What I learned from spending a year as a solo machine learning researcher - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@DavidMack/what-i-learned-from-spending-a-year-as-a-solo-machine-learning-researcher-7f2266203d94 <comment><USER2> Thanks David for sharing your experience.</comment>


Show HN: Minimal Worker-Job Queues in Your Golang Apps - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kc1116/goqueue <comment><AUTHOR> Hey guys, I wrote a package in Go to get you started with simple workers and jobs backed by Redis. Tell me what you think so far and what I can do to improve. Thanks for the feed back!</comment>


Verity Stob on Rust - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/11/27/in_rust_we_trust_stob/ <comment><USER2> Bit kitschy, but I actually really enjoyed the style of this post.</comment>


Lobbyist claims Monsanto  Glyphosate safe to drink, then refuses to drink it - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/03/27/tv-lobbyist-claims-monsanto-r.html

<comment><USER2> The best data says that eating Crayola's is safe. Young children do it all the time. That doesn't mean that I'm going to munch down a boxful if asked to, even if I work for the company and I'm talking to someone who is skeptical. It isn't food.

EDIT: check the bottom of the article for an update. He is not an employee or lobbyist for Monsanto (the manufacturer).

</comment><comment><USER3> Bahaha. My (now ex) wife pulled this on a door-to-door salesman claiming his cleaning product was non-toxic, in case the kids accidentally got into it. So she challenged him to drink some.

Apparently he drank a little. Then she told him she's "just a woman" and that I "don't allow" her to handle the money.</comment>


Data-Oriented Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://blog.eyas.sh/2020/03/data-oriented-architecture/ <comment><USER8> We jump through so many hoops to avoid this terrible pattern. This puts more load and less scaling options on your DB. If you need to upgrade how something is stored, you need to touch every service. And they didn't really solve their problem.

If you can't keep track of what services call each other, what makes you think you'll be able to keep track of who is writing out what data?

Reading how they did SOA (spaghetti of services with highly coupled interactions) I don't think putting that at the data layer is useful in the long run. They even suggest many services operating on the same data as a way to decorate the data as it haphazardly makes it way through this mess of an app. Their original problem was a poorly planned separation of concerns leading to cross service coupling. In DOA that still have it. Its just coupled directly through the datastore with no hope of cleaning it up without a massive migration.

<comment><USER9> The simple answer to this question is that all mature data stores have extremely sophisticated tooling for multiple concurrent access. Namespacing, views, access rights, concurrency/locking, migrations, stored procedures, etc are all things you end up poorly implementing at the app layer that you get out of the box at the data layer.

Every rdbms left on the stage was built with the assumption that lots of disparate systems would be coordinating within them.

I've yet to see a SOA system with half the tooling to support this. That's before you get into the performance advantages.

If you've done a bad job coupling your data tier it's because you didn't know/follow best practices we've had for at least 30 years. Don't blame the architecture for that.

<comment><USER10> Agreed with kasey_junk.

Also assuming you are sane and give every service/user/etc their own user account into the DB, your DB logging will easily show user X did action Y.

Databases these days scale very well. PostgreSQL, which is a great OSS database can scale very well out of the box on any single system, and the size of X86 boxes are getting pretty giant these days(not to mention other platforms). Plus there are loads of 3rd party, but well supported, options for scaling past a single instance.

There are other systems like FoundationDB, etc that scale well out of the box, but I'd argue most people don't actually need to scale that large, 99% of us will never get to Google size and one can get very far on a single DB instance. Especially for new projects, scaling should be near the bottom of your todo list, until it starts to hurt, and then the general answer is, just throw money at the problem, since if you are having scaling problems, you better not also be having money problems or you likely have larger problems than scaling your DB.

<comment><USER11> You can accomplish this with a monolith too though. The service part is doing no work. And a stateless monolith is even easier to scale than a database.

Monoliths certainly can reach their breaking point for other reasons. But they can take you very, very far too. Depending upon your exact use case, a stateless monolith, Postgresql, and something like Redis can handle millions of daily users.

It's been a while since I've had to do this, about 10 years. The breaking point for our use case was around 6 million daily users. I would imagine you can take it further today, but haven't had the need to so I don't really know.

<comment><USER12> I would say nowadays, from a scale-up perspective we've never had it better.

Multi-core CPUs are cheaper than ever, and terabytes of RAM are not uncommon.

The only problem is that to have an HA solution with these monster machines, you need at least 2 of them, and maybe a similarly sized test system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I liked the clarity of the article and the reasoning is solid. Still, I'm not too convinced:

\- A key reason for splitting up a monolith into services is because collaboration becomes too costly with 100s to 1000s of developers working on the same code. Your build & test system can't handle the number of commits. Your code takes too long to build. Would the data-access layer not them become the development bottleneck in such scenarios, meaning that it doesn't scale as well as SOA?

\- What are the advantages and disadvantages of centralizing in the data- oriented layer over centralizing through a network-related tool like Envoy, Kubernetes, or Istio?

\- The database layer itself often becomes a performance bottleneck, which requires us to run a sharded database. Some companies go the extra distance by running in-memory databases, document databases, and time-series databases. In such cases, wouldn't the data access layer need to support federation, which is a hard problem according to database research?

\- Is O(N^2) really that big of a problem? It seems like the problem can be reduced to something simpler: developers cannot easily understand which services communicate with one another. If that is the case, would a visualization tool be sufficient?

<comment><USER14> yes, at scale this turns the database into the bottleneck. this is not strictly a downside though, as it means you can centralize ownership of your database to one team of experts who can handle optimization, capacity planning, sharding, multi-tenancy, security, monitoring, etc for everyone. most product teams do not and should not need people with that expertise, so if you have multiple products or services running into scalability issues this approach can be a far more cost effective way of solving them than having each product or service handle these issues independently.

while they do not use the term "data-oriented architecture", many of the largest web companies use what is effectively this approach and have teams dedicated to building and maintaining a shared data layer. some examples:

google - <USER2>

youtube - vitess, migrated to spanner

facebook - <USER3>

uber - <USER4>

dropbox - <USER5>

twitter - <USER6>

linkedin - <USER7>

notably absent is amazon. amazon has taken the full blown microservices approach where anyone can do whatever they want. worth noting is that amazon is in a very sad place when it comes to data warehousing and analyzing data across teams/products/etc. while the shared database approach is strictly intended for OLTP use cases and explicitly not meant for OLAP use cases, having a common interface to all data and something approaching a data model makes it extremely easy to replicate all your data out into a data warehouse or data lake or whatever you want to call your system for your OLAP workloads. with the 'every service has its own database' model, each team has to be responsible for replicating their data to analytics systems, and that is usually not super high on their priority list relative to product features. this problem is magnified when people from a different team want to consume data from that team's product/service but the team producing the data has no incentive to make it available. in large organizations (including amazon) this is a huge issue for teams who mostly do analysis, reporting, marketing, and other activities where they primarily consume data produced by others.

<comment><USER15> Choosing an architectural design simply because it makes data warehousing easier doesn't seem like a good enough reason to me.

You give examples of all the Big Tech having such shared DBs but that seems like more of a reason to not use that pattern. Good DBAs are hard to find and not many people choose to become DBAs anymore. Big Tech can hire the experienced ones since they can compensate them pretty well; most companies can't. The shared DB therefore becomes a critical bottleneck to the business.

<comment><USER14> beyond some fairly large size of company it's less that it makes data warehousing easier and more that it makes centralized data warehousing possible.

fortunately this type of environment is available today as a managed service in a few different offerings. gcp has spanner and vitess is available as a managed service on multiple cloud providers from planetscale.

<comment><USER16> Centralized data warehousing is possible as long as you constrain the number of distinct database _engines_ and provide connectors for those. Services having private databases doesn't preclude data warehousing. It's why we _have_ data warehousing! To enable joins across data from different silos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This was the predominant architectural design about 20 years ago.

There are many strong points for this the general challenges are...

Databases don't/didn't have too much in the way of integration primitives...

Databases can become a performance bottleneck that can only be scaled vertically...

SQL language is not that great as an application programming language

EDIT: forgot the biggest one which is, it is completely up to discipline to produce any kind of separation between implementation details and public api since everything lives in the database. That's really the biggest challenge.

<comment><USER18> > Databases don't/didn't have too much in the way of integration primitives...

Hum... They have the best and most diverse set of integration primitives available. Services architectures (micro, SOA, and whatever) did never actually reach parity to them.

Your other points are good (DBMSes do scale horizontally, but it's not easy nor nice), agreed on everything. But they still do not beat the capacity DBMSes have for integrating stuff on most applications, so this is still a good paradigm.

<comment><USER17> I am quite serious when I ask for more specifics on the types of integration primatives you are talking about?

My experience has been the opposite here are some examples:

Number of times I had to implement or maintain hand rolled queues in the database.

Number of times I had to implement a web service whos only purpose was to expose database data to the world.

Number of ETL processes I wrote just to handle some data daily data input from a third party.

Number of times I had to use comparatively complex SQL techniques to iterate over a list of rows because SQL is intended for set based operations not iterative processing ..

