Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again - <AUTHOR> https://www.franzoni.eu/stopping-the-internet-of-noise/ <comment> d--b As much as I really liked using IRC back in the day, I still think I spent way too much time on it. I mean you got to know the people there, and after a couple of years most discussions were like office conversations. Plus the takeovers, the trolls, the noobs, the never ending screwing around with the bots, etc.

I've never done much newsgroups because I didn't like public speaking without anonymity.

ICQ and others were like today's WhatsApp and hangout. I didn't use a single interface for them at the time, and still don't today, I don't see a big difference.

Today, I'm off Facebook, I barely follow twitter at all. I'm fine with reading hacker news, and other tech news aggregators.

I think you can lament on the disappearance of RSS, but to me, that's just about the main issue.

I guess the big difference between then and now is that we used to control better what we opted in. Now we're more force fed.

<comment><USER2> I think a lot of the nostalgia is a result of being uncomfortable dealing with people now being the "insiders" rather than the users. It's much easier to call out the new generation of users or large companies and praise old things than actually creating something relevant for today.

I've played around with creating a relevant version of things like usenet, but at the end of the day it wasn't something I wanted to work on. A large part of the work is correcting for flaws of the Internet that most "hackers" won't recognize. And while you could certainly overcome those problems, I don't think the end result would be worth it. Much of the "hacker crowd" these days aren't, in my opinion, motivated by naive curiosity and shallow idealism (like it used to be), but forced nativity to further their own interests and a opinionated demeanor. That's why many of these alternative services don't work out. Because they aren't motivated by creating something that is nice to use, but to satisfy the convoluted criteria of the creators.

<comment><USER3> Reading your comment made me nostalgic for trust.

It took a lot of effort to make a long post back in the rec. And alt. days.

I remember trip planning 19 years ago looking at trip reports. Got superior tips for my once in a lifetime Yukon vacation

I dont believe todays internet noise partially because it is too easy to opinionate. There is no effort required anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cable news' rolling coverage, but instead of the same info repeated every hour, we can now read the same thing every second...

<comment><USER5> How about implementing an RSS interface on top of the likes of Twitter and Facebook by screen scraping? Would have to take authentication of course. Then we could consume it via RSS readers just like the good ol' days. Does that already exist? I would pay for that.

<comment><USER6> Most probably it would be illegal, against each website's TOS. If such tool catches up, it will be removed - and you still need to account for upstream changes that periodically kill the functionality.

<comment><USER7> Against the TOS does not make something illegal.

<comment><USER8> Not yet - but people seem to confuse legislators and corporations more and more frequently...

<comment><USER7> Clink or Hoosegow?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My own theory about why our ability to focus on what we want to on the internet is Attention Capitalism. Our attention is the latest resource to be exploited by capitalism, and each company is attempting to control what we focus on for their profit. I've noticed this trend; very little software let's me control what information I see anymore. It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see.

<comment><USER10> > _It 's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim > I want to see._

The algorithm is known as "doing what users want". Very popular with companies and even open source projects nowadays. It works like this: you do some "analytics" of your product, or look what sells for others, assume it reflects what users want (and the things that are missing are obviously not wanted by users), and do those.

This algorithm ignores the fact that a lot of the time, users don't get _any_ way to express preferences. Users buy/use what's available and what's popular. Through this algorithm, producers make choices for the consumers, and then use statistics to justify them.

<comment><USER11> Or, worse: the discerning users or customers blot out the company (or its website) and go elsewhere.

A/B testing can't test for the users who aren't present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With all due respect, what changed since the 56k days (which I remember fondly as well) is that people showed up. Before that, the only users on the internet were early adopters. It's unreasonable to expect 'those people' to go away.

<comment><USER13> The Internet is decentralized. It doesn't matter that all the 13 year olds are congregating on Club Penguin or whatever; we can set up our own communities. That's why HN is great (and other small communities). It's intrinsically hostile to the wider internet simply by virtue of the subject and the format of its content.

<comment><USER12> The issue is when the unwanted folks follow the cool kids around. This happens a lot on Reddit. People will make a subreddit with the type of community they want. Others will join. Eventually people will complain that the quality has deteriorated. Then the cool kids will start a new one and migrate there. Rinse. Repeat... _ad infinitum_.

 _Edit: I don 't know if there's a general name for this phenomenon, but I believe it is related to network decay. [0]_

[0] [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay)

<comment><USER13> Reddit really 'dug' (see what I did there) its own grave by aggressively catering to casual users, in order to drive signups and grow the user base. I can't remember exactly what happened at which point, but it all follows the general pattern of appealing to the mass market. E.g. the curation of the frontpage via default subs such as /r/AdviceAnimals that don't really contain meaningful discussion. There's no real need to do this if one is concerned with maintaining an existing community, or the standards of it. As a counterexample, private trackers have been rather good at this, generally by having interviews/invitations for new memberships, or even disabling signups entire. Though these are really the most extreme options.

The other main problem is that like Digg, that there is a powerful cabal of moderators in control of most mainstream subreddits, including those concerned with serious topics like news and politics and they do a lot of "curation" of content by removing stuff, rather than letting the users decide on which links and topics are relevant to discussion (by, ya know... upvoting/downvoting) with chilling effects on those respective subs. That this was allowed to continue, without overhauling and maybe even democratising the moderation system of default subs, was Reddit's choice. I can only suspect that this either (a) plays into the hands of advertisers directly via corporate censorship or (b) indirectly, by relegating content from users who fall outside of the "mass-market" demographic to niche subreddits or other websites.

<comment><USER14> Curation of shitty content is also built right into the algorithm.

They'll hide behind "But people are _voting_ for this mindless content" but that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted higher than a vote after 5 minutes.

It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on. Engaging content means fewer pages viewed, which means fewer ad views.

<comment><USER11> A vote after 5 seconds _is weighted_ , or _acts as if weighted_?

If that's built into the algorithm, that's one thing. If the _social effect_ of early moderation is amplified, well, that's still a problem (and a major one), but ... of a different sort.

Citations requested.

<comment><USER15> The first graph linked below shows "hotness" as a function of time with upvotes held constant. The equations are above the linked section. Compounding this effect, there is a feedback loop where hotter elements are more likely to be seen and voted, which increases hotness logarithmically.

So no, the algorithm doesn't intentionally punish dense material. But it does happen incidentally.

[https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking- algo...](https://medium.com/hacking-and-gonzo/how-reddit-ranking-algorithms- work-ef111e33d0d9#9e88)

<comment><USER11> Right. Reddit definitely doesn't favour quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Elon Musk said that as time passes, technology continuously degrades, not improves, if people don't make a hard effort to keep improving it. The Egyptians knew how to build giant pyramids, and forgot how. The Romans built fantastic aqueducts, and forgot how. We built vehicles that landed on the moon in the 60s, and the next vehicle we built could only go into earth orbit, and then we no longer even had a vehicle that could do that.

Today, for some reason, everyone thinks that writing software for a platform on a platform on a platform with no interconnecting standards or protocols is a great idea. Instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty. You need 8 gigs of ram minimum just to browse the web, and god forbid you want to do something like back up your data. I was just in a meeting where nobody could get Google's video conferencing to work.

Instead of building _internet_ technology, we build _web_ technology. The web is harder to write software for. It's an ephemeral, inconsistent, difficult thing. But if we try really hard, we can turn the tide on the unnecessarily complex box we've forced ourselves into.

The proposed fixes are good ideas, but they're bandaids on axe wounds. There are much deeper problems going on that won't be fixed by a feature add or a pivot. We need a re-evaluation of all internet-based technology, how we develop it, how we incorporate it into our lives, and what we want as a society from it.

<comment><USER17> I'm skeptical the Egyptians simply "forgot" how to build giant pyramids (especially as pyramid construction seems to be well-documented today). It seems more likely that the age of pharoahs ended and giant pyramid construction was no longer an important skill. Technology hadn't "degraded", it had adapted.

Just like we didn't forget how to build lunar vehicles, we just decided that it wasn't worth it in its current state. It's still very possible to do another moon landing, it will just cost a ton of money that corporations won't risk and governments won't spend without a clear political goal like the old space race.

Space technology isn't degrading, it's becoming more cost-oriented. A SpaceX rocket only reached orbit but it was relatively very cheap. Cost efficiency helps space technology reach more people and create greater impact, ultimately making the technology more valuable to society.

It's the same with the web. You say that the web is bloated "instead of trying to improve people's lives" but the reason the web platform is so heavy is because the platform is rapidly adding features and APIs and tools that make it easier for developers of all skill levels to make complicated applications. Letting more developers make stuff in less time improves people's lives. Maintaining backward compatibility at the cost of bloat also improves people's lives.

Society has been constantly evaluating the web and it has consistently reached the same conclusions: RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms, and weird legacy stuff is fine if it means we can run 15 year old websites.

<comment><USER10> Those two views are equivalent - humans don't _forget_ technology; what was once invented can be reinvented (the more of the old invention remains, the cheaper it is to reinvent it). So it's always about incentives. But GP (and Elon) has a point here.

