Hacker News Reader

Comment by smacktoward | Hacker News Reader

Yes, that's right; if you believe that you truly have developed a remarkable healing elixir in your garage, the burden is on you to obtain scientifically valid proof that it does what you claim it will do before you can go around selling it to people.

Whether or not you see this as a horribly unjust burden imposed by an unfeeling government will probably depend on whether you are the inventor or the person the inventor was planning on selling it to.

View on HN

If you apply that standard to other products, such as software, what happens? If you cannot distribute software that is certifiably bug-free and algorithmically correct, that is warranted to be fit for a specific purpose, what happens? If you cannot sell a car if it cannot go 70 miles-per-hour, consuming fuel at 50 miles-per-gallon, and have zero fatalities in a head-on collision, what happens?

too bad they are not as rigorous with the food we eat. One example is that they don't even have the resources to check if the food manufacturers claims are true (you can't be sure what type of fish you eat nowadays).

This is a really critical point. People who are pro-regulation are under the premise that regulation actually does protect people. There are countless examples to the contrary.

(The finance sector is even much worse than the FDA in this regard---for example Bernie Madoff was regulated, leading people to think their money was safe with him---but in some ways, the FDA is just as bad.)

Of course it can help, some. I'm not going to deny the obvious. But it's highly imperfect, and it often hurts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com