The first high-resolution map of America's food supply chain - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling <comment><USER2> Clickbait title is clickbaity.

Direct link to paper:

"Food flows between counties in the United States"

Xiaowen Lin, Paul J Ruess, Landon Marston and Megan Konar

Published 26 July 2019. Environmental Research Letters.

[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab29ae)

(Original link and title from: [https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the- first-map-of-americ...](https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of- americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling))

And the map in question:

[https://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/14/8/084011/downloadHRF...](https://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/14/8/084011/downloadHRFigure/figure/erlab29aef5)

Viewable online (above link downloads): [https://imgur.com/gallery/E7eaf7l](https://imgur.com/gallery/E7eaf7l)

<comment><USER3> That imgur link is wrong ....

<comment><USER4> could've been worse.

<comment><USER5> Should have been a rick roll in my opinion, but nobody got my joke so far : /

<comment><USER6> HN isn't typically responsive to jokes.

<comment><USER7> HN is typically responsive to jokes that are on topic, technical in nature, and/or make a good point. Rickrolling is none of those. As an example this joke [0] I made is currently at 6 upvotes despite being burried pretty deep, I can't see how many upvotes the joke it is a reply to has, but it is clearly highly upvoted (it probably has many more upvotes than my reply).

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21411080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21411080)

<comment><USER8> > HN is typically responsive to jokes that are on topic, technical in nature, > and/or make a good point.

Also jokes that others can use as a launching point to nerd out about something.

E.g., I once made a joke about how the ships in the old days were some of the most efficient forms of transportation ever, because they got thousands of miles per galleon.

dredmorbius responded [1] with a short essay on the history of marine propulsion over the last couple of centuries, and how sail has many advantages over powered ships. Many others jumped in with long, thoughtful, well documented posts full of naval nerdery.

My joke got about 70 points, probably because people appreciated the responses.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736579](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7736579)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My takeaway from this is that the logistics network is very brittle and contains many weak points:

"A disruption to any of these [nine] counties [in California] may have ripple effects for the food supply chain of the entire country."

and

"... a lot of grain produced throughout the Midwest is transported ... via the waterways of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

The infrastructure along these waterways ... have not been overhauled since their construction in 1929. They represent a serious bottleneck ... If they were to fail entirely, then commodity transport and supply chains would be completely disrupted."

It would be interesting to know if the food logistics network of other countries have a similar scale-free topology with a handful of very important nodes and overlooked, but critical infrastructure. I'm guessing yes, they do.

<comment><USER10> Fresh produce is sensitive to logistic snags but aren't grains much more robust and thus able to better withstand delays caused by temporary infrastructure failures?

<comment><USER11> Only if it is temporary. A worst case lock failure will knock out river transport for years. Eventually you run out of wheat on the other side of the failure. Of course there are options, but they are vastly more expensive (ie thousands of trucks).

<comment><USER12> Rail will take over for barge before they would use trucks.

<comment><USER11> Rail will try, but doesn't scale as fast: tracks are not always running in the right direction, and the best maintained tracks are already busy. Eventually rail can have more capacity, but trucks can scale faster.

<comment><USER13> >tracks are not always running in the right direction

If the alternative is to let the grain rot, it does not matter much what direction the tracks run in; all that matters is that the the rail network connects some destination willing to buy the grain with where the grain is now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't think most Americans appreciate just how much of the food they consume originates in California. Not just California, but in 6 or 7 counties located in the San Joaquin valley. I grew up in the middle of it in Tulare County and even I don't grasp the multibillions of dollars agriculture brings in. In the event of some megadisaster which cause the valley to stop producing or something happens to the transportation infrastructure on a massive scale, there will be a lot of empty produce bins and grocery shelves in the US and they won't be quickly refilled.

</comment><comment><USER15> A project idea I've toyed with is "Where does X come from?", which would show someone, to some approximation, where the things they buy and consume originated, and the path they took to get there, and where their waste goes. Mainly this is inspired by my own curiosity, but also desire to better understand the impact my decisions have on the world.

I haven't pursued it due to lack of time and expectation that acquiring and reducing the data would be a monumental effort, but this looks like a good source for "where does [food item] come from", and has some useful-sounding source databases for tracking other items.

Some other resources I'd want to include: water, sewer, trash, electric (at least where the lines are and nearby power generation), and gas.

</comment><comment><USER16> A few days ago I was listening to an interview on the radio, and the man said that Spain had a very inefficient food supply chain becuase the food would travel across provinces. He said that if the provinces would be able to self supply about 80-90% of their own food that would reduce massively the CO2 footprint. He gave some numbers which I don't remember, but they were quite massive.

Texas alone has a bigger surface than Spain, I wonder how much pollutes the transport of the food alone and how much could be avoided by producing food locally. The whole thing seems pretty wasteful...

<comment><USER17> People would have to stop expecting to be able to eat all vegetables and fruits at all times. Going to be a hard sell, especially in the northern half of the US that doesn't grow anything in winter.

<comment><USER18> Improved local production doesn't have to reduce variety by necessity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> A county in Delaware being on the top ten for food inflow seemed odd. I assume this must be including raw grain, because the only thing notable about that county is that it apparently is nothing but chicken coops[1].

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sussex_County,_Delaware#Econom...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sussex_County,_Delaware#Economy)

<comment><USER20> Could it be because Delaware is a preferred location due to corporate tax laws? Please note that in this case, this is a non-rhetorical question on my part. Transportation and tax shelters are out of my areas of interest. just wondering if the graphs may be of parent company post office box numbers instead of loading dock addresses.

<comment><USER11> No, it is probably chicken coops. I'd guess that one country is responsible for most of the eggs in New York, all those eggs going out means a lot of chicken food going in.

Corporate tax laws just mean any significant company has an official address in Delaware, which amounts to a private post office that gets official mail for a few hundred companies and forwards it to the real headquarters which isn't in Delaware.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm currently doing a literature review for a research project closely related to this exact topic. And they say reading HN is a waste of time! ;)

But seriously. This is a great example of what a lot of other research also points to: the growing vulnerability of the US food system to systemic existential risks due to geographic specialization, market consolidation, and decrease in network resilience of local food systems. This is important stuff. Glad to see food systems pop up here.

<comment><USER22> What risks are these? When was the last serious food shortage in North America?

<comment><USER21> Absolutely. But that's the not box to think in to see the problem. Sure, we haven't had that happen in recent memory. Soooo... if there _were_ to be a problem then, that means it wouldn't look what like we think "food problems" should look like. What we see doesn't determine the problem space, the problem space suggests ways we may need to change our viewing angle.

By the time you're responding to a catastrophe there have already been system level changes happening for quite some time before that kind of observable "phase transition" from normal function to disaster even occurs.

We've gotten increasingly better at producing a particular type of highly optimized food and distributing it through just as optimized Just in Time/LEAN systems. Which is great and allows you to carry less "inventory waste" \- we've managed to get down to now keeping about 75 days worth of food reserves globally - HOWEVER, the trade off to that type of efficiency is that introduces new sources of risk. It (by definition) removes a ton of redundancy from the system and severely decreases the resilience of the total system to any sort of shock - let along multiple coincident ones.

THAT then brings in our outdated ways of conceptualizing, preparing for, and mitigating risks across functional and geographic areas. If you're dealing with an issue as complicated the global food system it's not productive to just have individual risk calculations with insurance/consumer pricing baked in for _individual_ scenarios. For example, in any particular area there may be an x% chance of a 1000 year flood. So if there are 5000 of those communities and the total system would have been able to withstand some number of 1000 year floods distributed between them in a normal year, what happens when you factor in that, for instance, our climate "context" is different than when lots of infrastructure was built? What's the ability of the system to withstand the normal amount of thousand year floods when you add in climate effects that may both cause more events and make each event more severe/destructive and there also happens to be a "bad year"/5-10% reduction in (mostly monoculture) cereal crop output or a case of African swine fever that kills 300 million pigs in China. Now factor in the systemic changes and consolidation leading to less redundancy in the food system and you've got a hard risk management problem on your hands.

A few case studies that may be interesting: [https://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2017/03/Multiple- Breadbasket...](https://www.bu.edu/pardee/files/2017/03/Multiple-Breadbasket- Failures-Pardee-Report.pdf) [https://www.fcrn.org.uk/research- library/lloyd's-emerging-ri...](https://www.fcrn.org.uk/research- library/lloyd's-emerging-risk-report-2015-food-system-shock-insurance-impacts- acute)

A _great_ video about food/ecological systems and co-benefits: [https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with...](https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish?language=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How come the midwest is not in the outflows chart? I thought there was a lot of agriculture there?

<comment><USER4> also why isn't the central valley of California featured? pretty sure they produce more than los angeles county.

<comment><USER24> Fresno, Tulare (home of the World Ag Expo), Stanislaus, San Joaquin, Merced, and Kern counties are all on the top food outflows list and in the Central Valley of California.

EDIT - for a total outflow of 53.9 billion kilograms of food. Of course, this includes any flows between these counties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I was surprised to find that my county (Harris, TX) was one of the nine counties "most central to the overall structure of the food supply network".

Not much farming happens in this county, nearly zero industrial farming. In the few spots of undeveloped land a few people have some cows, mostly for tax purposes. One more thing, Harris encompasses most of the greater Houston metropolitan area. It's mostly city and suburbs. So what gives?

