Is Hyperloop the future of travel? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-36307781 <comment> pi-err There's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not.

One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour.

Even if Hyperloop managed to get built at half the price of HSR (which would already be a feat, there's zero chance they'll do it at 10% of HSR price), this makes a very thin passenger flux to deliver reasonable amounts of operational cash.

Where HSR can deliver $7M to $14M daily with $150 ticket price at peak time, Hyperloop would max out at $2M daily with $300 tickets during peak hour. And those prices would probably kill their market anyway.

And that's with an entirely new transport platform to fund with many unknowns such as metal fatigue for pods in near-vacuum at those speeds, passenger tolerance for accelerations and lateral movements etc.

Maybe the business plan for passenger planes and trains was also that hazy back then?

<comment><USER2> > High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour.

How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into account the fact that Eurostar can go from London, Paris and Brussels) and 1500 passengers/hour is comparable to the number of passengers the Eurostar carries in an hour.

[0] [http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service- inf...](http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service- information/rtti#/dep/7015400/7015400)

<comment><USER3> Europe's busiest express train line seems to be LGV Paris-Lyon, with a peak scheduled capacity of 13 TGV trains per hour. Given that a TGV duplex fits 545 passengers, we are above 7000 per hour. Now couple two TGVs together, and you'll be well above.

Weirdly enough, the only source I found was German wikipedia on the train track (LGV Sud-Est[1]). Neither English nor French wikipedia have capacity information, and neither of the respective articles on the train itself have capacity information, even though the TGV duplex was introduced for this very reason.

[1] [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Sud- Est](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGV_Sud-Est)

<comment><USER4> In Germany there are some tracks with higher usages, but those are not the same line – they just share part of the line (imagine on the track A -- B -- C -- D, a train going from A to C, and from B to D, both every half hour – between B and C now you have 15min frequencies).

But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.

Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway. And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.

<comment><USER5> >Hyperloop transports less people than a single lane of highway

So what? Airplanes also transport fewer people than a highway. How many people travel _by air_ between LA and SF right now per hour? Probably no more than the capacity of Hyperloop.

>But the point is the same, regardless of if we use Japan, Germany, France, Spain, etc: 10k people per hour, or more, is easily possible.

What makes you think 10k people per hour actually want slow train service between LA and SF, when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time, and then not have to rent a car at their destination?

>And with the cost you could maintain teslas for rental on a dedicated highway for many decades.

You're placing passenger capacity above speed. The whole point of Hyperloop is speed: it's faster than an airplane, without all the downsides of the airplane (terrorism, TSA, crashing, etc.) HSR is not, it's slow (esp. the way they'll build it in this country). Of course, Hyperloop doesn't have the advantage of not having to rent a car like driving yourself does, but it makes up for it with very high speed.

<comment><USER4> > when they can just use their car, get there in about the same time

> HSR is not, it's slow

Have you ever seen an actual HSR system?

We're talking about 220mph minimum. That's quite a bit faster than per car.

And, due to TSA, it's faster than an airplane, and without the annoying stuff. And cheaper.

Hyperloops only differences over HSR is that it's 15min faster, is a lot more uncomfortable, a lot more expensive to build, a lot more expensive to use (due to few people per capsule), etc.

<comment><USER5> >Have you ever seen an actual HSR system? >We're talking about 220mph minimum. That's quite a bit faster than per car.

Sorry, that's complete bullshit.

We're not talking about HSR in Japan, China, or Germany here. We're talking about "HSR" in California, USA.

The California system will be very, very lucky if it manages to ever hit 200mph in a short stretch. Realistically, it might be about the speed of the Amtrak Acela Express, which is basically no faster than any regular train, except that it manages to hit 150mph once or twice, briefly.

You seem to be making the ridiculous assumption that HSR in America will resemble HSR in other countries somehow, in both speed and cost. Nothing could be farther from the truth. HSR here is a horribly expensive boondoggle. It'll be worse than the F-35.

<comment><USER4> I've only seen German and French HSR, but the one in the US can't be that bad.

Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.

<comment><USER5> >I've only seen German and French HSR, but the one in the US can't be that bad.

This is your problem then: you're speaking from ignorance. Yes, it really can be that bad. Acela Express is a total joke compared to foreign HSR, and the one in California isn't even built yet, the cost projections are insane, and the proposed top speed is only 200mph.

>Worst case, you just let some Germans build it for you.

We can't do that. I'm not joking, I mean that literally. We simply cannot do that, and will not do that. Sure, it'd make sense to just let a company that's already an expert do that, but we won't. We'll do it with crappy domestic companies (though perhaps getting the passenger cars made by Bombardier in Canada) at an absolutely astronomical cost, because that's just how things are done in this country now for anything that's government-funded. Just look at the F-35 jet for proof.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Except it is really, really expensive.

> Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn > (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative.

I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route

<comment><USER7> If I remember right, part of the reason why Musk estimated that the hyperloop would be so cheap was that he assumed it could be built on highway meridians for free, and the tracks were to end end far outside the city centers. It also had a fraction of passenger capacity and number of stations as high speed rail.

It seems likely that for the same amount of service as high speed rail, the hyperloop would be a lot more expensive.

<comment><USER8> Don't forget that the cost estimate included drilling holes in mountains for magically minature amounts of money than current technology provides.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No, it's not.

There's also the Vactrain concept. Several variants were pursued from 1914 on, with Robert Salter of RAND writing a couple of proposals in the 1970s.

The idea's not new, has been seriously explored previously, and has been rejected or failed on technical, cost, political, practical, and economic grounds.

Some forms of local or highly-dedicated application, _possibly_. But for general use, no.

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

Salter, Robert M. (August 1972), The Very High Speed Transit System, RAND Corporation

[https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html)

Salter, Robert M. (February 1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation

[https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html](https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html)

And, despite Musk's ability to prove me wrong, I'll stick with this projection for now.

<comment><USER10> Musk plan:

1\. Announce Hyperloop to the world

2\. Let someone else build it with tubes

3\. Go to Mars

4\. Use everything people have built - and went bankrupt - in the thin atmosphere on Mars with success without expensive tubes.

Now the SpaceX plans, the Mars plans and Hyperloop come together.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't be surprised if his involvement in Solar City comes into the picture somehow either.

<comment><USER10> +100

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Haven't really fast trains (sometimes maglev) inside evacuated tubes been proposed over and over again. Trying to work out what is new here.

For example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain)

<comment><USER13> Vacuums get much more costly as you get ever lower pressure. Hyperloop is an interesting cost / benefit between fast travel and lower construction and maintenance costs which is why the speeds are relatively low. The vehicle is also closer to an electric aircraft than an electric train. Note the big fan on the front: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#/media/File:Hyperloo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#/media/File:Hyperloop_no_tube.png)

Another consideration is the faster you travel the straighter your path needs to be. 4,000+MPH paths require incredibly strait designs.

<comment><USER4> You realize that the fan concept, and the hovercraft concept both were cancelled?

The new hyperloop concept is just a fan-less capsule hovering on a MagLev track.

It's just VacTrain over again, but more expensive and with lower capacities.

<comment><USER13> I don't think that qualifies as 'HyperLoop' even if they keep the name. It's like building an airplane except you use it underwater, sorry that's a sub.

That said, it suggests that the HyperLoop concept is not viable which is not that surprising IMO. However, it might also just be a case of lower R&D costs.

<comment><USER4> Well, obviously they want to keep the hype alive. So it's understandable that they'd refuse to change the name.

Sadly, this also means we have a lot of people think this is something revolutionary, although I guess that's intentional.

It's really annoying when you consider how the US refused a proposal from japanese companies a few years ago to build a MagLev system between Boston, NY, Washington, with capacities around 10k people per hour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I know Elon Musk has a lot of goodwill around here, but is no one else cynical about the notion of a smart, ambitious automobile CEO coming up with some plausible-seeming science-fictional FUD to torpedo a high speed rail project that may very well compete with his interests?

<comment><USER15> You're suggesting Musk is so concerned with the success of Tesla that he is willing to torpedo alternate projects to drive up sales of his own product. If that is true why did he release the patents for those products into the public domain where someone could build a directly competing product?

<comment><USER16> Because electric cars need a critical mass in order for charging stations to reach a critical mass in order for electric cars to become ubiquitous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Fun fact, New York City's subway started out with a similar system (between 1870 and 1873, called the Beach Pneumatic Transit): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit)

<comment><USER18> & London's Crystal palace pneumatic railway predated that by 6 years [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railw...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railway)

Not a roaring success though!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Related: [http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One's-Hyperloop-product- work...](http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One's-Hyperloop-product-work-—-at- scale-cost-effectively-safely)

I think the deal breaker is the high speeds, which require a much straighter track and much larger turn radius (410ft for a train, ~4.6 mi. for HL). That means a lot of tunneling through mountains and bulldozing expensive buildings. Land is the biggest expense in these projects.

I'm more hopeful of NASA's current work trying to reduce the sonic boom on airplanes. Flying high solves the air resistance problem, and going in a straight line isn't a problem up there.

<comment><USER20> The problem with flights is the time and trouble spent getting to and getting through airports so the flight time has to be long enough to justify the wasted time.

