Ask HN: What are alternatives to OO programming? - <AUTHOR> Don't say functional. It combines the power of abstract mathematics with the learning curve of abstract mathematics. Any programming paradigm that requires me to write a dissertation to use shouldn't morally speaking count as a programming paradigm.<p>I want a programming paradigm that doesn't breakdown after 500k LOC. That rules out structured programming also. <comment><USER2> This is a question that's been on my mind ever since I did my master thesis in 1997. And yes, I agree that FP is not it (my school was heavily FP- influenced).

IMNSHO, architecture-oriented programming is what OO wanted to be. Or maybe it should be called connector-oriented.

In short, in addition to a library of data types / classes you can use, compose and adapt, you get a library of connectors you can use, compose and adapt.

Another way to think of it is tamed metaprogramming or language-oriented programming on rails.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is architecture-oriented programming?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To be honest, there isn't any mainstream alternative to OOP, when it comes to building software professionally because of the very wide use of OOP , because of multiple reasons like security (provided by private & protected classes) or data hiding or Abstractions or Encapsulation.

If you are having difficulty with OOP & objects, then go through the reference, but do it, there's no better mainstream alternative.

</comment><comment><USER4> Take a look at the Golang model, it uses duck typing and also CSP for parallel exec'n

</comment><comment><USER5> Functional

<comment><AUTHOR> * Something fundamental as input and outputs was an open problem for decades.

* Has the gentle learning curve of abstract mathematics.

No thank you.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, I should have said "pragmatic functional". Pure functional is borderline useless. Push the impurity (I/O, Infrastructure, UI) to the outer edges of whatever application you're making. Any popular functional language will make purity easy and idiomatic, but will also make the ugly parts possible, albeit a little verbose, to encourage avoidance.

Was it easy to learn how to do OOP well? If you're looking to move away from OOP, are you sure you ever learned how to do it well? I've been doing OOP for 20 years and I've found far more practical application from functional ideas than any design patterns I've come across.

You don't have to go all in on any paradigm, you can mix and match. The parts of any system should be small. If the part is easier to design in OOP (UI comes to mind), then use that. If the part is just manipulating data (just about everything else comes to mind) functional can be very nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> When I took programming classes in uni it was the OOP section where I would consistently get 100% on tests. Everything else was 75-80%.

OOP is one of the few parts of programming that are genuinely enjoyable. Sometimes I open up Ruby and make an OO model of something from my work (mathematician). So I'm not asking because I'm bad at it.

But it seems like there are only two programming paradigms: object-oriented and structured (classical functional programming (like you find in Scheme) is really structured programming without loops and variable assignments). And the problem is that structured programming is not temporally infinite: it breaks down most ungracefully past 150k lines of code.

You can't tell me that the only temporally infinite programming paradigm is OO and that nobody invented anything else in the intervening 30-40 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Goto Basic</comment>


Susceptibility of cats and dogs to SARS-coronavirus-2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.30.015347v1 <comment><AUTHOR> The most striking experimental result here – with obvious implications for public health, if it turns out to be replicable – is that cats can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, and transmit the virus via respiratory droplets.

The full title of this preprint is "Susceptibility of ferrets, cats, dogs, and different domestic animals to SARS-coronavirus-2", which is too long for an HN submission, so I truncated it.

</comment><comment><USER2> This has me very worried. Today I went out for groceries, and when I returned, put the groceries down, took off my shoes/sweater/pants and went to go wash my hands, I realized my cat is absolutely compelled to go over and sniff anything I've placed on the ground. If there are any droplets on my clothing or the items I've brought in, he might get infected, and then infect me later. An infection from a surface contact is mild, but an infection from a "generator" of virus (i.e. a human or a cat) can be life threatening.</comment>


Quantum Scientists Force Electrons to Break Ohm's Law - <AUTHOR> https://scitechdaily.com/quantum-scientists-force-electrons-to-break-ohms-law/ <comment><USER2> Far outside my wheelhouse here, but isn't this just superconductors [1]? Liquid helium forms below 5.2 kelvin [2] and super conductors can be formed ~4 kelvin.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistance_and_cond...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistance_and_conductance#Superconductivity)

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

<comment><USER3> They mention as much in the article:

 _The researchers used superfluid helium, which has several unique properties. For example, it remains in a liquid form at temperatures down to absolute zero, when any other liquid would freeze, and behaves like fluid with zero viscosity, or no resistance._

They use that liquid helium to create a _no resistance_ T-junction circuit.

But that circuit did not obey Ohms law, because while the elections had two zero resistance paths through the T-junction, they only used one of those two paths.

Then when they sent the elections down the stem of the T-junction the electrons behaved as expected, using both the available paths.

<comment><USER4> To simplify this the electrons broke ohms law because they didn't follow the path of least resistance.</comment></comment></comment>


UN: Nations hide rise in private digital snooping - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/un-nations-hide-rise-in-private-digital-snooping/2014/07/16/350ac6e4-0cd2-11e4-bd4e-462c357f0998_story.html <comment><USER2> Not news to this crowd, but still important to note. So many times as commentators we focus on evil companies, or evil governments, or evil agencies.

Nope, it's all of the above. Or rather, _nobody is evil_ , just each party needs data for various reasons. Governments trump everybody, so if your information is being recorded, it's accessible to a government somewhere. (And you can be assured that tons of information about you is recorded daily)

Interesting (to me) is the fact that we've spent the last twenty years cranking out various sci-fi dramas about all the things that could go wrong in a future society. There was cloning, nuclear war (an old favorite), alien invasion, designer babies, prison cities, artificial intelligence, memory wiping -- tons of stuff. All the time, the people who produced and consumed such fiction said "You know, it's good that we bring up these ideas. We're going to need to deal with this kinda thing in the future. It's morally important. This is deep, thoughtful work."

Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind. And now when you point it out to folks, they either think it doesn't matter or they're so overwhelmed they give up thinking about what they could possibly do about it. The unstated question is: Gee, why didn't somebody tell me about this!

<comment><USER3> >> Meanwhile we were all happily building and participating in the largest dystopian society that has ever happened to mankind.

Ironically that is caused by an increase in freedom that the internet brought about.

We have long had the right to freedom of speech but it was expensive to interact with a large number of people. The internet made it much easier to actually use the rights heralded by politicians.

I think sci-fi has done a better job of realising some of the social implications of this explosion in rights. For example in showing how national allegiance can be lost in favour of geographically desperate groups of like minded indviduals.

<comment><USER4> Yes, he has a strange definition of dystopia. In Star Trek the leadership clearly knows where everyone is at all times, is that a dystopia? Very few people go full Stallman, although they could.

<comment><USER5> Maybe he's thinking of a Huxleyan dystopia. Very few of us would call the setting of Brave New World a utopia, but very few of the inhabitants of that world would call it anything else. Our joyful new information-dense world has brought with it compromises that the culture hasn't really assimilated yet, often isn't even aware of yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You read it here last, from the UN Human Rights Commissioner. Zamyatin, Orwell, Chomsky, Hager, Binney, Drake, Assange, Snowden ... they've been on about this for a century. Ten years ago it was conspiracy theory, now it's mainstream social reality. Still, most people don't care to listen... secure in their televised Colosseum serial economic treadmill stupour... knocking back throwaway media to numb themselves to the truth, competing to buy fallacious fashion facepalm devices that actively discourage intellectual authorship, context, privacy or even direct unmediated expression... but perhaps the tide is finally changing?

On the flip-side, this one's nicely timed, given the preface and thrust of Cypherpunks[0], for the same day as the review of Assange's case in Sweden... which according to Assange's recent interview[1] should get thrown out after tomorrow's appeal[2]. I wonder if the UN gets it now? Of course, it's semi- irrelevant anyway since the US will cockblock[3] them on actually actioning anything remotely related to real, functional, positive change, but it's a nice gesture on the human rights commissioner's part for national-level change-makers to point the finger at.

0\. [http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/](http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/cypherpunks/)

1\. [http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/7/exclusive_inside_embass...](http://www.democracynow.org/2014/7/7/exclusive_inside_embassy_refuge_julian_assange)

2\. [http://www.thisdayinwikileaks.org/2014/07/15-july-2014.html](http://www.thisdayinwikileaks.org/2014/07/15-july-2014.html)

3\. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_veto_power)

</comment><comment><USER7> I think there will need to be another wave of global revolutions to end this. Even the vast majority of "democratic" governments are extremely reluctant to give this power up now, and the more they use it the harder they will fight against giving it up, which probably means violent and bloody revolutions will be necessary to regain the rights we thought we already (re)gained decades or centuries ago.

When people caught doing it will be _severely_ punished, then you'll know the tide has turned. Until then, even if new laws are passed to "limit" the surveillance, they probably won't change much, as they'll keep doing it in secret, and then get protected by higher-ups when getting caught.