"We did this by looking for counties with the largest number of connections to others"

Ok, well there's very little farming in the surrounding counties relative to California and the corn belt. We're quite a ways from the Rio Grande valley (which does have quite a bit of farming).

So this still doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER26> It's probably a major importer then

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> From the article:

"At over 17 million tons of food, Los Angeles County received more food than any other county in 2012, our study year. It shipped out even more: 22 million tons."

I think that statement is backwards. The graphic shows Los Angeles with an OUTFLOW of 16.6b and an INFLOW of 21.9b.

<comment><USER28> Yep, I'm assuming the graphic is right because it makes zero sense that a metropolitan area could somehow grow more food than it needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> It doesn't look like there is enough flow eastward across the Appalachian Mountains to the heavily populated eastern seaboard.

</comment><comment><USER30> There is a giant flow from KS to gulf coast TX. I assume those are grain exports?

</comment><comment><USER31> Always disappointing to see counties used for comparison. Also disappointing to see totals instead of per-capita values.

<comment><USER32> Per-capita doesn't make sense in this case. This is about the total flow of food. It again wouldn't make sense to say that a small town in the middle of no where with say 100 people who have the highest per-capita food export when in total they aren't even a drop in the bucket in importance to somewhere in CA or the Midwest that is an agriculture power house and accounts for most of our total food production.

<comment><USER31> But total flow is skewed when one county is an order of magnitude bigger than another in size. If you are going to compare counties which are not a fixed physical size, you at least need to account for differing physical size's effects on population or you can't reasonably compare. Were the counties a quarter of their current physical size, capita split and all, would they still appear as significant?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Some People Are Impossibly Talented - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191118-what-shapes-a-polymath---and-do-we-need-them-more-than-ever <comment><USER2> 'According to his son and daughter, he would play music whenever he faced an intractable problem, and would often finish the performance by saying, "There now, I've got it". It was a much better use of his time than continuing to fruitlessly agonise over the maths or physics.'

Fascinating. Definitely have experienced this with hard problems and writing music. There must be some kind of orthogonality going on there.

<comment><USER3> It implies the existence of a common underlying connection between music (or should I say art in general) and pretty much everything else. And there's the science-society-art triangle that seems to work really nicely together as three pillars of knowledge you can pursue. There's a perspective based on either of those three you can take when considering anything. I have no punchline, it's fascinating to me too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This tweets says it all:

[https://twitter.com/onetrunna/status/1198329720896516096?s=2...](https://twitter.com/onetrunna/status/1198329720896516096?s=21)

<comment> AA-BA-94-2A-56 Galatians 4:16

(Paraphrased) "And they hated him because he spoke the truth."

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the introduction:

Polymaths excel in multiple fields. But what makes a polymath – and can their cross-discipline expertise help tackle some of society's most pressing challenges?

</comment><comment><USER5> Yeah but the article overlooks the many polymaths who spread themselves thinly across a variety of different fields, never achieving true mastery of a particular field. The phrase 'Jack of all trades, master of none' springs to mind. There are however polymaths who achieve mastery of all the fields they choose to pursue, although I imagine they are rare.

<comment><USER6> I guess the question is: would these people be significantly better at any of these fields, if they specialised more? That seems like an open question to me.

My personal experience as a jack-of-all-trades is that if I try to specialise, I dry up creatively and get less effective.

<comment><USER7> I recently found out about the concept of "scanner personality", which covers what you mention (I'm also a "sufferer" of it). If I specialise (too much) I feel constrained and dry up creatively as well.

<comment><USER8> The trick might be to always imagine multiple angles along which you can approach a problem, however specialized the problem might be. That way, you never feel "constrained".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times > more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist.

This is a remarkable claim, so I set out to find out if it's justified, or yet another mis-interpreted statistic in a pop science article. I'm leaning towards the latter. The vague phrasing of "studies have found" immediately makes me suspicious.

Google first led me to the book "The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility" by Waqas Ahmed, mentioned in this article (a submarine?), which contains this paragraph:

> "According to a study by American psychologist Bernice Eiduson titled the > 'Sigma Xi Survey' based on testimonials by numerous Nobel laureates, most > great scientists often have multiple avocational interests. In-depth > analysis of Nobel laureates in literature between 1901 and 2002 found that > great artists and writers often have multiple avocational interests. He > found that the science laureates were highly accomplished outside the lab: > more than half had at least one artistic avocation, and almost all had an > enduring hobby, from chess to insect collecting; one quarter were musicians; > and 18% practiced visual arts such as drawing or painting. These laureates > are 25 times as likely as the average scientist to sing, dance, or act; ..."

I was not able to find a specific "Sigma Xi Survey". I assume the title is a reference to Sigma Xi, the scientific research honor society [1]. I don't know when or how this particular Survey was given, or where the results were published.

I did find several other publications by a Dr. Bernice Eiduson, all from the 1960's. Then I discovered that she (not "he") died in 1985 [2], and therefore probably wasn't doing much analysis of Nobel laureates in 2002.

The link just before this claim in the BBC article is to a 2004 paper, "Artistic Scientists and Scientific Artists: the Link Between Polymathy and Creativity", by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein. This paper seems to be unmentioned in "The Polymath" book, but is perhaps another part of the claim, as its Table 1 and Table 2 are about "NOBEL LAUREATES IN LITERATURE, 1901-- 2002".

The only mention in this paper of dancing with respect to any science laureates is Table 4: "Frequency of Arts Avocations in Chemistry Nobel Prize Winners Compared with Sigma Xi Members" \-- "DANCING" is a big "0" in both cases. Where are all these dancing Nobel scientists they're alluding to? And the table doesn't mention singing at all.

Table 3 is "Hobbies X Citation Cluster for Scientists of the Eiduson Study", which sounds promising but doesn't mention dancing or acting at all.

Is it possible to substantiate the 25x claim? It's really starting to seem like a made-up statistic, and an excuse to sell books. Out of all the alleged singing, dancing, acting scientists, they picked _two_ photographs of Einstein playing the violin. Where's the rest?

And if the first pull quote I chose to check is so emphatic yet so difficult to confirm, what confidence do I have that any of the rest of it is true? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Xi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Xi) [2]: [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la- xpm-1985-08-10-fi-3906-s...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la- xpm-1985-08-10-fi-3906-story.html)

(Do the Snopes researchers read HN, or BBC?)</comment>


The crisis of American filmmaking & cultural life - <AUTHOR> http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/nyc1-m16.shtml

<comment><USER2> This is from the "World Socialist Web Site", which is "Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)". In that light, the following statement is interesting for what it doesn't say, as far as I can tell from skimming the article:

" _We've made the point before: the Russian novelists of the 19th century, by their combined efforts, contributed to the discrediting of official society and its eventual downfall._ "

Yeah, and that lead to a government that murdered probably in excess of 100 million people (my own adjustment of existing figures, based on what's been discovered when sites of international socialist (AKA communist) mass murder are examined and many unknown ones stumbled upon, plus what we know of the the systematic falsification of the official demographics starting with the 1937 census (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_%281937%29> )). And of course that pattern has been repeated time after time.

To advocate the downfall of an existing society without considering the known costs is ... well, I'd say beyond irresponsible, but perhaps not....</comment>


House rejects extension of 'Patriot Act' powers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12400834 <comment><USER2> The situation here is a bit more complicated than this headline implies. The House Judiciary Committee plans on looking at these provisions. This bill was introduced to temporarily extend them to December of this year to give them time to do so.

Today's vote was an attempt to pass this extension by supermajority, a tactic that can be used to avoid debate. A majority was reached but a supermajority was not, by a few votes. It will be passed shortly by a simple majority after minimal debate, the Tea Partiers had their say.

The White House wants to extend these provisions until 2013 no matter what the Judiciary Committee decides. They are concerned that abruptly curtailing the use of these powers will not give law enforcement adequate time to prepare alternatives and workarounds.

It is basically all a smokescreen. For the foreseeable future, law enforcement has pretty much carte blanche with respect to surveillance, and is limited only by a secret and completely unaccountable court and a few aggregate numbers they have to report.

<comment><USER3> > the Tea Partiers had their say.

That's a bit misleading: of the 111 "tea party endorsed", 96 voted for the extension, 12 voted against, and 3 didn't vote. This is essentially indistinguishable from the other Republicans, at 114/14/2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
      The bill was opposed by most Democrats and some Republicans

65% of Democrats voted against it. While that's a majority (of Democrats), "most" would imply, to me at least, more like 85-90%.

<comment><USER5> While I'm glad the extension of these provisions of the act didn't pass, I'm skeptical that compromise legislation that's as bad for privacy and civil liberties generally but more politically palatable won't pass shortly.</comment></comment>


Hackers Breached San Francisco's Transit System and Demanded a Ransom - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2016/11/28/san_francisco_muni_hacked_for_a_ransom_payment.html <comment><USER2> I don't know why this isn't more upvoted. As an SF resident I can confirm that this happened over the holiday (Friday) (I heard a muni station agent mentioned the word hacked, all the gates were open and said "free"). Plus the article has a photo of proof.

The gates seem to be working as of this morning though... I wonder if they paid?

<comment><USER3> "HDDCryptor not only targets resources in network shares such as drives, folders, files, printers, and serial ports via Server Message Block (SMB), but also locks the drive. Such a damaging routine makes this particular ransomware a very serious and credible threat not only to home users but also to enterprises."