Number of times I had to do tedious text templating to generate HTML or XML or JSON or any kind of heirarchical data format that is easily consumable by a non database system.

That's what I am talking about

Which isn't to say this is a bad architecture. Just that database as integration platform has its challenges, a lot of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's in a certain way a very roundabout way to describe a event based SOA system.

Many of the problems described are problems from SOA systems which are using a number of common anti-patterns for SOA systems.

Also the way this person describes DOA is prone to end up with a monolith in _data_ and a just the logic is not monolithic but might end up accidentally being quite tight coupled. (Through it does have some benefits).

Also even with DOA you can end up with internal state coupling between services if you do it wrong. It's harder then in some bad designed SOA systems but IMHO roughly as likely as a SOA system communicating with events.

\---

\- So use events if you do SOA (for inter service communication)! \- Never rely on the internal state of another Service. \- Make sure you don't send events to a specific service, instead "just" send events, then all services interested _in that event_ will receive it. (Make sure to subscribe for events independent of their source not services; E.g. use a appropriate event broker or service mech; Sometimes just broadcasting is fine; __Oh and naturally storing the event and making that trigger other services works, too. At which point we are back at DOA __)

\----

DOA is not bad just IMHO misguiding. If you want to use it look at common problems with event based systems for vectors of potential problems wrt. accidental internal state coupling as many of this will apply to DOA, too (if your system becomes complex enough).

Note that I don't mean all problems caused by combining eventual consistency + high horizontal scaling with event systems. Sadly this is just very often mixed up.

<comment><USER20> What are some good articles/resources on event-based SOA? I've been hearing about event-driven architectures a lot in the past few years.

<comment><USER19> Honestly I'm not sure. I listened to some grate talks on youtube about event sourcing mainly for with a scalability focus but I don't remember by whom they where. Most good articles I read about event sourcing for traceability/replyability where pretty old even when I read them a view years ago. Also many articles I read where pretty messy wrt. what applications of event sourcing help with which problems and have which consequences :=(

Give me a minute I will try to find at least some of the sources, but don't get your hopes up.

<comment><USER19> I think that one was good:

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STKCRSUsyP0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STKCRSUsyP0)

I wasn't able to find any other talk I watched back then or any of the stuff I did read, but I then last time I looked into talks and reading material about this was ~2.5 Years ago and while a lot of new software and tooling was done since then the principles didn't change. Try some of the other GOTO; talks about it if you like listening to talks, they tend to be quite good.

This was interesting as far as I remember but not what I was looking for:

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ3wIuvmHeM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ3wIuvmHeM)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I like this architecture but I worry that in sufficiently complex systems it can lead to some significant complexity if there are entities within the database that have a lot of contention around them. For example, it may end up translating to deadlocks etc. when two services that are naive to each other start locking tables in interleaved sequences of interactions. It still seems wise even if you follow this pattern to segment areas of the database to management of particular services or consumers and then have those present APIs or message passing interfaces to each other. Which leads you half way back to SOA or microservices.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, totally. The way I've seen this work is that a single service will "own" a record, so you never are running into a multi-writer situation for a given record.

While this seems closer to SOA, the key difference here is that single Type or Table can still have multiple produces (of non-overlapping records). In a trading system, you'd have producers of RFQs from makretplace A, B, C, etc. but for each single row in that table, the same service "owns" it. So you still get the benefits of not caring about the DAG/callgraph or knowing about the individual service that calls you.

Locking might be hard if you're doing some transactional change. Those become harder to do. But the half good news is that shifting to an "Event-based" programming mindset might mean you run into less of these.

But yeah, there's a whole new set of drawbacks.

<comment><USER22> But what's the point to keep them in the same table then?

Won't having several independent (and maybe physically remote) tables, one per service, solve the problem better? You can still `union all` them for analytical purposes.

<comment><AUTHOR> Same schema, and the service doing the query doesn't need to worry about which tables to union. (Problem with union all is that it reintroduces addressability and a form of direct component interaction)

But sure, you can probably implement that with views etc. also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hmm. Does this not turn the data access layer into a service bus?

This could get very messy at scale.

<comment><USER8> This is the correct take. They just reinvented the ESB.

<comment><USER24> Sub that database graphic out for the Kafka logo and it sounds exactly like everyone else's recommendations lately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Yikes. You haven't reduced inter-component communication. You've basically got an interface distributed across all your components, and defined as a data schema. Any change to this can now potentially break communication between any two or more processes.

</comment><comment> awinter-py using schemas rather than APIs to share information between components seems right

IMO one of the reasons CRUD is so hard now is that the schema is different at every layer of the product

Slight differences between layers are necessary for permissions / privacy, but there are probably better ways to get that done than to reimplement the schema at every layer.

<comment><USER19> I was thinking about this recently a lot as in my experience the difference in the API is often a major source of overhead (not necessary complexity).

\- I think a major problem is in the difference between the way you can layout thinks in the storage layer and your application.

\- Another is where to evaluate correctness (e.g. in service checks + DB- system constraints, etc.).

\- Another major think is that different actions/taks take different slices of the same data. One area where dynamic typed languages can have a clear benefit.

\- Different actions/tasks in the same system work better with different representations.

\---

What I currently think is helpful is to:

\- learn from Entity-Component Systems (from Games) for slicing data of the same entity. (but can lead to problems with consistency across slices, transactions can help if doable).

\- I would love to have a DB which can somehow do algebraic data types/sum types/tagged union/rust enum (all different words for roughly the same concept).

\- Be __very __strict about preventing coupling of internal state, mixup of service responsibilities in logic /endpoint _and_ mixup of this responsibilities in __data __. Which e.g. means that e.g. you avoid any FK between schemas owned by different services, even through it often seems usefull at the beginning.

\- Have a _system wide_ schema for all entities split up into small slices which if combined together from the entity and only use that schemas in the system no service specific schemas.

\- Specify this schema somewhere, preferably generate data types and similar from it, preferably have some opt-in strict schema validation (enabled during part of testing).

\- Use events for communication, use the schemas from above here, too.

\- Have a well defined way to represent "patch"/"update" queries, I have run to often into the problem with JSON of "reseting/deleting" a values vs. just not changing it (null value vs. field not given) and/or nested optionality.

<comment><USER19> Also depending on what you do using event sourcing can be helpful, too. Or can be a big chunk of unneeded additional work. Be aware that there are 2 ways to do event sourcing one focused on traceability and maybe even replay-ability which has a choke point in that you have a single sequential log, i.e. it doesn't scale horizontally. Or the one which uses it to archive huge horizontal scalability but on the cost of problems with (more) eventual consistency and a very very hard time to get system wide transactions right. (Best of both worlds is if you can shard your system into _independent_ subsystems and have a use case where you can rely on it to not need too much throughput per shard so that you can go with sequential. E.g. like a chat system which can shard per channel all messages and user management per workspace/group).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> DOA isn't a great acronym :)

<comment><USER19> Yes it's _Domain_ orientated architecture. Which is a less well known think since I think 10+ years ;=)

<comment><USER24> Dead On Arrival

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Congrats, you just reinvented the monolithic database with a bunch of functions on top. Everything old is new again.

</comment><comment><USER28> Would it be possible make interactive systems with this architecture? The requester needs to be notified about result availability, so some communication must be targeted to specific component (the requester) going against the foundation idea of this pattern.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't cover it in the article, but the key to get interactivity would be to switch to a datastore layer that supports subscribable queries.

I'm aware of Esper[1] which tries to do this. And maybe/arguably Firebase (?)

[1]: [http://www.espertech.com/esper/](http://www.espertech.com/esper/)

<comment><USER29> I believe RethinkDB also has this functionality, but I'm not 100% certain. Will check the docs later and update...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is nothing new and generally how SOA began in the 2000's.

One of the critical improvements to SOA is DDD (domain-Driven Design) where context matters and boundaries should include the service and its data.

Data oriented architecture a bad idea. Period.

<comment><USER31> Any good sources on DDD?

<comment><USER32> "Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software" by Eric Evans seems to be the preeminent book on the subject.

<comment><USER33> It's valuable, but very hard to read. I would recommend implementing DDD by Vaughn Vernon first. Also understanding event storming helps a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> So in this scenario are we essentially reimplementing Apache Kafka? Producers who create events that are then read by consumers and persisted on a database layer. What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not really reimplementing, Kafka is a great example of a technology you can structure a DOA around.

<comment><USER24> Reinventing a less scalable version of Kafka/ESB is basically what this is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> A central message broker that intermediates between services also solves the problems described in the "Problems of scale" paragraph. It might be worth mentioning this.

</comment><comment><USER36> If you put your data in CSV files on your file system and had different programs on the same server access those files.. would it be a data oriented architecture?

</comment><comment><USER37> Another interesting point of this architecture, that you can plan your cache really well.

</comment><comment><USER38> Cache rules everything around me.

</comment><comment><USER39> So on a high level redux but for backend (Store-reducers-components) ?

</comment><comment><USER40> Industrial-grade Data-Oriented Architecture:

[The Pure Function Pipeline Data Flow v3.0 with Warehouse / Workshop Model]([https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow](https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow))

1\. Perfectly defeat other messy and complex software engineering methodologies in a simple and unified way.

