60 journalists all spend one week covering Cincinnati's battle with heroin - <AUTHOR> http://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days-of-heroin-epidemic-cincinnati/ <comment><USER2> Let's not forget who to blame for this. Pharmaceutical companies and Doctors.

West Virgina is the most effected - [http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/eric- eyre](http://www.pulitzer.org/winners/eric-eyre)

These articles shouldn't make you sad but MAD.

"In six years, drug wholesalers showered the state with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills, while 1,728 West Virginians fatally overdosed on those two painkillers" That's 433 pills for every man, woman and child in the state.

<comment><USER3> _Let 's not forget who to blame for this. Pharmaceutical companies and Doctors._

It's almost certainly not true. This massive susceptibility to addiction is a larger social problem of alienation, lack of community and purpose, not getting a couple of pills from your doctor.

Prohibition worked to some extent and would work tried again but it does not address the root problem.

<comment><USER4> >>not getting a couple of pills from your doctor.

You're gonna have to back that claim up. All the evidence points to the claim that over-prescribing is a real epidemic.

You're not wrong that there are larger social problems, but your argument essential boils down to "drugs addicts are drug addicts". The root problem is not being born a heroin addict, or not having a purpose in life, or not having a strong community. It's over prescribed pain medication pushed onto people for profits sake.

"Sales of prescription opioids in the U.S. nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2014,1 but there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain Americans report.2,3 During this time period, prescription opioid overdose deaths increased similarly." [https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/prescribing.html](https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/prescribing.html)

<comment><USER3> It's a famous story/finding. Vietnam soldiers who were actively addicted to heroin and came back to the States simply stopped.

[http://jamesclear.com/heroin-habits](http://jamesclear.com/heroin-habits)

Obviously you can only become addicted to what is available and opiates are being made available through prescription. But the fact that so many people are susceptible to addiction is a completely different problem.

The huge social changes of 19th century led to the same problem with alcohol. And well meaning activists did try to solve it by banning alcohol. Prohibition did work to some extent. But what really made a difference was an improvement in people's lives, a change in the environment for the better: more rooted, connected communities, less financial stress, migrant work, etc.

Drug addicts are addicts because of their environment first and drugs second. (Some genetic disposition exists as well, of course.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was born in Cincinnati, and lived there for 18 years until going to Ohio State. Today I live on the peninsula.

I'm here in Cincinnati now, for family stuff. And I'm concerned. Cincinnati still has a large industrial component (P&G has their HQ here), but many factories are gone. A lot of the east side of the city has been converted into microbreweries, homes, and shopping. My Mom works at a biomedical company that's growing. Gigabit FTTH for residences is available.

I'm still concerned. Property taxes have grown beyond reasonable limits. There are so many areas that are not benefiting from the improvements being made. There is culture being destroyed by rising rents and gentrification. And the pain killer/opioid epidemic gives a perfect path to "release".

Case in point: Today I met some relatives at a brewery for lunch. But my Aunt had a problem ordering: They send a text message when your order is ready to pick up, and she doesn't have a mobile phone. The place was all stools and tables; if we had invited my grandfather, he wouldn't have had a place to sit.

There are good places and people though. I'm here to attend my grandmothers funeral. In addition to my boss, two of my relatives also had flowers sent by their place of work. On the day we were doing planning, my uncle suddenly shows up: My uncle builds furniture; he was sent by his place of work to pick up some big sandwich & pasta platters, and drop it off to my grandfather. All paid for.

I'm rambling. The point is: There is so much good here, and it is so at risk. And sometimes I think that if I moved back here (either working remotely, or finding a similar job locally), that I would just exacerbate the problem.

<comment><USER6> I Also grew up in cincinnati. You've probably seen signs with my last name (Neyer) on them, as my family has been there a while. Also live in the bay area now. Cincinnati really was like a small town; people did seem to look after each other.

I think if people like us moved back there to work for other tech companies, we'd exacerbate the problem.

If we moved back and started companies that employed low skilled labor, we'd make things better. If we could end the pointless war on drugs, and spend that same money repairing infrastructure, we'd be way better off.

Our old system is breaking down. Unfortunately i think it'll have to get worse before it gets better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > They've tried spraying naloxone into his nostrils, but it's had no effect. > He's not breathing. They're running out of time.

> One of the medics takes a drill out of his bag and turns it on. It whirs > like a dental drill as he pushes it into the man's shin bone, trying to > create a more direct path for the naloxone to enter the bloodstream.

Wow. Just wow.

edit: more info, I'd never heard of it: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraosseous_infusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intraosseous_infusion)

<comment><USER8> Pretty cool huh?! They used to have to auger the bit right into the bone by hand. As you can imagine, trying to twist them into the bone while the patient is alive is not easy. Also, once you punched through, there was usually enough momentum and force by the MD's hand, that they would then punch on through the other side of the bone and then right into their other hand that was stabilizing the procedure. Now you had two patients instead of one. Many MDs would really hesitate in doing it, as expected. These little sterile and disposable drill have saved a lot of lives. These are a 'poster boy' of modern bioengineering in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >Heroin is big business, but not for the Mexican immigrant Reagan is tailing today. He's just a suspected courier who might make $500 or so. The real money flows to the gangs that control distribution, and to the drug cartels back in Mexico.

>When they finally pull him over, police rip up the floor boards and dig through the driver's back pack. They check the bumpers and the trunk and look for secret compartments in the doors.

>Nothing.

>Reagan is frustrated. There have to be drugs in that car, he thinks.

Wait, they pulled someone over and destroyed their car over nothing? I hope they had some really solid evidence, but the article didn't say.

>The agents don't have time to dwell on what went wrong. About 7,000 kilograms of heroin are seized in the United States every year, three times as much as a decade ago. They will be hunting someone new tomorrow.

Oh, okay then. They don't have time to dwell on what went wrong.

<comment><USER10> > They don't have time to dwell on what went wrong.

But damnmit the bigger issue and what I'm really mad at is people protesting Police abuse! /s

It's absurd how skewed this country has become in the "Police can do no wrong" mentality.

When spoken in the abstract people are quick to say of course there is corruption and things can be improved in policing. But when it comes to specifics or even specific instances popular opinion and the justice system never fails to side with the police.

And no, it's not just the conflict of interest for prosecutors that's at issue. We have a serious issue with the role of Police as public servants in this country.

The (deliberate) pendulum swing to overly idolizing soldiers post-Vietnam, the declaration that police were now in a war against an inanimate object (drugs) including equipment and tactics, and the "otherization" / racial aspect have really made a perfect storm that is has now begun to spread out to society at large.

<comment><USER11> Hmm, I do agree with you but when I read that I read that as literally meaning "these police officers have no time to dwell on whats wrong".

With that many deaths and overdoses in just one week a lot of these departments are pretty taxed. A lot of these guys are doing the best they can with what little time they have and showing compassion where they can.

Fortunately for those battling these addictions I suspect, this epidemic is touching people the police know and care about. When it's not quite literally a black and white issue (or latino and white), and when the victims look like the officers or their friends or family, I think you see a bit more compassion.

But boy are a lot of these places just plain overrun with calls these days.

Hopefully one day we'll see more compassion for every citizen and I'm hopeful we're slowly but surely moving in that direction. I dunno what it is I just have a decent amount of faith in America's ability to generally move forward over time.

Man, some of those stories were really heartwrenching.

<comment><USER10> > I dunno what it is I just have a decent amount of faith in America's ability > to generally move forward over time.

So with this, you just happened to touch upon an only tangentially related strongly held opinion of mine. So I'll rant for a sec: It is my strongly held belief that society and life does _not_ just get better over time. All of the improvements we've seen in society have been from people fighting incredibly hard against entrenched systems in order to improve live for future people. Rights to vote for women and minorities, child labor laws, ending slavery, workplace improvements, anit-discrimination laws. Absolutely none of those improved "with time". All of them involved difficult, confrontational and frankly uncomfortable fights to improve society for everyone.

I think your view (and i'm not selecting you) is endemic in a lot of people in this country (particularly younger generations) that think life will improve if we just sit back and do nothing and give it time. This has never been the case in American society. People have been pushing hard to improve society and I really feel like a lot of people now have a view of "just wait and it will just happen". I personally believe this is an extremely misguided and hazardous view.

I'm definitely not looking to start an argument about it, but I do ask people to think of any major social improvements of the last century+ that didn't involve a large associated active social fight for it. Without people pushing us forward systems and societies calcify and then begin to rot.