<comment><USER21> Hyperloop has same problem as flying with terminals being located away from the city. With Hyperloop, the issue is that would require expensive right-of- way or tunnels to bring it into the center of the city. Which is why the initial proposal had end in San Fernando Valley, an hour from LA.

High speed rail has the big advantage that it can use existing tracks, at slower speed, to reach the center city train stations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> My answer to the question, is 'NO'.

I love trains, and use them whenever possible.

However, with static start and endpoints, and existing low-cost air infrastructure that is dynamically reroutable and equivalently fast, why spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate something so fragile and limited?

Municipalities are wisely, generally in a 'wait and see' phase for the next decade, as autonomous personal transport guarantees to spur the redesign and redevelopment of entire cities and transportation infrastructure.

<comment><USER23> The autonomous transport you mention in the end is also an issue for Hyperloop directly. Highways are "easy mode" for autonomous cars, so automated services to move you between cities may be available substantially before they can necessarily move you within the city. Sure, they'll be a lot slower than the hyperloop, but they'll probably be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the hyperloop could win the deploy-to-production race with _fully_ autonomous cars, but at this point, I bet it can't win the race with autonomous cross-city quasi-personal transport.

<comment><USER24> I wonder how the economics would work out for something the size of a bus, but with much better aerodynamics? (Perhaps with laminar flow boundary devices?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Bay area's problems are best solved with having some kick ass public transport which afaik nobody is working on. IMO, that is a real game changer as opposed to hyperloop, electric cars :/ Most european countries have this already and they are such great places to visit and live.

</comment><comment><USER26> For a more advanced concept with a working prototype, see [1]. The Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University has a maglev train in a glass tube about two meters in diameter. Their goal is 3000 KPH.

Here's a technical paper on the maglev system used.[2] They discovered a problem with bumps in the magnetic field at rail joints, and figured out a way to fix that.

Maybe that's the future. If you're going to have a maglev system, you may as well go all the way and ditch the air turbine propulsion.

[1] [http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154](http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154) [2] [http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3](http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3)

</comment><comment><USER27> The German Transrapid gave very little advantage over regular trains and was bound to fail from the beginning. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid)

The Hyperloop has the same problems (technology still developing, requires new, incompatible infrastructure) but it has one big advantage:

In contrast to the Transrapid, it can compete with planes regarding to speed.

What both technologies share: They require electricity, which is good. Electricity can be generated easily, possibly with thorium reactors in the future. It is hard (but possible, e.g. reduction of CO2 to methanol) to create combustible fuels for plane engines from electricity. Electric transport will likely overtake all kind of combustion engines.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm still wondering how a neighbourhood will react if you want to build two massive tubes through it. I can't imagine people will like those tubes.

Yes, you could put them underground but this will increase your costs.

<comment><USER29> Wasn't one of the ideas to put them through the existing highway infrastructure, elevated in the meridian?

<comment><USER9> Hyperlink turning radius (at top speed) is on the order of 100s of km, due to g-forces. You don't have much routing flexibility.

Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible.

Alternatives are to slow down massively as you approach / traverse urban areas, but this further increases trip time, changes acceleration and energy needs, and reduces the already abysmally low net passenger throughput.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, I'm still wondering for how long the Hyperloop can keep its high speed before it has to break again. This is already a big issue with high speed trains in Germany, so that some people say, why do we waste money on 300 kph trains which have to break after six minutes anyway. The energy needed to reach this speed is way too high and you don't save a lot of time either.

And with Hyperloop it will the same thing. It might work to go from LA to San Francisco without too many stops but Think about Boston to Washington DC.

<comment><USER29> Ah, but the Hyperloop will allow for small, individual cars of maybe 8 people (I'm guessing). This means that you get in the car based on destination and it uses switches so that there are no in-transit stops.

 _Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible._

Again, my understanding was that this was part of the original TDD (SF to LA) and they found that it was, indeed, feasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Sydney is just about to roll out a new (mostly) sub-terrainian train system [1] which would be an interesting demo for hyperloop tech, except for the large numbers of stops being incorporated into the trip. Despite this problem, the costings should be an example of how much it would cost to build new, tunnel based, infrastructure through similar areas (admittedly, Sydney is mostly soft sandstone).

[1]: [http://sydneymetro.info/](http://sydneymetro.info/)

<comment><USER6> Hyperloop is designed to be above-ground, which is significantly cheaper. Also, musk's original route plan has it stopping outside city-centers (presumably to keep the cost-estimate down)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I know it's a cynical point of view, but IMO these companies working on Hyperloop is akin to Hooli building inside out compression. I don't think it's going to work.

</comment><comment><USER32> I just think it is scary going that speed in a tube. To be a terrorist all you would have to do is like stick a beer bottle in the tube and when a train comes a 700mph shit going to start happening

</comment><comment><USER33> Just imagine the TSA line for the hyperloop.

You'll have to arrive days ahead of time.

<comment><USER6> Why? Wouldn't it be more like a train than a plane?

A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane

<comment><USER34> Blowing up inside a tube would be a lot more expensive than blowing up a train on the tracks.

But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.

<comment><USER35> More to the point, you can't weaponize any fixed-track conveyance like a train/monorail/HL system like you can a plane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping? Surely that would be a highly profitable project from the start?

<comment><USER37> > Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) > trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping

1) There's very little merchandise that needs to be shipped trans-Atlantic that quickly.

2) Shipping containers are huge and heavy. Transporting a cargo-ship's worth requires a lot of energy, which translates into high expenses.

3) If shipping a cargo-ship's worth of containers, this will become an impossibly long train, nearing 70 miles long (around 18,000 containers per ship, and each container is about 20ft long)[1]

This has been the crux of the hyperloop since inception. The numbers really don't add up to making it more economical than any already existing alternative (even for transporting people). Shipping things via slow boat in a container is surprisingly not very expensive (given you've filled a container with goods, the goods value will greatly exceed your transport costs).

[1] [http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21432226](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21432226)

<comment><USER38> The original plan was to reuse existing infrastructure and have very few stops outside city center. For that scenario the number were holding up.

Now the question is what problem is this solving: you have cheap novel transport system for passenger between 2 points nobody is really interested in.

And that's the wall all the project around hyperloop are hitting. Either you need the government to step in to make it competitive for endpoint that people are currently interested in. Or you keep the original design, but you need the government to step in to ensure those uninteresting endpoints become interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> why can't they just use existing shinkansen technology instead of reinventing the wheel with this pie in the sky nonsense?

</comment><comment><USER40> Also, will it render autonomous trucks obsolete? [1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11711657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11711657)

<comment><USER41> How will the goods get from the source to the hyperloop stations? There's your answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand.

I hope I can Hyperloop from NY to LA some day, and if we can leverage the current high investment traffic to get that to happen, I'm all for it.

<comment><USER43> > _I think you know you 've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on > HN all dismiss it out of hand._

Please don't diss the community as a rhetorical device. There's no substance in that, and since you're also an esteemed commenter on HN, it's false.

<comment><USER42> I understand what you're getting at, and you make a fair point, but you really don't think there's a trend on HN where pretty much every idea is called obvious or terrible by some of the most popular comments on a given submission?

I was hoping to put some red ink on the trend and maybe curtail it slightly, for what that's worth.

<comment><USER43> > _you really don 't think there's a trend on HN_

It's really hard to assess that objectively because the cognitive biases affecting such perceptions are so strong. Certainly we don't want HN to be that way and try to nudge it in more fruitful directions. But the way to fight an undesirable pattern on HN is not with another undesirable pattern.

<comment><USER42> I'll defer to you on identifying undesirable patterns from now on, sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This technology has been around for over a century. Remove wheel friction and air pressure as the primary barriers to speed with the pinnacle being maglev in a full vacuum (something that was proposed for 5000mph trains crossing the ocean on the seabed at one point). The Hyperloop concept has relaxed these constraints by allowing for some atmosphere, which also greatly reduces the top speed, but fundamentally it's the same thing. And it's all perfectly possible given enough engineering.

The only real problem is the financial viability of such a project.

Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Just the land rights alone will quickly balloon the cost into 100s of billions for any sizable project between two major cities that people want to travel between - and until that gets figured out, this will never happen.

The recent news around a startup raising 80M is meaningless because they will waste all that money chasing tech without realizing that they will never be able to successfully lay track anywhere.

<comment><USER45> > Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big > distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real > estate that a train needs.

Hyperloop is very specifically aimed at medium distance routes. SF to LA, for example, where the plane has relatively little time cruising at altitude, where it can fly efficiently. If a plane is spending most it's time flying through denser aid, then it's not flying efficiently, and burns a lot of fuel on a per-mile basis relative to a longer flight. Hyperloop is specced to be more efficient than air travel at the distance it's proposed.

<comment><USER44> Efficient != cheaper.

The only thing that matters is what people are willing to pay, and that's not much for medium distance. And for the billions it costs to install the track in the first place, you can buy several airlines and operate them for years.

<comment><USER46> Cheaper != better.

