How Do Developers Promote Open Source Projects? - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04219 <comment><USER3> A very useful article, thank you for sharing.

This is definitely a hard problem for solo developers who are like me and have significant difficulty with social aspects. I've never submitted any of my projects or writing here, because I have this underlying feeling that I'd be bothering people. It also doesn't help to be on a site filled daily with dozens of really incredible projects that feel so much more deserving of attention. Yet I've often found myself bewildered by concepts such as SEO and promotion, and I much prefer to spend my time coding. I hate to generalize, but I can't imagine I'm particularly unique in this regard.

But indeed, it's a serious growth limiter when we are stuck working alone. I feel like any serious open source project really needs someone on the team who groks all the social stuff and can get the word out to the right parties who would be interested. A networking service to connect these two types of people would truly be invaluable, I feel.

I was also told that technical writing helps a lot, and indeed, despite being a little guy in a small niche, two of my articles were submitted by others recently, and seeing such a positive response has been a huge boost to my self-esteem and confidence. (It did ruin my bounce rate stats though, went from 44% to 87% in two days :p)

But yeah, I'll agree with the arXiv conclusion that HN is an incredibly valuable resource for open source developers, with a very friendly community behind it.

<comment><USER4> online forums like HN and reddit aren't useful for meaningful feedback - <USER2> out local meetups and pitch your idea

<comment><USER5> If you submit your project to HN you will be getting unparalleled feedback imho. The depth and range of expertise here is incredible - from VC to legendary developers and CEOs - and a lot of people are comfortable sharing their feedback. On top of that, there are just experts across all intellectual fields hanging out here.

But it's technical feedback, it's idea feedback, product feedback, it's not likely to seed your users or paying customers. And a lot of submissions go unnoticed.

<comment><USER6> Submission to HN is not enough in itself. The title and link in any "Show HN" submission needs to be calibrated to both catch the eyes of the right HN readers (so they learn - if only fleetingly - that the project exists) and also intrigue them enough to devote 5-10mins of their time to investigate the project and offer feedback.

I have not managed to work out (yet) how to craft such a submission for my OS project. Putting in the time and effort to get to the stage where a submission does generate interest/responses is the entry price that I need to pay, to earn those responses.

In the meantime browsing HN has become one of my main pleasures, and an education on subjects way beyond my comfort zone.

<comment><USER7> Yep, I'm in the same boat. Worked on a project and made a Show HN that linked to Github that linked to the website and docs. No comments or upvotes so I'm sure it got lost in the sea of other Show HN posts.

<comment><USER8> Try again, timing can matter a lot. Friday 4pm est vs Monday morning will change the number of responders and even the responses

<comment><USER7> Thanks man, I'll give it a shot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a little worried that this only studies channels and not the original content itself. I've personally used most of these channels and have found a rather "bucket-of-crabs" sort of reaction, unless I'm very, very careful to release an absolutely perfect post.

There generally seems to be only a level of tolerance for projects released by big companies. If you have a FANG coolant behind your name, it doesn't matter what you're releasing, how long you've been working on it, or even how big your team actually is, you'll grab a ton of popularity.

But as a solo dev releasing under my own name, the only things I can get attention for are basically hacks in niche topics. The long-standing, well designed work I do, that is used in real projects, with tons of documentation and proven results, at best gets ignored. At worst, I get accused of "re- inventing the wheel", even for things _I_ invented.

I've never gotten anyone to join me on a project. There are a lot of self- fulfilling prophecies that "solo-dev work won't be around in a year, so don't bother even starting". Either I release too early and people don't want to join because nothing is finished, or I put a ton of effort into documentation and contribution guidelines and then things just get ignored. Just when is it a good time to go from code I've written on my own to sharing with others?

It just really makes it seem like FOSS is only for people who have a big, recognised company backing them. I've even had a project or two copied by recognized companies, with no larger team than one or two people, and watched their half-baked early releases quickly eclipse my own efforts just because they could get people to join the effort and work for free.

<comment><USER10> This mirrors my experience 100%. I'd like to say that you are not alone but...well...

We are all alone together.

<comment><USER10> Just checked your profile, didn't realize you were the author of PrimroseVR. Now I feel even more alone-together with you, I'm the sole developer for JanusWeb and my experience completely matches what you describe.

Pretty depressing how open source projects by individuals can at best hope to "inspire" devs at FAANG companies to just do the same thing and then use their company's immense resources and developer relation teams to promote their project over the ones that existed before them. I wonder how many talented devs have had this happen to them only to give up and stop trying.

<comment><USER9> LOL, thanks. I tend to think the only reason Primrose had any attention was because it was the only complete framework for WebVR in the browser at the time. I remember using JanusVR in 2014 at a VR meetup on someone's DK2 and really liking it. But all I had at home was a smartphone in a cardboard box that I had hacked together myself shortly after seeing the Google Cardboard announcement. I only got a DK2 after Tojiro started releasing his WebVR builds of Chromium, then got lucky that my design was similar enough to his early WebVR API design that the port only took a day.

Primrose existed for a year before A-Frame came out. And overnight, I somehow became the copycat. In the second year, I even saw claims I was copying ReactVR.

Incidentally, way early on, I had been planning to extend Primrose to run in JanusVR. But after the third year, I just couldn't get past the burnout and was getting professional dev work only for Unity. So here I am now, I'm the head of VR at a foreign language instruction company, where I'm working exclusively in Unity. I have a new framework I call Juniper, but I haven't really told anyone about it because I just don't care anymore. It's good enough that it's just for me. It's open on Github, and if someone stumbles on it, that's ok, but otherwise I'd rather focus on working for money than working for criticism on HN.

<comment><USER10> Yup, very similar story here. I'd been working on a WebGL engine called Elation Engine since 2011, and when VR hit the scene, I quickly added support for barrel shader and WebSocket tracking, then when WebVR was a thing added support for that as well. Those times were exciting, it felt like indies and hackers were driving the technology, and the possibilities were endless.

I joined Janus in 2016, after Facebook bought my previous employer and fired my team. I'd added support for loading Janus worlds within my engine, which opened it up to normal web browsers, and the team at Janus was excited for the possibilities. It was a great story of how I was able to turn an open source project into a paying job, and people were EXCITED about what we were building! We had investors and users, everything was great!

Fast forward to today. The team is broken and burnt out. Many left when we couldn't secure another round of funding and the paychecks dried up. The code is in a poor state because we kept chasing what platform gatekeepers and potential investors told us THEY wanted to see. The founder and myself both had kids within a month of each other and can no longer work like we used to. One guy's wife left him because he was spending so much time travelling and promoting the project. We have less users than ever, despite our tech being years ahead of what people think is possible. We still pretend like we're a normal healthy happy company, because we still believe in the idea and nobody's going to invest in a company of depressed burnt out people. But now even that fantasy is unsustainable, it's probably time to just give up and get a regular old job.

Of course success was never guaranteed, but what we didn't expect was how we'd just end up shunned and ignored. When A-Frame first launched, they listed Janus as an inspiration, but once they reached some level of success and saw us as competitors, they wrote us out of that history book - literally just removed us from the list of inspirations, but kept other projects like SceneVR (whose author also credits Janus as his inspiration). We've got literally thousands of interconnected worlds people have built which nobody visits or links to, but if someone makes a similar world with A-Frame or Babylon, we're sure to hear all about how great and new and innovative it is.

Modern open source is not the same scene it used to be. I don't know what's next. It's pretty depressing.

<comment><USER9> I just don't talk about my stuff online that much anymore. I'm still excited by VR, probably more so now than ever now that I have a great job where people really appreciate me. I can do so much better work now. I can actually look at my GitHub commit records and see the timeline.

I try (and often fail) to remember the 90/9/1 rule of online communities. 90% of people are only lurkers. The next 90% (9% of total) of people only comment. It's only 1% of people that create things. It's why I have retreated from taking about my projects online. Literally 99% of the people looking at your project have no idea what it's like to build something.

Stay in touch. You can find my contact info on my website. I might need help in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There are many open source projects got submitted to HN everyday but not many got the chance to be upvoted to front page and attract traffic. So I built a service called Porter[1] to collect HN submissions, filter out news about open source projects and send digested email to subscribers. There is also a `explore` page[2] at Porter which will show the daily submitted projects. You can find from the page that only two or three projects get a lot of upvotes and many projects got zero upvote at all.

I was wondering if many users are using Porter, I might have a chance to bring traffic to those projects developed by solo developers and becoming good channel for promoting and discovering. But just like those open source projects, I have problem promoting my service too. I don't feel like to spam people by submitting the url everywhere. There are organic growth but it's not fast enough for me to put a lot of resource in it. I guess marketing for open source related projects and services is always a hard problem especially for solo developers.

EDIT: Those projects that got exceptional growth might have successfully attract traffic from HN. But just submitting your projects to HN does not guarantee any growth.

[1] [https://porter.io](https://porter.io)

[2] [https://porter.io/explore/](https://porter.io/explore/)

<comment><USER12> I'm subscribed to Porter and I really like it! Between Porter and Github Explore I feel I have a pretty good picture about new projects arriving on the scene. One request though: I'd love to see direct links to the Github repos in question from the email and the web digest. It takes too many clicks to reach the actual repos and I'm not really interested in the trend graphs that porter offers

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not here to promote my own publications, but if you search for basically any language or technology that your project is associated with and follow it with "weekly" or "newsletter" (e.g. "javascript weekly" or "python weekly") you will almost certainly find a newsletter curator hungry to promote your project (if it's any good or would be of interest to their readers). I have almost half a million such subscribers now, plus about the same on Twitter, across various developer niches.