\---

On the topic at hand I absolutely think the majority of police mean well and are trying to help. However I do think as an broad generalization - as an organization police departments (and their unions) don't take feedback well, often work to defend/justify their actions rather than find ways to improve, and have a view of being above the law or that they should be granted exceptions because of their circumstances. This makes it difficult to root out those offices who condone and commit bad behaviors.

There is a reason why teachers choose goodie-two-shoes types to be hall- monitors. When given power over others, people need to be held to an even higher standard of behavior, vs be granted exemptions from rules/laws/accountability because of their job. Everyone should feel 100% at ease and trusting of their encounters with police. For whatever reason in today's society a lot of people justifiably don't feel that way. And we as Americans should make it a priority to fix that. Police and society should be on the same side - both against criminals.

<comment><USER11> Oh yea. I absolutely agree with you. My faith is in the American people to continue fighting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shocking to read. But what really shocks me is the amount of arrests mentioned for possession of heroin or syringes.

When will the US (and the rest of the world) finally learn that locking users up just perpetuates the problem - you won't get a job with a criminal record, same for housing. All this arresting does is fill the coffers of (private) jails and creates needless suffering.

Also, why do people keep calling the _cops_ on relatives and friends who OD? That just makes the problem worse. In fact, it should be made _illegal_ to arrest anyone when emergency services are called to an OD, and this must be publically announced. People rather let other people die than save their lives because they're afraid of jail.

> She's part of a protest against Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones, who won't > let his deputies carry Narcan. He's the only sheriff in southwest Ohio whose > department doesn't use it. Two doses of Narcan cost about $75.

And, what kind of person is this moron? He should be in jail for willfully preventing deaths!

> "Either she got a new dealer, or her dealer hosed her," a paramedic says.

Yet another case for why it 'd be really necessary that the _state_ provides drugs like heroin, with proper quality control. So many deaths and near-deaths that could be avoided.

<comment><USER13> I'm surprised that drug use is normalised to the extent that you can say with a straight face that the state should provide heroin.

I'm not in favour of punitive measures, but the state providing it? Really? I'd also like to see data on providing a milder form of an opiate working better to wean people off a dependency.

So far, all I've seen is the dependency switching to the replacement.

<comment><USER12> > I'm surprised that drug use is normalised to the extent that you can say > with a straight face that the state should provide heroin.

People won't stop doing drugs, so it is more than justified to try to reduce the harm done by having people rely on street dealers:

\- wildly fluctuating dosages, leading to ODs

\- "stretching" agents, from harmless herbs in weed over rat dung to fentanyl in heroin (which doesn't mix evenly so you end up, from the same supply, with one dose having vastly more of the stuff than the other) and their associated side effects

\- massive amounts of cash (2010: 109 billion dollars per [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-10/more- pot-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-10/more-pot-less- cocaine-sizing-up-america-s-illicit-drug-market)) funneled to the black market. This "competition for cash" creates violence by itself (e.g. gang turf wars), creates massive incentives for bribery (if I were a customs agent, I don't know if I'd say no to a million dollars for letting the occasional shipment through), directly funds wars and destabilizes countries (e.g. Afghanistan, Mexico) and also increases the amount of crimes the users do in order to afford a dose (e.g. if a user needs, for the same amount of heroin, to rack up 10$ vs 1000$, then the amount of crime he has to do in order to get said money is reduced massively)

> So far, all I've seen is the dependency switching to the replacement.

Better have the money flow to the state in form of taxes and (in a fully state-provided drug regime) revenues, than in the coffers of hardcore criminals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> ibogaine. saved my life. it's sad more people don't know about this miracle. even sadder that government has chosen to outlaw the best available treatment for addiction that exists.

please, if you or someone in your family suffers from drug addiction, especially heroin, please investigate ibogaine. seriously, just google it.

<comment><USER15> The fact that ibogaine, a drug with little if any neurotoxicity, is a Schedule 1 drug in the U.S. while millions of opioid pills get handed out every year to hopelessly addicted poor people makes me very, VERY upset. Does your government care if you live or die?

<comment><USER16> Only if you are an embryo.

<comment><USER17> What country are you in? In most Western countries, embryos are pretty much fair game.

<comment><USER18> I think it's a dig at the US Republican Christian Right, whom are "Pro-life" but anti-"taking care of that, or the mother's, life." Considering Republicans control the majority of all three branches of government, they have an opportunity to ram through their unpopular ideological agenda.

Disclaimer: Neither party is currently relevant to the average US citizen. People ought to seek post-partisanship and post-identity to side-step divide- and-conquer polarization and unify to attack the corruption.

<comment><USER19> > Disclaimer: Neither party is currently relevant to the average US citizen. > People ought to seek post-partisanship and post-identity to side-step > divide-and-conquer polarization and unify to attack the corruption.

Horseshit. Both parties are _NOT_ the same and one is quite relevant to the common citizen.

For example: One party has been attempting to fix healthcare; one party is attempting to dismantle it.

That's _REALLY FUCKING RELEVANT_ to the average citizen--especially in red states--especially in states with an opiate epidemic.

One party is attempting to legalize some drugs; the other continues to want to throw everybody in jail. I can go on.

There is no such thing as "post-partisanship" until the Republican party starts operating on truth and fact, again.

Could the Democrats be a lot better? Sure. However, I don't see Democrats assaulting people and still hanging onto their office. Weiner and Spitzer got chucked out of office for far less.

Come talk to me about "post-partisanship" when Gianforte isn't in office anymore. Until then, I am quite free to assume that Republicans actually _SUPPORT_ the current level of corruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow, just wow. As someone not affected by the heroin epidemic, this was very hard to read. I was almost brought to tears at how many stories involved children of heroin users and how their lives are affected.

<comment><USER21> The children celebrating a birthday in a time-limited jail room got me. They're a similar age to my own children. It's probably far better than a lifetime of health issues, but it seriously saddened me that those children didn't get to do that at their pace, in their family home, without third-party supervision, with friends, etc. Their "normal" gets entirely defined by mistakes of their parents compounded by their parents' inability to control that mistake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For anyone who may be struggling with chronic pain and/or opioid addiction, I implore you to research kratom. As far as anyone can tell, it is safe, minimally addictive, and in my experience it is good for head pain, stomach pain, anxiety, minor depression, not to mention potentiation of all kinds of other drugs.

Of course, use at your own risk. It may interact dangerously with many compounds, because it inhibits the cytochrome p450 enzyme. That said, after a six month up to three times a day habit, I've quit cold turkey twice without too much trouble.

I recommend I highly if you're out of other options.

One last warning, do not buy in person, you will be ripped off. You can get 250g for less than $30 online, and a dose for pain is 1-2 grams. Higher doses are mildly psychoactive, but OD is anecdotally impossible because you quickly become nauseaus and throw the powder up if you take in excess of 8-10+grams.

<comment><USER23> I'm seeing lots of addicts wandering about Portland, OR. I read your comment with interest. I wonder if someone distributed this to addicts on the street if it would make a difference. I feel very helpless in reclaiming our city from an addiction crisis.

<comment><USER22> There are numerous anecdotal reports online of heroin users using kratom to kick the habit. At the very least, one can be functional on kratom, contribute to society, and withdrawal shouldn't be terrible enough to motivate violent crime.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Read all the timestamps this morning. It's a sobering view on something we are already aware of. Not sure how this issue rids itself. Circling back on my gratitude to be healthy.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wonder if anyone will see this, but I have a general question I might as well ask here.

What if, you put an addicted person in a padded cell, and supply progressively decreasing doses of the drug(s) the person is addicted to?

The dosage gradient could be mathematically computed to find the lowest possible harmful withdrawal effects.

The person would stay in the cell environment until completely past the hardest phases of withdrawal (however long this takes, whether days, weeks, months(?)), but they would be free to move around (within the secure complex) as they please, and have limited access to technology (anything enabling communication would be heavily vetoed, but eg unlimited access to a video library could work well).

It seems that the current models in use depend entirely on the will of a person who is heavily compromised. I honestly have to say, that seems fundamentally and ridiculously broken, and yeah, even suspiciously so: _it 's so obvious that this approach is not going to work for most, so why does every "treatment center" continue down this path?_

The only caveat I can think of with the suggestion above is about the violent phase of withdrawals, and sedating a person enough when in that phase so they can eat/drink/etc. (I'm not sure how long it is - I vaguely recall it's just a couple of days right?)

