Zuck's photos from Facebook's futuristic Arctic data center - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/gallery/facebook-lulea/ <comment><USER2> Pretty interesting. I love how bespoke data centers are converging along very similar lines. I'm sure if you were inside a Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or Facebook data center you would recognize the new design touch points. The old data center is dead, long live the new data center.

This was the second big thing Google had learned early on: _" The equipment is reduced to its basics so it runs cooler. It can also be easily accessed and repaired quickly."_ \-- slide 12/17

The whole sheet metal box around a server was a real waste of time if your employees are the only ones accessing the area, and the only reason they want to touch the machine is to repair it. This in contrast to NetApp (where I had worked before) which was busily designing impressive cabinets that would "stand tall" on the raised flooring of the data center.

<comment><USER3> I think the lesson came in earlier in the NUMA and MPP machines where they kept trying to cram more stuff on boards that were themselves pluggable into the larger system. This convergence has happened from several directions. It's not all the different from the earlier one that started in the 1960's where they fought cost and inefficiency by getting as few components per box sharing as much as possible. Moores Law temporarily reversed it (transistors and memory are free!) then reality check hits that this seems to be a fundamental principle.

My design a while back was to put it all on PCI cards on a PCI backplane. I saw backplanes that basically look like motherboards full of PCI slots that load into racks. I wanted to make the cards nothing but CPU and memory whose software communicated over efficient networking (not TCP/IP) through PCI DMA. My design had IO/MMU functionality in the backplane or PCI cards. At least one card having full-featured stack for management and at least one I/O card for external interface. I figured the backplane itself could be extended for that, too, with a dedicated port like motherboards do integrated GigE. Management and I/O could come through remote DMA over dedicated wires like many servers do with Ethernet so all the PCI slots could be dedicated to compute.

Dumbest thing about Facebook's model is them destroying drives. The first thing to notice, due to Ross Anderson's Security Engineering, is that those pieces still contain a _lot_ of data if they weren't degaussed first. Next is to remember the fastest way to destroy data: use clustered, encrypting filesystems so that secrets never touch the drive. Then, you just have to delete the keys to loose the secrets. No need to trash the drives at all. The crypto can happen at the storage manager or at hardware interface with HW acceleration available for both types. I'm surprised they haven't already built this with all the smart people they have working on big-data stacks.

<comment><USER4> To your last paragraph, only relying on forgetting the keys works great, as long as you have absolute 100% confidence in the mechanism used to do that. I read your posts on HN often so I know you know you're quite familiar with defense in depth--I feel that user data is one of those areas where it's ok to do more than one thing to protect the data.

That said, there are a number of systems at FB where deleting a crypto key loses the linked data forever--but they still crunch the hard drives just to be really sure. The drive crunching is an incredibly tiny expenditure compared to the massive CapEx and OpEx required to build, stock, and run the datacenters. It's worth it if only for the peace of mind.

<comment><USER3> Well, thanks for chiming in with insider view.

"as long as you have absolute 100% confidence in the mechanism used to do that"

It's true. These mechanisms fail way less than shredders, though. Ideally, the drive encryption would pull KEYMAT from a dedicated system for that somehow on boot (kernel, network, whatever). That system should be medium to high assurance. Easy way is rad-hard ASIC's (or antifuse FPGA's) with ECC RAM and ChipKill that implement a safe-coded protocol engine that moves keys around in memory. These are in high-availability configuration with electrical and optical isolation. Separate box manages things, does backups on encrypted data, etc. A good HSM combo at Level 3 or 4 is already mostly there, though. Remember even Ross Anderson's people couldnt break IBM's outside some stupid, unevaluated software for banking. My ideal just assures protocol itself a bit more.

"I feel that user data is one of those areas where it's ok to do more than one thing to protect the data."

It's fine, except to environmemtalists, to do it _extra_ on top of crypto for extra assurance. By itself, crushing it is insufficient given it might be recovered given just how much data they cram in tiny spaces. It's why DOD/NSA standards were to suck the magnetism out of the platter with qualified degaussers then destroy it. Crypto then destruction can't be directly compared but should also make it hard.

"there are a number of systems at FB where deleting a crypto key loses the linked data forever"

Great they do. Thanks for telling me.

"The drive crunching is an incredibly tiny expenditure compared to the massive CapEx and OpEx required to build, stock, and run the datacenters."

I believe that. What groups like Facebook pull off in datacenter hardware, software, and administration continues to amaze me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Marketing photos released by Facebook's CEO" is a much more accurate headline, this is clickbait.

<comment><USER6> But then he wouldn't succeed in cultivating the nickname he always wanted!

Good old Zuck!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The colour and settings remind me of the movie "Brazil".

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that its called "Pinnacle Sweden AB" on Gmaps [0]

[0] [https://email@example.com...](https://email@example.com,22.1099815,1301m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m8!1m2!2m1!1sfacebook,+Lule%C3%A5!3m4!1s0x0:0xf6ef64b232313a3d!8m2!3d65.6193632!4d22.114234)

</comment><comment><USER9> The aesthetic feels like it was meant to be a Bond villain's Arctic lair

<comment><USER10> nah, a much better 'villain' data center actually exists in Stockholm.

[https://www.wired.com/2012/11/bahnhof/](https://www.wired.com/2012/11/bahnhof/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting that they aren't using commodity hardware. Is that a myth then? The farms of cheap linux boxes?

<comment><USER12> These are farms of cheap Linux boxes.

They go out of their way to design and manufacture their own motherboards and equipment[1] to reduce their capital and operational expenses.

While the motherboard and enclosures are probably custom made, the components inside (CPU, memory, etc) are all "commodity".

[1] [http://www.opencompute.org/](http://www.opencompute.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is this how we are finally going to melt the Arctic?

<comment><USER14> I wonder whether they are using the heat for surrounding buildings. Otherwise it would just be wasted, which is sad.

<comment><USER15> Put one rack of servers in every house in Sweden. Each one warms the house a little bit.

Of course, you lose out on all the other advantages...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Great photos but the default resolution is frustratingly small. Here are the links to the fullsized versions: [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1446837...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14468376_10103136675908131_1017204796411632535_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1446872...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14468726_10103136675758431_9005661492814123754_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1450070...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14500704_10103136676077791_481490702728193485_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1442533...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14425336_10103136675873201_6012411229515107747_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1446840...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14468401_10103136676062821_2921648280975177438_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1452461...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14524617_10103136676432081_4482533052638067228_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1443508...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14435088_10103136675558831_8236639323516846744_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1448048...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14480486_10103136676292361_3173932299854703497_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1448073...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14480737_10103136675768411_5425692135538561053_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1442542...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14425428_10103136676242461_4852340690901958969_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1452503...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14525039_10103136675753441_1884992352847746370_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1452440...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14524406_10103136675893161_8227743870037033580_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1442545...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14425453_10103136681347231_6250889468166724265_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1452496...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14524966_10103136675563821_5871425778878901352_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1450042...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14500420_10103136676172601_5172988181273031856_o.jpg) [https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/1443528...](https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2016/09/14435283_10103136675997951_5698881809545986046_o.jpg)

<comment><USER17> Thx. The slideshow presentation is also crap because the banner ad on top makes the whole page jump around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is from 2014 on swedish radio news (google translated):

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fsverigesradio.se%2Fsida%2Fartikel.aspx%3Fprogramid%3D98%26artikel%3D5803221)

Governmental million to Facebook's new data center in Lulea

Scroll down to read it, basically taxpayers money went to Zuckerbergs pocket.

<comment><USER19> And zuckerberg's money went to tax payers in terms of taxes and salary and tax on salary and spending from salary, so a profitable deal overall.

<comment><USER18> > so a profitable deal overall.

I don't think that facebook is good for openness of the web and/or society as a whole, the amount of power without oversight that this Zuck has is simply scary.

Edit: here's some food for thought- [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook)

<comment><USER20> Weren't you talking about investing public money?

<comment><USER18> Also, I'm all for it when paypayers money go to new struggling but promising startups, fb is not one of them. I can't really see why they would need governmental financial help other that to support corrupt politicians.

<comment><USER20> Is the question about what returns on the investment or about who the government invests in?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've always wondered this, but why don't we just scale up some data storage device? Like create a massive hard drive, 10 feet across? It has to be more efficient than tons of tiny little drives.

<comment><USER22> From what I understand, there are a few issues, including:

1) The head has to move further to read the next sector of interest, which is particularly problematic for fragmented data.

2) It is more difficult to manufacture high data density (AKA high-precision) disks in large formats, as some surface defects are cumulative, and get worse as the disk gets larger.