[http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/b...](http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security- intelligence/bksod-by-ransomware-hddcryptor-uses-commercial-tools-to-encrypt- network-shares-and-lock-hdds/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you doing automated UI testing – why or why not? - <AUTHOR>

I have worked in several companies that have had goals of automated UI regression test suites, but I've never worked at a company that pulled it off successfully.  I can name off a case-by-case list of reasons why these efforts have failed, but I am curious if the community is seeing similar trends. <comment><AUTHOR> I'll add one example from a past company I worked for:

\- We had a manager and one internal developer assigned part-time to an effort to seed an automation effort.

\- The front-end of the application was Flex.

\- Most QA analysts at the company had never written code before.

\- We attempted to use Selenium.

As you can imagine, this was a crash and burn for several reasons. The company couldn't get enough buy-in internally to dedicate more developer time to seed the effort, and the long-term approach was not well thought out. A few tests were deployed, but they were brittle because they relied on DOM elements. This was partially because QA analysts were expected to be able to use a Selenium "capturing" tool to create tests without writing any code.

Writing this out now, I think the root problem is that at the management level, the sentiment was just that we should "do automation" and no one really understood how much that would involve. There doesn't seem to be any turn-key solution out there that is designed to fit in with the rest of a company's development processes.

When there isn't a clear path for solving a problem, it becomes a much more expensive problem to solve. In this case, the cost far out-weighed any benefit that the company would see.

With that said, I am still optimistic about the potential for effective UI automation testing and I'd love to hear more stories.

</comment><comment><USER2> \- We use selenium, test cases are written in python.

\- We use the webdriver, recording never worked

\- Followed the page model

\- Had to build in retries on getting elements to make tests reliable

\- You need upper management buy-in. Took us 8 months to start getting it right

\- I would say our team members are intermediate with python

\- Devs currently do not write tests. But they asked to start writing which is a good sign

\- Yes some days you just spend fixing broken tests. But you get experience on how to write them better over time

Tips:

\- Work with devs to get build the page with proper selectors (use ID if not, then us CSS selectors, don't use xpath)

\- Use APIs to seed data for your tests

\- Get to the page you need to test as fast as possible by hitting the urls directly, using APIs to seed what data u need. Manually injecting cookies to get to the state you need.

Costs:

\- 2 full time engineers only working on automation for 8 months.

\- Once you have your framework in place writing tests become a lot easier

</comment><comment> jags-v I think the question is incomplete(at least I think so).

Its not about automating the UI tests for regression testing,but to ensure that regression testing is effective.Most of the times,this is driven through the UI, which could be flaky.

As the test pyramid paradigm states , having a lot of UI tests, depending on the functionality & complexity could be an anti pattern. Essentially , a lot of the functionality can be tested using by writing unit tests & integration tests and the end to end business use cases should be automated through the UI just to ensure it works.

If it is possible to drive the state of the application using an API or URL, to the target state and then we assert elements to check the UI.

This enables faster feedback and is less flaky.This is how we approached testing in our team.Depending on the objective , we would use Selenium ,JUNit , Cucumber or corresponding ones in a given programming language.

</comment><comment><USER2> Yes, I along with my team members have helped my company come from zero automation to decent coverage with UI tests. We have tests that run reliably for Web, iOS and Android.

It has certainly improved our deployment time.

If you describe some of the your problems. I can tell you how we overcome them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. I have several questions.

What is the division of labor between developers who work on the tests and (perhaps non-coding) QA analysts?

What software are you using?

How large is the application, and would you mind describing the nature of the application?

Do you have any clear cost metrics on the effects of automation testing? E.g., are you able to operate with a smaller QA team, measurably lower incidence of bugs discovered in production, etc.?

Thanks again.</comment></comment>


Solving Project Euler problems - <AUTHOR> http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2010/01/solving-project-euler-problems.html

<comment><USER2> Project Euler is a great tool to learn a new programming language. I used it, along with 'Programming Clojure' to learn Clojure. You can see all my problems on GitHub. <http://github.com/semmons99/clojure-euler>

<comment><USER3> I can't decide whether to put my solutions up. They're in Arc, so they might be useful for people learning the language, as there aren't many Arc-specific programs out there.

<comment><USER4> So why are you hesitating? If your programming is good you will only help other people and may get some useful exposure in the community in the process.

If your programming is bad, (hypothetically) you will likely get people to give you good pointers so that you are better next time.

Either way, I see no reason not to, and the fact you are using Arc just increases the importance of helping people to follow along behind you.

<comment><AUTHOR> One good reason to hesitate is that Project Euler is supposed to be a set of problems that people solve for themselves. Therefore the admins request that people not post solutions, and occasionally will tweak parameters if certain problems are too easy to find with a Google search.

It is a losing battle to be sure, but they put a lot of work into it and I prefer it when people respect their request to not facilitate cheating.

<comment><USER4> People who are going through Project Euler to practice will never search for those and would likely forget the fine details quickly, so having the answers out there somewhere won't matter to them. People who want to cheat at Project Euler already have plenty of ways (and besides, what would they gain? At least from my minimal participication, it does not really look like a contest and there are no prizes).

On the other hand, people who want to learn Arc might be very greatful to have a good set of code out there.

<comment><USER5> _and besides, what would they gain?_

Some companies in the financial industry use PE problems for interviews. People memorize brainteasers for these interviews, so I imagine people might also want to memorize PE solutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> IMHO Project Euler teaches bad programming by asking you to solve specific cases instead of general problems. I've found at least one problem where the straightforward correct answer failed in the general case, and the generic solution was significantly more complicated.

Edit: this one [http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=13](http://projecteuler.net/index.php?section=problems&id=13)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not sure what you mean by "straightforward correct answer".

I just used a big integer library, calculated the answer, and then took the first 10 digits. That should work out fine in any reasonable general case that you're likely to be thinking of.

<comment><USER6> What I found in example solutions, and is indeed accepted by the site, is truncating each number to 10 digits and then summing. You can do this with just double-precision FP so it's likely to be the most common solution in languages that don't have bignums baked in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, right.

There are also a number of problems where it is possible to narrow down the answer fairly easily, then submit a limited number of guesses until you get the right answer without having really shown that it is right.

But they try to limit how easy that is to do.

<comment><USER7> _There are also a number of problems where it is possible to narrow down the answer fairly easily, then submit a limited number of guesses until you get the right answer without having really shown that it is right._

To some degree, they need to rely on the users to care enough not to "cheat." There is no way to completely avoid people doing things like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> #240 is pretty evil. I spent a lot of time trying thing that I thought would work, but didn't. Well done creating it.

<comment><USER8> Why can't you just figure out how many ways to sum 10 12-sided dice to 70, and then for each solution, multiply that by the number of ways the other dice could all be ≤ the smallest one (times changes in ordering). Seems like it'd take no more than 20 or 30 minutes to code up.

<comment><USER9> Go ahead and try it out. I've only solved 87 problems, but I enjoyed it very much. My experience was that many problems were very deceptive. At first you think, it is really easy, and after awhile it becomes evident that the problem is much harder than initially thought. I appreciated that every problem seems to teach you something new, even if the problem seems very similar to a previous one, there is usually a twist.</comment></comment></comment>


Rubytoolbox (great resource for rails) at risk of shutting down - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rubytoolbox/rubytoolbox/issues/1 <comment><AUTHOR> I am really sad to hear this. Rubytoolbox is a great resource and it will be sad to lose it.</comment>


Ask HN: Outsourcing to India or China? - <AUTHOR>

What is your experience with outsourcing development to India or China ? I have the impression India has cheaper resources , China more expensive but more qualified? <comment><USER2> Are you looking to start India China War here? Just kidding.

I think cheaper is correct but not necessarily more qualified. India has lots and lots people in IT Software (my guess much more than China), quality ranges, so you have lot more to filter from.

</comment><comment><USER3> Depends on what you're outsourcing.</comment>


Ask HN: When should you not tell people your ideas? - <AUTHOR>

I went to an event for founders looking to meet partners and practice pitching. Some wanted help others wanted opinions.
At the end of the night I was talking with someone I'd been hanging out with most of the night. Mentioned an idea I'd been working on for a little while. He saw the money potential in it. And said it's better to test it and that he could probably build a prototype in an hour.
Haven't heard from him since. I know it's all about execution, but it's a simple idea. It's been a few weeks. He's probably just been busy/lazy.
But anyway, how much should you tell people about things you're working on? <comment><USER2> This is a good example of why you, yourself, should have made a minimally viable product prior to pitching it to other developers.

I don't think he's gone home and began writing his own - that's not what I'm getting at. I'm just saying, feedback is much more constructive when you can show people functionality right then and there. If all you can show people is a Photoshop rendering of the design, or can only give them a verbal description of it, the feedback you get is going to be about that Photoshop image. For example, they're going to be knit-picky about button placement or font choice rather than whether or not they'd find the service useful.

Also, if you had gone in there with a demo to show, perhaps it'd seem more concrete to others and they'd be more willing to jump on board rather than ignore your messages.

edit: I guess to be more direct about your question - I tell people my ideas usually as soon as I begin to think that I may be on to something. I tell my close circle of friends first, to kind of bounce around the idea. Then, I built a super basic demo in a night or two and go toss it around on IRC and here on HN.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wouldn't take the "in an hour" thing too seriously. We all say that, but what it really means is that the basic idea is not that difficult to implement a prototype for and see if our assumptions are correct. They rarely are.