Also, about the padded room - I'm not talking "psychotically mad-proof" padding, but just enough for this context. Obviously that's going to change per drug and person, and maybe thick padding _is_ what would be required.

I'm just thinking about cost here (cost of sedation and padding), because I know that a) everything health-related in the US seems to attract the most markup and overhead in any field in the world, and b) because (as per my notation that the current model is _suspiciously_ broken) I wouldn't be surprised if anyone who tried this would find it mysteriously hard to get funding.

On the other hand, I must admit that I've never really tried to find out if this idea has been attempted or not. Would/does it not work?

<comment><USER26> I am doing a version of this myself (minus the padded room), using buprenorphine under the supervision of an excellent case worker and doctor. It's taken 5 years, but I'm down to 1.6mg from 32mg at the start, and 24 works in the future I'll be off it entirely (and taking a month off to go down to my family's holiday home on the beach here in Australia, for the final withdrawal symptoms).

One weird thing: even with my much lower dose, the acute withdrawals every morning are mostly the same. A little less bad, sure, but still rather terrible. I just put up with it, because it's better to be productive and able to move forward with my life after 6 years of heroin addiction than go back to where I was.

Interestingly, opiate replacement therapy done with heroin itself has had quite good results. The downsides to buprenorphine and methadone is that the withdrawals are rather "drawn out" compared to heroin and morphine. The upside is that the fact they last so long in terms of binding is what makes them excellent at stopping a user from bouncing back and forward between the two (in theory anyway; a given users metabolism means this isn't always true. I could've easily used heroin any time during my treatment as I metabolise bupe and methadone extremely rapidly -- I just chose not to. It wasn't worth it.)

<comment><USER25> > _I am doing a version of this myself (minus the padded room), using > buprenorphine under the supervision of an excellent case worker and doctor._

Wow, that's absolutely awesome.

> _It 's taken 5 years, but I'm down to 1.6mg from 32mg at the start, and 24 > works in the future I'll be off it entirely (and taking a month off to go > down to my family's holiday home on the beach here in Australia, for the > final withdrawal symptoms)._

 _Niiice_. (I'm actually in .au too (Sydney area), I agree that some of the beach environments are really nice. Cool.)

> _One weird thing: even with my much lower dose, the acute withdrawals every > morning are mostly the same._

Hah. I figured it might be like that! (Unfortunately!)

> _A little less bad, sure, but still rather terrible._

Mmm.

> _I just put up with it, because it 's better to be productive and able to > move forward with my life after 6 years of heroin addiction than go back to > where I was._

Indeed. And kudos for having the strength - as I said in my previous comment, not everyone has the willpower to strong-arm a rewired reward center into doing things _completely differently_.

Survival of the fittest :D

> _Interestingly, opiate replacement therapy done with heroin itself has had > quite good results. The downsides to buprenorphine and methadone is that the > withdrawals are rather "drawn out" compared to heroin and morphine. The > upside is that the fact they last so long in terms of binding is what makes > them excellent at stopping a user from bouncing back and forward between the > two (in theory anyway; a given users metabolism means this isn't always > true. I could've easily used heroin any time during my treatment as I > metabolise bupe and methadone extremely rapidly -- I just chose not to. It > wasn't worth it.)_

I see. Yeah, buprenorphine _isn 't heroin_. It's very good to distance oneself.

So... when you say buprenorphine works great in terms of binding, I get the impression that you mean that the effect lasts longer, and that it is needed less frequently? That would have helpful practical ramifications, yeah.

<comment><USER26> > So... when you say buprenorphine works great in terms of binding, I get the > impression that you mean that the effect lasts longer, and that it is needed > less frequently? That would have helpful practical ramifications, yeah.

Exactly, yeah. For most people it will "hold" them for 24-48 hours. Unfortunately for me, it only holds me for about 12, but that should hopefully mean that my final withdrawal symptoms are more acute and less drawn out.

I'd rather a week or two of agony than months of less-intense but still terrible shit!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Moderators:

This is a duplicate of an earlier post:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15224794](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15224794)

Which has the exact same URL:

[http://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days- of-h...](http://www.cincinnati.com/pages/interactives/seven-days-of-heroin- epidemic-cincinnati/)

Is there a bug in the submission system?

<comment><USER28> If a page was recently submitted and didn't get many comments people can repost it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> as a Lyft driver in Cincinnati, this is really making me rethink my main source of income

most of my passengers during the day are lower income, and while I personally haven't had any major issues there are definitely times when I'm glad certain passengers are out of my car. I feel like if the drug problem is really this bad, it's only a matter of time until one of these stories is in the back of my car

</comment><comment><USER23> Does anyone know of anyone using the drugs listed here (ibogaine was one) to help addicts? Because of the FDA, is this something illegal? It would be fascinating if cryptocurrencies permitted a black market for drug trade that allowed concerned citizens to buy these drugs and distribute them to addicts without fear of interference by the federal government. A silk road that we could all stand behind.

<comment><USER26> Anecdotally, the three people I know/knew who used ibogaine to get "clean" failed to various degrees. It truly seemed to help each of them to begin with, but after about 6 months each one of them relapsed -- probably due to the lack of counselling and dealing with the original reasons they started using to begin with, I'd wager. Two of them are dead from overdoses, the other I'm unsure, I haven't seen or heard from him in years now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I always wonder what would happen if caffeine/caffeine containing products (coffee, tea etc.) were illegal. Would people go to the same extremes for a caffeine fix?

<comment><USER30> I'm curious why this would be down voted.

<comment><USER31> I gave you an upvote, as the question seems fair. But if you're a coffee/caffeine drinker, you can answer this for yourself by going without coffee for a couple of weeks. You'll miss it for a few days, but it's ultimately not something worth going to jail or having a hole drilled into your leg for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Is this journalism or just a publicity stunt for journalists? And why is everything a "battle", "war", etc. War against drugs. War against terror. Battle against heroin.

And must everything be a "crisis". Maybe just knowing how the news industry works has me a bit cynical.

Anyways there is always a "crisis". A few years ago, there was the meth crisis. A few years before that, the ecstasy crisis. Before that there was the crack crisis. Before that the marijuana crisis. All the way to opium.

I guess as more things change, the more they stay the same.

</comment><comment><USER33> And not one mention of doctors over-prescribing opioids!

</comment><comment><USER34> One thing not mentioned in the article is the size of the area and the population. I have no idea how big Cincinatti is or how many people live in those counties. So I don't know if those are big numbers or not.

<comment><USER21> It's probably an oversight given they're writing first for a local audience?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> When I went to school they made sure that Drugs Are Bad, Just Say No was a message that was hammered into every single child. Think about how our culture views drug addicts -- if you hear an acquaintance or a friend of a friend is doing drugs, especially heroin, do you think "Man, that person's got it together! I really want to be like them!" No, you think about how they're a shitty person living a shitty life and you want to stay far, far away from them, because you know they'll lie and steal from you to get their fix.

So I don't really have sympathy for addicts. It's not like drug addiction is a thing that happens to you, unlike losing your home to a hurricane, or getting cancer. If you choose to shove a needle of heroin in your arm of your own free will, that's a choice you've made -- and the consequences of that choice are also things that you've chosen for yourself.

It's not like that people don't know that drugs ruin lives. It's not like it's a _secret_ that drugs are illegal and you'll get sent to jail.

The area I grew up in is a Rust Belt town in similar circumstances -- maybe with even more drugs and less hope than Cincinnati. So I share my understanding and dismay of the economic situation that community's in. But drugs aren't the answer, and anyone who turns to them is clearly lacking in moral character and common sense.

<comment><USER36> > "It's not like drug addiction is a thing that happens to you"

A common route that leads people to taking heroin is...

1\. Go to the doctor, get prescribed pain medication.

2\. Become addicted to pain medication during treatment.

3\. After supply of pain medication dries up, turn to illegal alternatives (which includes heroin).

So it really could happen to anyone, as it's possible to become an addict without any prior intention to take illegal substances.</comment></comment>


Liberal America's Single-Family Hypocrisy - <AUTHOR> https://www.thenation.com/article/zoning-housing-homeless-segregation/ <comment><USER2> > . As cities regain their cultural clout, low-income African-American and > Latino neighborhoods are often among the few where new housing is permitted, > concentrating growth pressure and accelerating the process of > gentrification.