3) Manufacturing defects which occur pseudo-randomly increase proportionally to the surface area of the disk, so the reject rate increases as a square of the radius.

4) Smaller drives can be spun much faster, allowing for higher data rates, as the centripetal accelerations in the disk are proportional to the square of the radius (and I believe the stresses are proportional to the cube of radius).

For these reasons and many others, HDDs have been moving to smaller and smaller form factors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Do people think Facebook will ever enter the cloud hosting market?

<comment><USER24> It seems unlikely considering their acquisition and later shutdown of Parse.

<comment><USER17> I do wonder what that was good for. Parse looked like an interesting idea - before the acquisition, anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


JavaScript Archive Network - CPAN for JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://www.openjsan.org/ <comment><USER2> This is really really awesome I hope it gets resurrected!</comment>


Best Way to Parse Twitter Search to Slack Channel? - <AUTHOR>

I have a channel in Slack that is linked to a Twitter account. I want to expand its capabilities, and include search results for certain terms. Considering Zapier. Any other suggestions? <comment><AUTHOR> looks like mention.com will be a good first start.</comment>


The Amazon Android Tablet I'd Buy - <AUTHOR> http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe/2011/03/why-we-need-an-amazon-android-tablet.html <comment><USER2> It's a brilliant idea, and makes sense in context of Amazon setting up their own Android store. Of course, Amazon's Android store policies are fairly heavy-handed when compared to Google's, but if they launched their own tablet/phone it would make perfect sense. It solves the problem of why Android phone manufacturers don't really need to update their phones firmware: they're not getting a cut of the software revenues like Apple does.

But if Amazon had their own device, running their own store, hopefully not excluding the default store, they would have an incentive to keep it up to date with the latest Android OS. I would also imagine Amazon could do something worthwhile in their Android mods to improve usability, given that their entire business revolves around superior customer service.

An Amazon tablet could be gangbusters, and a way for Amazon to keep their Kindle owners from jumping ship to Apple's platform.

<comment><USER3> A "Kindle Color" would hurt the Kindle brand. Whenever I tell someone I have a Nook, they respond with "Oh, the color e-reader?" They don't even know an e-ink Nook exists.

Kindle == e-ink. Anything Amazon Tablet related should stay away from Kindle; closer to the movies and TV on demand.

<comment><USER4> They could use the Pixel Qi screen and have something that is good for reading/ really long battery life but can also do video, color when necessary.

[http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2011/01/10/ces-2011-from-a-pixel- qi...](http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2011/01/10/ces-2011-from-a-pixel-qi- perspective/)

I assumed this was what the article was talking about, instead it's just suggesting a Nook Color without needing the community supported software to access all the full functionality (which would be nice, but not amazing).

ZTE have already announced such a tablet, so Amazon could just use them as OEM if they've not already got something cooking in their labs.

[http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2011/02/14/zte- introduces-7%e2%80%9...](http://pixelqi.com/blog1/2011/02/14/zte- introduces-7%e2%80%9d-tablet-pc-with-pixel-qi%e2%80%99s-sunlight-readable-low- power-display/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Amazon has a better understanding of the digital content space than Apple does, it shows in the way the market Kindle, MP3s, and now video with their rental channel.

That being said, if they did do an Android based tablet, the smart thing (but the hard thing) to do would be to kick Google to the curb.

The one thing that has differentiated the iPad from the TouchBook or the original Microsoft Tablets has been application speed and application focus.

If you look back in history you will find the Apple Newton Message Pad, another "magical and revolutionary" device, which had, at its core, a tightly written OS and a poorly implemented handwriting recognition algorithm. If you look further you will see that it had its ass handed to it by an upstart company called Palm which created a device which capitalized on two key design concepts : focused and fast.

The Palm Pilot was focused on the things you needed, calendar, address book, short notes. And it was fast, fast, fast. Turn it on and Bam! ready to go. Further it lasted plenty long before needing new batteries or a charge.

Apple took that lesson to heart.

If you look at failures in the tablet space which preceded the iPad they were all slow, had poor run time, didn't know what they wanted to be, and clumsy to use, especially without a stylus. Apple attacked not one, but all of those problems at the same time.

So back to Google. Google doesn't know what it wants because its a hydra of competing ideas. Now that Google is in the "product" space that churn becomes visible to folks outside the candy factory.

What is the best tablet solution ? If you said Chrome as a front end to a high performance kernel, you would find that a third of the internal folks at Google would agree with you, if you said "A really big phone" then the Android team would congratulate on how clearly you saw this space, if you said more dedicated device where OS branding is irrelevant, well there would be supporters for that too. It's healthy to have internal debate, it's toxic when you cannot move past it.

So can you build with Android and tell Google to take a flying leap at a rolling donut? Sure, but they won't license you the Google Apps then now will they? This is clearly Google's right and they have grand visions.

But it takes a special kind of set of conditions for a company like Google to see something that is outside their ability to imagine, I know that those conditions don't exist. And to date they haven't shown any ability to imagine and iPad killer, so I don't look to them for an answer there.

An iPad rival will arise, eventually, but its going to take someone other than Google to do it. It will be interesting to see what WebOS brings to the tablet market, and it will be interesting to see what the next generation of entrepreneurial folks push in this space. There is also the distinct possibility that Apple can push folks to an alternative with extortionate pricing and intolerable terms.

</comment><comment><USER6> I just want an 14" (8.5"x11") or A4 eink reader with a digitizer:-\

</comment><comment><USER7> Barnes and Noble has indicated they are launching an Android App store of their own [1]. Although, judging by that discussion, I think they see the opportunity they've created with the NookColor but they are still trying to figure out how to take full advantage and win developer's trust.

[1][http://connect.nookdeveloper.com/t5/General- Discussion/Nook-...](http://connect.nookdeveloper.com/t5/General- Discussion/Nook-Developer-Blog/m-p/1831/highlight/false#M833)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Amazon has more global reach than Barnes and Noble does. Does B&N even exist outside the US and Canada?

Even Amazon isn't fantastic in Europe, but at least they are here and active.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like the idea a lot, but I'm not sure the fate of the Kindle development program bodes very well: it still isn't out after how long?

</comment><comment><USER8> I was being recruited by Amazon quite heavily during past 6 months due to my android Developer skills..

Its a strong possibility that Amazon will in fact launch an Android Tablet product.</comment>


Request for Beta Testers: TweetHook.com - twitter search webhooks - <AUTHOR>

I am getting ready to launch my new startup - http://tweethook.com - and am in need of a few more beta testers for the site.
Specifically, I am looking for a few people that can test the webhooks using Python and Ruby endpoint scripts and perhaps provide simple example scripts they write to be featured on the site. You will get a fully functional beta preview account.
If you feel you can help me out by playing with it in the near future (say, starting today or tomorrow), please drop me a line at "chad at jazzychad daught net" and mention Hacker News and your scripting language somewhere in the email. Thanks!
Addendum: If you want to use another language, let me know. I have plenty of PHP testers, so I suppose I should more generally say I need testers of "non-PHP" endpoints. <comment><USER2> Are you searching the full Twitter feed?

Do you have an agreement with Twitter or is your service limited by the API request limits?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link - <http://tweethook.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool idea. I wish I had time to make a toy Compojure example tonight.</comment>


Show HN: transit.js - <AUTHOR> http://onloop.net/transit

<comment><USER2> Nice. I'll try it. But it would be great if you could parse data directly from GTFS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! To tell you the truth, I didn't know about GTFS until after I finished it up, and I'm working on GTFS support now :)</comment></comment>


Apple has a message for Amazon and Google and it's plastered on side of a hotel - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/06/apple-privacy-ad-ces-2019.html <comment><USER2> Apple's default search engine is Google though.

<comment><USER3> ... for now. Apple has the resources to do that if they want to.

Google search actually kind of sucks. It just sucks less than the competitors. Its not just privacy but the lack of truly advanced features that I know Google has the plumbing for internally.

<comment><USER2> It took years before bing became a credible challenge to google. I would love to see apple try to beat google at search. Microsoft is a giga Corp and still can't seem to beat google at search..</comment></comment></comment>


This mom gave her son an 18-point contract with his iPhone. Would you? - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2012/12/31/mom-presents-18-point-contract-with-rules-of-use-to-teenage-son-would-you-be-tempted/?fromcat=all <comment><USER2> Countdown to a 13 year old taking the road to programming and rooting in 18..17..16..

