Bootstrapping a startup with Craigslist arbitrage - <AUTHOR> http://cam.ly/danesblog/2011/01/craigslist-arbitrage/

<comment><USER2> I appreciate the post, but in the end it just isn't that useful. It's like "I did all this stuff to sell MacBooks and didn't really make any money, so I started this startup."

Obviously you can't do it for long if you're not making coin, but either a more in-depth analysis of how many you sold for what prices, or any success / fail stories, would make this a more useful post for readers. Instead it's all the build-up of an objective study with no real payoff.

Hopefully this comes across as a useful critique and not something that's personally attacking. I like the idea, I just want something more out of a post like this.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Find a deal with the data and intuition on Craigslist. Then, meet in person and barter at least $50 off the asking price._

You mean, agree to $X over email and then demand it for $X-50 when you meet in person? That's really, really tacky.

<comment><USER4> He said 'asking' price.

What he is saying is that the person is offering $X and when he arrives in person he counters with $X-50. (Probably more like offering $X-100 so you get a counter at $X-50).

<comment><USER5> Right... but if you agree to the price over the phone, don't negotiate in person. It's a dick move. If I'm selling my TV for $250, you agree to that, I drive to meet you and you low-ball me for $200, I hate you. It's that simple.

<comment><USER6> Rule #1: Never drive to meet someone if you're the seller. Let them come to you. If they can't, someone else will.

Half of people on CL are flakes or cheapskates, you have to assume they will either never show up or lowball you

<comment><USER7> Hah! Like I'm going to give my address out to people.

I meet people in a public place: Starbucks, a grocery store, McDonalds, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Properly speaking, this is not arbitrage. There are two criteria for arbitrage, it has to be riskless and self-financing. Looking at an item and saying, I should be able to sell that for more is not an arbitrage. If you were able to locate a buyer willing to pay a certain price prior to purchasing the item, and then buy an under priced item and sell it to your buyer for more money, that would be arbitrage. Arbitrage is a sexy three dollar word that people like to throw around, but if you are risking loss in order to hopefully make a profit, then plain and simple it is not arbitrage.

<comment><USER9> He's doing statistical arbitrage.

<comment><USER8> What basis are you using for saying this is StatArb? Typically that involve hundreds or thousands of equities where you can use the laws of large numbers to your advantage. Buying one item that is below the average price of something and "hoping" you can sell it for more just doesn't strike me as any type of real arbitrage.

<comment><USER10> StatArb has no dependency on equities. This is arbitration, Arbitration between two markets, his local craigslist market and the rest of the online market. There is no hoping, hes priced the item in one market and it is above the price of another, that is pure arbitrage.

<comment><USER11> Arbitration does not mean what you think it does.

<comment><USER10> s/arbitration/arbitrage/g my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Here's an interesting graph from the data that proves the price difference > increases with price: [followed by a graph of nearly random data]

Drawing a straight line through loosely correlated data doesn't "prove" anything.

> I didn't do Craigslist arbitrage for long because it was not worth my time > and effort.

So a more appropriate title for this post would have been "Failing to bootstrap a startup with Craigslist arbitrage"?

</comment><comment><USER13> > For example it quickly became apparent that a unibody Macbook was worth more > than one that wasn't a unibody.

Then that's just another variable. Not intuition like the author claims. Intuition would be in recognizing the important variables.

</comment><comment><USER14> He posts a math formula, a fancy graph, and even the Python script but barely mentions the end result.

I would have loved to know how many he actually bought, sold, and for what profit.

</comment><comment><USER15> Slightly unrelated to the blogpost, but how do your cameras work in low light settings? I'm looking into a similar system for a business my wife and I run.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wrote a (fairly) successful e-book on this topic, freely available over at my site.

</comment><comment><USER17> the word is "bargain" not "barter".</comment>


Meta-Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://blog.floydhub.com/meta-rl/ <comment><USER2> This seems to be a contextual bandit where the previous reward is included in the context.

I can't come up with real world examples where the behavior of the reward function is changing like this to warrant making different decisions based on a previous reward.

<comment><USER3> While a contextual bandit could be learning using more parameters about the environment than the multi-armed bandit posed in the example, it still has the goal of finding the best reward given the specific domain (while by and large using the same strategy as the multi armed bandit). But placed in a different context, the state space and underlying model parameters could be completely different, so the previous reward for any given state, or sequence of states, could be irrelevant.

The goal here is to reward the agent for the search strategy they employed to arrive at their answer, not the quality of the answer itself.

One possible use case (directly related to their example with multi-armed bandits, possibly learnt by a contextual bandit but requires a good deal more modeling) could be retail pricing, where different categories of products have drastically different demand curves. A meta-algorithm has the promise of generalizing better and rapidly arriving at the optimal pricing across a wide range of similar price curves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> we already know that deep RL is sample inefficient... is meta-RL really useful for something not trivial? This seems rather silly.

<comment><AUTHOR> The first applications appear really simple because they illustrate cognitive abilities that imitate planning/model-based RL related to neuroscience/psychology.

It doesn't mean that meta-RL won't scale up with more computation (see [http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html](http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't reall yget the point of your article ? You seem quite dogmatic and don't even discuss other hypotheses.

<comment><USER6> This article's intended audience is clearly the subset of ML engineers that have a practical rather than a theoretical/academic background in ML. I'd argue it definitely has a use as a practical guide to understanding an original approach to RL, which looks like it has good potential. You could fairly argue that the article could use more mathematical grounding to what's being explained, like AMS blog posts tend to be. However, consider how afraid of mathematics a lot of the CS crowd tends to unreasonably be. The pedagogy of the article is noteworthy, it helps the reader get a hold of the jargon and ideas of this burgeoning approach. It prepares them for further research, kind of like Quanta Magazine tries to do, but it allows itself more technicality, in line with the blog post format. It's not an easy task given how multidisciplinary meta-RL really is, and the author does a rather great job, IMO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Any example for real world application?

<comment><AUTHOR> For more information about why meta-learning (and in particular meta-RL) is useful see this post: [https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2017/07/18/learning-to- learn/](https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2017/07/18/learning-to-learn/)</comment></comment>


Mathematicians Crack the Cursed Curve - <AUTHOR> https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-crack-the-cursed-curve-20171207/ <comment><USER2> Just to add a comment on "why this idea is cool" from my perspective (I'm a mathematician).

The situation being studied is: C is a curve in the plane (as another commenter pointed out, the z variable can essentially be ignored and set to z=1), described by a horrendous equation f(x,y) = 0 with very few rational solutions.

Well, thinking abstractly, if there are only finitely many rational solutions, then there certainly _exists_ a second equation, g(x,y) = 0, giving another curve C' that intersects C at only the rational points. (Because any finite set of points can be interpolated by a curve, e.g. by Newton interpolation. [shrug] Nothing deep about this!)

But, it seems completely hopeless to try to find the equation g(x,y) in practice, other than by _first_ finding all the rational points on C by other means, and then just writing down a different curve passing through them.

So what's special here is that this "Selmer variety" approach provides a method, partly conjectural, for constructing C' _directly_ from C. And the paper being described has successfully applied this method to _prove_ that, at least in this one case, C' intersects C at precisely the rational points. (And once you have the two equations, it's easy to solve for the intersection points -- we now have two equations in two variables).

PS: Part of what's special here is the connection between number theory and geometry. A Diophantine equation has infinitely-many solutions if you allow x and y to be real numbers -- there's the entire curve. It's usually an _extremely_ delicate number theory question to analyze which solutions are rational. But here, we're converting the problem to geometry -- intersecting two curves (much easier).

<comment><USER3> Thank you, that was helpful.

Follow-up question: is there any practical significance of rational solutions? I can understand why one might be looking for integer solutions to an equation. Can you provide an example where rational solutions correspond to something interesting in the context modeled by the equation – for example the "path travelled by light" thing hinted at in the article?

<comment><USER2> Hmm. I don't know about this particular equation (which sounds like it's mainly significant because it's viewed as a bellwether -- if the method works on it, it's likely to work on other problems). Anyway.

First -- for "homogeneous" equations like the one being studied (or simpler ones like x^2 + y^2 = z^2), a rational solution can be rescaled to get an integer solution -- replace (x,y,z) by (cx,cy,cz), a new solution with denominators cleared out. Homogeneous equations are very, very common.

That said, yes, the ultimate goal is to understand integer solutions (and as you say, they're often the only meaningful solutions in practical situations). But integer solutions can be _impossibly_ hard to find, whereas rational solutions are just... _very_ hard.

I guess I could imagine some unusual situation where rational solutions make sense but real ones don't. But it would have to be some context where x,y are "sort of discrete", they can be broken down into finitely-many parts (so fractions make sense) but no further (so sqrt(2) is out). But this does seem less likely.

<comment><USER4> Does this particular method only find rational solutions less than one?