</comment><comment><USER14> Somehow it feels wrong to be using Open Source software based on the authors' promotion efforts rather than the software's merit. It'd be better to have fewer evangelists and more meticulous developers. Then again, just like startups, mediocre projects can gain traction and improve significantly by attracting decent developers with a good vision/mission statement/presentation.

<comment> toper-centage But I think the point is that users can't learn about projects that deserve that merit unless they become popular.

<comment><USER14> Useful projects will become popular eventually through word-of-mouth, but nowadays they have to fight promotion efforts by the less useful competition. That's what I don't like...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> In my experience, if the open source project solves a software development problem, presenting it as an answer in Stack Overflow can drive lots of consistent, long-term traffic.

<comment><USER16> I had genuinely never thought that was even a possible channel - yet it seems so obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm totally biased here, but I feel like the newsletter option in the chart should be higher. I mean, how much visibility will you get from a low-follower Twitter account or a small blog?

I run Web Tools Weekly ([https://webtoolsweekly.com/](https://webtoolsweekly.com/) \- ~11,500 subs) and Tech Productivity ([https://techproductivity.co/](https://techproductivity.co/) \- new, ~1000 subs) and I can tell you that any good open source project that fits will get great click through rates.

I also recommend any of the newsletters by Cooper Press, which have way more subscribers than mine do ([https://cooperpress.com/publications/](https://cooperpress.com/publications/) \- see the top comment in this thread, by the founder of Cooper Press).

</comment><comment><USER18> As someone with several thousand-star+ repos, I can say that the majority of traffic (and stars) on each repos is strongly correlated with a Reddit/Hacker News submission (although lately Tweets have been much better).

GitHub has deployed a project discovery widget on their logged-in homepage, but I've never used it to discover a project.

<comment><USER19> The GitHub weekly popular projects/interests email has been getting me to discover some really good projects as of late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is not surprising. I've noticed that github stars, everyone's favorite vanity metric _, go nuts if you wind up on the front page of HN for a while.

I'd be curious to hear if front-page or #1 status on HN correlates to deeper metrics of engagement with OSS and/or engagement with new for-profit services. Does going to front-page or #1 have a meaningful effect on, say a, SaaS business?

_ Vanity metric seems about right - I noted that when a project I helped start ([https://github.com/lemire/simdjson](https://github.com/lemire/simdjson)) first got a wave of stars on HN, it tended to lag other OSS projects with similar numbers of stars on other metrics of engagement. Despite being pleased to see all those stars, one has to remind oneself that it's equivalent to "yay, someone bookmarked us".

</comment><comment><USER21> I thought the purpose of an abstract is to briefly summarize rather than beat around the bush and tease you into reading the whole paper. Reading the linked summary of this paper was nothing but infuriating!

</comment><comment><USER22> I often find me searching for a package that does XYZ on npm and find just so many. But most of them are either badly designed (!!!), have bugs, no typings or just don't do what I would expect they do. The few good ones are just impossible to find in reasonable time and I have to implement it on my own.

I think having a curated list of packages with clear categories and alternative comparisons would be of great value to both package consumers for finding an high quality package and package publishers for being promoted if their package is of high quality.

<comment><USER16> >>> The few good ones are just impossible to find in reasonable time and I have to implement it on my own.

I think you just put your finger in bon's main problem - but how to turn that into pypi/cpan??

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I personally avoid promoting my free software projects. I don't see any benefit in doing so, only downsides.

I write the software for my own benefit. I then share it for the benefit of others, but sharing it requires a near-zero amount of effort (`git remote add` and `git push`, basically). I sometimes then derive a benefit to myself when others improve or otherwise contribute to my work.

This only holds as long as my userbase consists mostly of competent technical people who are able and hopefully willing to contribute, and not likely to waste my time.

Dealing with support requests and so-called bug reports from non-technical users that found out about my software from a blog post somewhere is simply not a way in which I'm willing to spend my limited free time.

If I knew that my free software was being used by millions of people, I won't deny that it'd give me a bit of an ego boost, but I am not sure it's really worth anything at all, really. It certainly isn't worth the many hours of free customer support (a thankless minimum-wage job even if it were paid) I'd have to provide.

By contrast, having it be used by a handful of like-minded individuals, who might contribute actual code, or simply talk about other interesting technical topics, related or not, provides a ton of value for little to no effort from me.

So I think I will continue mentioning my free software only in mailing lists, and hope that no one ever sees fit to blog or tweet about it :)

I would be curious if some of you that _do_ care about promoting your work would say why you care about it, though. Do you expect the popularity of your free work to have an impact in your professional career? Or is the satisfaction from providing value to so many people worth the huge extra effort to get there? Or is it something else?

</comment><comment><USER24> Super interesting. Good marketing is often crucial for the success of OS projects. And it's often overlooked by developers.

Fun that they named HN in it!

<comment><USER25> > the success of OS projects

How do you define success in this context?

<comment><USER26> The most important success metric for any software is number of users.

<comment><USER25> Why is that important? For me and my projects the important thing is that they solve my problems, and maybe help some other people. The number of other people they help is not something I care about, or can actually know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm almost at the point in development where promoting my compatible text/binary formats [1] [2] would be important, but I'm stuck for ideas on how to do that. I've gone through all of the channels they list, but it seems like a chicken-and-egg problem, where only eyeballs beget eyeballs. I've seen that happen with other projects I've done, where it suddenly goes to 1000 stars over the course of a month. But ask me how it actually happened and I couldn't tell you...

[1] [https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-binary- encoding/blob/ma...](https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-binary- encoding/blob/master/cbe-specification.md)

[2] [https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-text- encoding/blob/mast...](https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-text- encoding/blob/master/cte-specification.md)

</comment><comment><USER28> You can promote any GitHub project by adding [https://2fb.me/](https://2fb.me/) in front of a URL. You can see it in action [https://2fb.me/https://github.com/sheetjs/js- xlsx](https://2fb.me/https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx)

This is my solo project. It hasn't really taken off to date but who knows. If you find it useful for your work, at the conclusion of the share it will ask for a small donation.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's interesting that email isn't more common in promotion of OSS. It seems like there's lack of tooling and so people put it in the "too much work" bucket. Email is one of the most successful marketing channels across all industries and so it's a shame there's nothing out there for open source makers to help them easily add email to their toolbelt.

I'm building [https://gitmail.io](https://gitmail.io), an email marketing tool for open source projects. Reach out if you'd like to voice your thoughts!

</comment><comment><USER30> If you're looking for the recommendations:

Open source project managers should consider the use of Twitter (47 projects among thetop-100 most popular GitHub projects have active Twitter accounts), Users meetings (which are organized or supported by 41 projects), and blogs (which are used by 38projects).

Open source project managers should also consider promotion on social news aggregatorsites. Successful posts on Hacker News may have an important impact on the popularityof GitHub projects. However, only 10% of the Hacker News posts about the studied projects have had some success.

</comment><comment><USER31> They work on things people care about.

Then Hacker News and Network Effects takes care of the rest.

<comment><USER32> How many virtual DOM libraries were out there before React? Were none of them as good?

Marketing is important.

<comment><USER28> Enyo for example.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One way is via comments, like this:

PyWarm, the functional API to build neural networks for PyTorch [https://github.com/blue-season/pywarm](https://github.com/blue-season/pywarm)

<comment><USER34> Well _I_ thought it was funny.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My project has 10K+ stars:

[https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun)

Most of the traffic has come from HN!

And a ton of organic search (tho my project has a generic name that is hard to find in search) so word of mouth.</comment>


Invalid SSL certificate for www.php.net, belonging to cu.be - <AUTHOR> https://www.php.net/

<comment><AUTHOR> they fixed that

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Notice that this doesn't happen when heading to [https://php.net](https://php.net), only for [https://www.php.net](https://www.php.net).

Bad vhost?</comment>


Apple buys autonomous driving startup Drive.ai - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90369438/apple-buys-drive-ai-showing-its-autonomous-car-project-is-still-alive <comment><USER2> Link to the original article: [https://www.axios.com/apple-buy- driveai-753da17d-60fe-44f9-8...](https://www.axios.com/apple-buy- driveai-753da17d-60fe-44f9-84ff-1d2d82cd0b81.html)

<comment><USER3> which was posted earlier at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20280920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20280920). Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> In 1984 Apple figured they could build a better general computer than anyone else, so they launched the Apple MacIntosh

In 2001 they figured they could build a better music player than anyone else, so they launched the iPod

In 2007 they figured they could build a better smartphone than anyone else, so they launched the iPhone

Does Apple really think they can build a better car or self-driving computer than anyone else?

<comment><USER5> If I'm not mistaken, the only times they managed to one-up everyone was when Jobs was at the helm. Going to be a tougher time launching something truely revolutionary without that vision and persona at the wheel.</comment></comment>


North-East Passage navigated [video] - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8264445.stm

<comment><USER2> "Not invented here" alert: the BBC neglect to mention that the Soviets (and then the Russians) have been using this route commercially since 1935: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_east_passage> .

<comment><USER3> I think the point is that it was done without the help of ice-breakers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Navigating it without the help of ice-breakers has only become possible because of the thawing of the Arctic ice - caused, some say, by global warming."

More like "Caused, say 99% of scientists, by global warming"</comment>


How To Remotely Admin Servers Via Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://lethain.com/entry/2009/mar/22/how-to-remotely-admin-servers-via-twitter/ <comment> patrickg-zill Maybe it is just because it is late, but I can't think of anything dumber than this.