<comment><USER8> > violent and bloody revolutions will be necessary to regain the rights we > thought we already (re)gained decades or centuries ago.

Digital privacy is one of these funny freedoms which everyone either greatly over or under-estimates.

I don't think anyone with a firm grasp on politics really thinks digital privacy will spark violent uprisings, so I'll put the question another way: do you really believe you're morally justified in _killing_ over domestic spying?

<comment><USER9> It's not "digital" privacy, it's just privacy. Even if you avoid digitally networked devices(which is almost impossible), your photos still appear on facebook et al, you're still being recorded by CCTV everywhere you go, your banking transactions and medical data is still being recorded etc.

<comment><USER10> Privacy isn't exactly a black and white thing. You have no expectation of privacy if you're in a public street, so being filmed isn't the worst thing in the world. If you're filmed in your own home, perhaps through your webcam, then that's a different story.

<comment><USER9> If the CCTV cameras weren't connected to the internet and their recordings were periodically deleted, this wouldn't be a problem at all. Even Richard Stallman has said as much.

What however is happening more and more, is that recorded data is kept indefinitely and is networked.

Have you heard what Binney has said what the software he wrote for the NSA does?

There are various domains from where it gathers data (cellphone, banking, social media, gps etc.). These domains are graphed and mapped in such a way that they can pull out all the attributes any individual has from any any or all of the domains.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=590cy1biewc)

In other words, the data doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's all being graphed and correlated in order to build a comprehensive picture of your life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is funny how quickly the ground shifts. Not that long ago, discussions over this kind of stuff were generally the province of the institutionally paranoid and subjects such as echelon occasionally cropped up in sci-fi books and the manifestos of folk like David Icke, along with his rambling lizard bobbins.

These days, my gran might mention these subjects over a cup of tea after talking about the cricket, and she's a dyed in the wool establishment conservative.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think we (everyone who participants here on Hacker News) have to learn how to be smart freedom fighters who can use nonviolent methods to overthrow dictatorships if we are to have any hope of reversing these trends, whether the snooping comes from governments directly or indirectly through poorly guided business corporations. We can't win this fight by imagining violent revolutions. Dictators become dictators by being practiced in using violence to gain power. We probably can't learn enough about violent means soon enough to overcome a slide to dictatorship in any country.

I advocate nonviolent means to fight dictators for two reasons: I don't like seeing my innocent neighbors get killed, and I have seen nonviolent means work to overthrow dictators. The largely peaceful transition from martial law and one-party dictatorship to pluralistic rule by law with free press and free elections that I saw in Taiwan[1] is just one example of a people power revolution where the dictator was baffled because there were few violent incidents on the part of the opposition to stir up a violent response from the regime. There are other examples from around the world.

An organization that collects real-world advice on how to win freedom even under dictatorship nonviolently, and how to keep the revolutionary movement from turning into another dictatorship, is the Albert Einstein Institution founded by Gene Sharp, an occasional nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. I have recommended before here on Hacker News that readers who are really, truly interested in winning freedom for themselves and guaranteeing freedom for people around the world ought to read the free, downloadable materials on the Einstein Institution website.[2] If you are not willing to learn the art and craft of forging a cohesive, effective resistance movement based on real-world examples, this is all just talk. Talk is cheap. I know actual freedom fighters who succeeded against dictators whose techniques included total control of all mass media with "prior restraint" of publication and complete domination of the country's education system and targeted assassinations of opponents. The dictators still lost. You (we) can win, but only if you (all of us) learn to fight effectively. That doesn't take violence. Winning in a people power democracy movement does take mental toughness, because the dictator's side could use violence, but always the people outnumber the rulers. The people just have to learn how to stand together, overcoming their own fear.

Start your reading with _From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation_ if you are wondering where to start among the several handbooks on the Einstein Institution website.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5985720)

[2] [http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/](http://www.aeinstein.org/downloads/)

<comment><USER13> I think a non-violent approach is unrealistic. History tells us that tables only turn when soldiers refuse to shoot citizens on order of the government and turn the guns back against them.

The best interim approach is to destroy all means of facilitating the dictatorship. In this case that means destroying the tools by which we work, destroying the banks, the commerce regimes and the communication and logistic platforms muck like the Russians did when they pulled out of the Eastern Bloc. No one has to be hurt to do that but people _will_ go hungry, jobless and penniless. This will however open their eyes to the situation.

I'm not advocating this as a solution nor would act upon it but I'm without a better option in my mind.

Edit: to the down voters. This is not reddit. Don't down vote because you disagree, down vote because it's not relevant. This is relevant discussion.

<comment><USER14> It has been shown (for example in Altemeyer's research on authoritarianism) that violence increases authoritarian tendencies among population, while violent attacks against nonviolence decrease those tendencies.

This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong, with the 2nd amendment. The reason why soldiers refuse to shoot against citizens is because they are unarmed and have moral upper hand. Once that happens, the powerful people have to give up, because they themselves can only rely on other people to stay in power.

<comment><USER15> >This is where American Founding Fathers got it wrong

They got it right in 1776-1783 when they put their lives on the line, and fought for their independence. Britain never would have "given up" their North American colonies peacefully.

<comment> jude- What made the American Revolution succeed through violence were the facts that (1) it was a war of attrition against a foreign, remote power, and (2) it was bolstered by another foreign, rival remote power. Due to its far-flung nature, it cost British Empire a LOT of money to keep the war effort going, and moreover at a time when they were hurting for cash (since this was just after the Seven Year's War with France). The Americans and French were able to make it too costly for Britain to continue to hold on to the colonies.

Britain also tried to take America back in the War of 1812, but was again thwarted by the costs of maintaining a war abroad (and the war had come to a stalemate by 1814).

Unlike most revolutions we see today (which are revolutions at home, and become civil wars if they turn violent), the American Revolution succeeded through violence because it was against a foreign adversary and because the Americans were able to make it too costly for Britain to maintain their war effort. These preconditions do not apply to local revolutions, where no side has an economic incentive to stop fighting until the other sides are crushed. Each factions' lives are on the line, largely eliminating the cost consideration. It's not like King George III or the members of Parliament were in danger of losing their lives, families, and lands if the Americans won.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What can I do with .0016 Bitcoin? - <AUTHOR> I have a little over $12 worth of Bitcoin (at the current market value) from 21.co. I'm not a speculator, investor, etc but am interested in the blockchain.<p>What do I do with such a small amount of Bitcoin? <comment><USER2> When you're dealing with such a small amount of money, my best advise would be to keep it as Bitcoin. The worst that could happen is it crashes and you're out $12. If it goes up in value, you're up whatever that ends up being.

I think of my own story ... I had mined about 25 bitcoin back in (I think) 2009, when each was worth (I think) a penny. My interest was purely academic -- I love this kind of thing, I thought the idea was neat[0]. I had a major OS failure and decided to reinstall, wiping the drive and my wallet. At today's prices, I'm out $135,000[1]. Whoops! You never know...

[0] Though promptly tossed it into the category of cypherpunk fantasy -- while everything that was claimed about it "could happen", back then it seemed more likely that my dog would write Shakespeare.

[1] Referring to #0, I would have ended up selling that 25 bitcoin when it hit around $10, assuming that making $250 would be pretty incredible. There's no way, short of removing that drive and storing it, forgetting about it and realizing the error "yesterday" that I would still have had those Bitcoin.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can get a pizza today.

In 2010, a programmer paid 10000BTC for two pizzas. [https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-pizza-day-celebrating- pizza...](https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-pizza-day-celebrating-pizza- bought-10000-btc/)

Hopefully in future you won't regret buying a pizza with 0.0016 BTC. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Think of that one Little Caesar's pizza I can get;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hold it and remember this years later.

<comment><AUTHOR> Was feeling the same way. No need to end a good experiment and we don't know the ceiling yet.</comment></comment>


Self-driving cars with "remote" drivers could test on roads in April - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/self-driving-cars-with-remote-drivers-could-test-on-roads-in-april.html <comment><USER2> That's about as "self-driving" as the 17th century Mechanical Turk was "intelligent": hiding the human component is not quite the same as not needing it.</comment>


Proof that Android is Linux - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/tomjuggler/de994c48e4f7790a3c22b204c58c35b9 <comment><USER2> Is this a secret? The android operativsystem wiki clearly says this.

"Android is a mobile operating system developed by Google, based on the Linux kernel and designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_\(operating_system\))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am not sure why now, but I had some expectation of getting a different result. Just me being an idiot. I use the same code all the time to differentiate Windows from Linux.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well it is, effectively, a custom Linux distribution.</comment>


Efficiently Generating a Number in a Range - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/bounded-rands.html <comment><USER2> > Let's move from an over-engineered approach to an under-engineered one.

The article says this to deride C++s implementation as being too complicated because it supports ranges such as [-3,17] and then promptly goes on to discuss how a modulo based implementation is very biased if the upper end of the range is above 2^31. It's not really clear why the former use case is unimportant but the latter isn't.