Infrastructure projects are important and what enables society to grow. Moon landings were plain awesome and had important effects on both the zeitgeist and growth of technology. That we're not incentivized to grow, _or even maintain_ them, says a lot about us, and not much of it good.

And I do think GP is right when they say: "instead of trying to improve people's lives, we're just making things needlessly complex, buggy, and bloaty." Any actual improvement to people's lives that falls off this process on the web is _incidental_. The conclusions you say we've reached, like "RAM is cheaper than developers, a slower platform with a bigger audience is worth dealing with over multiple native platforms" are not conclusions. They're _excuses_. Excused for doing shitty engineering in order to get to the market first. And anyone trying to do the things the right way moves too slow to keep up with the hype train.

Ultimately, the complaints about the way technology develops today stem from this: some people see the suboptimal solutions created by our incentive structures, and also notice there are _much better_ solutions available only a _small step_ from the path we're on - solutions we could reach if only we could relax the market pressures a little bit. This is true as much for the web (e.g. for interoperability issues and bloat issues) as it is for transportation (where electric cars finally got viable after one player basically started to shove a product into peoples' throats until the market forces gave up and accepted it).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is partly what weboob ([http://weboob.org](http://weboob.org)) wants to solve, or at least work around. Its goal is to pull the web out of browsers (hence the name):

\- each website is handled by a module that does all the scraping, or uses the api if needed

\- each module provides one or more capabilities, such as "list an account transactions" (typically for your bank or your mobile provider) or "receive and send messages" (such as HN or reddit or tinder)

\- applications plug into those capabilities and give the user functionalities, regardless of the website. You can list the schedule for your bus just as well as the schedule for carpoolings.

One of the applications is actually a daemon with the capability to send and receive messages (with threading and all) and sends messages to the email adress of your choice; you can also configure it as an smtp mta, which means you can use any mail client and interact with all your discussion websites without ever opening the browser.

Obviously this is not a perfect solution for OP's problems, but it seems to me it's going in the right direction. Oh and it doesn't stop at websites; I use it for sending RSS feeds to my email in the background.

<comment><USER19> Am I the only one who read the name and thought this was a porn site?

I think the service would reach a greater audience with a simpler name.

(Btw I still don't get how the creator wants me to read the name and what it means)

<comment><USER20> I suspect the name was deliberate (look at the site's logo).

Either way, it definitely might struggle to get a bit more traction with that name/domain. It's like a modern day Pen Island or Experts Exchange.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > But we need a common API ... so that people can use their favourite tools

Yup, that's _exactly_ what made the internet great in the good old days.

But how do you monetize users who get to use their favoirite tools _instead of yours?_

<comment><USER22> Perhaps some form of decentralized hosting to offload the costly aspect of hosting an online community to its members? The percentage of people with access to ample broadband connections at home is increasing constantly, and bittorrent proved that distributing large amounts of data amongst peers can be done without centralized hosting.

It would be pretty neat if everyone could simply buy or configure some low- power hardware (like a router in both size, cost, and energy consumption) and have that become their internet 'home'. When participating in a community that supports the protocol used, that device simply allocates an amount of bandwidth and does its share of distributing content to the swarm. All a community would need is a central place to host the data needed to get started. Anyone could set up a new community with a minimum of means.

If technique used is standardized (and open) and gained popularity, service providers could even create hosting packages that do the hosting of your internet 'home' for you for a small monthly fee, so you don't have to bother with setting up your own device (although you could, and should always be able to).

This kind of concept probably exists of course. The challenge lies in getting it both technologically feasible for mass-scale adoption, and simple enough for anyone to participate. Still, doesn't this make sense for a future were we won't be as depended on a handful of commercial silos?

<comment><USER23> This has been tried in various forms, and always fails for a few reasons:

\- Spam. When the cost of bandwidth goes to zero, the most useless freeloaders are enabled with no negative consequences for their pollution.

\- Media storage. There is a huge demand for storage of (pirated) movies, tv, music or video games, which sucks up the vast bulk of volume. Entertainment needs monopolize communication resources to the detriment of knowledge preservation and freedom of expression.

\- Legal and other liability. Aside from the piracy, there's child porn, private information, politically sensitive topics, etc. Society wants an accountability mechanism and will destroy or discredit platforms that lack it.

Commercial silos tend to address all three. Social media in particular is effective at #1 by leveraging the social graph as a filtering and reputation system. Which means once people are invested in their profile or channel, you can wield it as leverage to ensure compliance with #2 or #3.

There are still huge pieces missing to do this in a decentralized and federated way. For starters, a reputation and identity system that is not fully public and transitive. And also, a return to the willingness to tolerate violations of #2 and #3 on a local scale for the sake of intellectual freedom, which the contemporary web sorely lacks.

Email isn't even an exception. Becoming a reputable sender is hard, the data volume is still limited, and the privacy protection is laughable in the wild.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm going to write a chat app built on IRC that gradually uses more and more RAM, and adds new features while breaking old ones.

Just as it has everything MSN used to have ill have it shut down, rename itself and its website and start all over again.

<comment><USER25> Ping me. I'm really excited about this.

<comment><USER26> Pong

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Did we get to this point of fragmentation due to smart phones and their walled garden philosophy? People stopped making applications for the sake of interoperability. ... if RealAudio™ was founded today it'd be king.

Or is facebook to blame? John Gilmore famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." \-- he was wrong, censorship just has to wait for the right monopoly to appear. And with the success of monopoly interoperability becomes its casualty

<comment><USER28> Amazon and Facebook, to me, are symptoms of a deeper problem: Technology is still hard. We're building complex large-scale products because the non- technical consumers can't use the simple small-scale products.

We're here because it's convenient, not because it's _good._

I always felt that Google should have created simple tools for web publishing and creating personal walled-gardens - make the web personal for 7 billion non-technical humans, and the brands they consume. Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

G+ copied Facebook when they should have studied why people were using Facebook instead of the open web. Don't make the problem worse, fixed _those_ problems; take the role of guardian of the internet. Create or support standard APIs, release relevant IP/research, and bankroll SV startups that build the tools to publish or consume through the open web.

Google is still an ad/search company that relies on the open web. They need to protect it and drive further innovation. What happens after the coming adpocalypse - micropayments? Subscription bundles? Who knows? Or, perhaps we'll be chained to ads forever because we'll be locked into walled-garden apps... what a hell that would be.

Are there any companies working in this space? Closest I've seen is Squarespace, and even then... not really...

<comment><USER29> > Surely there must be something in between Facebook and Jekyll/Hugo.

I guess Wordpress is an example. It's got a hosted plan, which requires little more computer literacy than Facebook, and you can also leave at any time and self-host the software, which keeps the hosted offering honest. But it's just not as contagious as something like Facebook. That's the problem, Facebook isn't just more 'convenient' than self-hosted tools, it also has your friends tagging you in photos.

<comment><USER28> I'd argue that, in terms of features, Wordpress is little better than Jekyll/Hugo. Social integration is the aspect that's missing. Chat, access control, tagging, push/pull update, etc.

I envision this is a two part problem: the "back-end", one-click install or oauth register services to create your private space and identity (possibly a VPS or agglomeration of AWS services) for sending/receiving emails, direct messages, tags (push), and friend posts, group updates, news subscriptions (pull), plus APIs for search, access control, creating/managing your own content, so on; and the front-end, a glorified RSS reader for using the above services through standard APIs.

That's the challenge. The solution is _way_ more complex then the existing offerings, like WP or other simple blogs, but all that complexity must be buried away so it's at least as easy as registering to Facebook.

It's possible, all of the constituent problems have been tackled separately... what's lacking is a unified standard, comprehensive tools, and stable (corporate) backing.

<comment><USER28> and I kinda wonder how much of this ultimately falls on ISPs for not building out high speed internet... it's not inconceivable to imagine an always on "social network" box, or more options for home servers

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> _I 'm not saying we should get back to IRC or to NNTP._

I am. Not in the sense of go back to using them for everyting (they're still there if you want to), but int eh sense of building some new protocols on those existing foundations. NNTP was _really good_ given its technical limitations. TBH I think part of the secret of Facebook's success is that it hews to the same ethos of standardization and simplicity, as opposed to myspace which quickly feel victim to its own customizability and ended up being as chaotic and hard to navigate as the web itself.

</comment><comment><USER31> "Nowadays we have people instead of topics. I have nothing against people, but maybe, if I follow a great software architect, I'd like to hear what he's got to say about software, not about other shits."

That's so true. I want to follow some people on Twitter because sometimes they tweet very useful things, but the amount of "noise"/tweets I don't care about is too high. Tons of people put very good info on Twitter because is quick and easy compared to writing a blog post.

</comment><comment><USER32> Yeah, I'm old as well. Things change. Not for the better maybe, but you can't turn back the clock.. the only way forward is to make something new and better.