If someday my own offspring are not able to circumvent, bypass, hack, crack or otherwise render useless all of the monitoring and limitations I could possibly think of to control them online in their teen years I will know that I have failed to make them technology literate :)</comment>


Introduction to 8 Essential Data Structures - <AUTHOR> https://livecodestream.dev/post/2020-06-15-introduction-to-8-essential-data-structures/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of CS Algorithms and Data Structures 1, what a pain of a class, but helpful post</comment>


NIST Randomness Beacon - <AUTHOR> http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nist_beacon.cfm <comment><USER2> One possible application of this that NIST didn't discuss is mentioned in a new paper on accountable Bitcoin mixes: [http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/077.pdf](http://eprint.iacr.org/2014/077.pdf)

They use signed contracts combined with a novel mixing fee mechanism based on public randomness to ensure honest behavior by rational Bitcoin mixes. If you're interested in Bitcoin the full paper is worth a read.

<comment><USER3> I'm one of the authors. It's interesting that you cite our paper as an application of the NIST beacon. Perhaps a better reason to cite our paper is that we actually design a beacon using the Bitcoin blockchain itself (Section 4.4), because the NIST beacon has many problems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Besides trusting NIST what are the other problem[s]?

<comment><USER3> The other major one is reliability (but that is encompassed by sufficiently broad interpretations of "trusting NIST.") Also, for our specific application it's not clear how to assign precise timestamps to Bitcoin blocks that everyone can agree on; this is necessary to be able to use a beacon that is external to the block chain.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for responding. I never thought about bitcoin+time problems. Are there any efforts/research into how to address the bitcoin+timestamp problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ahahahaha no. You can only "prove to anybody that [you] used truly random numbers not known before a certain point in time" if this supposed "anybody" trusts that NIST isn't just sending out pre-generated numbers.

<comment><USER5> You probably shouldn't use it for crypto, but this would be a big help in scientific and industrial contexts where you can just point to NIST instead of having to come up with answers about the quality of your random data source. Say for example you want to showcase some algorithm that you say performs 10% better than chance (in some field where that confers a significant time/$ advantage), this gives you a meaningful benchmark to measure against. And since all the random data is stored, it makes certification of scientific papers much more repeatable since they can just show longs of when the NIST server was accessed in the materials & methods section of a paper. There are many applications of a good random beacon besides crypto.

<comment><USER6> Forget how random the numbers are if your source of randomness is literally being broadcast publicly, it doesn't matter.

<comment><USER7> Things like Monte Carlo simulations can, and have used public random numbers over the years -- the Rand Corporation's book of one million random digits [1] was used for this purpose. A public entropy source means that in verifying something, you can demonstrate that there was nothing up your sleeve when you used the points you did.

[1] [http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html](http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html)

<comment><USER8> I remember finding that book in the college library and sitting down to "read" it. I was fascinated that someone would make such a thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Very neat, though it's a pity that the warning about crypto in the lower-right is so hard to notice.

I mean, people weren't going to trust NIST on this anyways but if you're going to warn about crypto then it should probably be more prominent.

<comment><AUTHOR> The dearth of documentation is also a pity.

<comment><USER10> If only they had a web interface as handy as [http://www.random.org/integers/?mode=advanced](http://www.random.org/integers/?mode=advanced)

<comment><AUTHOR> At least the UI is better than a book from RAND.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Who in their right mind would trust anything NIST offers considering Dual DRBG EC? Best bet is to use many entropy sources including local hardware (ie sound card audio input) mixed in a fortuna entropy pool.

<comment><AUTHOR> The metrology folks at NIST are top notch. I think they have been awarded four Nobels in physics in the last twenty years.

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, that attests greatly to their credentials and precisely nil to their trustworthiness. For all we know there are NSL gag orders in effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure what you are talking about. Do you know what metrology is?

If there is a NSL gag order in effect for the work recognized by the 2012 Physics Nobel how did the committee hear about the work? You think the scientific community just took Haroche and Wineland's word and never looked into their results?

<comment><USER11> Please, allow me to paraphrase 'pg: pedigree is for suckers.

These data points have absolutely nothing to do with practical, trustworthy crypto standard processes or confidence in their ability to due-diligence systems.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please allow me to paraphrase dfc, "confusing metrology with crypto is for suckers."

To recap; you started this thread with "Who in their right mind would trust anything NIST offers." I responded by pointing out that there is a very talented group of people working on metrology at NIST and that some of these individuals have been awarded Nobels. What is the connection between trustworthy crypto standards and metrology?

<comment><USER11> Maybe you're not reading the same words...

Nobel snobels, still has nothing to do with crypto.

Thank you for arguing my original position for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> You did not limit your criticism to the crypto group at NIST. Your comment was about "anything" that came out of NIST. I am not sure how I argued your original position by saying that the metrology work that comes out of NIST is top notch. How did I support your claim by arguing and presenting evidence of the opposite?

<comment><USER11> You presented my argument in argumentative manner as something different. None of this has nothing to do with NIST's reputation for evaluating crypto systems and guiding standards. So please give up trying to say how great their weighs and standards are, because again, a Nobel in physics has nothing to do with crypto.

<comment><AUTHOR> I just read the bit in your profile about wanting to get to zero karma in 2014. It never occurred to me I was an unwitting conspirator in your race to the bottom. Had I known this I never would have "presented [your] argument in argumentative manner."

<comment><USER11> Ad hominem attacks and claims of moral superiority also have nothing to do with NIST allowing Dual EC DRBG to be backdoored and this entropy source being suspicious.

<comment><USER13> I don't know why you'd accuse a source of public randomness of having a _backdoor_. It has a _front door_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Regarding other RNG products they comment: "However, demonstrably unpredictable values are not possible to obtain in any classical physical context."

What's wrong with any hardware RNG that produces 0's and 1's straight from physics, if these also pass the relevant statistical tests?

<comment><USER15> Physics is predictable

<comment><USER14> To clarify:

What's wrong with any hardware RNG that produces 0's and 1's straight from observing natural phenomena like "thermal noise, the photoelectric effect, and other quantum phenomena", as wikipedia puts it[1].

How can they do better than that; specifically, what do they mean with "demonstrably unpredictable values"?

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generato...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_random_number_generator)

<comment><USER16> From the quote you already posted: "in any _classical_ physical context". They're not talking about anything quantum.

<comment><USER14> Got it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why would anyone trust a public random source? It may be truly random, but it can also be completely recorded such that if anyone uses this as a random source and the timestamp is known then the encryption can be broken.

<comment><USER18> You cannot use that randomness for private key or private data generation, true. But there are less common usage scenarios that need unpredictable randomness that is guaranteed to be generated only after a certain point in time. For two party protocols you can exchange nonces to prove that both parties are participating in this exact moment, but those don't scale to thousands of mutually distrustful parties. An example for that is the proposed Bitcoin protocol change that is already cited by swordswinger12 which prevents attackers from hoarding Bitcoin blocks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What would happen if, just by random chance, the numbers ended up in a pattern that isn't "random". Like it returned 4 a thousand times in a row or something like that. What's the worse case scenario?

</comment><comment><USER20> Why they say "DO NOT USE BEACON GENERATED VALUES AS SECRET CRYPTOGRAPHIC KEYS"?

<comment><USER21> Because you can't know for certain that the values are random and thus it's a terrible idea to use them in cryptography.

<comment><USER9> Beyond the randomness thing (which you're right about, although NIST _is_ claiming that they're actually random), the problem is that they're not secret.

Given that you'd probably want to avoid using for any crypto use (not just secret parameters) unless you can be sure that using this randomness for a public parameter doesn't break the cryptosystem (or USG isn't in your threat model). Given that few of us are experts in cryptology it would seem like the safe thing to do is to avoid for crypto use at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> can anyone help me understand why the chain of signed/hashed values is important? Is it all about tampering?</comment>


Perl programming survey (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://survey.perlfoundation.org/

<comment><USER2> Please note that it is useful to fill this out if you've used Perl in the past, whether or not you do now. People are sure to analyze the data in a number of ways, and will be interesting to contrast views from people who use the language actively with those who don't any more.

</comment><comment><USER3> I found the question about "school" ambiguous.

Depending on your location, this may or may not include university.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't really get the point of these surveys. All they do is quantify what we already know -- lots of people are using Perl, and most people get paid for that. In theory, if the survey asked what areas people were using Perl in, then grants could be given to shore up modules for the popular areas. But if people want to do that, they will do it anyway... and if nobody wants to do it, only someone very desperate for some spare change will do it, with results that match.

So other than liking to click stuff and look at data, I don't get it. It seems to me that if the Perl community stopped yelling, "no really, we aren't dead", everyone would stop thinking that.

