Gmail auto-unsubscribe simplifies your life - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/72216/gmail-auto-unsubscribe-simplifies-your-life <comment><USER2> They should let you unsubscribe without reporting as spam. As far as I'm concerned, anyone whose mailing list I ended up on as a result of a purchase and who lets me end it with one click shouldn't have their email delivery system damaged by spam reports. Those should be left for the non-opt-in and non-unsubscribable lists.

<comment><USER3> Think about it this way: when you attempt to unsubscribe, you are in effect telling the mass marketer that this is a live email address. As in, there's an actual human being reading these emails.

Such live email addresses are very valuable to spammers. So this feature is susceptible to abuse by spammers providing the unsubscribe functionality, but only prioritizing the attempted unsubscribers higher in their mailing lists.

So built into their unsubscribe attempt, there needs to be a way to very strictly penalize those who pretend to allow unsubscribes while ignoring them to harvest more email addresses. Hence, they call it "unsubscribe and mark as spam" because any other email messages you receive from that sender will be marked as spam with extreme prejudice.

<comment><USER4> This makes sense if all _future_ emails from the sender are marked as spam, but the email I am using to unsubscribe should _not_ be marked as spam.

The button should be "unsubscribe and mark all future emails as spam."

<comment><USER5> I usually use "mark as spam" as a "never show me anything like this again, please" button, so I do not really care if the message is really a spam.

What bugs me is that some legit mailing lists are prone to receiving spam once in a while.

<comment><USER6> I can't bring myself to do that. In my brain "mark as spam" is synonymous to "Mummy! Make the Bad Man go away!". I have trouble overloading this with "Gee I guess I'm just not that into you".

<comment><USER5> Well, I grew into "Mark as spam" before I got any spam,back when I my email was from a small local ISP and I didn't send many public emails. I taught mozilla's spam filter to recognize the forwarded emails my father sent me (and keep the emails he wrote himself), which were generally junk powerpoint presentations, so for me it's always been a way of saying "gee, I'm just not that into you" (which is also why I think I'd like a bayesian filter to learn my categorizations of messages into labels).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> They should just offer this directly. You shouldn't have to first declare it "spam" (which I would feel bad about if it was something I'd signed up for), nor should I have to scrabble about in the small print for a link that might then expect me to log in with a password.

Maybe Google could push for a standard unsubscribe mechanism with the driver being that you're more likely to get falsely accused of being spam if you don't offer people an easy way out.

</comment><comment><USER8> This depends on the List-Unsubscribe header: <http://www.list- unsubscribe.com/>

which can be set to an email address or link. If you're adding remove links to your outgoing emails, you might as well put it in the header as well. Hotmail/live mail will only show the link for trusted emails IIRC.

As Gmail has no "feedback loop" that sends spam reports back to the sender, this is better for me (as an email sender) than nothing. People regularly report email as spam that they signed up for and that they just don't care to receive anymore (they even report transactional email as spam, such as an ordery summary/order shipped email).

</comment><comment><USER9> As a total aside, something I didn't know about until far too recently: hitting 'm' in a Gmail conversation thread mutes it, meaning replies are automatically archived. It doesn't always seem to work, but I find it awfully useful.

<comment><USER10> Really!? I wonder how often I've done this by accident and never knew figuring the conversation ended.

<comment><USER11> It only works if you enable keyboard shortcuts. It also shows a yellow alert banner along the top of the screen and provides an "Undo" link.

<comment><USER10> I probably would've noticed the banner then, thanks.

I love the keyboard shortcuts, just never heard about this one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an excellent little feature.

I do wonder though, that if you send the unsubscribe request via this feature if Google lowers the weight of your spam report. As someone that runs a few mailing lists I know that many users will click the 'spam' button in their email client instead of sending an unsubsribe request. They don't realize it, but if enough people do that on gmail, yahoo or hotmail the mailing list is marked as spam and its almost impossible to get unmarked as spam.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if this will lead to unsubscribe links containing captchas. Oh the irony...

</comment><comment><USER14> How can we get an auto-activate script for emails that arrive that require clicking a link to activate a new account somewhere?

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't get this option in Gmail.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't get this option in Gmail.</comment>


10 Tools to Power Up Your Command Line - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/_darrenburns/10-tools-to-power-up-your-command-line-4id4 <comment><USER2> TL;DR

      z, jump to a directory from anywhere
      fzf, a fast fuzzy finder
      bat, to view files with syntax highlighting
      bench/hyperfine, for benchmarking your code
      asciinema & svg-term, for recording your terminal as an SVG animation
      wrk, for benchmarking your HTTP APIs
      exa, an alternative to ls
      fd, for finding files & directories
      rg (ripgrep), for finding strings in files

<comment><AUTHOR> nice summary, most of the tools are written in rust, most of them respect .gitignore etc which is nice.

i started using them today, 'bat' is really nice to read markdown on CLI(and other source code), hyperfine is good too. 'exa' is a little too hard to type comparing to 'ls' which I aliased to 'ls --color' and does what 'exa' does, 'z' needs a while to learn before it is useful.</comment></comment>


Nokia was developing an Android phone before the Microsoft purchase - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/14/nokia-was-developing-an-android-phone-before-the-microsoft-purchase/ <comment><USER2> Nokia was experimenting with Android, as any serious business would. You have to explore every option, so that if upper management decides to go that way, they are ready. It's completely normal. Hell, they'll probably continue experimenting, even if it's just to see how Android compares to Windows on the same hardware in terms of speed.

<comment><USER3> It may have even help leverage their negotiations with Microsoft.

<comment><USER4> That was my immediate thought. Even if they weren't planning on switching to Android in the short term Nokia could have made Microsoft's decision to buy a lot easier by hinting at the possibility.

<comment><USER5> It seems like Microsoft's decision to buy Nokia was pretty easy. If Nokia happened to experience a lot of success with Windows Phone, they'd have even more money to hedge their bets and not be dependent on MS. But if Nokia kept slipping and actually went under, MS would lose it's major Windows Phone hardware partner.

I mean, ever since Elop became CEO, the talk was "Microsoft just bought Nokia ... for nothing".

So what I'd be curious about, after all the lies and betrayals (QT, argh... grrr), did Nokia actually get any "real money" for jumping onto the failing MS Phone ship (edit: given the threat of an Android double-double cross or whatever)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They weren't developing it, a bunch of random engineers ported it to the hardware they had. Like MacOS on x86 Intel.

<comment><USER7> I read the blog post and every blog post the blog posts pointed to. You seem to be right - some engineers ported Android to Lumia hardware. As the blog posts stated, there are surely Microsoft employees playing around with iOS 7 and Google employees playing around with Windows Phone.

This post seems more a symptom of professional bloggers needing to fill story quotas rather than being actual news.

<comment><USER8> I hate journalism so much for these types of reasons, one of my biggest pet peeves is journalism attempting to trigger an emotion or response rather than reporting the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder why anyone would be surprised of this. Nokia builds phones and has an R&D. It just make sense that they try different OS on their own hardware as long as they have the source and can deal with the proprietary drivers needed.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can we let go of this post-mortem analysis of the world-that-could-have-been already? It's like the reports you get after someone dies "Oh, he was so happy... he was working on a new album!"

Nokia could've done many things, but it's hard to argue that them making an Android phone would have saved either Nokia, or improved the Android ecosystem. Nokia's failings go much deeper than the choice to go with Windows, (or the failure to go Android). And had they gone Android, they would've been yet another hardware vendor trying to differentiate themselves in a crowded Android field. HTC, Samsung, and Motorola are also capable of making good hardware, but unless there was some secret sauce about Nokia that would've solved all the existing shortcomings in that ecosystem, it's pointless to lovingly sigh and talk about what might've happened.

<comment><USER11> Looking at the last generation of non-windows Nokia phones reveals how 'bad' Android is as a phone OS.

Nokia's Asha range could go a month between charging. They had support for apps, and for instance had a spotify client. They were oriented towards open standards like email, rather than closed vendor lockin solutions like gmail. An android phone without using google service is half what it could be.

Clearly, Android gives a superior user experience, but I think by providing developers with an easy, PC like programming experience, Android made a design decision that will mean it has a fraction the battery life of an OS that makes Aps behave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There probably wasn't a thing on earth Nokia _wasn 't_ developing before MS got involved.

</comment><comment><USER13> And, of course, there's nothing to stop Microsoft from releasing an Android phone.

<comment><USER14> Suppose that rather than making an Android phone, Microsoft were to release a Windows phone with an Android compatibility layer.

The idea would be to lower the barrier for current Android users to trying a Windows phone for their next phone, because they could keep their Android apps.

<comment><USER15> A Java VM for .net already exists[1] (Scala for .net leverages it). Obviously the presentation layer would need rewritten for the platform and also for XAML, but an Android app and Windows Phone 8 app can share much of their base code if done correctly. Storage mechanisms like SQLite can also run on either device.

[1] [http://www.ikvm.net/](http://www.ikvm.net/)

<comment><USER16> Xamian also ported Android to C# a year ago. [http://blog.xamarin.com/android- in-c-sharp/](http://blog.xamarin.com/android-in-c-sharp/)

<comment><USER15> Yup, I actually have a license for it and currently using it with MonoGame. It's also quite nice for native development as well with how they tweak the APIs to be more C# like instead of Java (plus async/await).