It just goes to show that one person's niche use case is another person's main use case. I wish people would just avoid the judgemental term "over engineered" and instead focus on matching appropriate algorithms to appropriate use cases.

<comment><USER3> The comment there is not about [-3, 17] being an obscure _output_ range from a distribution. It is that the distribution must be able to handle a random generator that outputs numbers in that range.

I think there's a small error there in that the output type of _UniformRandomBitGenerator_ must be actually be unsigned. The larger point still stands though. It is possible to write a conforming _UniformRandomBitGenerator_ that has an output range of [3, 17] and it falls on the distribution to handle this.

<comment><USER2> Ah, good call. I did slightly misinterpret what was being said. I think my overall point still stands, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        return min + (max - min) / 2

Oh, you want a random number?

<comment><USER5> Or in O(1):

      return min

Alternatively

      return max

<comment><USER6> > Or in O(1)

You mean in one instruction? The parent comment is O(1). The methods in the article are all O(1) too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In TXR Lisp, the algorithm I put in place basically finds the tightest power- of-two bounding box for the modulus, clisp the pseudo-andom number to that power-of-two range, and then rejects values outside of the modulus.

Example: suppose we wanted values in the range 0 to 11. The tightest power of two is 16, so we generate 4 bit pseudo-random numbers in the 0 to 15 range. If we get a value in the 12 to 15 range, we throw it away and choose another one.

The clipping to the power-of-two bounding box ensures that we reject at most 50% of the raw values.

I don't bother optimizing for small cases. That is, under this 4 bit example, each generated value that is trimmed to 4 bits will be the full output of the PRNG, a 32 bit value. The approach pays off for bignums; the PRNG is called enough times to cover the bits, clipped to the power-of-two box, then subject to the rejection test.

<comment><USER8> Off the top of my head, for a randomly chosen range of size n, you reject a throw with probability 1/4, right?

<comment><USER9> It's unintuitive, but I believe the probability ends up being 1-ln(2) if you think of n as being uniformly random.

<comment><USER8> For any power of two m, then for any range size n (with m/2 < n <= m), the probability of rejection is (m-n)/m. If any n is equally probable, then the average rejection is equal to the rejection of the average n (= 3*m/4): (m/4)/m = 1/4\. This is true for any power of two m. I stand my case!

<comment><USER9> Hm, yeah not sure what I was thinking. Maybe expected number of attempts?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is well-timed. I don't know much about different random number generators but I do know that we recently had an problem where RNG was a serious performance bottleneck.

<comment><USER11> I only skimmed the article, so maybe they said this, but for choosing from a small range, for example 0..51, you can get several of these from a 32 bit random number with this algorithm

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6046918/how-to- generate-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6046918/how-to-generate-a- random-integer-in-the-range-0-n-from-a-stream-of-random- bits/10481147#10481147)

You should be able to run a 64 bit PRNG once and pick at least 8 random cards from a deck.

<comment><USER12> The article's conclusion was that the PRNG generation method used is usually not the bottleneck, but how you take that to get a result is. Don't know if that applies to the algorithm linked, but the author's point was that bottlenecks are more likely to arise in the code that surrounds the PRNG algorithm than in the call to PRNG itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if the "Bitmask with Rejection" method would be more efficient if you sometimes made the mask one bit larger than strictly necessary.

As it is, if you want a number in the range 0..8, you take 4 bits of randomness, giving you a number in 0..15. This is great, but 7/16 (43.75%) of the time you have to try again. This not only means more loop iterations, it also means you discard 4 bits of randomness, which may have been costly to generate.

If instead you took 5 bits of randomness, you'd be able to accept anything in 0..26 and would only have to reject 27..31, which means only rejecting 5/32 (15.625%) of the time.

0..8 is a particularly bad case, though. If you need numbers in the range 0..14, then it's not worth trying to use 5 bits.

</comment><comment><USER14> It seems crazy to me that there's no way to produce unbiased numbers in an arbitrary range without rejection sampling and a loop. Is there a proof of this?

<comment><USER15> I'd expect it's possible by changing the generator at the lowest level, but it makes sense to me that you need a loop if you don't control the underlying generator.

Imagine you want to turn a random number in 1..4 into a random number in 1..3. The original is your only source of randomness, so the rest should be deterministic. Then each outcome in 1..4 has to map to exactly one number in 1..3, but there's no mapping that accepts all of 1..4 while still giving each of 1..3 an equal probability.

<comment><USER14> What if we allow the mapping function to be stateful?

<comment><USER15> I guess you could save up a few bits over repeated calls, but it can't help you always execute the first call with a single round of generation.

<comment><USER14> Could it cap the maximum number of generator calls though? Rejection sampling is technically O(infinity) because you could reject an unbounded number of times. This isn't a problem in practice but it sure is theoretically annoying. With a cap on the maximum number of calls, it would be O(1).

<comment><USER15> I don't think so.

If you want a number in 1..3, and the generator provides numbers from 1..4, and you want a cap n, then you could model it as a generator that provides numbers in 1..4^n. There's never a way to split that space into three equal parts.

You always end up with unwanted extra possibilities that you still need to handle somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Personally I'm a fan of the xoshiro[1] generator I have found it to be faster and give more equiprobable outputs.

[1][http://xoshiro.di.unimi.it](http://xoshiro.di.unimi.it)

<comment><USER17> xoshiro has flaws: [http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/a-quick-look-at- xoshiro256.h...](http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/a-quick-look-at- xoshiro256.html)

<comment><USER18> xoshiro's response: [http://pcg.di.unimi.it/pcg.php](http://pcg.di.unimi.it/pcg.php)

<comment><USER14> Melissa O'Neill's response back: [http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/on-vignas- pcg-critique.html](http://www.pcg-random.org/posts/on-vignas-pcg- critique.html)

<comment><USER17> Thanks. This completely allays my concerns about the PCG's I would actually use.

Edit: And I like that MCG with 64-bit multiplicand that she shows. I might switch to that for Monte Carlo applications.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Challenges and opportunities for better nutrition science - <AUTHOR> https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m2470 <comment><USER2> The title does not mean that they think calories have no impact on nutrition. They state their stance more clearly midway through the paper:

"We need urgently to overturn calorie counting as the mainstay of nutritional advice and prevention of obesity. There is growing consensus that it lacks value as a practical tool in weight management. It is impossible to measure intake accurately, and too many variables influence calorie expenditure to make calorie counting useful. New research in humans suggests our bodies and metabolic rates can behave differently when given identical calories in different contexts."

This seems accurate to me. What we're doing isn't working great, and it seems unlikely that if we had less emphasis on calorie counting that the obesity epidemic would be much worse. So let's try something else, and see if it works better!

<comment><USER3> Having calories on food packages helps though, even if it is reductionist, because it's a good surrogate for foods high in energy, low in nutrients, the kind of food that's designed to be overeaten.

For whole food, I agree that calories don't matter because we can trust our satiety signals. For junk food designed to be overeaten, I find that information quite useful.

Note that I do track my calories periodically.

In spite of popular claims it isn't that hard, technically speaking and it doesn't have to be super accurate.

The problem with calorie counting is one of mentality. Because you end up thinking about how many calories you have left, it ends up draining you emotionally and you can suffer binging episodes due to it. The brain is unpredictable and we can't necessarily control ourselves which is why we can get fat in the first place.

I think everyone should try to measure their calories for educational purposes. If you do, the best app is Cronometer, by far.

But to lose weight you need first of all long term compliance, so you need a strategy that can work long term. Counting calories doesn't work long term if you're too emotional and you can't help to treat those numbers as anything else than just data. Counting calories definitely doesn't work for me.

<comment><USER4> Seconding Cronometer as a good tool; it's the best I've found, supports data export, and isn't full of "social" features that obscure the key feature: easy and accurate calorie tracking. In particular it's database is more accurate than the crowd sourced ones like MyFitnessPal.

<comment><USER3> It's accurate indeed, it has useful info on vitamins and minerals. Some people use it for that and not for calorie counting.

It also makes estimating home cooked meals doable because everything comes measured in grams. You just insert your recipe. Estimating home cooked meals in other apps like Myfitnesspal is super frustrating.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The top 10 companies control over 70% of what we eat and drink and have annual sales larger than the gross domestic product of many countries ... systemic change is needed first and this is likely to require governmental action."

But when the government acts, it acts according to the influence of the companies that its regulatory agencies have been captured by, particular those same top 10 companies that control most of what we eat and drink. This is not a new development. When U.S. nutritional recommendations emerged in the early 1970s they were already being written by these same companies and their predecessors. From my perspective they were already dead wrong, and those recommendations have wrought enormous damage in chronic disease and lives cut short. There is no realistic prospect that this is about to change.