But to answer your question, I would always share my ideas with people who are interested. The details are probably too much for a casual conversation, so that's what I won't get into unless I know that there's a purpose for the conversation such as co-founder seeking, investor, idea feedback...</comment>


Bruce Lee's Letters to Himself About Authenticity, Personal Development - <AUTHOR> https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/22/in-my-own-process-bruce-lee/ <comment><USER2> The little scene in the beginning of "Enter the Dragon" in which Lee trains a student has remained with me for many years as a broadly applicable koan for lots of things.

"It is like a finger pointing at the moon..."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY- AgR3dFr8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tY-AgR3dFr8)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you live in the pacific northwest , I highly suggest visiting the Wing Luke museum and checking out the Bruce lee exhibit . You get intimate glimpses into his life: sketches, journal entries, meal plans, work out routines and personal letters.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also of interest: Pierre Berton's interview with Bruce Lee: [https://vimeo.com/36323215](https://vimeo.com/36323215)</comment>


Vancouver house prices are falling - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/903194/vancouver-house-prices-are-falling-as-it-gets-its-real-estate-bubble-under-control/ <comment><USER4> In addition, the article fails to mention the Empty Home tax implemented by the city. Homes that sit empty (for speculation or other reasons) are taxed 1% per year. This was done to increase the vacancy rate and encourage owners to put all this property sitting idle back onto the market. AND: Collected Empty Home Tax will be reinvested into affordable housing initiatives.

<comment><USER5> Wildly insufficient. As a local, I'd vote that foreigners shouldn't be allowed to buy property here at all - not residential, not speculative, not vacation homes, nothing. 1% tax is slightly better than nothing, I guess.

<comment><USER6> > As a local, I'd vote that foreigners shouldn't be allowed to buy property > here at all

Define "local" and "foreigner". Does local mean you grew up in vancouver, or moved there a while ago, or your family spent three generations there already?

In addition, define foreigner. Anywhere else in British Columbia considered "foreign"? What about from Ottowa?

If you mean that you want to punish behaviour, such as buying houses and properties you don't live in or use, that's one thing. Discrimination based on locality sounds an awful lot like Jim Crow laws.

<comment><USER7> You had me right up to _Jim Crow laws_. That is a bit hyperbolic and an inappropriate comparison, IMO.

<comment><USER6> "Foreign real estate investor" in Vancouver is a thinly veiled euphemism for "Chinese and Russian money."

When you're passing a law that disproportionately affects certain ethnic groups, that particular comparison is apt.

<comment><USER8> Most of the Russian and Chinese money is being laundered out of their respective countries.

Your ethnicity isn't being discrimated against, just your country's economics circumstances. No reason to bring the SJWing into an economic argument.

<comment><USER6> >Your ethnicity isn't being discrimated against, just your country's economics circumstances.

Restricting people, no matter their ethnicities, based on their country's circumstances is generally frowned upon. Especially when it only affects citizens of a few countries. "Well, this law only applies to <action> Too bad only people from these countries perform these <actions>"

Besides, your claim that the money is being laundered is highly speculative and unproven. That's the definition of painting with a wide brush - <USER2> most money is suspect, you cut off access to all of it?

<comment><USER8> Both local governments and popular opinion in those regions differ from your opinion, although you are still entitled to that opinion.

Local residents and voters have the right to keep others out if their laws allow for it. Outsiders/non-citizens don't get a vote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This Bloomberg article explains what has been happening here: [https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-vancouver-real- estat...](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-vancouver-real-estate- market/)

Vancouver is located at the most western point of the Fraser Valley which is locked in by a mountain range to the North and the US border to the south. I live in Chilliwack, BC at east end of the Valley. I bought my home out here in the "cheap" part of the FV in 2015 for $375,000 and two years later it's assessed at $570,000.

The joke here is "they pay you in mountains and rivers". Wages are nowhere close enough for the average family to live here, so many are having to leave. But because Canada has some pretty epic winters in most of the country, and Vancouver has the mildest weather and climate (read: it rains a lot here) many baby boomer Canadians move here to avoid the winters the rest of the country endures 3 - 4 months out of the year.

If you're a US citizen thinking about leaving the US and are considering moving to Vancouver, do your research first. Talk to other Vancouverites and check your assumptions before committing to buy property. I'd recommend renting here for a couple of years to see if it's for you, and also because the market will hopefully correct and you'll get a better price on a home.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure I'm getting this right - they got 3.7% drop after 250% raise in 10 years and they consider the problem being fixed and everybody should come and look how cool they are? Something is missing here. OK, let's say they manage to get the local market get lethargic - nobody sells because prices are too low and selling means realizing huge losses, nobody buys because there's nothing to buy. How this is "bringing it under control"? It's like shooting your computer and saying "here, I debugged it! It's no longer crashing!" It's no longer working either...

<comment><USER11> You do know that over 10 years that is an annualised 9.6%, a 3.7% drop in a year is a big deal. What do you want, anarchy?

<comment><USER10> I want to understand what is the great achievement this article is touting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Imagine the Canadians who bought in the last 6 months. They probably purchased thinking it was a great investment and if they didn't buy now they'd never be able to afford a home in Vancouver.

And the shocking thing is just how big the losses can be when homes cost >$1M. If you buy a $200K home and the market drops 10%, it's a $20K loss of your down payment. A lot of money, but something manageable for most people.

If you bought a $1.5M home and the price dropped 10%, that's a $150K hit to your pocket book. And 10% is a small drop in an overheated market like Vancouver. It wouldn't surprise me to see a drop closer to 20-30%. That's a $300K to $450K loss for those home owners.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> They probably purchased thinking it was a great investment

You would think by now people would have learnt their lesson and stopped thinking of housing as a 'great investment'.

<comment><USER13> For most people your house is one of your largest investments .

<comment><USER14> Once you factor in mortgage interest payments, taxes, maintenance, inflation, real estate commissions, your time, and the time it sits vacant while you try to sell it, it's usually a lousy investment.

Much better off investing in the S&P 500.

<comment><USER10> You can't live in S&P 500 ;)

Also, when you factor this in - the landlord also knows how to factor those in. So rental prices won't be far behind. There are a lot of factors in renting vs. owning, but it's not clear-cut either side - you need to always look to specific local prices.

<comment><USER14> > You can't live in S&P 500

Getting a place to live is quite different from getting one as an investment.

> the landlord also knows how to factor those in

Rents are determined by supply & demand. They are not determined by whatever the landlord pleases to charge any more than whatever the renter pleases to pay.

<comment><USER10> > Getting a place to live is quite different from getting one as an > investment.

Not really. You need a place to live anyway, so why not get one that can also would appreciate in value? Alternatively, getting one that would depreciate can be financially ruinous. So investment consideration is always there, even if they might not be always the primary one.

> Rents are determined by supply & demand.

That's a platitude. But you are thinking of "supply and demand" to narrowly - nobody would purchase a rental property that brings in less money than it takes out, whatever demand is around. There's a price floor for rental price, and that's how much it costs to the owner to get and maintain the property. Short-term, the price can drop below it since selling house takes time, and the market may be not good. Long-term, nobody would keep such asset. People don't do it for fun, they do it for money. If selling is more profitable, they'd do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's fascinating how effective the foreign ownership tax has been. It's only 15%, but it essentially halted the Vancouver property bubble in its tracks, and is now deflating it.

I'll admit to being one of those who thought Vancouver's real estate prices were due to an unwillingness to build. I was wrong. It was always just Chinese money fleeing uncertainty and trying to find a safe place to land.

<comment><USER16> Can't be too quick to attribute the "halt" as there have also been changes in currency control policies in China that came into effect in the new year. There likely are a few different contributing factors.

<comment><USER17> The article addresses this. Actions taken by china affect all cities but only Vancouver in recovering from bubble pricing. Other Canadian cities continue to suffer rising prices. Therefore we may conclude that the cause is specific to Vancouver.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> IMO, the timing also coincides with Chinese government's several actions of tightening regulations for foreign exchanges/purchases. So it may be a combination of multiple factors (not sure which one is more significant)

See [https://www.ft.com/content/87d8a7e8-cfe8-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b...](https://www.ft.com/content/87d8a7e8-cfe8-11e6-b06b-680c49b4b4c0)

<comment><USER19> The foreign tax appears to be more significant due to other cities without the tax not seeing prices drop.

<comment><USER12> You have to remember that Vancouver was _the_ hottest housing market in Canada. Toronto is #2, but prices there are maybe 60-80% of those in Vancouver. And Toronto is a massive city with a ton of high paying jobs. Vancouver not so much.

As I stated in another reply, I have no doubt the foreigner tax had an impact. But even without it, the Vancouver market was poised for a downturn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know where these guys got their stats but an average-priced detached home throughout Greater Vancouver costs $1,470,265.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/02/vancouver- detached-h...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/09/02/vancouver-detached- home-price-crash-housing_n_11837936.html)

<comment><USER12> I assume their number includes condos as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I expect prices to drop up to 15% and then to recover. Such trends to happen when prices are elastic, profits are high, and a new tax is enforced.

I'm more interested in the effects of the new monetary rules/enforcement that China has imposed on its citizens. Still, I remain steadfastly skeptical that the sky will fall.