<comment><USER33> I'm still using RSS without issue. Funny thing is, i didn't really use it back in the day, I've just gravitated toward the best UX available over the years.

<comment><USER34> This. Many stuff is still there for who want to use them. I use feeds, email and nntp everyday. Also paper books, fountain pens. And also WhatsApp. I don't get the need that the stuff I use to be justified by its popularity or its newness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty- four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilivy, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

Anonymous publisher, as quoted by Hamilton Holt, _Commercialism and Journalism_ , 1909.

[https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/2...](https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/20/mode/2up)

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe what people want is a centralised web, not a "good practice" web ? This is not what I want but as a matter of fact, that may be what majority wants. I wonder how devs/techies people think they know the truth for other people.

What changed a lot of things are modern apps and their new features : push notifications, infinite scrolls (attention killer) or adding a f... emoji (I miss smileys personnaly). The rest is just filling empty boxes about what people want/need : a chat for friend, a chat for work, a single feed and not 10's of website to search to have a single information. All I think is missing is local web, all is considered as world and then maybe local, people don't talk to each other in the bars, they prefer now to use Tinder and Facebook to insult themselves.

<comment><USER36> The people want a working web. They don't care if it's centralized or decentralized, and most probably never even lost a thought about it.

"Techies" think that they know better because they are the first to be impacted and have noticed the shortcomings of a centralized web.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I think this is related to monetization, since the web gets "louder" to attract advertising consumers. Most companies are actually advertising companies and the users are just part of the product (sold to advertisers). Maybe we need more paid services - and the will to pay.

I'm thinking about creating a hierarchical forum like the usenet, but I'm sceptical whether this would earn enough money to work in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm very much for this. I have five messaging apps, two email clients, three file storage apps and a news reader all on my iPhone - just to stay in touch. It's hard to stay organised when businesses use different technologies across different platforms and there's no single place just for "Messages".

I don't care how the message is sent, I just want to make sure it gets to the right person.

</comment><comment><USER39> Don't worry. I'm in the process of solving this.

The solution was in front of us all this time. It's the semantic web. What was missing is an accessible client, and it will be available soon.

Imagine one giant unified semantic decentralized database of everything. Add smart contracts, quantified self, intent inferring, and binary input (à la Tinder or Akinator). Organize this on a timeline, so that your OS becomes a task management system. That's it.

Unfortunately, my strategy is to target kids that haven't yet be corrupted by current communication paradigms. I think 5 to 12 year old is the sweet spot. Older people will be able to use it, but I don't know if they'll be able to grasp the full potential. Only time will tell.

<comment><USER40> > one giant unified database of everything

That's Google (almost; not everything is online). No need for the semantic web at all, or to wait for your vaporware 'solution'.

<comment><USER41> _That 's Google (almost; not everything is online)._

As a (presumably) end user, do you think that the interface provided by Google is database-like?

<comment><USER40> query; results. So yeah. It's easy enough to scrape. All this stuff about structured data is trying to find something that isn't there to begin with. If you want structure from unstructured data then use machine learning, don't try to sell everyone a "semantic data format" they have no incentive to use.

<comment><USER41> How do you do JOINs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Whenever I come across a new Twitter handle I think of following I first run it through [http://www.tweetstats.com](http://www.tweetstats.com). I check one simple data there:

         Number of tweets per day (tpd); and also maybe tweets per month (tpm)

If the handle is churning out more than ~10 tweets per day I tend to stay away. Because if even a couple of hanldes I follow crosses _30 tpd_ or so my feed will pretty much become pointless unless I am glued to my feed all the time and I would miss a lot of good content.

Another big problem is repeated content as the article suggests - I follow a quite some literary Twitter handles and longform handles. Everyday I come across just too many tweets that link to the same article. What is worse sometimes the same handles tweet about the same articles repeatedly (to get more views I reckon) with different texts. I usually end up unfollowing many of those handles and that means I actually going to miss a lot of content that I would have otherwise liked but in a _moderate dose_ , at a slower pace.

I request my friends/family members to remove me form there WhatsApp broadcast lists and after sometime I simply tell them if they don't stop with that daily "Good Morning/Evening" forwards and all that crap I am simple gonna block them. I wish WhatsApp let me remove myself from all the broadcast lists I am added to or let me choose that I don't want to receive broadcast messagegs at all (if they can't/won't make it granular).

I've completed given up on Facebook. Sometimes it shows me posts that I've marked hide like five times. It never keeps my friends photos, self written text posts on top but all those video and silly article shares, those annoying and mostly unfunny memes. In fact they have a limit I guess (haven't really used them in a while) and the _personal_ posts get drowned in the mass market noise.

Maybe the problem is we talk of Internet being decentralised but we are all try to find that decentralized Internet at any one place or vert few places - be it Twitter, or Facebook, Google. We are adopting the social networks, content sources wrong... maybe.

</comment><comment><USER43> I am excited at the proliferation of Mastodon servers. Every cohesive tribe that can afford a $15/month VPS should set one up and ditch Facebook.

<comment><USER44> Maybe that'd help ditch Twitter, but not Facebook. There needs to be a better (de-centralized) solution for writing that's longer that also provides the ability to add photos, videos, etc. The substitute for Facebook should be like Facebook in almost every way in terms of features to get better adoption, with improvements in several areas where Facebook is weaker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The internet is definitely getting noisier but I don't get his "solutions", especially about "blogging". What does it ever mean "I think most of us won't discuss about so many totally unrelated different fields. It's a change of mentality - we shouldn't write something just because we can."? He makes it sound as if there are tons of irrelevant blogs out there spewing nonsense and polluting people's experiences, while in fact the people who blog are still the absolute minority. I particularly agree with the idea of "blog small things", since no matter how "small" your experience might seem to be, there could well be somebody else facing a similar situation who can be helped by your article. Also I don't understand his "blog with focus" thing. Many of us are not writing blogs as commercial projects. We are just blogging whatever we find might be helpful to others and in this sense there's absolutely no point in overthinking it. Just blog whatever you want. I get that he might be unsatisfied with the rambling _comments_ in many websites and forums. But come on, what does that have the least bit to do with blogging and "write just because we can"?

</comment><comment><USER46> And apparently there are now state-sponsored sources of noise.

Wasn't there an RFC finalized recently for a site-independent comment system?

<comment><USER47> Do you remember anything about the name of this? I am very interested in contributing!

<comment><USER48> I think that is called Web Annotation: [https://www.w3.org/annotation/](https://www.w3.org/annotation/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> If anyone is wondering, Usenet is still alive.

<comment><USER50> Recommendations on a good Windows client?

<comment><USER51> Whatever you use, make sure it's a dedicated NNTP client and not some e-mail client that also "does" NTTP as a side stint.

<comment><USER52> how come?

<comment><USER53> Because Thunderbird sucks, as do other email clients that claim to also support news. As an email app it's below average, but as a newsreader it's downright horrible.

A good newsreader needs to be able to thread and block and filter and preview binaries. Few apps ever did this well, and many that did have since become obsolete (Pan2, Unison, etc).

With the rise of Windows and the decline of Usenet, the demand for newsreaders faded fast, leaving few or no supported freeware newsreaders alive today. Even commercial newsreader apps are increasingly rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Frankly I think what is missing is an understanding of statistics.

Even having "1000 friends", which sounds amazing, is statistically insignificant when we are talking about populations of millions or billions. Think about the last "really long thread" you read on Reddit or something, and think about when you tuned out: was it a few dozen comments, maybe a few hundred? Still statistically insignificant, or at the very least severely biased.

People are regularly exposed to, and worse _respond to_ , statistically biased samples. This is a really, really bad thing. What we need is a way to almost forcibly blend samples from many different populations so that the number of comments you can "stand" is a more representative sample. That way, when you get up in arms about "what people think", it might actually _represent_ what "people" think instead of "my friends" or whatever other biased sample is out there.

<comment><USER55> I'd like to see better moderation systems. Moderation done by people who are actually good at it rather than just upvoting or downvoting comments depending on whether they agree with them or not (moderating the moderators). Ways to mark comments as duplicates so they are all grouped into one bundle. A way to avoid the "first posts" effect, where the earlier posts are likely to be the highest rated regardless of their merits.

Aggregators like Hacker News are already part of a solution; putting interesting articles in one place so that we don't have to subscribe to 10^8 personal blogs and fringe tech sites.

<comment><USER25> Begs the question: what are the best moderation systems in software? Are there any?

<comment><USER56> I always thought slashdot had a pretty good moderation system. Would in most cases separate the wheat from the chaff leading to excellent comment threads

<comment><USER57> Yeah meta-moderation, limited mod points and a secret algorithm for earning mod points based on reputation works pretty well. Oh.. and a maximum score for comments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> The internet era our author mentions was not dominated by companies whose investors measure success by "engagement" \-- that is, by wasting our time.

FB and Twitter measure success by engagement. That means they don't have the incentive to organize our information and save us time.

(Gotta go... Hacker News is about to tell me to get back to work!)