It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was proposed. This is California and environmental aspects need to be taken into account. Airlines are a major source of CO2 and California wants a more environmentally friendly solution. There is a proposed high-speed rail project with a $10B initial estimate that's sure to at least double by the time the project is complete. The high-speed rail project is only high-speed compared to existing rail since the max speed will be around 200 mph.

It's into this environment that Musk proposed the Hyperloop. On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster and with less pollution. The "more airplanes" alternative may be cheaper and probably faster (with the TSA is doing its best keep air travel slow) but fails horribly on the CO2 emissions front.

<comment><USER47> > It's important to look at the hyperloop in the context in which it was > proposed.

I don't think it really is, because the proposal was a comically unserious one designed to generate interest in the underlying technology. The route proposed in the paper as a supposed alternative to HSR which has termini outside of the immediate area of the population centers which it notionally connects would never be useful and will never get built.

OTOH, the interest the technology has drawn from that splashy initial PR campaign means enough people are working to develop it that that, if anything like it is viable, one or more commercially-viable variants will likely be ready for Musk's Mars colonies.

> On paper, it's better than the high-speed rail in every way. Cheaper, faster > and with less pollution.

Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs _and_ avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus.

Unlike HSR, which not only terminates near the population centers, but includes as part of the same project improvements in the local connecting transit systems.

The proposed Hyperloop route was the high-tech version of a bridge-to-nowhere.

<comment><USER24> _Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers at either terminus._

It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter assumption isn't so bad.

<comment><USER47> > > Its only "cheaper" because the proposal both made unrealistic assumptions > about real estate costs and avoided much of the real estate costs by not > terminating any place with useful transit access to the population centers > at either terminus.

> It's supposed to be an alternative to a short airplane flight, so the latter > assumption isn't so bad.

It was pitched as an alternative to the actual HSR proposal, which both connects the population centers _and_ includes connecting improvements on both ends to regional transit. So, yes, as an alternative to HSR, it was comically unserious.

(Even as an alternative to air travel, its _still_ comically unserious for the same reason -- while the major airports are farther from the population centers than the proposed HSR termini are, they are _much closer_ than the termini for hyperloop that were proposed, and _do_ have significant transit connections into the population center and the surrounding region, so terminating in place without either that proximity to where people would want to come from and go and without including the cost of transit improvements to make the termini useful in the cost of the proposal is ludicrous.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is it time to eliminate tenure for professors? - <AUTHOR> https://theconversation.com/is-it-time-to-eliminate-tenure-for-professors-59959 <comment><AUTHOR> Since the tenure system is so inflexible, universities instead rely on semester-to-semester adjunct faculty.

Sounds like someone needs to make Uber for higher ed.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've taught at 3 Universities as, two of those were as adjunct faculty. I've worked in an industrial research lab. I've worked as a University employee on research grant projects.

You seem to dismiss "the freedom to do research" as an important goal, needing much less priority than teaching.

Let me share some pseronal observations about both teaching and research.

Adjunct teaching is free labor these days. I love to teach but my adjunct gigs barely covered the cost of travel and food. Given the number of hours spent preparing courses, running labs, office hours, and actual teaching, the paycheck was WAY below minimum wage. I can't afford to teach.

There are some facts about research you need to consider. First, research takes time. Second, it takes money. Third, it takes focus. Fourth, research usually doesn't succeed. Fifth, we really NEED researchers. Lets look at them one at a time.

Research takes time. A research project can take 10 years to produce something that can be useful. Do you like the wonderful new AI Neural Network projects? Are you amazed at the Alpha-Go program that beat the world Go champ? I worked on that exact problem...in the early 1990s...using Neural Nets. After a couple years I gave up. The current leaders (overnight successes) didn't give up and didn't succeed until around 2010. That's the advantage of being a tenured professor.

Research takes money. There used to be government research labs (until Reagan killed them). Big companies ran big labs. Xerox had PARC (which gave us windowing, mice, and the ethernet), Bell Labs gave us microwaves (the device), and check readers (early Neural Nets), IBM gave us disk drives and scanning microscopes. Universities gave us AI and robots. ARPA (the government) gave us funding for a thousand new things.

Now? Not so much. Government labs are gone. Xerox PARC and Bell Labs are gone. IBM management is doing everything they can to starve IBM Research. Microsoft killed a research division. Google (Alphabet) is killing research efforts. ARPA became DARPA so all your research had to be for "defense".

All of the tenured professors I know spend a LOT of their time begging for money. A tenured professor's "research" these days amounts to hunting for money to pay for students to do the actual research. The military is the primary source of funding these days... and you wonder why "killer robots" are coming?

Research takes focus. IBM Research (Ralph Gomory) pointed out that a research project takes an average of 10 years to produce a result; e.g. Axiom, a computer algebra system developed at IBM Research, took over 10 years. It involved dozens of researchers and millions of dollars as well as dedicate management and lab space. It was a career project for the project lead (Richard Jenks). The Neural Network story is the same, except it happened in Canada. Tenure gives you the chance to create an area of science (e.g. Gilbert Baumslag in Infinite Group Theory).

Research rarely "succeeds". Gomory (IBM Research Pres.) pointed out that less than 10% of all research projects produce a useful result, e.g. my work on re- writable paper, similar to the Kindle paperwhite, my work on automated robot assembly from CAD drawings, etc. Unfortunately you can't predict which research projects WILL succeed. Certainly nobody would have predicted that Neural Nets would beat a Go champ (and thus, my NN-Go work would be vindicated?).

Fifth, we really NEED researchers. When my parents were born plastic did not exist. Everything was wood and stone. Look around you and count the number of plastic things you can touch. When I was born transistors didn't exist. You probably can't count the number of transistors you use in a day. When you were born self-driving cars didn't exist. In 20 years you won't know a single person who knows how to drive.

So now you propose that professors no longer get tenure. You want them to justify their job every year (they do already in the form of grant applications). Next you will propose that professors get rated on a scale of 1-5 and that the '5' performers should be fired. IBM Research did that and it killed the whole division. Edward Demming (helped restore Japan to a world economic power) debunked the whole rating idea but management won't listen.

Tenured professors are the "last man standing" in the research arena. Beware what you kill; there will be nothing left.

I have a counter-proposal... Professors should get tenure AND GUARANTEED 100k per year minimum funding for the life of the tenure. Sure, some will "retire on the job" but some will create Deep Neural Networks. Place your bets.</comment>


3 Reasons Why Facebook Connect Will Be Our Only Sign-in Option For Now - <AUTHOR> http://blog.leapfor.it/post/17155827909

<comment><USER2> Makes total sense. Using registration/authentication as a deliberate strategy for selecting/segmenting your market is underrated.

Startups too often get in a cycle of wanting ALL the customers, instead of wanting the right customers.

You're not walmart, you're not trying to please everyone. Time is at a premium, so if your userbase is mostly on facebook (and willing to authenticate via facebook), don't waste time supporting everything under the sun.

Wait until 1000s of people say "Hey i'd like to be able to auth via X" before you build it.

<comment><USER3> Well said. It's not ideal but it's quality over quantity to start.</comment></comment>


Intuition behind Covariance Kernels - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sigopt.com/post/131498069303/sigopt-fundamentals-intuition-behind-covariance <comment><AUTHOR> I'm one of the founders of SigOpt (YC W15) and will be checking this post all day and am happy to answer any questions about this, our tech, or anything.</comment>


Does the U.S. Produce Too Many Scientists?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-the-us-produce-too-m

<comment><USER2> Like everything else, just because a horse is a horse, doesn't make it a racehorse. For every scientist produced, there will be good and there will be bad. The more we have, the better the chance for good ones to float to the surface.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does the US produce too many science PhDs? Do we suffer from degree inflation? Is US science funding broken?</comment>


How MIT Became the Most Important University in the World - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/2012/10/mit-important-university-world-harvard/

<comment><USER2> Speaking as someone who went to a university that could also claim this title, I think there's a tendency to overstate these things because it makes a good story (case in point with this article). The difference between top-tier and mid-level universities seems a lot bigger from the outside. The truth is, there are smart people _everywhere_ (and, conversely, dumb people too). Someone with a game-changing idea is almost as likely to come from somewhere completely "random" as to come from MIT.

I'm not saying there isn't a difference. The difference is definitely there. MIT is great, and is a pioneer in many respects (to pick just one example, their OpenCourseWare initiative is wonderful, and MIT's entrepreneurship drive is good too). It's just that the difference isn't as great as articles like this will claim, and it does a disservice to the people doing great work at other universities to say things like this.

<comment><USER3> "it does a disservice to the people doing great work at other universities to say things like this."

Totally agree, and I write that as an MIT alum.

This is just Boston Magazine link baiting targeting the MIT and Harvard communities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This article was something of a joke between me and my friends here at MIT- while parts of it are true, parts of it are also patently false ("MIT kids are [...] covered in tattoos—they're cool and hip and very different. Their clothes are edgy.")

The types of people described in the article definitely exist here. They're also definitely a lot less common then the article suggests.

</comment><comment><USER5> My theory is MIT has really good PR (in addition to a lot of really smart people). Over many years I've noticed when research comes out of MIT headlines almost always state "MIT does X". I haven't noticed this pattern as much with other Universities.