I didn't recommend it since it isn't free, but it's well worth the money if doing cross-platform apps (they also give students a reasonable discount). If initial cost is a concern, Scala would be my alternative choice.

<comment><USER16> I wasn't referencing Mono for Android, although that is a neat product.

About a year ago, Xamarin did a direct port of the entire Android operating system to C# as a research project to improve their automated tooling. It's called [XobotOS]([https://github.com/xamarin/XobotOS](https://github.com/xamarin/XobotOS)). It's open source, unmaintained, and entirely unsupported.

<comment><USER15> I remember XobotOS. I was kind of excited about it, but then nothing happened with it after they made a press announcement. I had some questions about it when they still had comments posted on their blog. They decided to remove the comments shortly after without answering any of them, not sure why. Can't remember what my questions were now, but I think something related to building it.

I was hoping to mess around with it and make some sort of compatibility layer for dalvik based apps to run on it and everything else to use C# that I or anyone else might do (I mod AOSP and such in my spare time).

Too bad it Xamarin has not done anything with it since the announcement, as dalvik is the bane of performance on Android.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To me it doesn't seem to be extremely hard to get a Android build running on a handset that uses off the shelf hardware for most parts. Especially not if you're a specialist on smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER18> Duh! Their loyalties are (or were) to their shareholders, not to Microsoft.

But I wonder if the pulled a Motorola ("we'll sue other Android phone makers...oh, you want to buy us Google? Hmmm...let's see")

<comment><USER19> I think we need more comics of companies as characters. I read your comment in stick figures :)</comment></comment>


Washington Has Been Obsessed with Punishing Secrecy Violations, Until H. Clinton - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/07/05/washington-has-been-obsessed-with-punishing-secrecy-violations-until-hillary-clinton/ <comment><USER2> I would hope it would become immeasurably harder to prosecute anyone for these kinds of crimes in the future--after all, if we let Hillary Clinton get away with blatant criminal conduct, how can we in good conscience hold anyone else accountable? I find it disgusting that just because she is a Clinton, and because she's running for president, we are unwilling to make her accountable for her crimes. Worse, I find it astonishing that people are so afraid of Trump that they are willing to accept Hillary Clinton and her criminal ways just to avoid him. I don't think Trump is an icon of virtue, but we KNOW Hillary isn't. And for me I still expect those politicians I suppose to maintain a veneer or respectability. To me it is astonishing that either Hillary Clinton didn't know she'd be caught--in which case she's an idiot and unfit for presidential duties--or, more likely, didn't care that she'd be caught--in which case she REALLY is unfit for presidential duties. To me it's not a matter of voting for Hillary to avoid Trump, it's a matter of not voting for either of them because neither of them deserve a vote from anyone with a conscience.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well written article.

I could care less about politics, what upsets me is that someone gets away Scot free with multiple crimes when we have people getting put away for years for having less pot than you can hold in one hand. Or how about all those people that got put away for 30+ years for the exact same crimes i.e. Chelsea Manning.

Freedom and Justice for Some indeed.

<comment><USER4> Worse.

Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden did what they did because they genuinely believed the public needed to know.

Hillary Clinton did what she did because she genuinely didn't want the public to know.</comment></comment>


108 Counterintuitive Things About Testing - <AUTHOR> http://infiniteundo.com/post/158170334513/100-counterintuitive-things-about-testing <comment><USER2> > In general a series of positive integers might start counting from 0 or from > 1 there is no way to know up front.

No. Positive means precisely greater than zero.

> Tight coupling is good.

No. It depends, usually because decoupling has _cost_.

> By spending 50% of your time NOT writing prod code (but tests instead) you > can INCREASE your velocity.

...as well as decrease the velocity for all the rest of your team by stiffling the architecture with tests. Depends on what and how is written.</comment>


Preventing data leaks and injections in your DB - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cossacklabs/preventing-data-leaks-and-injections-in-your-database-a640574fd2ef#.eg3jdvprw <comment><USER2> Wouldn't it be a rather gruesome performance penalty, sending all traffic through a proxy like that?

<comment><USER3> It would, but the place where these techniques are helpful the most (untyped languages with problematic input sanitization) are the languages for which hurting intermediary performance is a minor offense: most of it is already wasted by language itself.</comment></comment>


Google and YouTube moderators speak out on the work that gave them PTSD - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-moderators-ptsd-accenture-violent-disturbing-content-interviews-video <comment><USER2> It looks like the writer of the article was surprised Google was trying to develop technical solutions to deal with content to moderate instead of spending money on their workers but he really shouldn't.</comment>


What is nexus? And where did it come from? - <AUTHOR> https://central.owncloud.org/t/what-is-nexus-and-where-did-it-come-from/19270 <comment><USER2> Has anyone tried it? I tried running the make future, but something seems to be borked and I don't want to invest any time in debugging right now. Still this sounds very interesting!

<comment><USER3> Hey it's all pretty early at the moment, but feel free to join talk.owncloud.com to discuss things or get questions answered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't seem to say what nexus is, or why we should care what it is. Anyone care to clue us in?

</comment><comment><USER5> And why was it lifted and taken somewhere

from the far end of town where the Grickle-grass grows?

The old Once-ler still lives here.

Ask him. _He_ knows.</comment>


Paper on Ni-H Fusion by Focardi - <AUTHOR> http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/FocardiSlargeexces.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted about the history of nickel-hydrogen fusion on my blog: <http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=61>

Let's just say that I did enough research that I am now convinced that the E-Cat device is not only possible, but likely very real. Read everything, especially the site of Christopher Calder that I submitted as another entry because it is worth it: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3176820>

<comment><USER2> I would think this would be on the "front page" of every media outlet by now. It would rival the announcement of the potential aids vaccine. OWS folks would be playing it up as the beginning of the end of the Evil Corporations.

Instead, silence.

I consider it very unlikely that the experiment was a success. So that leave two possibilities: 1). Deliberate fraud, a la Madoff. Or 2). interesting science, not fusion, but still a reaction that is not well understood. Something like a fuel cell, when for a while it looks like e_out > e_in, but in reality e_in happened over a long time, and as such the reaction is non- sustainable.

I'm hoping for 2)- an honest mistake in which we learn something.

<comment><USER3> While it's right to be skeptical, it's worth considering that the press has been burned by cold fusion claims many times by now.

No serious journalist would touch this without a ton of caveats, and then what's the point? So a lack of massive mainstream media coverage doesn't really mean all that much.

Especially given that these guys seems to be secretive, which is understandable whether or not it's real or a scam - if the process is easy to reproduce, and claims are that the process is very simple, and thus _if_ the effect is real they're probably worried about someone copying it and finding simple ways around any patents they might apply for.

Of course the second reason to be secretive would be if it blatantly is a scam or they have failed to make it work and refuse to accept that they won't find a way to fix it.

And history is littered by companies like this that claimed to have similar stuff for all kinds of reason and then just fell off the radar after it turned out they were frauds, wrong or delusional...

<comment><USER2> My point exactly.

<comment><AUTHOR> The most trusted media outlet who wrote about E-Cat was Forbes: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/30/believing-i...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/30/believing- in-cold-fusion-and-the-e-cat/)

It is worth noting that the Italian Patent Office first rejected Rossi's patent on claims it was dubious, but they finally recently granted it in April 6, 2011: [http://www.uibm.gov.it/uibm/dati/Avanzata.aspx?load=info_lis...](http://www.uibm.gov.it/uibm/dati/Avanzata.aspx?load=info_list_uno&id=1610895&table=Invention&#ancoraSearch%20Patent%20Issued%20by%20Italian%20Patent%20Office)

As I said, Rossi and Focardi are very bad at making themselves look credible. Hopefully, over the next year or so, the situation will clear up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I no longer think "is this true?" when reading about stuff like this. I know that the odds are in favor of this being another fake technology. What I do think about is whether there is any mechanism for real inventions to become acknowledged in this kind of environment. Would Nikola Tesla be considered a fake these days? Did he have good documentation for his devices? How did his public demonstrations go?

<comment><USER2> Initially Tesla would be viewed with skepticism. But his work with AC was reproducible. His anti-gravity experiments are not accepted.

An interesting contemporary thread currently is the inflationary expansion of the universe that was reported a couple of years back ([http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/334907/title/Cosm...](http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/334907/title/Cosmic_acceleration_discovery_wins_physics_Nobel)). It was a remarkably unsettling find, yet seems to be confirmed other teams. If it's not true we will learn something truly fundamental (like h-bar isn't really constant or something).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very likely to be a scam. The guy is just delusional and trying to get financing to make it work because it probably doesn't work _at all_. Why don't they visibly disconnect the generators? why don't they allow anyone to verify that new elements have been created inside the fusion modules? why all the secrecy and only letting reporters go in for a few minutes during the test? They've been publishing their bullshit papers since the mid-90s. If this was for real, reproducible and all, somebody else would have verified it by now.

<comment><AUTHOR> In 1996, the CERN did reproduce Focardi's first experiment: <http://lenr- canr.org/acrobat/CerronZebainvestigat.pdf>

They discovered results consistent with Focardi et al.: excess heat around the nickel bar and hydrogen absorption. However they also placed an additional temperature sensor on the container of the cell which was unable to measure any significant excess heat. They theorize that the nickel bar is prone to local variations of its thermal characteristics, correlated to the phenomenon of hydrogen absorption. They concede that hydrogen absorption remains unexplained.