I've been watching as one of my favorite nutrition authors, Nina Teicholz, has been tilting at these windmills via the Nutrition Coalition. They have struggled mightily to present the dissenting science to the people who control these recommendations, and have met with roughly the same success as Don Quixote. Watching them lose their innocence is like watching a slow motion train crash and not being able to do a thing about it.

My preference is to get the government out of the nutrition science business, but that's about as unlikely. Barring that the best approach is to either ignore them or count them as just one more opinion, and to do the research and N=1 experimentation for yourself.

<comment><USER6> > My preference is to get the government out of the nutrition science > business, but that's about as unlikely.

It's critically important that the government is in the nutrition science business and it does nutrition science correctly. Think about all of the ways the government is implicitly taking a stance on nutrition. The farm bill, school lunches, checkoff programs, government cheese, prison meals, snap, and many more.

The problem is one of incentive alignment. For example, the FDA is responsible for both the agricultural industry and the health of the population, which currently are at odds as the agricultural industry producing a lot of junk food.

Democratic systems can work by increasing the transparency of the government and by increasing the education of the voting population.

<comment><USER7> "Democratic systems can work by increasing the transparency of the government and by increasing the education of the voting population." Most of the big problems facing the humanity can be addressed using transparency of government combined with better education for all. To that list I would add, decreasing the role corporate money plays into influencing government and universities. For this to happen we need to rethink Economics ([https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_sho...](https://www.ted.com/talks/kate_raworth_a_healthy_economy_should_be_designed_to_thrive_not_grow)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Sort of a tangent, but I legitimately thought at the start of lockdown that people would lose weight on average because they couldn't go out to eat anymore. It turns out I just completely underestimated how much people eat out, and how quickly they would all switch to just getting take out.

I have friends that would always talk about how we spend way more than them at the grocery store each week. Obviously, they'd tell me, it's because we didn't shop at Aldi. Nope. Turns out it's because we cook and eat at home.

I don't remember where I heard it (maybe Michael Pollen?), but the advice I try to follow is: Eat whatever you want, just make it yourself.

<comment><USER9> > the advice I try to follow is: Eat whatever you want, just make it yourself.

This is categorically bad advice. Anyone that has an obese friend that's into baking knows why. It's very easy to make incredibly unhealthy and calorie- dense food at home.

I understand the sentiment but there is nothing about the process of making your own food that makes you a more healthy person. It all depends on the ingredients and the amount.

It's obviously better to eat healthy takeout every day than it is to cook home made french fries for dinner.

<comment><USER10> I think it comes from the idea that you'll have more knowledge about what you are eating.

There's some truth to that, but cooking for yourself still hides a lot. And it might end up just being a false sense of health.

It's also what stage you are at. Most people can't make soda at home, so eliminating that alone might be a big help for some.

<comment><USER9> > Most people can't make soda at home

Sure, but most people also already know that soda is unhealthy for you, so they can stop buying it and drink water with their food instead. It doesn't require a framework of "home cook everything" to make these small, incremental changes: in fact I'd argue that these changes are easier than what's essentially just a diet by another name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I couldn't disagree more, having used it for myself, and having coached hundreds doing it as a personal trainer.

An individual who employs reasonable practices well can thrive using this modality.

EDIT: IIFYM is "act, measure, adjust" using calorie counting and body weight / size measurements. I understand that there are triggers for some individuals in that statement. Doesn't really change what needs to be done if body weight / size goals need to be addressed. And yes, there may be other manners of going about this, but those will mostly work around directly engaging in the anchors of IIFYM.

</comment><comment><USER12> > New research in humans suggests our bodies and metabolic rates can behave > differently when given identical calories in different contexts.

I wonder what the "a calorie is a calorie" zealots would say about this?

<comment><USER13> > I wonder what the "a calorie is a calorie" zealots would say about this?

I don't think any serious person ever meant this literally. You're misrepresenting them by saying this.

There are a lot of calories in coal but I can't digest it so they aren't the same as the calories in sugar. That's obvious, nobody serious is disputing that.

What everyone I know means when they say this is that if you're eating a massive cheese burger or a huge bag of nuts or a kilo of jerky then don't try to kid yourself that for some elaborate reason (I've worked hard today, they're healthy, I deserve a treat, I walked 100m today, I took the stairs instead of the elevator) that the calories in it don't matter. The calories in it are still calories. That's what they mean.

In practice, for me, in my experience, limiting my calorie intake is the only way to control weight to where I want to be. And that means not kidding yourself that a cheese burger doesn't matter for whatever crazy reason.

<comment><USER14> > I don't think any serious person ever meant this literally. You're > misrepresenting them by saying this.

I believe sibling comments do pretty much say that.

> In practice, for me, in my experience, limiting my calorie intake is the > only way to control weight to where I want to be.

Aren't you doing that by choosing what you eat and not eat, mostly? E.g. "I'm not going eat some carrots instead of that bag of chips while watching TV" instead of "I'm going to only eat 80% of that bag of chips"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Calorie counting functions properly for controlling weight. The physics and chemistry of it is sound. And the empirical proof is the many thousands of professionals who use it successfully: models who need to be a certain shape; football players who need to be heavy so they don't get lifted off their feet by their competitors; or dancers who need to be light so that they can get lifted off their feet by their partners.

I say that up-front because there are a bunch of people out there who think that the basic science of calorie counting is wrong; that there are other hidden factors that keep some people thin and make other people fat.

BUT, what is true--and which this article highlights--is that calorie counting is super hard to do. As a system, it's hard "operate". You can't make mistakes, like forget to enter a meal or a snack, or forget to properly record activity. And it's kind of miserable to live that way. That's probably one reason it's mostly professionals who really do it well.

In software terms, calorie counting has terrible UX. And our food system has bad defaults. The cheapest, most heavily-advertised food is often high in calories per volume.

And of course calorie-counting does nothing for your nutrient intake, which is arguably more important to think about now because foods across the board (i.e. even organic kale) seem to have falling nutrient content.

<comment><USER16> You are simply wrong.

Calorie counting is impossible to do right and meaningful. All that experience you mention is simply a chance and has a tone of confouding variables.

Your internals are not fixed like a machine, parts of the system can be shut down (such as reproductive system) and parts of it can demand more energy at specific times (like immune system) and parts of it can appear (like cancer). There are also other factors like hyperinsulinemia which is more like logistics problem (some parts of body get bunch of energy while others are starving). With this kind of dynamic, relying on calorie counting is simply usless as all people are on various states on this system.

Sure, when you bring calories down to 0 you will certainly di of wasting but that has 0 practical value.

<comment><USER17> Calorie counting is well supported by the studies in which people stay in metabolic wards and are fed a controlled calorie-counted diet. This is close enough to regular life experience to be meaningful, and would disprove your assertion that it's simply chance. You, on the other hand, bring up a lot of fairly extreme situations (immune system fighting an infection, cancer, shutting down the reproductive system), which simply do not happen nearly often enough to be relevant here. So the comment you're replying to is not "simply wrong".

<comment><USER18> It is not close enough to real life. The controlled calorie counted diet given to you by doctor is also designed to contain all iron you need, all vitamins of all kinds you need, fiber and so on. It is not random person food minus whatever that person finds easy or reasonable to kick out.

The people in metabolic wards are also not expected to be performing in work simultaneously, they are not expected to perform family duties or handle stressful situations reasonably. That also makes it massive difference against normal life where needs like this contribute to peoples failure to keep perfect diet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There is physics supporting calorie in, calorie out. However, there is also pharmacokinetics to consider...if your calories are a sugary solution like juice, Coke, beer, etc, they will be absorbed into the bloodstream much more quickly, spiking blood sugar and leading to rapid storage in fat cells.

Contrast that with the same calories from a lean chicken breast, it's going to be hours until that's fully digested and absorbed, meanwhile it's much more filling and prevents more calories from being eaten. Also because its protein and not sugar, your body metabolizes it differently and it is not going to be stored as efficiently.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is a lot of interesting points in this article--not just about demoting the calorie as nutritional advice--such as the lack of funding for basic nutritional studies and the role of large food companies.

</comment><comment><USER20> I skimmed the contents, but I don't get any alternative to the standard calories counting.

It's the only way to quantify the intake without revolutionising the food industry packaging, or am I missing something?

<comment><USER6> Weight watchers will allow you to scan a barcode of some food and it will tell you how many "points" it is, and someone in weight watchers has a limited number of "points" they can consume in a day.

This is an example of an existing solution to quantifying intake without adjusting packaging.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're just calorie counting, you can certainly have success, but it's not a bad idea to maintain some idea of where you stand in terms of your consumption of fat, carbs, and protein.

If you calorie count and generally try to stay around 33/33/33 in terms of percentage of macronutrient consumption by the end of the day, it's hard to go of course.

It's a course set of rules, but sometimes keeping it simple as opposed to precise (since the pursuit of precision involves complicated and likely to be overturned theories) makes it easier to embark on that journey to begin with. I can't tell you how many people I know who say that want to lose a few pounds but reject calorie counting because they heard that's not the right way to do it. They rarely find an alternative so they never get started.