Here's a test, go to google news, and search for '<university> researchers' and look for articles about research results/breakthroughs from that University. I tried it with MIT and Harvard, here are the top three results about research for each:

* MIT figures out how to power tiny devices with... the ear

* MIT Breakthrough Could Lead To New Military Body Armor Only...

* New MIT Method Could Help Communities Plan For Climate Risk

and for Harvard:

* Tiny, Artificial Lung On Microchip Used To Test Drugs

* Harvard Research Finds New Ways to Change Coating Colors

* Bio-battery could power medical implants

</comment><comment><USER6> Can "any" University claim to be the "most important" ? One of the most important, yes, but "most" .. I doubt it.

<comment><USER7> Somewhat related:

"As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else." -- Paul Graham (<http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html>)

<comment><USER8> I always thought this was really silly of PG to say. If you had some "intellectuality index" of cities and Cambridge _just_ inched out other cities, it'd be true that it'd be more preposterous to call any other city the intellectual capital of the world -- but it doesn't mean it's still not preposterous to say it about Cambridge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article reads like an advertising pamphlet. It also awkwardly avoids mentioning that the university most often described as the center of tech entrepreneurship is Stanford. Boston seems to be developing an inferiority complex regarding Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER10> Boston has an inferiority complex about everything.

Admittedly, it's entirely justified in seeing how much-loved New York City's "entrepreneurial scene" has become, when NYC has maybe _half_ the concentration of serious technology companies, universities and talent available in Boston... but has several times the _money_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reads more like "Why MIT is better than Harvard and Harvard can suck it and how MIT's dad could beat up Harvard's dad" than MIT becoming the most important university in the world...

</comment><comment><USER12> Is it because people from MIT go around saying it is the most important university in the world?

</comment><comment><USER13> Just curious, are there people here who went through or are going through the MIT Tech Entrepreneurship program? Or maybe just took some courses from them? What are your thoughts?

</comment><comment><USER14> _Sincerely, Boston Magazine_

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm still on the election. It took me a while to realize the title if referring to the university and not the presidential candidate.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can we please stop using "sexy" to describe tech work? It isn't sexy, it requires a LOT of knowledge and a LOT of critical thinking. That it gets called "sexy" and is "the thing that teens and twenty-somethings flock to" just shows the culture we have here. "Oh that's cool, I wanna try it!" 90% of the people who ever start in "tech entrepreneurship" are going to fail, because they have absolutely no idea what they're doing, other than following the trendy train. Drives me nuts.

<comment><USER17> Sorry if you don't think that say a Spitfire isn't sexy and should make any engineers heart sing just to see it fly and to hear the sound of the merlin or griffin you have no soul.

And the sad grandeur of the last TSR2 (look it up) all alone at the back of a hanger with its wings off at Cranfield doesn't make you sad you should not be working in technology not even on some little iphone fart app.

<comment><USER16> The Spitfire is sexy. The work that went in to producing it? Not so much. That's the issue: the people who are being attracted by the "sexy" tag are people who actually don't want to do any of that work.

<comment><USER18> I dont' see the problem. People are already attracted to engineering for the "wrong" reasons - most of them dig deep enough to discover just how much work it is, and run screaming in the other direction.

And that's fine, now we have someone who's doing something else and better informed to boot.

I'd venture this "problem" is neither a problem nor is it unique to our field. People think making video games is sexy until they see the innards of a game studio. People think making movies is sexy until they actually start doing it. People think being a musician is sexy until they've dealt with labels, marketing, and the royalty system.

So on and so forth.

Nothing executed at a high level is actually that sexy, but that's okay, because _it's still sexy to the people who are doing it_. Tons of rocket scientists, software engineers, automotive engineers, movie directors, and musicians wake up every day and can't wait to do the myriad of supposedly boring things they find sexy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Sorry that would be Harvard.

<comment><USER20> Different folks, different strokes.

I think everyone should realise going into this that the entire premise of the article is ridiculous. I think very few people in academia would disagree with this. MIT may be the most important university in the world for _technology_ or _entrepreneurship_.

But if you're a arts student is MIT 'the most important university in the world'? No, probably not. It is extremely easy to myopically focus on the fields that are relevant to your own interests, and prioritise accordingly.

Of course, it's a magazine article, not a paper. People shouldn't take it too seriously - I went to Harvard, I also cross-registered at MIT. I enjoyed my time at both places. I now interview and help recruit international students in the UK. If your primary readon for choosing a university is a magazine article, or a ranking, or anything other than your own personal feeling you're doing something wrong.

<comment><USER19> I agree the premise of the article is ridiculous. I was taking a tongue-in- cheek jab at the self-importance exhibited in the article... Harvard absolutely dominates MIT in finance, business, politics, law, medicine, and all the fields of the humanities. I wouldn't be surprised if a higher proportion of Harvard graduates started their own companies, considering Harvard's massive MBA program.

<comment><USER21> _Harvard absolutely dominates MIT in finance, business, politics, law, medicine, and all the fields of the humanities. I wouldn't be surprised if a higher proportion of Harvard graduates started their own companies, considering Harvard's massive MBA program._

You're very confused. Related: MIT does not have a law school or medical school.

<comment><USER19> What relevance does that have?

Would you consider a university the greatest in the world if it didn't have any engineering or science programs?

<comment><USER21> I'm already regretting replying to you, but in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.

 _What relevance does that have?_

Should be obvious. You've claimed that Harvard "absolutely dominates" MIT in law, but MIT doesn't have a law school.

 _Would you consider a university the greatest in the world if it didn't have any engineering or science programs?_

Not sure the relevance here, as MIT has a full complement of humanities programs.

 _I wouldn't be surprised if a higher proportion of Harvard graduates started their own companies, considering Harvard's massive MBA program._

Doubt it. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Sloan_School_of_Management>

_Harvard absolutely dominates MIT in finance [and] business_

No. [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best- gradu...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate- schools/top-business-schools/finance-rankings)

 _... [and] all the fields of the humanities._

No. [http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best- gradu...](http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate- schools/top-humanities-schools/economics-rankings)

If you actually _do_ want to see domination, though, feel free to check this out. [http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate- schools/articl...](http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate- schools/articles/2011/03/15/mit-dominates-rankings-of-best-engineering- programs)

<comment><USER22> _You've claimed that Harvard "absolutely dominates" MIT in law, but MIT doesn't have a law school._

If the other team doesn't even show up, the team that does gets the W.

<comment><USER23> While I don't mean to discount the importance of a law school, from a _research_ perspective I think there is a massive order of magnitude difference between lacking an engineering or med school vs lacking a law school.

In short, I don't think a law school matters enough _from a research perspective_ to factor here. The med school thing does, though.

The only university with top research programs in essentially everything is Stanford. If you allow UCSF to stand in for Berkeley's med school (which you can't really), then UCB/UCSF would be the other one.

While Harvard is an exceptional research institution, I think it falls just a little too far short of Stanford and Berkeley in engineering and applied science to qualify as the top research institution.

<comment><USER21> _While I don't mean to discount the importance of a law school, from a research perspective I think there is a massive order of magnitude difference between lacking an engineering or med school vs lacking a law school._

MIT and Harvard solve this by partnering together for HST.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard%E2%80%93MIT_Division_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard%E2%80%93MIT_Division_of_Health_Sciences_and_Technology)

 _While Harvard is an exceptional research institution, I think it falls just a little too far short of Stanford and Berkeley in engineering and applied science to qualify as the top research institution._

... all of which would be hard-pressed to try to claim that they deserve that title more than MIT.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Aredis–redis client for Python(also has support for sentinel and cluster) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NoneGG/aredis <comment><USER2> Looks Great. On a side note, Just Wondering whether folks are still doing sentinel based deployments when cluster has been stable for quite some time now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sentinel and cluster both exist in production environment of my company. My leader prefer sentinel than cluster just like he prefer python2 than python3. I think the main reason is that some commands are not supported well as sentinel(just can be thought as a single server under management with replication) and, as he explained before, sentinel may be more stable.</comment></comment>


Way Cooler: A tiling window manager for Wayland written in Rust - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Immington-Industries/way-cooler <comment><USER2> Client-side decorations, visible in the screenshot, are a true PITA. It's stupid that each widget set has to replicate this behavior. It results in visual differences, and it's doubly stupid that this is touted as an "advancement" just for the rate case that you want to override the title bar.

You could have done the inverse, as currently done with X11 (server-side decoration by default, but overridable).

This incurs in stupid behavior for all tiling window managers in wayland, as they cannot enforce the client to remove the title bar. For a tiling window manager user, this a significant downgrade in wayland. The WM protocol in X11 is one of the few areas that let X11 innovate a lot compared to all other desktops. The number of (wonderfully) different window managers is proof. Server-side decorations, in particular, should have been a no-brainer!

<comment><USER3> FWIW, we use server-side decos in the Wayland implementation of KDE Plasma and KDE/Qt apps, for these reasons and many others. If anyone says it can't be done, feel free to point them our way :-)

<comment><USER4> How?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also check out sway, i3 compatible window manager for Wayland: [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/sway)

<comment><USER4> I've never used i3, but I've tried sway and it works, though isn't at feature parity with i3. It's usable though. And as I wrote in a sibling comment, Xwayland integration is even more buggier in libwlc (used by way-cooler and sway) than it is in libweston, so be prepared for weirdness with X11 apps. Floating window support is also wonky.