Then Focardi took this feedback into account and wrote the 1998 paper which I linked above.

But the stigma attached to cold fusion did entice researchers to have a 2nd look at this later paper. Some of the scientists interviewed on October 28, 2011 for the test admit that they had never read about hydrogen-nickel fusion until 2011. You can bet that from now on, many are starting to look into it...

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant: "did _not_ entice researches to have a 2nd look"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Everything I read about the E-Cat sounds fishy to me. Especially the latest experiment - so the output is 480kW, and there is a 500kW generator connected, but supposedly not operating? What a coincidence!

People want this to be true so I can understand the reporting but come on, this is just not real.

<comment><AUTHOR> In other smaller experiments earlier this year, they had no generator attached to the cell: [http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article31...](http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/energi_miljo/energi/article3144827.ece)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm kinda always falling for free energy stories because they appeal to my hopes. Rationally, I know it doesn't work and my brain keeps telling me it's a scam. In my gut, however, I dream of a world where free energy reigns and we don't have to burn fossil fuel en masse just to keep society afloat.

However, lately I wondered: Would free energy really be a good thing? If there's limitless energy for everybody, wouldnt it be even easier for a lunatic - or a government run by lunatics - to run amok. Economically and Ecologically, it would be terrific. But I wonder if we, as a species, are already adolescent enough to be given such power.

<comment><USER8> Free energy appeals to the dream to keep up the historic trend of human expansion, using more and more energy. It could prevent a lot of struggles in this century.

However I somehow feel it isn't going to be this easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's more accurate to say that the this is a paper on the experimental setup with which they claim to have achieved low temperature Ni-H fusion.

A plausible mechanism for the supposed fusion itself has yet to make an appearance.

<comment><USER10> There actually is a theory that seems to have some credibility: [http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/nasa-confirms-widom- larsen-...](http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/05/nasa-confirms-widom-larsen- theory.html)

According to the theory, it's not actually fusion, it's some kind of new reaction involving the weak nuclear force. (Rossi's not a fan of the idea.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If this were a real breakthrough, we would be seeing a trickle of confirmations followed shortly by a flood of news and immensely stepped-up activity.

I'm impressed by Focardi, however. Not because he can make energy from nothing (I triple-dare say he can't). Making money from nothing, however, doesn't violate any physical laws and this guy seems to have that talent although it is probably a "once-in-a-lifetime" trick.

<comment><USER12> Focardi is a co-author. Andrea Rossi is the one that set up the whole experiment and is in contact with this mysterious US company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Novembre 1998

Has there been any progress since, is the question ... googling around I find a lot of press-release type material breathlessly translated into English but not much else ... surely, by now, someone has been able to measure the copper isotopes produced and at least take a stab at a theory ...

</comment><comment><USER14> Nickel and hydrogen are abundant on Earth - do they fuse in nature?

<comment><USER15> I wondered if nickel fuses in a supernova - a bit of browsing shows that it is apparently one of the main seeds for creation of heavier elements through neutron capture:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-process>

Edit: The conditions in a supernova are probably just a wee bit different from anything we can create outside of the core of an H-bomb.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So... this is real?

<comment><USER17> No. It's a free energy scam. It will go away and in a couple years another scam will bubble up against all odds and make it into mainstream media. Call it zero-point quantum energy, call it magnetism, cold fusion, free energy by any other name.

Research the people, not the techno babble. If they don't submit to independent scientific scrutiny and approach ignorant investors individually, well there you go.</comment></comment>


8values - <AUTHOR> http://8values.github.io/ <comment><USER2> Sounds about right: [http://8values.github.io/results.html?e=40.4&d=50.0&g=54.9&s...](http://8values.github.io/results.html?e=40.4&d=50.0&g=54.9&s=55.7)

A lot of questions whose answer is "it depends" though.</comment>


The pesticide that caused bee colonies to collapse is killing birds now - <AUTHOR> https://www.salon.com/2020/08/18/the-pesticide-that-caused-bee-colonies-to-collapse-is-killing-birds-now/ <comment><USER2> This clearly shows that you cannot believe companies when they say that there pesticides/GMOs/etc... are "safe".

You can only see this when enough population is affected, by then it might be too late.

To assume that this applied to human food is not poisonous is also a fallacy: you cannot say "yeah we fed humans for 3 months with this food and they are still ok".

The human body is extremely resilient, so obviously nothing bad will happen in 3 months.

But accumulate this shit for many years and bad things will happen, you also can't know how it affects children.

Scientists and companies are arrogant, they don't understand that interactions in a complex system cannot be predicted, it is NOT POSSIBLE TO PREDICT THEM, no matter how low your p-value goes.

<comment><USER3> Despite what Salon implies, neonicotinoids are not believed by the scientific community as the cause of colony collapse disorder. It may be a factor, but even that is still not completely known.

"A large amount of speculation has surrounded the contributions of the neonicotinoid family of pesticides to CCD, but many collapsing apiaries show no trace of neonicotinoids." [1]

>To assume that this applied to human food is not poisonous is also a fallacy: you cannot say "yeah we fed humans for 3 months with this food and they are still ok".

GMOs and pesticides are used to enable large scale food production to feed the planet. We do know that people without food for 3 months die. The vast majority of what you're complaining about is about tradeoffs between known and absolute downsides and trying to reduce them.

> , it is NOT POSSIBLE TO PREDICT THEM

Not predicting all outcomes to 100% does not mean mankind cannot predict vastly widespread outcomes with very high liklihood. So it is possible to predict them, just like every science, with very good error bounds and certainty.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder)

<comment><USER4> > many collapsing apiaries show no trace of neonicotinoids.

And 'many' (notice the weasel word) car crashes are caused by drivers that show no trace of inebriation. More to the point: "Most academic and governmental bodies agree that neonicotinoids have had a negative influence on bee populations.": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid)

As for GMOs, they may well be safe (for consumption, let's ignore any invasive-species like effects, or toxicity to insects, or the potentially catastrophic combination of both...), but is our incentive structure ready for them? So far corporations are limited in how much they can tinker with food, but once they have the ability, what are we more likely to get - vitamin- enhanced rice, or vegetables that are as healthy and addictive as Twinkies? And what will the effect on food sovereignty be, when the only way to compete is with GMOs, control of which is concentrated in at most a handful of global companies?

As for the common "well how is GMO different from selective breeding done since antiquity?" objection, it's different in one very important way - in the evolutionary Red Queen's race, it's _much faster_ , and non-engineered life cannot keep up.

<comment><USER3> >when the only way to compete is with GMOs

Already the case, and in the US many crops like corn are 92+% GMO, as selected by farmers during planting season.

We can undo it, and we can also go back to a fraction of the current yield per acre and to people paying significantly more of their budget on food. We can price the poor even more out of getting enough food by making it all costlier.

Food was around 25% of household spending in 1930 in the US. It's now around 7%.

Corn yields were about 25 bushels/ac from as far back as we have data (1800's) till about 1940 when we started applying modern science, and is now around 160 bu/ac [1], an astounding ~7 fold difference. Most crops saw similar gains. This has massive realworld implications on food. A significant part of that is due to GMOs [2] (note the study also demonstrates reduction in toxins since we can engineer more carefully for pesticides desired).

Thankfully mankind has used tech to increase yields drastically, lowering cost, and thus freeing lots of money for other things like housing, medicine, entertainment, and social programs.

>are we more likely to get - vitamin-enhanced rice, or vegetables that are as healthy and addictive as Twinkies?

Once we reach that level of design, why would we not engineer all sorts of beneficial items in? Even now there's published evidence that GMOs are healthier for people than alternatives since it allows us to tailor which pesticides and how much we need to reach yields sufficient to feed the planet.

>on food sovereignty be

This has been one of the goofiest non-arguments ever. People keep claiming somehow no one will able to grow food - there's so many non-GMO places to get any seeds you like, and even many GMOs are off patent protection and fully able to be used as anyone likes. The most you can worry about is not having the latest 20 or so years of seeds. So for free all farmers and people are getting more seed options, not fewer.

>it's much faster, and non-engineered life cannot keep up.

There is no law of physics that cannot mutate things slowly or quickly, so this assumption that there is some magical limiting rate of evolution is also not science based.

Things can wildly mutate in one generation, it's been seen, and things mutate when there's selection pressure. It's the case, for example in viruses, that they mutate faster to keep up with things we do to them.

And the point is to beat things out that destroy crops, like rusts, disease, water shortages, etc. As global warming increases, there will be significant needs for more drought resistant crops, and GMO is delivering on that in a manner that no selective breeding can do quick enough. GMOs will likely save billions of lives in the coming decades.

[1] [https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTren...](https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/YieldTrends.html)

[2] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21284-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-21284-2)

<comment><USER4> Most of your counterarguments either barely make sense, or don't even address the arguments I made. But I'll try to clarify and spell things out for you.

> Once we reach that level of design, why would we not engineer all sorts of > beneficial items in?

Why would we not engineer all sorts of beneficial items into Twinkies? Why wouldn't we maximize visibility of healthy food in supermarkets, instead of junk food? Because it reduces profit. PR efforts such as golden rice will give way to profit maximization as soon as there's wide acceptance of GMOs. This is what _already happens_ with other food that corporations are able to totally engineer, but you think they'll suddenly find their conscience and do what's best for the consumer once it's GMOs they're engineering, not cookies?