<comment><AUTHOR> _It seems to me that if the Perl community stopped yelling, "no really, we aren't dead", everyone would stop thinking that._

I totally agree with this statement.

However I don't think this survey is being carried out with this purpose in mind. So I'm hopeful that some interesting and perhaps useful metrics will be gathered by this census.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A couple ambiguous questions. What other dynamic languages have I formally studied? Does that mean weakly typed? In that case none, though obviously I've picked them up here and there.

> What percentage of your work time working on software projects is spent not > writing code?

If we're looking at actual time I spend writing code, probably 5%. But then that's not counting reading code and testing code I've just written. So I don't know, it seems like that's a very small sliver of development when it feels like people are wondering how much time one spends in meetings or doing mockups.

<comment> mike-cardwell I stopped filling it in when I got to this question. Ambiguity is a killer in questionaires like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> They have a question: Please indicate up to five programming languages that you use frequently [excluding Perl]

Followed by: Where does Perl belong in this list?

Why didn't they just ask "Please list up to 6 programming languages that you use frequently INCLUDING perl?

<comment><USER6> My thinking here is to simplify and clarify the question.

The downvotes make me wonder if you disagree with my premise "These two questions could be simpler/clearer" or my attempt at a solution.

Care to tell me which?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I liked the XKCD survey's "gender" question better.

Q: Do you have a Y chromosome?

</comment><comment><USER7> Best captcha ever: Unit rash (a test suite gone ugly?)

</comment><comment><USER8> Select boxes don't work on the iPad.

<comment> adam-_- Worked for me on the iPhone...

Edit: I could get it to work on the iPhone by using the crazy two finger click/slide gesture I use for select boxes.

<comment><USER9> Could you describe that? I was unable to get it to work on the iPod touch.

On reflection though, I guess I'm running an old version of the OS on that one.

<comment> adam-_- Literally click and hold with one finger and then with another perform an awkward scrolling type movement - usually seems to work but it's hardly elegant!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good idea, I filled one out.</comment>


Noninvasive Deep Brain Stimulation via Temporally Interfering Electric Fields - <AUTHOR> http://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674%2817%2930584-6 <comment><USER2> Great work!!! This could be amazing...if you can stimulate a reasonable number of neurons without an implant, it's a game-changer!!

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems like a big step forward for TMS technology. Without this fancy interference based method it was previously impossible to stimulate deep brain regions without a significant focality tradeoff.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just a reminder: it's electric, not magnetic. So I guess it revolutionizes more the DCS (direct current stimulation) technology, more than the TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). ;)

<comment><USER3> whoops, thanks. In that case, I hope something analogous is possible with TMS

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Startup idea: fashionable hats that block EM waves.

Edit: Misread the abstract. Thought this involved _indirect_ EM radiation (i.e. "contact-free" deep brain stimulation).

<comment><USER5> Better startup idea: Electronic recreational "drugs"

Actually - if you were able to figure out how to do this - it would be better to develop it far as possible, in secret, then release the information (schematics, code, etc) public domain under an alias - probably to one of the wireheading communities, maybe to a newsgroup or something.

Because once it got out there, things might just come down hard on anyone trying to monetize it.

As an aside, there is a researcher out there who claims (and has written papers on it - which can be found if searched for) to have come up with a form of "digital heroin", using ultrasonic stimulation of the brain. He claims it worked so well, that students he worked with begged him to allow them to continue to use the machines. I was able to find his archive of papers and grab them all a while back. There was more than a bit of interesting stuff in there. From what I recall, the ultrasonic stimulation system was a fairly high-power system - to replicate it, one would likely need to repurpose (at a minimum) a fish finder sonar (or other larger transducer and amp).

None of the papers (from what I recall) talk about this finding - at least directly. But in various interviews with him, and reading "between the lines" of the various papers, I found that there was just enough information available to (at a minimum) begin to research and re-implement it. He became kind of notorious and reclusive after this was brought up a few years back. Last I looked into it, he was teaching at ASU, and had moved on from the brain stimulation research.

I won't give out his name; I've given enough information that if one wanted to, his information and such could all be found.

<comment><USER6> This reminds me of those blinky goggles that made you see a bunch of trippy patterns (even though the blinkiness was completely diffuse!), here's the instructions ([http://wealoneonearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-build- gogg...](http://wealoneonearth.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-build- goggles.html)) and here's a proper scientific paper about this phenomenon: [http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002158) .

The interesting thing is that the patterns that recur (known as "form constants, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant) ) in these geometric visual hallucinations are pretty similar to those obtained by taking hallucinogenic drugs (like LSD). As one might expect, these "form constants" don't directly originate from the flickering light nor the LSD molecule -- there's certainly no way to encode a description of those swirling geometric patterns in a small molecule or in diffuse light -- the information for those hallucinations has to reside in the brain _somehow_. Fascinatingly enough, these trippy geometric hallucinations are generated by the _exact same_ brain structures and mechanisms that the visual system uses to process edges/contours, surfaces, and textures: [http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf](http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-3.pdf) ! Certain operational modes (that LSD or diffuse flickering light can help create) in the edge/contour/surface/texture-detection machinery -- once transformed to the visual field's coordinates -- look exactly like the form constants. These geometric visual hallucinations -- the imagery fed to a conscious mind whose visual system is temporarily malfunctioning -- have a deep correspondence with the normal mechanisms of vision, in much the same way that the "glitches" produced by feeding a H.264 decoder with a slightly corrupt video file let you immediately appreciate the motion-compensating machinery of the codec.

There is sublime beauty in seeing these "form constants" in images that look like geometric visual hallucinations appear in _machine learning_ research. The universal adversarial perturbations (which, when added to an image, are said to cause misclassification) in page 6 of [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.08401v1.pdf) were striking to see, as they strongly resemble the same beautiful swirly colourful geometric visual hallucinations that humans experience when taking a hallucinogenic drug (or staring at diffuse flickery lights with the hallucination goggles).

<comment><USER7> Mitch Altman, Brain Machine, it's an OSH arduino gadget made from a repurposed POV LED trinket. Bought mine in kit form at the first Maker Faire.

[http://makezine.com/projects/arduino-powered-brain- machine/](http://makezine.com/projects/arduino-powered-brain-machine/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


ASK HN: Preparing to launch for second time on Producthunt - <AUTHOR> So, in April 18 I launched colorsandfonts.com
Colors & Fonts. Curated library of colors and fonts for Web Developers & Digital Designers.
And it took 8th place on that day.
I made significant changes regarding layout and content and I am planning to do much more.
I am looking for recommendations regarding the relaunch.
- What should I do? - What should I avoid doing?
Any constructive feedback is also really welcome.
Thank you and have a great day !
/Mike <comment><USER2> Looking at the choices on the landing page, it's not clear to me what I'll get if I click on each other than a vague sense of what the text under each graphic says.

I think it would be much better if each graphic showed a kind-of small version of what they'll see when they click. For instance the gradient choice doesn't even show a clear gradient and just looks like a rounded red square to me. It could show four gradients so I get a sense of the range of possibilities (e.g. grayscale, hue, saturation, etc.) Also the example for colour palette is confusingly showing a quantized gradient.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regarding the bald text.

\- I fear to explain more in case the user just can't other reading.

Regarding the icons.

\- The palettes icon is using those colors because otherwise it would be too much.

Regarding the gradients, do you mean the ones in the page or the icon. ?

Thank you so much.

<comment><USER2> The text is fine, I just wanted more from the graphics so I wouldn't even have to read the text.

The picture in the box labelled "Color gradients" just looks like a red rounded square because the top-right red-orange gradient is so subtle.

That's extra confusing because the box labelled "Color palettes" is showing colors in a 5-step gradient pattern.

I would be good if "MUI Color Picker" had several small circles of related colors as it's graphic since that's how its used. And I have no idea what 'MUI' means.

I hope some of that makes sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> You want a piture that goes like the saying.

An image is worth a thousand words, it might be true that. I could work on that tho...

MUI Colors stands for Material UI colors, is a very well known termn in UI / UX design. But I personaly do not like it either. I would write Material colors.

thanlk you so much karmakaze.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's your intention here? Just want to get more users, looking for help, trying to make money, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's actually a good question.

My intention is to get more traffic and keep them.

The first time I launched on PH it brought 1268 users.

Right now there's between 150 to 300 users daily since april 18th.

The site is free, so no money here is needed.

I just want more users though...

Thank you for asking.

<comment><USER3> Why do you want more users? Are you wanting to build your own recognition in the UX space?

I hope I don't sound snarky. I just want to better understand your thoughts and motives.