</comment><comment><USER59> What do you think about Reddit? Topics are enforced and have an API.

<comment><USER60> The same thing happens to every subreddit. It's good, people like it, it grows very large, the quality of submissions goes down (or the same content gets reposted constantly). People are incentivized by their visible "karma" score to post mass amounts of low-effort content.

<comment><USER61> I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have no real incentive to increase it.

I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any popular question are usually very low-effort answers from posters who really shouldn't have answered at all. I wonder if it's an example of their otherwise well-executed reputation system creating noise that might have been avoided.

<comment><USER56> Out of curiosity, does any one know of any research or articles into reputation systems in general?

<comment><USER11> Randy Farmer's "Building Web Reputation Systems" is a good start:

[http://buildingreputation.com](http://buildingreputation.com)

There's a blog, book, and wiki.

Some keyword searches: [http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3A+online+reputation+sys...](http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3A+online+reputation+systems&qt=results_page)

[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=online%20reputation%20s...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=online%20reputation%20systems&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I still use NNTP every day. I've never used Usenet, but it's very useful (through Gmane and Gnus) as a way to follow mailing lists. Also, the internal forums at $DAYJOB support connecting through NNTP, which is extremely convenient.

Likewise I use IRC every day, through Bitlbee, to interact with people on Facebook Messenger and other platforms.

I can do all of this from my client of choice (I choose Emacs) without a problem.

Admittedly this doesn't solve the problem of topicality, but I think things are better than they seem.

</comment><comment><USER63> The problem is that it appears most people actually want noise, and it's becoming especially apparent as a lot of these content channels become more mainstream.

Anyone who's been on Reddit for the majority of the site's existence will probably have noticed monumental shifts in popular content, which I feel is essentially a movement away from serious diverse discussion towards entertainment and self validation.

I don't think I'd be going out on a limb to say a large amount of HN readers are interested in serious discourse, and I wouldn't be surprised to find there are many like me who feel completely alienated by modern Reddit. Previously it was enough to just ignore the default subs, but the momentum has become so strong that it has become pervasive even in niche subs.

I've been thinking about it a lot recently, probably mostly stemming from nostalgia of what Reddit used to be, but I feel something that is quite important is identifying that different people are interested in different content, an that nobody is really entitled to stop others enjoying the category of content they want to consume.

I don't care about entertainment on Reddit, and I particularly don't care about image macros, in-jokes and one liners. I absolutely love the high effort informational posts and discussions though, and some of them are truly insightful. I yearn for a mechanism to reliably filter out most of the entertainment things and promote the high effort content. I'd love for it to stay some form of voting mechanism though as it seems really effective when the community votes using congruent inclinations.

The Slashdot voting system worked using a classification system (interesting, funny, etc.) but that is hardly good supporting evidence for content classification as it didn't work particularly well, perhaps because it was so limited (votes themselves were limited in quantity.)

My current line of thinking is using emoji reactions might be an interesting option like you see on GitHub comments. If I want to avoid the entertainment posts I could filter out posts which predominantly have the laughing emoji. There is evidence that emoji reactions themselves are compelling enough to be used, and possibly more compelling than the style of categorisation that Slashdot used.

I feel that it's fundamentally important that a system like this needs to integrate into existing communities somehow, as there's no point having it if there's no content to apply it to. This is probably the hardest part but possibly also a very compelling part, having a content indexing / classification system might also be a way to centralise a lot of this content.

This post got a little long winded and ranty so apologies for that, but I've been wanting to get these thoughts in writing for a little while. If anyone has any ideas around this general topic I'd love to hear. I've gotten to the point where I'd like to invest energy into attempting to solve it.

<comment><USER64> My view has always been that after a day of work or school, the last thing most people want to do is engage in a deep discussion. Instead they want to scroll down funny content (I do this myself or just play video games, just in case I sound like a snob).

<comment><USER10> In a way it's good that many people do that _during_ work/school time, leaving some cognitive reserves for an actually productive evening.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Now we have great discussion forums and link aggregators where a small group of moderators rule over a very large number of places and will frequently go on power trips, dominate discussion (or coddle a power user) and, not rarely enough, engage in doxxing.

One thing that keeps me returning to YC is that I'm not even reminded of the existence of moderators over here.

</comment><comment><USER66> Indeed. I miss the days of IRC and such. The internet started feeling really noisy after the iPhone was popularized.

<comment><USER67> This. It's because of smartphones. People don't write things on smartphones, it's tedious.

<comment><USER66> It also brought a lot of people online who previously were not. Desktops were stashed in some room, one per household, and laptops were still seen as somewhat nerdy or work related.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Walled gardens and a "protectionist web" are the natural outcome of the legal structure we've chosen to put up around the internet. It's not a technical limitation, and technical solutions can not really affect it.

Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the policies of various content providers.

Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way that displeases the server's owner.

There is no technical limitation stopping people from collecting and curating data from many sources and combining/filtering them according to their own interest. The internet is _already_ open in principle (cue Schneier: "trying to make digital bits not copiable is like trying to make water not wet"). The issue is that we've given the Facebooks and Googles of the world the right to hold our data and our personal networks hostage.

Start a decentralized, standardized protocol like email or IRC and companies will cooperate insofar as they must to ride the wave, and then they will work aggressively to corner things off into their own little world.

Understand, all software companies want one thing: lock-in. They want to make it so that there is as much pressure as possible to remain on their platform. It's the age-old story of someone who can't move to Mac, even though they greatly envy it, because their greeting card program from 1997 won't work on it. Instead of importable programs, it's importable personal networks -- but now, with everything server-side, it's usually illegal to try to bridge that gap on the user's behalf (insofar as doing so involves contacting the server of a competitor).

The situation with potential copyright and patent violations was precarious enough when it was all occurring on the user's local machine (WINE is in a big legal grey area, for example; my instinct is WINE would lose if MS ever decided to seriously try to squash them), but once you cross the line into some company's IP space, all bets are off. The CFAA allows them to define "authorized access" to their servers on their own terms, including "people trying to access our server to provide data portability". This has already been litigated with specific regard to Facebook in _Facebook v. Power Ventures_.

As long as we give companies the legal tools to exert effective ownership over user-generated data, we are destined to see well-designed, decentralized protocols that maximize availability, resiliency, and portability get whittled away by the overriding corporate interest in establishing some element that can be used to keep users locked in.

The Halloween memos may have caused a stir in the late 90s, and they're all but forgotten now, but their sentiment is more alive than ever.

<comment><USER69> > Just this week there was a "Show HN" that combined data from Twitter et al > in interesting ways. It was offline less than 24 hours later as all the > comments indicated that it was a clear violation of the policies of various > content providers.

I missed that. What's the HN URL?

> Why should we care about those policies? Well, because under the CFAA, we've > made it a federal crime to send packets to a server in a way that displeases > the server's owner.

There are ways to avoid such oversight. Consider, for example, Sci-Hub or TPB or third-generation dark markets. What's hard is doing that at scale. And that, I believe, is a huge niche that's aching to be filled.

<comment><USER10> > _There are ways to avoid such oversight. Consider, for example, Sci-Hub or > TPB or third-generation dark markets. What 's hard is doing that at scale. > And that, I believe, is a huge niche that's aching to be filled._

TPB and BitTorrent helps move files. Sci-Hub helps move a particular type of files (scientific papers). So maybe we need a TPB/BitTorrent for _data streams_? Some way of moving around generalized access to and results from APIs of server platforms?

<comment><USER47> The question is whether we're fetching this off of the same APIs i.e. Twitter themselves are using, or if we're scraping it from server-side rendered sites. If we're attemtping to do it via their open APIs we're going to be hitting rate-limits, and probably also face liability. What if there was some service that you could run on different computers, that each had their Twitter API tokens, and then we'd distribute the requests to different hosts, so that it could not be tracked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> We are working to restore the openness of online discussion with Lyra: www.hellolyra.com. We aim to provide helpful services for conversation, not to get users addicted.

We have made the choice to focus around people and conversations rather than topics (because Lyra is designed to be harrassment-proof, and topics lead easily to harrassment - you don't see this so much in the tech world but in the mainstream it's a huge problem).

We are currently thinking about the best way to do notification aggregation (Facebook does this very badly - several comments on the same conversation will give you several different notifications) and marking-as-read. We have several interesting options in test at the moment.

<comment> d--b Just some thoughts: putting the full message in the discussion tree means that people will tend to write shorter / comment-like messages, and not in-depth argumentations.

On the other end, having only a tree of authors is a bit to slim, cause you have to read the content of each message to know what's going on. I think people who reply to a thread should give it a "reply title". You know it's the same thread, but you can have an idea of the content with the reply title.

<comment><USER70> Thanks for your thoughts!

Are you suggesting that every reply should have a title?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> As someone who remembers being uber frustrated at having to use trillian to talk to all of my friend, I disagree, there was major fragmentation back then as well. Also for which BBS you were on, which friends were on AOL or other nerfed internet.