> So for free all farmers and people are getting more seed options, not fewer.

They get more seed options just like they have the option of hand tilling the soil instead of using tractors - they'll go bankrupt unless they plant the most optimal seed. Even if the gain is only 5% or less, profit margins are so thin that can make or break a farm. This is only "goofy" if you completely ignore economics.

> There is no law of physics that cannot mutate things slowly or quickly, so > this assumption that there is some magical limiting rate of evolution is > also not science based. [..] GMO is delivering on that in a manner that no > selective breeding can do quick enough.

Those sentences contradict each-other.

<comment><USER3> By your reasoning every product we produce would converge to a single super Twinkie of maximal profit, and we'd make nothing nutritious. Since this is clearly obviously false, being a straw man, there is no reason we'd not also engineer many varieties of food.

You also keep repeating that somehow seed control is going to make things expensive, despite decades of it doing the exact opposite, hence vastly lower consumer expenditures.

So, once you stop avoiding actual economics as demonstrated econometrically, your arguments fall apart.

> Those sentences contradict each-other.

No, they don't. You think extremely black and white, missing important nuance. Certainly selective breeding could randomly in one generation create anything, but the odds are too low to make it practical, thus GMO, by increasing the odds, improves the _expected_ outcome, which is what we care about. And certainly mutation could make our changes irrelevant in one generation, but we hope that it doesn't. There's no one size fits all rate of evolution that supports your simplistic claim that one has to outpace the other. We only engineer in the hopes that it doesn't.

If you really want everything explained this carefully so you don't inject extreme positions I'll do it.

There's no reason to continue if you're more interested in repeating the same claims regardless of evidence. If you want to continue please cite some decent evidence to back your claims.

<comment><USER4> > Since this is clearly obviously false, being a straw man, there is no reason > we'd not also engineer many varieties of food.

And yet tomatoes are getting more and more tasteless.

> You also keep repeating that somehow seed control is going to make things > expensive

Nowhere in my posts did I claim that - the terms "seed control" or "expensive" aren't even in my posts. I claimed that the requirement to use GMO seeds to remain economically viable will concentrate the control over the food supply into a handful of corporations. If you take the smallest glance at agribusiness, you'll see consolidation is exactly what's already happening, and GMO will make it worse.

> No, they don't. You think extremely black and white, missing important > nuance. Certainly selective breeding could randomly in one generation create > anything, but the odds are too low to make it practical, thus GMO, by > increasing the odds, improves the expected outcome, which is what we care > about.

So.. genetic engineering _is_ vastly faster than natural or artificial selection? I.e. my original claim? Oh, sorry, I forgot to add the important nuance of _on average_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Breaking news: Poison that was found to be killing animals is now, after some time, indeed still killing animals.

...I mean what did they expect, it's still a poison after all...</comment>


CS is a field that hasn't encountered consequences - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/yonatanzunger/status/975545527973462016 <comment><USER2> I love the narrative this starts off with!

But, solutions... I don't see how professional ethics could actually be applied productively. And I say this as someone with an engineering background.

If a company's business is building bridges, ethics are an orthogonal concern and hence relatively straightforward to apply. But how could a civil engineer productively apply their ethics to a company who's business it is to build concentration camps? Making sure corners aren't being cut doesn't really address the problem! If it is just one company building camps in a far off land, then sure a review board can apply judgment and sanction their employees from the rest of the industry. But if your domestic society shifts to where building camps is an upstanding economic sector...

Essentially all of the funding for consumer software is based on the assumption of surveillance, period. Low marginal costs means investors desire home runs. Metcalfe's law means the introductory price has to be free. Success means users end up locked in - so even if the consumer-facing front end manages to be profitable on its own, the back end is still able to add to profit through surveillance, or at least store everything until they figure it out.

Even business sectors that should be outside sources of non-surveillance development seem to prefer sitting on the sidelines. For example, it would be pretty straightforward for banks to start offering direct public APIs for customer access to accounts, letting users choose which software they'd like to trust with such data. And then even, as an outside authority, putting restrictions on service providers about data retention. But instead the banks stonewall, and so we get surveillance-service providers like Yodlee filling the gap.

I don't really have solution per se. On a different day I'd go on about end- user Free software. But that's clearly outcompeted for the reasons listed above. When is the last time you saw a GNU TV commercial?

<comment><AUTHOR> > But if your domestic society shifts to where building camps is an upstanding > economic sector...

Is that the case, though? It seems to me that in the last few years the tone has shifted in the opposite direction, where even the mainstream is starting to question the overall utility of social networks and other surveilance- filled software.

<comment><USER2> Talking sure. But has any of this effectively shifted the investment focus?

Founders have not wanted to be creating surveillance-based companies _the whole time_. The standard course is for that functionality be added afterwards for monetization. In order for the engineers' ethical judgment to have mattered, they had to have prevented this change _a priori_ by designing the software to treat the future company itself as an attacker. This is very expensive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Computers simply do as they are told for better or for worse.

The radar operator at Pearl Harbor misinterpreted the "awfully big flight" of incoming planes as friendly U.S. bombers, not enemy bombers. About 55 minutes later, the attack started.

After this attack people were outraged at the radar technology, describing it as "nothing more than a freak gadget". Many simply wanted the technology gone. Ironically the radar was working fine.

In response, the military created the receiver operating characteristic to identify operators who misinterpret enemy planes as allied planes. Named appropriately, I think.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-270#Use_of_SCR-270_radar_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-270#Use_of_SCR-270_radar_at_Pearl_Harbor)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteris...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_operating_characteristic)

</comment><comment> racer-v Many computer scientists are working in the nascent field of home automation. Surely this technology, with its myriad Internet-connected sensors and voracious logging, has the potential to implement a perfect surveillance state - especially combined with data mining. I would like to think the companies building these systems are going to value user control over all else, but somehow that seems unlikely given current models of funding.

</comment><comment><USER4> I generally agree. I think moral consequences become especially relevant in the field of AGI.

<comment><USER5> Computerphile has a series of videos on AGI that touches on this topic, using the lens of "define a human to a computer," a seemingly simple task with a huge slew of ramifications that come with it. Basically exploring whether or not Asimov's Laws are actually useful or practical (they aren't, and this is a huge reason why).

The short version of the specific video in the series about this explores how edge cases become extremely relevant in this domain, and asks whether or not an AGI would consider these to be people or sufficiently people-like:

* Dead people

* People in vegetative states

* Unborn people

* Simulated human brains

* Sufficiently intelligent animals

And so on. We can't simply list every edge case, that list would be literally endless and the developer is guaranteed to miss one that the AGI will eventually find.

They all come with implications. How can an AGI never harm a human without also accurately predicting extremely discrete details from the future? Any action it takes _may_ cause harm or death to one or two humans 50 years later, and it can't really know for certain. It can probably known if its actions will affect hundreds or thousands, but not one or two.

Suddenly a whole lot of deep moral judgements have to be made, some of them nearly impossible for a human (e.g. the aforementioned unborn human example above). The Three Laws of Robotics unfortunately rely way too much on human intuition, something that is extremely difficult to model in a machine.

I may be remembering incorrectly, but the whole point of that story was how those laws fail spectacularly. That's a critical detail. But I digress.

Clearly an AI designer isn't qualified to just make those judgements on their own, and probably doesn't want to anyway. Really no one, either living, dead, or unborn, is qualified to be the judge and jury in this case, and a committee isn't necessarily better.

It's a fascinating topic, to be sure, but I'll admit that it's not my area of expertise.

<comment><USER6> Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics are often remembered as being hard set rules, but Asimov more often than not used them as the precursors to murder mysteries. So many of the best of his Three Laws stories are locked room murder mysteries where a robot finds some edge case that no one had yet considered. Especially, the entire concept of the Zeroth law is interesting because it was a loophole defined by robots, and the ethics of which are somewhat debated in the series, but most of that debate is left as an exercise to the reader so readers don't often do it. But even a lot of the very edge cases listed here are part of the meta-ethics debates across the Three Laws stories.

Whether or not the Three Laws are a viable system for AGI governance (and I agree it seems rather unlikely, at least in their simplest define forms most encountered in Asimov's stories, but even the stories would claim that the way they are written in English is not exactly how they are coded in positronic technology, however that may be), the ethics conflicts and edge case debates in the stories are very fascinating reads.

It is somewhat surprising to me how many people seem to think the laws are set in stone and don't realize how many of the stories themselves are secretly ethics debates about edge cases. Just because some of the characters believe the laws to be infallible doesn't mean those characters are right and the laws are infallible. There wouldn't be so many tales about the Three Laws if there weren't so many edge cases and exciting locked room mysteries to explore.</comment></comment></comment>


Google hates Survey.io - 32% drop in SE traffic - <AUTHOR> http://blog.styleguidance.com/post/356647486/google-hates-survey-io-32-drop-in-se-traffic <comment><USER2> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation)

The numbers here are too small and the data too limited to make that claim. Also search engine changes aren't instantaneous -- I've seen it takes days or weeks for changes found in a crawl of a small site to percolate through Google. Did Google even crawl the pages in question on the day Survey IO went live?

<comment><AUTHOR> survey.io widget is site wide, so it was showing up on all pages on the site. Google crawls the site every day, so changes are more or less instantaneous.

A lot of times, it takes like 7 minutes from the moment a question is posted, to the moment it shows in Google.