</comment><comment><USER2> We use jabber for this. It's realtime, easier to secure, doesn't rely on a third party, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> _It's been something of a reoccurring dream of mine to control my server remotely from my cellphone._

I spent some time making my backend cell phone friendly and it was one of my best ideas ever in terms of productivity enhancement. Although actually using the web service on my cellphone costs me about $50 extra month (grrr), the ability to access customer records means I can handle 90% of support inquiries through my cell phone. This means that I can make productive use out of the 2 hours a day I spend on the train. Yay for reducing dead time.

Now if only I could do Rails and Prawn development on the phone...

</comment><comment><USER4> The concept is great, but the restriction that Twitter puts on the number of queries you can do an hour makes it reasonably non-useful for on-demand tasks like restarting the webserver.

It has the seed of a great idea, though -- everyone has a Twitter client on their phone. You can sit down to any browser and issue commands.

<comment><USER5> Everyone has SMS or email. More than have twitter clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> now, /that/ is useful information for "hackers"

</comment><comment><USER7> @srv_node_01 someone just spilled coffee on me. ouch.

@srv_node_02 @srv_node_01 OMFG dude!

@srv_node_03 RT @srv_node_01 spilled coffee, ROTFL</comment>


A strong case for using separate computers for work and personal use - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/d30ae1c692ff53c3?pli=1

<comment><USER2> Care to explain? I don't see any case at all, much less a strong case.

<comment><USER3> The OP's link is porn.

<comment><USER2> Ok, that's pretty embarrassing, but what does that have to do with work computer vs home computer?

And if you really wanted to compartmentalize things, can't you just logout and have two accounts on your computer?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's more an argument against looking at porn while working.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


IPads in UK may be subsidized for 60% off. - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/22/subsidized-ipads-coming-to-the-u-k/

<comment><USER2> Wow, that is going to be _really_ hard to compete against, especially given that no other tablet manufacturer can even make a 10" tablet at a reasonable price point to begin with...</comment>


An 11-year-old is selling cryptographically secure passwords for $2 each - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/10/this-11-year-old-is-selling-cryptographically-secure-passwords-for-2-each/ <comment><USER2> I think this should be appreciated for what it is...a very young girl learning something very important that most people are totally ignorant about, trying to do good with that learning for other people, and capturing some of that value back.

The folks complaining in the Ars comments are going to either be employed or hacked by this girl in not too long. It's not a good business or even a good way to get a secure password, but that really doesn't matter.

<comment><USER3> > It's not a good business or even a good way to get a secure password

On the other hand, that might help make people understand how to pick a good password.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't really understand why this is even theoretically supposed to be a good method of making a password. I wish the article tried to explain that.

Here are a few questions I have:

\+ I understand that the pseudo-randomness of a computer is often accidentally way less random than the programmer thinks. So, the by-hand nature of these passwords seems like an advantage, all else being equal. Right?

\+ I thought real words were really bad in a password. Is the idea here that, with six words from these lists, the possible combinations are so great that the trade off is worth it because the password is memorable? That seems suspicious to me because you're essentially giving the cracker the list of possible passwords. Though that list may be quite long, it's still a list. Right?

\+ These can't be better than the 30 character passwords I generate with 1Password, right? Unless there's a bug in 1Password... Maybe that's part of the point.

EDIT: list formatting (I hope).

<comment><USER5> DICEWARE is a list of 7776 words. Each word is indexed by a five digit number. The five digit numbers are obtained by rolling 5 six sided dice. (11111 through to 66666).

When it started a 5 word list was recommended. Now a 7 word list is recommended.

Imagine a word list where all the words are lower case, and don't use any special characters. And our passphrase has 7 words, each separated by a single space, with no extra special characters or numbers. And also our attacker knows our wordlist and our passphrase rules.

We have a phrase that is one of 7776^7 different phrases. This list is too long for a dictionary attack.

It's really weak if we have 4 words or less.

Ideally you'd have a long strong passphrase to open a password safe.

It'd be great if people could invent really good tokens instead of passwords.

<comment><USER6> > It'd be great if people could invent really good tokens instead of > passwords.

U2F which the new Yubikeys supports?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Organic, artisanal secure passwords. Worth the extra coin in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> Organic, artisanal _small batch_ secure passwords.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I totally bought a password and it was the best $2 I spent all weekend. I have no intention of using it, but more of a pat on the back telling her to "keep it up" and that people approve. Last thing she needs is telling her she's doing the wrong thing here.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is obviously dumb and a problem nobody needs solving, but let's appreciate the fact than an 11 YO girl made press about her startup. I didn't even have a website at 11. She's going places..

<comment><USER11> >This is obviously dumb and a problem nobody needs solving

So she'd fit in pretty well in SV :)

<comment><USER10> maybe ur referring like that YO app..but truth is, marketing/sales fixes things temporarily if product game is weak and that's what they had: traction. Likewise, this girl's app is going to do sales because of the press, but it won't last long

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hehe, props to her. At least you know she has your password, both profits _and_ social engineering in one.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oddly, I think this might actually be a good thing, security-wise, but not for any inherent property of the passwords generated this way.

Instead, consider this: right now, people just don't care about the security of their passwords. Part of this might just be the "psychology of free": people don't see any reason to upgrade from what they're doing if it doesn't seem like the "upgrade" is at all scarce.

So, what if "actually secure" passwords really did cost money? Maybe people would be willing to use (or even memorize) a 10-character string of letters and symbols if it cost them $10 to generate?

</comment><comment><USER14> The bit they don't tell you is she keeps a copy and sells those passwords, with mailing address, for $20 each ...

</comment><comment><USER15> when i was 11 i was trading pokemon cards xD

</comment><comment><USER16> In case it's not obvious, this is an absurdly terrible service you should never use.

Here is some free software that accomplishes the same task, which is almost surely not more likely to give your password to third parties than just typing it on the same machine would:

echo $(shuf --random-source=/dev/urandom -n 6 /usr/share/dict/words)

<comment><USER17> Well, except that even most HNers won't immediately grok your command-line example, not to mention most of the people in my family or any family. It's educational at least, and $2 is not much to pay for an education about how not to use your grandchild's name and birthdate as a password.

Not to mention it's awesome that an 11 year old girl is dabbling in cryptography already.

I pay $2 for lemonade at a lemonade stand. It's not because I'm thirsty, and I'm most assuredly not going to comment about how it's an absurdly bad business because Wawa has 40oz drinks for half the price.

Edit: sometimes I am legitimately thirsty.

<comment> vezzy-fnord _except that even most HNers won 't immediately grok your command-line example_

That's a fairly damning outlook you have on "most HNers".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > written by hand, sent by mail

So now it's a password known only to you, the girl and the US government: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly- monitoring-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly-monitoring- mail-of-thousands.html)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure the NSA on to her. Expect an NSL in a few days.

<comment><USER20> Containing loaded dice and an abridged password lookup table.

<comment><USER21> I hope she isn't using Bluetooth Dice... [1]

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG- iM9MwpXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG-iM9MwpXE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Don't buy this girl's passwords. I'm a 40 year old man and I can make you software that does this for free! Don't be fooled by this little fraud.

<comment><USER22> I think you all missed the sarcasm here.</comment></comment>


Madam C.E.O., Get Me a Coffe - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/opinion/sunday/sheryl-sandberg-and-adam-grant-on-women-doing-office-housework.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

<comment><USER2> This is 100% consistent with my personal career experience. The catch being that if I post details pointing fingers, I will be summarily chastened.

Just today, I read some dumb quote that stuck in my craw: "When you complain, you become a victim. Leave the situation something something something." Imagine what a career looks like when you leave the situation?

Mine.</comment>


The switch that could double USB memory - <AUTHOR> http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=165732&CultureCode=en <comment><USER2> Original paper here [https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00824](https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00824)</comment>


You Can Submit a Pull Request to Inject JavaScript Code into Donald Trump's Site - <AUTHOR> https://blog.chibicode.com/you-can-submit-a-pull-request-to-inject-arbitrary-js-code-into-donald-trumps-site-here-s-how-782aa6a17a56#.vlu8dnffy <comment><USER2> I love JavaScript. I mean it's really, really good. I have a lot of JavaScript, I mean a lot. When people look at me, they say "That guy has a lot of JavaScript". I know a lot of JavaScript, I think we need more JavaScript. Did I mention I have a lot of JavaScript? But we need to make JavaScript safe for Americans, really, really safe.

</comment><comment><USER3> sweet, nice work</comment>


Google is using old searches, even when not logged in - <AUTHOR>

I Googled "ruby multiple inheritance".  When I Googled "thyroid" a few minutes later, "Ruby" was highlighted in the results (About halfway down the page).  I'm not logged in.  Is this standard Google behaviour now?<p>http://imgur.com/Smyqad9 <comment><USER2> You're not logged in but probably still in session as a uniquely identified user.</comment>


Thomas Friedman-- We're No. 1(1) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12friedman.htm

<comment><USER2> That's why USA are so attractive to foreign students who want to work hard and get the best education. There is an always weakening local competition.

<comment><USER3> I have to wonder about that. At least in the STEM fields, there's no particular change in US K-12 schooling I know of that you can point at for a cause in decreased US student interest, unless it's the final decay of the Sputnik inspired stuff.

US K-12 education has been _horrible_ for nearly _3/4 of a century_. The most basic, fundamental skill, the foundation for all other learning, was in such bad shape in 1955 that the whole _Why Johnny Can't Read_ thing got started, along with a _furious_ debate then or a little later on "Federal Aid to Education", which then was pushed through in the '60s.