2\. Realize the unification of software and hardware on the logical model.

3\. Achieve a leap in software production theory from the era of manual workshops to the era of standardized production in large industries.

4\. The basics and the only way to `Software Design Automation (SDA)`, just like `Electronic Design Automation (EDA)`.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you drink? - <AUTHOR> I find I code better with a drink nearby. I can't have snacks or food near me but having a soda or something is great.
Right now I drink 2-4 coke zeros per day, which is better than my former habit of a couple cokes a day, which was better than the even earlier habit of a couple of Rockstars per day.
What do you drink?
Just looking for some (hopefully healthier) ideas. <comment><USER3> It depends on what sort of coding I'm doing. It's usually water or herbal tea. If I need extra energy, black tea, but I try not to do that more than a couple times a week since I broke my addiction to caffeine.

When I have to deal with new and interesting bugs that only occur with Internet Explorer, I drink whiskey.

</comment><comment><USER4> Lots of tea (camellia sinensis: green, Earl Grey, Oolong, Lipton, whatever). Water. No soda.

<comment><USER5> I used to drink a few sodas a day, and I switched to tea about five years ago. I lost some weight during the first year, but I've found I have more energy with tea and no crash. I get most of my tea from Adagio (I'm not affiliated).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Water.

<comment><USER7> mixed with a little bit of 100% fruit juice

<comment><USER8> But, then it's no longer 100% fruit juice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Buying a tea infuser is one of the best things I've ever done - real leaf tea by the cup! Moroccan mint is my favourite at the moment, but I like to experiment, and can't help but think that in tea I've just found one more thing to be geeky about.

I also find that the regular ritual of making tea helps to stop my thought processes from falling down rabbit holes, so to speak. It's sometimes good to step back and wait for kettles to boil and leaves to steep.

<comment><USER10> I have discovered the same thing - giving my brain time in modes other than problem-solving, like wait-for-kettle mode, seems to augment my problem- solving mode endurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I drink mate 2 or 3 times a day.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mate_(beverage)>

</comment><comment><USER12> Monsters, mountain dew, iced coffee. Anything with caffeine when hacking. Not a healthful response, but an honest one.

</comment><comment><USER13> My usual daily routine consists the following: 1-2 cups of coffee in the morning and lots of water and orange juice the rest of the day. I quit drinking soda years ago for the most part (still drink it occasionally but rarely) in college when it was just a lot cheaper to drink water instead and have never really had the urge to pick it up again.

If you're looking to kick the soda, I'd suggest switching over to something else other only water initially since I can almost guarantee you'll get sick of it having no flavor (maybe orange juice, apple juice, or tea).

<comment><USER14> Easy on those juices -- that much simple sugar can lead to a metabolic/alertness roller coaster, if not weight problems.

<comment><USER13> Probably good advice, I'm not a doctor nor do I play one on the internet. For myself though, I stick mainly to water throughout the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Devils-Avacado Coffee from 9AM to 6PM.

Beer from 6PM until 2AM.

<comment><USER15> That's what I'm talking about!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'll agree with the consensus: water is the best, but if you want caffeine, freshly brewed tea is by far the healthiest source of caffeine. The theanine is also a nice bonus.

<comment><USER17> Instant coffee causes greater dehydration due to the chemicals used in the manufacturing processes. So you should be drinking extra water to make up for its diuretic effects. So if it's coffee it has to be freshly brewed - <USER2> aroma is a bonus treat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've got quite into Rooibos tea over the last few months. Very drinkable with a pleasant aroma and no caffeine. I still love coffee, but save it for the weekends.

</comment><comment><USER19> I recently found Viso Vigor which is pretty good for a quick, intense (300mg) dose of caffeine. It also has tons of vitamin B (6, 12 etc.), and feels less to me like drinking death than Red Bull and the other canned energy drinks do. I don't drink it often, but if I need a boost that tastes good and isn't soda it works.

I also enjoy yerba mate. It's very popular in Uruguay where I started drinking it. Especially so among students as an (ostensibly) healthy herbal tea with a good dose of caffeine to keep them awake for studying. My favorite part is the slow, calming ritual around drinking it in the traditional way.

Those two exceptions aside, generally I prefer water.

</comment><comment><USER20> Just water throughout the day. I'll have a beer or a cocktail in the evening. On rare occasions, if I'm feeling particularly tired and need to be alert I'll have a soda or coffee.

</comment><comment><USER21> Tea, Earl Grey, Hot

</comment><comment><USER22> Always double-fist with ice water. Most of the time we're drinking b/c we want water. Expect to pee a lot.

On most days, regular coffee is fine. Stage 2 is a tall americano (you know from where). Stage 3 is a chai with two shots of espresso. Stage 4 need not be named, but it gives me wings. I usually save those for mondays or all- nighters.

<comment><USER23> See, funny thing about that, I hate drinking water because it makes me have to leave my desk a lot. I still do it because I know I need the water intake. Usually my day is 50/50 between Coke Zero (or Mountain Dew on a bad day) and Water. Sometimes it slides to 30/70, but I do my best.

Edit: And by 50/50 I meant one or two cups of water and one can of soda (or on bad days, a 20oz).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Water or green tea!

Beware the Coke Zero, its sweeteners are quite harmful, according to some physicists I consulted (and to what happened to myself: got very strong stomach pain for months, and the reason was that I got a reaction to Coke Zero! Switched to Coke Light and it's all gone...)

<comment><USER25> Did you mean physicians? If not, I would not put much more stock in a physicist's opinion about sweeteners than any other random person's.

<comment><USER24> yes, I meant doctor, medic... guess it was kinda obvious, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When I was in Europe a few years ago I picked up a seltzer habit. Nothing is as refreshing as an ice cold seltzer. To me it rivals the effects of a coffee in the morning. It's a good alternative if you like fizzy drinks. You can mix some fruit juice in if you want something sweeter. Besides that I drink lots of ice black coffee in the summer -- homemade though because coffee shops use disgusting stale/burnt coffee for iced and it tastes really bad black. If you get some good beans, grind them yourself, and get the coffee off the burner quickly after brewing you'll get an ice coffee that isn't too bitter.

</comment><comment><USER27> Water usually, occasionally with Berocca tablets (not sure I've noticed any energy benefits, but they taste nice).

A nice hot cup of tea with milk and sweetener at around 3 or 4pm every day - and no caffeine any later.

Diet Coke or Dr Pepper zero when I need to get some serious work done.

Starbucks skinny caramel macchiato when I want a treat, or their latte to wake up first thing. Occasionally Innocent smoothies as well, or homemade blends.

I only drink alcohol if it's free. This rule has kept me sober for months, but lets me get away with a glass or two when it's a networking event or dinner ;)

</comment><comment><USER28> Upon waking up I have 1-2 cups of coffee, minus the sugar.

Throughout the day I have close to a gallon of water. Also, I drink Weight Watchers soda: contains no sodium, no sugar, no calories, etc... Coke zeros contain sodium, no? If a drink contains sodium I always thought it defeated the purpose of drinking it - which in my case has always been to quench thirst... sodium acts as an agent to make you drink more never actually quenching my thirst - in my experience.

As far as alcoholic beverages, my handle speaks for itself. :)

<comment><USER10> I was under the vague impression that a little bit of sodium was necessary for keeping the proper h2o equilibrium in the bloodstream.

I don't go out of my way to ingest sodium (I probably get plenty in my diet) and I don't know whether sodium helps or hinders hydration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> On the average day:

• 2x extra strong coffees with sugar (still dislike it really, too sour, but it wakes me up.)

• ~1-2 litres of Coke and/or other fizzy drinks (my addiction)

• 1-2 Hot chocolate (at night)

• ~4x litres of water, sometimes with flavouring

<comment><USER30> No offense intended but are you overweight? If not, how do you keep the weight off with that much consumption? Daily gym?

<comment><USER27> My 'no offence intended' reply would be - does the poster have any trouble sleeping?

I used to drink a ton of fizzy drinks - all diet, but I noticed a significant correlation between insomnia and pop. Drank nothing but water (literally) for 6 months and suddenly could fall asleep before midnight...

<comment><USER29> My drinking habits sure do tell a lot about me, huh?

I kind of have trouble with my sleep. I sleep wonderfully (8-17 hours; yes, 17, not very often though, on average 11), but I think (or thought?) I have mild free-running sleep disorder, where I go to bed later and later each day (if I didn't manually control it, I'd have a full 24 hour cycle over the course of a few weeks). But I've never thought about pop being the cause. I'll try and ditch it, see if it makes a difference!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I mostly go with water throughout the day.

With meals I usually have a Isopure zero carb drink, which tastes great and lets me load up on protein without all the fat or carbs.

I had stopped caffeine completely, but now that I'm off the caffeine wagon again, once a week (usually Friday) I'll load up on 2 or 3 cups of strong tea -- either Earl Grey or Chai, with cream and Splenda.

And then Friday evening it's usually a couple glasses of wine with supper as an extra treat.

Then back to water again. Repeat and rinse.