This fact hit me like a ton of bricks. I had assumed that the reason all this new construction happens in gentrifying neighborhoods is because land is cheaper. But of course that can't be the main reason. In Palo Alto, you can get a single family house with an 6,000-8,000 square foot lot for $2-3 million. With reasonable zoning you could put in a 6-8 story building with a 3,000-4,000 square foot footprint and 12-24 units. At the upper end, the land cost of each unit would be about $150,000. If construction costs $200 per square foot, that's another $260,000 for a 1,300 square foot 3BR unit. Say half a million in costs for the whole unit. Already, you're looking at land costs being a smaller part of the overall per-unit costs, and this is a relatively modest building (as you go higher, the per-unit land cost goes down). Going to a gentrifying neighborhood might save you on land costs, but at substantially greater risk. (Maybe the neighborhood won't gentrify as fast as you expect, people will expect a discount to live in a gentrifying neighborhood, etc.)

<comment><USER3> A few months ago, I merged two data sets: one depicting Seattle's history of redlining in the 20th century, and another that showed every building demolition project since around the year 2000.

What I found was that these historically redlined districts have see over 10x the amount of demolition that explicitly white neighborhoods have had.

I'll put this online sometime soon. It's really astonishing to see the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They forced density in Vancouver, Canada by billing property taxes on possible uses of land instead of actual uses. So if city council decided your land could actually be a 10 story condo, they would hand you a gigantic tax bill based on that condo tower rate in hopes you'd sell to developers. It turned the city into a judge dredd style dystopia of luxury condo towers but they achieved density.

<comment><USER5> > It turned the city into a judge dredd style dystopia of luxury condo towers

Is it really that bad?

<comment><USER4> Not entirely, but because of local political corruption a lot of development ended up like this but it doesn't have to be this way. US cities I imagine are far more strict seperating development from politicians than the grey areas here that permitted foreign money laundering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a little confused by the implications the article is making. Density in the outer suburbs is probably not a good idea, for all the reasons the article mentions, such as traffic. Then you have to factor in all the other things like electricity, water, sewage, garbage collection, police, firefighters, more public schooling, etc.

I'm 100% all for more density, but just throwing up 8 story apartments in what were single-family lots all over the outer suburbs isn't really going to help anyone.

There are all kinds of competing forces at play, but the one I think is the hardest to understand is quality of life. Everyone has an idea of what works for them and it's different for everyone. Some of us do want to live in the core of a city and be as close to the energy as possible. While some of us need to be in a quiet area far from it all. I don't want to shame people for wanting to live in a single-family home with room for a garden and toolshed. Those spaces should exist and be in reach for anyone who wants that lifestyle.

Yet, I do think we need to rethink what is considered the "core" of a city and should expect and demand that those areas build up. That's when I start getting frustrated with cities on the peninsula. All of the downtowns from Burlingame to Cupertino have height limits of 2 stories. Are you kidding me? None of them have views, and all of them have Caltrain stops.

So I don't think "liberal America" is necessarily wrong, and I'm not sure the article is convincing me of that.

<comment><USER7> > I'm 100% all for more density, but just throwing up 8 story apartments in > what were single-family lots all over the outer suburbs isn't really going > to help anyone.

It'll help the people who no longer have to pay $5k/month in rent.

> Then you have to factor in all the other things like electricity, water, > sewage, garbage collection, police, firefighters, more public schooling, > etc.

Density makes all of these things cheaper.

> Those spaces should exist and be in reach for anyone who wants that > lifestyle.

Low density living is environmentally unsustainable yet heavily subsidized by the government. People living in rural and exurban areas receive far more infrastructure spending per capita while paying the same taxes as the rest of us. If you want to destroy the earth just so you can have big yard then not only should the government not subsidize you, you should be paying extra to reflect the negative externalities caused by your carbon emissions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've got an important question for everyone the writer. According to their premise and most 'liberal' premises white people are inherently racist and don't want to live around 'poc' or whatever is the polite word these days. See white flight. So what makes them think the people won't just flee the suburbs again if they do this? I too think those rich people are racist and use their wealth to live away from poc while supposedly working for them but I need some clarification on this point. I'd also love to see and be amenable to the idea of the government forcing these people to practice what they preach to the rest of us. Diversity is our greatest strength after all.

</comment><comment><USER9> There's been a lot of pushback on Minneapolis's 2040 plan, but ultimately I think it's a step in the right direction. Most of the objections are from people living in quiet, mostly single-family neighborhoods who don't want apartments near them. But really, most of the rezoning only takes place directly along busier corridor streets; the interiors of those blocks would still be single-family zoned.

<comment><USER2> That's really cool: [https://www.curbed.com/2018/11/27/18113208/minneapolis- real-...](https://www.curbed.com/2018/11/27/18113208/minneapolis-real-estate- rent-development-2040-zoning). Someone called Sweden "Minnesota writ large" and that really seems to have a kernel of truth to it.

<comment><USER10> That and also it's full of Scandinavians.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't find this persuasive at all. Over-population of humans on this planet is the root cause of the impending climate disaster. Jamming more people into cities is just going to fuel the population explosion. I think we have to find a way to reduce the population to a sustainable level.

</comment><comment><USER12> Maybe it's just me but maybe we should do our partisan name-calling somewhere other than Hacker News. I'm sick of these flamebait articles that do not "satisfy curiosity" in any way.

<comment><USER13> I don't think there's any partisan name-calling at all in here? If anything, it's partisan introspection.

The content is pretty substantial and goes into great depth about the history of single-family zoning.

<comment><USER12> The title is flamebait. It's just the typical rant about NIMBYism with a partisan tinge to it. When I made my comment there was only two comments and one of them was:

"Liberal .* hypocrisy would match a lot of things..."

These types of tired comments, and more eloquently framed versions of them, always pop up under articles like this and they never bring up any interesting points.

<comment><USER14> Liberal is ideological, not partisan.

Nonetheless I agree.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New paper claims that the neutrino is likely a faster-than-light particle - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2014-12-faster-than-light-particles.html <comment><USER3> If true, this would explain the Fermi Paradox. If there is a faster-than-light particle in this universe, then that is what intelligent life would use to communicate. We can assume that aliens that are smart enough to reach the level that they figure out what a neutrino is, would also, eventually, figure out a way to use it to communicate.

Edit: in case my point wasn't clear, I mean that no intelligent life form will communicate with the standard parts of the electro-magnetic spectrum, which at best travels at the speed of light, if there is a faster alternative. IF there is a particle that travels faster than light, then it seems likely intelligent life will find a way to send that particle in bursts, allowing at least as much communication as is allowed by Morse Code. The point is, the universe is very big, and the speed of light is very slow if you are trying to converse with someone on the other side of your galaxy, or in another galaxy. So if there is a particle that does move faster than the speed of light, it is likely that intelligent life would attempt to use it for communication. This would explain why the SETI project has not picked up anything yet -- they are listening for the wrong thing.

<comment><USER4> _If there is a faster-than-light particle in this universe, then that is what intelligent life would use to communicate._

SETI-like efforts have a big handicap for a different reason. To oversimplify a bit: any signal that is distinguishable from noise is a waste of energy.

Right now, in the name of spectral efficiency, we're migrating our legacy systems (such as TV broadcast) to modulation formats that sound exactly like white noise to a receiver that doesn't know the coding scheme... and never mind encryption, which has the same effect. Other races will be confronted with the same problems, and will use the same solutions, to the extent they use wireless for medium- to long-range communications at all.

So, the only way we'll detect intelligible signals from an alien world is if we happen to catch them between their development of communications technology and information theory. This is a pretty narrow window -- only about 100 years in our case.

If SETI has any hope at all, it will lie in detecting deliberate beacon transmissions, not incidental RF. But some smart people have argued that attracting attention with such a beacon would be a mistake, possibly the last one the species in question ever makes.

<comment><USER5> _" Other races will be confronted with the same problems, and will use the same solutions, to the extent they use wireless for medium- to long-range communications at all."_

This seems a little ahistorical and antropocentric to me.

Ahistorical because even humans have avoided using certain technologies for a variety of reasons -- from certain weapons (chemical/biological, cluster bombs, nuclear weapons, etc) to pesticides, communications technologies, certain programming languages, etc. despite their arguable technological superiority or ability to get the job done.

Anthropocentric because, really, who knows how aliens would think or what they would do? Your argument applies, if it applies at all, to species that think and act much like us. It is debatable whether radically different intelligent (a term which we don't understand even when we apply it to ourselves) species would even understand something as "fundamental" as mathematics the way we do, nevermind actually use technical artifacts in a way recognizable to us.