Im saying that as someone who has gained and lost significant weight to achieve goals (lifting, running, maintenance) at various times.

PS: If you do decide to diet, regardless of what you do - cut out alcohol consumption if that's currently a thing for you, and you'll be amazed at how effortlessly weight comes off, even if you don't really make many changes to other parts of your diet.

</comment><comment><USER22> I believe it's more urgent to get rid of "serving" as measurement.I recently tried to build up a dash diet shopping list and was sent on a wild hunt for what is a serving exactly (turns out a serving is different depending on the food and measured in different cups and other imperial units).

Most dash diet books (or others) I read spend 200 pages out of 250 explaining basic useless nutrition factoids then get on a "sample week menus" that aren't practical at all if all you want to know is "how much pounds of this and that should I eat per day or per week ?".

I should open a blog about how to get that (easy recipes, easy shopping list), would be a nice journey.

<comment><USER6> It's a little annoying, but you can do the math with a spreadsheet and a scale. Also many online resources has nutritional information for an item per 100g, and adjusting measurements of weight to other measurements of weight is much easier than adjusting measurements of volume to measurements of weight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess the holy grail is to get to the point where you can take some lab tests (genetic?) and a doctor can tell you: "eat this kind of diet, avoid these kinds of foods, and you'll be healthy".

Obviously it would take a lot to get there, but having a few high quality studies that can give a lot of people at least some advice (without tons of qualifiers and weasel words) would be a huge help.

This might cost ~50B, but that seems worth it.

<comment><USER17> This is kind of funny, but we're already there! Take 0 tests, eat a balanced diet with plenty of vegetables, don't eat too much, avoid processed meats and junk food and the rest of it, exercise, and you'll be healthy, you've heard it yourself already too. How many people do you know who'd actually do it if a doctor said something like that to them? You kinda manage to both under- and over-estimate the current abilities of food science at the same time, and if people don't already do the things that we pretty well know for sure, an extra $50B won't really change any of that, that's a people problem.

<comment><USER23> If people took a high-tech test and were told that that advice was personalized, imagine how much better compliance would be though.

<comment><USER17> So like a very expensive placebo?

<comment><USER10> Not quite.

Right now there's a lot of confusion. Is gluten a problem for me, or dairy, or fat, or sugar, or alcohol, or caffiene? It's easy to get overwhelmed.

If you eliminate everything that _might_ be bad for you, there's not a lot left. There's a lot of value in specificity because it's actionable.

<comment><USER17> I suppose I just fundamentally don't agree with you about the confusion existing in the first place. Here's my understanding. All of those things are fine, in moderation, unless you have a specific medical condition against something. Except for alcohol: that's just bad for you in proportion to the amount you drink. And that's already with existing research, as far as I know, I might not like it but I don't get overwhelmed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I thought we already knew that caloric contents are context dependent? Or are we living in some strange dietary multiverse?

Weight gain, weight loss, muscle gain, muscle loss, are operations almost independent from each other. There's a lot of huckstering out there that burning fat and gaining muscle are somehow interlinked or "oppose" eachother such that while you do one, you automatically undo the other. But this is just as ridiculous as the constant lack of good information on nutrition.

A few days ago we had that article on how Vegan diet tends to have people eating garbage. This is again because eating healthy and avoiding eating X have nothing to do with one another, but in the marketing of things we equate veganism with uber healthy eating.

At any rate, we need a comprehensive explanation of how the body works at all stages, and how does nutrition and exercise impact the body _at each of these stages_. Once you enter ketosis for example, rules change. Something to consider.

Food for thought.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but I honestly couldn't disagree more with the overall premise with regards to losing weight. Yes, nutrition is certainly vastly more complicated than the single data point calories provide, but the vast majority of people (myself included) will never, ever be able to ascertain that knowledge much less be able to interpret them in a way useful for their own health benefit.

For me, calorie counting was a revelation. I'd tried eating less and exercising more without much success, and then I read a simple explanation of calorie counting and realized the whole thing could be simplified into a simple math problem. If I just kept track of my inputs (food) and roughly knew my outputs I could control my weight. Once I focused on that I lost ~45lbs in a year.

</comment><comment><USER26> The obese and overweight will see these headlines and keep eating 6,000 kcal/day thinking "See! It doesn't matter."

<comment><USER27> Anecdotal, but a few overweight people I've known have been terrible at estimating how much they eat.

Usually they'd skip over/forget very hefty 'snacks', or think a portion is a portion, while scooping up a small family's serving onto their plate.

The really sad thing is when they don't have a coping mechanism for sadness except for eating, which leads to them being sad over body image issues. It's a terribly vicious cycle.

<comment><USER28> > Anecdotal, but a few overweight people I've known have been terrible at > estimating how much they eat.

That's pretty much the thrust of the article. Calorie counting works in theory, but evidently the average person finds it too hard to follow (either miscalculating, overestimating, forgetting to track or just giving up).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Less p-hacking would be a start.

</comment><comment><USER30> I've lost weight multiple times using calorie counting. It's literally the only thing that works for me.

<comment><USER31> A theory I've heard is that _any_ kind of diet is useful for losing weight, because it forces you to think more carefully about what you're eating.

But ditto, I've lost 50lbs twice in my life and both times were basically just via calorie counting.

<comment><USER32> Likewise, in my adventures in power lifting and body building, I gained ~25-40 lbs on several occasions. The only way to do this reliably for me was to count calories.

Once you establish your basic metabolic rate, it simply works. Yes, it is a pain in the ass. Yes, it's a lot of effort and discipline.. but the results are predictable and reliable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> as

</comment><comment><USER34> I eat 5000 calories worth of sawdust a day and can't gain weight.

<comment><USER35> Insoluble fiber is not included in calorie counts on nutritional labels.

<comment><USER36> As I understand it, what's actually subtracted from the calorie counts on nutritional labels is a very rough estimate of the number of calories that aren't actually available because they're stuff like insoluble fiber, based mostly on the type of food. So it's not necessarily that accurate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> This seems so condescending. Maybe it wasn't their intent.

"But obtaining a mere $2m-$4m (£1.6m-£3m; €1.8m-€3.6m) for a nutrition study is a lifetime aspiration for most nutrition scientists".

<comment><USER38> Why does that seem condescending?

<comment><USER37> CDCs entire "preventing global disease" division is $450M in funding.... For example.</comment></comment></comment>


Wire (E2EE IM and Voip) Now on Linux - <AUTHOR> https://wire.com/download <comment><USER2> This looks like a great service, but I have to wonder how long it will be around if it's completely free, fully encrypted, and there's no ads.

<comment><USER3> Vendor lock in. I will not touch any IM services that is not completly open (client and server) and federated. I am looking for matrix.org that uses Olm [1] for E2E encryption.

[1] [https://matrix.org/git/olm](https://matrix.org/git/olm)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How many users per server? - <AUTHOR>

I understand that there are a lot of variables involved, like:
- The service you provide and what your users do - Your hardware
But still it would be interesting to discuss your personal experience with this.
For example, I'm currently developing a kind-of online CMS service. Atm I'm able to support around 250-300 concurrent users using a modest dual-core server (which performs similar to an Amazon EC2 'core'), horizontal scale is almost linear. My current goal is to achieve a rate of 1000 concurrent users on a cheap EC2 instance.
As another example, 'somewhere' I've read that Facebook receives around 100 million of concurrent users. 'Somewhere else' I-ve read that thay are using around 200,000 servers. So you could think that the efficiency they've achieved is around 500 users per server. <comment><USER2> Obviously this depends a lot on your stack: Node.js is going to be your best bet though. Sinatra + Unicorn can drive some pretty nice reqs/second, but if what you need is actual "concurrency" as opposed to just reqs/second performance, go Node. Express benchmarks that I ran a few months ago were showing ~7k requests per second, and I've heard claims of well over 10k.

Depending on your scale, your DB could be another potential bottleneck. Heroku provides hosted PostgreSQL DB's as a standalone service, and their performance has served me well in the past; could be worth looking into for you. Also, of course there's the Mongo in the room: I've heard mixed reviews, and I've never employed it in production myself so I have no wisdom to impart regarding it. Just be aware of your options :)

</comment><comment><USER3> What is the bottleneck you're hitting at 300 concurrent users? Is everything hosted on a single box? You might see better performance if you had a separate database and app server if CPU or disk I/O is the bottleneck.

</comment><comment><USER4> 1000 concurrent users? Are you prematurely optimizing? Very very very few sites get that many concurrent users. I own a site that gets 1500 visitors a day, and usually there's 12-15 concurrent users.</comment>


Ask HN: Is the HN front page rendering for mobile? - <AUTHOR> 2 mobile browsers on my phone are showing the homepage desktop style. Anyone else? <comment><USER2> Another thread has already been opened: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351571](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20351571)</comment>


PSA - Don't tweet photos of your credit/debit cards - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/#!/NeedADebitCard <comment><USER2> Jeez, I couldn't believe it until I saw it for myself. Are people really that dumb?