</comment><comment><USER32> I used to rarely drink soda (only when I went out), but now that they give it to me at the office, it's a bit tougher to avoid.

What I've found helps me avoid the temptation is _really_ good green tea -- I keep a tin of it on my desk at all times. It's ultra-natural, both in how it feels/tastes and in reality; it's got a bit of caffeine, but nothing that'll end in a crash; and it tastes good whether it's hot or cold!

</comment><comment><USER33> Mostly water, though a fruit smoothie in the morning makes breakfast compatible with working, and a 7UP every so often adds some of the soda flavor without being too sickeningly sweet (like Sprite), caffeinated (Coke), or having a heavy, sticky aftertaste (Coke again). Mix in some orange juice to perk you up and you're golden. Alcohol is strictly reserved for off-duty hours.

</comment><comment><USER34> V8 Fusion. Absolutely delicious, and (according to the marketing on the label) contains a full serving of fruit and vegetables in every 8oz.

That, and water.

</comment><comment><USER35> Ten Ren Green Tea Powder.

Its good, healthy and easy. A small spoon of it in my water bottle, a good shake and its done. Its good hot too.

As an aside, my wife noticed how my fingernails started growing faster after my green tea habit - really! ;) It prompted a google search several months back and indeed, it does help with nail growth among its many other healthy benefits.

</comment><comment><USER36> 3-4 cups green tea a day (good to mix creatine with). You're drinking water and sometimes good anti-oxidants (great for cleansing your body after exercising, or during hangovers).

I try to stay away from coffee; it doesn't take me long to acquire a tolerance for caffeine. I just don't see the benefits of coffee.

I'm a huge fan of grapefruit juice and V8 too.

<comment><USER37> I usually had success with an "addiction reset" by going cold turkey after every semester as an undergrad. As a grad student, I've found that even though I drink 3 cups of green or white tea per day, which is supposed to have relatively minimal caffeine, I get headaches on the weekends when I don't have tea. Do you notice withdrawal headaches with that level of consumption?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Ice Tea (16 - 32oz daily) and water

I find that ice tea keeps my hydrated and keeps me focused. It's perfect for coding and it's also healthy.

My recipe

\- Leaf Tea (not the boxed kind) usually fruity ones. (peach and cinnamon rooibos is my favorite)

\- Boil 2-3 cups of water

\- 2 spoons of tea in a container and pour water. (sit for 2 mins)

\- Take a jar and fill it with ice, strain the tea over ice.

Bonus \+ Lemon \+ Fruits

</comment><comment><USER39> Bum wines. Usually Cisco RED. <http://www.bumwine.com/>

</comment><comment><USER40> 3-4 cups of Yamamoto jasmine green tea during the early part of the day (waking until 6 or so hours before sleeping).

Water the rest of the time.

I occasionally drink orange juice, when eating chocolate or when having a hot breakfast like grits and eggs.

About once every two or three weeks, I'll have a Pepsi when eating pizza.

</comment><comment><USER41> I always have a bottle of Minute Maid Pulpy Orange near my computer. And I also drink about 5 cups of authentic Madras Filter Coffee [<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_filter_coffee>] a day.

</comment><comment><USER42> I drink 90% water. At work I get up at least once every hour to refill the glass. Gives me a reason to take a break and stretch my legs. I will occasionally have a soda with lunch. I have never had a cup of coffee before and I stopped drinking energy drinks.

</comment><comment><USER43> Water, mostly.

Black coffer (French pressed for creamy goodness) in the morning, and sometimes late afternoon.

Iced tea with lunch, unless I'm eating raw veggies, then only water seems to taste good.

Black tea with fruit, or muffins if we've made some, in the afternoon.

Some caffeine-free diet Pepsi with dinner.

But mostly water, all day long.

</comment><comment><USER44> My daily fluid intake:

1-2 cups of coffee in the morning.

2-3 cups of Lipton green tea throughout the day.

1 litre of bottled carbonated mineral water at home in the evening.

1 glass of red wine with supper.

I also drink the odd cup/glass of tap water here and there.

Edit: I also never drink soda.

</comment><comment><USER45> Orange juice with breakfast. Water, all day long. Usually a soda with lunch or dinner. I used to drink sodas all day, but I'm getting a bit more health conscious (only a bit though).

</comment><comment><USER46> When I'm at home (where I work most of the time) I drink water, sometimes mixed with (orange) cordial. I found a light version of it, making me feel less guilty about drinking it. :-)

</comment><comment><USER47> One cup of espresso in the morning.

Freshly ground, tamped, and run through a home espresso machine. Add a bit of cream. The beans are: Café Awasa direct fair trade organic Ethiopian

</comment><comment><USER48> Coffee (French pressed, buy pre-grinded) with splenda.

Tea (black mostly like Red Rose, Earl Grey, English Breakfast with honey/sugar).

Water (after a run and before).

Perrier bubbly water.

Buttermilk.

Milk.

Diet coke, sprite zero, and other junk less often.

Sugarfree red bull.

</comment><comment><USER49> I have a small bottle that I refill several times a day with water. If I am drinking soda I prefer Pepsi Max (similar to Coke Zero)

</comment><comment><USER50> I drink water, cuz it's healthy (everyona should drink 1,5-2l water a day), and black tea, to help me focus.

</comment><comment><USER51> Coffee and water. I generally try not to have more than 2 cups of coffee a day if possible.

</comment><comment><USER52> No soda! Yuck!

I drink water mostly, but I also drink some Twinnings Breakfast tea in the afternoon usually.

</comment><comment><USER53> Mill Street Coffee Porter after dinner, and Rockstar™ for late night coding.

</comment><comment><USER54> 2 big glass of iced coffee, and the rest is water.

</comment><comment><USER55> Here in Uruguay many of us drink "MATE" mate++ :)

</comment><comment><USER56> water, green darjeeling, coffee, black tea (in order of approaching deadlines ;) )

</comment><comment><USER57> Black tea, in mass quantities.

</comment><comment><USER58> Zip Fizz and Mountain Dew

</comment><comment><USER59> try iced coffee, also called coldpress in some places

</comment><comment><USER60> water or orange juice

</comment><comment><USER61> water. iced coffee

</comment><comment><USER62> Iced peppermint Tea. The most refreshing drink in the galaxy. Much easier on the head than the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster too.</comment>


'A game-changer': How Vertex delivered on cystic fibrosis - <AUTHOR> https://www.statnews.com/2019/10/23/we-conquered-a-disease-how-vertex-delivered-a-transformative-medicine-for-cystic-fibrosis/ <comment><USER2> I never knew anyone with CF until college. Didn't even know how serious it was.

First day of the orientation, at our dorm I made a new friend who I later found out has CF. He would take medication and enzymes every day and do his CF treatment with the vibrating jacket. He seemed very healthy and energetic otherwise, except for the occasional cough.

I stayed in touch with him over the four years. I've witnessed him go to parties, sing, study, help his friends. He was always very public about how he has CF.

I remember at one point a mutual friend of ours told me "I really like him, I'd love to be in a relationship with him but chances are he won't be with us in a few years, I am not sure if I want to get myself involved knowing that's what's going to happen". I didn't think too much of it, maybe thought she was worried too much.

This friend went on to get a few great internships, first one nearby so no flight necessary but the second was in Texas, flying from Illinois to Texas a few times, he must have been exposed to some pathogens in during the flights and this guy whom I knew to have had his CF under control for 4 years, whom had his chance to "make a wish" and had his wish despite make a wish foundation dragging their feet for years hoping maybe he would die before getting his wish, as they didn't expect him to live this long to begin with, he basically worsened and passed away in 4 days, literally a few weeks after graduating college.

Not sure if the recent advancements would have helped but whenever CF is mentioned, I think of him.

He lived his entire life with doctors telling him he will die young or he won't live to finish elementary school, high school and then college. He finished college.

<comment><USER3> I find these stories enormously humanizing. We're here to beat the odds. Never surrender.

<comment><USER4> Exactly, let the cures march on. Its depressing when medicine looks to death as a solution. Seems like a copout and a failure to actually advance medical treatments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The 14% number they give in the article is wrong in a subtle but very big way. They describe it as an increase in volume of 14%, but it's actually an increase in the FEV1 score by 14 percentage points. FEV1 is calculated by dividing the volume of air you can expel in one second by the amount they figure a normal healthy person could expel, based on your height, weight, and probably some other factors. So if you expel 50% of what a healthy person could, then your FEV1 is 50%. Trikafta increased that FEV1 value by an average of 14 points over placebo, in only a few weeks. That's massive.

I'm 32 years old, diagnosed with CF at 6 months old, and before starting Trikafta at the beginning of November, my FEV1 was 24%. (That's incredibly low. I was in the hospital on IV antibiotics, and we were all set to put me on the waiting list for a double lung transplant, when news of Trikafta came in and put the transplant on hold. At the time, I would get winded just by taking the trash down the hall to the trash chute, and would usually start hacking up a lung by the time I finished walking back to my apartment.) I go back to the CF clinic in just a few days to see just how much I've improved, but judging by just the way I feel now after about 2 months, I would not be at all surprised if I'm now pushing 40% for my FEV1. (And at the very least, I don't expect to hack up a lung after every pulmonary function test, which has been the norm for the last decade of my life.) If I go from 24% to 40%, that would be over a 50% increase in actual air flow volume. That's why this is a game changer.