(Note, however, that a large fraction of kids, almost certainly enough to keep the STEM pipeline filled, will learn to read no matter how bad _Dick and Jane and Their Running Dog Spot_ is. The success of this "method" was "proven" in a single study of ... the kids of University of Chicago professors and the like. It's a middle set that desperately need phonics to learn how to read.)

The attractiveness of US higher education can be largely explained by these hard to dispute facts:

Our best universities are simply the best in the world, full stop.

In a lot of countries the local universities are very bad (note where Feynman developed his theory of cargo cult science) and/or are _way_ too small to support the number of students qualified for them (e.g. India's IITs; imagine, assuming you qualify to even take the test, being one of 400,000 competing for 4,000 seats ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Technology#Entrance_examinations) )). Many good students from those countries don't have to go to top or first tier US school to get a superior, often vastly superior education in the US.</comment></comment>


Uses for cURL - <AUTHOR> https://httpkit.com/resources/HTTP-from-the-Command-Line/

<comment><USER2> I would strongly suggest HTTPie for the majority of these tasks: <https://github.com/jkbr/httpie>

<comment><USER3> May I ask why? What benefits does HTTPie have?

<comment><USER2> The GitHub page does a good job of highlighting all of the benefits HTTPie has if you're already familiar with cURL. But for me it's the design of the interface with syntax highlighting being the sugar on top.

See: <https://github.com/jkbr/httpie#interface-design> , <https://github.com/jkbr/httpie#redirected-input> , <https://github.com/jkbr/httpie#usage>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _> If you only care about headers use the -I flag and the response body will be hidden_

That is actually wrong. The -I flag set the request method to HEAD. So in some cases it will return different headers than a normal get request (and some servers don't implement HEAD responses at all).

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, great catch. Added a note about having to specify the method explicitly / that -I uses HEAD implicitly. Thanks!

<comment><USER5> A better way to view only the header of a response is using the flags -o to redirect the body and -D to redirect the header of the response. When I want to print only the header to stdout I do

        curl -o/dev/null -D- http://www.example.com

-I does not work with methods other than GET. This does the job.

<comment> brown9-2 Why not just use -i?

<comment><USER5> -i mixes the header and the body of the response into one stream. If you want only the header it won't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you're on windows and don't feel like using the commandline you can click around in Fiddler to achieve similar things. The help is much shorter <http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler/help/composer.asp>

I wasn't able to change the Host header successfully, though. A workaround is needed: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/httpfidd...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/httpfiddler/x8edRBYVhmE)

<comment><USER7> > If you're on windows and don't feel like using the commandline

Just install gow ( <https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow> ) and you'll be able to run all of those examples as intended. The command line becomes very pleasant on Windows after that one little install. It's very lightweight and well designed.

<comment><USER8> Does gow support curses yet? Last I used it, it broke my zsh completion.

(I just use Cygwin now, though, because mintty beats CSRSS all hollow.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice. I like the way examples were constructed.

BTW, here are some more cURL tips I noted down a while back, which I found to be useful for daily work. - <http://laktek.com/2012/03/12/curl-tips-for-daily- use/>

</comment><comment><USER10> The site does not work on the iPhone at all if you want to zoom in to read the text. If you start to touch and scroll the menu that was hidden away on the left decides to rear its ugly head and makes the site completely unreadable.

I'm pretty frustrated with sites that don't just have a basic two column layout. Is this a template theme? Otherwise why would you waste so much time on a left column that reflows and messes up the browser experience? Or better yet why not test this on an actual mobile browser?

I am not trying to harp on this site or the author specifically because there are certainly other offenders. This site though is quite annoying because once you finally think yougot that stupid menu out of the way, BOOM it pops right back an ruins the site again.

This is both a rant and a notice to the author since most people probably got too fed up to tell him about this problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the heads up. Made a quick fix by taking out affix on the column. Tried to get this up pretty quickly with Bootstrap, need to spend some more time on it this weekend. Sorry for the annoyance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This title is a bit misleading. I was assuming that I'd be reading about how to use something that _wasn't_ curl?

<comment><AUTHOR> It got changed, sorry. Original title was "9 uses for cURL everyone should know". Perhaps a bit assumptive.

<comment><USER12> Check out the guidelines here: <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

They suggest you drop the number and go with something like "Uses for cURL everyone should know" instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, you're right. Duly noted, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I knew 8 of the 9, but the one I didn't (testing virtual hosts) was worth the cost of reading the entire article. Thanks.

<comment><USER14> That will only work with named vhosts. Outside of shared hosting / personal web servers, almost everyone uses IP-defined vhosts.

<comment><USER15> Well, doesn't everyone do "their own" shared hosting? With ip4 getting more and more scarce, and before ip6 is viable, I'll definitely keep using named vhosts for stuff. Add in SNI, and it even works with SSL. Sort of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Test Virtual Hosts, Avoid DNS

> With cURL just point the request at your host's IP address

It's not even necessary to manually look up the IP, since options have precedence:

      curl server1.example.com -H Host:\ www.example.net

looks up server1.example.com and connects to that IP with the given Host: Header. Just try the "-v" option to see what's going on.

</comment><comment><USER17> Fantastic, there's also a grand tool called httpie that's a bit nicer than curl <https://github.com/jkbr/httpie>

</comment><comment><USER18> Curl is great to have, but remembering all the options flags is a pain. Nowadays I use:

Chrome: "Postman" extension

Firefox: "REST Client" addon

...both great utilities for creating and saving any HTTP request you need.

<comment><USER19> man curl

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I generally use wget myself. For basic HTTP debugging needs, I run ":%!wget -Sd <http://www.example.com> inside a new vim buffer. Then I can read the Varnish headers or whatever and figure out what's going on.

I ran into an issue where the SSL implementation was a bit dated, though, and didn't recognize how a GoDaddy cert implemented multiple hostnames -- but it turned out to follow the standard. wget was just lacking in its implementation and reporting an error when the cert was fine.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm sure there must be other sites documenting this too, but that's a very well written and prioritized bit of documentation - nicely done.

Your echo service is pretty nifty too.

<comment><USER22> It is. One thing I just noticed though, the echo service indicates that docs are available at <http://httpkit.com/echo> but that URI is a 404.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good catch -- need to get that page up :) Built echo primarily to help me test wiretap so it hasn't gotten much documentation love. Will get that up this weekend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Real HTTP from the command line is 'telnet localhost 80'.

<comment><USER24> 'nc localhost 80' FTFY

<comment><USER25>
        exec 5<>"/dev/tcp/localhost/80"
        echo -ne "GET / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: localhost\r\n\r\n" > &5
        cat < &5

FTFY

<comment><USER26> Clever, though nc really is better than telnet. It is much easier to pipe into just for starters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This can be combined well with <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4762444> :)

</comment><comment><USER28> Nice!!! Here is one more when it comes to working with the Internet Of Things: <http://cosm.com/docs/quickstart/curl.html> And using this I was inspired and managed to do this: <http://www.agilart.com/blog/agilart-programs-using-cosm> #YAY

</comment><comment><USER29> I never learnt cURL, or for that matter missed many of command-line tools because of the laziness to read boring long man pages. This is a perfect example of how a man page should be. All the options explained one by one with simple examples! It took me hardly 5 minutes, now I feel confident in using cURL for my next use.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a great resource. We use curl for sample API calls in our docs (developers.box.com/docs) because it's ubiquitous, but we've come to learn over time that knowledge of how to use curl is not ubiquitous.

Thanks for making this!

</comment><comment><USER31> I can add -I parameter to these. It sends a HEAD request, which only returns headers, works better when you don't need the response body as in -i.

</comment><comment><USER32> `curl --head <http://google.com`> is useful just to get the response headers back.

</comment><comment><USER33> And if you prefer Ruby, try out htty: <https://github.com/htty/htty>

<comment><USER34> recommended, i use it to test all my REST apps, the project needs a breathe of fresh air and get moving with its feature roadmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Does someone knows how to use Google Analytics API with cURL?

btw: nice overview!

</comment><comment><USER36> Helpful. I 'know' these, but this is a good cheat sheet to save around.

Really like the casual plug of your new project; I signed up :-)

</comment><comment><USER37> Why do people like cURL? I've regularly found it to have stupid defaults compared to wget. Is it because it's default on Mac and wget isn't?

<comment><USER38> cURL is worth learning in my experience because it is bulletproof, ubiquitous, fast, highly-configurable, and comprehensive. No other option listed in here are all of those things, though they are all easier to use. But start talking about SOCKS5 proxies or FTPS and all of a sudden you have to start monkey patching your (pretty) tool or, you know, learning curl.

Seriously how often are you guys performing PUTs and DELETEs manually from the command line? `man` up and write a wrapper.

<comment><USER37> I didn't realize there was such a discrepency in proxy functionality, that's exactly what I was looking for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I hope tomorrow I'll see an even more useful article on sending email from the command line! Wow. /sarcasm

<comment><USER40> I'd be interested to know exactly what you mean (I usually don't really get sarcasm). It seems that you think this advice is useless, or that people never use the command line, or something, but I don't really know what.

Could you be more specific? I find it useful to understand different points of view.

Thanks

<comment><USER39> Site is "Hacker News", not "How-tos for dummies", last time I checked. Do we really need this kind of stuff in home page? Hardly so. What about an article on how to create a three columns layout with CSS? Or how to edit a file using a text editor? Come on... how to use curl? Really?

<comment><USER41> Seeing that 200+ people upvoted, it would suggests that enough people found it useful.