On the subject of recognizability, could bacteria recognize the humans that they dwell on as intelligent or even living? Can they recognize anything at all? As bacteria are to us, so we may be to alien intelligent life, or even to potentially intelligent life here on earth such as trees, superorganisms like insect or fungal colonies, etc. Organisms that operate at radically different time scales or radically different ways of relating to the world.

Some have argued that the Earth is an organism with agency, or the Internet is one. If that is so, how would we recognize these as such, how would we communicate with them, if it is possible? And if communicating with these on Earth is so unlikely, how much less the likelihood of communicating with beings from other star systems or galaxies utterly unlike that of our own?

<comment><USER6> If they don't use radio technology we'll of course never hear from them - <USER2> least not via SETI. So, when it comes to SETI being effective, the interesting case is where the aliens are using radio technology but never advance their modulation technology to the point where the signal is no longer obviously artificial to an observer without knowledge of the coding scheme. It is of course difficult to say whether this is likely to happen; however, it seems contrived for a species to exist that is okay with using math and physics to construct and operate high-power radio transmitters, but refuses (or is unable to) use math to reach the next level of spectral efficiency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article on phys.org appears to be taken verbatim from a press release written by the paper's author, Robert Erlech. (Here's his website: [http://mason.gmu.edu/~rehrlich/](http://mason.gmu.edu/~rehrlich/)) From that site, here's a link to what seems to be the original paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804](http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804)

Just as a minor quality signifier, it looks like this paper is categorized under gen-ph ("General Physics") on arXiv.org. That's unusual for mainstream research: topics like this would usually be categorized as "High energy physics" or "Astrophysics". I don't know exactly what criteria arXiv.org uses to judge when a paper should be moved to the "general" category, but I've had the sense that re-categorization is used as a (weak) form of quality control.

I haven't read the paper yet, but this is a truly extraordinary claim. It would take extraordinary evidence (or at least a hint of such evidence) for me to take it seriously.

</comment><comment><USER8> I originally thought the SN1987A results--which show the neutrino burst from a supernova in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud arriving at the same time as the light, within error-would easily falsify this but forgot that high energy tachyons approach c from above as their energy goes up, so for the 5+ MeV neutrinos that were detected the velocity difference would be negligibly different from c regardless if the mass is positive of negative.

It's a curious result, but I'd still lean toward consistent defects in the data over a tachyonic neutrino, personally.

</comment><comment><USER9> OK, how does this avoid breaking causality?

<comment><USER10> If neutrinos are, in fact, tachyons, our notions of causality were _already_ broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Besides tachions, it's very interesting to hear somebody talk about the exact mass of a neutrino.

</comment><comment><USER12> From what I remember of physics, objects get infinitely massive as they approach the speed of light and therefore require infinite energy to get to the speed of light. Is this not correct anymore?

<comment><USER13> That's an argument for why objects can't be accelerated to and beyond c. But there's a loophole for objects that are already traveling faster than c when they're first created.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > The result relies on tachyons having an imaginary mass, or a negative mass > squared.

Perhaps these two were mixed up?

<comment><USER15> I suspect it's meant to be negative (mass squared) rather than (negative mass) squared.

<comment><USER8> Correct. Tachyons appear in dynamical equations with imaginary masses, which, when squared, give negative "squared masses".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is an old hypothesis: [http://arxiv.org/abs/hep- ph/9810355](http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9810355)

<comment><USER17> Which is likely why the linked-to article says "three theorists Chodos, Hauser, and Kostelecky suggested in 1985 that they might be hiding in plain sight – specifically that neutrinos are tachyons".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am always weary of a sole authored physics paper, especially in particle physics. Either he had nobody working with him, or nobody wanted their name associated with the work, both raise red flags these days.

Direct link to arxiv paper: [http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804](http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.2804)

<comment><USER19> Instead of attacking the person who wrote a hypothesis about neutrino speed, do you know who will be duplicating his experiment?

<comment><USER20> I didn't see the comment as a personal attack. It was merely pointed out that the commenter finds papers with a sole author to be questionable.

As for "his experiment", if you actually read the article, you can see that there apparently was no experiment; rather, the paper's conjecture relies on analysis of data from other observations and experiments. So the answer is that nobody will be duplicating the experiment in question, since it does not exist.

<comment><USER21> "It was merely pointed out that the commenter finds papers with a sole author to be questionable."

That's an argument from authority and/or consensus.

At the end of the day, only reproducibility matters in science. The problem with using unreliable heuristics like "single author papers" is that it means the findings of such papers are less likely to be tested or further investigated by others. It introduces a strong herd effect bias into science, which history has shown is not a good idea.

<comment><USER7> History has shown that heuristics like this are a _fantastically_ good idea. They've been part of science more or less since science started, and science has accomplished an enormous amount. The number of bold, exciting claims that are entirely wrong is far larger than the number of bold, exciting claims that are even partly correct. Heuristics like "put less trust in single-author papers" (among others) are _essential_ for science to actually make progress rather than spending all its effort chasing mirages. Yes, sometimes an important idea gets overlooked for a decade or two along the way, but the alternative would be to accomplish nothing at all.

(Unless you've been a physicist at a major university, you have no idea how many emails those folks get claiming to have quantized gravity or to have proved Einstein wrong.)

<comment><USER8> As a colleague once put it, "I believe papers published by people I know. Failing that, by people who have worked with people I know. In third place, by people who are at institutions I know have a history of good work."

Science has a deep internal tension that drives it forward, because it is both inherently elitist and necessarily public. If results are not published they aren't science, because they aren't incorporated by the scientific community. And yet while a) anyone can do science and b) anyone can publish, it is still the case that c) the scientific community is overwhelmingly tightly knit and fairly conservative when it comes to adopting new ideas, and the number of new ideas that get generated is so high that this sort of heuristic really is extremely valuable.

Sure there are lone geniuses. There are also lone nutjobs. It's not difficult to guess which one predominates, and these sort of filters do a good enough job of bringing the nut/genius ratio down closer to unity that we are always going to use them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Neutrino is faster than light in the water. To decide about vacuum we have to wait for another nearby supernova.

<comment><USER23> Neutrino being faster than light when both in the water doesn't mean anything regarding c as a barrier.</comment></comment>


My journey into Scandinavian design - <AUTHOR> http://oliverdamian.info/gds-scandinavia.html <comment><USER2> How the rest of the world can live without fika culture I'll never know

<comment><USER3> How is it different than the tradition of having a cigarette break with your pals, or going for a few beers after work? I don't know much about fika, but it doesn't seem like an exception for Sweden - I see folks going to have a coffee with each other all the time. Is there something else about it that I'm missing?

<comment><USER2> I think those things are usually done with clicks of people while a "fika" will often apply to all in office. Like you yell "Hey, everyone let's go fika, and everyone goes fika". It's also usual to have a set fika appointment around 2 or 3

<comment><USER4> > I think those things are usually done with clicks of people

Yeah, like, "people who smoke." :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looking forward to reading this because of how much Scandinavian minimalism has influenced the web as late.

But the blue... I have to work up to it. My morning eyes are not there yet.

</comment><comment><USER6> I suppose this might count as a bit off topic but I wish people would drop this 'Scandinavian design' shorthand. For a start Scandinavia doesn't include Finland, if you want Finland too then you are referring to the Nordic region or Nordic states. Secondly the various Scandinavian countries have distinctive styles and the supposed 'Scandinavian minimalism' is not universal. Here, in Norway, you often find quite different decor with reds and greens more prominent than the supposedly Scandinavian blond wood. And when it comes to organized coffee breaks, well in thirty years of working here I have never encountered one, probably because Norwegian working style and meal habits are quite diferent from Swedish, for instance. Here people start work early, have a short lunch break with a slice or two of bread and cheese, and go home early whereas in Sweden a hot lunch is common.</comment>


Former Qwest CEO, who fought NSA in 2001, out of prison - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/09/27/nacchio-its-life-on-mars/

<comment><AUTHOR> "Mr. Nacchio said he still believes his insider trading prosecution was government retaliation for rebuffing requests in 2001 from the NSA to access his customers' phone records. But some of the evidence he said he wanted to use was deemed classified and barred from being introduced.

An NSA spokeswoman declined to comment."</comment>


Amazon will not tell me what happens to their hard drives - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DataRealLies/amazon-will-not-tell-me-what-happens-to-their-hard-drives-976ea46c0858 <comment><USER2> That is one of the reasons why I encrypt every drive. Only boot partition has to be unencrypted, the rest has to be encrypted.