<comment><USER72> It was _possible_ to use and create trillian. Now I need to have slack, Hangouts and WhatsApp web open independently

<comment><USER73> It kinda is possible. You can use Franz: [http://meetfranz.com](http://meetfranz.com)

<comment><USER47> Would trust this service, if I could read the source. I don't know what the plan with MeetFranz is, but since it isn't open source, something tells me that there at some point will be monetization involved. Monetization isn't bad, but it also will at some point cause misalignment between it and the users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Medium is quickly becoming the central place for programming articles, and it's ridiculous they don't offer an API.

Check it out: [https://github.com/Medium/medium-api- docs/issues/91](https://github.com/Medium/medium-api-docs/issues/91)

More of these website are just becoming data silos and not sharing their data. Unfortunately I don't know of a better place to write programming content. [https://sergiotapia.me](https://sergiotapia.me)

If you're a developer and you care about this, like I do, where would you recommend we write articles sans-self hosting?

<comment><USER75> You could just push your stuff to github.io...

<comment><USER76> Or on your own website. Get your own domain! Host some static files!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> It's not that these points aren't valid; they are, and I know some people who've been rightfully hammering the exact same points for, well, decades, at this point.

But we arrived here neither out of pure accident or grand overarching malice, but simply out of the necessity of the now-commercial web and its lack of good business models, and perverse incentives.

Back when most of the traffic on the Internet was academic, institutional, government, or hobbyist, the incentives were to get the content out there and interoperate with others, because the dissemination of the information was seen as having intrinsic value, and the expenses were covered by out-of-band means (i.e. not monetized through the content or the consumers).

On today's particular flavor of a commercial web, especially when your next funding round depends on showing user numbers, easy out-migration is a liability, easy in-migration is a feature, so even the use of APIs frequently helps the product and the company more so than it helps the user.

When commercial entities started appearing on the Internet, particularly on the World Wide Web, some sites were pure billboards containing only an about page and contact information, e-commerce sites funded the operation through selling actual wares, but news/media/entertainment sites brought with them their previously trailblazed business model of giving away content and trying to recoup some of the cost with advertising. Later, VC-funded content silos took a page from early hobbyist web forums (that were mediocre reimagining of BBSes) and created login-walled playgrounds that funnel the content inward, making it easier to track, analyze, and monetize. It's no surprise that today's four largest display ad servers are Google, Facebook, Verizon/Yahoo/AOL, and Twitter.

Other business models only work for specialized players who can command some brand awareness and attract a discriminating customer willing to pay for quality (e.g. big-name or niche newspapers, streaming media sites, data brokers); and, as the HN meme goes, micropayments get much more interest from those who want to collect them than those who want to pay for them, so the everyman's market is full of me-too sites vying for limited attention, or captive content silos that re-create everything on the inside. The battle is largely lost, unless realistic progress is made in the web monetization space.

Luckily, there are no technical barriers to people banding together and making interoperable services like the way things used to be -- and keeping up the protocols that make that a reality. It's just that they will have to contend with the realities of playing in that space and competing with similar offerings that don't. Havens on the old web, or the old Internet for that matter still exist, just like amateur radio still exists along with public access television. It's just not where the mainstream attention-hours go.

<comment><USER3> As i read your well said reply i only know one thing: it will?change again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78>
      > Can't mark things as read
      > ...
      > it could resurface at any time

Except that you can't come close to consuming content faster than it's produced on things like Facebook. That's what the news feed is for, taking the massive stream of _stuff_ that your friends and pages are generating, and prioritizing it. I don't think it generally shows you things you've already seen before.

</comment><comment><USER79> > Incidentally, this is not a call for the open internet; I could not care > less if there's a leading provider for content, as long as such content is > accessible in a standard way.

There is such a provider and it's called Facebook, that is if you don't care about the open internet is exactly what you get.

</comment><comment><USER80> For all that RSS is "dead", it sure still seems to be everywhere. A few big- name sites like Twitter shut their feeds down, sure. Out in the rest of the web, I can't think of the last time I looked at a site or a blog that didn't have a pretty usable feed.

</comment><comment><USER40> If you want to focus on something, just google it - depending on what it is you'll get Wikipedia, some blog posts, and maybe a book or two on the subject.

What Facebook / Twitter / Blogger / etc. are good for is providing context - _why_ should I be interested in something. Generally it's as simple as "I like Mr. X and he's interested in Y". They're also reasonable at finding new topics to explore, although if you dive deep enough it turns out that everything is interconnected and you'll find it anyway.

It's really hard to define "topic" or "noise" in a way that isn't based on search keywords or (facets of) people.

</comment><comment><USER81> > Once was IRC

Seriously?

<comment><USER6> Uuh, despite the enormous attention, the article was written in just about an hour, and I'm not a native English speaker; that error slipped through the cracks. Thanks for pointing it out.

<comment><USER81> I was very tired when I wrote that, my apologies.

What I meant was that IRC is still alive and kicking.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Price Optimization API - <AUTHOR> https://pricingengine.io <comment><USER2> This sounds like the multi-armed bandit problem...

No need for fancy ML here - it's a thoroughly understood mathematical problem...

Unless of course you're using parameters of the user (browser, purchase history, interests, favourite pet, etc.)...?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right although multi-armed bandit problem doesn't address all the problems in the real world. E.x. adding different slot machines (prices) intelligently, or discounting past data without using magic parameters

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Typo on your middle card FYI

"Out ML algorithm will converge to a price that maximizes revenue, sales times price."

<comment><USER2> It also assumes the cost of providing service is zero....

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch. It's aimed at software companies at the moment although it could just take into account marginal cost in the future

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't use anything like this - it's morally bankrupt.

If everyone who sold anything used tools like this to maximize revenue, we'd all be bled dry, even more than we are now.

Protect your customers, remember they're your top stakeholder!

Your goal should be to find a balance between meeting costs, providing affordable value to your customers, and generating a reasonable profit.

Otherwise, you're part of the disease.

WILDE.TWAIN.

<comment><USER2> I don't agree.

The price which maximizes revenue isn't always the highest price.

This API could equally suggest a lower price, bringing in more customers who get more utility of your service.

In a good market with lots of competition, the best strategy for the seller also leads to the best result for the buyer.</comment></comment>


This tiny video camera makes everything you shoot look amazing - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/rylo-video-camera/ <comment><USER2> >"You asked what convinces people to work with us? That's it. It's always the video."

And yet the article has no video? Their landing page has the actual video: [https://www.rylo.com/](https://www.rylo.com/)

or if you just want a direct link: [https://player.vimeo.com/video/240323835](https://player.vimeo.com/video/240323835)

<comment><USER3> The video makes me ponder... Since when did it become normal to run along the edges of sheer rock walls? I've been noticing a lot more of this stuff lately on Youtube as if it's crossed some mainstream threshold. Extremely dangerous behavior with very low payoff to offset it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The article talks about 3 videos that the reviewer was wowed by... but has neither the videos nor links to videos. For a native advertisement piece, this is not the greatest one.

<comment><USER5> This looks like all their videos: [https://www.rylo.com/shotonrylo/](https://www.rylo.com/shotonrylo/)

<comment><USER6> that's an awful lot of lens distortion when they pan up/down still, it's honestly really distracting and takes away from the "seemless" effect quite a bit. randomly having fisheye effects that appear and disappear is more jarring than just having them at a constant level like most action cams

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like a GoPro/action camera clone that has image stabilization. I have shot a lot with action cameras, but ended up never editing it or sharing it. I think they're addressing a real issue with making it super easy to edit/share. Also, Apple should be making things easier for device makers to seamlessly transfer data.

</comment><comment><USER8> I scrolled all the way down for a sample that was not there. Can't believe someone wrote an article about a video camera and did not include a single sample.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is it waterproof/water-resistant? One part of the video makes me think so, but I was unable to find any more details on that.

</comment><comment><USER10> But none of the said footage is shown. So I have no idea if the footage is really fantastic, as the author claims.

</comment><comment><USER11> I must confess the video is making me feel pretty sick. Anyone else feels the same thing ?

<comment><USER12> Someone risking certain death for a promotional video is pretty nauseating.

<comment><USER13> "Risking certain death" is an interesting saying. Reminds me of George Carlin's rant against the term "self-help".

<comment><USER12> The main page video is of someone running and leaping along a narrow path on a precipice. There is a significant risk that they could trip or slip and fall. Such a fall would not be survivable.

They are not risking a fall with some possibility of death (or perhaps just a grazed knee), they are risking certain death. You fall, you die.

I have no idea what George Carlin's rant against the term "self-help" has to do with this, but it was pretty funny. So, thanks?

<comment><USER14> I suspect that cliff side isn't as steep as it looks - the steepness is being exaggerated by the camera's fisheye lens. The path looks like the sort of ridge trail used by skiers in the winter.

Also, the path isn't _that_ narrow, so the chance of tripping and falling _off_ the path (especially assuming they already know the route) seems minimal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "breakthrough stabilization technology"

Does this mean mechanical-stabilization of some form (like a free-floating lens mechanism)? Or software-stabilization (usually implies heavily cropping the pic)?