I will admit that I am not familiar with curl and I found this helpful and enlightening. If you don't find it useful, then just move on. We come to HKN to learn about the other aspects that we are not familiar with. Just be mindful that not everyone have the same expertise.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Frackers Face Harsh Reality as Wall Street Backs Away - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/frackers-face-harsh-reality-as-wall-street-backs-away-11551009601 <comment><USER2> I'd love to see an unbiased analysis of the long-term economics of an individual shale well.

There's some data that indicates volumes drop off pretty dramatically over time at the individual well level. If this is true, then it requires perpetual investment of new capital in new wells just to maintain constant production volumes.

The public data isn't great because old wells are mixed in with new wells and so it's hard to see how production changes with the age of the well.

Here's an example from Bakken [https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/historicalbakkenoilstats...](https://www.dmr.nd.gov/oilgas/stats/historicalbakkenoilstats.pdf)

You can see that in 2016 the total number of producing wells didn't change much, which probably means new wells weren't being drilled, so the data is mostly from older wells. Daily production per well drops quickly from month to month.

Then in 2017 and 2018 the growth rate in total wells more than doubles, and the production per well also increases, probably because new wells produce much more than existing wells.

If this is true, then it looks like the shale boom is sustained by heavy investment of fresh capital. When interest rates rise or credit dries up, the shale boom could quickly turn to bust.

<comment><USER3> I would love to show you an unbiased analysis of long-term economics of individual shale wells, I have a few. But, confidentiality.

I can say that:

First of all the picture is quite complex, and of course not all wells are the same. Second - talking "in general" \- the break-even oil price for shale oil wells has declined quite dramatically, from around $80-100 in 2014 to $40-50 today, with current wells costing less and producing more than wells of 4 years ago. However, third: The improved economics are _not_ primarily a result of technological advances. Rather, the lower well cost is largely due to lower rig rates and cheaper and more efficient labour. The lower rig rates are not sustainable in the long term, they are low only because it is better to have the rig working and earning at least a little money (not enough to justify buying a new one in the future) than rusting away in a yard. Labour productivity gain is partly explained by the fact that the only the most experienced and efficient crews are now working, and higher well productivity is partly due to only drilling the very best prospects. The quality of crews and prospects is a barrier to raising production further.

In summary, I believe the shale boom is an economic oddity. Whether it continues for any length of time depends on the oil prices. At the current prices, it is not sustainable.

Corollary: If the oil price is effectively set by the _true_ cost of shale oil, we should expect that the price of oil will rise to $80-100/bbl in the medium term.

<comment><USER4> How many years do the laborers have left? Is it less than the medium term of raising prices to 80-100/bbl?

I'm trying to figure out whether the current situation is likely to grow prices relatively linearly or more suddenly - if technological improvements aren't possible.

<comment><USER3> >How many years do the laborers have left? Is it less than the medium term of raising prices to 80-100/bbl?

I don't think the ageing workforce is a huge problem, if that is what you are asking. The labour pool can smoothly absorb new entrants to replace the retirees.

The problem is that if a rapid expansion of workforce is needed - eg in response to increased demand for rigs if oil prices jump into the $80-100/bbl range - the quality of the labour pool will suffer, the productivity will decline and costs will increase.

Are the prices likely to grow suddenly? In some scenarios (eg effective OPEC action, ME conflicts) - certainly. More interesting is what ought to happen in a "business as usual" scenarios. I see it as a race between the decline in production from major "conventional" fields, the growth in energy demand esp from India, China and the "little tigers", and the transition to renewable energy and the "electric economy". My pick is that the speed of the transition to renewable energy will not be sufficient to compensate for the other two factors, and that we will see an increase in the oil prices to $80-100/bbl by 2020, which will enable new production to be brought on stream profitably.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Speaking as an employee at one of the largest independent E&P's, we haven't relied on debt and equity financing in the last few years because we have had enough free cash flow. The only thing slowing us down really is things like pipeline takeaway and labor shortage.

<comment><USER6> This might be an unpopular idea among the fossil money and investment people, but as a victim and witness to pipeline activity by an unscrupulous corporation, I would suggest that there are a mountain of unstated risks and hidden costs. This example [1] pipeline has state and local criminal and civil legal issues, spills, runoff, poisoned wells, sinkholes, inestimable property value loss, loss of use, an explosion, and all other kinds of malfeasance. This line passes literally within feet of homes and schools, and I don't think we've begun to see the true danger: the stated blast zone is 1000 feet and the "self" evacuation zone is 3 miles [2]. Someone is going to get hurt.

Perhaps the biggest hidden cost has no price tag, which is the damage to democracy in the form of bad precedent that occurs when a big corporation steamrolls local governments, gets itself declared as a public utility, and begins to eminent domain and wreck everything in sight, literally bulldozing through suburbs. These are homes and businesses a dozen feet from the line: [3,4,5,6]. This is not CNG, it's other more explosive fractions. It's a travesty of injustice.

1\. [https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2018/12/24/spills-s...](https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylvania/2018/12/24/spills- shutdowns-and-legal-challenges-a-tumultuous-year-for-mariner-east-2/)

2\. [http://marinereast2.com/index.html](http://marinereast2.com/index.html)

3\. [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-75.6675604,3a,75y,1...](https://email@example.com,-75.6675604,3a,75y,170.37h,80.4t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sLKgDUrAPYcuT4bkoW-2UhQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

4\. [https://email@example.com,-75.5377762,3a,75y,2...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-75.5377762,3a,75y,25.45h,84.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sCbQch26KU8DBOTRQmvVB2g!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

5\. [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-75.6366127,3a,75y,1...](https://email@example.com,-75.6366127,3a,75y,123.72h,77.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sF8chYn-5tTd9EQeTqw3uvQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

6\. [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-75.5431866,3a,75y,3...](https://email@example.com,-75.5431866,3a,75y,314.74h,85.67t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sfs- KdQjsyz9hKXiNDBTuDA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

<comment><USER5> Not disagreeing with any of what you said, however I encourage you to consider the alternatives of pipelines. Rail and trucking typically have a significantly higher spill rate.

[https://www.iaee.org/en/publications/newsletterdl.aspx?id=46...](https://www.iaee.org/en/publications/newsletterdl.aspx?id=460)

<comment><USER6> That's a great discussion to be had, as well as the costs of burning stuff in general versus alternatives.

What I wanted to emphasize was, (1) we never had that tradeoff discussion at any level of government or community; it was forced on us, (2) there was substantial undisclosed activity that investors are probably not aware of, and (3) the overall shitty behavior by the company will have many long term negative effects on how we do public works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wall Street financing is no longer necessary for the fracking boom, the majors have heavily consolidated the fracking industry over the last five or six years. That consolidation continues apace.

The largest land owners in the Permian are now: Occidental, Exxon and Chevron. Ten years ago it was a very diverse ownership group of independent operators and speculators. The majors will keep buying until there are few small players left. Exxon doesn't need to go begging to Wall Street to give it a few hundred million dollars to finance more frack wells.

For example, the richest oil wildcatter in the US might soon be this man:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-27/wildcatte...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-27/wildcatter- turns-big-dog-into-fortune-as-oil-giants-weigh-bids)

Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon and Chevron would love to acquire his 329,000 acres in the Midland Basin in the Permian. Estimate on the price tag: ~$10-$15 billion.

In mid 2017, Exxon bought 250,000 acres in the Permian from the Bass family for $5.6b to $6.6b.

[https://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxonmobil- acquire...](https://news.exxonmobil.com/press-release/exxonmobil-acquire- companies-doubling-permian-basin-resource-6-billion-barrels)

Over the last four quarters, Exxon + Chevron have produced $40 billion in operating income. And that's with modest oil prices.

The fourth largest land owner in the Permian, is Apache, with 1.6 million acres (with ConocoPhillips in fifth). Apache's market cap is a mere $12b. It's obvious what's going to happen there. Exxon's market cap is $332b - they're just going to keep on acquiring the fracking industry (they used their well- valued shares - high for the energy industry - for the Bass deal). Companies the size of Exxon and Chevron can trivially afford to explore and prime wells in price downturns, then unleash them in upturns.

<comment><USER8> This is exactly what I was wondering. "Couldn't this just mean that they're self-sufficient now?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting I have friends and family who work at sand mines that supply the sand for fracking. The companies they work for are still expanding and they have more overtime available than they can take. I'm not sure on the long term future of fracking but in the short 5-10 year span it doesn't appear to be going away based on how much infrastructure these companies are adding right now and how much land they're buying.

<comment><USER10> Prediction: this piece is just fearmongering, in 1-2 years we will see fracking increase, not decrease.

<comment><USER7> It's something akin to talking about the problems independent burger stands are having while McDonald's is taking over.

US oil output is projected to rise to 16-18 million barrels per day over the next decade approximately, from 12.x million expected in 2019. At 16m barrels per day, the US will be producing 50% more oil than Saudi Arabia. To do that WTI oil merely needs to remain above roughly $50. At $70+ sustained oil, US production will add a million barrels per day per year.

On the flip side, sustained $30-$35 oil would be a catastrophe for OPEC and Russia. They'll cut and or restrain production expansion as necessary to keep oil over a minimum price. Saudi needs $65-$70+ oil to avoid epic budget shortfalls going forward. Russia needs it for spending to placate domestic popularity re Putin. They don't like giving up demand growth to the US, however for now they're not really net suffering a loss of output so much as ceding global growth to US shale. They'll keep doing that for quite a while yet, while hoping US output plateaus in the coming years.