The other big thing the article fails to mention is that the rate of exacerbations (which usually result in hospitalizations and a few weeks or more of IV antibiotics) dropped by about 60% over placebo. Exacerbations are where you see the biggest and sudden drop in lung function, so reducing the occurrence of those is really key to stabilizing our health.

Lastly, I want to mention that, while this drug isn't yet approved for children under 12, they're working hard on that. Theoretically, if a child were start taking this very early on, it's very possible that they would never experience any symptoms of CF. Unfortunately for me, I've had 30-odd years of CF that has permanently wrecked my lungs and pancreas (probably my bones too), but I still find it crazy awesome to think that I might be the last generation that has to deal with this.

The $311k per year price tag is still an unbelievably large amount, but the article certainly doesn't make any attempt to justify that price tag.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't help but notice the $311,000 price. What if you are not covered by insurance?

If embryos are screened for CF in IVF..what happens in a natural pregnancy? Would it still be legal to terminate the pregnancy?

What about other countries? I understand life changing medications are expensive. But shouldn't the govt just pick up the tab? Imagine we have universal health care...wouldn't they just do it?

<comment><USER7> I believe they have a free medicine program for people without insurance and copay subsidies for people with it. It appears to be handled on a case by case basis ([https://www.vertexgps.com/](https://www.vertexgps.com/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have CF and have been taking Trikafta for just over a month. AMA.

<comment><USER9> So based on your profile blurb, you've obviously lived a fairly normal / successful life, at least career-wise.

The Wikipedia article for CF makes it out to be a pretty devastating disease.

What affect does CF have on your day to day life? How has this new medicine improved things? How big of a "game changer" is it really?

Broad questions, but I'm just trying to get some context here.

<comment><USER8> I feel like I live a pretty normal life. I have the most common mutation of the condition, which is typically results in the worst cases you hear about, but for whatever reason I've always had a mild case (I'm currently 42 years old, with 50-60% lung function). I grew up very poor and in a very immune- system challenging environment (in terms of cleanliness and I had parents who smoked indoors). I wasn't diagnosed until age 13 (most are at birth). I don't think I ever developed a sense of CF being the core of who I was, and I suspect that plays a role.

Day to day, I take a lot of medicine as second nature: breathing treatments, insulin pump, and pills to digest my food. I'm a smaller guy, and not very physically strong, and am just short of breath most of the time, so I limit anything that would be challenging like outdoor activity or manual labor. CF causes infertility in males, though my wife and I will do IVF. Like I said, I feel quite normal, though I suspect my chosen lifestyle is a product of CF, so of course it feels normal.

TBH Trikafta (and its predecessors) hasn't been a "game changer" as much as some incremental improvement, but others in CF groups I'm in have had greater improvements, so I suspect that's a result of where I started from.

<comment><USER10> With IVF, do you plan to do pre implantation testing to ensure your kids don't have/carry it?

I read that many embryos are a genetic mosaic, so testing just one cell as they currently do isn't as deterministic as people think.

<comment><USER8> Of course. We are seeing the IVF specialist my clinic recommends. My wife has been tested to not be a genetic carrier for CF; all embryos are screen for CF and other conditions before implantation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does this drug have a positive impact on the problems of CF other than lung function?

<comment><USER8> Many have weight gain. Those with CFRD (CF related diabetes) may produce more insulin naturally; both of these are due to less blockage of the pancreas, though the scarring of the pancreas (where cystic fibrosis gets its name) can't reverse. Some women may have increased fertility (again due to less blockage)

I've gained weight in the month I've taken it (though just before that I lost 5-10 lbs due to an infection; so hard to say if I'm just returning to baseline). I do feel like my appetite has improved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Van Goor's fix used cells derived from human bronchial tubes to test the > potential of drugs.

Anyone know the back story on this detail? I wonder what cells specifically we're talking about.</comment>


Eloquent JavaScript, 3rd edition - <AUTHOR> https://eloquentjavascript.net/3rd_edition/ <comment><USER2> > "I estimate that I'll probably be busy with this for the next three months. > When it's done, the new edition will become the main one on the website. In > the meantime, the git repository for the book remains open, so you can see > what I'm doing."

So cool. Good luck!

Also in case it helps, couple tiny corrections for the landing page: ("is run by" and "existence").

<comment><USER3> Thanks. I found the 'existance' typo. What do you mean by 'is run by'?

<comment><USER4> Most likely the GP is referring to "This crowd-funding campaign is ran in ...".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Eloquent JavaScript is easily the text I most reference when asked for recommendations on where to go to learn/bone up on JS. It's a real achievement, in one guy's opinion.

<comment><USER6> I think Eloquent JS is a fan fruckin tastic book, overall. BUT, I have one quibble (about the first edition; I haven't looked at the second).

Its preface and first few chapters sort of present itself as a book intended to teach the absolute basics of programming to someone who has never done any programming at all before. A first book. And I think you'll find that if you give it as a sole resource to someone in that position, it just moves too quickly through the fundamentals. It's definitely a second book or a third book, or a book for reading after someone made it through a few of those ultra-beginner courses on Codecademy or Khan Academy or wherever.

<comment><USER5> I actually _completely_ agree. I usually work with people who have already had some exposure to basic programming concepts and I think it's wonderful for them. But for someone looking to get started there are presumably better resources.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. Once you hit that recursion/functions in functions chapter...lawd. And I'm coming from python (almost intermediate level)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Searching too long for the repo? [https://github.com/marijnh/Eloquent- JavaScript.git](https://github.com/marijnh/Eloquent-JavaScript.git)

      no_understand = author(!put_repo_url(site)) || me_blind;

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, This is fantastic news! The 2nd edition is the only JS book I recommend to learners, so it will be so good to have an update that introduces new ES6 features as well.

I needed an explanation like Eloquent JavaScript to finally get started at programming, starting from a graphic design background it _does_ take you from the basics up and doesn't assume you begin the book with any JS OR programming background at all. I'm hoping the new edition retains that approachability so this can remain essential reading for all JS learners :D

</comment><comment><USER10> The second edition was one of my favorite programming books when I was just getting started! Looking forward to this.

</comment><comment><USER11> > The biggest thing that happened in the JavaScript universe in the past years > is the finalization and adoption of ECMAScript 6 (or ES2015)

I don't know if it's meant as a joke, but isn't it usually known as ES6 or ECMAScript 2015? And people quarrel over which to use?

<comment><USER12> I think ES and ECMAScript are pretty interchangeable, as are 6 and 2015 (the latter is official, but the former is what it was called for forever). I've seen all 4 of those names used.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of the best programming books for sure. I will gladly chip in for the third edition.

</comment><comment><USER14> At what donation level does one receive an actual physical copy of the book? (The page implies that there will be a printed version, but never actually says you get one. Or did I miss it in two readings?)

<comment><USER3> That is not a perk that's being offered.

<comment><USER15> That's too bad because I was game for that as well. If it was included in a perk, then I'd love much closer to buying than I am now.

<comment><USER3> I assume NoStarch.com will have them available for pre-order in a month or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _We 're all writing let instead of var now, and a book that continues to > write var is starting to look a bit out of touch_

Serious question: Does this also refer to client side web developers? According to caniuse.com, only around 83% of web browsers support the let statement, which in most cases wouldn't cut it when releasing a web site or web app to accommodate the largest audience.

<comment><USER17> Yes, you can transpile ES6+ to ES5 for client-side applications using Babel.

<comment><USER16> True, but admittedly, I'm so fond of the ability to have no "middlemen" between the code I write and what gets run by the browser that my dislike for any logistics/bureaucracy overhead is stronger than my attraction to ES6+ (or CoffeesScript for that matter). I know it might sound a bit irrational (I'd much rather code in C++ than code in assembly), but I think one of the perks of writing in JavaScript was that I got to have a high level language directly run by a system and now I don't want to give it up. I prefer to wait until the percentage of browsers that support ES6+ goes up.

<comment><USER18> In that case, use var. There is no production ready polyfill for let. I'd recommend editing your original question and putting your requirement of not using any buildtools or transpillation in, because it's the salient factor here and for most questions you'd ask regarding JS.

>but I think one of the perks of writing in JavaScript was that I got to have a high level language directly run by a system and now I don't want to give it up.

Out of curiosity, what do you see you're giving up? Is it the theoretical knowledge that the code exactly as written is being interpreted? I find that the compiled code is very human readable nowadays, and with sourcemaps it's not an issue at all as browser dev tools will directly link to the source files instead of the compiled files. I used to think I was giving up something until I worked with such a setup.

<comment><USER16> sorry, missed your reply (so perhaps you won't see this for the same reasons) but anyway:

Mainly the feeling of giving up simplicity. Adding things (such as sourcemaps and any relevant configuration changes) usually detracts from the sense of "no middleman", although I know "no middleman" is always an illusion, it's less obvious when you don't have to do anything to create it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tim-- Marijn has worked hard on the 2nd edition. In my opinion, it is a must read for any new Javascript developer.

