhere you stand is a suitable place for The Insertion. There is no animal so disgusting, so vile that it deserves comparison to you, for even the lowest, dirtiest, most parasitic member of the animal kingdom fills an ecological niche. You fill no niche. To call you a parasite would be injurious and defamatory to the thousands of honest parasitic species. You are worse than vermin, for vermin do not pretend to be what it is not. You are truly human garbage. You are a fraudulent, lying, predatory charlatan. You are of less worth than a burnt-out light bulb. You will forever live in shame.

You have nothing to say, and Godwin's Law does not apply when writing about you. You are the anti-Midas, for all that you touch becomes valueless and unusable. Mothers gather their children close when you appear. You are an aberration, a corruption, and a boil that needs to be lanced. You are a poison in need of being vomited. You are a tooth so rotten it infects the whole body. You are sperm that should have been captured in a condom and flushed down a toilet.

I don't like you. I don't like anybody who has as little respect for others as you do. Go away, you swine. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, and a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon. You are a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. Meaningful to no one, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts that sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I wretch at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, and the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. You are a waste of flesh. On a good day you're a halfwit. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away. I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, study, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.

You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libellous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystrophic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, abrasive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, and socially-retarded.

Shut up and go away lest you achieve the physical retribution your behaviour merits.

Thank you for your kind attention to and expected cooperation in this matter.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#96

Pregnancy/Motherhood groups are swarmed with the same "can you read this, I think I see a faint line" + photo question every single day because of the cheap tests. The strip results are NOT easy to interpret, because you may still see a faint line on the paper when not pregnant, and it's kind of an important emotional question as some couples have been trying to get pregnant for years. Your OB does you a mercy if the…

kind of an important emotional question as some couples have been trying to get pregnant for years And for some just the opposite... like 19 year old me decades ago -- ambiguous test result, and no 24 hour drugstores at the time so led to a sleepless night for both of us until we could get a second test the next day. It was negative. Would have much rather had an unambiguous POS/NEG result.

If it was ambiguous, these digital tests may have told you it was negative even when it would be positive a day or two later. You might have slept better but it wouldn’t have been based on accurate data.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#97
post #71

Going over the conversation here I'm a bit surprised by how many people seem to prefer an unnecessarily complicated and obfuscating solution to the straight-forward one. The Twitter thread clearly points out that the electronics serve strictly as an intermediary layer between the paper test and the user. They just binarize the paper reading. This in turn gives a false psychological sense of security ("it's the comput…

I actually saw this last night and initially had the same reaction but had some time to think on it. Remember, for a lot of people taking a pregnancy test is incredibly stressful. Reducing the complexity of reading by outputting a less ambiguous result has a lot of value to some people.

This exactly. I had to convince my wife not to doubt herself. “Yes that’s a line. Instructions say that if anything appears even if faint then you’re pregnant. No we don’t need to double check. Wahoo you’re pregnant!!”

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#98

Pregnancy/Motherhood groups are swarmed with the same "can you read this, I think I see a faint line" + photo question every single day because of the cheap tests. The strip results are NOT easy to interpret, because you may still see a faint line on the paper when not pregnant, and it's kind of an important emotional question as some couples have been trying to get pregnant for years. Your OB does you a mercy if the…

I think you're right here. When you're emotionally invested in the result (you want to be pregnant, or you don't want to be), then a less than certain result can force you to agonise over whether you're doing it right, or trust your own senses.

A digital readout (assuming is pretty accurate) can remove this ambiguity.

The other benefit is for anyone who has difficulty with colour perception, or is in a poorly lit environment. I assume the device can read the stip in pure blackness leaving little enivornmental light to cause confusion.

But when it's all said and one, I bet this was created by the marketing department.

Re: Digital pregnancy tests have an internal paper test

#100
post #87
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know that whoever made the test, if it's a reasonably competent enterprise, made it with human capacities in mind. Are you sure they weren't just constrained by technological limitations when they designed the paper test? Maybe the reason the digital test exists is that a competent enterprise wanted to adapt the paper technology to better fit human capacities?

Maybe, although I doubt it. It would mean that they put in extra research to, for example, plot an ROC curve and see what the optimal threshold for the test would be. Even if that was the case, you can still frame the question in terms of cost/benefits. The electronic test is, let's say, 10 times more expensive than a basic one. Is it more reliable than taking 10 basic tests (maybe at different times) and averaging t…

I mean the giveaway to me seems to be the fact that they don't seem to include an "inconclusive" state.
Post reply on HN