<comment><USER6> tried it half a year ago. wasn't usable - constantly crashed

<comment><USER4> If you're speaking of sway, it's usable now, but Xwayland is wonkier than in Weston.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wish they had picked libweston instead because it's less buggy and Xwayland integrations has less problems as well. You can get libweston the 1.12 release (aka current git master or the new release in probably two weeks). There's also libweston-desktop that provides more abstractions and helpers for writing desktop compositors which should land in weston.git soon.

But since wlc 0.0.5 is out there, I can understand why they'd base it on that despite the deficiencies.

It's good to see more Wayland compositors and I hope that means someone will port urxvt or xterm to Wayland for those of us who miss too much in vte-based emulators or want something more stable than EFL-based Terminology.

</comment><comment><USER7> An Electron powered status bar? So we have Rust, Lua and Javascript in there. Hmm... Maybe someone can port (nwm)[[https://github.com/mixu/nwm](https://github.com/mixu/nwm)] to Wayland?

<comment><USER8> > An Electron powered status bar?

Chromium and Javascript to run a status bar? A panel is a relatively simple program; it shouldn't be using more than ~1MB of memory (maybe more with large icons). Using Chromium adds many useless layers of abstraction (e.g. HTML, JS engine) and wastes an incredible amount of memory.

<comment><USER4> You're right and the memory use of KDE, GNOME, XFCE is unjustifiable. Even sway (the i3-inspired Wayland compositor) uses a lot of money for a simple tiling compositor that doesn't have fancy "bling". It's three times the memory use as xmonad and xmobar, but maybe it's an architectural issue with wayland. I mean, Weston isn't light-weight either.

<comment><USER9> Wayland compositors must also do (some) actions that were previously handled by X server. Ergo your comparison is a bit unfair, you should try comparing sway vs i3 + Xorg.

<comment><USER4> That's what I suspected by saying "maybe it's an architectural issue with wayland".

<comment><USER10> More of an architectural goal than an architectural issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4xgcbd/announc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4xgcbd/announcing_way_cooler_a_tiling_window_manager_for/)</comment>


The iPhone is the new IE 6, says mobile developer - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/feb/08/mobile-web-broswer-criticism <comment><USER2> Koch said the iPhone is the new IE6 of 2000. As in, really great and popular.

He's just advocating we don't make the same mistake we made in 2000 (only developing for one platform).

<comment><USER3> I realize TFA is a troll, but the problem wasn't just that it was one platform. As I understand it, IE6 was at one time better than other browsers. The problem was it was a de-facto standard, MS stopped innovating, & it became increasingly outdated. Webkit follows standards & is open source.

<comment><USER4> Webkit is not much different than IE6 was 9 years ago. It implements SOME parts of SOME of the standards (no browser implements everything, the standards even contradict themselves in places). It also implements a large array of "features" that don't exist in any published standard, or are only part of a draft standard. Just like IE6 did, and which it is so widely criticized for doing now.

MS stopped innovating because they were almost dismantled by the DOJ a year after releasing it, in large part due to that browser.

<comment><USER5> _"no browser implements everything, the standards even contradict themselves in places"_

Thank you. I feel this is almost universally misunderstood.

If all browser makers followed the standards exactly we'd have no innovation. And those who malign various browsers for not fully implementing "the standards" would be wise to remember that the <blink> tag was once part of said standards.

<comment><USER3> It's not an all or nothing proposition. Standards aren't perfect, yes, & browsers aren't perfect either, but there are degrees to it. For example at this rate it'll be a decade before IE supports html5 video.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Having read the article in my RSS feed first and then seeing this headline here, the soundbiteification is a little painful. Dvorak himself would have a hard time coming up with a troll title that good.

<comment><USER7> Figured this was one to (read comments && read article)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the difference between IE6 and WebKit is that in all of Apple's documentation they say _WARNING DO NOT USE -WEBKIT EXTENSIONS -- THESE ARE NOT STANDARDIZED YET AND ARE SUBJECT TO CHANGE_ and explain the dangers of using standards that are currently in development.

Microsoft is kind of the opposite, encouraging people to use ActiveX, Silverlight, etc. as hard as they can.

<comment><USER9> Except that ActiveX and Silverlight are arguably products that require adoption. -webkit extensions are not of this nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of people are saying "the difference with IE6 is that the iPhone is standards-based and open," but I don't think that's right. The problem that PPK is pointing out is that developing for a single browser is bad, full stop. It doesn't matter if the browser is the holy incarnation of HTML5 itself, if you're not testing a wide variety of browsers - or worse, relying on proprietary extensions that you know not to be compatible - you're making the same mistake that was made with IE6.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's more like WebKit is the new reference implementation for HTML5. Look at the changelog: <http://trac.webkit.org/> I see submits from Chromium, Apple, Google, Nokia, RIM and others.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I think of IE6 I think of "popular (but frozen) platform that we have to take pains to support," but that's not the iPhone at all. Safari is very standardsfull, and still moving forward.

Beyond that, the good point - to develop for standards, not to a particular browser - is obscured by a cloud of anti-iPhone rants.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is just a rehash of a bunch of posts from two years that compared the iPhone to IE4.

[http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/The_IPhone_Is_Internet_Explore...](http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/The_IPhone_Is_Internet_Explorer_4_All_Over_Again)

<http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/iphone_is_ie4_a.php>

[http://www.martingordon.org/blog/2007/08/20/on-the-iphone- no...](http://www.martingordon.org/blog/2007/08/20/on-the-iphone-not-being- ie4-and-how-iphone-web-apps-still-suck/)

</comment><comment><USER14> "Mobile browser detection is really hard. None of the reports I've read so far show how they detect browsers."

From my experience it's pretty easy, here's one way to do it: <link rel="stylesheet" href="mobile.css" media="only screen and (max-device width:480px)" />

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/>

<comment><USER15> This test will only tell you "this is a mobile browser." It will _not_ tell you "this is an iPhone browser and not a BlackBerry browser." _That's_ the kind of detection that he's talking about.

Notice that part where he talks about mobile browser developers spoofing the iPhone user agent string to get to a 'mobile' version of a web page and how this might skew 'MobileSafari' penetration numbers if this is not accounted for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Funny I said the same thing earlier :)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1077119>

</comment><comment><USER17> um, ie 7 is the new ie 6.</comment>


Show HN: PJDL v2.0 – Single wire data link - <AUTHOR> http://www.pjon.org/PJDL-specification-v2.0.php <comment><AUTHOR> Here the repo: [https://github.com/gioblu/PJON/tree/master/strategies/Softwa...](https://github.com/gioblu/PJON/tree/master/strategies/SoftwareBitBang)

This is a totally software emulated single wire, multi-master data link implemented in less than 200 lines of code, supporting direct pin to pin communication with more than 50 meters range.</comment>


Why Python Pickle is Inscecure - <AUTHOR> http://nadiana.com/python-pickle-insecure

<comment><USER2> Ruby's Marshal library is not quite as blatantly insecure as pickle (it won't do any string interpolation on load), but you shouldn't trust any of these facilities: you're essentially passing data to a very weird variant of eval().

But _[edit, should have said this to begin with]_ pickle isn't an interchange format. It's not supposed to be secure. Python already offers a myriad of good interchange formats. Interchange isn't pickle's job, and if you use it for that, you've made a serious design error.

Ruby unfortunately blurs the line here by using Marshal as an interchange format in some cases. None of those cases are insecure by design (they all allow code execution by design), but the usage does create a confusing precedent.

You're better off with ASN.1/BER than you are with Pickle or Marshal as a file or protocol format; that's how inappropriate Pickle is to the task.

<comment><USER3> > not quite as blatantly insecure as pickle (it won't do any string > interpolation on load)

Are you saying that pickle works via string interpolation (or that this problem is possible because of interpolation)? That's incorrect...

<comment><USER2> No; Marshal and pickle are very different (and I confused things by talking in Ruby terms and referring to Python). Ruby Marshal isn't a virtual machine. Pickle is more like Flash or Postscript than RTF, which is what Marshal is like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Regardless of how insecure pickle is, it is the perfect module to learn how easy _basic_ data-persistence can be in Python through serialization. I don't get articles like this, maybe it's cause I'm still learning a lot, but I don't see the value of posting some inference a module or library already explicitly states in the manual or documentation.

Regardless of my opinion, pickle is a great module to get you going in Python and even better for scripting and storing basic data-sets on your local machine.

<comment><USER5> The article was prompted by some assertions on StackOverflow that pickle was secure or "secure enough", etc. See [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1389738/how-to-save- data-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1389738/how-to-save-data-with- python/1389792#1389792)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Isn't making pickle completely secure equivalent to solving the halting problem?

<comment><USER7> No.

Proving termination for programs written in models less powerful than a Turing machine does not require you to solve the halting problem. Programs using primitive recursion, finite automata, and regular expressions, for example, can all be proved to terminate, and can express a number of useful computations.