<comment><USER16> From the camera alone there's no obvious gimbal so unless they're tricking everyone and using an attached gimbal it's probably just cropping. Nothing new, honestly. Sony's higher end cameras all do a pretty good job, but still requires some touch up in post. I imagine their demo reel has a lot of color correction applied too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The one thing I look for in any action camera is the ability to hook it up to my PC and use it as a web camera. Cheap $30 spy glasses cams from China have this feature almost universally. Even my old Vivitar pocket digital camera did this.

Why do newer more expensive cameras tend to not have this function? Especially in the case of this camera, being able to do a live video from my laptop and simply frame the shot or control it live would be perfect when I'm doing something like live lapidary lessons. Such a simple feature that would guarantee a sale from me, something most cheap ubiquitous cameras have, yet it's not present.</comment>


Two Men, 58 Years and Counting. A Love Story. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/nyregion/58-years-and-counting-a-love-story.html

<comment><USER2> A wonderful, cute, and inspiring love story (that you can appreciate whether you're gay or straight).

Yes, I know, not Hacker or Tech related, but that doesn't matter. Read it and enjoy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Felt the same way and thought I should share. The part where he says: ""The pattern now seems to be, everybody has to reveal, 'I'm gay!' " Mr. Leedom said. "But the word didn't exist in our life, and we just were. It wasn't something you had to ever articulate. It didn't matter..." I found that particularly interesting. My understanding of modern day gay culture is that coming out is a type of rite of passage. To them that concept seemed foreign in a way.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best hosting solution for a startup? - <AUTHOR>

Dearest HN Network,
Assuming a budget of about $100/month, what are the best cloud hosting solutions available?  What should one be aware of in choosing a cloud based hosting solution?
Please discuss. <comment><USER2> It has been discussed here. Numerous times. Use google or the HNSearch link, below.

The unanimous result of the discussion, in case you're curious and don't want to look it up, was that everyone doing any kind of startup anywhere should click on the affiliate link in this article;-)

<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a very broad question. Heroku has dead simple deployment for Ruby applications; see the pricing page to play with options. Also it's free for very low usage applications, but scales up easily. VPS offering from Amazon, Linode, Rackspace, Slicehost, etc have a minimum threshold around $25-ish.</comment>


Seven Puzzles You Think You Must Not Have Heard Correctly (2006) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://math.dartmouth.edu/~pw/solutions.pdf <comment><USER2> Ah, I love these kind of puzzles!

Here's another one, similiar to the first one (Names in Boxes). Apologies for any incorrections in advance.

There are 100 prisoners. At random times one prisoner is chosen uniformly at random and led into a room with a single lamp. The prisoner can choose to switch it on or off or leave it as the last visiting prisoner left it. Apart from the state of the lamp he must leave the room unchanged.

After visiting the room, each prisoner is asked if every prisoner has visited the room by now. If he answers 'Yes' and indeed everyone has been to the room at least once, then everybody is freed immediately. Otherwise they are all executed ;) He can answer 'I don't know' without any consequences.

Apart from the lamp being on or off the prisoners have no way of communication at all, but of course as is customary in such puzzles they can plot a strategy in advance and everybody is a perfect logician.

So, to clarify: The goal is for one prisoner to be 100% sure that everybody has been to the room at least once. The "easiest" solution would simply be to wait a few billion years (it's an abstract puzzle, they are all immortal anyways ;). But of course there is a more elegant solution that terminates earlier.

Also, as the time for a visit is chosen at random a prisoner has no way of knowing who the previous person in the room was. It might just as well have been himself!

As there is some randomness involved, it is theoretically possible that the goal state never happens. Just assume that in the limit everybody will have visited the room infinitely often ;)

In other words: Implement synchronization between 100 threads with only one bit of shared memory and completely random scheduling.

<comment><USER3> Let F be the only person who is permitted to turn the light oFF. The N be every body else---they will be turning the lights oN.

F starts with a counter at 0. If the light is on when F gets to the room, they turn the light off, and they increment their counter. If the light is off when F gets to the room, do nothing.

Each N starts with a counter at 2. When any N enters the room, if the light is on, do nothing, but if their counter is more than 0 and the light is off, turn it on and decrement their counter.

If the light starts on, F will turn it off once, putting their counter at 1. Then, if their counter gets to 198 = 1 + 197, they will know all 99 N people has been in the room once, (and will be certain all but one have been twice).

If the light starts off, some N will turn it on. F's counter gets to 198 when everybody else has been in the room at least twice.

If any prisoner is queried, they should answer "I don't know" unless they are F and their counter is at 198.

<comment><USER4> This is indeed the standard solution. There is also a more difficult version: Every prisoner is required to have the same strategy (so you cannot pick a unique person F). (Every thread runs the same program, and threads do not have access to a unique thread identifier.)

<comment><USER5> I'll just solve this assuming the light starts off, because otherwise I have a feeling it will get miserable to think through.

Every prisoner starts at c=1. If light is on, turn it off and decrement c. If the light is off, turn it on and increment c. It c hits 0, always do nothing. If c=101, everyone has been to the room.

Everyone wants to turn off 1 more light than they turn on, but that means one person has to turn on the light 99 more times than they turn it off (and then they have to see it off, indicating the 99th person has reached c=0, and turn it on for themself to reach c=101).

Edit: Thinking back through, I think just starting at c=2 and waiting for c=200 works for an uncertain initial state of the light.

Edit 2: One of the problems with this method is that you are essentially waiting for the nature of random distributions to select people unevenly to get people to hit c=0 and be "removed". At higher average c (excluding 0s), this may take a while. It can probably be made faster by having a chance to not turn on the light at low c and not turn off the light at high c, but I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't actually end up being faster. At the very minimum a prisoner could stop lowering c once it got above the 50% mark.

<comment><USER6> Very nice solution.

I wonder if it can be made not rely on randomness at all. The 'standard' solution just required that every prisoner would be taken to the room infinitely many times. As long as this was the case, the warden could try any devious sequence they liked.

<comment><USER5> Interesting question. Haven't solved it yet, but it did give me an idea for an optimization.

If the prisoner stores c_max, they can decide to only ever turn off the light (until c=0) if c < c_max - 1.

This is because there is at least 1 other prisoner still turning on the light (they could turn off the light they turned on to reach c = c_max - 1, but only get lower if someone else turns on the light for them).

Unfortunately an adversarial sequence still hangs progress, as prisoners can be juggled between c_max and c_max-1.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like Cheryl's transfinite logic puzzle, which takes logic puzzles to a ridiculous extreme.

[http://jdh.hamkins.org/transfinite-epistemic-logic-puzzle- ch...](http://jdh.hamkins.org/transfinite-epistemic-logic-puzzle-challenge/)

The puzzle is inspired by Cantor's transfinite ordinal numbers, which are pretty cool. You don't need to know anything about transfinite numbers to solve the puzzle, but they are interesting in their own right. The simplified idea is suppose you count 1, 2, 3, ... up to infinity (ω). Everyone knows adding 1 to infinity doesn't get you anywhere, but suppose you can do it and get ω+1, ω+2, ... The limit is 2ω. But then you can go 3ω, 4ω, ... Which obviously :-) gets you to ω*ω = ω^2. Then you can keep going with bigger and bigger infinities. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinal_number)

</comment><comment><USER8> "Learning a single variable polynomial" also falls into this camp, although partly due to learned bias.

[https://jeremykun.com/2014/11/18/learning-a-single- variable-...](https://jeremykun.com/2014/11/18/learning-a-single-variable- polynomial-or-the-power-of-adaptive-queries/)

<comment><USER6> This is beautiful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thank god I could solve "Love in Kleptopia". Would have been embarrassing being a founder of a security company.

<comment><USER10> I'm mad at myself for not managing to figure this out myself.

I guess i made more assumptions about the limitations than there were in the description of the problem.

<comment><USER11> Same. It was not clear that multiple padlocks can be added to the box.

<comment><USER12> It took me way too long for this reason. I got it instantly once I realized I had made that limitation up.

I feel like there is some sort of lesson, here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I collect riddles like these! Here are a few of them.

Numbered Hats

A warden places a hat on the head of each of 100 prisoners, each with a random number from 1 to 100. There may be duplicates. Each prisoner can see everybody's hat but their own. Each prisoner then guesses their own number; if any guess correctly, they all go free. The group may not communicate in any way during the trial, but may strategize beforehand. What strategy has the best chance of success?

Colored Hats

A warden lines up a group of 30 prisoners so they can see everybody in front of them and nobody behind them, then places either a red or a blue hat on each of their heads, randomly. He then goes from the back of the line to the front, telling each prisoner to guess the color of their own hat. Each who guesses correctly is freed. The prisoners cannot see the color of their own hat, and cannot communicate with each other, but can hear each others' guesses and can strategize beforehand. What strategy saves the greatest number of prisoners?