But yeah I'm just as baffled as you, as to why it had such a big impact

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hi, This is Hiten from KISSmetrics / Survey.io - We do not know what is going on with this and have not heard of this issue before. We're taking a look at this issue right now. At the moment, we think it _might_ have to do with the Google Analytics code on the survey.io embeds, so we will be removing the GA code from them shortly. If anyone has any feedback or ideas please feel free to shoot me an email: hshah at kissmetrics.com

<comment><USER3> The Google Analytics code has now been removed from the embed. I took a quick look at the stats for our own ProductPlanner.com and didn't notice any dips as a result of the survey.io code. If anyone has any more details or ideas, please let me know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, if that inclusion is the reason then it's uncanny. On Monday I pushed a minor update to one of my websites that included the survey.io code and watched traffic coming from Google tank.

Just rolled back that inclusion... we'll see if that was the reason for the traffic drop.

Edit: quick clarification... the survey.io code was the only change that would be showing up to spiders. The other updates included in the change were all within areas that require authentication

</comment><comment><USER5> This may have nothing to do with with Survey.io, but I've noticed some weird survey behavior in the past week. When I click through some newly opened tabs, occasionally there is a large blank survey page up, like the javascript choked on the survey and never managed to get to the requested page. There's no obvious way to click through to the actual site. Reloading the page usually gets it to go away. I have not been paying close enough attention to say whether the survey was from survey.io.

</comment><comment><USER6> My first advice for any perceived SEO issue: Take a deep breath. You're probably seeing random variation. (Incidentally, I don't know what time zone you are in relative to your users, but my first thought would be "A sharp drop that lasts two days and then abruptly reverses, hmm, was either of those days Saturday?" And indeed, it looks like it was.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't believe that survey.io would have had that type of effect on your website traffic. We've been using it on <http://technews.am> for quite some time with no impact on visitor numbers.</comment>


Startup Quote: Ben Keighran, co-founder, Chomp - <AUTHOR> http://startupquote.com/post/4952469092

<comment><AUTHOR> By precipitating change, you'll create value. Those that do this best will win.

\- Ben Keighran (@benkeighran)

<http://startupquote.com/post/4952469092></comment>


Farm country feeds America, but try buying groceries there - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/us/rural-farm-market.html <comment><USER3> Grocery Stores closing really is happening, and really is a problem. And it's part of what's killing towns - if only because attracting new folk without one is hard.

We live in John Day, Or (pop 1700)(County pop 7200, area: about 2x Delaware), which we chose partially because of it's supermarket. The next closest supermarket is 90min away. (Walmart: 2h). Not having to commute hours for groceries is a big deal, as is being able to get vegetables of season - and in the rural west these things not a given.

When looking to relocate from Seattle to rural town in the west with hospital (wife's a doc) and broadband (for me), it soon became obvious that the quality of the food available was going to be the next most important thing on the list (and much harder than broadband). Too many places we looked had long commutes to groceries - or stores with almost no fresh food‡. Most places have no farmers markets or farm stands outside of summer, and early fall. And for us at least - living off of canned and frozen food just isn't fun (at least if we've not canned/frozen it.)

This really restricts immigration which is critical economically when your town's youth mainly move to the city as is _really_ common. These small towns are dying a death of a thousand cuts, but loosing your grocery store is a pretty big cut.

‡ My favorite story here is once when living in a small town with 2! stores for a short while, we decided to have a dish that called for cooking some spinach. Neither had fresh spinach, nor any substitute - kale say. Neither had any frozen spinach, the second store did have canned "creamed spinach" \- and an ingredients list that included both condensed milk and corn syrup. We made something else.

<comment><USER4> > Not having to commute hours for groceries is a big deal, as is being able to > get vegetables of season - and in the rural west these things not a given.

What you are describing is a de facto food desert: [https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/index.html)

There might be an easy (albeit costly) way to fix this. Just today I learned about a govt agency called the Essential Air Service:

> The United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) subsidizes airlines > to serve communities across the country that otherwise would not receive > scheduled air service.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_Air_Service)

Because seats are paid for in advance, airlines don't have to worry about route popularity, and that allows them to financially justify serving towns that otherwise would never be considered by any airline.

I wonder if taking the same model and applying it to food a la the Essential Food Service might make sense. If federal or state governments subsidized every grocery store purchase so the owners can afford to keep the lights on, we can stop or even reverse the grocery store death toll and enable shorter commutes for rural residents.

<comment><USER5> Why should we be subsidizing rural communities with free services that are terrible for the environment? If people want the benefits of modern civilization like air travel and grocery stores, they should move to cities. We are doing enough harm to the world in cities, we don't need to encourage sprawl even more.

<comment> core-questions Have you ever, like, left the city, man? Do you really think everyone can just live in the city without anyone out in the rural areas, you know, growing your fucking food?

<comment><USER6> Everyone hates government spending, until they want another handout.

We already massively subsidize rural living costs, stop that and the free market would raise wages to compensate without the need for government intervention.

Subsidized, farms, roads, healthcare, telecoms, deliveries, airports, etc etc it's just wasteful.

<comment><USER7> If you think the free market would serve markets better, then why are there food deserts?

The truth is that the free market optimises for maximised ROI to the exclusion of all else.

There used to be a lot of smaller retailers serving communities - <USER2> markets, corner stores, delis, etc. Large retailers came in and set up super stores which offered comparable goods at lower prices (due to the larger purchasing power and ability to take a local loss subsidised by other areas).

Once the local retailers were run out of business - the business eventually looked at what stores wern't turning enough profit and shut them down. After all, there's no local competition - customers will be required to go further.

This lead to lots of local unemployment and communities in which it's impossible to get food and other necessities locally.

In a free market, wages only rise where the business doesn't have control over the market. Once they do (through consolidation and driving out competitors) - wages drop, positions disappear, and conditions degrade.

<comment><USER6> Food deserts in urban areas are a direct result of people's spending habits. There is plenty of people, but stores don't stock products people don't buy. Further if they did it would just go to waste.

If you want root causes, I would propose it's a combination of subsidies on other foods combined with the reduced taste of modern fruits and vegetables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We gave up on farms in the 80s. Agriculture is just another industrial process now.

Since we subsidize growing vegetables in the desert and abroad, the market for stuff like vegetables, dairy and meats is hyper-consolidates. There are viable farms on the fringes, but they cannot get capital to grow and cannot compete.

I grew up in an area of upstate NY that was a breadbasket at one time, with a rich, diverse agriculture market that is _dead_. If you're a baseball fan and drive to Cooperstown on US Route 20, you can see the communities that you drive through rot away a little more every year.

In my town, 12 dairy farms operated in the late 90s (down from 30+ in the 60s). One remains today. Across New York, 60-70% of remaining farms will be bankrupt in the next couple of year.

The farm I worked on as a teen was about 750 acres and operated continuously and profitably since an ancestor received a land grant from the Dutch colonial government in the 1600s. Today, they were forced to be hobby farmers -- they board horses and hay to pay the property taxes and work elsewhere. (Due to limited water table, they can't subdivide the property enough to make enough money on the land)

<comment><USER9> I'm from upstate NY, and the loss of "breadbasket" status was great for the local ecology. When we were the breadbasket of the country (when the country was much younger), all the forests were cut down and erosion and water quality were a much bigger issue.

<comment><USER10> Did that just move the same problems somewhere else?

<comment><USER9> Kinda. The breadbasket became the Great Plains, which resulted in the destruction of that habitat. The question is, is it worse to replace forest with farmland or plains with farmland?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Stores like Walmart and Dollar stores opened up, and consumer _made the choice to shop there rather than at local grocery stores_.

Sounds like they are getting exactly what they wanted?

Reminds me of folks in SF who bemoan the loss of a local butcher store. Sure, they may like buying organic cuts of meat at $15/lb, but it's obviously most people don't, _that 's why those stores went out of business_.

<comment><USER12> What real choice did consumers have?

Walmart came in and drastically slashed prices on groceries because they had the size, money and infrastructure to cheaply move goods around. This was intentional behavior to kill local grocery stores and it worked, because consumers in these areas tend to be poorer and will shop at places that save them the most money. This is intentional behavior abused by Walmart to intentionally push out competition.

Local grocery stores can't compete because they literally cannot drop prices without going bankrupt. So they end up dying, leaving Walmart as the de-facto local Monopoly.

And then when Walmart decided to pack its bags, the town is devastated because they relied on it for everything [1]. At the very least educate yourself a bit on the way Walmart operates.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what- happene...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/09/what-happened- when-walmart-left)

<comment><USER13> How do these towns even exist if there are no jobs? One guy talks about a collection of 100+ guns(from my understanding guns are worth quite a chunk of money if well maintained)

This story makes no sense to me, just sounds like a town where people don't want to leave and have no incentive to stay.

The only sane person is the one who started sustenance farming - that's the way to go if you want to live in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER14> Anyone living actually _out in the country_ has already been driving 30-60min each way a couple times a month for "major shopping" including groceries, and maybe gardening or raising some livestock to supplement that if they're so inclined. The folks in these marginal towns are just getting introduced to that way of life, I guess, and that's the story here? If they don't like it... well, sorry, but it costs a lot more to get groceries at small volumes out to little, remote towns, so unless your town grows a bunch (unlikely) people are gonna keep driving farther away for better prices, killing new stores that try to start up, just as TFA describes. Start living like a real Country Person or move to where the grocery stores (that everyone actually wants to shop at, apparently) are.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. Small town grocery stores have significantly higher prices and lower selection than in bigger places. So it turns out that the people with cars only use the local grocery store for perishables/emergency shopping trips and do their grocery stock-up trips in bigger places.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Think of it as the end of rural sprawl.