The problem is that the pickle module is far too permissive. In particular, the REDUCE operation invokes a Python callable with an argument tuple on the pickle stack, which means that 'pickles' are at least as powerful (in the Turing-general, halting problem sense) as Python.

<comment><USER2> It sure sounds like you said "No, <stuff> <stuff> <stuff>, but yes."

<comment><USER8> No, they are saying that Pickle as it is currently designed is too powerful. Depending on the goals of Pickle, it may be possible to reduce its power by redesigning it to do no more than its goals.

<comment><USER2> And I'm saying "pickle isn't really designed to solve the problem they're saying it's bad at solving".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So what's news? Unpickling is safe only if you are very sure the pickled data was created by yourself, with the same version of Python. It has always been like this.

Typically you pickle when you wish to offload some objects to persistent storage. It's similarly typical to compute the message digest of the pickle data with some salt padding and store that in a place that you consider relatively safe wrt. to your security needs. Then you don't need to worry about unpickling malicious data.

<comment><USER2> I don't know what "the digest of pickle data with some salt padding" means (when you say "salt", you trip the "talking about crypto using words only lay programmers use" sensor), but it sure doesn't sound crypto-safe. There are a number of easy-to-make errors with digest schemes that allow attackers to make constrained modifications to documents without breaking the digest.

Long story short, _don't_ do this; instead, PGP/GPG encrypt and sign the pickled file. GPG is strictly better across all axes than hand-hacking your own protection scheme.

<comment><USER9> For what I've read salt is a commonly used term in cryptology, and refers to certain schemes for key derivation for hashing/encrypting. Salt can either be public (to make brute-force attacks infeasible) or private (for better security).

Almost always when pickling we're only interested in one aspect of security that is integrity: what we put in is what we get out. Encryption isn't needed and signing doesn't really offer much more with regard to this case. Instead, cross-checking against a message digest to make it hard to modify pickles (or any runtime data offloaded to disk) seems to be almost idiomatic. YMMV.

Not that I wouldn't want to write a fancy GPG based persistent storage but generally it would be an overkill. And overkills, in my experience, are good at blinding the developers from other threats. YMMV.

There are many good, proven message digest algorithms that are useful for implementing a simple salted hashing scheme. In practice, an application developer must eventually take algorithms for granted. We consider MD5 demonstrably weak but SHA, especially variations with longer digests, we consider strong enough for most purposes. So given the assumption that we can trust SHA, I'm sure you're familiar with something like the following:

\- take the pickle output from pickle.dumps()

\- create some random data and use it as salt

\- run the pickle output + salt through hashlib.sha512() or whichever you prefer to obtain the message digest

\- store the pickle output somewhere, even in public

\- store the message digest somewhere, even in public

\- store the salt some place safe

\- recompute and verify before calling pickle.loads()

You still have to have trust in some storage that you consider safe. Computing the salt dynamically from a set of fixed and/or runtime values could be done by anyone, and is merely security by obscurity. However, exactly the same applies to GPG: you would have to store the private and public keys somewhere safe, and go from there.

And finally, as for me, I'd probably create more security holes in implementing the GPG integration than just sticking with the standard Python hashlib.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For a secure alternative to pickle (with the same API so a drop in replacement): <http://home.gna.org/oomadness/en/cerealizer/index.html>

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice, worth it alone to find out about pickletools (something I've needed on many occasions but never thought to look for).

</comment><comment> cool-RR Makes me fear that data corruption in my pickles will crash the system. Maybe someone should implement an interface to 'pickle' that maintains a hash of the string.

<comment><USER12> Why are they any more likely to be corrupted than any other file (including your python sources or .pyc files (which use another serialisation scheme, marshal))?

<comment><USER13> I'm guessing because it's possible for the data to be corrupted in just the right way so as to construct some system-crashing (or critical-data corrupting) system() or eval() call. Though that's a pretty extreme paranoia.

As you state, the python files themselves could also be corrupted in such a manor and then run in the interpreter, or a compiled program could get corrupted in just the right way to execute 'rm -rf /' though it's not likely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's up with YAML? Doesn't Google use it extensively? Is it a better alternative than JSON even if you are sending serialized data from the Javascript in the browser to the web server and back?

<comment><USER7> YAML is strictly a superset of JSON in its expressiveness, since it allows tagging of serialized objects with a type name. JSON reduces everything to maps, arrays, and scalars, so any type information has to be encoded in (or inferred from) the structures themselves. I also find it to be a bit easier to read, and so prefer it for configuration files or console dumps of data structures.

However, YAML isn't quite as well-supported in the standard libraries of various programming languages, most notably Javascript. Which one to use depends largely on how heavily you expect browsers to consume your service output.</comment></comment>


Nike Is Expanding Its Day Care Benefit and Employees Are Furious - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-07/nike-nke-employees-protest-changes-to-company-day-care-benefit <comment><USER2> As someone who has children, on site childcare for those with young children is probably the best perk you can provide in terms of expense and aggravation it will save your employees.</comment>


In our genes are remnants of old viruses that now take on new roles in our bodies - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/31/AR2008083101759.html?nav=rss_health

<comment><USER2> Critique of ERVs: <http://www.trueorigin.org/theobald1e.asp#pred21></comment>


"Not proven" is a verdict available to a court in Scotland - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_proven <comment><USER2> It's likely that the 3-verdict system will be reformed at some point. The Scottish Government is currently conducting a research project into various aspects of jury decision making policies ([https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Research/by-topic/crime-and- jus...](https://www2.gov.scot/Topics/Research/by-topic/crime-and- justice/Juryresearch)), and there's definitely some pressure to remove a verdict which has relatively little actual purpose - though of course we'll have to wait and see what the outcome of the research says.

(Late 1600s the outcome of a case before a Scottish jury would have resulted in either "proven" or "not proven" verdicts, with the verdict of "not guilty" re-emerging in the 1700s in response to a particular case where the facts were proven, but the jury did not support conviction. Along the lines of jury nullification, which I know has been the subject of some interest in the US court system.)</comment>


The sugar conspiracy: sugar—not fat—is the greatest danger to our health - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin?CMP=share_btn_tw <comment><USER3> This is a duplicate from four (4) days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941)

<comment><USER4> Thank God. I was questioning both my sanity and the freshness of my browser's cache.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As someone who has shifted to a sugar-free, high-fat lifestyle (keto diet), I can attest to the fact that sugar really is the ultimate evil in terms of health and nutrition.

I've lost about 100lbs in 2.5 years... The only thing that I really changed was doing a Keto diet. I've learned a lot about nutrition along the way, and it's amazing how bad nutrition info was when I was growing up..

Common Misconceptions I hear/see ALL THE TIME:

1) Fruit Juice is healthy. It's not. It is sugar-water.

2) A calorie is a calorie... No. Your body does not process all foods the same. A thousand calories of broccoli will effect your body VERY differently than a thousand calories of soda. Yes the energy-intake might be the same, but the resulting effects are very different.

3) Fats are bad. They are not. Your body uses fats for all sorts of processes, and most importantly, your body understands and can use fats.

4) Sugar is part of a healthy diet. Nope, sugar is not necessary in our diets at all.

5) Salt is bad. In moderation, salt and other electrolytes are actually needed by our bodies (unlike sugar).

6) Lack of exercise is the reason people get fat. No... Most people would have to run 10 miles per day to burn off the garbage they would eat in the morning (think of a young adult having an innocent bowl of cereal and OJ for breakfast). "People aren't obese because they eat too much and are lazy. People are lazy and eat too much because they are fat." Sugar and insulin and the whole endocrine system play a huge roll in how people feel physically and mentally eating sugary foods.

So many more misconceptions out there... It's hard to find good info when you have Big Sugar, Big Food, and Big Beverage shoving bad information down the masses throats.

<comment><USER5> If anyone has any questions about starting a keto diet (high-fat, mid-protein, low-carb), feel free to ask. :)

Cannot recommend it enough. It simply just works..

<comment><USER6> How expensive is it? I mean literally. A lot of these alternative diets seem to work but be far more expensive than eating crap, unless all you eat are veggies (which few like).

<comment><USER7> I found that low-carb diets are way cheaper. There are two factors behind this (in my experience):

1) You eat _way, way, way, way_ less food. I was intensely into keto at probably peak-appetite years (16 - 19 years old) and have since been maintaining a much lower basal carb intake (now 21 years old). A complete dinner used to be large pasta dishes with sausage, garlic bread, a few glasses of milk (I used to be a fanatic), etc., but in keto I'm totally satiated after two small salmon filets. Homefries, toast and a loaded three-egg omelet is actually _less_ satiating for me than two fried eggs with some pepper, and I feel like crap after the former.

I do have a hard time with vegetables because I don't shop often enough for them not to go to waste, but I'll usually handle that with a salad for lunch.

2) In the event that you really do need to eat _very_ cheaply (Ramen level cheap), you can do that too. I've had periods where I'd rely on string cheese, peanut butter, and eggs almost exclusively. Not proud of it, but better than boxes of pasta IMO.