<comment><USER3> Or, if you please, are the current card systems that dumb? Yes, they are.</comment></comment>


Christmas Geotagging - <AUTHOR> http://www.tommycollison.com/blog/2014/12/24/christmas-geotagging

<comment><USER2> Does anyone here remember those huge catalogs of everyone's home address? I recall they were full of yellow and white pages.

I'm not sure what the point is here...if someone knows your name they can often simply look up your home address online (or in an anachronism).

Even _social security numbers_ are available online for people who have died: [http://ssdmf.info/](http://ssdmf.info/)

I can sympathize with the idea that people should be able to live private lives, but what Instagram is doing doesn't seem particularly notable.

<comment><USER3> The argument isn't "Instagram is publishing people's locations," it's "People are allowing lots of services, Instagram among them, to publish their location, and it's harder to participate in modern society while reliably opting out of all of them."

It used to be the case that you could call up the phone company and say, please leave me out of the phone book. It still is. But there are so many more ways to learn your address today, and as always with security, it only takes one oversight to be compromised.

There's nothing unique about what Instagram is doing. They're one of several services other than the phone company that can leak your location if you're not being constantly vigilant. They're _not_ notable, and that's the real story.

<comment><USER4> actually, it's really easy to avoid publishing your location. Turn off GPS.

This precludes Google Maps usage, though, which is frustrating to say the least.

I share frustrations with Facebook pinging for my location on my phone when I'm not doing anything linked to my location. But here, on Instagram, there's a very obvious "Add to Photo Map" button (which is off by default!), so these people opted in to this.

<comment><USER5> _This precludes Google Maps usage, though, which is frustrating to say the least._

You can use Google Maps and its GPS feature without a Google account. Then Google knows where your phone is, and you know where you are, but Google doesn't know who you are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've got a friend who works as a correctional officer in a German "open prison". When the inmates leave for home on weekends some of them are forbidden from consuming alcohol, drugs, contact certain people, visit certain areas.

According to my friend the most effective tool to check up on those inmates is Facebook. Quite a few of them just can't resist to post drunk party pictures, brag about stuff they shouldn't be doing, etc.

Another way they use Facebook is to detect if someone's using a mobile phone - which are forbidden on the compound: Simply check the inmates' profiles and see which inmates who are not on leave are online.

There's that quote that says that Facebook made possible what KGB, Stasi and the likes couldn't ever dream to achieve. So yeah ...

<comment><USER7> "There's that quote that says that Facebook made possible what KGB, Stasi and the likes couldn't ever dream to achieve." \- you only have to look at who originally funded [1] Facebook to see why.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/25-cutting-edge-companies- fun...](http://www.businessinsider.com/25-cutting-edge-companies-funded-by- the-central-intelligence-agency-2012-8)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> So Instagram geotags photos when the user agrees to enable geotagging. And photos on public feeds are public.

I'm not seeing how this is unexpected or newsworthy. It just sounds like there are folks out there who don't consider their location to be a secret. Folks who do are able to communicate that by denying the geotagging permission.

<comment><USER3> How many folks who answer "yes" to geotagging actually know what they're saying yes to? Are there any who say "yes" because they click yes to all dialog boxes?

How many of them intend to publicize the location of pretty pictures they take while traveling, but haven't thought about publicizing their home address?

Note that even Foursquare, bastion of not considering your location a secret, fuzzes home addresses/GPS locations if you somehow decide it's a good idea to check in to your home, even though they publish exact locations of everywhere else you go.

I'm sure there are a number of users who are intentionally geotagging all their pictures, and thinking about the fact they do so every time they hit publish. The author probably just doesn't expect that that number is 100%.

<comment><USER9> This was (or maybe still is) one of the most troubling things about Twitter's location services feature. When someone tweets and chooses to share their location, the label appears something vague like "Pittsburgh" or "New York City".

They may not be aware that the precise coordinates of where the tweet was sent, possibly narrowing down not just where they are, but even what room they are in, is shared with anyone and everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think geotagging, like other image metadata, is far less obvious to the general public than it should be because the location information isn't directly visible most of the time; maybe if cameras that geotagged photos showed their GPS coordinates in the same way that timestamps are shown, people would get the idea.

It's funny how many people will think you're a "hacker" and be very shocked if you reply to a geotagged photo they casually sent with a map pointing to exactly where it was taken. :-)

<comment><USER10> The default Photos app on iOS displays the location directly above the timestamp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is actually a pretty rudimentary use of Instagram's location features. On Friday I am releasing a site where you can monitor specific physical addresses for Instagram posts and get alerts in realtime - regardless of who posts them. Right now I am working on some pre-built feeds for celebrity homes (see inside celebrity holiday parties etc), major concerts and sports events, and news events (protests in New York etc).

Because Instagram geotags by default, it poses some really interesting privacy challenges and tradeoffs. If you are privacy sensitive, shutoff Instagram's access to your location.

</comment><comment><USER12> It should be noted that it's _extremely_ easy to scrape geotag information or any public hashtag feed via the Instagram API.

[http://instagram.com/developer/](http://instagram.com/developer/)

EDIT: Here's a very quick map of all the #tree tweets on Instagram in the past hour or so: [http://i.imgur.com/D66r3Ui.png](http://i.imgur.com/D66r3Ui.png)

</comment><comment><USER13> You could probably easily tell where anyone lives with the geotagging feature just by looking at breakfast and dinner photos.

</comment><comment><USER14> This site pairs geotagged photos with Google Street View. It's heartwarmingly creepy. By default, right now it's following #christmas, but here's the view of #tree:

[http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/?q=tree](http://sm.rutgers.edu/thebeat/?q=tree)

</comment><comment><USER15> So do people with numbers listed in the phonebook.

</comment><comment><USER16> and for some reason instagram always has to grab my GPS location when I open it. hmmm gtfo.</comment>


Tell HN: Entrepreneurs Anonymous - <AUTHOR> Link - https://blizkreeg.typeform.com/to/A79l8I
For the past year, I've been bootstrapping my startup full-time. More recently, I've had to take up a full-time job again due to diminishing finances and work on my startup on the side.
I'll admit, at times it gets really, really hard. I feel at wits end and wish there was a support group outside of family who I can reach out to.
I am starting this to gauge if there's interest in forming a local "club" of sorts for everyone who identifies with this. I know I'll benefit from it and I imagine there are many others. <comment><AUTHOR> Link to Typeform for anyone interested: [https://blizkreeg.typeform.com/to/A79l8I](https://blizkreeg.typeform.com/to/A79l8I)

I'm based in SF and would like to meet local entrepreneurs but if you're in another city, I'll share emails of others in your city.</comment>


Those litigious men in their flying machines - <AUTHOR> https://hushkit.net/2020/05/16/those-litigious-men-in-their-flying-machines-the-wright-brothers-why-the-us-wasnt-ready-for-war/ <comment><USER2> Patents have generally failed in their intended purpose. Edison probably spent half his career in court:

1\. being sued for patent infringement

2\. suing others for patent infringement

3\. being hired by companies to find workarounds for other patents

4\. being an expert witness in a patent case

The patent system should be abolished.

<comment><USER3> Wouldn't that just result in large companies having a even bigger advantage over the little guys?

<comment><USER2> No, it would be a lesser advantage. Patents are only useful to large companies, because filing them and suing is an expensive and complex process. For small companies, a patent is not that useful because the larger company can afford to steamroll them in court.

As for putting patent trolls out of business, I doubt any will shed a tear.

<comment><USER4> A small company with a valuable patent can rapidly attract large friends.

<comment><USER2> "XXXXX with a computer."

"YYYYY on the internet."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The patent system should be abolished. Here are a number of (convincing) arguments which refute the central premises of the patent system: "The Case Against Patents" : [https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/wp/2012/2012-035.p...](https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/wp/2012/2012-035.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER6> The title aludes to the movie titled "Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines", a comedy I found entertaining both as a child and adult: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Magnificent_Men_in_the...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Magnificent_Men_in_their_Flying_Machines)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interestingly Lawrence Hargrave, the Australian aviation pioneer, opposed patents:

"Workers must root out the idea [that] by keeping the results of their labours to themselves[,] a fortune will be assured to them. Patent fees are much wasted money. The flying machine of the future will not be born fully fledged and capable of a flight for 1000 miles or so. Like everything else it must be evolved gradually. The first difficulty is to get a thing that will fly at all. When this is made, a full description should be published as an aid to others. Excellence of design and workmanship will always defy competition."

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be interesting if, instead of a patent meaning "you can do whatever you want including preventing anyone from doing anything with this at all, if you so please", it only meant "you get X% royalties from anything anyone makes with this, but they are otherwise free to make those things".