<comment><USER11> So the higher the oil price, the greater the US market share growth. What a nightmare for OPEC and Russia.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://outline.com/euZR5L](https://outline.com/euZR5L)

</comment><comment><USER13> Also, a lot of people want to ban fracking

Personally, I'm not for an outright ban, but 100% public disclosure of the fracking chemicals used should be required at the very least

</comment><comment><USER14> I guess its not surprising the word "climate" doesn't show up in this text, but I still find it depressing.

<comment><USER15> Solar and wind aren't deployed rapidly across the world because of climate change; it's because they're stupid cheap compared to other generation technologies.

While I'd love for more people to embrace the urgency of climate change, using economic self-interest is just as good.

<comment><USER16> Really? Please look up some references. Eg. [https://jancovici.com/en/](https://jancovici.com/en/)

<comment><USER15> Germany and other nations that poured subsidies into renewables early on (and are to be commended for their economic sacrifice for doing so) are outliers. The rest of the world caught up as soon as renewables were cheaper than fossil fuels. Capital markets don't have feelings.

Humanity lucked out that solar and wind costs were driven down as rapidly as they were through manufacturing scale. We'd be screwed otherwise ("ie business as usual carbon output estimates").

Somewhat related but unrelated: it's not bad if fracking goes south. It'll drive the price of natural gas up, which will make existing nuclear and existing/new renewables more cost competitive. It'll also drive adoption of energy storage faster. We _want_ natural gas prices to rise, since we're not going to internalize the CO2 emission cost through regulation. This allows for market forces to kick in that are beneficial to climate change mitigation.

Disclaimer: I have brokered one tax equity partnership arrangement for a solar plant rated @ >1MW (Indianapolis suburbs), and have done my research.

<comment><USER17> > Humanity lucked out

Humanity didn't luck out. The Chinese communists invested heavily in solar while the US was wasting money on fracking.

<comment><USER18> That's just a clueless statement. How are people going to heat their homes?

Solar is amazing, but isn't the be all end all.

<comment><USER15> Heat pumps and weatherizing. Likely some homes in very cold climates will still need natural gas service (propane tanks, more likely) for emergency heat when the polar vortex hits, but a tight envelope and an efficient heat pump do most of the heavy lifting.

<comment><USER19> You live in the Bay Area, don't you?

No, heat pumps (which take energy; duh) and "weatherizing" are not going to heat houses in Canada or Maine.

<comment><USER15> One of my properties is in northern Illinois, no problems running off a heat pump almost year round. Natural gas bill is about $150/year for monthly service connections and rare use.

I've never lived in California.

<comment><USER20> Your comment omits an important but interesting detail here - how common is "rare use" and what is it being used for?

<comment><USER18> Air source heat pumps become less effective as the temperature drops. At 17F, you lose about 25% of BTU capacity as compared to 48F.

Hot water is another huge use — it's really expensive to use electricity for that purpose.

<comment><USER15> Heat pump water heaters exist.

"Heat pump water heaters use electricity to move heat from one place to another instead of generating heat directly. Therefore, they can be two to three times more energy efficient than conventional electric resistance water heaters. To move the heat, heat pumps work like a refrigerator in reverse."

[https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat- pump-w...](https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/water-heating/heat-pump-water- heaters)

<comment><USER17> > Heat pump water heaters exist.

Yeah I just put one of those in, mostly because I didn't want to run a gas line. And feel a lot more competent running a 30amp circuit than cutting and sealing a hole in the roof.

Works fine.

Also friend in Florida says she has a heat pump with an air handler. It produces heat in the winter and cooling in the summer.

Not the end of the world.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I build a portfolio being unemployed? - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! I've 9 years of working experience as a full stack developer and this month I decided to take a step back to study zand try to get a remote job. The problem is that I can't showcase most of the jobs that I did and I didn't contribute to open source. How can I start to build a portfolio being unemployed, perfectionist (most of the time stuck at analysis paralysis) and not very good at english? <comment><USER2> 1) If you are not employed then your website is effectively just a CV. If you do not have work to put on there tailor it to show your skills. You can add work as you come along.

2) contribute to open source stuff, find some freelance clients, write a blog about relevant topics and share your ideas and thoughts on design/development etc...

Have a look around at other portfolios of freelance web developers and see what they are doing :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> pick one project.

so you have an answer to what your doing now.

find one technically challenging part of it. do that. so you have something to ramble on about for a second or two about the project.

try for an interview. fail. do more stuff to your project. repeat until someone hires you.

don't talk about the business side of it when you interview.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir <comment><USER3> Dear Nani

Thank you for your tablet which we received on March 7, 1750BCE. We appreciate your business and can assure you that feedback like yours is important to us because it helps us improve our business. We take all feedback very seriously. We apologize if our service did not meet your expectations, but, more importantly, did not meet the high standards we set for ourselves. We are always striving to improve, which is why we remain Mesopotamia's leading producer of copper ingots.

Enclosed is a discount code which you can use on your next purchase to compensate you for the difficulties you experienced. This coupon expires in 1749BCE

Sam-Gun, Cutomer relations

<comment><USER4> That would have to be a remarkably prescient customer relations fellow to know that such-and-such would be born 1750 years later.

<comment><USER5> I declare this year 1533 BZ. I'm not obliged to let you know what the Z is, but it's gonna be important!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have found twitter to be the most excellent platform for complaints in the year 2017. Many orgs have responsive social media staff that monitor twitter and are able to make stuff right.

Twitter is better than clay tablets for complaints, though I do admire the gravitas of a clay tablet.

Nothing says "I am fucking serious" as well as pounding out a message on clay, firing it in an oven for 12 hours, and then sending a servant to deliver it by donkey or camel through hostile territory.

<comment><USER7> You'll be really excited about my pitch deck: Clay Tablets as a Service. Want to sign up for the API Beta?

<comment><USER8> You'll have competition: [https://dumbcuneiform.com](https://dumbcuneiform.com)

<comment><USER9> > Good catch, smarties! Cuneiform is a writing system, not a language (like > roman letters). We're transliterating - converting the syllables of your > message to the cuneiform script - rather than translating.

Maybe the next evolution of this is a service that translates to one of the ancient languages that was traditionally written in cuneiform! (But I guess the transliteration approach is somewhat legitimate considering the range of totally unrelated languages that have been written in this system -- so why not English too?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Everyone, please read the letter in full. It's great, and not too long.

Of course it's a translation of an ancient language, but assuming it's fairly accurate, it's awesome to think someone wrote something like that almost 4,000 years ago. I think sometimes we forget that at their core, people in 1750 BCE were just like people today.

> What do you take me for, that you treat somebody like me with such contempt? > I have sent as messengers gentlemen like ourselves to collect the bag with > my money (deposited with you) but you have treated me with contempt by > sending them back to me empty-handed several times, and that through enemy > territory. Is there anyone among the merchants who trade with Telmun who has > treated me in this way? You alone treat my messenger with contempt!

Love it.

<comment><USER11> That is why I love reading ancient books that have survived to our days.

<comment><USER12> You've probably already read it, but here's a mobile-friendly PlinyPedia:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15668314)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It gets better: [https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/123010716162/thesparkofrev...](https://prokopetz.tumblr.com/post/123010716162/thesparkofrevolution- blacktyranitar)

> But this guy, this Ea-nasir, he kept all of his angry letters - hundreds of > them - and meticulously filed and preserved them in a dedicated room in his > house. What kind of guy does that?

<comment><USER14> A narcissist.

<comment><USER15> FTFY: A wealthy narcissist.

Edit: Surprised on the downvotes. "Traveling merchant who imports metals and has a room in their house solely dedicated to customer complaints" Wouldn't the preservation of his narcissism to modern times heavily connote the importance of his wealth?

<comment><USER8> Was his house known as the "Ea-nasir Ziggurat" ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here are pictures of the letter:

[http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll...](http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=277770&partId=1&searchText=ur+131236&page=1)

<comment><USER17> Ah that's interesting. It even has dimensions. It's 11.6 cm x 5 cm x 2.6 cm. In comparison, the latest iPhone is 14 cm x 7 cm x 0.7 cm.

So this note was basically the size of a cellphone. Or as wide as a 3x5 card, but not as tall. Makes sense, I suppose. Factors that shape iPhones and 3x5 cards include easy handling, easy reading, and easy manual interaction.

<comment><USER18> 11.5 cm was the height of the first iPhone and iPhone 4. That old(!) _tablet_ fits that, it is a little narrower and a little more than twice as thick.

Imagine, Steve Jobs at al. chose the size that matched that almost 4000 years old tablet, just went to twice as thin.

<comment><USER19> But by making it so thin one could not write on the edge of the tablet[1]. Imagine the complaints from removing such functionality for the sake of mere thinness.

[1][http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/coll...](http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?partid=1&assetid=1613004127&objectid=277770)

<comment><USER18> Never thought about that, did anybody analyze if the "thou shalt" tablets from the Bible were also inspired by the Babylonian cuneiform ones?

From the debt receipts and complaints, to that..

Regarding side writing, yes I'd really hated broken compatibility. Not to mention that they'd break more easily!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The best part about this is that archaeologists supposedly found more complaint tablets in the same room of the house about the same guy, leading them to believe that the house they found them in belonged to the Ea-nasir himself.

<comment><USER21> The room for customer support/relationship maybe?

<comment><USER22> Like a clay-based call centre?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I love the inscribed metadata at the top:

 _Tell Ea-nasir: Nanni sends the following message:_

It's like an email header for a clay tablet.

<comment><USER24> I found that line quite interesting. The wording seems to imply that someone is going to read this tablet to Ea-nasir, and possibly that someone wrote the tablet on behalf of Nanni. In an age before near-universal literacy (i.e. most of human history), that makes sense: Ea-nasir would have summoned someone to read out the tablet. Given Ea-nasir's position as a presumably well-off trader, he may have simply had a scribe on-staff to handle his correspondence --an early instance of the modern PR hack?