It seems to me that integer solutions are rational solutions, and if you can find a finite number of rational solutions and prove those are all the rational solutions, you've also found all integer solutions (by filtering the rational solutions for integers).

But when there are infinitely many rational solutions, that may leave an open question whether there are also infinitely many integer solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Drawing inspiration from physics, he thinks of rational solutions to > equations as being somehow the same as the path that light travels between > two points.

What does this even mean? This looks like fancy words for "Kim used lines in his solution".

<comment><USER6> The earlier article that the article links to says a bit more about this. It's still pretty far from concrete, but it does say a bit more. When they talk about the path that light travels between two points, they're talking about the principle of least action.

Going by the earlier article, the idea seems to be roughly like the following. You associate to each point the fundamental group based on that point. All these fundamental groups then live in some larger space, and the ones based at rational points will minimize some quantity analogous to action (or, if we're thinking of light, time).

That's basically the best I can figure just based on the earlier article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It would be nice if the had drawn the damn curve (and the famous 7 points on it). Not all of us are capable of plotting a fourth degree curve on our heads.

<comment><USER8> It's not straightforward to get a useful visual plot, but the article does include a somewhat artistic one (w/o labeled axes) in the banner image at the top. It's a polynomial in 3 variables, so plotting the polynomial itself is 4-dimensional, and the roots are in 3 dimensions. The visualization at the top of the article is a 3d plot of the locations of the roots.

The seven rational solutions are given on p. 30 of the paper, and are: (x,y,z) = (1,1,1), (1,1,2), (0,0,1), (-3,3,2), (1,1,0), (0,2,1), (-1,1,0). Those were already known though. The new result of the paper is to prove that there aren't any others.

<comment><USER7> It is a curve in homogeneous coordinates. You can set z=1 to obtain an affine view of it, and draw it as a regular curve in the plane. Points with z=0 are points at infinity (directions). The two rational points with z=0 that you describe mean that the curve has two asymptotes at 45 and -45 degrees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you're curious about what the actual paper looks like, here it is: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.05846](https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.05846)

</comment><comment><USER10> For anyone who want's to play around with the curve a bit: [https://www.desmos.com/calculator/4qu7gezqmx](https://www.desmos.com/calculator/4qu7gezqmx)

</comment><comment><USER11> Could someone please point out the benefits and implications of this? Does this bring us closer to some very important solution or does it have some real world applications?

Edit: I suppose this is a related article talking about the same problem from December 2017. What changed since then?

[https://www.quantamagazine.org/secret-link-uncovered- between...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/secret-link-uncovered-between-pure- math-and-physics-20171201/)

<comment><USER12> The benefits are that mathematicians think it is interesting, and this allows us to answer mathematical questions we could not answer before. There might be practical applications I do not know of, but that's not the point of fundamental mathematical research.

For a thorough defense of mathematics, consider 'A mathematicians apology' by G.H. Hardy or [1], a modern response to that. To summarize [1], the argument is that the main product of mathematics is an environment that creates mathematicians. Those mathematicians can the use their problem solving skills in practical applications.

[1] [https://ldtopology.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/a-new- mathematic...](https://ldtopology.wordpress.com/2017/03/18/a-new- mathematicians-apology/)

<comment><USER5> That's a defense of math in general; do you know what the benefits of this particular proof are? I'm not looking for practical applications; rather, could it help solve other problems in the field? Is it an important result in its own right?

<comment><USER12> This shows that an oft talked about new technique in Diophantine equations actually works. The excitement is more due to proof-of-concept than the immediate logical implications.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have an applied mathematics background and I find it quite amusing that the descriptions of this article are so opaque and inscrutable that the ten-plus comments here are all penned by people that are absolutely fixed by what concept the article is trying to express (including myself, incidentally, even after checking the original paper because it's a totally different domain and level of sophistication compared to my zone).

<comment><USER5> There's a real dearth of summaries for papers that are aimed at those who have taken a reasonable amount of math: say calculus, some number theory, linear algebra. It always either ends up being some sort of terrible analogy to a real-world phenomenon that has no math in it or something that's about as complicated as the paper itself.</comment></comment>


Realm Objective-C and Swift 2.2: Safe object passing across threads (and more) - <AUTHOR> https://realm.io/news/obj-c-swift-2-2-thread-safe-reference-sort-properties-relationships/ <comment><USER2> Awesome. I have been waiting on this feature for ages. Passing objects by their primary key worked kinda ok, but being able to safely pass lists and query results is a game changer.

<comment><USER3> (Adam from Realm) Thanks for the feedback and glad to know this meets your needs! Anything else you feel you are waiting on?</comment></comment>


Reverse engineering AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://www.denialof.services/lambda/?repost1 <comment><AUTHOR> Reposting since it didn't get any comments last time. This is a fantastic article and investigation.</comment>


Renraku OS: The Way Up - <AUTHOR> http://daeken.com/renraku-os-the-way-up

<comment><USER2> Hi. I'm not familiar with Renraku OS and just read the "Renraku: Future OS" post. It seems to me to be a mix of Singularity, Unununium and the TUNES project.

I have thought about a similar system before: install-time verified (and native compiled) managed code, which is guaranteed to only run within its environment, so no need to separate processes into their own address spaces, object store instead of filesystem, orthogonal persistence, network transparent communications channels (in fact, IMO everything should go over some sort of communications channel which can be "rewired" or redirected. Like piping in unix command line, only global, for all apps, GUI or CLI).

Anyway, interesting project!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, it's a mix of several other projects. I've been accumulating ideas from all kinds of sources for years, and I've ended up with the list you see in the Future OS post (among others). One thing I'd like to note is that the interaction between objects, even just plain method calls, can really be seen as a communication channel and made network transparent very easily. I'd really like to get basic networking and network transparency into Renraku by year's end, but we'll see.

<comment><USER2> As long as I can, somehow, redirect the communication to other programs, I'm happy. I'll give you an example: if I have a text editor that I really really like, lets say notepad.exe for arguments sake, then I should be able to use this for all my text input. It should go further than this though: if I'm talking to you over pidgin, not only should I (somehow) be able to use notepad.exe, but I should also be able to redirect your responses to, for example, another pidgin conversations input, or a text-to-speech device or anywhere really.

The idea is that all input and output can be redirected, filtered, scripted etc. I posted a blog post about some of these ideas once, but I'm not gonna post a link :-D been meaning to clean it up for ages, so maybe after I finally get to doing so, I'll share, heh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I just want to thank everyone here for your support over the past month or so. The feedback on the previous Renraku posts has been greatly appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER3> The speed at which these guys are moving is amazing. Probably because they use Boo?

Nice work :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words.

It has a lot to do with Boo, really, particularly in the compiler. The rest of the OS is fairly similar to what you'd see in other .NET languages (although that has a lot to do with our reflectionless runtime not supporting a lot of the cool Boo functionality yet), but in the compiler the Boo list functionality has made life incredibly easy. The internals of the compiler really look a lot like that of a Lisp implementation; the code is loaded from .NET assembles into S-expression like lists, then transformed repeatedly until it becomes machine code.

No way this could've been done so cleanly in most other .NET languages; my previous .NET compilers can attest to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Renraku really, really needs a summary Wikipedia page...

</comment><comment><USER5> Very Nice</comment>


Build a serverless app with a serverless database - <AUTHOR> https://fauna.com/blog/serverless-cloud-database?yc <comment><USER2> 2018 will be so awesome when apps start to become clientless as well...

<comment><USER3> SMS chat bot! Actually, a growing category... :)

<comment><USER4> Y(SMS chat bot)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I still don't get how you can store something without putting it anywhere. It's just "in transient" like electricity in a superconductor closed coil? hahaha

Not doubting it I just don't understand. Unless you're storing through "cache" client-side or direct RAM I don't know.

<comment><USER6> Serverless just means not hosting your own infrastructure + boxes. Amazon Lambda is a good example where you run arbitrary script on their infrastructure on demand, without having always-available servers.

<comment><USER7> I find the term "serverless" quite misleading. Essentially, all the code in the world has to run on a machine so there is nothing really "server-less" about it.

It's probably more accurate to say something like "devops-free" since management of servers is hived off to a third party. Sounds less buzz-worthy, so maybe someone can come up with something better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case you are wondering what fauna is in general, it's an object-relational, temporal, geographically distributed, strongly consistent, multi-tenant, QoS- managed operational database. It's implemented on the JVM and queried via type-safe embedded DSLs like LINQ.

<comment><USER8> Is there any way for me to contribute money or other donations to your project? Good on you for making your dreams a reality.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can use the database, and eventually we will send you a bill for your usage. :-)

<comment><USER9> It worked for IBM. It then worked for Amazon. It worked for AT&T GoPhones. It can work for you, too. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Somebody else asked this, but the answer got distracted onto (reasonably so) the CAP Theorem.

What is the difference between Fauna and DynamoDB? Especially since the article swaps them out (and explains the API differences).