Coins on a Chessboard

A warden takes prisoner A into a room containing a chessboard, on each square of which is a coin randomly showing heads or tails. He then indicates a random square on that board. Prisoner A is given the chance to flip one coin (or none), then taken from the room, after which prisoner B is taken into the room and must say which square the warden indicated. The two prisoners may strategize beforehand, but may not communicate during the trial (except with the single coin flip). What should be their strategy?

<comment><USER3> Numbered hats: I'm not sure this is optimal.

When the prisoners are together, they assign each person a unique ID from 1 to 100.

Once the round starts, each looks around and adds up the total on everybody else's hat, mod 100. Suppose you see a total of h (mod 100). Then you should make a guess g = h - your ID (mod 100).

With 1000 repeated experiments of 1000 trials each, this saved the prisoners ~ 630±17 ~= 63±2 percent of the time.

<comment><USER14> If each person just guesses a random number you succeed the same amount of the time. You have a 99% chance of guessing wrong. The chance of 100 people guessing wrong is 0.99 ^ 100. So the chance of at least 1 person guessing right is 1 - 0.99 ^ 100, which is 63.4%.

<comment><USER3> Well then, I guess my strategy accomplishes nothing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A different solution to the Box in box problem, with less math:

Consider the square of (length + with + height). The sum of the diagonal terms is the square of the distance between opposite corners, the sum of the off diagonal terms equals half the area of the boxes. We can show that both these terms are smaller for the innermost box.

It's obvious for the diagonal terms, as the opposite corners of a box are the two points of the box that are furthest apart. So the opposite corners of the inner box must be separated by less than the opposite corners of the outer one.

For the cross diagonal terms: take axes that are aligned with the inner box. Consider the parts of the outer box that would be projected on the inner box if you projected either on the x&y, x&z, or y&z planes (i.e. you project on the faces of the inner box). These six pieces of the outer box don't intersect, and each of them is larger than the face of the inner box on which they project. So this part of the outer box has an area bigger than the total are of the inner box. QED

</comment><comment><USER16> The 'dot-town suicides' is a more general version of a puzzle I know, "The Island with Blue-Eyed People". The solution is an induction, which is unusual in these kinds of problems.

<comment><USER17> I think the puzzle as phrased is slightly incomplete. The stranger must communicate something _new_ each day to make the induction work.

For instance, if the number of blues is 25, and the (merciful) stranger says that the number of blues is not prime every day, no one ever has enough information.

And in fact, even that doesn't seem to be enough. The non-trivial part must be that at least one person knows more than they did before the statement, otherwise a merciful stranger could say 'The number of blues is less than <big number>' each day, where the big number is more than the population.

Unfortunately that stringent of a definition for non-trivial sort of ruins the problem since in the formulation is the idea that at least one person in the village gets (at least) one number closer to knowing the exact number of blues everyday, and as soon as they know the exact number of blues they are eliminated.

<comment><USER16> The clock is certainly necessary. But for information, I think its as easy as "somebody has blue eyes!" said once. If only one person has blue eyes, they see no one else with blue eyes so kill themselves. If two people have blue eyes, they see the other guy and think "maybe its only him". Next day, that guy is still alive; they now know the only remaining blue-eye is themselves; midnight comes and they both suicide. Then nobody else has to - the two guys died on day 2 so only 2 blue-eyes can exist. And so on.

<comment><USER18> If two people have blue eyes, "Somebody has blue eyes" is not new information, because everyone has already seen that someone has blue eyes.

<comment><USER19> > If two people have blue eyes, "Somebody has blue eyes" is not new > information, because everyone has already seen that someone has blue eyes.

The new information in that scenario is that the other guy with blue eyes knows that someone has blue eyes.

<comment><USER18> If they have seen someone with blue eyes they would already know that.

<comment><USER16> They know that _you know_ that. That's the new info.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I am so bad at this. Also, apparently I don't know the first thing about tennis.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's not in the same vein, but my favorite puzzle is the Monty Hall Problem. Although as is relentlessly pointed out, it's not actually how "Let's Make A Deal" works.

Monty Hall shows you three doors, two have goats behind them, one has a brand new car. While still closed, you pick a door. After you've picked, Monty opens one of the other two doors to show you a goat, and asks if you want to stay with your choice, or choose the other remaining door. What do you do? Stay? Switch? Or it doesn't matter?

For background and spoiler, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem)

Edit: Spelling

<comment><USER22> Monty Hall, not Haul.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> SPOILER 1 Names in boxes

I don't understand how this works. The answer says it works to a certain percentage if there are no cycles longer than 50. But even if chance has it that there are two cycles of length 50. Then it seems the chance would be very large that one of the 100 prisoners would en up in the "wrong" loop and thus not find their name?

<comment><USER24> It's because you start with the box labeled (via the initial random labeling) with your name. If you cycle back to it then it means that you found your name on a piece of paper, since the next box you open is always the one matching the piece of paper in the last box. So it is impossible to start in a cycle that doesn't include your name.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't I start in a "tail" leading to a cycle that doesn't include my name? Suppose my name is "A", and I proceed:

check box A - read name B; check box B - read name C; check box C - read name B

and now I'm in a B-C loop, and will never find my name.

<comment><USER14> Re-read your scenario -- you have both box A and box C containing name B, but the problem statement says each name appears only once. So you can't get into cycles like this.

<comment><USER4> Ah, of course! That guarantees there are no "tails"; every name (& box) is part of exactly one cycle. And this is then a property of cycles of permutations generally. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Peter Winkler's books of mathematical puzzles ("Mathematical Puzzles" and "Mathematical Mind-Benders") are top-notch and highly recommended. You will learn something there even if you've read dozens of puzzle books before.

</comment><comment><USER26> Some of these are poorly worded:

* Kleptopia is ambiguous about what gets stolen, and what toplogy the boxes/padlocks must have for the solution.

* The "clever" solution to Unwanted Expansion isn't a complete proof, unless you add some complicated reasoning or use the non-clever proof, but if you do that, you don't need the "clever" proof at all.

* The Wimbledon puzzle doesn't explain the scoring rules of tennis :(

<comment><USER27> the clever solution to "unwanted expansion" only uses the fact that addition and multiplication of two positive integers a, b > 1 always gives an answer that is greater than both a and b, therefore if the expansion never terminates and all your variables are 2, the overall result will be infinite. since expansion doesn't change a result, the pre-expansion evaluation should also be infinite; since it is not, the expansion terminates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think there's a simpler solution to boxes in boxes. Assume that the outer box is axis-aligned. Project both boxes onto the X axis, so they become one- dimensional. It's easy to check that the "projected perimeter" of the inner box is smaller. Repeat for axes Y and Z. From that and the triangle inequality, the result follows.

<comment><USER29> Can you expand on this last step? it's not obvious to me what you're applying the triangle inequality to and why it gives the desired result.

<comment><USER28> The length of a line segment can't be greater than the sum of its projections onto all three axes. Therefore the "perimeter" of the inner box can't be greater than the sum of its projections. But that sum is bounded from above by the "perimeter" of the outer box (which is equal to the sum of its own projections, because the outer box is axis-aligned).

<comment><USER30> I'm having trouble with your "therefore" conclusion. The projection of the perimeter of the inner box could easily be shorter than the sum of the lengths of the projections of each edge. It seems like you need a less obvious (to me, anyway) statement about the projection of a collection of lines.

<comment><USER28> By projected perimeter I mean the sum of lengths of projections of all edges. I'm not canceling them out or anything. Think of the box as a graph, its projection is another graph that happens to lie on a straight line, but we can measure the sum of its edges regardless.

It's not completely obvious why the projected perimeter of the inner box is bounded by the projected perimeter of the outer box, but it's a statement about one-dimensional segments that's easy enough to check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> <spoiler>For #1, I didn't hear correctly because I didn't understand that the clearly insane and cruel warden would let the prisoners label the boxes before hand :-/

<comment><USER32> You don't actually need to label them you just need all the prisoners to be able to memorize which name is associated with which box, Alice's box is the first on the left, Bob's the second etc... Then when Zach. Z. Z. Vanderwall opens "his box" and finds the name Bob he follows procedure.

You need a minimal perfect hash function but it's a thing that can be done, especially because prisoners in these sort of conundrums always have fantastic memories and mental math facility.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function#Minimal_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function#Minimal_perfect_hash_function)

<comment><USER33> Still, I didn't hear correctly either: I thought there would be 100 identical boxes lined up in a row by the warden's assistant.

<comment><USER34> The solution still works. The prisoners have agreed on a mapping between their names and the order of the 100 boxes. That mapping is what they rely on to inspect the boxes, the boxes don't need actual labels.

The problem statement makes it clear they can communicate prior to starting the game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm have some trouble understanding the solution to the 3 natives puzzle. Is the objective to find the road guarded by the truth teller?

SPOILER BELOW

The solution suggests

Q1) --> A

Q1): Is B least likely to tell the truth out of B and C?