<comment><USER25> I think it's literally just the equivalent of an envelope - a "to" field and a "from" field, so that any messenger in charge of deliveries can, at a glance, tell to whom this message is meant to be delivered, and to return it to the sender if it's undeliverable.

I wonder if ancient Ur had dodgy FedEx delivery guy equivalents who would knock on your door and toss the tablet in the dirt and mark it as "delivered".

<comment><USER26> "knock on your door and toss the tablet in the dirt"

At least then it'd be delivered (as opposed to the normal FedEx approach of "knocking" by slapping a missed delivery slip on the door).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Shouldn't this have (-1750) in the title?

</comment><comment><USER28> "Written in Cuneiform". How about Akkadian? Many languages were written in wedge writing. Cuneiform is neither a language, nor a fixed set of symbols. Cuneiform was used in at least eight different languages. </rant>

</comment><comment><USER19> "while I have given to the palace on your behalf 1,080 pounds of copper, and umi-abum has likewise given 1,080 pounds of copper, apart from what we both have had written on a sealed tablet to be kept in the temple of Samas."

I would be interested on what this joint-written, sealed tablet kept at the temple is. Some kind of escrow system? Unfortunately the wikipedia article does not mention anything about this cryptic phrase.

<comment><USER29> Basically a receipt probably for tax purposes

</comment></comment><comment> d--b This is fun, but at the same time not very surprising. People do complain and so sometimes put it in writing.

Is there a catalog of everything that is a "first known written stuff". Like the first known correspondence between a child and a distant cousin, or the first letter in which a woman tells another woman that they bought the same dress and that's not cool?

<comment><USER30> It's true, some of this is frivolous. It's valuable though, since we think in narratives and achieving milestones helps us feel progress. It's like how Floyd Mayweather just achieved a contrived goal of "undefeated in 50 matches," or the long list of Roger Federer's achievements, all made up "firsts" or "mosts."

There's a non-frivolous side too, I think. Firsts (and other data points) help to timeline the use of written language and its development. The Akkadian/Sumerian finds are really good for this, because of the quantity of finds and the ease of translation (Akkadian anyway). King List, Laws and other political/governance texts. Epic/mythological tablets and other "religious" tablets. Historical tablets. Some clay tablets are reproduced in the bible, and still form core parts of culture. A tremendous amount of accounting tablets appear in very early periods suggesting that clay was originally a finch startup idea.

<comment><USER31> Another thing we can glean from these records is how expensive/labor-intensive it was to produce them. If we find that in a certain time period, people were only writing about business and government as opposed to personal correspondence or frivolous things, then we can assume that the medium might have been costly at the time, and/or that people did less-official communication through media that were less durable, like paper or the brain of a messenger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> i can't find the source for this assertion but I was lead to believe that a large number of contemporary copies of this message were made and distributed around as a warning to others not to do business with this merchant.

<comment><USER12> That would make a lot of sense. It's similar to the public reference system that makes sites like eBay, AirBnb, and CouchSurfing work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Some people wonder what is the point of reading Herodotus or Plutarch etc and then you read things like this and see that human nature has not changed much in 5,000 years.

</comment><comment><USER33> The arabic version of the wikipedia entry has a picture of the tablet.

[https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/لوح_شكوى_إلى_ايانصير](https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/لوح_شكوى_إلى_ايانصير)

<comment><USER34> Its also linked at the bottom of the english wikipedia page, under External Links. It links the British Museum, where it has pictures of front and back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It always surprises me that people seem so surprised that people were the same way so many years ago. If you read basically anything written by human hands in any time period, it seems they all had very many of the same concerns we do today.

<comment><USER29> I think people are suprised specifically because they don't read anything written by human hands from the ancient world

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If only Ea-nasir had put his money into crytops, instead, we would be reading tablets on his 10000% return on investment. :)

</comment><comment><USER37> Getting ripped off is apparently at least 3750 years old. People seem to have not changed over time.

</comment><comment><USER38> This is fascinating stuff, thanks for sharing. It's amazing that I can totally relate to an almost 4000 year old stuff, it's kind of cute.

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder what artifacts will be found from today in 3750 years? BRB, gonna carve this comment into stone tablet and bury it.

<comment><USER40> The only surviving artifact from our period of time will be a single CD-ROM copy of Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation.

At offset 0x4B3B8A of the game executable, the following message is found:

> Tomb Raider IV - The Last Relevation -- Dedicated to my fiance Jay for > putting up with this game taking over our lifes,my step sons Craig,Jamie & > Aiden (Show this to your mates at school, they'll believe you now!!),also > for my daughters Sophie and Jody - See you in another hex dump - <USER2> > Flower 11/11/1999

[https://tcrf.net/Tomb_Raider:_The_Last_Revelation](https://tcrf.net/Tomb_Raider:_The_Last_Revelation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "million cuneiform tablets are estimated to have been excavated in modern times, of which only approximately 30,000 - 100,000 have been read or published."

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

What are we doing about this?

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder whether the complaint worked.

</comment><comment><USER42> That's very interesting, thank you

<comment><AUTHOR> I totally stole it from pjc50: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15669352)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Buyer was pissed. Really pissed.

</comment><comment><USER44> I love the details, and the points he's clearly outraged about. Basically a combination of, "It was dangerous!" "Do you know who I fucking _am_?!" and "Treat me with contempt? I'll show you contempt!"

People haven't changed really.</comment>


Diet Advice That Ignores Hunger - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/opinion/diet-advice-that-ignores-hunger.html <comment><USER3> The recent study Taubes critiques here was covered in several articles posted to HN.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061426](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061426)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068486](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10068486)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058472](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058472)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050278)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058190](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10058190)

<comment><USER4> The interesting thing about that study is that the low-fat diet had 8% fat, which is crazy low and a ~75% reduction, whereas the low-carb diet had 29% carbs, which is only a 40% reduction and not extreme at all. The studies that support low-carb being a more efficient diet have far lower carbohydrates than this study.

I mean, sure, if you just put people into ketosis with ~0% carbs it would be a different story! But 29% is on the other end of the spectrum. It is high enough that IMO, it makes the study's argument sound, but not valid, if you get my drift.

<comment><USER5> Not really, unless the diets controlled protein intake between the groups (which is often overlooked in low carb studies), low carb really just means high protein. in which case the beneficial results of the low carb group could just be because of increased protein consumption.

<comment><USER4> Yep, that would be another way to get relatively useless results, since protein metabolism is not at all energy efficient compared to carbs or fats.

So if caloric intake is kept constant at say 1500 but protein makes up a large proportion, "usable" calories is actually much smaller.

<comment><USER5> I don't think the TEF has a very large effect honestly. I think the other things that come with a high protein diet such an increased lean mass probably have a larger effect. Still in most low carb studies the low carb group is really just the high protein group. It's pretty obvious that you can't draw any kind of reliable conclusion if you change more than one variable

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The facts of that study brushed aside: the participants diet was based on potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, bread and macaroni. Notice, not enough protein to maintain lean body mass. This is a bad idea.

Also, over 24 weeks the group lost 25% of their body mass.

Look at pictures of the participants: [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294) These look like frail bodys that, indeed, can sustain on 1600 calories per day, which explains slowed weight loss.

If you're an individual looking at how to seriously lose fat and recompose your body, don't look at popular media, but look at those with vested interest in effective results. E.g. athletic trainers in sports where weight management is a key point of the sport, like bodybuilding, wrestling, MMA, powerlifting. The science is quite clear, you just have to figure out how to filter out popular articles. (Lyle McDonald's site is a great start.)

Calorie restriction, with adequate protein intake, works. Also, any diet or lifestyle change that works creates a caloric deficit, and will also work if you count this deficit.

<comment><USER7> My wife has been failing to lose weight for several months, she is literally weighing everything she eats and recording calories (~1200/day), plus doing a several hours of quite intense exercise (stairs, etc) per week yet has hit a plateau for well over a month - any advice, things to read? (Note: she "can't" do low carb, which I personally recommend.)

<comment><USER8> If your wife has been in caloric restriction for an extended period of time, she may have metabolic damage. I recently stumbled upon Layne Norton's work - he has a PhD in Nutritional Science and is a bodybuilder/powerlifter, and he makes some compelling arguments (and reviews of the literature) about how the metabolism responds to prolonged caloric restriction.

Here's a good place to start: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHzie6XRGk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHHzie6XRGk)

<comment><USER7> Interesting....again, this all sounds plausible, but is also contradictory with other perfectly plausible theories, some even in this same thread (whether low intensity cardio is good or bad).

Considering the plateau my wife's hit, I think maybe this is an avenue worth exploring though. She'll certainly be open to the idea of consuming more calories!

You know one thing that sucks, I would be not at all surprised if the average personal trainer at a gym hardly has a clue what they're talking about, not to mention the theoretical approach they subscribe to might not even be correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A 6 day study on diet in 19 people somehow generating meaningful conclusions about weight loss in general is _absurd_. It does seem like you could learn something about rates of change - are we speedboats or supertankers - <USER2> that's about all.

<comment><USER5> thank god there is someone else in here who saw that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> More diet fad posts.

Again, I have no idea what diet fads have to do with the stated relevance of this site. This is an opinion piece with little to no information beyond harping on one particular vein of diet ideology. I really hope these types of ideological off topic posts begin to be penalized and flagged soon.