If you put up with the initial withdrawals from sugar, "keto flu," you'll find that you'll eat less food and feel better.

<comment><USER8> > I do have a hard time with vegetables because I don't shop often enough for > them not to go to waste, but I'll usually handle that with a salad for > lunch.

Have you tried frozen vegetables? Some of the "steam in bag" kind that are meant for the microwave actually come out quite tasty and are very convenient.

<comment><USER9> IQF produce is usually better than the mediocre, long-haul-shipped produce at the grocery store. The vegetables that don't flash-freeze well are usually hard to find frozen anyways.

<comment><USER10> I love frozen veggies (especially peas). I do wish there were better options for leafy greens, though: I don't care for spinach (specifically), and I assume kale / arugala / mustard / etc don't freeze well because I never see them. Sometimes you really want some bulk for a stir fry or the like!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just the other day was in a store saw a package of candy -- basically pure sugar + artificial food coloring. Big giant label on the front -- "Fat Free!". It is true. But somewhat misleading as to what it implies -- "this is healthy, no fats here, eat this".

And also "2.5 servings per package", while most people would it eat it a single serving I imagine, but hey, they calorie counts look more reasonable, so they just divided whatever calories they had, by whatever they thought is acceptable to print on the nutritional label and they got some value for serving size.

<comment><USER12> When organic foods got super popular, I knew more than one person that thought organic cookies were healthy.

> whatever they thought is acceptable to print on the nutritional label

I'm not certain, but I think that's regulated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – > was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and > his reputation ruined. How did the world's top nutrition scientists get it > so wrong for so long?

First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

<comment><USER14> Fourth, it is claimed that it was understood this way all along and everybody always knew it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm seeing two major factual problems with many of the comments here.

1\. In terms of determining how much weight you are going to lose/gain. A calorie is a calorie. Calories in/calories out is the secret sauce to every successful weight loss diet, even keto. That is a simple fact, backed by all of the truly solid nutritional research in modern science.

2\. If we are talking about lean body mass, body fat percentage goals, healthy eating habits or disease prevention, then we should have a talk about sugar. It is certainly a variable that deserves attention. However, it is not the devil...

Fat is not the devil... Meat is not the devil... Carbs are not the devil... etc.

If you don't believe me, if some pop science book has convinced you that sugar is the worst thing in the world, I ask that you look into the work of Alan Aragon. A good place to start would be the following article:

[http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth- ab...](http://www.alanaragonblog.com/2010/01/29/the-bitter-truth-about- fructose-alarmism/)

<comment><USER16> Regarding #1... I'm pretty sure that to digest 100kcal worth of chicken breast requires more energy for the body to do, compared to digesting 100kcal worth of Coke/sugar. It also has a different impact on your insulin levels.

Living on a 3000kcal McDonalds diet will give you a different body shape compared to living on a 3000kcal diet of home cooked, organic meals.

No?

<comment><USER15> For #1: the point of #1 is that body shape and insulin levels are not being considered. That point specifically only matters for weight gain/weight loss. In regards to differing energy expenditure for digestion for one food vs another, I would guess that that is a level of detail the average person would not spend their time investigating.

For McD's vs home cookin, calories in/calories out still holds to be true. So, if your exercise levels are the same, then you will end up weighing approximately the same after both diets. However, lean body mass, body fat percentage, your overall health and the effect McD's has on any diseases you are fighting/trying to prevent will likely be different based on the quality of your diet and it's macronutrient distribution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This story always remind me of this interesting study done on rats, where they found sugar more tantalizing than cocaine or heroine.[0] Take it with a grain of salt (or sugar, if you prefer), since sugar has some nutritional value, but this is a little terrifying. Look at the obese, particularly in the USA, and look at these massive buckets of soda they drink, breads stuffed with 20+grams of sugar, sweets which are literally nothing except colored sugar. The public desperately needs some education, just like how trans-fats were scared out of us 10-20 years ago.

[0] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/connie-bennett/the-rats-who- pr...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/connie-bennett/the-rats-who-preferred- su_b_712254.html)

<comment><USER18> Cane is a hell of a drug.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11444941)

399 points | 4 days ago | 350 comments

</comment><comment><USER20> I lost a bunch of weight doing Low Carb High Fat, but later on switched to a vegan diet (of High Carb, Low Fat) for ethical reasons. I've been keeping the weight off with the High Carb diet and I'm actually eating more than before. Please note that high carb does not mean highly processed food. I eat mostly whole foods, little processing or refining, but ultimately it is treated as 'sugar' for the body: rice, potatoes, bread, etc. I also took blood analysis after LCHF and some months after the HCLF, and pretty much all indicators either stayed the same or improved. Colesterol levels were way high during the High Fat phase, and are now back to normal levels.

</comment><comment><USER21> I am most likely wrong or oversimplifying, but my understanding was that ultimately whatever macromolecules you are consuming, lipids, proteins, or carbohydrates all only get absorbed into the blood stream as glucose (putting on hold random nutrients like iron, vitamin XYZ etc etc).

If that's the case, doesn't it not matter what the originating molecules are as long as you avoid fast highs and lows in blood glucose levels since that is the main danger presented by sugars (fastest to be broken down)?

<comment><USER22> I'm sorry for being the one breaking it to you, but I think you may, unfortunately, be wrong. :)

<comment><USER21> care to elaborate? open to being wrong, but also want to see who says so and why

<comment><USER23> > _my understanding was that ultimately whatever macromolecules you are > consuming, lipids, proteins, or carbohydrates all only get absorbed into the > blood stream as glucose_

Amino acids, glucose and fatty acids are all ancient molecular structures known to all cellular life and thus can and do circulate in our blood at all times. If everything got converted into glucose during digestion, that would mean we could live entirely off candy fortified with vitamins and minerals, and produce all essential fatty acids and all essential amino acids from the glucose. Not so.

PROTEINS provide amino acids, basic building blocks for near everything organic about our body (or all cellular life-forms really), not just muscles but hormones neurons etc etc. The body _may_ convert protein into glucose but this laborious process occurs to any significant degree mostly under a prolonged lo-fat-lo-carb-hi-protein regimen or plain starvation conditions (ie post-fasting, not just normal fasting with plenty of fat reserves left, which is simply ketosis, hence protein-sparing and fat+ketone-burning). If so, this doesn't occur in the digestive tract, since glucose production (or provision from glycogen) is the job of the liver.

LIPIDS aren't and cannot be converted to glucose in the digestive tract, or we wouldn't store body fat to begin with and also have essential fatty acids circulating at all times now, would we? BUT 2 triglycerides CAN donate their glycerol backbones for the production of 1 glucose molecule, and I believe this is constantly happening in ketosis when glycogen is depleted. Again, glucose production/provisioning is a liver job, not a digestive tract job.

CARBohydrates of most any kind ARE converted to glucose in the digestive tract. Exceptions: fiber travels on to the colon for excretion or to be fermented by bacterial action (into I believe short-chain fatty acids and B/K vitamins) and fructose is "metabolized" into triglycerides by the liver. Since the blood needs a certain glucose level at all times (around 5g-ish), circulating glucose in excess is immediately shuttled into first: any cells that are receptive to the concurrent insulin signaling, second: glycogen storage (liver and muscles), third as a last resort converted into body fat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> To everyone saying a Keto diet is great, a word of caution. Going Keto gave me kidney stones.

I asked my mom, who's had both children and kidney stones, which pain was worse, and she said the pain was about the same, but at least with childbirth you get a few months warning -- stones just show up and give you excruciating pain.

So it's great y'all are loosing weight (I did too!) but just be careful and drink _a lot_ of water if you do it.

<comment><USER25> Wouldn't adopting a balanced diet that's reasonably low in carbs plus some exercise achieve the desired effect but without fucking shit up in the process?

I can't imagine going from a sedentary, high-carb, overweight lifestyle to a radical diet(be it keto or whatever else the person chooses) is easy on the body.

Did you get any lab tests done before and after starting the diet? If you did, how did the results compare?

<comment><USER24> > Did you get any lab tests done before and after starting the diet? If you > did, how did the results compare?

Only my normal annual blood test. Cholesterol was down after the diet, everything else was pretty much unchanged. We never caught the stone for analysis, but the diet was pinned as the most likely cause. To be fair, I don't have enough data to say it was the diet for certain, only correlations that people who go on Keto have a higher incidence of stones than those who don't.

<comment><USER25> I see, thanks. It'd be interesting to have people take a lab test right before going on a keto diet and then repeating it at fixed intervals to see how it affects the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think people here will appreciate the following information. To understand fat production, I recommend everyone research the way a liver metabolizes sugar, and its connection to fiber - it is most important. Long story short, the liver metabolizes excess sugar into fat cells when there is not enough fiber. Presence of fiber allows excess sugar to be broken down into waste which leaves the body, avoiding production of fat cells. In essence, this is why eating a bag of apples is healthy while eating just the sugar from the same amount of apples is not. Consuming adequate amounts of fiber is key to healthy sugar consumption. If you noticed, fat people tend to not eat much fiber. The smaller the ratio of fiber to sugar the fatter you are. Simply focusing on increasing fiber consumption leads to much better health because you naturally begin to consume more vegetables and fruits which also have the nutrients. Additionally, and this is perhaps the most understated health fact. The importance of pH balance. The body depends and thrives when the environment is alkaline, and dies when it's acidic. Although acidic foods are also healthy, it's important to eat more alkaline foods than acidic. And the pH is determine only after the body digests the food. This is why for example lemons are actually one of the most alkaline foods. Especially when you're sick, eating alkaline vs acidic foods is the best way to regain immune system strength and health. _ Dr Lustig's video presentation about sugar/fiber/fat metabolism: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM) _ List of alkaline & acidic foods: [http://www.rense.com/1.mpicons/acidalka.htm](http://www.rense.com/1.mpicons/acidalka.htm)

</comment><comment><USER27> It really is about a lack of balance between our activity and our food intake and the types and quantity of food we consume.