DynamoDB is going to be having a replica you can read from within physical milliseconds of your lambda function (serverless is such a bad name, makes me think of P2P, anyways...) while it seems like Fauna is gonna have to make network calls out to your service...

Which when you pay per time with lambda, and you want lambda functions to be fast anyways, I don't see the point of Fauna? Note: I'm not saying Fauna is bad, it seems like a cool idea, but I'm not understanding how it is a superior alternative.

So lets say you don't want to pay for DynamoDB, it still seems like you'd be better off running something like a pure NodeJS database like Parse's open source server or [https://github.com/amark/gun](https://github.com/amark/gun) , either inside the lambda function directly or connecting to it (since it'll be on a nearby machine in AWS)?

<comment><AUTHOR> FaunaDB is hosted in several AWS regions around the world, so the latency is similar to DynamoDB if you're colocated. We will expand to more AWS regions and other cloud providers soon.

The biggest operational difference between FaunaDB and DynamoDB, aside from being globally distributed, is that you don't have to pre-provision capacity in FaunaDB. DynamoDB requires you to provision capacity per table and you have to pay for whatever you don't use. If you go over the provisioned capacity your app stops working. FaunaDB is delivered like a utility; you just pay as you go.

Also FaunaDB supports joins, transactions, unique indexes, views, etc., and you can install it on-premises if you want.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the answer!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's the difference between "serverless" and "cloud"?

<comment><USER12> It's analogous to "functional" and "object-oriented". They're both popular buzzwords. One has been beaten to death and sometimes implemented poorly enough to gain a bad rap. The other is still new enough to serve as a vessel for software people to pour in all their vague hopes and unrealistic dreams.

At some point, the new hotness will be the old tiredness, and the cycle will repeat.

<comment><USER13> I'm honestly sure which description refers to functional and which refers to OOP. They fit equally well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's the difference between this and AWS' DynamoDB, or Aurora if you prefer RDBMS? A HTTP endpoint as the DB API? Seems like a lot of extra overhead, unless you're hosting a "client-only" webapp (which would previously have used Firebase, IIRC).

Also, this confuses me:

> FaunaDB can tolerate the loss of a minority of physical datacenters in a > cluster without interruption. According to the CAP theorem, FaunaDB is a CP > system.

CP means that consistency is favored over availability, yet "without interruption" tells me they favor availability over consistency during a partition.

<comment><USER15> If a partition leaves a quorum in contact with each other, why would it cause an interruption? CP means nodes not within a quorum become unavailable, and if a quorum no longer exists the whole system is unavailable. AP means minorities stay available at the risk of inconsistency.

<comment><USER14> > If a partition leaves a quorum in contact with each other, why would it > cause an interruption?

You can have a split that still has a group of machines with quorum: a 3/2 split would leave three nodes with quorum, and two without.

Clients which attach to the non-quorum machines would lose the ability to read or write if it's CP, yet the clients connected to the quorum machines would retain the ability to read and write. So it would be a partial outage, until some way is found to identify quorum members and route clients back to that quorum (making the assumption that clients could talk to any node in a partition).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you want to skip directly to running code, these instructions (linked from the article) should get you to hello world. [https://github.com/fauna/serverless- crud#installation](https://github.com/fauna/serverless-crud#installation)

</comment><comment><USER17> I really wonder what possesses people to use pullquotes

        WHAT POSSESSES PEOPLE
        TO   USE   PULLQUOTES

Its like they don't trust you to read a couple of sentences or something

<comment><USER18> A couple of reasons:

1\. They _don 't_ trust people to read everything. A lot of readers drop off before the end of an article just because their attention flits away. Pull quotes are a way of saying, "Here's something coming up that I think is interesting. If you are interested, you should keep reading."

2\. A lot of people have trouble with long runs of samey text. Some see it as boring, others as imposing, others as hard to navigate, but for whatever reason, long runs of text are simply hard to read for a lot of people. So pull quotes are a way to break up the text without resorting to vaguely relevant cat pictures.

<comment><USER17> > "Here's something coming up that I think is interesting. If you are > interested, you should keep reading."

But nearly no one ever uses it to refer to what is coming up, its almost always what has just happened 1 sentence ago.

> A lot of people have trouble with long runs of samey text.

nothing is more samey than repeating the same sentence!

pull quotes like how this article has,punishes the user for reading the article word for word. There are other methods that have the pull quotes outside of the flow!

And if it is a really important sentence, then throw some slight yellow background on the text or something, like a highlighter!

<comment><USER18> > _But nearly no one ever uses it to refer to what is coming up, its almost > always what has just happened 1 sentence ago_

That's true if you read them inline, but pull quotes are generally presented in a large font so that you can see them without having actually read the accompanying text yet.

> _pull quotes like how this article has, punishes the user for reading the > article word for word, There are other methods that have the pull quotes > outside of the flow, which I personally would prefer!_

I agree with that. The pull-quotes on this site are poorly designed and really hurt the flow of the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I understood that Lamda just freezes the code between calls. So any connection to a database just continues when the next call comes in. Only problem might be the server time-out for the connection if the time between calls is longer.

I never tried (yet) but if I need something like Fauna then my assumption was wrong ?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a prime example of where "serverless" means "someone else's server".

<comment><USER21> When has it ever meant anything else? P2P?

<comment><USER22> The first time I read the word "serverless" I immediately related it to P2P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is this DB ACID compliant? This is a major omission from the article, as I was considering this as a replacemnt for PostGres SQL As-A-Service offerings.

<comment><USER16> Yes. We offer global acid transactions using the Calvin protocol. [http://cs.yale.edu/homes/thomson/publications/calvin- sigmod1...](http://cs.yale.edu/homes/thomson/publications/calvin-sigmod12.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sounds awfully like a server to me.

</comment><comment><USER25> I was initially overly excited by AWS Lambda + API Gateway but now looking at the costs it's _cheaper_ and less overhead to just run a highly available boxes.

For large organizations, I can see the benefit of moving to serverless particularly doing away with server ops for more slower and less frequent tasks..

but for fast response and cost effectiveness, unless AWS Lambda dramatically reduces costs to match a $5 / month digitalocean instance that will respond instantly and can take quite a beating for lighter requests, I'd be more wary- AWS bills can rack up very fast.

<comment><USER26> Lambda cold start time for a .NET app that made a SQL connection and then did a simple count command was multiple seconds. Not useful for production.

<comment><USER27> That totally depends on what you are doing. We use Lambda to generate thumbnails of documents that are uploaded to one of our applications. I can throw 600-800 pages at it and because it calls a Lambda function per page, the whole thing finishes in less than 10 seconds. No need to scale instances and no need to worry about running out of RAM on our servers. The cold start also gets less after the initial run.

<comment><USER26> Yeah. I could see it for batch processing. It's just not suitable for real time / API work that I was hoping to use it for.

<comment><USER27> Yes, it's not necessarily going to work for things like that - the start up time alone would make it useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Meh - led by a couple of ex-Twitter infrastructure guys. No thanks.

<comment><USER29> Twitter is possibly one of the hardest sites to scale out there. Sure they had their share of the fail whale but can you blame them?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can read a little bit about our Twitter experience here: [https://fauna.com/blog/welcome-to-the-jungle](https://fauna.com/blog/welcome- to-the-jungle) Twitter still uses the social graph and timeline databases we built years and years ago.</comment></comment></comment>


Is the omission of Chrome from the suggested list of browsers deliberate? - <AUTHOR> http://www.facebook.com/common/browser.php I discovered this trying to go to facebook using w3m. And yes, Chrome is so damn compatible. <comment><USER3> Simplest explanation is probably the most likely: this page was created 3-4 years ago before Chrome was launched or before it was stable and nobody has updated it.

</comment><comment><USER4> I suppose the 'Any Browser Campaign' (<http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/>) is not their cup of tea.

 _""Anyone who slaps a 'this page is best viewed with Browser X' label on a Web page appears to be yearning for the bad old days, before the Web, when you had very little chance of reading a document written on another computer, another word processor, or another network."_ \-- Tim Berners-Lee in Technology Review, July 1996

</comment><comment><USER5> It's probably not a slight against Chrome. These sorts of edge-case error pages are typically some of the least up-to-date for a website. You need to use a browser they don't test with to see it, so naturally they won't see the page during testing.

Alternately, Chrome might be legitimately untested but functionally equivalent enough to Safari that everything works. In that scenario leaving Chrome off the list of supported browsers is just a CYA in case something doesn't work.

<comment><USER6> i cannot imagine chrome being untested by facebook.

<comment><USER7> Chrome isn't an incompatible browser, though; it's just not on that list of "recommended browsers" so they still wouldn't see this page.

To get to this page, they'd need to fire up Netscape or a version of IE they don't support or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just for the record...

I believed it was more of negligence to update the webpage than a passive- aggressive attack on Chrome. It just seemed amusing to me in light of the recent competition between the two companies =)

</comment><comment><USER8> It probably wasn't updated. Chrome appears on the list of recommended browser in the FAQ (<http://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=19339>)

</comment><comment><USER9> Old idealist geek alert.