Most small towns were built to support surrounding farming and ranching. Once that stopped being labor-intensive, the small towns lost their economic reason for being. Farming today is something like 1.2% of the US workforce. Most of the income in many small towns is now from Social Security, disability, and welfare for the people who didn't leave. In time, they will die off. Their town will then go on this list.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_United_States)

<comment><USER17> There need to be towns in picturesque locations (Been to western Wyoming, it's basically that non-stop) supported by industry other than agriculture.

The ability to remote work should draw a subset of developers and other workers into the area as long as the corresponding infrastructure has been met. Especially for self contracting / employed software engineers.

<comment><USER18> Maybe someone should create a bit of a tech-oriented template for helping it happen - core element checklist and then ways to invite/entice the rest. Start with decent internet, get some keystone employers, operate out of a co-working space that also brings a cafe/bar to the area. Let the residents of a community vote for what they'd like to see added to the mix of businesses.

Then let entrepreneurs scour town lists for the need that interests them. "I want to paint houses. These two towns in my state need a painter." Or "I moved to this town with my partner; the community is begging for a small garden store - I can do that."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Walmart and the like killed local competition."

I disagree (kind of). I grew up in the most rural part of Virginia. There _was_ no competition. We had a local grocery store, for sure; but it sucked. No ethnic food, not even soy sauce. No seafood. No link sausage, three kinds of salad dressing. Maybe four or five green vegetables. It was like a grocery store in some third-world countries I have visited. And there was literally no other option for almost an hour in any direction.

There were also no department stores. Nowhere you could buy a paperback, or a toy, or clothing. There was the local supermarket, the dollar store, and the auto goods/ammo store. And that was it.

Then a grocery store chain moved in. Sure enough, the locally owned grocery store went under. But not because of prices; it was because the chain had actual goods the local consumers wanted to buy. Soy sauce and Thai curry and fresh garlic and actual seafood, and a full produce section.

Then Walmart moved in, and suddenly you didn't have to drive an hour to go Christmas shopping or to pick up a pair of sneakers.

To be sure, there is a lot to dislike about Walmart. I am not arguing that they haven't put a lot of mom-and-pop places out of business. But like most things, the whole story is complicated, not least by the fact that many of those mom-and-pop places weren't great places to shop when they were in business.

<comment><USER20> The mom-and-pop stores cannot reasonably compete with Walmart or any other chain store. Their suppliers charge more because they lack the volume for the discounts the big stores charge, they lack the skills/manpower/IT to purchase, stock and maintain the thousands of products in a big store, and last but not least mom-and-pop stores don't get the _massive_ tax breaks and other incentives/bribes that the state provides for huge stores.

<comment><USER21> Your description makes it sound like Walmart is better in every way.

<comment><USER20> Walmart is better for the _consumers_ \- more variety in stock, affordable pricing, one place to shop instead of half a dozen - but bad for everyone else: the workers, the suppliers, the local communities around a Walmart that lose their small stores as people will rather drive 20km and have everything than go to the local store and spend more money on the goods than the gas costs for the 20km, the taxpayer...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I grew up in a very small town (pop ~300) where I pumped gas in the summers.

Guys would roll up running on fumes and ask me to put two dollars of gas in it so they could drive one town over and save a few pennies a gallon on gas.

Pretty soon after, the owner of the station stopped selling gas entirely. Yay!

If you weren't a farmer with your own tanks on site, you were pretty much forced to drive 6 miles to go get gas after that.

<comment><USER23> 6mi in the context of places where a town population is in the hundreds really isn't much at all. No wonder people were buying just enough to get to the cheap station. I drive 2mi to get gas and that's in a city.

<comment><USER22> This way of thinking would make sense if the only thing that mattered in life was money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I kinda felt like this was an article that had a missing Character, like covering the 2016 election but not mentioning Bernie or Comey.

The reality is that Walmart's Chinese-sourced non-food goods (including clothing, auto parts, and general household supplies) were priced 50+% cheaper than many non-food (and higher profit) items one could get from a grocery store, once you're at Walmart then, well you're at Walmart. This, combined with the insane Dollar General growth mentioned likely is why many of the local stores died. I always kinda felt that this kind of marketing positions sometimes actually harm the market, kinda like how Amazon's $50 android tablets trashed the non-iPad market by taking all wind out of their sails.

Also, for those not familiar, dollar General is not a dollar store as its name implies. They sell cheaper, lower quality items at a markup vs department stores but their secret weapon is incredible organization efficiency with cookie cutter free standing stores that are made simply using cinderblock construction and templated layouts. Their turn around after starting construction to store opening is less than two months at a very low cost in strategically placed places that lack close grocery/department stores. If you made a heat map of all the grocers and department stores in a rural area in the northeast with red for 'near grocery store' and green for 'not near', the dollar general onslaught would almost exactly be an inverse map, identifying low income areas. This is even true in suburban areas where driving is required to get to a grocery store, with dollar general's popping up in the projects.

<comment><USER25> It would seem the issue is with low incomes rather than with Dollar General.

<comment><USER24> Oh for sure, but stores focused on bringing high margin cheap imported goods and base minimum wage jobs into communities that formerly bought locally produced goods does not exactly help this problem. Dollar General's expansion would burn if the minimum wage were raised.

<comment><USER26> _communities that formerly bought locally produced goods_

How long has it been since these communities actually did that? Small towns can't really support the diversity of industry it takes to buy more local goods than shipped-in goods in a modern-day lifestyle.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, by locally produced, I'm referring to (mostly) foodstuffs, additionally, local small retailers that were resellers.

<comment><USER27> > Sorry, by locally produced, I'm referring to (mostly) foodstuffs, > additionally, local small retailers that were resellers.

A town in the Great Plains doesn't have a climate fit to make most foods locally, unless you call taking shipped-in ingredients and cooking them "making" food.

<comment><USER28> It certainly can (and did) make most food locally, it's just that it has to be different food - you eat what you can make from locally produced ingredient and don't eat what you can't. The type of food we eat has changed a lot, and the expectation to have "ethnic" food with products grown on another continent, or to have the same vegetables available year-round instead of them being seasonal - that's a relatively recent thing.

<comment><USER27> > It certainly can (and did) make most food locally, it's just that it has to > be different food - you eat what you can make from locally produced > ingredient and don't eat what you can't.

No. Not in eastern Montana. There are regions where you _can 't_ live off the land year-round like you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The article talks about Illinois as an example, but their main agricultural focus is corn and soybean production, which mostly becomes animal feed. It doesn't surprise me that it would be hard to buy actual food in a place like that.

<comment><USER30> I can only see the first two paragraphs, but it is apparently about Winchester Illinois which is in Scott County. According to Wikipedia, it now has a smaller population than when the county was created just prior to 1840.

Less than 5000 people are supporting the costs of administering an entire county. It should be merged back into Morgan County, which appears to have a stable population at least.

A lot of places in Illinois are heavily burdened by the sheer number of governmental units that they pay taxes to support. Consolidation would dramatically improve the situation and help bring a more vibrant economy that can support things like grocery stores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> We are very fortunate. We live in a very rural, conservative, very northern coastal town of California (next door to Oregon). Our typical shopping day has us first visiting a local farm to purchase Eggs, Cream, Beef, and Pork products all organic and locally grown (Alexandre Family Farms). Our next stop is the farm stand for our local organic farm to get in-season fresh vegetables picked very recently (Ocean Air Farms).

After that, our local organic food market which is expanding, having taken over the next door suite's lease. We get whatever staples they carry that were not available at the first two stops (Wild Rivers Market).

Last, we visit a major grocer, such as Safeway or Fred Meyers to get any items not available at the previous 3. Our shopping basket at this stop is progressively getting lighter and lighter as time goes by, thanks to the increased offerings at the first three shopping stops.

Seasonally, we also have two farmer's markets locally, one on Wednesdays and one on Saturdays. We stop at those when they are open, getting locally made goods, crafts, herbs, etc.

We have a local coffee roaster that feeds my caffeine habit, with some custom roasted beans as well as his normal fare... Wild Rivers Coffee - Thanks, Norris!

All in all, we are lucky to be able to stay mostly local.

My motto: Small is beautiful, and Think Locally, Act Locally. Supporting our neighbors keeps our commerce locally centered, sustaining (and growing) the health of our community.

This said, there is a Wal-Mart in town, as well as a Dollar General and DollarTree stores, so for those of my neighbors who prefer their items from these venues (and their lower prices) they can be accommodated.

<comment><USER18> This is time, effort and money people tend to find difficult to allocate. Do they spend their day off across four locations going shopping and neglect their yard or catching up with friends? It's possible to do it all, but easier to convince yourself you can't because you're tired, saving money, stressed from work/kids/etc.

<comment><USER31> I agree. And I would also go further to suggest this set of priorities are part of what goes into my consideration of "quality of life."

I have worked very hard to get myself to the point where I have the luxury of choosing to allocate my time and money this way. Definitely not all of my efforts have been successful, but as I continue to apply myself to my perceived values, I find success far more often than failure.