It is a part of "data is toxic" approach.

I'm not willing to spend time to trace what data is stored where - db, rabbitmq/mnesia, kafka, whatelse. Even if i did how I am supposed to wipe it if those tools during operation probably remove old data in rm style instead of shred-ding. Some of my clients consider their internal network configuration to be sensitive, so even my /etc/hosts is toxic.

IMO you have to either encrypt everything or be prepared to physically destroy your hdds with drill.

<comment><USER3> 100% agree, and encrypting is better than physically destroying, because your hardware might just get stolen (or confiscated), at which point it's a bit hard to physically destroy them.

For anyone worried about the overhead of encrypting for writes and decrypting for reads: barely noticeable for me (though I don't do very IO intensive things).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I expect they sell them along with other returned items by the pallet for very low prices, without doing any kind of wipe or QA check at all.</comment>


Show HN: The users behind Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://hnwho.com/ <comment><USER2> These meta posts -- users sliced and diced by karma, what makes a good rating system, the role of humor (or lack of it) in a successful social site -- always appeal to my inner data nerd. It's got a bit of everything: programming, stats, html5, and, well, me. As a startup junkie, I'm all for anything that brings attention for my various efforts, like <http://hn- books.com> or <http://caption-of-the-day.com>

I'd like to see a live twitter feed of the top HNers, but not just their comments here, also their public posts on FB, G+, and Twitter. To bring the volume down to size, I'd filter out the bottom 90% by karma, then maybe filter again by average. If you really wanted to nerd out, you could even allow the user to have some sliders to set their own thresholds. Seems like it would be an easy project to put together (hint, hint)

I'm concerned about privacy in a big way. I know some would find my idea pretty uncomfortable, but I've long since decided that what I put on the net is my public life. I worry a lot more about my insurance company asking me to install tracking GPS devices or my local police force being able to check my ISP logs without judicial review. I'm okay with the things I made public being correlated. It's access to the stuff I feel is private without notice that concerns me a lot.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a fairly private guy, and I find this a bit creepy. I've never been more glad that I don't have a Twitter profile.

(Which is not to say that I think that the developer is doing something _wrong_ , or even unethical: if you have a Twitter profile with your picture on it, one could fairly argue that you've made a contract with the world that the information is public. But all the same, stuff like this makes me want disconnect my internet connection and line my windows with tinfoil. If someone can make a site like this, someone can just as easily make a site that reads "Top Internet Pedophiles".)

<comment><USER4> Wait until someone gets the bright idea to mine all your past comments for factoids and pieces together your unauthorized biography.

<comment><USER5> How is actually the comment "ownership" on Hackernews? Do I still hold the rights on my own words or are they already owned by ycombinator or gone down the creative commons?

<comment><USER6> I'm curious about this as well. I know slashdot's position is that "Comments owned by the poster".

<comment><USER7> This is, of course, the legal default (at least in any country that subscribes to the Berne Convention). Unless there is some alternate policy somewhere that I don't remember signing, that would be the policy here as well. (IANAL, TINLA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Do the users get to submit updates to the descriptions? Do they get to delete their descriptions if they would rather not be listed? Is there are a particular reason why some users on the current Hacker News leaderboard

<http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders>

appear not to be on your interesting and informative site?

After edit: I see at the bottom of the display it says "powered by HNSearch API," which makes me wonder why the listing wouldn't be exhaustive and perfectly ordered by karma. Please let us know what technical (and social) trade-offs you are encountering in this interesting project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi. Thanks for noticing. The reason is that standard Hacker News profiles don't have photos or real names. Therefore I focused on the 1000 Hacker News profiles that have such data (by stating their twitter profiles).

Notice that HNSearch API limits the amount of responses to 1000, but this has nothing to do with the current limit (you can hack this limit by sorting ascending and descending). But the limit was not reached, so I did not need to cheat.

Twitter profiles were focused as not many people mention their github/facebook/stackoverflow profiles.

The reason why the list is similar to the leaderboard is because data is sorted by who has the most karma.

<comment><USER9> Interesting... it seems you must have some other criteria because my (admittedly woefully outdated) profile lists my (admittedly neglected) Twitter account, but I don't see myself on there. ~5000 karma should put me only a couple pages in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Andy. I am sorry, but not everybody had a clear twitter username on their profile. You are right, the list was complemented with the data from this one: [http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most- followed-b...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by- readers-of-hacker-news)

I've added you to the direct list.

Note that the inference algorithm is quite forgiving, so "twitter @Locke1689", or "@Locke1689 on twitter", or even "twitter: Locke1689" would all have worked out.

About 50 people (from a pool of 1000) with twitter accounts on their profile were left out due to this not so optimal inference.

<comment><USER10> I'm not on there even though I have a direct link to my twitter account. If I was left out on purpose then that's fine, just letting you know in case it's a bug though.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Edit:_ Thanks for reporting Alex! I was missing 3 other users from the leadersboard. Should be all good now.

Hi Alex. I am sorry you were not listed. My first user sources were hnsearch[1][2] and on _Twitter Users Most Followed by Readers of Hacker News_ [3].

I am adding the leader's list to the user discovery, and this should be solved shortly.

[1] [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&#...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&sortby=karma+desc)

[2] [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.c...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.com&sortby=karma+desc&start=0)

[3] [http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most- followed-b...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by- readers-of-hacker-news)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> heh... I was wondering why I started getting a bunch of beta signups + twitter followers today.

I like the highlight effect you have on mouseover, although it kind of feels like something should happen when you click on someone's profile. Perhaps redirect the user to the person's HN profile?

<comment><USER12> Yea I think that would be helpful. Usually if people have a high amount of karma, they have put some time into their profile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like a rather nice page linking top-karma users to said users' Twitter profiles.

So that's cool, though from the title I was expecting/hoping to learn more about _actual_ people behind (in control of) HN... ie. YCombinator people that actively work and/or moderate and the "About 30 YC alumni" who can "kill stories and edit the titles, and in extreme cases ... ban users."

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, that's a big list of guys. You have to go down many pages to get to 'bane' before you can find a female.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's really interesting to see the people and their associated projects, companies, and institutions that contribute to the hn commentary. For a lot of the power users, I recognized their usernames and always sort of connected that to who they were professionally, but this really makes it clear.

I'm not sure if this is planned, but I'd guess some of the users wouldn't want the information collected and displayed like that, you might want to add the ability to remove yourself from that listing (so users aren't forced to censor or even delete their profiles).

On a side-note, I was having trouble with the gray on gray text, so I made up a quick alternate design for the site here, if anyone is interested: <http://stylebot.me/styles/752>

</comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty cool. But seeing myself show up so high is really embarassing. Definitely don't deserve to be among those people.

<comment><USER17> Same here!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very nice, I like the clean design. One suggestion: auto-loading when you hit the bottom of the page.

<comment><USER19> But then you'd have to move all the bottom navigation to the top (or side) or you'd never be able to see them :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How do so many websites break the zoom feature on iPhone?

So frustrating. Patio's massive face drowns out all the content. =)

<comment><AUTHOR> It is a viewport meta tag. Sorry that the page doesn't work great on iphone. I am working on making the layout scale, and the page leaner for iphone. My nexus S views it just fine, but even it could use a better page.

<comment><USER20> No no.. We don't need a "lean" iPhone layout.

The iPhone is designed to view webpages. So make it a standard webpage. No special casing. =)

But... Really, just strip out the meta stuff for now. It's unusable on iPhone at the moment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. I've uploaded a new verion without viewport and without the overlay for mobile phones. Let me know how it works out for you.

<comment><USER20> It works!! It worksitworksitworks.

The layout in fact could not be more perfect on an iPhone.

Tell us whatever you did, so that we can refer other people to do the same, please!

<comment><AUTHOR> I am glad it worked for you!

I simply removed the viewport metatag, and removed the overlay

The overlay doesn't work on mobile phone perfectly (it has to have its size computed on runtime, as I let the user bios grow as needed).

Also it is useless on mobile phones, as its only removed on mouseover (it gives the glow effect on the desktop browsers), and put back on mouseout.

As a good side effect, with less javascript floating around, the page renders faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Thanks for doing this. Its great to put a face behind some of the people whose comments I have loved.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure why I don't show up here, even after clicking "more" enough times. I'm seeing users ordered by karma, but I'm not in the list of users with karma ≥ 3881. My karma has been higher than that for … maybe half a year.