I realize that 192% of everyone who ever lived uses Facebook for every possible task 27 hours per day, but every time I read "Facebook", I can't help thinking about AOL in the late 90's..."This is not the way is was meant to be."

We got away from the pseudo-monopolistic controls of AT&T, IBM, the US government, and finally AOL to enjoy the golden days of the world wide web from 2000 to 2005. Oh how glorious it almost was. Then, like self-mutilating OCD addicts on Xanex, we couldn't stand the freedom and quickly jumped to the next most promising walled garden.

FWIW, I used Chrome for the first time yesterday and I love it! No going back to ie or Firefox for me. Can't access Facebook? No problem for me; all I ever wanted was a simple browser and access to the open world.

No, yahoo, I won't use my Facebook id to get my email. No, <insert Website 2.whatever name>, I don't use Facebook. And no Facebook, Twitter, itunes, and the rest of you guys who want to wall us off, I will not use you. (And don't think I'm not starting to worry about you too, Google.)

I know, I know, I still use my Giant Eagle/GetGo frequent buyer card, so everyone on the internets probably knows that I bought aspirin last night, but I'm still clinging to my last little bit of freedom.

Respectfully yours,

The last free hacker standing, clinging tightly to my mouse and keyboard

<comment><USER10> Co-signed - fellow free hacker.

You're not alone. I realised that Facebook makes it possible for completely non-computery people to share pictures, write notes, have on-line conversations, have a sort-of blog, all in a one-stop shop. When my older niece started to use it I realised that there were half a dozen other facilities that would serve her better, but it's the 80/20 rule. For essentially zero effort she got more than she otherwise could have.

I sigh, but it's the way it is. It's the way it was with AOL, and maybe something will kill it eventually, but it's the way it is now.

I look forward to seeing where it will go, and I hope it's better than anything we can currently imagine.

It probably will.

ADDED IN EDIT:

When I clicked the link I got:

        You are using an incompatible web browser.
        Sorry, we're not able to support your browser.
        Please use one of the following browsers:

          * Mozilla Firefox
          * Safari
          * Microsoft Internet Explorer

I'm using a very old Firefox.

<comment><USER11> I don't think the page checks for the browser version. I am using the latest version of Firefox (3.6.13) and still get the same message.

<comment><USER12> Yes. <http://www.facebook.com/common/browser.php> is a direct link - <USER2> displays from Safari 5.x or FF 3.6.13/Mac

EDIT: So, presumably one could access it from IE as well (not something I can test from here).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A worm exploiting OpenSSL's SSLv2 code (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://tech.slashdot.org/story/02/09/25/1210247/new-linux-worm-found-in-the-wild <comment><AUTHOR> What is funny is how little attention it got back in 2002.</comment>


IPv8 ... starts with IPv4 and evolves it. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg23021.html

<comment><USER2> You know IPv8 is a running gag right? :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> anyone got creds to unir.com? i need to access the latest IPv16 draft standard.</comment>


How to Bypass iOS 9 Content Blocking - <AUTHOR> http://dieulot.net/bypass-ios-content-blockers.html <comment><USER2> Users would still be able to block Google and Facebook ads easily but would help some users in the meantime. Though as you noted they could simply allow content blockers to be able to block ips in an update. No need to wait to iOS 10 since it wouldn't be a new touted featured but rather a bug fix like they do all the time when people circumvent jailbreaking. So Apple could easily add that fix in version 9.1, 9.2 or anytime they like. Most likely they will wait to it becomes more widespread since dns changes aren't something the average person who manages their own site can update easily.</comment>


Vue.js is easier to learn than jQuery - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/js-dojo/vue-js-is-easier-to-learn-than-jquery-abbbb9c12cf8#.9cwt60spf <comment><USER2> Vue looks great; a good move away from jQuery's low-level imperative paradigm, and I would definitely recommend it to an intermediate student interesting in leveling up. However, having taught middle-school CS for two years, I disagree with the author's assertion that it would be easier for beginners to learn.

Beginners want to make something happen. Like making alert windows pop up or (oooh!) modifying the text on a page. For these kinds of things, you actually don't need to know any of the underlying mechanisms. You just need to know that you put an id attribute on the thing you want to mess with and match it in the script. Similarly, throw the script at the bottom of the body, tell them to keep it there, and dispense with $(document).ready(). I haven't done the research (yet), but my experience tells me it's best to start people off somewhere in the middle of the ladder of abstraction, high enough that you can do something interesting right away, but low enough that you have some sense of the mechanism.

For beginners, brevity contributes to simplification. I used to write explanatory comments in scripts I gave my students. But their eyes don't parse the comments effectively, and therefore they perceive the comments as extra complexity. For this reason also, I would stick with jQuery.

But I'd love to find out. Anyone teaching intro CS who has time to run a comparison?

<comment><USER3> > they perceive the comments as extra complexity

This surprised me as well, but 2 lines of code with 10 lines of comment gets a panic reaction while 4 lines of code is ok.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We switched from React to Vue.js recently and we are never going back. Our team couldn't be happier as our productivity dramatically improved and I can tell you it's not even funny.

First, to answer OP's question, well the question is a little weird because i'd say that jquery supplements your vue.js app and makes it even more powerful. For instance, jquery provides methods like $.post() and $.get() along with a wide array of utility functions that you would typically use in your vue.js app.

But if you were comparing Vue.js to other frameworks like React, I'd say it's not only easier, it's a lot more fun to use and elegant (the same way jquery did for DOM several years ago). I would say always bet on elegance!

There is a horde of React developers who probably invested way too much time for them to move to anything else but my advice to them is once you go vue.js, you are probably not going to wanna go back, and hopefully that is a good thing.

React can be fun to learn in the beginning but over time it does cause a lot of fatigue when you need it to do a little more, which can overcomplicate your app rather quickly. So in my mind, I wouldn't be surprised if vue.js takes the lead over React anytime soon.

<comment><USER5> "We switched from X to Y and we are never going back."

I think I've seen thousands of combinations for X and Y on HN. First everyone switched from JS to JQuery, Then JQuery to Ember or Backbone and never looked back. At one point everyone moved from Ember to Angular and never looked back. Then from Angular to React. Some people even switched from Swift and Java to React Native and never looked back. Then from Flux to Redux. And now I see people switching from React to Vue.js (and even back to JQuery?). And these were just for the Frontend JS libraries. It's all like a cat and mouse game. You cannot win. And I'm not sure there is even real progress. It seems like they are all reinventing the wheel again and again.

This also reminds me of Joel's article on "cover fire": [http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html)

<comment><USER6> Well, since React and Vue 2.0 are so similar it's not a big deal to switch. And yes, I'm not going back to React after experiencing the cohesive and well- thought out Vue. If something super better comes along I might start using that, but I doubt that'll be anytime soon. The improvement needs to be worth The effort to learn the new framework. With React -> Vue the improvement doesn't need to be enormous because it's an easy conversion.

<comment><USER7> No, I am not going back, in fact I never went back.

I switched from Jquery to Angular 1, never went back. I switched from Angular 1 to React, never went back. I switched from React to Angular 2, never went back. I am considering Vue.js, and yes, I will never go back.

<comment><USER8> That sounds more like a concentration problem than a framework one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The assumption this article makes is that beginners don't know the DOM and browser APIs, so if they don't, vue.js is easier than jQuery.

That's kind of ridiculous though.

No one should be writing anything for the web without a basic understanding of how the DOM works, even if you wrap things like jQuery, vue.js or React around it.

It's not that complicated.

Every beginners tutorial should start with a basic introduction to the DOM, with some examples, and without ANY libraries.

Using jQuery here is pointless.

Here, without jQuery. How is using jQuery here with a beginner of ANY help?

0

          <button id="increment">Increment</button>

<comment><USER10> Well if they come from a web design background they know the css selectors which work with jquery. Unlike your example, which doesn't work as written.

<comment><USER11> Probably doesn't work because _document.getElementById_ doesn't work with a CSS _#id_ selector as a parameter, it needs the bare _id_ , so it isn't finding the increment or output elements.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think this comparison doesn't make much sense. jQuery is a low level lib aimed at providing something that is easier to use than the DOM API while doing mostly the same. Vue.js is in a completely different league. It's like comparing apples with oranges.

<comment><USER13> He's not comparing jQuery with Vue, he's asking which one is easier to learn for a beginner.

<comment><USER14> Surely you still have to compare the two to make that decision?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Need to spice up a mostly static page? Reach for jQuery.

Need to create a complex UI or a single page app? Go for Vue or React. This list for me used to include Angular 1.x, ExtJS, jQuery UI, and many others.