</comment><comment><USER19> I literally just finished the 2nd edition last week, and built [https://learnsearch.xyz/](https://learnsearch.xyz/) using my new found node and http knowledge from the last few chapters.

I'm definitely backing this</comment>


Why are the Maltese so competitive? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20190107-why-are-the-maltese-so-competitive <comment><USER3> > Year after year, followers of respective patron saints attempt to outspend > and outdo their neighbouring parish in a contentious crusade for showmanship

It looks like a set of very bad habits. A place where signalling power and wealth is more important than self-growth.

Malta is a tax haven and famous for the assassination of the anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia.*

All that does not hint a healthy society, but a society that needs to get away from tribalism and embrace better ways.

* [https://www.theguardian.com/world/daphne-caruana-galizia](https://www.theguardian.com/world/daphne-caruana-galizia)

<comment><USER4> Small island nations (or smaller countries in general) don't have the muscle large nations do. You're not going to build a production facility for cars on Malta, for example.

There is nothing wrong with them having a beneficial tax system if it means people will relocate and spend money there while paying (some) tax.

What does a country like Malta, Cyprus or Monaco honestly have to lose by being a tax haven?

<comment><USER5> Dyson may have missed your memo: [https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/23/dyson- to-begin-construc...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/10/23/dyson-to-begin- construction-of-singapore-electric-car-factory-in-december-production-begins- in-2021/)

<comment><USER6> Well Singapore is 10 times more populous though. Not to mention the strategic location of Malacca strait.

<comment><USER7> Oh and because of southeast asian culture

And Singapore is not as majority are Chinese/china culture

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> More than 12% of Malta's GDP is from online gaming [0]. Countless online casinos advertise in other European countries, but are located in Malta due to more relaxed rules and lower taxes.

[0] [https://calvinayre.com/2017/11/22/business/malta-gambling- bi...](https://calvinayre.com/2017/11/22/business/malta-gambling- biz-12-percent-economy/)

<comment><USER9> How does Malta's regulation help?

I presume if you want to accept German players u need to conform to German rules. So how do these online casinos operate inside the EU ?

EDIT: also note that Malta population is 500K. So even one large unicorn can shift the economy numbers.

<comment><USER8> Companies in Malta are subject to Maltese supervision, and thanks to the EU the companies can operate in the rest of the EU as well. There's probably some extra rules they need to follow in each country, I don't know the details.

The Maltese economy is full of money laundering, tax evasion [1, 2], mafia [3], and other gray areas [4, 5] anyway. This article is a puff piece in the travel section, so it's hardly the place for mentioning of the Panama papers or journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia that was investigating online gambling and corruption was killed by a car bomb in 2017 [6].

[0] [https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/gambling_en](https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/gambling_en)

[1] [http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/dodgy-gaming- bu...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/dodgy-gaming-business- malta-plays-fast-and-loose-with-online-gambling-firms-a-1148929.html)

[2] [https://www.bbc.com/news/world- europe-40026826](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-40026826)

[3] [https://www.occrp.org/en/thedaphneproject/how-maltese- online...](https://www.occrp.org/en/thedaphneproject/how-maltese-online- gambling-became-an-atm-for-the-italian-mafia)

[4] [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/16/tax- evasion...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/oct/16/tax-evasion-oecd- blacklist-of-21-countries-with-golden-passport-schemes-published)

[5] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-11/why- the-e...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-11/why-the-eu-is- furious-with-malta)

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Same salaries as France, insignificant taxes, no social protection, Californian weather... Young and healthy developer are happy there - <USER2> people with families better stay away. Lovely tourism destination though !

</comment><comment><USER11> The extravagance brings the potlatch [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch)] and similar customs to mind.</comment>


Facebook may be plotting to poach YouTube's creators - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1199751/facebook-may-be-trying-to-coax-creators-away-from-youtube/ <comment><USER2> New job just created talent agent for online video stars.</comment>


Losing Confidence in Creative Commons - <AUTHOR> https://marteydodoo.com/writing/2014/05/09/losing-confidence-creative-commons/

<comment><USER2> Looks like pointless complaints to me. You're losing confidence in CC because their _process_ for reporting security issues is okay, but not perfect?

They did the hard thing, which was emailing users about a "breach" that may or may not have been exploited. I mean we're only talking about names/emails here but whatever.

I donated to CC a couple times and may be in that file but frankly I couldn't care any less, as long as CC does an outstanding job improving their licenses (which they do!).

<comment><USER3> OP says that CC didn't reply. At all.

If true, I think it's totally reasonable to complain about that.

You donate to an organization because you want to support them. You responsibly report a data breach because you want to support them. And in response? They can't be bothered to take 10 seconds to type "Thank you! We'll fix this ASAP." Really?

My advice to OP: Next time you're fortunate enough to be able to donate to an organization, pick another one. It's not just about supporting good causes, it's about supporting effective organizations.

<comment><USER4> Something like 'enlightened self-interest'. I like the term "effective organizations". There's little point it supporting any other kind, except perhaps for external effects - praise, reflected esteem - which is more PR than a will to benefit the public.

Now I have a way to distinguish public organizations wanting my money. And since I donate anonymously, I have no need to ever donate to the PR kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hi Martey, thank you so much for alerting us to this issue, and for your other suggestions. You should have already received the email below from CC general counsel Diane Peters; I'm posting it here so that others in this thread can see it too.

Cheers,

Elliot Harmon / Communications manager, Creative Commons / firstname.lastname@example.com

\---

Martey,

Thanks for your help in identifying this issue and for your related suggestions. You're welcome to post this reply as an addendum to your blog post; we'll also be posting it on the Hacker News thread.

We regret not replying to you promptly about what we were doing to resolve the issue, and to express our gratitude. That was our error, and we apologize. Our immediate focus was on locating the file you identified, confirming that no other files with sensitive information had been inadvertently uploaded, determining what information the file contained, and identifying and contacting affected donors. Thankfully, we were able to remove the file the same day you reported the incident. That was our highest priority.

We have since learned that our rapid deletion of the file limited our ability to access statistics about its use. We will share an update if we learn more about views or possible downloads.

As to your other suggestions, they are well taken and we will do better. Both emails for the audit committee on the contact page are functional, but in order to avoid confusion, we removed one of them. We have also emphasized that email@example.com is the most appropriate portal for sending privacy- related concerns at this time.

Thanks again for calling this to our attention, and our apologies for not more quickly replying to you individually.

Diane M. Peters / General Counsel, Creative Commons

</comment><comment><USER6> It seems like CC did the right thing in general but the informer of the problem would have liked an email acknowledgement.

Although not as serious as the release of names and addresses, I email people and organizations all the time when I see typos on their web sites, and I don't much expect any response or acknowledgement; I am just trying to be helpful. It seems like the author of the article was similarly trying to be helpful.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure from submitter: the writer of the blog post is my brother.</comment>


Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC's anti-blocking rules - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/01/net-neutrality-is-half-dead-court-strikes-down-fccs-anti-blocking-rules/ <comment><USER2> What the court is saying is that, if the FCC refuses to classify broadband providers as common carriers, then, because they neither receive the same protections as common carriers nor have the same responsibilities, they can't be regulated as if they were common carriers.

The FCC could change their rules to treat broadband suppliers as common carriers. However, that's something that big-name broadband providers don't seem to want, as it would reduce their freedom of operations.

<comment><USER3> What are the other ramifications of being classified as a common carrier?

<comment><USER4> Congress specifically forbade the FCC from applying common carrier regulation to what the Telecommunications Act of 1996 calls "information services."

<comment><USER5> It's terrifying enough to think of congress today deciding the fate of the internet, much less the congress of 1996.

<comment> SG- Well, at least the Internet in the US. Other countries have their own laws and regulations.

<comment><USER6> Treaty obiligations make some onerous US law viral.

<comment><USER7> We should stockpile modems. It seems we're going to need them...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Note that the DC Court of Appeals is the one that the Filibuster Crisis was all about. According to the Wikipedia, it still(!) has three vacancies, and the Senate Republicans have spent the last ~N months preventing any of the Obama administrations nominees from being confirmed to the Court.

These things matter.

<comment><USER9> I believe the two judges (Rogers and Tatel) that struck down the FCC's regulations were Clinton nominees. The one who dissented in part was a Reagan nominee (Silberman).

<comment><USER10> Keep in mind that Clinton also signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A few key things that this act did:

\- Allow for consolidation of radio stations (and thus, the meteoric rise of ClearChannel)

\- Allow for consolidation of telecommunications companies (and thus, almost the major phone service companies are the progeny of the Baby Bells)

It also did some very good things, like requiring entrants into the data services market to interconnect with incumbents.

But it also allowed telecoms to rip off the USGOV and taxpayers in extraordinary lengths (see previous discussion on HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7021057](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7021057) )

<comment><USER8> As long as we're cataloging Clinton's sins, don't forget repealing Glass- Steagall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is obvious that they are, de facto, common carriers.