If yes ask Q2 --> B, If no, ask Q2 --> C

Q2): If I were to ask you does your road lead to the truth village, would you say yes?

If yes, you know where the truth village is. If no, you would know the person you are questioning in the liar, but both of the other two could be the truth teller or the random answerer?

For example, if A is the random answerer and randomly selects 'truth', or if A is the truth teller, they will both direct you to the liar for Q2.

Let me know where I've gone wrong.

<comment><USER14> There are only two roads and one village, and the problem is to find out which of the roads lead to the village. Forget about "guarding" and the "truth village".

If you ignore the random answerer for a second, then you ask "if I were to ask you if this road leads to the village, what would you say?". Let's call this the original question. The answer will be trustable, because the truth teller will tell the truth, and the liar will lie about a lie, making the result the truth as well.

Now we introduce a new question, and a third answerer -- random. Since we know we can solve the problem with only the original question and original two natives, the goal of this question is just to eliminate the random answerer.

The solution given in the article uses this new question in two ways. One, by asking it of one native and not ever asking that native the original question, if the native we happen to ask is the random answerer, we know we won't ask the original question of that answerer, so what they answer doesn't matter -- either way, we'll end up with the liar or truth teller to ask the original question of.

So we only need to design the new question assuming the one we ask it of is _not_ the random answerer. So now we're back to asking a "double question", resulting in a truth about a truth or a lie about a lie. You ask the question you stated, knowing that the native identified as "least likely to tell the truth" will never be the random one, due to truth-about-truth, lie-about-lie, or due to the random answerer being neither B nor C.

<comment><USER35> Ah ok, if there are 2 roads and 3 people then the question makes complete sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I have always been a fan of the Pirate game puzzle. [https://omohundro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/stewart99_a_pu...](https://omohundro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/stewart99_a_puzzle_for_pirates.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER37> One that I heard last week: There is an 8x8 checkerboard in a room with a coin placed on each square. Each coin is either facing heads or tails up, and the face is determined randomly. Before you can inspect the board, a "master" comes in, picks a square of interest, and must make a manipulation to the board by flipping one of the 64 coins. He then exits the room. You are now allowed to enter, and must read out which square of interest the master chose by inspecting the state of the board. There is a strategy that is guaranteed to work for all possible configurations of the board.

<comment><USER14> I think you're referring to this puzzle: [http://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html](http://datagenetics.com/blog/december12014/index.html)

The version you gave is missing information and so can't be solved as stated.

<comment><USER38> I had to read that like 11 times before I started to get the underlying principle. That's amazing.

<comment><USER39> In a very similar vein, try this one: [https://youtu.be/N5vJSNXPEwA](https://youtu.be/N5vJSNXPEwA)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Of course a few of these mathematical puzzles assume that the human beings involved are all robotic, and capable of remembering a randomly ordered list 100 long. The blue dot red dot problem being the worst offender because the theorem doesn't hold up of you assume anyone in the village has the wrong internal state.

</comment><comment><USER41> Ah. I hate these kind of puzzles!

</comment><comment><USER42> A short collection of similar puzzles that have been shared with me over the years: [https://quaxio.com/some_math_puzzles/](https://quaxio.com/some_math_puzzles/)

</comment><comment><USER43> #2 is super interesting! I wonder if it generalizes to higher dimensions.

<comment><USER44> I don't quite follow the solution, can anyone explain a bit more? What's the motivation for considering large epsilon?

<comment><USER45> The rigorous version would be:

0 < (Vol(Bε) - Vol(Aε))/ε² = ((a+b+c) - (a'+b'+c'))π + 2((ab + ac + bc) - (a'b' \+ a'c' \+ b'c'))/ε + (abc - a'b'c')/ε²

The limit for ε to infinity must be >= 0 and is ((a+b+c) - (a'+b'+c'))π, therefore a+b+c >= a'+b'+c'.

"large epsilon" is a standard way to express "consider the asymptotic behavior for epsilon to infinity and you will see what I mean".

<comment><USER44> Thanks, I get that it means asymptotic behavior - that's the thing I don't get the motivation for.

<comment><USER43> I think the intuition is that we want to focus on the edges of the box (where the lengths sum together like the answer we're looking for), not the volume (where the lengths multiply together and cause problems). So we expand the edges until they completely dominate the equation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> The tennis was was so straightforward I was thinking it must be a trick, but it was that simple.

</comment><comment><USER47> Title gore</comment>


Show HN: ThreeKit – Easy 3D for eCommerce - <AUTHOR> http://threekit.com <comment><AUTHOR> We built this recently: [http://threekit.com](http://threekit.com)

It uses our existing 3D WYSIWYG editor [https://Clara.io](https://Clara.io) and we have enhanced it to work well with ecommerce platforms via allowing the 3D graphics to response to option/variant changes.

Lots of demos here:

[http://threekit.com/demos](http://threekit.com/demos)</comment>


Riak 0.13 released, includes full text search - <AUTHOR> http://blog.basho.com/2010/10/11/riak-0.13-released/ <comment><USER2> This is actually a significant release for Riak. Something that has always been sited as lacking in Riak was it's ability to index documents similar to couch. With this release, <http://bitbucket.org/basho/riak_search/src> (beta), what they have done is integrate lucene indexing on top of their distribution mechanism.

Besides that big news, this release intriduces a number of performance enhancements over it's predecessor. Read all about it, [http://bitbucket.org/basho/riak/src/tip/releasenotes/riak-0....](http://bitbucket.org/basho/riak/src/tip/releasenotes/riak-0.13.0.txt).

</comment><comment><USER3> For those of you who aren't too familiar with Riak, here are some comparisons:

[https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak+Compared+to+Cassand...](https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak+Compared+to+Cassandra)

<https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak+Compared+to+MongoDB>

<https://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak+Compared+to+Neo4j>

</comment><comment><USER4> I had never heard of Riak before (shame on me!) and it looks like the exact thing I would need for a project: does anyone care share success|horror stories?

What about price? There is a free version but the prices of the commercial version (with support) are not disclosed. This makes it look like it's targeted at big companies...?

How does it compare to S3?

<comment><AUTHOR> Here is who is currently using it in production: <http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Who+is+Using+Riak>

and some comparisons, but not S3

<http://wiki.basho.com/display/RIAK/Riak+Comparisons>

<comment><USER5> You can also see a list of customers users here: <http://www.basho.com/customers.html>

<comment><USER4> This I had seen, but it looks like big firms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't have a app that uses Riak but I can vouch for any project that Sean Cribbs is behind.

</comment><comment><USER7> I launched a service to production last week that uses riak_core to distribute load/storage to 8 nodes. Documentation is a little sparse, but I was impressed by how easy it was to take my single-node service and distribute it using riak_core. Definitely recommended.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm just curious, does anyone why it was named Riak?

<comment><USER9> Riak means "ripple" in Indonesian. This is both the name of a pre-release version of the software and a reference to how storage operations in the k/v store work.

<comment><USER10> > Riak means "ripple" in Indonesian.

It's also more commonly used as a root meaning "yell".</comment></comment></comment>


'Severe" Figure Manipulation Found in Studies from Leading Plant Lab - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06814-2 <comment><USER2> Not a lot of who/what/why/how answers in that, that I could understand.

Anyone have links to more information, or does one have to wait until the "end of September" followup mentioned?</comment>


The Mirror Man: Treating Phantom Limb Pain With a Simple Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/mirror-man-treating-phantom-limb-pain-simple-technology-87450/

<comment><USER2> > _In 2008, Stephen was working as a property manager in south Baja, Mexico, > when he had a particularly agonizing bout of phantom pain. "I was not > presentable for 72 hours," he says. He was aware of mirror therapy from > having looked online for treatments, and he decided to give it a try. He got > into his truck and drove two-and-a-half hours to the nearest Home Depot to > buy a mirror. He tried it right there in the parking lot, and in five > minutes the pain was gone._

> _Stephen used the mirror for two weeks, then stopped because the pain had > not returned. About a year and a half later, he felt the pain again, and > this time he stayed the course for the full five weeks. He hasn't had > phantom pain for over four years. "It's gone now," he says. "It's gone > because I treated myself with a mirror."_

The patient arranges a mirror to show a healthy limb as if it were the phantom. They can then "move" the phantom limb [by actually moving the surviving healthy limb].

I recall reading of experiments with healthy subjects where an arrangement convinced them that a model was their limb, the limb was injured and they felt pain - something along those lines, seems similar to how this works.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ramachandran's ted talk:

[http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind](http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind)</comment>


Nezumi partners with New Relic and is now free - <AUTHOR> http://blog.newrelic.com/2014/11/03/nezumi-heroku-mobile-management/

<comment><USER2> I'm here representing New Relic - ask me anything!</comment>


Real-world F#: one man's happy experience - <AUTHOR> http://www.frenk.com/2012/01/real-world-f-my-experience-part-two/

<comment><USER2> "The second decision was to use F#. Fortunately nobody objected (again no pun intended)."

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this. Thanks for the post.</comment>