<comment><USER22> New rules were not technically imposed, just a tougher enforcement of older rules. Anyways, the next moves by he Chinese gov should happen post CNY, they've already ratcheted up interest rates a bit in a surprise move, they'll probably make other moves in the next couple of weeks after people start coming back to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Christy Clark, the premier of BC, is considering getting rid of the 15% foreign buyers tax already and has proposed or implemented initiatives to bolster the RE market again. She and the mayor of Vancouver are said to have great ties to the RE industry. She needs to address the problem (elections are coming up) but doesn't want to anger her biggest donors (elections are coming up). One of the things she just did is implement interest free loans for 5 years for new home owners

<comment><USER24> The BC Liberal goverment has been in power too long, but people really like to play Real Estate Casino so the legacy lives on for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if anybody has built a system to correlate Chinese policy actions with economic effects elsewhere. I rudely became aware of just how much Chinese capital controls mattered in cryptocurrencies when BTC took that mini- dive. I'm sure there's some bank out there that's run the numbers -- it's fascinating how many variables might hang on what is essentially a black box.

<comment><USER26> > I rudely became aware of just how much Chinese capital controls mattered in > cryptocurrencies when BTC took that mini-dive.

except they don't, really.

[http://imgur.com/a/KDwtE](http://imgur.com/a/KDwtE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> > So how did Vancouver tame its roaring housing market?

Tamed? The article makes it sound like over a decade of faster-than-inflation price appreciation has been wiped clean with a one year decline of 3.7% and cooling sales.

The real estate market moves in very long cycles due in part to the difficulty of trading in an out of it. Believe what you want, but I suspect now is not the time to dive into the Vancouver real estate market.

Also, no mention of China and the strong desire of many citizens to move their money out of the country and into offshore assets like Vancouver real estate:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stephen-punwasi/chinese- buyers-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stephen-punwasi/chinese-buyers- vancouver-real-estate_b_14584566.html)

</comment><comment><USER28> Local municipalities could easily take more protectionist measures like this to preserve basic needs of local citizens. It seems very reasonable and feasible to tax money coming from outside of the municipality so that housing prices (or food prices, etc) don't inflate faster than the growth of the local economy.

I'm thinking of dynamics where geographical wealth mismatches could affect prices. A couple examples I've been exposed to:

      - Chinese investment in Bay Area residences
      - Transient Bay Area tech workers renting in Mission / SOMA
      - Residences being turned into vacation rentals in SF
      - Houston oil money buying residences in Colorado communities
      - NYC, LA, SF money flowing into Austin, both travel and investment
      - Vacation spending and mainland investment increasing the cost of residences in Hawaii

.. obviously many more examples could be cited. You could probably throttle taxes on purchases from any outsiders - foreign buyers, vacationers, business travelers to maintain a balance for residential property value growth.

The counter-side to this is that the wealthiest property owners (local and foreign) benefit from the free inflow of capital. These people may be more influential constituents to municipality leaders than people who would be negatively affected by rising housing prices.

<comment><USER17> In what way are Bay Area tech workers "transient"?

<comment><USER29> Everything is transient. ("If something cannot go on forever, it'll eventually have to stop.")

But I'm pretty sure that's not what GP was referring too ;)

<comment><USER17> Indeed. I would like to know how a tech worker is more transient than a banker, bus driver, welder, poet, lawyer, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This makes a lot of sense to me. I would like to see this implemented elsewhere.

I live in the Bay Area, and I'm trying to buy a house with my fiancé and we are really struggling to find anything affordable. I'm a software developer and she is a school teacher.

<comment><USER31> The Bay is more driven from internal consumption than Vancouver, though. Vancouver had the problem of foreign owners buying up a significant percent and leaving those homes empty. A tax on foreign owners won't have anything close to the same effect in SF: SF's prices are driven by salaries and wealthy residents much more than Vancouver's was.

<comment><USER22> This. The bay is much more driven by google and Facebook millionaires while Vancouver's bubble is/was almost completely driven by Chinese speculation. LA is probably more exposed to a pop in Chinese speculation than the Bay Area is.

<comment><USER32> The Bay is driven by vast numbers of Google and Facebook millionaire _hopefuls_ , who are willing to pay 60% and more of their salaries for single rooms in dilipidated apartments shared with strangers, and to endure uncomfortable hour-plus commutes, in pursuit of their dreams.

High competitiveness among the few thousand who actually got rich would not fall on the middle and working class so heavily.

A huge number of people willing to pay most of their upper-middle-class salaries for a standard of living we would call poverty in any other region, on the other hand, makes even poverty-style living too expensive for the Bay Area's actual poor.

<comment><USER12> Agreed. How many people have been made millionaires through tech companies? 10,000? 20,000? Even 50,000?

There are 7 million people who live in the greater Bay area and they live in ~2.5M owner-occupied housing units. I can't see tech millionaires making _that_ much of a an impact on housing prices. Sure, they could push prices up by 10-20%, but SF housing prices have pretty much doubled since the great recession.

I think it's the "now or never" mentality of home buyers. they think that prices will only ever go up, so if they don't buy now (even if it means overextending themselves) they'll never have a home. I'm sure a lot of people thought the same thing before the housing crash of 2007.

<comment><USER33> Prices are set on the margins.

Sales volume in the bay area are low for a variety of reasons (Prop 13, not enough new construction).

It doesn't take many people with high salaries when there is low inventory to push prices up.

If many more houses were for sale, the prices would plummet due to lack of buyers able to pay the current prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How comparable do people think their market is to the Bay Area? Would we expect to see something similar if Trump did something similar (not out of the realm of possibility at this point if it would give him a victory)? Or are the job markets and situation with Prop 13 too different such there would still be more demand than supply?

<comment><USER35> Vancouver's market isn't really comparable to the Bay Area. They have actually been building quite a lot of new housing, and have been for some years. Vancouver's real estate boom was mostly caused by foreign buyers (Chinese) using it as an investment vehicle and a place to park their money. This is a reason why Vancouver is among the top 2 or 3 most unaffordable cities, because the median wage (~60k CAD) there doesn't support owning a family home, which could easily be over a million CAD.

I doubt a foreign buyer tax would have much of an effect on the Bay Area, since much of it is driven by internal demand and high salaries. On the other hand, places like Sydney, Auckland, etc. have similar problems with foreign buyers and could probably benefit.

<comment><USER12> _Vancouver 's real estate boom was mostly caused by foreign buyers (Chinese) using it as an investment vehicle and a place to park their money._

Although foreign buyers do have an impact on the Vancouver housing market, I think people really overestimate the effect it has.

After lots of discussion about hoards of Chinese buyers, the BC gov't started tracking purchases. It peaked at 13% just before the tax (and most of that was concentrated it the top of the price range).[1] Also, that definition of foreigner is just someone without Canadian citizen or permanent residency. If you live and work in Canada and are on a work visa, then you would still count as a foreigner (which I don't think is fair).

That means only 1 out of 8 homes were bought by a foreigner and 7 out of 8 were purchases by resident Canadians.

What people seem to ignore is the absolutely shocking way that Canadians are overextending themselves when it comes to real estate. It's a "now or never" mentality and mortgage products like the ones that brought down the US economy are becoming more and more common in Canada.

The foreigner tax is likely the straw that broke the camel's back when it came to the Vancouver real estate market. Even without the tax the market was about to turn.

[1][http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real- estate/vancouver/foreign...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real- estate/vancouver/foreign-buyers-13-per-cent-of-vancouver-region-real-estate- sales-since-tax/article32572605/)

<comment><USER36> > After lots of discussion about hoards of Chinese buyers, the BC gov't > started tracking purchases. It peaked at 13% just before the tax (and most > of that was concentrated it the top of the price range).[1] Also, that > definition of foreigner is just someone without Canadian citizen or > permanent residency.

You can still purchase permanent residence status with cold hard cash in Quebec. A lot of Canadian "citizens" / "permanent residents" are nothing of the kind, they are citizens of convenience. The passport and house is for getting out of Dodge when the sh _t hits the fan.

Similarly, a lot of multi-million dollar houses are owned by Chinese students.

I'd feel very comfortable betting the _truly* foreign percentages is far, far higher than the government is telling us. It took high levels of public outrage before the government finally released a subset of the statistics, if they were really now interested in telling the truth, they'd publish all the metadata available for citizens to examine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I call b#)(sh!t [http://creastats.crea.ca/natl/index.html](http://creastats.crea.ca/natl/index.html)

Wishful thinking. Wealthy asians are still buying up everything.

<comment><USER38> Wrong. The majority of purchasers are Canadian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Condo prices in Vancouver, however, are on the upswing.

<comment><USER40> If by "upswing" you mean -5% for Vancouver west side over 6 months, then yes

[http://www.rebgv.org/sites/default/files/1.%20REBGV%20Stats%...](http://www.rebgv.org/sites/default/files/1.%20REBGV%20Stats%20Pkg%20January%202017.pdf)

<comment><USER39> My source would be my friend who is looking for a condo right now and their experience has been that everything is being snapped off the market in days for above asking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> how much are the property taxes in vancouver? I know in San Francisco its around 1.15%. A 1M condo pays, 15k in property taxes a year. So vancouver just increased this 15k by 2.25k and made it 17.25k? This seems negligible.. A 20% increase in business class plane tickets from China would have a bigger effect than this..

<comment><USER42> You misunderstand. This is a 15% premium on the entire purchase price. So for a $2M home the tax would be $300k [1].

[1] [http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc- to-t...](http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/bc-to-target- foreign-real-estate-buyers-with-new-tax/article31096550/)

<comment><USER43> I'm surprised that this has a material effect. I can't imagine that someone who is willing to buy a $2M home not to live but to park money from overseas is somehow not willing to pay $2.3M.