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries.

I am trying to create an audience because I have some plans for the website.

In the nearfuture I want to let users be part of it by letting them:

\- Create a profile, for an individual, team or agency.

\- Upload shot of their work and automatically / or manually create a palette, gradient and fonts used on the image.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Evolution of Reddit's Architecture (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.infoq.com/presentations/reddit-architecture-evolution <comment><USER2> The Reddit redesign must be the worst redesign in the history of redesigns.

It's super slow to load.

It's slow to use (Scroll is sluggish. It loads giant images and puts huge autoplaying videos in your face. Comment function now starts an ugly html wysiwyg editor).

It misses features (outgoing links in the sidebars are gone).

It takes away screen estate by having a fixed element on top of the screen that stays there when you scroll down.

It's buggy (often weird overlaps between elements happen when you resize the screen).

It's confusing. When I click on a post I get a view that shows the post in an overlay of the page I was looking at. When I reload the page I suddenly get a completely different view with only the post.

It's almost unusable on my iPad (where I have to beg for the desktop version every time I open it because the mobile version is even worse).

It seems like they are still A/B testing it. Because sometimes I get the redesign and sometimes the original design.

Funny enough, I _can_ see how the redesign might increase user engagement. The endless scroll with content right in your face _is_ kind of addicting. It pulls you in a state of "I hate this. And I hate myself for using it. But I can't stop. I will just scroll down one post further.". So the experience is _worse_ but the KPIs might be better. I bet this is how booking.com became the hell that it is.

I would _love_ to see how the numbers of those tests look like.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. And I wouldn't consider myself to be nit-picky regarding design, as I mostly read Reddit for the content in specific subs.

Despite some questionable design decisions my main grip with the new design is that it often just does not _work_ at all. I rarely alter default options in software but I had to use old.reddit.com quite often to even _use_ the site:

      - sometimes the whole page does not work because of cookie issues
      - sometimes posts don't load (I have to manually refresh)
      - sub's sidebars missing: there was often useful information (might be the job of the moderators though)
      - unable to do local search (CTRL-F) due to endless scroll

Regarding my last point, Reddit is not the only culprit and many websites unfortunately switch to this style - hopefully at least Google keep their pagination - but I find it terrible.

With traditional pagination you can CTRL-F for keywords, go to the next page, and repeat the process, but with endless-scroll content is usually loaded dynamically depending on your viewport, so it's nearly impossible to search in a reliable way.

<comment><USER4> > sub's sidebars missing

I'm a mod for a few subs and for that reason was forced to start using the new UI. Most of the sidebar can be developed to look and work similar to the old markdown sidebar, but without all the custom css styling.

I see the new UI as the a less dramatic version of myspace as the old, and facebook as new.* This includes but not limited to stripping out custom CSS. (You don't have to be a front end developer to style your sub anymore.) The reddit ecosystem as a whole will now look and function much the same everywhere. Some sub designs were getting out of hand. This gives Reddit execs and admins much more control and the lowly mod a lot less.

Alas the reddit mod is further relegated the jerk the community maligns for setting arbitrary rules and unfairly limiting free speech. Also a lot of the mod tools are streamlined, link/user flair, user access/banning, etc. I really don't like the look and feel of the new UI and after a month of constant use still prefer the old UI.

*(Avoiding any reference to dig 4.0)

<comment><USER5> > Some sub designs were getting out of hand

Hey, /r/ooer is a treasure, and the redesign is a lesser beast for not allowing its like!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reddit is the only major site I know which is regularly (well not so often, but often enough for me to realize) unplanned, and planned, downtime. Makes me wonder whether their architecture is really something to follow.

<comment><USER7> Without even looking at architecture, they went from lisp to python to node. While I certainly wouldn't have chosen any of those languages, it seems like every step they took was a step backwards. What's next, tcl/tk?

<comment><USER8> Why is that and which language would you choose? I am asking because I want to get into web development and started learning React + NodeJS recently.

<comment><USER9> React and Node are well engineered and in demand, plus you can even use it to build mobile app with React Native, which is in demand too. Don't listen to advices from anonymous random guy from the internet, doubt even me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The redesign effectively ended my use of this site completely. It is so slow and agressively user hostile, it blows my mind anyonw would want to 'learn' from it in any way but avoidance.

<comment><USER11> Old.reddit.com

Bookmark the version of your favorite sub-reddits for mobile use.

Manually edit https:www.reddit.com/post to old.reddit.com/post

OR

Use a chrome or Firefox extension on PC to automatically redirect reddit URLs to old.reddit.com version.

Problem solved for now

<comment><USER12> You can also opt out in the user settings if you have an account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The great irony here, is that Reddit is making the same foolish mistake Digg did with a redesign, costing them their entire userbase, and propelling Reddit.

<comment><USER14> The difference, though, is Reddit has no peers. The closest I'm aware of is Voat, which is basically the Isle of Misfit Toys for Reddit's banned hate speech subs.

<comment><USER15> Eh, I didnt really need a "peer" to replace reddit. After the redesign I just stopped going for the most part; I'm here or on google news if I'm just killing time. I'll still search reddit if I want to see a discussion about a specific subject, but even then I'm mostly looking at 1-2 year old threads. I feel like the content is in a feedback loop with the redesign, and they're both killing the host.

<comment><USER13> Not sure your age, but I think a lot of us are just growing up, and we're seeking more stable, intelligent news sources. I stopped using Reddit a couple years prior to the redesign. HN and Google News satisfy my news niche as well.

<comment><USER16> Out of curiosity, why Google News specifically? I stopped going on Reddit and mostly come here or glance at Twitter for social media. If I want news I normally go to a specific outlet's website.

<comment><USER15> Going to specific news sites always ends up with that feeling of being "captured" and hearing my own opinions repeated back to me. I'd rather read a handful of Fox News articles a month and consider if they have any valid points than just dismiss them entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I just watched the entire video and it was very informative. Fwiw most of the comments on here did not watch the video and seem a little uninformed. The node apis were built by a small group of front end developers and most of the pulled out services they're building are in python .

There were also a lot about message queues, cacheing, and ops related things in the talk.

I definitely recommend watching the entire video if you're interested in high traffic architectures.

<comment><USER18> While those basic strategies are technically good for scaling, I think the other commenters have a very valid point: it seems a lot of folks say, "no, this strategy is not something that appears to be working because the site is slow, buggy, and, oh, did I mention slow."

I think many folks consider scaling and fast a success and scaling and slow/buggy a failure. Who wants to emulate failure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> (Based on the transcript, thanks for providing that, I don't have time for videos)

The summary would seem to be that the first generation of developers built a monolith. A reasonably well scaling monolith, but only up to a point. Newer developers fear the blob and prefer Node to Python, so new development has been done in a cluster of menhirs of node around the python monolith.

The monolith suffered from lock contention because it was inadequately sharded across subreddits. They have now addressed this.

(Not mentioned: the redesign which shifts a large amount of CPU usage onto the client)

</comment><comment><USER20> If I were to design reddit I would have enforced the following rule to handle their scaling problems. You cannot touch the database when you are reading the homepage. Instead every minute we generate the canonical list of ~500 links that is "reddit". Cache the html for that and throw it on a CDN. The "next" and "previous" timestamped links should reference when it was first loaded so you can continue paging and avoid the duplicate link problem. You can cheat for logged in users by loading in their data after page load with JS, but the site would never fail entirely if it were overloaded. Votes should never affect another record, they should always create a new record in your datastore to avoid locking problems.

<comment><USER21> I think you are really confused here.

The problem with Reddit isn't the subreddit home pages it's the article comment pages. There are so many of them, people routinely comment/upvote months old articles and the distribution is unpredictable so it can be difficult to know what to cache.

And there isn't a datastore on this planet that could handle an event log like what you are proposing. Reddit would receive hundreds of thousands/millions of votes a second.

<comment><USER20> Nah definitely not confused about the architecture, it's fairly simple to wrap your head around. What I'm advocating for is making the general site semi- dynamic instead of fully dynamic. (Break expensive caches at regular predefined time intervals instead of every time data changes)

The key insight is that reddit still functions as you expect if you are seeing stale data from other people so long as your posts/comments/votes are visible when you navigate.

Shard the databases by subreddit and you will be able to horizontally scale the load. Use JS to post to a separate subdomain for each service. I.E everything under www.reddit.com/r/funny points to funny.reddit.com which can live as its own independent service.

Internally I would treat reddit as a group of individual high traffic sites instead of one massively trafficked site. Then you have another service that queries each site to build the main page.