</comment><comment><USER16> While I agree with the author's points, I don't think we need another post to praise Vue.js. The merits of Vue.js are quite evident, even if you have watched just a few minutes of some video tutorials ([https://laracasts.com/series/learning-vue-step-by- step](https://laracasts.com/series/learning-vue-step-by-step)). As a newbie to front-end development, I'm more interested to know how Vue.js measures with other light-weight alternatives --- in particular Mithril --- which take different approaches. I would like someone with rich experiences to analyse the relative merits/drawbacks of them, such as the pros and cons of using template language against pure JavaScript. Unfortunately, this kind of analyses are very rare on the internet. The official website of Mithril has listed some advantages of Mithril (e.g. easier debugging), but I really want to hear a second opinion.

<comment><USER17> Whats your opinion? Anything you read or hear will be their opinion which was derived from their experience solving their problem. Whats my opinion? They're all awesome. Try them all. Then once you've done that you can do that thing thats very rare on the internet, the analyses, and be the internet champion to all the newer newbies in front-end development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> You could simplify this

with

</comment><comment><USER19> Am I the only one who think jQuery is important for beginners since they can get a feeling of what's underneath and furthermore, it is easy to pick up....

<comment><USER9> No, beginners should start just with the DOM, not with jQuery.

That's how they actually get a feeling of what's underneath.

The browser APIs have become a lot more consistent and useful (querySelector was a biggie), you really don't need jQuery at the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment> vladimir-y jQuery doesn't provide a structure for you app, it's just a library for DOM manipulations, not the framework. So jQuery and Vue.js are not comparable things. Using Vue.js or Angular you are not supposed to work with DOM directly apart of the directives.

It's a key thing to define a flexible structure when you are working on a complex project. It's supposed to be harder to learn Vue.js or similar things than jQuery since using such kind of frameworks you will probably be working on the complex project, so you will have to use your brain to define a proper app structure, to keep code base maintainable, to conduct a refactoring, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> Yes it is. Even though you are comparing two different libraries that does different things, vue.js is easy then jquery. Because it is much smaller in it's api. What it does is very simple and clear to understand.

I am using vue.js and vuex in some of my current projects. Only problem for me is that after adding Vuex and all it's getters, mutations and actions, my Vue component code now looks like lot of boilerplate code. Did any one else had that feeling. Is there any way I can directly connect vue template with vuex without intermediate component?

<comment><USER6> You can mutate the state from within your components. Vuex doesn't prevent that. It just makes maintainability more difficult.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I disagree. jQuery is dead simple. You select an element and call a function on it. That's pretty much it. I think a 5 year old could understand that.

Vue.js requires a lot of different concepts that many developers have never run into before. There are multiple parts working together. It is tremendously more difficult to understand (though only on relative terms, no absolute).

</comment><comment><USER22> Lesson 1: Yes. A simple app, Vue.js code is more readability than jQuery. It's like a matching game than learning to program.

Lesson 2: No. There're not enough Vue.js plugins in the wild. You can't play with fancy stuff. No more joy.

Lesson 3: No. You will find hard to understand the bundled NODEJS tools on articles and the way to use libs.

</comment><comment><USER23> There is also the Quasar Framework for Vue (quasar-framework.org), which is like Ionic but using Vue instead of Angular.

</comment><comment><USER24> Vue.js reminds me of Knockout.js. Is there any significant difference between the two?

</comment><comment><USER25> jQuery is a DOM api wrapper, Vue is an MV* Framework.

Comparing the two is ridiculous. They both have different aims and use cases.

</comment><comment><USER26> Yes it is</comment>


Piet Program Gallery - <AUTHOR> http://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet/samples.html

<comment><USER2> Interesting twists on Piet would be: * animated piet programs - perhaps where the incrementing the PC would also increment the frame of animation, or the current frame of animation is another property that can be manipulated. * writing an editor to make it easy to convert works of art into Piet programs.

<comment><USER3> Or similar: Piet Gifs: every n instructions the program changes but the IP remains. This feature shall be called polymorphism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey, my "Alpha" program is still there! I remember learning Piet for the Perplex City ARG (2006/2007) and thought it was an amazingly weird language. Thanks for the memories!</comment>


Study of 95K children finds no link between MMR vaccines and autism - <AUTHOR> http://www.vocativ.com/culture/science/no-link-autism-and-vaccines-mmr/

<comment><USER2> "It seems silly that this is still an argument."</comment>


Think v. Brown: FaceCash Sues the State of California - <AUTHOR> https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html

<comment><USER2> I'm a little mystified as to why you haven't engaged outside counsel or hired a legal officer. Although I think you have some strong arguments, there's an awful lot of avoidable-seeming 'who said what' questions that ultimately boil down to whether the jury finds you or the state's witnesses more credible. Winning on the facts is no guarantee of winning on the questions of law, and the appeals process is going to be lengthy no matter which side you find yourself on.

 _Pro se_ litigants that bring test cases on constitutional matters are laboring at a considerable disadvantage. Litigating your own case does not seem like the best use of your energies. Although I can relate to both your pedantry and one-man-band approach on a personal level, I am perplexed by your (apparent) hostility to gathering outside financing or simply taking the same approach as your competitors, none of whom seem to be anticipating criminal charges.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm sympathetic to the claims presented but how can Think file suit pro se? Corporation are considered separate persons and therefore cannot be represented pro se as has been held in numerous cases (e.g. Brandstein v. White Lamps). While there are limited exceptions for administrative claims, this suit is not being filed as a continuation of the process but rather for damages created by flaws in it.

It seems that the two options are to find counsel willing to represent Think pro bono or for Aaron to re-craft this as a personal claim.

Note that I am not an attorney and this does not constitute legal advice.

<comment><USER4> Is it possible to file suit, and then in the future retain legal counsel for representation? (i.e. is it possible Aaron has simply yet to hire a lawyer?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Question---rather than inundating the DFI with complaints yourself, would it make sense to inform their competitors of violations, and let them do it? I can see the DFI ignoring violation allegations from you, but I notice both Verizon & Airbnb are on the list---perhaps notes to AT&T and some hotel lobby might be effective?

</comment><comment><USER6> Aaron, if so many companies are in violation of this new law, why aren't you working with them?

</comment><comment><USER7> You can demand 25 million dollars?

<comment><USER2> You can demand the sun, moon and stars if you feel like it. The judge instructs the jury on what grounds they can award damages, and those grounds may or may not impose a limit - sometimes you get 'economic' damages that represent quantifiable loss, sometimes you also get 'punitive' damages that are designed to send a warning to other potential defendants. Sometimes the case is dismissed and you get nothing. If damages are awarded, there are usually procedural arguments over their size at appeal.

In some respects, asking for $25 million can be seen as an assertion that the litigant intends to a) get the defendant's full attention and b) be very stubborn, causing the defendant to run up a hefty legal bill, if nothing else. Not a lawyer, just a law student with an interest in the economics of litigation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for posting Aaron. And good luck with the lawsuit.</comment>


BBC News - Security experts say Google cyber-attack was routine - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8458150.stm <comment><USER2> This makes a good point _however_ it's a bit misleading in calling it routine IMO.

I've done a little digging and this is looking like a rather massive co- ordinated effort. Call it similar to before but much much wider scoped.

<comment><USER3> And even if it was routine, it doesn' make it any more acceptable.</comment></comment>


Tech CEO found decapitated and dismembered in his NYC apartment - <AUTHOR> https://abcnews.go.com/US/tech-ceo-found-decapitated-dismembered-nyc-apartment/story?id=71794870 <comment><USER2> Discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23846654)</comment>


Urban Compass. Heard of it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/search-and-enjoy-ori-allons-next-big-thing-20130130-2djvy.html

<comment><USER2> 44 days ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4930652>

I think it's fairly safe to say that by the time something gets a writeup in the Sydney Morning Herald the majority of readers of HN will already have heard of it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did a HN search and nothing came up originally, I must have done it as one word. I'm wondering if anyone has any knowledge/experience of it, other than media hype.

I hear 'the next big thing' and immediately think 'what makes you think that?'</comment></comment>


Remix OS for PC Upgraded to Android Marshmallow - <AUTHOR> https://www.google.com/amp/www.theverge.com/platform/amp/circuitbreaker/2016/7/26/12284240/remix-os-for-pc-can-now-be-upgraded-to-android-marshmallow?client=safari <comment><USER2> This is awesome! This is the update we were all waiting for. I'm impressed with the Remix OS possibilities and the future seems brighter.

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds great!Android on PCs was really a need and the updated OS seems to be very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER4> I imagine Android on PC sounds pretty good for casual gamers.

<comment><USER5> I use Remix OS for PC and dual boot with Win10 on an XPS 13. The experience is pretty nice but the Wi-Fi is iffy... don't know if it's due to my XPS though. Games, when they do connect are pretty smooth.

</comment></comment><comment> Lucy-Lander This is exciting, I am so looking forward to trying it out.