<comment><USER44> I suspect it's a sign that they're a lot more leveraged than one might expect. These people are not paying cash as long as money is near-free. They'd be total fools to pay 100% of 1 house instead of 20% on 5 houses. So consider a conventional mortgage that typically requires 20% down and you get it back when you sell, plus a profit. With these rules, they now have to pay 20%+15% to hold it, and they lose the latter portion to the government, plus significantly higher tax annually.

I'd guess they're good enough at this game that they're even more leveraged than the 20% conventional downpayment requirement and probably using the (bubble inflated) equity to print new money out of thin air and get another property.

I have no idea what's actually going on but this is how I've seen people speculate on real estate in other markets and seems like the obvious thing to do. I would even guess that there are ways of borrowing against money that is still in China, which subverts their restrictions on moving money.

I also predict that this hiccup will be invisible within 6 months, for two reasons.

1\. Nobody goes shopping for houses in December and January because it's cold and there is Christmas/Lunar New Year etc, especially with the storms this year.

2\. These restrictions are going to have loopholes and a market this big has an implicit bounty on finding them. They'll figure out how to get Canadians to hold the title to dodge the 15% foreign tax and they'll sign rental agreements with their lawyers kids/pets and say it's officialy rented or whatever else they need to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> If I knew a trusted local, could they buy the property for me and then give me a leasehold without incurring the tax?

<comment><USER46> Sure. You might be able to get out of the tax just by living in the house. The law is just meant to be for people who are buying property as an investment with no intention of living in the city.

<comment><USER47> Incorrect. You need to be a Canadian citizen, or a Permanent Resident, or have a valid work visa to avoid the tax.

<comment><USER44> Those are trivial to buy in most countries by "investing" in a business. Probably even a business that buys and sells property.

<comment><USER36> You can buy PR in Quebec, the predominantly French speaking province that has a parallel government as they threaten to seperate every so often when they don't get what they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have to chuckle at the thought of Trump introducing such a tax on foreign house buyers. Imagine the outrage!

<comment><USER49> Well sure, that would pretty annoying, this sort of thing shouldn't even be the federal government's job, let alone the President's. Note that this was done by the government of BC, not Justin Trudeau. Which makes a lot more sense.

<comment><USER50> No, if the laws concerning ownership are based on citizenship, then it should be done at the governmental level that manages citizenship, i.e. federal.

A 'national 15% tax' would have been much better.

Buyers from Van have shifted to Toronto. Which kind of defats the point - <USER3> city passing on their disease to another.

Globalization is having some crazy effects on the entire world, and we need some new laws.

A 15% tax on all foreign buyers on all homes in the world would be appropriate - these are not 'stocks' or other assets - these are the homes that people live in, and they are forced to gamble with their entire savings and future savings due to shifting economic tides that they don't have the capital base to deal with.

When shifting economic tides disrupt markets - the big winners are those who have enough capital to withstand the storm - they come in and pick up the pieces. Much like farmers during the great depression forced to sell their land cheap to big banks.

<comment><USER51> Residency, not citizenship. Huge difference.

<comment><USER50> Both residency and citizenship are controlled at the Federal level. (Except Quebec :).

Also, I agree that there should be a difference, and that should be reflected in the tax as well.

Non local residents 15% tax, resident, non citizens 5% tax, citizens 0% tax. For every regime.

<comment><USER52> This would deter a lot of high skilled immigrants coming into Canada. Waiting 6 years to buy a house is crazy. They'd move elsewhere. If you have a permanent residency, it should not incur a tax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> As someone from Vancouver: ...hahahahahaha oh wait you were serious. Let me laugh even louder.

House price inflation hasn't gone down in the slightest, especially not if you consider the greater vancouver area, which is where everyone's been driven off to, and consequently has become a metric that has to be considered when talking about "Vancouver" house prices. Those people are now also getting driven out of the GVA because the price increase over the last five years despite being "neighbouring city" was in the order of ~4%, ~4%, ~4%, ~4%, and then suddenly thanks to Vancouver proper, 30+%

</comment><comment><USER54> The tech industry is highly cyclical. There's been a crash in 1999, and there's been another one in 2007 (along with the rest of the economy). There's no reason why it can't happen again. I'm sure that Bay Area housing prices are a good proxy for the state of the industry. If you're a techie and you don't have a way to stick it out through the next downturn, don't buy a house here.

<comment><USER55> There was no tech crash in 2007.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Independent contractor software engineers - <AUTHOR>

The recent Uber court ruling got me thinking, what constitutes independent contractor in the software world? What is your experience in being classified this way, or hiring people this way?
Let's assume all replies are for entertainment, not for advice, and discuss the law without everyone saying to talk to your lawyer. <comment><USER2> When I was freelancing before I owned my consultancy, my basic rules to keep it clear:

1\. I set my hours.

2\. I don't work on-site but may on occasion for deployments or times where it would be of benefit.

3\. I use my own equipment (computer etc).

4\. I pushed hard to have work carved out and I self managed my schedule and deliverables. So I didn't "report" to their PM/dev lead for direction, but only to help coordinate work and make sure we were on track and aware of any changes that might affect either side etc.

I never had any issues doing it this way, but I had a few employers that refused to work with me because of it. They said I had to use their equipment and be integrated to their team. Which at that point I knew I wouldn't be independent, so I refused for personal reasons, mostly because I wanted to control my schedule. But it also benefited me since it could have "defined" me as an employee and then I would have been way overpaying taxes.

From what I understand it is fairly low risk for the "contractor", even if they get reclassified other than overpaying taxes. From what I understand it is more an issue for the employer, any information to the contrary?

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is the Microsoft case which was a corner stone to the contractor vs employee debate:

[http://corporate.findlaw.com/human-resources/employee-or- ind...](http://corporate.findlaw.com/human-resources/employee-or-independent- contractor-the-implications-of-microsoft.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're in the U.S., here's some information from the Department of Labor about employee vs. contractor classification (PDF):

[http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs13.pdf](http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs13.pdf)

<comment><USER5> This. In the U.S. there is a bright line test. That said, many, it is common to see startups and early stage companies skirt these regulations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Judging by what I see in London, I'd say in most cases it's mostly law/tax evasion scheme that's beneficial for both sides.

</comment><comment><USER7> In Denmark you are protected/seen as an employee after 12 months of freelancing if you mainly work for one company.</comment>


Authorize.net rejects customer emails containing "+" - <AUTHOR> https://community.developer.authorize.net/t5/Integration-and-Testing/Create-Customer-Profile-requests-with-emails-containing-a-symbol/m-p/62394 <comment><AUTHOR> From their CS department, per the above page:

'I've reached our to our developers and engineers, since this is a highly unusual question. They have confirmed that our system does not allow that character, and that this is an intentional decision. They provided the following reason as an explanation of why that decision was made:

"It is a security issue. We do not allow the special characters so that hackers cannot do SQL injection in the field"

</comment><comment><USER2> They also treat newlines (\n) in the XML payload as an invalid character for <airquotes> security reasons </airquotes>. Authorize.net is an antiquated company that is slowly disappearing, having lost the race versus Bluesnap and Braintree, just to name a couple of providers in the field.

Good riddance.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is 2018; time to stop coming up with half excuses and fix your security bugs instead of protecting yourself by removing a potential character from being used.

I'm sure we all have different reasons why we use a + for me it's email+list@domain which lets me sort out client emails into folder for me to easily manage.

Not allowing . would be a similar cry from users; if it's a valid email address shouldn't you accept it?

Otherwise you are letting authorize.net pick your customers</comment>


Getting out of your comfort zone with Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://blog.count.ly/post/26159130586/a-story-of-getting-out-of-the-comfort-zone-with-node-js#disqus_thread

<comment><USER2> We were used to building stuff in static, strongly typed languages. We had powerful IDE support, stable libraries, old and proven frameworks. There was always the right tool, the right library, the right idiom, the right way.

There was confidence and security in the well known world of stuff you already tried and built. The confidence that came from the knowledge of how difficult or easy something could be. The skill of estimation was fine tuned, and the feeling for effort was strong.

It was not the fact that nothing could go wrong that was comforting. It was the power to know what, when and where could go wrong.

An anxiety-neutral condition, with limited set of behaviors to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk.

A true comfort zone.

Then we chose Node.js for a project. We are yet to see how wise a decision that was business wise, but it was certainly good for the soul.

<comment><USER3> _... but it was certainly good for the soul._

How so? Are you building new kinds of applications that you couldn't or wouldn't have built using familiar, reliable tools?

I'm curious because there's a sort of risk for risk's sake feel to your comment.

It seems like loosening the bolts on a car and then driving to the same old places; there's a thrill to be sure but you don't end up anyplace new.

<comment><USER2> Maybe that was my point. I am not sure. You see, a new technology was considered and eventually chosen because it was a different kind of project. And so it happened that Node was a perfect fit for the job and a good opportunity to try it out. It is still to be determined if the choice was correct.

It is better to get out of your comfort zone not by doing the same thing in a new way, but by doing a new thing. You are bored with your job? Its not Java, or c#, or c that is boring. It is the stuff you are using it for and the way you are using it.

Anyway, Node is an excellent tool. Just don't use it as an easy way out of your comfort zone.