As a society we have become too good at making cheap, easy to consume food that supplies far more energy than most of us need. Sugar is one of the worst culprits perhaps but it isn't the only one.

I have avoided most really sugary foods for years but with my age and activity levels eating a lot of grain based foods has pretty much the same result. Which isn't really surprising.

When I have the discipline to do it what really works for me is eating more veggies. I am sure you can get fat on a vegetable heavy diet but you probably have to work a lot harder at it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Robert Atkins published _Dr. Atkins ' Diet Revolution_ (possibly the ancestor of all the modern low-carb diets) in 1972 and credited a 1958 article in _The Journal of the American Medical Association_ by Alfred W. Pennington. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_diet) So I don't think one lone researcher figured this out in 1972.

<comment><USER29> The article agrees that this is the case: the dangers of sugar _used_ to be orthodoxy, but around the '70s is when sugar was de-emphasized in favor of fat to such a degree that low-carb proponents were labelled cranks.

> When, in 1957, John Yudkin first floated his hypothesis that sugar was a > hazard to public health, it was taken seriously, as was its proponent. By > the time Yudkin retired, 14 years later, both theory and author had been > marginalised and derided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Several years ago I was addicted to coca-cola, drinking daily even 2L - <USER2> probably exceeded the daily recommended amount of sugar 4 or 5 times. Since then I've drastically reduced sugar in my diet and luckily I never had a problem with weight, but I wonder what'll be the long-term effects of intaking so much sugar for such long time. The scary thing, now that I check the ingredients of everything I buy, is how much sugar is there in the majority of products, even in those advertised as "healthy".

<comment><USER31> I had a roommate who was quite large and used to drink at least one 2L of cola a day. He cut it out and went on a weight loss diet and vigorous exercise and lost around 100 pounds. But I gotta think a huge part of that was just the insane amount of excess calories in the pop.

Still admire the degree of dedication he put into his lifestyle change tho.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The major thing I took away from both the article and the comments originally submitted a few days ago is that nutrition science is too hard to create a one-size fits all guideline to _what_ people should eat.

If we have to have a one-size fits all solution to nutrition however, my anecdotal guess is that the answer shouldn't be what we should eat but how much. Namely as long as people aren't over or under eating they should be fine.

<comment><USER33> Is that really true? Or is the evidence pretty much in that all people shouldn't really be eating refined sugar?

<comment><USER34> If there is evidence I haven't seen any. Pretty much everything I have seen suggests that A) You should meet your macro needs which are slightly different for everyone, B) after that don't over eat, but what you eat doesn't really matter.

From a weight loss perspective low sugar diets are good for psychological reasons, not thermodynamic ones. Sugar tends to cause quick, but short lived fullness, where fat and protein take longer to kick in but once they do they are much longer lived.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The greatest danger is overeating our past our caloric limits. It's not sugar or fat or whatever, it's calories. Lets stick to that.

<comment><USER36> But that's not true since our bodies process different foods in different ways. Marathon runners don't eat a bunch of steak fat before a run.

<comment><USER37> Overall bodyweight is controlled by calories in vs. calories out. The different types of calories that you consume (fats vs. carbs vs. proteins) control things like how the extra bodyweight is stored or burned off and the signals your body gives as to whether or not you're hungry.

There are a few biological pathways that you can use to your advantage but they're difficult and short-term. Your body has a very hard time storing protein as fat but that just means it will store the extra calories from carbs and fat as body fat.

These discussions about "CICO only" vs. "Obviously macros matter" are always caused by people arguing two different things with each other.

<comment><USER38> I think a lot of people talk past each other in these discussions. One problem is that a lot of diet fads promise magic solutions, and then people get tired of magic and revert back to CICO only. Any discussion that does not start with CICO and clearly show which side of the CICO ledger is influenced, and by what mechanism is doomed.

I think maybe if we discussed CI and CO separately it would help:

CI:

      Calories in are influenced by many things: eating habits, Macro content of food, access to good food, stress eating, satiety signals from blood sugar, leptin, ghrelin, etc.

CO:

      Calories out are influenced by basal metabolic rate, exercise, enviromental temperature, fat storage (calories that do not get used up), etc.

I would love to see a series of articles that clearly articulates the two main headings, and then goes into each item underneath, in order of impact on health overall and weight specifically

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> This type of demonising one over the other is not proper science. Sugar (in various forms) carries the energy needed for the cells to operate well, brain being the highest consumer. Balanced nutrients would be the best bet for overall wellbeing.

</comment><comment><USER40> Dr. Lustig is known for his interesting and thorough, if somewhat controversial, case against sugar [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM)

</comment><comment><USER41> My father died at 105 and was addicted to chocolate and ice-creams.

<comment><USER25> My grandfather died at a similar age and he's been a smoker for decades. Doesn't make smoking any less harmful in my eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Maybe the greatest danger to our health is... eating too much of any one type of thing? Alas, that doesn't grab headlines.

<comment><USER43> Indeed. Just that somethings are easier to eat in access than others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> This is not really a conspiracy. We've been hearing this for four decades at least.

</comment><comment><USER45> So when can we have stevia into all of our food?

<comment><USER46> Might be better to just curb the craving for sweetness. Study after study shows no effect of diet sodas vs regular sodas.

While artificial sweeteners have a low glycemic index/load, they stimulate the release of related hormones like insulin and GLP-1. And insulin, if you recall, signals fat cells to suck up the energy and grow.

So if you drink a diet soda, it might have no calories itself, but it's more likely to convince your body to turn more of your lunch into fat than otherwise.

<comment><USER47> No no no no no

God damn. This is a perfect example of how a little knowledge is dangerous.

1\. Artificial sweeteners do NOT cause insulin to be released. 2\. On that note, insulin is a storage hormone. That is it. It is not a fat-hormone. You know what's one of the few hormones that almost all bodybuilders take? Insulin - because it makes their muscles grow.

You get fat because your intake of calories is excessive, regardless of whether its done via carbs or fats.

<comment><USER46> > This is a perfect example of how a little knowledge is dangerous.

So is your own comment.

1\. Aspartame doesn't release insulin, but it does provoke release of related hormones. Other artificial sweeteners DO stimulate insulin release. See my reply to my own comment for a quick sampling of relevant articles.

2\. Yes, insulin is a generalized storage hormone, but fat is always ready to absorb, while muscle requires exercise to stimulate the absorption. Unless you're exercising heavily (which isn't most of us), my general point stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> there's nothing wrong with sugar other than how fast it spikes into your bloodstream.</comment>


Question: Is there a YC company that does not put "YC" in front of its name? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> What does that mean? I've never seen any company do that.</comment>


The Nightmare of Valve's self-organizing "utopia" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dunia-media/the-nightmare-of-valves-self-organizing-utopia-6d32d329ecdb <comment><USER2> Humans are naturally tribal, and tribes come with hierarchy. Human society developed hierarchical structures everywhere because with the way we evolved, hierarchy is the most effective method of organizing. If we all had women sort of permanent Vulcan mind meld that might be different. It's not surprising that, when humans are left in a vacuum, a form of hierarchy arises again.</comment>


Rethinking Churchill (Part II) - <AUTHOR> https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/rethinking-churchill-part-ii/ <comment><USER2> The Churchill government ended WW2 in an instant. Troops came home and were laid off after being paid. No welfare, no unemployment insurance. The UK went down economically in a near vertical dive. The pound was devalued from $4.80 to $2.80 and there was zero funds injected. Next election went hard labor socialist and killed the country for decades. It was not until Thatcher went toe to toe with the unions(like Reagan did to the flight controllers) who went on strike after strike to keep workers in mined out coalmines in what were called feather beds (No work, full pay until retirement). The people at large were on her side and she was right. Britain went back to growth again. That said, Churchill was the right man for the war effort. He was from the monied class and workers were dirt under his feet = voted out.Education stopped at 14, only a few wemt on to higher education - this has changed, 16 now and better education than the USA now. Britain and all the colonial powers ran their empires for maximum $$ goes home. Native workers were menials, never trained to govern at all (some exceptions here). The managers all left in short order in all these old empires and strong man rule started all over the place. These strong men acted like the British, Belgians, Germans etc and raped their own countries = maximum to swiss banks - nothing to the people. Places like Zimbabwe and South AFrica did better, but soon were ruined as well. Now China has it's foot in man of those places - soon blood will flow...</comment>