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome and great! Love it, it's going to be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great! I am looking forward to this new upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great! I am looking forward to this new upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER9> Look forward to it.</comment>


Germs That Love Diet Soda - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/06/opinion/sunday/germs-microbes-processed-foods.html <comment><USER2> Diet soda is either on the same level of harm as seltzer, or is worse. But I believe both to be healthier than any sugared soda.

Different diet sodas use different artificial sweeteners, so diet soda cannot be treated as a single group. Diet Coke uses only aspartame as sweetener; Coke Zero combines aspartame and acesulfame K to create a more realistic taste.

I readily believe that any diet soda sweetened purely with aspartame is harmless. The chemical structure of aspartame is such that stomach acids should break it down into aspartic acid, phenylalanine, and methanol, the first two being ordinary amino acids. Methanol sounds threatening, but very little aspartame is needed to sweeten a beverage. I thus have no problem drinking diet coke.

What's more unclear is whether the sugar-like taste of artificial sweeteners affect the body's blood sugar regulation.

<comment><USER3> _Diet soda is either on the same level of harm as seltzer, or is worse._

What's wrong with seltzer?

<comment><USER4> When my close friend got bariatric surgery, the doctors told him the carbonatiob would expand his stomach much faster and so seltzer was forbidden forever. Might also apply to all stomachs.

<comment><USER5> This means nothing for a normal person. Stomachs are massively elastic under normal circumstances.

<comment><USER6> Not quite nothing, there's a reason people get their stomachs stapled.

<comment><USER7> Reading the thread, the comment you responded to was using "normal person" as a contrast against someone who had undergone bariatric surgery (which stomach stapling is a variety of).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Article opens with, "There are lots of reasons to avoid processed foods. They're often packed with sugar, fat and salt, and they tend to lack certain nutrients critical to health, like fiber."

Diet coke has no sugar, no fat, and less than 100 mg sodium. The specific results from Nature are about trehalose, a sugar not found in diet coke. I'm not aware of any diet soda that contains it, either. I realize it's an opinion piece, but pseudoscience and speculative articles should not be the domain of NYT.

Of note, the zero-calorie definition of artificial sweeteners is based on the amount excreted in urine/stool: It should be very close to the ingested amount. I find it hard to believe the conclusion drawn by the authors that other sweeteners (sucralose and saccharin), are consumed by bacteria since the amount ingested matches the amount excreted.

<comment><USER9> If you read the full article instead of just the opening, you get to it:

The prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease has, it's worth noting, sharply increased in recent decades.

Then there are artificial sweeteners like sucralose and saccharin, which we consume in diet sodas and "sugar-free" snacks in hopes of cutting calories. Our bodies can't directly digest most of them — they're meant to pass right through — but it turns out that the microbes inhabiting our colons can metabolize the sweeteners, potentially to our detriment.

Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have found that, in mice, saccharin causes glucose intolerance, a marker of impending diabetes — and one disease that those who eat these sweeteners are probably trying to avoid. When the scientists transplanted microbes from mice fed saccharine to mice that hadn't consumed the sweetener, the recipient animals developed glucose intolerance as well, suggesting that the microbiome that was warped by the sweetener, not the sweetener itself, was causing the problems.

<comment><USER10> What diet soda contains saccharin? Also, that study only looks at saccharin. What about sucralose?

<comment><USER11> Besides Tab, Diet Coke from a fountain contains saccharin: [https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2008/04/17/Coca- Cola-w...](https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2008/04/17/Coca-Cola-wins- sweetener-legal-battle)

(Trying to find another source, I believe Diet Pepsi from a fountain does as well, to extend shelf life.)

<comment><USER12> Wow that blows my mind. No wonder soda from fountain tastes different, and I am not even talking about only the low-calorie ones. I thought it was merely due to some sort of imprecision in dispensing the concentrate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Clickbait title. The only germs loving diet soda would be the potential shifts in gut biome as a result of saccharine consumption, which would only apply to Tab.

        "The scientists also fed a small group of healthy people saccharin-sweetened drinks for a week. In a subset of volunteers, microbial shifts occurred, accompanied by mounting glucose intolerance. So for some people, diet sodas may not be any healthier than regular sodas."

The Nature study has a better title:

        "Dietary trehalose enhances virulence of epidemic Clostridium difficile"

[https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25178.epdf](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25178.epdf)

<comment><USER14> Tab? Are you joking?

The point isn't about one specific chemical, but rather the principal that the prevalence of non-nutritious, edible chemicals seriously augments the dark, warm controlled environments of our guts.

Nutrient capture as a whole, shifts in a way that, at the bottom of the tract, there are chemicals that humans leave unused, but which are still useful to certain opportunistic organisms.

If only those chemicals are available, and normal food is absent, every member of the environment is forced to deal with scarcity, and the strongest survive, and fill the void if they can.

If those organisms are forced to opperate with greater efficiency, then their capacity to deal with adversity offers them an advantage as an invasive species, and they will prevail in general, everywhere, not just in the adverse scenario.

<comment><USER13> Yes, Tab. Exactly.

Which other diet sodas were identified as having "germs that love diet soda"?

The studies show effects for trehalose and saccharine. No diet soda contains trehalose, only Tab contains saccharine.

Any effect from the non-nutritive sweeteners in other diet sodas did not appear in the studies, so they focused on saccharine.

There may be more subtle effects from those sweeteners, or future effects from those sweeteners, but we haven't found them yet, extrapolation from a general principle not withstanding.

"Germs that love Tab" wouldn't draw as many clicks as the current title.

<comment><USER15> Someone posted this above.

[https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2008/04/17/Coca- Cola-w...](https://www.foodnavigator.com/Article/2008/04/17/Coca-Cola-wins- sweetener-legal-battle)

Supposedly diet coke from fountains contains saccharine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Soylent used to contain 12g of trehalose per serving, and I'm wondering if that might have some impact? Based on this research it seems likely. I'm not sure if they switched out the trehalose for isomaltulose, and I don't know if isomaltulose would have similar effects on the GI tract. I find this portion of the Soylent Wikipedia page interesting though:

 _Later versions of the product lowered the amount of fiber content, but this did not stop the reports of gastrointestinal problems._

<comment><USER17> Soluble fiber usually produces more bloating, maybe that's what they're referring to?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny how the narrative goes from "microbiome helps you adapt to new foods" except when it doesn't and it then becomes this super sensitive thing that breaks down when approached by any foreign substance.

In every test done with a different substance the question needs to be, how much was it given to the subjects? (g/kg body weight). A lot of tests are done with excessive amounts (which are fine for testing purposes, but doesn't mean the effect will be as pronounced in smaller amounts)

I'll get the sugar-free soda as opposed to something that is the definition of high glycemic index empty calories. Or even better, just water.

</comment><comment><USER18> This article is an amazing test of reading comprehension.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is a data point of one, and I am certainly _not_ implying that there is only one kind diet that works for everyone, but:

Every time I've lost a significant amount of weight (currently at -70 lbs from my peak) it's because I have drastically reduced sugar/carbohydrate content--- while continuing to guzzle aspartame-based diet soda like water.

So either: 1.) I'm an outlier, 2.) These results are only relevant to saccharine sweeteners, and not aspartame, 3.) These results are bunk, like so many other nutritional studies, or, 4.) Low carbohydrate intake offsets any negative effects

<comment><USER20> Most of the things I've read about diet soda were more related to individuals with insulin resistance, and problems related to that.

Soda is bad for other reasons too. The carbonic acid will rot your teeth.

<comment><USER21> Do you have a source on the carbonic acid rotting your teeth? I thought it was the phosphoric acid. Carbonic acid is an incredibly weak acid.</comment></comment></comment>


Stopping managers exploit fresh graduates with intimidation and tough tasks? - <AUTHOR>

My manager is politically planning lots of games against me and neither is he letting me go.He is very senior guy in his 50s and used up all my weekend effort and used to work 12 hour workdays.Am not worried about next job ,but am rather saddened by the fact that there are a lot of people still held under such managers ; pinned down by intimidation and they are young fresh graduates!What do we do about such people? <comment><USER2> Well, people will exploit only to the point where you'll let them. You have the power to say no, to talk back (it's not a bad thing), to express your opinion. I've been in situation like this quite a number of times and I just tell myself: I'm a very talented developer and I can always get another job or work for myself if it comes to it, so I will not accept any exploitation. To do this you need confidence. As a developer, my way of getting confidence is being so good they can't ignore you (check out that book). Do your very best, learn every moment you get a chance. BTW, sometimes you can just talk directly to your manager and let him know how you're feeling. Tell him you feel like you're being singled out and you think it's unfair. It's the truth. If he can't handle that, and keep pushing you, just leave at the time you feel you should leave and tell him you have errands on the weekends. But use the weekends to your advantage by learning new skills. He/She can't physically force you to do anything.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks; let me train myself to those lines and yes because this thing is so prevalent all places, i'll anyway someplace or other hit upon it.The best way out is to grow out of it and hope all young grads get to do the same :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are management teams that expect the same even from seasoned teams. Sometimes you get lost in the challenges of the product, my recommendation is don't. There really is no need for continuous insane hours. Spikes, yes, regularly? No. It is a sign of poor management.