<comment><USER4> The main point of my blog post was to show our positive experience by using something new to build something new. I'm not talking about renewing your existing backend, changing your perfect PHP implementation to Node.js, I'm talking about our story of choosing a platform for our new project and suggesting people out there to be open to trying new platforms according to their needs. I know the feeling, I did the same before. I have used PHP for projects that I had better alternatives for, just because it felt comfortable and hassle-free.

In our case we have tried several other platforms/languages and the best fit was Node.js for us. "Do the research, be a developer not just an X language developer" would probably sum up my whole point.

<comment><USER5> I think there was some really awesome benefits of nodejs that are worth mentioning. I recently finished migrating our old .NET API to NodeJS and found:

1) persistant connections, we deal with massive concurrency and remote connections to just about anything external (even on same network) could be saturated and overwhelmed so quickly

2) pseudo-caching data in the background, things like game configuration etc we just keep loading over and over on an interval so wherever possible we just have whole mongo collections and db tables sitting there in ram always fairly fresh

3) mirroring our application-wide redis cache locally on each server in the background so whenever we do get a cache hit it's insanely fast

These are probably the coolest things I found moving our analytics api to nodejs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> tl;dr: we tried something new, namely node.js. We liked it. You too should try something new from time to time.

What's newsworthy about this post, beyond being positive to a project that everyone seems to like (including me)?

<comment><USER7> Adding to

      if buzzword_count['node.js'] > x: required_qualification_keywords.append('node.js')

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am so tired of reading complaints about PHP performance only to realize that the author uses some bloated, over-engineered framework like Cake or (much worse) library like Smarty. What do you expect?

Yes, high-level design matters. Ever since I switched to my own framework in 2005, most of the pages on my websites generate in less than .1 second, and that's _without_ extensive caching, often on cheap VPS. There is nothing fancy about it, just simple, straightforward system design that doesn't fight the language and pretend like I'm coding Java.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've rewritten entire python codebase of my company in node.js several weeks ago.

I like the 'purity' of it all now. It irks me still that js isn't really comforting at actual scripting.

<comment><USER10> That's a real pity. You probably would have been hugely better off with gevent instead. Using gevent isn't quite as good as using a language with a true preemptive runtime, but it's way easier to work with than nested callback spaghetti.

Anyone else considering Python -> Node, look very carefully at gevent first. Not only can you save the rewrite, you can end up with a better solution at the end too.

<http://www.gevent.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking at the changelog and the pace of releases is very heartening!

<https://raw.github.com/joyent/node/v0.8.4/ChangeLog></comment>


Another Hacker's Laptop, Cell Phones Searched at Border - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/11/hacker-border-search/

<comment><USER2> I find it amazing that there is so little outrage at what is happening in the USA.

The country that paints itself as an example of freedom and democracy and aspires to spreading those values around the world is the same country that:

* kidnaps and tortures people,

* sets up a military prison with no civillian oversight, outside any legal jurisdiction, where it keeps people indefinitely,

* kills people in various countries using missiles launched from drones,

* interrogates its citizens as they come back from abroad, threatening them with detention or not letting them into the country,

* tightly controls the media and what information gets released from war zones,

* has a lawless "zone" extending 100 miles from its border, where laws are unclear, and people can be searched without warrant,

* seizes computers, accesses and copies data, threatens people so that they give up their passwords,

* uses scare tactics on security researchers (see story above) and whistleblowers (see all the wikileaks stories)

I come from a former-communist country that was under the Soviet influence. We fortunately no longer are. I think what I listed above is very visible to people like me, but somehow it goes under the radar of most Americans. I see it as classical secret police tactics, utilized in all totalitarian regimes, while Americans seem to see it as a necessary nuisance to "combat terrorism".

I find it even more amazing that instead of fighting back, people just discuss workarounds. Ship your data via FedEx, keep it online, wipe your drives, carry a laptop with an empty drive… This works today, but the way things are developing, it might not work tomorrow!

Wake up, people. In comparison to things I listed above the whole ridiculous story about the "naked scanners" is just a joke.

<comment><USER3> What amazes me is that the great swath of Obama supporters who decried the Bush administration's civil rights abuses are strangely quiet about the continuation of those abuses today. (Caveat: I'm not American, but if I was, I would have held my nose and voted for Obama in 2008.)

<comment><USER2> But look at the greater problem: Obama or not, people don't actually _do_ anything. Sure, there will be some forum discussions, but that's pretty much it. The EFF and ACLU seem to be the only organized movements that actually try to do anything. In the political landscape these issues just do not appear.

<comment><USER3> You're right. Most people assume their democratic duty amounts to showing up and voting once every two or four years - though almost half of eligible Americans don't even do that much - and that voting for the best candidate is enough to effect change.

Community organizer Saul Alinsky famously had a meeting with US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had just been elected in the deepest trough of the Great Depression. Alinsky spoke about the President's role in creating a more fair and prosperous society.

At the end of the meeting, FDR told Alinsky: "Okay, you've convinced me. Now go out and put pressure on me!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It could be worse. Here in the UK, they would have locked him up for refusing to hand over his passwords. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act makes it a specific criminal offence and people have been imprisoned for it. Personally, I'm worried that I might get locked up for refusing to decrypt the contents of /dev/urandom. I think we need to wake up to the fact that there are a lot of people in power who would prefer that strong cryptography be the exclusive preserve of government.

<comment><USER5> You know, if you ever wanted to keep something _really_ hidden, naming it /dev/urandom (or some variant thereof) would be a good way to go.

<comment><USER6> Or perhaps "one-time-pad.txt" :)

<comment><USER7> You could actually encrypt your data using a standard algorithm, then construct a "pad" such that they combine to make a seemingly benign plaintext. No way to prove that your ciphertext is anything other than the other half of the pad (though I'm not a cryptographer :) ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> slightly relevant:

To protect his privacy and that of his clients, Mitnick encrypts all the confidential data on his laptops, transmits it over the Internet for storage on servers in the U.S., and wipes it from the computer before returning from any international trips, just in case officials decide to search or seize his equipment. He also encrypts his hard drive. And now, he says he is going to keep a "clone" of his MacBook at home so he will have an exact duplicate of it if it is ever seized.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10054569-83.html>

<comment><USER9> Why would he tell people where he keeps the clone?

<comment><USER10> To make people think he's keeping it there but he really isn't? A bluff?

<comment><USER3> I thought analysts took a dim view of security by obscurity.

<comment><USER11> I think the dim view is on using obscurity as your only or main security approach. However leading attackers down blind alleys, in addition to having real security measures in place, doesn't seem to me to be entirely worthless (IANA Security Analyst).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly, I just had a discussion with my roomate about this. We were sitting in a coffee shop, and he was mad at himself because he forgot the latest copy of a game he is working on at the house...

Why is this a problem _at all_ anymore? Hosting is _cheaap_. I have a linux VPS at linode that I pay $20/mo for and almost everything that i do is stored there. Honestly, the only things I can think of that _aren't_ stored on that machine (which trades nightly rsyncs with another machine with a different provider and on a different network) are minecraft, my music collection, some photos, and a journal that I just started keeping a couple of weeks ago (gets encrypted with 256bit AES and lives in the home dir on my laptop).

My point is that there is absolutely no reason to keep anything on your local machine anymore, at least not ones that I can think of. Why not keep a server in the basement, and then just run SSH with X11 forwarding? Keep a cheap, disposable machine with you and if something like this happens, sell it and buy a new one.

It's really sad that this is even an issue, but I do think that there are solutions to it.

<comment><USER13> Not a good idea if you know that you're targeted by the government. ;) In fact this makes it much easier for them to get access to your data.

If they know your name they can get to your credit card transactions. From you're credit card transactions they get to your hoster. And from your hoster they get the data that's stored on your VPS.

You can somehow mitigate this issue by storing your important data on an encrypted filesystem, but this does not really solve this problem as the key has still to be kept in memory.

<comment><USER12> I'm not saying do it via VPS, I'm saying keep a server in your houe.

_I_ do it over VPS because, as far as I know, nobody is after me :-P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Border search exception (to the 4th amendment warrant requirement):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_search_exception>

In a similar vein, check out Exigent Circumstance:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exigent_circumstances>

The text of the fourth amendment to the constitution:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

<comment><USER15> The government has decided that the "border" extends 100 miles inland from official land/sea borders. This apparently covers 2/3rds to 4/5ths of the U.S. population.

Coverage on the 100-mile-thick ACLU-dubbed "Constitution-Free Zone":

Wired: <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/10/aclu-assails-10/>

Ars Technica: [http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/aclu-23-of- us-p...](http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/aclu-23-of-us- population-lives-in-constitution-free-zone.ars)

(Note the entire land area of the Hawaiian islands are covered, as is the entire state of Florida.)

I think it's probably even worse than that, though, because International airports count as "borders" no matter how far inland. So I would not be surprised to see this extended to a 100-mile radius of all international airports as well, which would cover almost everybody.

<comment><USER16> I remember being pretty surprised by this when I was a kid, and we had to stop at a checkpoint on I-10 in West Texas, where it turns away from the Mexican border (eastbound) to head into central Texas. I recall thinking that it must be some sort of emergency, like they were looking for an escaped criminal or something, because surely those kinds of checkpoints aren't allowed in a free country in routine circumstances?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If I were him, I'd be tempted to make an image of his drive, and compare that to an image made after the agents tampered with it, to see what changes occurred in the process.

But like he said, he couldn't even trust them physically. I'd be tempted to just toss them in the trash, if I could afford to easily replace them.