<comment><USER22>
      Shard the databases by subreddit and you will be able to horizontally scale the load. Use JS to post to a separate
      subdomain for each service. I.E everything under www.reddit.com/r/funny points to funny.reddit.com which can live
      as its own independent service.

      Internally I would treat reddit as a group of individual high traffic sites instead of one massively trafficked site.
      Then you have another service that queries each site to build the main page.

this is terrifying to read, in that this is exactly what the media companies did for the last decade to try, and _totally fail_ , to compete with facebook.

having a unified platform is a competitive advantage.

also your "sharding and subdomains" trick is straight out of 2010 and a mix of irrelevant (everything's sharded now) and anachronistic (h2 is everywhere now).

also-also, you clearly have missed the best use case of reddit, which is to have unsub'd from all/most of the "default" reddits and replaced them with your own customized set.

you are optimizing for everyone reading the same thing (newspaper homepage) not everyone reading their custom thing (social network). that has been a proven losing strategy for a solid decade now, you could argue 2.

<comment><USER20> Everyone _is_ reading the same thing on reddit, just different combinations of the same thing. Reddit is just a combination of multiple newspapers masquerading as a single custom newspaper. No reason why the internals should leak to what is shown to the user. You could keep the exact same user experience that you have today and guarantee that the site never falls over.

You need to make the distinction between UX and Operations. Everything the user sees still lives under the same structure as today but internally it is structured so that you don't overload yourself and if you do fail, those failures are isolated and don't take down the rest of the site.

<comment><USER22>
      Everyone is reading the same thing on reddit, just different combinations of the same thing.

this is categorically untrue, you don't seem to understand reddit.

      Reddit is just a combination of multiple newspapers masquerading as a single custom newspaper.

that is exactly the anachronistic thinking that leads you down this path.

its movable type vs wordpress all over again. wordpress won.

the engineering constraint of pre-calculating caches is worse, in the long run, than the occasional outage for casual/non-logged-in users. its optimizing for the wrong audience, it is a long slow path to failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I hate using Reddit on mobile. I'm generally reading on a bus or train in Safari and it will virtually force me to use the app. 90% of those times it will open the store instead and maybe want to update the app, or I'm not logged in so I will have to take a few minutes to reset the password, even though I'm logged into the web app. If the app does load it's slow and buggy. I wish I could make the mobile web page the default.

<comment><USER24> Have you tried 3rd party apps? On Android I use Relay and it works great, I assume on iOS there are similarly good apps.

<comment><USER23> Thanks for the tip, I'll investigate

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> reddit.com's time spent on each request and uptime are shameful, and they are not getting any better after the redesign.

<comment><USER26> The redesign is such a horrible user experience, the day old.reddit.com gets shut down (assuming there is no Desktop program that comes close in quality to the mobile app Apollo) is the day I'm going to stop visiting.

<comment><USER27> This same sentiment was echoed just as strongly after the last major redesign (when they went from straight text to adding thumbnails and more whitespace).

The majority hated it, rebelled against it, said that the change in the way content consumption was focused on images more than text would push out quality content in favor of image macros that can be voted on quickly, that the quality of the people using the site would drop, etc, etc.

10 years later, I still feel all of those concerns were valid and correct, however these changes did not hurt reddit, and in fact the company grew by leaps and bounds.

And even now, I still share the same sentiment as you and others, but I think whether or not these changes are actually detrimental to reddit as an entity are yet to be determined.

<comment><USER28> I think the problem is that people always, without exception, hate UI/UX change, and companies know this and have learned to just ignore the objections of their users. Every single change to the Facebook UI/UX, every single change to Windows UI/UX, is met with an enormous backlash from users--"I just want it to look and work like it used to!" Then the next redesign comes around, and lo and behold, now people are attached to the current design that they previously hated, and now hate the new design. Tale as old as time.

I've never been like this. I've actually really liked virtually all of the widely panned UI redesigns over the years: iOS 7, every version of Windows, every evolution of Facebook.

However, there have been 2 redesigns that even I didn't like: the Digg redesign, and this Reddit redesign. Both are objectively bad. We know what happened because of the former. It remains to be seen what will happen due to the latter.

<comment><USER29> A redesign of a system you use regularly and have some sort of personal attachment to is like someone sneaking into your house at night and rearranging the furniture.

I work for a major UK community site and we get a furious backlash against even the slightest of changes. And sometimes against things that users think have changed but actually haven't.

(Very) generally we as humans hate having to think. Figuring out a change to something we use regularly means all our automatic shortcuts no longer work and we have to start paying attention.

It's like how annoying it is when they keep moving stuff round in the supermarket but *100 worse.

<comment><USER30> Yes, but nobody would want to go back to Windows 3.1 now, and new users get put off by old-looking pages. There can be real advantages to those redesigns.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Simple JSON query tool - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ashwanik.in/2018/02/simple-json-query-tool.html <comment><USER2> jesus christ have mercy... why do you use so many libraries? you can write a json-query tool with 20-100 lines of code</comment>


Show HN: Play snake by moving your head - <AUTHOR> https://paruby.github.io/snake-face/ <comment><USER2> Not in Firefox? Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:75.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/75.0

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah thanks for pointing that out! It worked fine on my Mac with Firefox.

Does the face direction estimation work (see text at bottom)? Or is there an issue with getting video from the camera?

<comment><USER2> Doesn't even request the camera permission.

Console says:

uncaught exception: Object

Error: The video element has not loaded data yet. Please wait for `loadeddata` event on the <video> element. 34 tfjs-core:17:526700

Source map error: Error: request failed with status 404 Resource URL: [https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tensorflow/tfjs- core](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tensorflow/tfjs-core) Source Map URL: tf- core.min.js.map

Error: The video element has not loaded data yet. Please wait for `loadeddata` event on the <video> element. 136 tfjs-core:17:526700

<comment><USER2> Works in Chrome, cool! Making a sharp U-turn is a bit of a challenge :D</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Love Resembles Addiction - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/love-is-like-cocaine <comment><USER2> I'd love to see if these MRI studies hold up if you select participants who are happily married or in long-term relationships of > 3 years length. The author's study selected participants with a maximum relationship length of 7.4 months. I dug up the Bartel's study referenced by it, and it had selected participants by putting out posters & Internet posts looking for people "truly, madly, and deeply in love", and got people with a relationship length of 2.4 +- 1.7 years:

[http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/pdf/NeuralBasisOfLove.pdf](http://www.vislab.ucl.ac.uk/pdf/NeuralBasisOfLove.pdf)

FWIW, I can recall crushing hard on girls up through college, with exactly the same drug-like intoxication that the article describes. But as I got more secure of myself and comfortable in my own skin, the crushes moderated. When I met my wife, there were no massive can't-stop-thinking-about-you highs, no obsessive yearning, few intrusive thoughts. It just felt natural - we enjoyed being together.

This was really disconcerting at first, like maybe it wasn't love after all, but I checked with a number of friends who were happily married for long (sometimes >10 years) periods. Very often, they mentioned the same feeling of _not_ having the trumpets and whistles blow, and instead they grew together and found that love developed later on. Indeed, the people who were always "truly, madly, deeply in love" were usually broken up 2 months later.

I've heard a theory circulated round that when we feel that huge deep rush of intoxication, we're actually reading our "completion" into personal characteristics that the other person possesses. We're not so much in love with them as in love with the _idea of being with them_. And that limerence persists as long as the idea does, but eventually we all have to face the reality that we are not our partners, and we are not going to somehow become more or better than ourselves just by being with them. That huge mind-blinding rush of dopamine when you meet a new person might be an antipattern, because it blinds us from seeing the real them.

<comment><USER3> This is very enlightening. I am not sure if people are aware but arranged marriages are still prevalent in India (which these days means being asked to meet someone and decide in few months if you would want to get married). Although, it seems a bit awkward and more of being forced into it but there is statistical evidence that it can work out really well.

If people enjoy being together, love develops eventually.

<comment><USER4> I've met some people from India who spent a grand total of 2-3 hours doing what people in the U.S. would call dating (spending time together; talking to each other) before deciding to marry them.

I think that _is really messed up_. Marrying someone is one of the most important decisions you can make in your life, especially if you're planning to stick with them until you die.

I think you need to spend at least a hundred hours (preferably, even more) together with a potential mate, before deciding whether you want to spend the rest of your life with them. A hundred hours together could be a 60 or 70 dinner dates, and weekends spent together, which you could do in less than 6 months.

Everyone puts on a show in the first couple of dates, and it takes a little while to get to know who a person better / for who they really are.