Give up the lobbyist payola, reclassify them, and introduce some real competition to my now more frequent than annual Crapcast price bumps (or significant humps, as it were).

(And in my case, this is primarily for Internet, although basic cable comes along as a quasi-freebie -- it costs, but then a discount on the combined package largely or totally negates that cost.)

Otherwise, you can bet I'm not voting for either major party, next time around.

As a consumer, I find that the only way to defeat this bullshit, is to stop paying for it. If I had an alternative to Crapcast in my neighborhood, I'd take it. (I don't count AT&T, because for a lonnngggg time they refused to deploy high speed Internet here, and because their policies and behaviour are just as bad. As well, they've personally screwed me in a prior location, as I've commented before.)

<comment><USER12> > and introduce some real competition

You do understand that regulating carriers as if they were utilities but then demanding more competition is inconsistent? Utilities get monopoly protection in return for offering universal service. That's the quid pro quo.

<comment><USER13> I think he's hoping if all ISPs become highly regulated common carriers, then all neighborhoods will have to be supplied with uverse, cablemodems, and long range wifi/wisp service, instead of just some.

So there's one and only one highly regulated cable provider, and one and only one uverse , not sure about the WISP thing...

<comment><USER12> But that's at odds with the call for more competition. In a more competitive market, providers would compete to provide faster and faster service in the most densely-populated, highest-value markets. E.g. basically T-Mobile's strategy in the U.S. They spend their limited infrastructure capital on rolling out fast LTE in key markets, while leaving non-urban areas with HSPA or even no service at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant We could make all the laws we want about Net Neutrality, it wouldn't change the fundamental flaw that made this problem possible in the first place: too much centralization.

I hear that the US, there are only 2 ISPs: one of the big 2, or the little local one. In France, we have about 4. At the other end, we have Google, Amazon, but most notably we have YouTube and Netflix.

Clearly the market is not efficient. Why do we have so big players in the first place? Why do we tend to have _only_ the big players?

Because of the infrastructure. In the way the internet is distributed, artificial economies of scale and barriers to entry favour the big ISPs (this is clearly the case in France, I suppose the US is the same). And, we have asymmetric bandwidth, which _kills_ peer to peer exchanges. If people were allowed to host servers at home, there would be no need for things such as YouTube, Blogger, or Facebook (search engine are still a thorny problem, though).

If we got rid of this over-centralization, it would be harder to discriminate your bandwidth in the first place. Net Neutrality would be the default, instead of something we have to fight for.

<comment><USER14> 4 major broadband providers would be a lot better than 2. In the US, the two are the cable TV company, and the telephone company. Recently, a telephone companies came to a marketing agreement with the cable companies; the telco would control the wireless connections, and stop seriously competing on the wired broadband side. So, we might be moving to de facto monopolies for fixed line.

How does France have 4 providers? Wherever we tried line-sharing here, the ILEC would stop repairing the lines used by competitors until the customers switched to the incumbent.

<comment> loup-vaillant The trick in France is, the last line often belongs to the former National Monopoly (which has been privatized since, and is now called the "historical operator"). Since monopolies are bad, the historical operator has an obligation of leasing its copper wires.

It's still bad, and we still have a relatively high barrier to entry, but it _is_ possible. There exist for instance a number of little non-profit providers (not among the big 4), who make do by sub-leasing part of the big one's network.

There are still problems of the sort you're talking about (like "it's not us, it's the other company your data goes through"), but as people are now able to cut themselves off completely from the historical operator, their actual provider has to (and do) take responsibility, and fix the line.

As an aside, it is somewhat written in our law that to be called an "internet connection", it must provide a public IP address, and the user must be able to do whatever she wants. There are violations (Orange blocks the outgoing SMTP port), but it mostly holds: users are all allowed to host servers —though asymmetric bandwidth makes this impractical. Note that mobile connections are called "data" deals, not "internet" deals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone who is interested in a really good overview of 20th century telco policy should read _The Master Switch_ by Tim Wu ([http://www.amazon.com/The- Master-Switch-Information-Empires/...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Master- Switch-Information- Empires/dp/B005GALGNY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1389719458&sr=8-2&keywords=the+master+switch)).

It goes over the transition from telegraph to telephone to internet, talks about the rise of media conglomerates, and basically explains how we're in the mess we're in today. Quite an enjoyable read, especially when learning about the differences between old and new styles of monopolies.

<comment><USER16> I second this suggestion, The Master Switch is a great read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's the full text of the opinion on Casetext: [https://www.casetext.com/case/verizon-v- fcc-3](https://www.casetext.com/case/verizon-v-fcc-3)

We'll be getting some leading net neutrality scholars and lawyers to annotate the doc, so check back later today for interesting, in-depth analysis along- side the key passages in the case.

</comment><comment><USER18> My knowledge of Anti-Trust laws dates back to elementary school, but how is it legal for the companies that maintain the infrastructure to be in the content game as well, when other content providers can't compete on favorable pricing for bandwidth?

<comment><USER19> Because it's considered "vertical integration" and therefore not subject to anti-trust laws. Comcast merging with Time Warner would be considered horizontal; Comcast merging with NBCU was considered vertical and therefore allowed to go forward in January 2011.

I'm currently reading Susan Crawford's book Captive Audience, which is a detailed history of this exact topic. Recommended. Here's a talk she gave at Harvard summarizing the story and issues at stake: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R4xhwy-1oI](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R4xhwy-1oI)

<comment><USER20> Since when has vertical integration not been subject to antitrust laws?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Paramount_Pictures,_Inc).

<comment><USER21> It definitely is. The Comcast / NBC merger had to be approved by the DOJ who only allowed it with conditions.

[http://www.ustelecom.org/news/newsletters/broadband- connecti...](http://www.ustelecom.org/news/newsletters/broadband-connection- depth/depth-comcast-nbc-merger-commitments)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, the court agrees with many others that the FCC needs to re-label cable companies as communication common carriers before regulating them as common carriers. I guess that's good?

Is it a difficult thing technically or only politically for the FCC to change their minds / admit they did this wrong in the first place?

What is the downside of treating the cable networks as communications media?

There are some thoughts on that here, though note the source: [http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/government-policy/the-fcc- hav...](http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/government-policy/the-fcc-having-its- forbearance-cake-and-eating-it-too/) .

</comment><comment><USER23> Definitions from US Code Title 47:

"(1) Advanced communications services The term "advanced communications services" means— (A) interconnected VoIP service; (B) non-interconnected VoIP service; (C) electronic messaging service; and (D) interoperable video conferencing service."

"(11) Common carrier The term "common carrier" or "carrier" means any person engaged as a common carrier for hire, in interstate or foreign communication by wire or radio or interstate or foreign radio transmission of energy, except where reference is made to common carriers not subject to this chapter; but a person engaged in radio broadcasting shall not, insofar as such person is so engaged, be deemed a common carrier."

"(24) Information service The term "information service" means the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service."

I'm not a lawyer, but consider myself well grounded in tech and telecom, but reading these definitions I'm kind of at a loss. In common law, my understanding is that a "common carrier" is someone that makes transport services available to the public. These can be physical, such as shipping a crate, or technological (telecom) in nature. By that inference, transporting packets of information is essentially same as transporting normal packages.

Unfortunately, the "by wire or radio or interstate or foreign radio transmission of energy" is so period-specific that one could argue that it doesn't apply and the (24) Information Services is so broad and vague, it could practically be applied to anything.

One interesting bit, which makes me think that there is hope, is the definition of advanced communications, that include both VoIP and messaging services. Sadly, their definitions are not that broad...

<comment><USER12> The definition of "common carrier" implies a lot more than just "carries goods for the public." For example, common carrier status implies regulation, often of rates, and liability on the part of carriers for any losses. In the world of telecom, it represents a whole host of regulations. For example, telephone carriage is taxed to fund something called the Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes infrastructure development of telecom service to rural areas.

One of the key purposes of the 1996 telecom act was to deregulate the industry to the extent that it was possible. The FCC consequently decided to treat internet service as an "information service" under the Act, so as to avoid subjecting it to all the regulations applicable to "common carriers."

So while you could argue that modern ISPs resemble common carriers in certain ways, one of the ways they do not is that they are relatively unregulated, and there was a lot of intent and purpose behind the decision to treat them that way.

<comment><USER23> While there might have been reason to not regulate in the past, schemes like the ones advocated by Verizon really strike me as questionable. In 1996, we had to worry about these networks really catching on. In 2014, it's hard to imagine not having them.

Consider a simple ad supported news site. It may run ads hosted on hundreds of sources. When the page loads, the browser requests individual images from different sources. If some are not paying the verizon tax or not paying enough, the page loads slower or with broken content. This is pretty foundational stuff. It really isn't all that different from having different audio quality in a phone call depending if the local exchange operator was paid extra or not.

As the result, it seems to me that classification and the additional regulation is warranted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is a duplicate of another thread started an hour earlier: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057495](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057495)

<comment><USER25> it's a different article, about the same topic.