Edit: I see, I have to list my Twitter username in my HN bio…

</comment><comment><USER23> This has taught me something.

"Holy cow, I am almost on the leader board. I spend too much time here."

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea, but there is a lot of scrolling and [More] clicking going on. Would love to see an easier navigation option.

Also just out of curiosity: What is the current minimum kama level required to get into the top 1000?

</comment><comment><USER24> Need more females. :)

<comment><USER25> I'm female and fairly openly so (and people still sometimes refer to me as "he/him" because they assume I am male, presumably just because it's HN and for no other apparent reason). A lot of the women here seem to intentionally downplay their gender a good deal. On at least one occasion a female member created a throwaway account to explain in part why she hides her gender while posting here.

So a) I wonder why you are saying that and b) I wonder how accurate perceptions are in that regard. (FWIW: I am assuming I did not make it onto this list because I don't have a twitter account and I have no idea if I have enough karma for it, which seems to be a factor.)

<comment><USER26> It was just an glaring observation. I do remember the post about anonymous female members, but I didn't think it was something that was wide spread. Nevertheless, it would be brilliant if we could have more females on here[diversity].

Yea, I was looking for your account too[there is a more button on the bottom of the page]. So, I think maybe it is for people with twitter handles. I appeared twice, maybe trice[didn't reach that far down] with less Karma.

What are your suggestions for increasing our female population?

<comment><USER25> _What are your suggestions for increasing our female population?_

If you are male and want to encourage women to show up and post as openly female, then engage the women in intelligent conversation. Don't gush at them about how great it is to, gee golly whiz, see A GIRL here. Please don't publicly try to hit on any of the women here. You are highly unlikely to get what you are looking for and all it does is make the girls go into hiding because it promotes a predatory atmosphere.

I'm sure that could be expanded upon. I'm also sure I'm too tired to do so without getting myself into hot water at the moment (my 24 year old son has vetoed one of my illustrative remarks as a very bad idea <insert halo>). Hopefully, it's a place to start.

EDIT: I did see your reply to my reply before you deleted it. If you seriously want more feedback, email me and I will tell you privately what I left out of this post. And thank you for deleting it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting. I've noticed that I don't show up on there (not that I mind). Wonder why that might be.

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment you have to list your twitter name in your profile. Things like twitter: @name or even direct link like <http://twitter.com/#!/name> are all fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Awesome!

When you get a chance to develop this out, would be great to have:

embedded twitter follow buttons autoload further users when scrolling reaches close to the bottom look-through AJAX box for their recent posts/comments

Thanks and great job

Rayhan <http://rayhano.com>

</comment><comment><USER29> Great job, but how do you plan to monetize?

KIDDING

</comment><comment><USER30> Shouldn't you filter the ones that don't have a real photo? Seeing the photo of the person makes them seem real and personable...those pure avatar ones to me feels like one is just looking at the HN username.

<comment><USER31> Looks like it's mostly just based on a Twitter account in the profile, so I would assume that those are Twitter proflie icons.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right pyre. I am considering adding people with gihub/stackoverflow/facebook profiles as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see fallentimes (now deceased, if I remember correctly) is on the list.

<comment><AUTHOR> The list is becoming more of a reflect of HNSearch outputs[1][2].

The idea is that there are many cool stuff hacker news members did that we are not generally aware of (but hidden on the user's bios), and we can showcase them.

This is not 1000memories[3], but I find it nice that we can live forever through our creations.

On the other hand, this is a reflect of community, and if it decides it is no longer appropriate to list the members who left us, I'll respect it.

[1] [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&#...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter&sortby=karma+desc)

[2] [http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.c...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/users&q=twitter.com&sortby=karma+desc&start=0)

[3] <http://1000memories.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The list doesn't seem exhaustive. For example, where am I? :)

</comment><comment><USER33> Holy crap, 100k karma? I knew Paul Graham was cool (I've even told other people to read his essays), but I didn't know he was 100k karma cool.

<comment><USER34> It is a reflex to upvote any post from pg.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> so, what are the criteria for the list? doesn't quite correlate with the leaders list. is it based on comment only score?

<comment><AUTHOR> Look above for more info on how the list was crafted: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3117846>

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Paul Graham: 100K! I now believe in Rebirths

</comment><comment><USER37> I get a blank page for some reason, even after enabling everything with NoScript.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, but it reaquires Javascript. On mobile phones it can take a while to render.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> 1473 karma in 396 days but no Twitter profile

:(

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't like this.</comment>


Low and high carb diets increase risk of early death - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/17/health/low-carb-high-carbohydrate-diet-risk-of-death-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> > But the researchers recognize that their findings are purely observational > at this stage and cannot prove a cause and effect of eating too little or > too many carbohydrates.

Title of the article - "Low and high carb diets increase risk of early death, study finds"

Not saying this study isn't worth reporting and reading, but they could have titled it better.</comment>


Falcon – a Chrome extension for full text browsing history search - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon-js <comment><USER2> This ( and TreeStyleTab ([https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree- style-ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)) ) is the main reasons I keep preferring Firefox for leisure-browsing before Chrome. Every time I use Chrome, it's impossible to find previous pages based on the title or URL, while in Firefox is super simple and works really well.

Which is kind of ironic since Google is all about search and data but can't handle a browser address bar...

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it's incredible how search in the Chrome's URL doesn't find URLs (or page titles) I've visited 15 minutes ago. It's utterly frustrating.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure why you're experiencing that, but Chrome's bar certainly does let you talk about titles. Just type "Hacker" or "news" and see.

At least, that's what it's _supposed_ to do and is currently doing for me.

I just fired up Firefox, and neither actually seem to index into the _content_ of the page, which is what's so cool about this modification.

<comment><USER2> I'm on Ubuntu and just tried this in Chrome, I went manually to news.ycombinator.com, then open a new tab and type "Hacker" and HN is nowhere to be find there...

<comment><USER4> There may be a regression with the Chrome support in that OS. As it is a very tiny share of the Desktop market and is the hardest shell to maintain of the 3, I'm not surprised.

I have confirmed it works fine on Windows 10 and OSX variants both in Canary and Stable.

You perhaps might be interested in reporting the bug. That's a major regression. I'd be annoyed if it was missing too. Not enough to go to Firefox, mind (the speed loss is too great once you have 20-40 tabs open), but it'd definitely lower the speed at which I work.

<comment><USER2> > the speed loss is too great once you have 20-40 tabs open

That leads me to my second point, TreeStyleTab. I commonly have 50+ tabs open, and they are nested nicely under each other so I actually can find them. In Chrome, there is bunch of half-baked addons for easier finding, but nothing like TreeStyleTab for Firefox.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried Tab Outliner? [1]

Compared to TST it has two (major?) drawbacks upfront:

1\. It sits on a separate window next to your other browser windows.

2\. Some of its features are paid features.

I always thought that TST for Firefox has ruined all other browsers for me but I actually like Tab Outliner more than TST. Here are my reasons:

1\. It manages all my browser windows in a single tree view. Separate windows are children of the current session.

2\. Its has a much better keyboard support like rearranging tabs with your arrow keys while holding CTRL or indent/unindent a tab further into the tree with the usual TAB / Shift + TAB shortcuts.

2.1. Even rearranging your tabs with the mouse seems much more deterministic than in TST. In TST I struggle with rearranging a tab as a new child vs. as a new sibling tab.

3\. You can unload tabs or entire subtrees (collapse its children and then press the green unload button) to free your RAM.

4\. Google Drive backup feature to sync your entire tree to your other computers. You can restore your entire tree or just a subtree on an other device just via drag and drop.

I only use a subset of all Tab Outliner features but it is already giving me a much saner tab management experience than TST could do. The better keyboard support and syncing my tabs across devices while preserving the tree structure are essential features that I can't have with TST on Firefox. Personally I have more sympathy with the TST developer (always nice on GitHub) but Tab Outliner is still the better browser extension.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs- outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > you can clone it on your local machine, read through our code to verify that > it is not malicious, and then install it

I like that the authors share my concern about installing an extension that would by design record every page I visit. However the repository contains several minified Javascript files [1]. This somewhat contradicts their invitation to read through the code.

[1] [https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon/tree/master/extension/js...](https://github.com/lengstrom/falcon/tree/master/extension/js/lib)

<comment><USER7> I agree that the thirdparty javascript files also should be supplied in full, and minified during the build process.