<comment><USER5> I'd just start FedEx'ing things and just take a book... Perhaps travel with just a SIM card and pickup a new phone when I landed.

That's about the only thing you could really start to do.

<comment><USER18> I've heard that this is SOP for international lawyers. They don't want some border agent sniffing around confidential legal files.

<comment><USER19> Yes, you heard correctly. I remember a talk at a past LegalTech conference where the panelists urged anyone doing a lot of traveling (especially to 'sensitive' parts of the world) to simply travel with a 'spare' laptop, and keep everything important on encrypted USB drives, which can be sent through the mail in tamper-resistant packaging. It solves several problems:

1\. Confidential data won't be compromised during a border search, theft, accident, etc..

2\. You avoid the issue of being forced to give up your passwords to law enforcement.

3\. If the laptop is confiscated, it can take months to get it back, so you wouldn't want that to happen to your main work machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > "I can't trust any of these devices now," says Marlinspike, who asked that > Threat Level not report his real name. "They could have modified the > hardware or installed new keyboard firmware."

I thought when you get searched they have to keep your possessions within your view at all times.

<comment><USER21> I believe that's generally true for the TSA, but not customs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Let me get this straight. This is a person who has openly admitted to knowing how to hack banking systems among others, then travels to countries like Abu Dhabi and the Dominican Republic to present that information.

We are surprised that he is searched at the border to the US? He was treated politely, not physically harmed and had his hardware returned. Sounds like the government is finally doing their job.

Maybe there are "certain" people out there throwing his name around and the government was obligated to look into this.

I would not support gross negligence by our government and this sounds like normal procedure to me, given the extenuating circumstances.

<comment><USER23> i suspect that many people on HN have the skills to break into quite a few computer systems, and travel to places that are hotbeds of computer crime such as New York, SF, and of course internationally.

does that mean we should all be detained and have our computers ad phones taken away and searched whenever we go within 100 miles of a border?

<comment><USER24> You're right, this place is rife with technological supermen. Give me a sawzall and an acetylene torch and I could 'hack' the Gibson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> That's completely ridiculous. Makes me want to travel even less now ...

<comment><USER15> "The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution contains a border-related exception to unreasonable search and seizure laws, permitting searches at border checkpoints that wouldn't be permitted elsewhere. But federal statute 8 CFR 287.1 (a)(1-3) defines the border zone for enforcement purposes as encompassing an area within 100 miles of the actual border, with the possibility of extending it further under certain circumstances. This means that the US Border Patrol could conceivably set up random checkpoints asking travelers for a passport in places like Columbus, Ohio; Houston; or anywhere in the state of Florida. And, in fact, it appears that it has been doing exactly this."

[http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/aclu-23-of- us-p...](http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2008/10/aclu-23-of-us- population-lives-in-constitution-free-zone.ars)

<comment><USER26> Well, it's not so much "contains" as "has had read into it".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder if the government is targeting this hacker for his involvement in Whisper Systems, <http://www.whispersys.com/>. Their main products are easy to use encryption software for calls and texts on android smartphones. From what I can recall the gov really does not want ubiquitous encryption for voice communication in the US. It totally breaks down the whole wiretapping paradigm.

</comment><comment><USER28> Things like this, along with laptop theft, are excellent reasons to encrypt your home folder. This is pretty easy with built-in software on both Windows 7 & Mac OS X (and I'm sure common Linux distros).

One caveat is that encrypted home folders tend to take maybe 1.2× the space of an unencrypted home folder, so delete some videos & music if you're on an SSD or otherwise constrained HDD.

</comment><comment><USER29> A word of caution to those keeping data on 3rd party machines...

[http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/third_party_co...](http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/06/third_party_con.html)

Also, note that this article is from 2007 and the law may have changed slightly since then.

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems like they buried the lede. In the simple minds of the Feds he was connected to the Wikileaks crew.

</comment><comment><USER31> I was a bit surprised by the fact that he didn't want his name revealed in the article. It's not like some people don't know who he is. [edit] decided to respect Moxie's request in the article and remove a small bit of identifiable info

<comment><USER32> as he goes by Moxie socially as well, doesn't want his true name to be revealed is a bit sensational

<comment><USER31> True. I guess unless he's legally changed his name the feds and anyone who's cut him a check obviously already knows who he is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> <http://www.googlesharing.net/>

Moxie's awesome addon/proxy.

</comment><comment><USER34> If it took them "a few hours" then essentially they cloned the hard drive, sector based.</comment>


Ask HN: So, what'd you have for breakfast today? - <AUTHOR>

There seems to be a lot of nutrition-speak going around here, so I thought I'd ask the question. (question taken from etcetera in #startups) <comment><USER2> An egg (fried, over easy) and well, I don't know what to call this: a piece of whole wheat bread, grilled on one side, then spread a light layer of ranch dressing on the soft side, sprinkle generously with nutritional yeast, and then apply a thin layer of Frank's buffalo sauce on top of that. I know it sounds disgusting, but trust me, it's f'ing delicious. I'm salivating now just thinking about it.

</comment><comment><USER3> 1/4 cup greek yogurt with frozen blueberries and ground flaxseed.

<comment><USER4> Greek Yogurt is awesome (Fage and Chobani are the two brands I've most frequently come across).

I enjoy mixing any of the following: granola, strawberries, walnuts, almonds, honey, raisins.

And if you want to mix things up wrt to your yogurt viscosity, try the soupier "Australian-style" yogurt from Wallaby. It's a nice contrast to the thick Greek-style yogurt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Today wasn't normal — had a medium latte and an apple dessert thingy at a coffee shop.

Normally though, my favorite thing for breakfast is super healthy and filling: \- Quickly fry two pieces of turkey bacon \- Microwave some frozen spinach, drain. \- Combine cut up bacon and spinach in a bowl, add an egg, a healthy glug of egg whites (mine come in a carton), splash of milk, herbs, salt, pepper, and miscellaneous veggies from the fridge. \- Scramble, top with some shredded cheddar, enjoy.

Full of protein and healthy veggies, super tasty, very enjoyable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had the most amazing breakfast burrito (eggs, chorizo, veggies, guac, beans all wrapped in a wheat tortilla) and green tea after I came back from the gym. Didn't know that Starbucks makes 30oz drinks now.

</comment><comment><USER6> I make overkill health food smoothies for breakfast.

A cup of soymilk, a random fruit, veggie powder, and 1 tablespoon each of lethicin, fiber, ground flaxseeds and bone meal powder in a single-serving blender.

It tastes good, it's really filling and it's not that much harder to make or clean than cereal.

</comment><comment><USER7> My morning routine is pretty standard, today was no different: cup of coffee, hour and a half of yoga, bowl of steel cut oatmeal with fruit and nuts (today: apples and almonds) and a splash of milk. Unbeatable.

</comment><comment> tomh- Sandwich with chocolate sprinkles (Boterham met hagelslag)

</comment><comment><USER8> Piece of white bread toast with grape jelly, three or four small bites of a sausage patty (I prefer the edge), and a glass of milk. Yum!

</comment><comment><USER9> Granola bar + glass of water before bike ride, blueberry bagel (plain) afterwards. Out of bananas or I'd have had one with the bagel.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some cottage cheese mixed with natural whole milk yogurt and sour cream. A small cup of coffee with a tablet of sugarine.

</comment><comment><USER11> Scrambled eggs and cheese. Glass of milk.

</comment><comment><USER12> A can of Diet Coke and a banana.

I seldom eat before noon, when I do it's usually a piece of fruit.

</comment><comment><USER13> Leftover baked chicken with Parmesan, baked potato, and blueberry muffins. Jasmine green tea.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pot of coffee and a cigarette.

<comment><USER15> I know that 'me too' statements aren't generally accepted on HN, so I feel like I'm unnecessarily expounding on the notion, but that's basically what I had today, yesterday, the day before, etc.

While I'd love to kick the cigarette vice, I feel like it's my soul that has the coffee addiction. I could take or leave the caffeine even (maybe), but the taste of coffee is simply irreplaceable on all but the hottest of mornings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Granola with raw milk, but boy does that breakfast burrito speek had sound good!

</comment><comment><USER17> Cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, and a sugar free Redbull.

</comment><comment><USER18> As usual before noon, nothing but a couple cups of black coffee.

</comment><comment><USER19> Carrot/Apple smoothie (home made) + porridge (with blueberries)

</comment><comment><USER20> Fried Eggs, Soy Sauce / Sambal, Spring Onions... Ketosis ftw.

</comment><comment><USER21> Spot the Australian: Four Weetbix, and Orange Juice.

</comment><comment><USER22> Milk and cereal. Every day.

</comment><comment><USER23> croissant with apricot jam, muesli (with water, not milk) and coffee

</comment><comment><USER24> Twinkies and Mt. Dew :(

<comment><USER25> Similar here: A mysterious pastry from the vending machine, though I actually drank water with it.</comment></comment>


Amazon is now offering virtual health care to its employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/24/20882335/amazon-care-telemedicine-employees-healthcare <comment><USER2> My workplace offers this too (although not company branded). Hardly anyone uses it, though.</comment>


Get 20% Off iTunes Credit - <AUTHOR> http://www.vouchercloud.com/itunes-code-vouchers/449356/20-off-itunes-codes-over-25-with-giftcloud-discount-voucher-code

<comment><AUTHOR> Guessing many of you use iTunes so might like to use this!</comment>