</comment><comment><USER9> "Intellectual property protection and national security have long been intertwined. For as long as espionage has existed, spies and agents have tried to steal and copy foreign technology."

What I want to know is:

 _" Which country copied/stole/appropriated (use whatever languaging makes you feel comfortable) the wheel from which other country, first?"_ <g>

"Intellectual Property Theft", you gotta love it...

It's amazing, because all of Silicon Valley stands on the shoulders of pioneers; on the shoulders of giants, but not once in those silly interviews of the latest successful founder, who's only a kid, do they ever, ever _thank all of the people that made all of the infrastructure_ that made their present day business able to function... people including, but not limited to: Boole, Tesla, Turing, Shannon, Von Neumann, Atanasoff, and others too numerous to count.

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

Also, most so-called intellectual property "secrets" \-- usually appear in some form or other in academic papers _way before they are snapped up and patented by some multinational company_ , some multinational company who is usually not the original researcher or researchers.

Which brings me to another other point... usually the multinational company profits more, way more, orders of magnitude more, than the original inventors/researchers, who might not (in some but not all cases) be compensated at all...

So now the next question is, _who stole what from whom, when?_

a) Did some other country, i.e., China (or whoever) steal intellectual property from another "Country" (which are actually corporations/corporate interests in that other country)?

or

b) Did the corporation that was "stole from" \-- steal that intellectual property from the original inventors/researchers? (You know, via legal means, paying someone a pittance and calling it a "fair deal" is still stealing...)

or

c) Did the original inventors/researchers steal their idea from ideas that were already floating about in the academic community and in previous academic papers, in that field of study?

 _Who stole what from who, when?_

?

That's what I want to know.

And I also want to know which country stole the wheel from which other country, first... <g>

</comment><comment><USER10> There's Stephan Kinsella's point once again.

</comment><comment><USER11> In a post-patent world, success is driven by the ability to blow large sums of money buying market share. We were lucky to have an era where there was enough venture capital to do that. Thank Softbank and the Saudi Arabia Sovereign Wealth Fund for being the suckers who made that possible.

In Silicon Valley, up until about 2000, venture capitalists wanted a strong patent position before funding something. As a group, VCs made money from the 1970s to 2000 or so. In the 2000s, with the push for growth, failures cost more and VCs, as a group, lost money. Not sure about the 2010s.</comment>


Panorama's (YC S13) advice for first time founders and YC applicants - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/founder-stories-panoramas-yc-s13-advice-for-first-time-founders-and-yc-applicants <comment><USER2> Great article! I especially like the comment below which is very true in our experience (W '13): YC: What's been the most surprising thing about YC?

"How much everyone really cared about us. You have a lot of mentors and friends and supporters who are all helpful, but the YC partners had this astronomical degree of kindness toward us."

</comment><comment><USER3> This is really great piece of advice. Especially for first time founders. Even I am a first time founder and can understand how important all the emotional and other help is useful. Few days earlier we were on the HN's first page. and received really great feedback. All the community's love was really a moral booster for us. The community believed in us even before we did. The love we receive in the beginning is always indebted.

</comment><comment><USER4> +1 for:

What's the hardest part about doing a startup so far? - "Figuring out what's most important."

How do you figure out what's important? - "We mercilessly prioritize."</comment>


San Francisco man fights eviction after rent increase from $1,800 to $8,000 - <AUTHOR> http://abc13.com/realestate/man-fights-eviction-after-400-percent-rent-increase/1401148/ <comment><USER3> I suspect I have the unpopular opinion, but I don't see this as an especially big deal. Yes, I understand this is an especially sensitive issue for SFers. And yes, it sucks for the guy. Renting has its perks, but this is part of the risk of renting; you're living on someone else's property. Repeating that-- it's THEIRS, not yours. If you have no current contract (lease), why should they be required to rent something to you under terms you like? Where else does this occur? When some business raises rates, it is the exception, not the rule, that you're "grandfathered" in to a previous rate.

I get that having to move and find a new place to live is a bigger deal than if McDonald's raises the price of a cheeseburger by a dime, and that's why there are some protections in place (requirements of notice, an eviction process, etc.), but there is no indications that those aren't in play here.

<comment><USER4> "Renting has its perks"

Do you mean renting or rent-seeking? I fail to see how renting has perks.

<comment><USER3> There are lots of them. The biggies:

Mobility (i.e., not being tied down to the property).

Either a) not tying up a lot of money on housing (assuming outright purchase or large down payment) or b) cheaper monthly payment than a mortgage (small down payment).

Outsourced maintenance (although there are good and bad landlords in this regard).

If there weren't advantages, renting wouldn't be as common as it is.

<comment><USER5> I agree it has some advantages, but citing commonality seems weird when it's increasingly unlikely for new to be homeowners to afford a home in cities like London, SF, etc. I doubt most people waste thousands of dollars each month for the ability to relocate quickly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This appears to be a case where the landlord wants the tenant out, perhaps to live in the unit himself, or perhaps to sell it as a vacant unit, but for various legal reasons it's impossible or unattractive to take the simple path of saying, "I decline to rent to you anymore", and the landlord instead is going with the effectively equivalent option of raising the rent to approximately infinity.

I don't believe they expect the current or a future tenant to actually pay $8000/month. It's conceivable that they might lower it to far below $8000 as soon as the current tenant is gone, and then rent it out to someone else -- maybe the landlord just doesn't like this tenant.

Of course, none of this is allowed in a rent-controlled unit, and all pre-1979 apartments in San Francisco are rent-controlled, so my guess is that this hundred-year-old multi-unit building is actually a set of condos, and the owner of one had been renting it out to this tenant; in such a situation, rent control is generally not in effect, for the same reasons it's not in effect when one is renting out a single-family house.

<comment><USER7> Hmm yes my first question was "does the rent contract stipulate he can raise rents? or is it month to month so he can change it whenever he wants"? (assuming its a male landlord, sorry ladies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> In no way am I defending the landlord, and I know nothing about the rents in that area of SF, but the news clip fails to state when the last increase was. It also doesn't mention how large the apartment is, or what a comparable rental in that area would be.

The renter says he's been living there a long time. If the rent hasn't increased in 20 years, there may be an expectation of an increase at some point. That doesn't mean it needs to be 400%, but if the renter has been 'saving' on rent while the rest of the market increases, this may have been inevitable.

At the same time, I'm surprised that there are no limits to rent increase amounts.

<comment><USER9> In California if you raise rent by more then 10% you have to give 60 days notice. This article didn't mention if the landlords notice was properly done.

<comment><USER8> But even still, a 60 day notice on a 400% increase isn't much if you've been living in the residence for 20 years.

I'd find it interesting to have a 60 day + 2 weeks per year of residence or something like that. The longer you stay in a place, the harder it can be to leave.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My landlord recently put up a rental for $9,500/mo. The backstory is interesting: he told me someone had been staying at the place paying $700/mo. He cut a deal with that tenant where the tenant moves to a much smaller unit and instead of paying $700, only paying $300/mo. So overall, tenant gets to pay less and the landlord has a chance to make additional 5-6K/mo.

<comment><USER7> Wow, seems something's a bit "out of whack" or "outdated" when a landlord wakes up and realizes "wait, I could charge 10x the rent!" :) I assume he could't just evict the tenant because of some kind of tenancy laws or something?

<comment><USER10> Yup. Rent control laws in SF don't allow that. That's the flip side of rent control: you have people paying _a lot_ less than market price. Or another way to look at it, people moving into the city are subsidizing costs for existing tenants resulting in higher market prices--which depending on your perspective, could be seen as unfair to new tenants or fair for old tenants.

<comment><USER11> The costs of being a landlord don't change that much from year to year - especially in SF where property taxes are capped by prop 13.

New tenants aren't "subsidizing" anything. Whats happening is that landlords are making a killing on rapidly rising rents, with relatively fixed costs.

<comment><USER10> Landlords making a killing and new tenants subsidizing aren't mutually exclusive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We socialize certain types of goods in the United States - roads, police, schools and mostly (though not always) the fire department. Other goods, like healthcare, while not socialized in the United States, are regulated (in many other countries of course, health care is in the same column as police/roads/schools).

Singapore is an interesting example of a country where they've mostly socialized housing to great success.

You can still buy property if you are very wealthy, but 80%+ of the population lives in a government (heavily) subsidized "HDB" \- Housing Development Block - basically massive apartment blocks, that the government builds by the 10s of thousands. You then get a "99 year lease" to the property, though, by the time the property starts to get around 40-50 years old (HDBs have only been around that long) - the government will usually build much nicer, newer buildings, and give the occupants of the old building first right of refusal of (collectively) moving out of the old one and signing a new 99 year lease (Known as Selective Enbloc Redevelopment Scheme) - it remains to be seen if there will be any leases that ever expire.