Sometimes founders will insulate themselves by hiring some engineering management to do their bidding.

<comment><AUTHOR> \-- Sometimes founders will insulate themselves by hiring some engineering management to do their bidding.

that's exactly what happened in my case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stop working 12 hour days, don't work on the weekends, and see what happens.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes thats exactly what i am doing...</comment></comment>


Shenzhen becomes first Chinese city to ban eating cats and dogs - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-52131940 <comment><USER2> Clarification, selling dog meat for food has been illegal in all of People's Republic of China since 2015, and many provinces had local regulations earlier than this. The new law goes a step further and bans individual consumption, a law no other country has seen the need to pass. In contrast, USA did not ban sale of dog meat until 2018, and private consumption is not illegal in the USA unless conflicting with other animal protection laws.

</comment><comment><USER3> former expat in China, youtuber serpentza, finally unleashed the hounds with his experiences about animal eating over there:

[https://youtu.be/rbHxeOQA1Mc?t=505](https://youtu.be/rbHxeOQA1Mc?t=505)

Hard to argue with. Totally gross, too. But I love eating cows, chickens and fish and see dogs as companions so whatever.

</comment><comment><USER4> Did they do this during sars and they lifted soon after

</comment><comment><USER5> I've visited China several times, one of those times I traveled all over the country for thousands of miles and stayed in many small towns, villages and giant cities, and spent many months over dozens of trips in other east Asian countries.

I am 100% certain the Chinese will never, ever, EVER change their eating habits, even if it meant they were all going to lose their firstborn sons. It's never going to happen. We will see Americans willfully giving up their guns and embracing communism and Jews eating Pork before the Chinese give up dogs, cats, bats and everything else you can find at a neighborhood Chinese market.

</comment><comment><USER6> The ban covers other animals as well, but every western media story I saw on this specifically only says cats and dogs in the headline.

<comment><USER7> So what? Including all animals in the title would make it long.

Also, this news is not that big a deal; it only goes to negate the CCP's propaganda about the source of the disease!

<comment><USER8> Yes it would make it long because the ban is actually a whitelist, not a blacklist. This means that among other things, Penguins and Woolly Mammoths are now banned from private slaughter.</comment></comment></comment>


Rails Has Turned Me Into a Cannibalizing Idiot - <AUTHOR> http://wekeroad.com/2012/01/03/rails-has-turned-me-into-a-cannibalizing-idiot/ <comment><USER2> In programming, pragmatism always beats dogma. The blog post to which this link responds was particularly venomous and unsubstantive, and is easily dismissed when you apply a modicum of reason.

I'm a little surprised that rant even earned a response. Are current web frameworks perfect? No. Are we all in complete agreement about how to improve them? No. Ok, with that out of the way, lets keep this in mind during our collective disagreements: [http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/upload/2009/08/weeke...](http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/upload/2009/08/weekend_diversion_how_to_argue/disagreement- hierarchy.jpg)

<comment><USER3> """In programming, pragmatism always beats dogma."""

Yes, but also computer science theory --which is mostly _infallible_ domain specific mathematics--, always beats idiotic industry practices and ignorant dismissal of theory.

Pragmatism is: "2 + 2.0000000000001 = 4, for my purposes".

It's not: "2 + 2 = 5, theoretical dogma be damned"

<comment><USER2> Of course, there are do exist hard laws in computer science; this is not in dispute. However, web programming is inherently not a ivory-tower mathematic art, as the objectives of the web programmer are different than those of computer science researcher. The researcher will prioritize scientific rigor, and the web programmer will prioritize practical use of resources during their implementation.

<comment><USER3> """The researcher will prioritize scientific rigor, and the web programmer will prioritize practical use of resources during their implementation."""

Yes, but in the end, you can't escape theory, you have to know it, even if less rigorously and systematically.

Consider the example of the web programmer that stores monetary transactions as floats in some db, blissfully unaware of the issues. Hilarity (or huge lawsuits) ensues...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "I have a module called "Authenticatable" that handles membership for me. I can attach it to whatever model object I please (Customer, Account, User, whatever) and guess what it can do! Ruby is really a fascinating language when you take the time to understand it beyond a demo that makes you hate it. Did you know Ruby is older than C#? It is."

I been doing this exact thing in my project. Core behaviors are now modules included in my AR classes. I can make anything authenticatable, or locatable, etc etc etc. One of my classes "extends" many modules, each one independently tested and gives some specific behavior to any object it takes.

Granted, rails is not good as a long-term framework for long-lived projects. It's a great starting point. Eventually you will use less rails and more custom services. I think of rails like facebook thinks of PHP -- front end code.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice. An interesting read. I haven't used FubuMVC before but as for rails and other similar web frameworks, the principle is "Convention over Configuration", so you would have certain limits on the way you think.

But the bright side is that this "Convention" has arose from identifying the common problems with web development and coming up with a standard solution which adheres to DRY principle which is another one of the Rails founding principles. The Convention also makes it easier for users to share code helping DRY again. So, if you prefer "Configuration over Convention", you are better off using something else.

</comment><comment><USER6> I especially enjoy the fact that Chad's preferred MVC framework, FubuMVC requires Ruby and Python to be installed to setup the development environment.

> Where is CommonAssemblyInfo.cs?

>

> CommonAssemblyInfo.cs is generated by the build. The build

> script requires Ruby with rake installed.

>

> Run InstallGems.bat to get the ruby dependencies (only

> needs to be run once per computer)

> open a command prompt to the root folder and type rake to

> execute rakefile.rb

</comment><comment><USER7> A friend of mine said similar thing about Django, mainly because of its ORM. He said I can't think out of the Django ORM's box.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is model based programming?

</comment><comment><USER3> From the article: """That a person can unequivocally declare every other web framework in the world as failures – is just precious.""""

That a person cannot fathom that it's entirely possible that "we're (all) doing it wrong" is just priceless.

How about the CGI era? Should we have all stuck with that, still using CGI interfaces in whatever language? Yeah, all or almost all solutions at the time were DOING IT WRONG.

It's not even that uncommon. Take Java EE for another example. Almost all frameworks circa 2003-2006 were this bloated mess. Not only the official Sun EE frameworks but tons of libraries and additional third-party stuff was using the same bloated, messy, XML-laden, inefficient style. And they found out they were all DOING IT WRONG, and changed course.

In general, the response article is mostly smart-assy ill attempts at humor.</comment>


Life Path - <AUTHOR> http://lifepath.me/ <comment><USER2> Two questions:

1) What is this? Why would I want to register? (Also, why do you even have a sign up link if it just says "coming soon" when I click it?)

2) Why don't you have a fallback for custom fonts not working, aside from displaying a message telling me that they're not and that everything is going to look like crap?

</comment><comment><USER3> _"Coming Soon"_</comment>


Ask HN: Why use Ansible/Puppet/Chef/Salt to build Docker images - <AUTHOR> I have gone down this path but it seems I spend more time troubleshooting these tools than actually benefits from them.<p>What others think is a good way to build Docker images if you think Dockerfiles are limited and lead to spaghetti code? <comment><USER2> Ansible and Salt don't seem to fit the use case of configuring something that is effectively a chroot, and I don't know if Chef can be used with chroot-like installations, but you must have used Puppet in a wrong way if it caused you trouble (my guess is that you used Puppet with master, not a CFEngine-like masterless mode).

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I translated all the configuration that would be done through RUN commands in a Dockerfile, into Ansible roles and playbooks that are applied at build time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I use make to build my docker images. It works really well.

`make update`: fetches the latest version of the code.

`make build`: builds the images.

`make push`: pushes them to the registry.

Salt's great tho, I use it to manage my Docker environment files and keep other systems up to date.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you use Salt from within a Dockerfile to make the changes inside the container?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://nixos.org](https://nixos.org) might help</comment>


The kik Ruby gem. Would this be next? - <AUTHOR> https://rubygems.org/gems/kik <comment><USER2> Probably not unless Kik will decide to create something for ruby: [https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the- breakin...](https://medium.com/@mproberts/a-discussion-about-the-breaking-of- the-internet-3d4d2a83aa4d#.lqhtdd3dz)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like he created it to find out.

<comment><USER4> I feel like I'm missing a large fact. The gem looks interesting, what is the experiment?