And those successes for my efforts give me great satisfaction.

I frequently find at the base of this the example of the children presented with the "marshmallow" test - The ability to delay gratification.

Or as others have summarized: Work hard, then easy, rather than easy, then hard: By working hard in the beginning, later the work/living is easier. The alternate makes for a dim prospect for my future, so I make my choices appropriately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So the town in the article is going to be nearly completely unlivable without a vehicle and is about 20 miles from a Walmart.

There will be few decent jobs that are walkable, limited medical care, etc, in a town of 1,500, it is just the way it is.

Which isn't to say that these folks can't lament reduced access to food, but the literal availability of food is low there only if you ignore that other circumstances already pretty much force owning a vehicle to live there.

<comment><USER33> The car dependency of rural America is certainly worth discussing, and this specific grocery store case does have consequences. As one example, in towns like this retirement homes or apartments catering to older people are often within walking or shuttle distance of a town center with a grocery store, which helps preserve independence for people who no longer drive. But the focus of the article is strange, and seems to come from a rather urban mindset. Lines like "nowhere to buy even a banana" don't square with "the only grocer within 15 miles shut down last year" or "5 million people in rural areas have to travel 10 miles or more to buy groceries". A ten mile drive is not short, but it's not actually unusual for _many_ services in the (mid-)western US. (Which is probably why the people interviewed don't share the reporter's focus on distance.) People living on actual farms may well have been ten miles from the grocery store too!

The most telling line in the piece is: _" In town after town, people said their greatest challenge was enticing their neighbors away from dollar stores or the Walmart four towns over."_ Meaning, one, that people are already driving for groceries. And two, that finding out there's a grocery store in down didn't persuade them to switch. I looked up Mountanair to see where people _were_ shopping, since 45 miles to a grocer is unusually long. (It's Family Dollar or a 45-mile drive to Belen.) In the process, I ran into this review for B Street Market, the new local grocer discussed in the story: _" It's the only grocery store in town... Nice people that work there but[...] prices so high that you don't even want to go in there.... It's worth the drive to Belen[...] to go get groceries plus a lot better selection."_ Ending Mountainair's story with the happy news that it once again has a grocery store was only half the picture.

I think that poor choice of focus causes the story to neglect any truly interesting analysis. The obvious place to start is not "ten miles to a grocery store" but "the last grocery store went out of business", which leads to a larger discussion of rural America's economic prospects, the price disadvantages faced by non-chain businesses, and the vicious cycle of box stores taking money out of communities and so creating more dependence on low prices. Or else keep pursuing the briefly mentioned topic of where people _are_ shopping - there's a fascinating comparison to urban food deserts, which enforce a similar choice between distant grocers and unhealthy processed foods nearby.

Fundamentally, this feels like pretending that one example of a much larger pattern is special, rather than just a human-interest way of approaching the topic.

<comment><USER34> The reporter made the mistake of not measuring distance in a unit of time! 10 miles in rural areas is just more than 10 minutes if you obey the speed limit - nobody actually does that though, so in reality it probably is less than 10 minutes.

The same distance in NYC could be well over an hour (Note that I don't live in NYC so I have to guess). Depending of course on where you are going and how you get there, but most traffic is running much slower than rural areas. If you drive there is the time to find a parking spot and get to your destination - time that rural areas with plenty of parking don't bother count. If you take transit there may be a few transfers and the time to wait for your bus/train at each one. In NYC you may think about walking to the grocery store: 10 miles is hours each way.

Car dependency isn't worth discussing because there is no other option. When you are by definition in the middle of nowhere there isn't any other option. Rural areas exist for farms: there is no way to move them in.

<comment><USER33> It's particularly surprising since the story references "rural food deserts" and cites the USDA "number living 10 miles from a grocer" statistic, but doesn't put 2 and 2 together. The USDA publishes that stat because of its food desert definition: _" more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas, and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas"_.

Now, the USDA definition sound weirdly broad to me. I apparently grew up in a suburban 'food desert' which encompassed most of the town, including several extremely rich subdivisions. Since it was a suburb with practically no traffic or stoplights, that means "desert" applies to a ~15 minute walk or ~3 minute drive to the store. And in a town with brutal winters and minimal public transit, even the sub-poverty-line families outside that 1 mile radius completely relied on cars. So looking into this has made me more skeptical of "23.5M Americans live in food deserts".

(Ironically, people did what this story promotes: bought short-lifespan foods at the close store, and expensive or bulk goods >10 miles away. The USDA just needed to apply its rural definition to that suburb.)

But the USDA at least has the right idea: access is defined by time and effort, not distance. Time is fairly obvious; walking, public transit, and driving in traffic are all slower. More subtly, my experience living 20+ minutes from groceries in a rural and an urban setting is that it was _much_ more pleasant with a car than on foot. With a car, you can freely get heavy or bulky stuff, stock up for longer, go after dark when you're tired, or shop in summer and winter without spoiled groceries or frostbite.

There's no way to write this story effectively without understanding that 10 miles can be 10 minutes, or that for farms outside these small towns _everything_ is 10+ miles away. Hence the people in New Mexico saying that a grocer right in town is still less good than driving 45 miles to a better store: you're already planning major trips to get goods regardless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I get the feeling that half the "problem" is bigger stores moving into grocery (e.g. Walmart, Costco, Dollar General) and some serious problems with distributors. If you live in a rural area, then "local" can often mean 45-90 miles. Heck, go to Sam's Club or Costco a couple hours away every couple of weeks is not a big deal. The quality of store bought food I can get now as an adult far outstrips what I could get during my childhood. Frankly, Walmart is a whole lot less corrupt than the local grocery place.

The interesting part is that the old truth seems to still work, if you have a good butcher, you can survive fairly well.

<comment><USER36> This is true. We drive 30 minutes to a butcher in Roanoke, AL and it is seriously packed on a Saturday. Reasonable good meat and local flash frozen southern vegetables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> " About 5 million people in rural areas have to travel 10 miles or more to buy groceries, according to the Department of Agriculture"

is that supposed to sound like a lot? It's probably a 12 minute drive. I know people who drive 60 miles to and from work every day in Texas without batting an eye.

<comment><USER38> It's a lot for people who can't drive, like children or the elderly.

<comment><USER37> I don't see how it would help, then, if it were closer, like 2 miles? What would they do, instead not be able to walk there?

<comment><USER38> Two miles is still really far. That grocery density would mean only ten grocers or so in a major city like Berlin. Small towns should be able to achieve much shorter distances . Nevertheless, 2 miles is well within the ability of people to cycle. Elderly people with poor balance can use electric tricycles.

<comment><USER37> The topic was not major cities. It's rural areas. It's very unrealistic for them to be expected to be even as dense as one in every two miles, when in many cases there might only be four houses or less in a one mile stretch.

It seems unlikely that people who are physically unable to drive would be walking that distance or using electric tricycles. I would think that what is going to be helpful for these people is grocery delivery service.

Also, children are not typically expected to be responsible for grocery shopping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> But has anything changed?

60 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get bananas in entire regions (this is easily evidenced by how quickly organic bananas go bad), much less avocados within a 20 minute drive.

Even 30 years ago, the selection of fresh fruits and veggies was much more limited. It's a big reason for juices by concentrate, dried, and canned goods.

There are certainly still local (farmers stands and pick your own (apples, strawberries, tomatoes) in much of the agricultural southeast, and true farmers markets - but would you know about them unless you drive by some country road, or know somebody that runs a farm.

</comment><comment><USER40> I don't see the problem. If you are making 200k in one of these places you can afford to hire a couple workers to farm your land and deliver groceries. Problem solved and you are probably still saving money over living in SF or Seattle

</comment><comment><USER41> Bigger businesses have all the advantages - negotiating with towns for tax incentives; huge overseas buying power for lowering prices; paying a few locals a local (small) wage for work that would pay double in a larger town. Add to that, WalMart & co know to position themselves on the edge of town, near the major highway. So folks in town must choose to go downtown, _or_ go to the edge of town and do all their shopping at WalMart. And folks out of town drive into town, come across WalMart first and generally just stop there and do all their shopping. Starves the downtown almost completely.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can confirm, live in a rural farming/ranching area. Drive past farms (vegetable, grass, ornamental, and commodity) every day. Local grocery store trucks produce in from all over the country. The local grocery stores (Wal Mart, HEB) are also higher priced than even their stores in the nearby suburban area. We drive weekly to Aldi for most of our groceries, or to the bigger, nicer HEB with better food. The local farmer's market is overpriced trash / antiques and junk. We do have a local friend that gives/sells/trades eggs with us though.

<comment><USER43> I grew up in rural Texas and when I visit back home I've noticed the farm stands are considerably worse than what I remember them being growing up. On the other hand I live in rural New England now and the farm stands here are excellent, albeit strictly seasonal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am an Air Force brat. We didn't live on the base, but it was a bit of a drive to get to the base. All our grocery shopping was done on the base. Since it was a drive, maybe 30 min, we'd buy 2 weeks of groceries at a time.

</comment><comment><USER45> During WWII, the government urged urban citizens to plant Victory Gardens so that farmed produce could go to the troops. Home and community plots resulted in an estimated 10 million tons of harvested produce, equal to the commercial production of the time.