As a result, property is affordable to all citizens, though if you are less well off, there is a good chance you will be living with other family members sharing rent - Singapore is a much more family oriented country, so this is normal and accepted. Also, if you are price sensitive, you might chose to live in a somewhat more distant property (known as New Estate, as compared to Mature Estate that has lots of shops, transit, built up around it).

And, then if you strike it rich - and don't like the HDB lifestyle, you can go buy a Condo (has lawn, pool, security, gym, usually nicer architecture) for 2x what a similar HDB would have cost you.

Singapore is a fabulously expensive country for expats to live in - <USER2> they've done a great job (amazing job) of keeping it _very_ affordable for citizens. Transportation, Food, Housing, Healthcare Insurance - all of the essentials have had a lot of work put into them to keep everything cheap, cheap for the citizenry.

<comment><USER13> This "socialized apartments" would not work easily in the U.S.

In California, the highest tax bracket is 13.3% and it's 39.6% as the highest Federal income tax bracket, for a total of:

13.3% + 39.6% = 52.9%

The top income tax bracket in California (combined) is nearly 53%.

Could California build socialized apartments to satisfy demand? I.e. are taxes high enough to provide the funds to do so?

The highest tax bracket in Singapore is 20%. (See [https://www.iras.gov.sg/irashome/Individuals/Locals/Working-...](https://www.iras.gov.sg/irashome/Individuals/Locals/Working- Out-Your-Taxes/Income-Tax-Rates/))

Singapore is able to socialize apartments by taking only 20% of their citizens' money. If you think about it, their 20% top bracket:

\- pays for all their roads, schools, bridges, etc. _AND_ \- pays for huge apartment communities

There is absolutely no way our state will ever be efficient enough to socialize housing. We're taxed at almost 3X what Singapore is and we cannot even manage paying for all our roads, schools, bridges, etc.

<comment><USER12> Fair point about taxes - but, to be clear, I'm sure the HDBs are sold at a profit compared to the cost of building them - but there is no land speculation (they are 99 year leases), and housing speculation has a zillion dials to reduce it from happening with HDBs (you have to live in them for a while before you can sell them, you have to pay extra taxes if you are not a citizen)

And all this came about because in the 1950s, the housing situation in Singapore was abysmal, possibly one of the worst in the world. Government decided to take a leadership role in ensuring that their citizens had housing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was at school participating in a legal clinic I had lots of clients facing eviction and we had plenty of tricks to use. Most popular was to demand a jury trial, which could take a month or two to organize, during which time the tenant wasn't paying rent and so could save enough to move.

The basic procedure:

[http://www.courts.ca.gov/27723.htm](http://www.courts.ca.gov/27723.htm)

<comment><USER15> Kind of shocked to hear about this happening at a "legal clinic". I'm familiar with the business structure behind these types of programs and they're invariably seedy characters involved with a paralegal group and lots of cold calling. Clogging up the courts so you can avoid paying rent... _shrug_

<comment><USER14> Who said anything about going to court? It's a simple delay tactic to give the client time to save enough money for a deposit on a new place. By the time the court date is even set, they have already moved. Know that the client by this point is probably locked out of their apartment. Not all landlords act legally. By initiating legal proceedings the client can get back in, getting a place to sleep so that they can continue working.

As for seedy, this isn't ambulance chasing. This is law students helping the poorest of the poor. Nobody ever cold calls anyone (Where did you see that?). There is no profit to be had. Most legal clinics are funded by law schools and similar institutions. And I say "funded" as in they give them a place to meet clients. Our clinic moved around, seeing people in church basements and community centres after hours. The licensed lawyers we worked with all acted pro bono. This is poor people being treated very badly and needing the help of lawyers they cannot afford.

<comment><USER15> The business pitch is usually "delay evictions now". The cold caller will get a list of properties that have recently gone into foreclosure. They call and offer to delay your eviction by 3-5 months as long as you pay them $400/month. Then they have paralegals file paperwork with the courts to contest the eviction. Basically they're using due process to delay being evicted and instead of paying their landlord they're paying the cold caller. I first saw this scam being run by a group of former drug dealers.

I would complain to the state bar about your legal clinic behaving unethically. The whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

<comment><USER14> That's not a legal clinic. That's a law firm or, i suspect, a referral service (a clearing house) that farms cases out to cutthroats. Legal clinics don't take fees. Clients don't pay and cash settlements almost never happen. Clinics are generally staffed by law students. Complain away. Every local bar promotes clinics as a means of serving indigent communities. None would consider the assertion of a client's right to a jury trial as any sort of wrongdoing.

[http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/clinical/clinics/housing-law- cli...](http://hls.harvard.edu/dept/clinical/clinics/housing-law-clinic-lsc/)

"The bulk of the clinic's work consists of litigation in the Boston Housing Court, defending evictions and prosecuting affirmative cases to improve housing conditions and to prevent utilities from being shut off."

And in california:

[http://www.calbar.ca.gov/AboutUs/CenteronAccesstoJustice.asp...](http://www.calbar.ca.gov/AboutUs/CenteronAccesstoJustice.aspx)

[http://one-justice.org/](http://one-justice.org/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Can San Francisco just hurry up and build some more high rises already?

<comment><USER6> We don't need highrises. We could cut the cost of housing in half by increasing the supply by 30% (i.e., around 110,000 units), and we could do that by converting 6% of the city's single-family houses into six-story apartment buildings. The other 94% of the houses could stay the same, and no other plot of land would need to change. No buildings taller than six stories would be necessary.

Sources: [http://experimental- geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employmen...](http://experimental- geography.blogspot.com/2016/05/employment-construction-and-cost-of-san.html) [http://spothopping.com/sfhpn.html](http://spothopping.com/sfhpn.html)

<comment><USER17> The real trick is convincing the families in those 6% single-family homes to move.

You'd have an easier time rezoning old industrial areas into residential, like they did with Mission Bay.

<comment><USER6> _> The real trick is convincing the families in those 6% single-family homes to move._

No way; that would be a piece of cake. The only reason it's not happening now is that zoning law forbids it. If that were changed, homeowners would be falling over themselves to sell their land to apartment developers; it would be a giant windfall for them. In fact, you'd have to charge a steep development fee to reduce that windfall to something modest in order to ensure that only 6% volunteer to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reddit has good discussion of this story: [https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4pt2hu/san_fr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/4pt2hu/san_francisco_man_fights_eviction_after_rent/)

To summarize: it sucks for anyone to lose their home, but in this particular case the details are a bit confusing (what about rent control? doesn't eviction take a while? etc.).

</comment><comment><USER19> Could I ask why HN crowd supports rent control? It seems we are going against our own interests. 90% of flats are not on market, that makes remaining 10% very expensive.

<comment><USER6> This is a bit like asking, "So, what does everyone here think about gun control and abortion rights?"

<comment><USER19> My impression is that most people on HN moved to SF recently and do not qualify for rent control. And it is not the same as your examples, I dont see a campaign that EVERYONE should get rent controlled apartment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I honestly wonder if anyone will pay that? If the landlord ends up having to rent it for something less, isn't this basically just using the rent to force out the tenant?

Or on the other hand, maybe the landlord has someone lined up already to pay $8000 a month. Either way, this is pretty insane. That kind of insanity is what just made me leave California entirely.

<comment><USER21> I was also curious about exactly this.

This unit also was listed for $8k/month and is about a block away: [http://www.apartments.com/1818-mason-st-san-francisco- ca/3pq...](http://www.apartments.com/1818-mason-st-san-francisco-ca/3pqsgff/)

<comment><USER6> That's a just-remodeled 3-bedroom fully-furnished unit with high-end appliances and all utilities included -- even TV and broadband. It's hardly comparable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In Germany, private rent contracts (i.e. the renter is not a business) can be raised max. 20% over three years, and the new rent may not be over the average rent in the area ("Mietspiegel").

400% rent hikes is insane.

</comment><comment><USER23> it's interesting</comment>


Let's not get greedy with these bubblicious seed rounds - <AUTHOR> http://www.humbledmba.com/lets-not-get-greedy-with-these-bubblicious-se

<comment><USER2> Alternately, when things slow down again, who wins? The people who have the lowest burn rate, the most cash in the bank, and the ability to turn profitable. Saying "well what if things have gone sour when you need to go back out for your next round" disregards the fact that investors will turn the screws on you then regardless of whether you gave them a good deal this time around or not.

</comment><comment><USER3> smart words. Especially about supporting the VCs/Angels who are putting out for the founders. The contraction will occur, who do you want to still be standing? Help them help you succeed and all will be well.

In 25 years of consulting/contracting software dev it's always paid off to not let my rates slide up to the maximum the market will bear. MSuster's "high side of normal" kind of applied there as well.

When things slow down again who do you think gets work? The people who pushed clients for all the market would bear or the ones who let rates slide up a bit, but didn't go crazy pushing for the maximum last cent. Yep, the latter.</comment>