<comment><USER5> Arranged marriages are probably a vestige of ancient society were alliances were designed to solidify clan associations.

If more women enter the workforce hopefully a Women's Rights Movement will take off. Maybe it will induce a sexual revolution and do away with arranged marriages in Indian society.

I was about to link to the recent NYTimes article [1] posted to HN which said Indian women were leaving the workforce ( workforce participation slid from 37% to 27% ), but looking at the linked data now it looks it stayed at 27 % [2]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/world/asia/indian-women- la...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/world/asia/indian-women-labor-work- force.html)

[2] [http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS](http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS)

<comment><USER6> I think most people commenting here on India and arranged marriages have no clue what they are talking about. While some of it is generally true, but not any more truer than if I make a statement like "Cops in the US are wife beaters" (Translation: Long stressful job with association with violence seems to increase the likely hood of domestic violence compared to general population.) Arranged marriages may have started off as ways to solidify clan associations.. may be.. in the long lost past and more recently for a very select few. By and large arranged marriages in India now a days is just a matter of convenience. Mostly parents, bride, groom all reaching some sort of a consensus as to whether the marriage is likely to succeed. Why does this matter? Generally because unlike (again generalization) in the western society, this is truly two families coming together. It is easier for every one if there is a bit of compatibility between families too in addition to the bride and groom. As to the "messed up" factor in this, usually these marriages do not happen overnight. Engagement is followed by many months (to many years) of time "together" (not necessarily in a live in sort of way) after which the wedding happens. In many many cases the engagement gets broken off for one reason or another. There is a certain amount of taboo associated with this, so it is not easily said and done. On the other hand, this is good practice ground for resolving conflict among each other. Contrast this to ( what appears to me, an Indian) the usual dating ritual in the US.. Mostly starts of with both parties in various degrees of inebriation, followed by some awkward dates where one pretends to be smarter, funnier and what not, followed by a few sexual encounters, after which reality may dawn and the relationship is broken off. Fast forward many years and relationships and at some point the people involved realize that well, no body is perfect, lets make this work, we have some similar interests and lets face it, we are getting old. They decide to make it work and get married. I do not generally see how this has any chance of working any better. If one could see the magic list of all the people (past present future) one could potentially get married to, with all the qualities listed, sure, one can pick the perfect partner. But till then, it is like predicting the best time to buy a stock. Who knows if something better is in the horizon. But more importantly should one care?

<comment><USER7> Pretty cynical. It all depends on your cultural framework I guess. I'm sure there are places in India (not upper-class technology workers for instance) where the rules are different. And there are sure different ways in America for dating to work. How about: meet in college, have a few study dates, go out for dinner or a movie, meet her parents on Parents' Day, graduate and continue common interests like folk dance club or book club. Propose among the amazing plants of the Cactus Garden on campus. No inebriation, settling or age-related angst involved.

<comment><USER4> A bunch of my friends have actually gotten married that way. They met and dated their future spouse in college, and got engaged in their senior year, and married the summer after graduation.

They were all serious Christians though. They also went to lengths to ensure there was absolutely no sexual contact whatsoever before marriage -- e.g. by avoiding being alone in a room with their fianceé; always meeting/dating in public places, etc.

I will admit, American Christians do fall outside the majority cultural norm in this country, and I was writing from that perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > I think romantic love is an addiction ...

Or perhaps addiction is like romantic love. (Also noticed the first comment for that article also mentions this).

Evolution probably had good reason to select an addiction center in the brain because, well ... those that didn't have and didn't fight for their loved ones, didn't start wars because of it, didn't care as much, somehow haven't made it this far. So that machinery seems to serve a purpose.

<comment><USER9> Evolution never has a reason - it just is what tends to happen :)

Having said this it is a really interesting question what could be the evolutionary force driving romantic love. My pet hypothesis is that it holds couples together long enough for their children to be too old to abandon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Few academics and laymen regard romantic love as an addiction

I think dozens on pop songs say otherwise.

Jazz: "Like someone in love" "you go to my head" Pop: Kelly Clarkson's "Addicted", Kanye's "Addiction", Kesha "You're love is my drug" (and those are just the "K" artists!)...

<comment><USER11> Gretchen Parlato cover of SWV's weak made me aware of this:

        'when the cause and cure is you.'

     that illustrate the situation pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Since love came first, wouldn't it be more accurate to say cocaine is like love? But somehow that sounds worse.

<comment><USER13> Yes, my thought precisely.

There's also cross-tolerance ;)

But cocaine can be far more intense. Once you burn out those dopamine channels, they don't come back. You lose, more or less permanently, the ability to love, or even care very deeply.

<comment><USER14> Your comment prompted me to do a quick search; interesting concept. Thanks!

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/health/views/31mind.htm...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/health/views/31mind.html)

<comment><USER15> That's brutal. I'm never doing drugs.

<comment><USER13> That's one option.

But for sure, one should be careful with drugs that down-regulate receptors, especially those that do so long-term or permanently. As cocaine does. Receptor down-regulation is the mechanism for biological addiction. Cocaine is less addictive than nicotine, ethanol or opiates. You need considerable high- dose exposure to do serious damage. But once it's done, you're screwed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was in a crazy addicted love relationship once in my life in 2007 and it scared us both because of it's irrational power and what the article terms "intrusive thinking." We met on StumbleUpon and were attracted by our shared sensibilities at first, later much more than that after we met. About that time, when it was getting crazy, we both read the story of game designer Theresa Duncan[1] and artist Jeremy Blake[2], two lovers who committed suicide within a week of one another. She and I broke it off after that. It seemed like the smart thing to do. I would have scoffed at this article if I had not had a very real experience of what the article is describing.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_Duncan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresa_Duncan) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Blake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Blake)

<comment><USER17> We didn't. I met a girl overseas and within 24 hours we moved in together. Obsessive, all encompassing, "can't take my eyes off you" love.

I moved continents to be with her; 8 years together, married for 4.

Then suddenly, early last year, it all fell apart as quickly as it started. Finalizing divorce next month.

It was crazy, but I feel blessed to have experienced it. We're still good friends, but the thrill is gone, well and truly. I was actually relieved when she said she was having an affair. Good, I thought, better you than me; now let's end this.

<comment><USER18> Stories like yours make me wonder if "marriage for life" is even a worthwhile goal.

<comment><USER19> It's hard, because people change through life. But I guess if you can change together, that you found a pretty good match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> True, mad love is a beautiful experience, maybe the most powerful and satisfying thing that can happen to you.

I have been lucky to have experienced it once and now, 8 years later we still have it in us.

Of course it doesn't manifest in endless nights of looking into each other's eyes, but we still cherish that period as a gift from God himself.

Yes it does resemble an addiction, although maybe it's worth reversing the terms - addiction is actually like "true" love.

Everything in our lives just clicked - we'd just moved to the beautiful city of Barcelona, it was spring time and flowers were in bloom, we had money, more than we could spend and we traveled around and experienced each other through Europe - Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Brussels, Stockholm, Athens, Vienna, ...

Every week in a different city, weather was always great, the food and wine were fantastic - but all that beauty around us was pale in comparison to the look in her eyes.

That look - when this beautiful girl looks at you like you are everything for her and you feel like she's everything for you - like you are the perfect drugs for each other - that is a powerful and fulfilling experience.

That's what it feels like to be blessed.

Our daughter is the result of that love and we often joke that our love was actually the effect of her coming into this world.

Drugs don't really come close to the powerful emotions that we can generate naturally when we are in love - I can only compare it to an MDMA trip that lasts for months...

That love has carried us through the difficult moments of having a child and careers in our modern, artificial society and we would have been separated many times had it not been for those memories.

<comment><USER21> I love your story. I hate that can't tell if I should wait for that or "settle" for the feeling others describe of "just well comfortable". I keep waiting for, searching for, your style of relationship but all I find, generally, is the "this is comfortable" style which while pleasant is also mostly "take it or leave it" kind of feeling for me. For lack of a better way it's nice while together but it's mostly "out sight out of mind".

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think it varies by cultural extraction and emotional background. My life experience suggests that people from "warm" and "romantic" cultures are more likely to experience the highs of falling in love than people from more measured, rationalistic and phlegmatic cultures.

Being from a "warm and romantic" background myself, I can confirm that falling in love is very much intoxicating. It alters one's frame of mind and leads to decisions one simply would not make for any other reason. Some of them are quite momentous and have lasting impact indeed.

<comment><USER23> I grew up in the care of parents that decided to stay together for the children.

I can't really complain--they both love me--I grew up in a safe middle class environment, one of them always read with me at night when I was young, I never worried about being hungry, got toys on x-mas, etc. They certainly never abused me.