<comment><USER24> Different article, but same court opinion!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I know this isn't a popular opinion, but I think we need to reconsider accepting precedent that we're OK with the US government regulating the Internet (without legislation, no less). With the concern about surveillance, copyright abuse, DMCA/Computer Fraud and Abuse Act abuse, and content regulation (in the case of the UK and China), is this really the solution we're looking for? Neutrality is a real problem, but this seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

<comment><USER27> The US Government has regulated telecommunications for nigh a century now. AT&T had cleverly figured out that the right way to avoid scrutiny for their monopoly was initially to provide a _very good service_ and start a two-way relationship with the government.

I'll clarify two things here. First: this actually had a net-positive effect on telephone communications in the US. Regulators were initially more informed, and Vail was able to grow AT&T by making legitimate concessions and demonstrating universal access and service. Second, we know in hindsight that this was also the start of a practice of regulatory capture, but regardless, that the history of regulating telecommunications has often-times been beneficial even when the regulators were biased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Quote from the linked article, "(net neutrality rules) forbid ISPs from blocking services or charging content providers for access to the network." But that is confusing. ISPs are already charging content providers for access to the network. Netflix and Google need to pay for their bandwidth.

Actually, web neutrality means the ISPs should treat all data in their network equally.

</comment><comment><USER29> Intuitively, I would have thought that this would be horrible news for content providers/distributors, and great news for wireless carriers. However, today, Google, Facebook, Amazon &etc are flying, while Verizon and AT&T are falling.

Does anyone in the industry know what this is all about, and what importance this decision really has on the future of mobile?

<comment><USER13> Note that your flying providers are huge. The hope of network neutrality is to turn the networks into gatekeepers to eliminate competition.

So say I want to create in my garage, an online store to compete with Amazon selling in the pet rock market. Oh what a pity, all your online shopping traffic got dropped at our border routers. We can "fix things" for you for a modest fee, just like Amazon. Of course we have a minimum payment of $50M/month to "fix" things. Oh you say you can't pay $50M out of your garage? Well our internet isn't for people like you anymore.

So yes, its very good news for large content providers because it eliminates any need for product development and eliminates competition.

The other way it eliminates competition is Amazon might be able to afford a department of a couple people to do nothing all day but negotiate with ISPs, but a startup could never spare the manpower. So startups could only release on TWC or Charter or AT&T or ... rather than everywhere on the internet.

<comment><USER12> > Oh you say you can't pay $50M out of your garage? Well our internet isn't > for people like you anymore.

The fact that it doesn't work that way already is largely just an accident of history, and I don't know if its necessary to keep that status quo artificially. Small entities are just in a bad leverage position, especially when their "product" depends heavily on someone else's very expensive and hard to reproduce infrastructure. Look at the app market. The people selling the infrastructure (Apple, Samsung) make all the money, because lots of people can write apps but very few can build cell phones. That's the natural state of things.

<comment><USER30> That is an odd analogy, and I don't think infrastructure providers making all the money is "the natural state of things".

The people actually building the infrastructure (Android) arent't making much any money with it, while those using it (Samsung) are. That is how its supposed to work; if power companies and utilities had been able to extract all the profit from manufacturing companies and discriminate against specific ones or have the ability to simply deny necessary upgrades, we would still be using oil lights.

I also respectfully disagree on the "very expensive" part. Internet access is one of the _cheapest_ basic services, trivial to scale and the variable costs are basically _zero_. There is no inherent difficulty in transporting bits! Consider other infrastructure. Providing reliable electricity is _very difficult_ (you need to balance demand and supply at all times), there is a very harsh regulatory environment that is constantly changing (in some countries, pocos need to prioritize renewable energy and pay guaranteed prices to customers inserting it), the _hardware_ necessary is copper-heavy and poses significant reliability and safety issues.

Meanwhile, we are being reluctant to regulate internet providers to the point where they are the fast, dumb pipe we need, because lawmakers are clueless how this internet thing works (the 'cloud' isn't helping) and internet providers have this dream where they are the premier entertainment and media source (wakeup; YouTube and Netflix exist).

<comment><USER12> Android is part of the platform, but it's clearly not the capital intensive part of the cell phone infrastructure. That's be the CPUs, the DRAMs, the flash memory, etc.

And there is nothing cheap about providing internet access. AT&T and Verizon lead the country in annual capital expenditure: [http://news.investors.com/technology/091913-671712-institute...](http://news.investors.com/technology/091913-671712-institute- ranks-highest-us-corporate-capital-spending.htm).

> Meanwhile, we are being reluctant to regulate internet providers to the > point where they are the fast, dumb pipe we need

Why should we regulate the telecoms into being fast, dumb pipes because that is what best serves the Youtubes and Netflixes of the world?

> because lawmakers are clueless how this internet thing works

There is a difference between not understanding the internet, and having a different value structure with respect to the internet. Saying that telcoms should be "fast, dumb pipes" isn't a matter of technical fact. It's not a part of any RFC. It's a (very software-centric) normative judgment about how the ideal organizational structure of the internet. It's certainly more consistent with how most software people view the internet to treat the physical infrastructure as dumb pipes, but that view has no technical basis. TCP/IP works just fine if AT&T gives higher priority to packets originating from companies that pay to play.

<comment><USER30> CapEx obviously doesn't tell the story, certainly not for companies like AT&T and Verizon. Try fundamentals; Moores has done good work for bandwidth, as media is still being streamed at 6 MBit. I'm not sure lawmakers understand this; _there is no capacity problem_. Technology is vastly ahead of growth and certainly consumer access to bandwidth. Meanwhile, internet providers are trying to tell lawmakers they need to make YouTube (and customers) pay for traffic because theres somehow congestion.

Of course it's not a technical fact. The basic idea is that regulating them to be the dumb pipe can yield the biggest gain for the general economy, while they get the benefit of a low margin, but extremely stable business (as with any other infrastructure).

The obvious problem right now is that instead of competing with each other, _internet providers are trying to compete with their customers_. That is not the sign of a working market, and it is not acceptable for critical infrastructure. Regulation is needed, and certainly not towards giving providers more flexibility.

<comment><USER12> > CapEx obviously doesn't tell the story, certainly not for companies like > AT&T and Verizon. Try fundamentals; Moores has done good work for bandwidth, > as media is still being streamed at 6 MBit.

It's hilarious for you to say CapEx doesn't matter, then invoke Moore's law, which is rooted in exponentially increasing CapEx! Guess who is in the top-5 of the CapEx list along with AT&T and Verizon? Hint: it's Intel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Why can't they start classifying ISPs like common carriers?

</comment><comment><USER32> The economist in me is happy, as this allows for greater investment incentives on the part of ISPs.

The FLOSS advocate in me is sad, as this is a compromise that I don't want to see go away.

</comment><comment><USER33> What I wish would happen is that organizational forces were focused on breaking up ISP monopolies over the pipes. Essentially, building a firewall between infrastructure and content. It would create a market...remember that thing we think controls America's destiny...that would lead to faster bandwidth and also ISPs that offer free, open, and protected services.

</comment><comment><USER34> Am I experiencing deja-vu? I fee like many of these comments (and their responses!) are exact reposts from earlier submissions about this very same topic.

      "The court is saying the FCC needs to reclassify providers"
      "The Republicans are holding up nominations"

so on so forth.

</comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone have a good solution for this argument? I find myself wildly sympathetic to both sides of it. Is there any way to decentralize internet access in the future (something like what the utopian ideal of solar powering your home would be for electricity)?

<comment><USER36> To the extent that near-future cellular data connections are good enough for most things, they introduce a lot of additional choice. Instead of just cable, DSL, or satellite, you can also throw three or more cellular networks into competition.

As for wired connections, I see a way to get competitive pricing there too. Neighborhoods and towns should invest in their own last-mile fiber, and then buy transit at competitive rates. They could outsource the operation of the local network, but they would retain ownership of it and can always get competitive bids for another operator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> How much should the rest of the world care about this?

If a web service is hosted, say, in Europe and is being consumed by a customer also in Europe, will they be affected? AFAICT, they shouldn't.

<comment><USER26> That's like saying the rest of the world shouldn't care about the UK's content filtering. None of us live in isolation; all our lawmakers are friends and they like to share ideas and cut deals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> >In its ruling against the FCC's rules, the court said that such restrictions are not needed in part because consumers have a choice in which ISP they use.

in theory vs. in practice

</comment><comment><USER39> Perhaps this means the other shoe will fall. Will local regulations making it easy for municipalities or other actors to set up their own ISPs?

</comment><comment><USER40> Why is this not a bigger deal?

</comment><comment><USER41> How can something or someone be half-dead? Life is a binary thing, you are either YES (1) alive or NO (0) dead. I fail to comprehend how any respectable (tech) journalist would call something "half-dead". It implies there is a state between being alive and death when this is clearly not the case.

<comment><USER42> I don't think this tangent adds much to the intended discussion, and I feel you're missing the point of the original post. There is much more to talk about here than the definition of death. However; I would like to both humour and disagree with you, I don't think there is an agreed position of what it really means to be alive. Is someone in a vegetative state really alive? If a human is on their deathbed with absolutely no chance of recovery, although they're not technically dead, they're not really alive either. There is most definitely a transition.</comment></comment>