<comment><USER5> I believe this is what OP is referring to: [https://medium.com/@azerbike/i-ve- just-liberated-my-modules-...](https://medium.com/@azerbike/i-ve-just- liberated-my-modules-9045c06be67c#.wnouqzt30)</comment></comment></comment>


China's Tencent buys a majority stake in Finnish Supercell - <AUTHOR> http://supercell.com/en/nextchapter/ <comment><AUTHOR> I've just read elsewhere that they paid US$ 8.6B for it. [http://www.wsj.com/articles/tencent-agrees-to-acquire- clash-...](http://www.wsj.com/articles/tencent-agrees-to-acquire-clash-of- clans-maker-supercell-1466493612)

I'm quite curious now to see how this moves forward. China is a very different market from the "West".</comment>


The PHP strtod() denial of service bug - <AUTHOR> http://blog.andreas.org/display?id=9

<comment><USER2> Wow, a blog post that doesn't blame me for something. That's a first. :)

He has a point about this code being used everywhere though. When we figured out what caused this we did a quick search to see how other people who use this same code deals with this issue. And for the most part they don't. The version in Spidermonkey, for example, is a newer version, but very similar. Dropping the Spidermonkey version into PHP produces the same problem. The one saving factor here is that 32-bit x87 hardware is going away pretty quickly, so this particular annoyance is getting less and less important.

<comment><USER3> This is why I love HN. Thanks for being here Rasmus, you just made it that much cooler. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post is incorrect. The problem is not a bug in GCC, but rather the PHP developers making unwarranted assumptions about the hardware.

The C standard allows compilers to keep floating-point intermediate results in registers; this is both faster, and can give more accurate results. Since it is allowed, GCC does so when IEEE-extended mode is enabled by compiler flags. PHP enabled those flags, so GCC enables IEEE-extended math, and thus keeps results in registers.

There are a couple ways the PHP developers can fix this:

1\. Since the code explicitly says it does not work in IEEE-extended mode, they can disable it by adding "-fexcess-precision=standard" (for GCC) or "-fp- model precise" (for ICC) to their CFLAGS.

2\. Alternatively, they could compile in C99 mode; C99 changed the floating- point semantics to make IEEE mode the default.

3\. They could use the system's strtod() or strtod_l() , which is presumably designed to work on the current architecture.

Finally, regarding the author's suggestion to use Clang: the only reason Clang works as he expects (eg, incorrectly) is because it apparently does not support IEEE-extended math on x87-enabled processors. Suggesting that users switch to a compiler because it is missing features is ridiculous, especially if they add support for this feature later.

</comment><comment><USER5> The author might have something of a point in his rant that it is not exactly intuitive. When you specify 'double' you also expect computations to be done in 64 bit fp precision, so disabling the 80 bit fp flag or using SSE fp by default would have been a sane choice.

But the point remains that relying on any specific floating point semantics (in C, or any other language) is dangerous.

The potentially infinite loop in strtod was a bug, no matter how you spin it to blame the compiler. Iterative algorithms that must finish in limited time must always have a max # of iterations...

<comment><USER6> It does not seem all that unreasonable to assume (in library code for dealing with 64-bit floating point numbers) that your 64-bit floating point numbers are actually 64-bit floating point numbers.

<comment><USER5> Well this shows again that assumptions, even if they look reasonable, can be very dangerous. The C standard is vague on these things, which leaves a lot of leeway for compilers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like how the author rants that the existence of this bug as totally unacceptable then suggests instead using clang compiler "for those who [...] can tolerate a few bugs"

<comment><USER8> And yet from my point of view there is a world of difference between, _We have bugs that cause problems that we have decided we don't care about_ and _We have bugs we are not yet aware of, but we are responsive when you find them._

Even though I may encounter more bugs in the latter situation, I feel less pain when I encounter them. And I have the satisfaction that I'm somehow making the world a better place.

<comment><USER9> This is the first time I've heard someone argue that undocumented bugs are better than well-documented ones.

<comment><USER8> What can I say? There is a difference between errors of commission and omission. I much prefer the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > forced millions of users...

While there may be millions of servers running PHP, I doubt millions of users (PHP programmers) were the ones upgrading them. I'd be shocked, if _most_ PHP programmers have ever installed PHP themselves.

<comment><USER11> I imagine most PHP programmers have at least installed a package like XAMPP on their development machine, even if they haven't compiled their own PHP binary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> How come I read this function out loud as String to Death?

</comment><comment><USER13> > GNU Mono

I see Miguel finally caved!</comment>


Shoes By Jews launching today (yes we're real) - <AUTHOR> https://shoesbyjews.com/ <comment><USER2> Finally found the very annoying tab that started to make noise somewhere and immediately closed it.

<comment><USER3> yeah agreed, they should disable autoplay for a better user experience.

<comment><USER4> In most cases I'd agree but the best part of this is the video

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Square toe shoes are extremely dated and unfashionable. In fact, they all look awful. Who did you guys consult on what styles to put out?

On another note: I do not understand the short person complex because I am 6 feet tall, but my shorter friends have never tried to hide their height. In fact, by doing so, you would come off as extremely insecure and lack confidence. You might be putting on 3 inches of height, but you're not kidding anybody when you take the shoes off. If you're artificially increasing your height because you think you'll increase your odds at picking up women (or men?), two things you need to realize: they're going to eventually find out and you should probably work on yourself (and your confidence) before shelling out cash for ugly shoes... You could at least spend that same money on a nicer pair of shoes / outfit.

<comment><USER6> Does appearance influence what strangers think of you? Yes. Have studies shown shorter men have less success in dating and professional lives, everything else being equal? Yes. Do most social interactions with strangers, where your appearance matters, happen while wearing shoes? Yes.

All your arguments are moot, but more importantly, you can't know what it's like for short men because by your own admission you are giant by comparison. It's a lot like a man claiming female discrimination in IT doesn't happen because he's never noticed it (and he has a lot of female friends!).

<comment><USER5> Fair enough, I'll agree with what you've mentioned regarless of your lack of proof. However, I still think confidence plays a bigger role and will more than compensate for a lack of height. But you got me; I don't have research near my armchair to convince you. My experiences are purely anecdotal.

However, it doesn't remove from the fact that these shoes won't help you out. If anything, they'll make you look even more out of touch being that they lack any sense of style.

<comment><USER6> You can find more info and sources on wikipedia: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination#Height_an...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Height_discrimination#Height_and_social_discrimination)

If these shoes will make you look taller without making it obvious that you're wearing height-increasing shoes, and I believe they are, then these will help you out. I don't understand where you're coming from when you say that they wouldn't work. I agree that they're not stylish by any means, but that's another thing entirely. Shoes like these aren't new either, they've been around for as long as I can remember. I'll posit that you probably have met someone who wore these, and you never noticed it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder what the chances are of getting a pair with differing lift heights?

My son has one short leg and is very conscious of how odd his one lifted shoe looks in comparison to the other.

<comment><USER8> this is a valid reason to own these shoes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, the video is absolutely hilarious I'll say that

<comment><USER9> Call it the Dollar Shave Club business model: dress up an unremarkable product with a funny video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a 6'5" guy, I can finally hit on the 6'7" ladies.

</comment><comment><USER8> As a 5'6 man with a girlfriend who is 5'7, anyone insecure enough to buy these shoes needs to start looking at their priorities in life. Just be you, own it man!

<comment><USER11> My best buddy is about 5'4" and a bit round too, but I have never sensed for an instant that he feels hampered by or insecure about it. He's a smart guy and happy with himself. He has my admiration, as do you.

<comment><USER8> It bugged me more when I was younger, but its such a petty thing to be worried about.

Also as a rounder gentleman, Id much rather continue to lose weight and get in shape than worry that I'm kinda short.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is advertising genius. Instead of just selling shoes with lifts, they're selling sex, essentially. Men will buy anything that purports to get them laid more.

</comment><comment><USER3> I love this idea and might get a pair by midnight tonight. I just wonder if you get addicted to 2-3 more inches and you can't buy another pair of shoes again.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're uncomfortable being shorter than average at a bar, it might be easiest to just move to NYC...

<comment><USER14> Or Tokyo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mr. Berlusconi could be their biggest client. [http://digilander.libero.it/annainfuriata/BLOG/scaRPA%20BERL...](http://digilander.libero.it/annainfuriata/BLOG/scaRPA%20BERLUSCA.jpg)

<comment><USER16> Works with Sarkozy too.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vw0YTqkkYoY/SwGlSVpLi5I/AAAAAAAAAT...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_vw0YTqkkYoY/SwGlSVpLi5I/AAAAAAAAATM/TIlh08WOOtE/s400/Box+is+his+best+friend.bmp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm almost tempted to get a pair just to see how it would feel to be 6'7\. MUAHAHAHA!

</comment><comment><USER19> IAMA 6'3" guy who doesn't need these shoes. AMA.

<comment><USER11> Yes, have you ever wanted to be shorter? ;)</comment></comment>


First Power from Rosatom's VVER-1200 Generation III+ Nuclear Reactor - <AUTHOR> http://www.ee.co.za/article/first-power-rosatoms-vver-1200-generation-iii-nuclear-reactor.html <comment><USER2> Wow! —did they set out to deliberately make that the most annoying web page in the world? Don't think I've seen so many flashing, scrolling, distracting things since Geocities bit the dust.</comment>