But to this day I struggle with relationships. I have a hard time connecting with people, even in a non-romantic context.

Man, I realize I don't know anyone who's going to read this, but it feels real good to confess it to someone.

EDIT: To be honest, I feel like such an asshole. There are people that have had it way worse than me, and here I am feeling sorry for myself.

<comment><USER24> Nah man don't compare yourself to others or minimize your experience. I grew up in a similar situation. It sucks. Your role models are all messed up. Your normal is not really normal as they say. But now you know a reason why relationships may be difficult for you and now you can actively work on them. You can choose to be different and who you want to be with. It takes a lot of work but it's worth it. It's good that you recognize it for what it was. A lot of people don't get there. Some of us repeat the same patterns.

<comment><USER23> > It takes a lot of work but it's worth it. It's good that you recognize it > for what it was. A lot of people don't get there.

I don't really know what the next step to take is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> If not love, then what else?

Couldn't someone say you're addicted to work? To entrepreneurship? Solving problems? Or for many here, hacking?

<comment><USER26> Solving problems ⊃ hacking

(Not being pedantic, I just like set theory symbols and never get to use them)

<comment><USER25> Probably the better superset is intellectual stimulation. Hacking, strategy games, crossword puzzles...all fall under that moniker, and are they so addicting too! It's just of great luck that unlike cocaine or love, hacking can lead to returns in other utilities like in money and a career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Real love is actually pretty good for you altogether, body and mind, emotionally and psychologically. But that's not what most people think of as "love".

</comment><comment><USER28> This particular trope of equating romantic love and substance addiction is annoying and fundamentally confused. It doesn't take neurology to understand that any activity from which we derive pleasure could, given the right circumstances or wrong attitudes, lead to a self-destructive spiral. And if one is aware that dopamine and other neurotransmitters are how pleasure is "implemented" in the brain, research which correlates a pleasurable experience with adaptive dopamine responses is pretty yawn-inducing.

Even if one doesn't agree that the factual content of this research is boring, rather than salacious, I think the conclusions drawn here are vastly premature given our current understanding of the brain. Imagine that somebody with a tool to "see" electrical currents (an oscilloscope? CAT scan? I don't know) was looking at my computer, first as I unleash a massive DDOS attack on some unsuspecting evildoers, and then as I put my latest philosophical writings on my ftp server for all my rabid fans. In both cases they'd see my NIC go crazy, working itself to death to blast out packets to either badly configured DNS servers or badly confused human beings (as it happens, these human being strongly resemble cocaine addicts when it comes to reading highly digressive rants composed by yours truly). So, is hosting an essay on an FTP server "the same" as initiating a DDOS? Yes, I suppose either one could fry my network adapter, but that's pretty contingent. So, how exactly are they different, and what does this have to do with cocaine?

Restricting ourselves to what's happening inside the computer, the differences reside atop a massive tower of abstraction. And what's more, these differences put down shallow roots. Even with an understanding of the von neumann architechure generally or my intel chip in particular, most physical ("neurological") measurements one could make would look pretty damn similar. One would have to understand the dynamic relationship between the cpu state register, my RAM chips, and my Hard Drive to even begin to grok what's "really" going on. I think neuroscience is in a state analogous to that of a man measuring currents in a modern computer. Even if it turns out that in certain neurological ways love and cocaine are _completely identical_ , it may turn out that the similarities are completely overshadowed by subtler states in a different subsystem. We don't understand brain architecture, so who knows.

And really, the crux of the difference between the DDOS and rabid fans downloading my latest essay in beautiful LaTeX formatting has to do with the way the activity is situated in the relationship between me and the social world in which I exist. And the same is true of the difference between love and cocaine addiction. Courtship is a foundational human activity, one that profoundly shapes our cultural practices and understanding of ourselves. _Of course_ it changes us! What the hell is meant by "Normal Altered State?" What is an "unaltered" human state? Being a human is _inherently_ a state of profound embeddedness in a culture which originates in _others_. And another human being, who is also a rich and complex cultural creature, has immeasurably more to offer than the cruel, contentless, solipsistic chokehold of a drug addiction.

Take it from somebody who has both.

<comment><USER29> Out of curiosity, and if you don't mind sharing, do you have a site/blog where I'd be able to find more of your writing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is one of the reasons to read Infinite Jest - it explores the concept of addiction with incredible depth and interest.

I love the idea that many things in life can be modeled as addictions. Abstractly, an addiction takes the pattern of long periods of misery (plateau) interrupted by brief moments of ecstasy - what's special about an addiction is that it feels like the moments of ecstasy are worth it. This pattern is similar to that involved in learning a new skill, or going through a personality change.

</comment><comment><USER31> I'm reminded of these lyrics...

 _" Love is like oxygen...You get too much you get too high... Not enough and you're gonna die"_

<comment><USER32> Long (album) version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRVwcPTnug8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRVwcPTnug8)

Short (single) version: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlM6OBRc8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTlM6OBRc8w)

By Sweet: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweet)

(You may know them better for _The Ballroom Blitz_ : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_jdiU47bFA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_jdiU47bFA) ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> There's a documentary about this with the scientist who wrote the article

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

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a good example of why love is so misunderstood. What is being described in the article is closer to desire than love. The two are not the same, though desire can be the gateway towards love. Loving relationships aren't defined by codependency, though desire and love can exist together.

I'm not a Christian, but the best description of love (that I know of) is found in the Bible...

[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+1...](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13:4-8)

<comment><USER35> I wouldn't be so quick to label and put experiences into boxes. Your experience and your culture and your understanding of love can be so different than another person's that labels mostly just get in the way.

To look at it in information-theoretic terms, you need a higher-bandwidth channel to communicate about "core" experiences like love. Labels condense information by encoding culture and definition into them. So it's tempting to reach for them. But if the person you're communicating with doesn't share the same culture and definition, then you wind up mis-communicating until you can work out the source of the disconnect.

Labels are great for talking about computer software systems. Not so much for love.

For me, and to use your terms, I can't feel romantic love for someone without also having desire for them. I can care deeply for them, want the best for them whether it's with or without me, but in order for me to have a loving relationship with someone, desire has to be a constant undercurrent. I cannot spend copious amounts of time with a person otherwise, I start to retreat back into myself. Desire is that thing that draws me out and allows others in, it's absolutely essential.

So, while your love / desire divide may work well enough for your purposes, it won't necessarily for other people. You can try to adapt the framework to accommodate them, but do this too many times and you're left with a mess.

It's best to just share your own experiences with as plain of language as you can and let other people come up with their own abstractions.

<comment><USER34> > "Desire is that thing that draws me out and allows others in, it's > absolutely essential."

That's what I meant by saying that desire can be the gateway to love. Desire helps you commit, love can grow from that point on.

<comment><USER36> I see desire/infatuation as catalyst or bootstrapping mechanism for a relationship. In my experience the early stages of a relationship involve a lot of calibration: communication style, likes/dislikes, emotional landmines, lifestyle, etc.

Without the strong feelings that often characterize the first period in a relationship, I or the other would probably have bailed out before even figuring out if some of these issues can be resolved.

Of course, the downside is that I've found myself spending a lot of time and energy in the infatuation phase only to discover that there were fundamental incompatibilities and wondering how I could have felt so strongly about this other person in the first place. But I guess that's unavoidable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> blubb-fish [http://www.pnas.org/content/113/5/1417](http://www.pnas.org/content/113/5/1417)

Cocain destroys your mind - love heals it.

<comment><USER37> Losing love has been the most unexpectedly devastating thing I've experienced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Love and Addiction [http://www.amazon.com/Love-Addiction-Stanton-Peele- ebook/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Love-Addiction-Stanton-Peele- ebook/dp/B00IVAQQOK)

</comment><comment><USER39> I wonder what chemical reactions occur inside our brains and bodies when we "fall in love." Reminds me of _Rick and Morty_ , which refers to love as purely a symptom of secreting oxytocin.

</comment><comment><USER40> Which one has been around longer? Think the comparison might be backward.

<comment><USER41> I'm quite sure plants were there before humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> > Modern data suggest that romantic love should be treated as an addiction, > regardless of its lack of official diagnostic classification as an > addiction.

What would this mean in practice? Court-ordered rehab?

<comment><USER43> For stalkers, perhaps. Might be beneficial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Stanton Peele made this observation 40 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER45> happy valentines day! the onslaught of "love"-based articles is great.

</comment><comment><USER46> Oh, really?

</comment><comment><USER47> LOVE IS LIKE COCAINE!</comment>