However, I've found the originals so you can still check if they contain 'contaminated' code.

chrono: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/chrono- node](https://www.npmjs.com/package/chrono-node) \- a natural language date parser for Node and Browserify

notie: [https://www.npmjs.com/package/notie](https://www.npmjs.com/package/notie) \- a clean and simple notification, input, and selection suite for javascript, with no dependencies

readability: [https://github.com/arrix/node- readability](https://github.com/arrix/node-readability) \- Node implementation of Arc90's Readability (however seems this code has been slightly modified)

semantic: [https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic- UI](https://github.com/Semantic-Org/Semantic-UI) \- Semantic UI JS support

stopwords: list of stopwords for the english language

<comment><USER2> It serves no purpose, reviewing third-party code that you don't even know is the same that is distributed. But anyways, since Chrome has autoupdate for addons, it doesn't matter if you're reviewing the addons you install or not, because it can change at any point.

<comment><USER8> If you clone it on your local machine you also won't receive any automatic updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote an extension that did the same thing a couple years ago. [http://lifehacker.com/deeper-history-searches-the- contents-o...](http://lifehacker.com/deeper-history-searches-the-contents-of- visited-pages-1502340820)

I voluntarily removed it from the web store after realizing it was caching lots of sensitive data. I eventually started encrypting the stored info but I realized that if the extension ever became very successful, it would become a target and I wasn't comfortable with that.

I hope the developer of this extension will invest more effort in their user's security than a simple blacklist.

<comment><USER10> Seems like this extension stores all the data locally, so it's probably much less of a problem.

<comment><USER9> As did mine. There are many well known attacks that breaks locally stored data out of its sandbox. If attackers are sure there are bank account numbers, balances, email addresses, and other sensitive info in plaintext, they'll come after it.

<comment><USER11> Do you still have the code somewhere? I would like to take a look at it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really really useful extension, whoa. Searching the _content_ of pages you've browsed. I need it legitimately multiple times a day lol.

Two caveats though: 1) obviously it can't index the pages you browsed before installing the extension and 2) it's a bit unclear how to use it (in searchbar press f tab).

I'm also interested to see info on storage usage after a long time using it.

<comment><USER13> Upon installation, if you the user opted, couldn't it crawl the history up to some specific date? Or does chrome not allow extensions to access browser history?

<comment><USER9> My defunct extension did exactly that. So, yes, chrome extension can access history.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is awesome! We develop a tool that does exactly this and found that getting the search right can be really tricky given the very large volume of data. Love the simplicity of making it a chrome extension. Excited to try it out!

</comment><comment><USER15> Gifs are great to explain visually.

The gif on this page is really bad at it.

Slow it down. I have watched it loop 5 times in the last 30 secondes and I still cannot tell what it is without reading the text. I feel dizzy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Thank you for this! Many times have I wished the browser's history search could provide this.

Now that school is starting again, and I had some free time, I was thinking of working on a project that would allow to search through the websites you've visited, the documents you have on your machine, the photos and music you have on your machine (if you can run some program which generates a description for your photos and run some mp3 to lyrics program for the music), and all the same across many machines. I started looking at elasticsearch, because that is what I found during my research for the search tool I would need for this project.

</comment><comment><USER17> Kippt used to do this. Unfortunately, I never got the email that their service was shutting down. And I lost all 500+ of my tagged bookmarks.

</comment><comment><USER18> It would be great if this worked for bookmarks as well. On average I probably accumulate about 10 new bookmarks per day of notable content. Over the years that adds up.

Obviously searching pre-existing bookmarked content (and not just history) would entail far more complexity, probably requiring a back-end service.

<comment><USER9> This can be done entirely client side.

<comment><USER18> You're right. A cursory investigation suggests spinning up a bunch of client- side HTTP requests from a Chrome background page should do the trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This has been one of my favorite things in Opera since they introduced it in the late 2000s. It seemed weird Chrome wasn't better at this. I'm going to have to give this Falcon a try because it looks just like what I would want!

</comment><comment><USER20> I built something like this as well!

I wonder how you solved the data storage and indexing. Does it scale to multi- month heavy usage ? Does it deduplicate multiple visits?

Cool stuff, gotta put mine somewhere. Always planned to, but never got around to it.

<comment><USER21> Looking in the code, it loops over all the indexed text and does substring matching on tokens from the search query. Good enough for everyone so far, but...

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I made one a couple years ago called All Seeing Eye.. have not had time to update it since. Did screen capture too. On Github .

<comment><USER23> I've missed All Seeing Eye & haven't found another free solution til today. fetching.io was nice, but I really wanted a local (or self -hosted) solution.

<comment><USER14> fetching.io is self hosted on OSX at least

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very nice work, this will be useful in my day to day browsing for sure!

</comment><comment><USER25> How similar is this to fetching.io?

<comment><USER14> I can't speak to the internals of this extension but a few things jump to mind: this works with chrome, fetching.io works with Safari, Firefox and Chrome. This works on any OS that has chrome, fetching.io is only self hosted on OSX (otherwise there's a cloud version). This appears to implement its own indexing scheme, fetching.io uses elastic search. Fetching.io has it's own search UI, tagging notes etc, this is integrated directly into chrome. Which is best for you probably depends on your needs. Oh and fetching.io isn't open source ;)</comment></comment>


Roommate's Tip Led Cops to iPhone Finder - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/roommate-iphone/ <comment><USER2> _The police headed to Hogan's parents' house, also in Redwood City, and were let in by Hogan's father. They found Brian Hogan sitting on his bed with his girlfriend. When the cops told Hogan that removing evidence implied 'consciousness of guilt,' Hogan agreed to cooperate, and phoned his friend Warner, who had taken the computer gear and the stickers away in his car._

Well that was a bad move. What part of "never talk to the police" don't people understand?</comment>


Aussie data mining firm snaps PayPal co-founder - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartcompany.com.au/start-up/20111107-aussie-data-mining-firm-snaps-paypal-co-founder-as-chairman-after-11m-funding-round.html <comment><USER2> Could you change the title to mention that its Kaggle? The company has been featured on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER3> Their previous chairman was Dr Nicholas Gruen, one of Australia's most prolific and entrepreneurial economists. He runs an economics consultancy, chaired the Gov 2.0 inquiry and has a mortgage broking business on the side (!).

He blogs at Club Troppo, one of the blogs I host: <http://clubtroppo.com.au/></comment>


Adobe Flash for Android on Samsung Tab an "embarrassing disaster" - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/adobe-flash-for-samsungs-google-tab-is-an-embarrassing-disaster-2010-11

<comment><USER2> I wonder how much it affects the battery life?

Also, I wonder if the BlackBerry PlayBook will suffer from the same issues given that their whole app suite will be based on Flash?</comment>


Kavanaugh's defense of NSA phone surveillance looms as confirmation question - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/brett-kavanaughs-defense-of-nsa-phone-surveillance-looms-as-confirmation-question <comment><USER2> Also, his words on net neutrality:

"In short, although the briefs and commentary about the net neutrality issue are voluminous, the legal analysis is straightforward: If the Supreme Court's major rules doctrine means what it says, then the net neutrality rule is unlawful because Congress has not clearly authorized the FCC to issue this major rule. And if the Supreme Court's Turner Broadcasting decisions mean what they say, then the net neutrality rule is unlawful because the rule impermissibly infringes on the Internet service providers' editorial discretion. To state the obvious, the Supreme Court could always refine or reconsider the major rules doctrine or its decisions in the Turner Broadcasting cases. But as a lower court, we do not possess that power. Our job is to apply Supreme Court precedent as it stands. For those two alternative and independent reasons, the FCC's net neutrality regulation is unlawful and must be vacated."

He certainly doesn't sound like an activist judge, so Susan Collins will likely approve of him. I am very pessimistic about the future.

<comment><USER3> Would you prefer a system where law can be overruled by the stroke of an unelected administrator's pen? All he this says is that if government wants a power, it has to follow a _legal_ process to obtain it.

We _had_ net neutrality under GWB. We _lost_ it under Obama by a botched change in administration governance without corresponding legislation.

<comment><USER2> No, of course I wouldn't. I wasn't lamenting net neutrality, I was lamenting that I think he will be confirmed by means of those measured statements. The due process isn't upsetting, the fact the court will likely be regressive is.

With you having made me think about it, I'm pretty sure the supreme court judges are unelected administrators. Our Congress isn't representative, so I don't think their confirmation process is either.</comment></comment></comment>