<comment><USER11> I guess the point the author was trying to make is that extreme calorie restriction with a nutrient poor diet is bad for you, but I would be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees. I guess he was trying to extrapolate from that study somehow but the article goes off the rails and drops a bunch of factoids about calorie restriction and diet and then closes by mentioning a study of dubious quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> 24 week study sounds brutal, would never happen today in politically correct society.

       participant: I want to chop of my fingers and eat them, or kill myself, please let me go.
       "doctor": You signed a waiver, now shut up and eat your turnip!

Anecdote: There was a Polish Survivor edition in 2004, ran out of ideas halfway thru the series and started starving contestants out. They did things like an hour long swimming/running race culminated in holding item over your head in full sun until you collapse, all for the prize of small bag of sugar, while losers got small portions of white rice instead. Ordinary men got turned into stick figures. Last program was recorded one month after the contest, all previously super skinny guys sported huge beer bellies, when asked said they couldnt stop eating.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why has the simplistic traditional advice worked for some? Is there big variation in the extent to which different humans are affected by macronutrient ratio and food quality? Are nuanced dietary dos and don'ts a domain reserved for the unlucky?

<comment><USER14> How hard your body holds on to calories is genetic. I carry a gene variant that makes it much more difficult for me to shed fat cells than other people in my family.

<comment><USER15> I've never found it easy to diet. Unless you can precisely and easily measure your caloric intake, it seems too difficult, especially if you don't cook.

When I was younger I could just start running 3-4 days a week and lose 20lbs over several months. Now that I'm older, and more out of shape, I've resorted to a lot of walking, plus I'm adding a spinning bike. The Apple Watch's ability to monitor my activity got me started getting me moving enough to see results.

[https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple- watch-8-weeks-...](https://h4labs.wordpress.com/2015/08/27/apple- watch-8-weeks-and-9-pounds/)

I'm hoping to lose another 20lbs this year.

<comment><USER16> Counting calories is hard indeed, but doable. With a good calorie logging app[1], you should be able to look up how many calories any food you're eating is likely to have. It doesn't have to be exact, just in the ballpark; it's really the fact that you're logging at all that keeps your intake in check.

And after a while it becomes a lot easier, because you'll get pretty good at estimating how much calories something has. (That omelette I got at that french restaurant? Probably 700 calories, since it was really cheesy... etc.) Plus, you're just as likely to overestimate calories as underestimate, so over the course of a given week any inaccuracies probably even out.

I lost 50lbs by counting calories years ago. It took me a year to drop all of them, but I've mostly kept it off for 2 years more. ("Mostly" because I stopped counting several months ago and gained about 10 lbs since my lowest level, so I'm counting calories again and am back down to +5 or so from my lowest and dropping.)

[1] "Lose It!" is my favorite, but I've heard good things about MyFitnessPal, which has a crowdsourced calorie database. For any food with a barcode you can just scan it, and there's a huge database of restaurant foods, as well as estimated calorie amounts for anything you're likely to cook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Taubes breezily dismisses the Hall paper, which is, methodologically speaking, pretty conclusive. If you're curious about the paper and its implications for Taubes's obesity-insulin hypothesis, I'd recommend these two blog posts by Stephan Guyenet, an obesity researcher:

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-new-human- tr...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/a-new-human-trial- seriously-undermines.html)

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/more- thoughts-...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2015/08/more-thoughts-on- recent-low-fat-vs-low.html)

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't dismiss the controversy just yet. Although the obesity-insulin hypothesis ignores other hormones and factors such as leptin, glucagon, and ghrelin; as well as other factors to nutrition, like how insulin spikes contribute to muscle growth, it is pretty effective at predicting heart disease and diabetes and reduction in not just carbohydrates but also starches / free sugars is almost universally agreed to provide long term health benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So many problems with the interpretation of the starvation study here.

Quantity of food (in caloric terms) not type, is the single biggest predictor of weight loss. In fact unless your body magically defies the law of conservation of energy; it's impossible to lose weight in a caloric surplus regardless of food choices.

The subjects in the study stopped losing weight despite staying at the same caloric consumption BECAUSE THEY LOST A LOT OF WEIGHT ALREADY. Therefore, their maintenance caloric requirements were lower than when they started. To assume that this is because of anything other than their body mass lowering is ridiculous.

The second study had too small of a population and was too short in duration to try and extrapolate anything to a longer term diet.

Taubes is a vehement believer in the low carb movement and has sold a lot of books on the topic. His opinions are heavily biased and he has a lot invested in interpreting the data in a way that's favourable to him.

The fact remains, it's physically impossible to lose weight when not in a caloric deficit, so sorry Taubes, you really do have to either "eat less" or exercise more (hopefully both).

<comment><USER19> So if I eat 3500 kcal worth of sand a day I won't lose weight?

<comment><USER20> Assuming your body, with your lifestyle, requires on average 3500 kcal a day to sustain itself, and if your body can extract 3500 kcal out of the sand you produce, then yes, you won't lose weight.

There are multiple factors that change:

1) intestines+stomach can have different absorption rates

2) food preparation can change amount of calories (cooked food simplifies calorie extraction)

3) glycemic index affects how readily cell absorb calories

4) body can only release a limited amount of energy out of fat cells per day (study seems to suggest 22kcal per day per pound of fat). Deficit beyond starts burning through other tissues than fat

5) Base metabolic rate - different weight and different lifestyle will have people have different amount of daily required calories

There are many things that are affected, and it is best to calculate out yourself. How efficient is your body in absorbing calories, and how efficient is it in burning them, and then ensure you absorb less than you need to burn.

<comment><USER5> 'Absorption' is a detail you don't need to know when it comes to losing weight. All you need to know is you put x calories in your system and you maintained weight, therefore x - y will produce a net loss of weight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Don't call it hunger, call it : "the sensation of weight loss"

<comment><USER22> You shouldn't have been downvoted, thats a valid technique for some. Often phrased as "nothing tastes as good as being lean feels".

<comment><USER23> It sounds like common anorexia rhetoric. Maybe let's not go down that path.

<comment><USER21> Seeing the world as "fat and happy" or "anorexic and starving" is common obese rhetoric. Maybe let's not waddle, gasping, down that path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It appears Taubes has been bitten by a meme. The subjects in the NIH study consumed isocaloric diets and were put in a chamber that measured all of their thermodynamic outputs -- it turned out thermogenesis was a tiiiiiiny amount higher on one diet. Why is that? Well, the "loading" (pre-test) diet was mostly carbohydrate, the low-fat diet was also, but the low-carbohydrate diet was mostly fat. After only six days, the subjects' metabolisms were still adjusting to the diet. Where did I get that idea? _It 's in the study abstract:_

> Mathematical model simulations agreed with these data, but predicted that > the body acts to minimize body fat differences with prolonged isocaloric > diets varying in carbohydrate and fat.

Even some of the _media stories_ , like the one in your first link, quote the author of the paper saying this:

>Indeed, Hall's mathematical modeling predicts that in the long term the body acts to minimise body fat differences between diets that are equal in calories but varying widely in their ratio of carbohydrate to fat.

>"Over the long term it's pretty close," says Hall.

You'll recognize Hall as the first author of the study. Let's be clear: the lead author of the study said in plain English that there was probably not a significant long-term difference in energy usage resp. composition.

Why is the media blowing this up? Because they just want a story. They want nutrition to be an argument, rather than a gradually developing science with occasional surprises.

Their goals are at odds with researchers who want to make useful information about nutrition available to consumers. That includes the New York Times. Keep that in mind.

</comment><comment><USER25> Just a trawl through old diet advice, but what stood out to me was the crappy advert (something about how many triangles I see). I cannot for a moment image the published paper accepting some crappy trawling / phishing ad for its sunday edition - even if they ponied up the cash.

How has advertising got so bottom-feeder and no one seems to care - this is your brand guys !

<comment><USER26> As mentioned, it's a remnant ad network. As for why they're doing it, well, look in a mirror. Advertising has turned, as the saying goes, print dollars into online nickels. If you wish to have free online content, something has to pay the bills.

<comment><USER25> I don't agree it's the fault of the mirror. A tradition jam newspaper can be seen as a vertically integrated article aggregator and curation site.

So the model for reddit and HN is to charge for access, and pass on to the articles clicked through to. However in that game, I would pay NYT a long time before I paid Reddit.

<comment><USER26> A newspaper is exactly _not_ an aggregation and curation site. They pay to produce content. No income, no more content.

Reddit and hn are entirely different: they pay nobody to produce content, nor do they charge for access.

<comment><USER25> But if you got the editors and writers in NYT and said do Reddit /r but your upvotes are worth 10x or 1000x then essentially I would be asking for curation by the editors, not production and curation

Production will be valuable - but the curation is the secret sauce.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


iPhone, iPad now represent 83% of WiFi mobile devices; PCs shift into minority - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/21/iphone_ipad_now_represent_83_of_wifi_mobile_devices_as_pcs_shift_into_minority_use.html

<comment><USER2> Mobile devices have cellular connectivity, so why would you sign-up for WiFi.

I'd like to see stats on if boingo has grown or shrunk in the last few years. are people using less paid public internet?

</comment><comment><USER3> ...at airports.</comment>


When exactly did clowns become scary? - <AUTHOR> https://apnews.com/533cac182c5841659222fd99f9d00a83/No-laughing-matter:-When-exactly-did-clowns-become-scary? <comment><USER2> Also: this clowns are scary thing seems to be US exclusive? Please correct me if I am wrong.

</comment><comment><USER3> One infamous clown in US pop culture was Pogo the Clown, AKA serial killer John Wayne Gacy:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wayne_Gacy)</comment>