The cause of these food deserts must be addressed, but in the mean time, I think a return to the Victory Garden would be useful (assuming it doesn't work too well and end up tanking agro prices). You just need south or east facing windows, porches or roofs, and you can easily construct (or buy) window boxes and raised beds.

<comment><USER46> I suggest you do the math. My mother was a fanatical gardener and food preserver, so I know full well how much land it takes to grow enough produce to feed a family for a year from a season's frozen/canned produce. I personally did a lot of literal spade work (and harvest work) to make it happen.

A couple of window boxes will about cover 1/4 of your need for herbs(1). I am not sure how big mom's gardens (plural) were, but I would guess an acre or so all together.

Really, it isn't hard to do the math. There are a zillion books on gardening that address space planning starting from your desired yield estimate. It isn't difficult math -- my mom taught it to a herd of 4-H kids over the years, and as the 4-H garden judge at the county fair expected your notebook to include the computations.

So, I encourage you to grow a Victory Garden. Tell us how that works out for you. I guarantee that at least some of the food that you grow will be astoundingly good. Not everyone finds the process satisfying, though.

The ironic thing is that the farm country we are talking about in this thread is exactly where mom's gardens were, and gardens were common in the day. But not any more -- people would rather work at Walmart, and buy their canned corn there, than grow it and can it themselves. The rural economy has changed -- at least the farm country economy -- because it is rare to be able to make a living full-time farming any more.

(1) Never trust a sentence with the word "just" in it.

<comment><USER45> The "math" can be quite complex, because estimates range anywhere from 1/4 acre to feed a family of four to 1 acre to feed 1 person. It depends on how intensely the land is managed, climate zone, caloric requirements, etc. I pack my veggies in much closer rows than you're supposed to, but they do fine.

It's funny, I built one 12"x48" window box just for herbs and I barely use them! I have oregano, thyme, thai basil, mint, lavender, bee balm, parsely, cilantro, even green onions, and I kind of forget they're there. A shaker of dried herbs provence works for me most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This makes for an interesting comparison to Japan. I've lived in rural Tokyo for about two months, and local produce is a thing there. The produce doesn't need to be sold at a market. The farmers just sell their produce on the roadside, right next to their plots of land.

This is also true in some places like semi-rural parts of Dongguan city, Guangdong province of China.

<comment><USER48> >I've lived in rural Tokyo

Did you mean to say rural Japan?

<comment><USER47> No, I really mean rural Tokyo. Tokyo is _BIG_ and not all wards are like Shinjuku/Chuo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> [http://archive.is/SOD24](http://archive.is/SOD24)

</comment><comment><USER50> Walmart and the like killed local competition. There's a gas station I stop at from time to time in the country with a Walmart next door. It's insanely busy.

I have family in the country and they accept having to drive to get decent groceries. There are seasonal vegetable and fruit stands but you couldn't get everything you need. A local ranch sells beef but it would be quite expensive to buy year around unless you want a whole or 1/2 cow.

The county has something like 12,000 residents. It's about the same population as a 2-3 mile radius is the suburb I live in.

To be honest I don't feel bad for some of these people in the article. They are opposed to the word co-op.

Edit: Removing the last 2 sentences of the last paragraph as it's against the guidelines for flamebait topics. Reading between the lines of the original article I can only assume "speak the the language" is referring to politics.

> "It's ironic because it was farmers who pioneered co-ops. They're O.K. with > 'community store.' They're the same thing, but you've got to speak the > language."

<comment><USER51> There is a lot of blame for Walmart, but let's not forget the car culture that has everyone leaving their town every day and commuting instead of living and working in a community.

<comment><USER52> Yeah, this isn't really a relevant critique in farm country. You can live in a town and walk to the grocery store, but then you need to drive to work. Or else you can live on a farm and drive to a town to buy groceries. But in no scenario does farming and density work together. Industrial-scale farming doesn't happen without car travel. Subsistence farming does, but if all the farmers are subsistence farmers then the cities don't get fed.

If you want to be a proponent of dense urban living, that's great. Dense urban living is good. But dense urban living is only feasible because farm country exists.

<comment><USER51> I'm not critiquing dense urban or rural living. However, when 70% of the people who live rural pass a couple grocery stores on their way home, the ones who don't commute are going to suffer.

Roads should be designed to travel between communities, not bypass communities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> You don't _need_ a grocery store. You can live off a couple bags of legumes and cereals. People want meat, eggs and milk, though. I have very little sympathy. If it means less animals will have to die for some bommers' gluttony, then I hope more grocery stores go out of business.

</comment><comment><USER54> We're just a blink away from a new era of autonomous vehicles, which should make most of this a moot point.

For all of these small rural communities, it makes sense for each of the local governments to purchase a fleet of vehicles that offer free shipping to its community from distant urban areas and subsidize on a local level.

The future of bricks-and-mortar (or cinder blocks and cement) is anyones guess, but frictionless delivery strategies could surprise us all with the remedies and solutions to the old-world logistics problems.

<comment><USER54> If its the costs that are preventing the consumers from getting the products they desire, the markets should find a way to overcome the obstacles using the new tools and resources available as the come online.

I've heard it called a warehouse on wheels, but it will be interesting to see how the delivery economy evolves.</comment></comment>


How to launch and defend against a DDoS attack [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.secure.edu.pl/pdf/2013/D1_1530_A_Graham-Cumming.pdf <comment><USER2> SIP is a particularly terrible protocol using UDP. A single SIP packet can generate significant processing, generally with IP address as the only sort of authentication. Most VoIP providers will fall over pretty quickly. The "best" implementation I've heard of is a simple L3 whitelist of known-OK IPs, but that still has the effect of killing your network to many customers. On top of that, RTP comes in dynamically on different IPs, so you need to propagate L7 info in real-time to your L3 filters. And of course, if an attacker knows who your customer is, they can just spoof their IPs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Set your DNS records TTL to something relatively small like an hour.

If you are hit with a DDOS and want to direct traffic through a DDOS mitigation service you will often need to point your domain at their servers. If your DNS TTL is 48 hours then you will be up a creek for quite a while.

<comment><USER4> What are the downsides of a small TTL? Why wouldn't a low TTL be default?

<comment><USER5> If your TTL is very low, you end up creating/handling a lot more DNS traffic, because your records are flushed from the cache more often and have to be re- retrieved. Also, many public DNS servers (e.g. your ISP's, or Google's) set a minimum TTL on all records (overwriting any lower value) to minimize DNS traffic/requests. Setting your TTL to an hour is fairly standard, but some DNS hosts (especially old ones) will leave the defaults set to something like 48 hours for no real reason.

<comment><USER6> Very few resolvers break DNS TTLs in that way anymore. Google certainly honors TTLs down to at least 30 seconds. I'm not aware of any major ISPs that get this wrong anymore either.

This hasn't been a significant problem in years. When I execute a DNS change on a record with a 30 second TTL, I expect to see 95+% of the traffic move within a couple of minutes. The things that tend to get it wrong these days are applications that don't honor the TTL instead of resolvers, but browsers generally get it right.

<comment><USER7> madsushi is talking about servers, not resolvers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I watched Artur Bergman's talk at Surgecon:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LQ_6o...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LQ_6oS3UqsM#t=761)

He covers DDoS in detail. Warning, possibly NSFW for many f-bombs.

</comment><comment><USER9> Martian packets are a funny thing: The packet is ALWAYS coming from somewhere, so why don't internet providers just flat out refuse to send packets exiting their networks if the given IP doesn't match what they get?

Okay, routers are supposed to get a packet and just route it to the next point by blindly following the instructions ("0.0.0.1 wants to UDP 22.214.171.124 on port 80"), but whatever the route taken, once my route leaves my home router, my first stop will ALWAYS be my provider's routers, the very company that gives me an IP.

So why can't these companies check on their client-to-outside-world routers that the request is coming from my IP and not something otherworldly?

<comment><USER10> And what happens if you use a VPN?

<comment><USER11> VPN is on another layer, the packets should still have valid IPs. 'V' stands for virtual (not Vendetta), there is no actual private network existing on top of the internet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am quite surprised by "Dreamhost" listed in the spoofed IP list?

What is the reason Dreamhost servers are comprised? Are those the old server accounts?

I am also amazed by the durability of our infrastructure able to sustain this huge flow everyday. But good work, CF.

<comment><USER13> It's a list of spoofed addresses. That means they are pretending to be Dreamhost, not that Dreamhost is compromised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have a number of websites hosted on a dedicated server running Linux. Is there any specific things that I should do on my server to mitigate/prevent any impact from a DDoS against one of the site I host?

<comment><USER15> Make sure your upstream or colo provider comes with DDoS mitigation.

Nothing within your power can protect you from a multi-gigabit DDoS attack except bandwidth or a black hole route.

If you're getting smaller attacks you can try Fail2ban, some Nginx rules, or an edge cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Under "Hide Your Origin", how does one ensure that "IP only accepts packets from the [DDoS] service"?

<comment><USER17> Determine the range of addresses used by the service and then you could use hardware and/or software (iptables, pf, etc.) packet filtering to only allow packets from those hosts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Are there any "best practice" settings for specific OS/firewalls? I use FreeBSD and pf.

</comment><comment><USER19> What are the Martian ip addresses?

<comment><USER9> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_packet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_packet)

TL;DR: "Today, all CloudFlare routers were being DDoS'ed by 127.0.0.1. CloudFlare is now investigating its employees."</comment></comment>