Chinese Hackers Breach U.S. Navy Contractors - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-navy-is-struggling-to-fend-off-chinese-hackers-officials-say-11544783401 <comment><USER2> Not surprising at all. What's surprising is that it's taken this long to appear in the news.

While in the shipyards for maintenance I would stand watch and was responsible for letting people on/off a large ship. Most were contractors. The only requirement was that they had a contractor badge. How did we tell this was a valid badge? Good question. You'd think there would be some sort of master list of people with badges we could check and verify.

Not quite. Every contractor had their own style of badge and we had no way of knowing if any particular badge was real or not. Want a "valid" badge? Buy a badge printer. You're in.

We had people we didn't even know just show up to install systems on board that nobody was able to verify were supposed to be there or not. It was a little better with the classified systems, but you can imagine that any verification of contractor IT systems was non-existent.

<comment><USER3> I can't believe it, but I also can believe it - Me, ever since doing CyberSec 2 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A non-trivial bit of the problem is the highly fashionable attitude of refusing to do work that helps the Department of Defense. The fact that skilled labor is a limited resource for both nations, which means refusing to help is at least similar to aiding foreign powers, which are statistically dictatorships of one kind or another, seems to not factor into the set of moral ethoses that such folks espouse.

Remember, it's not just China. It's North Korea, Russia, Iran, Isreal; any country facing significant military threats is interested in US weapons technology.

You live in a constitutional democracy on a planet where the mean, median, and mode country is a dictatorship? And don't want to defend that government? Really?

<comment><USER5> "And don't want to defend that government?"

Well, here's the problem. How much of what the DoD does is actually defending our government, versus going off and killing far-away people who pose no threat to us for various murky reasons?

Do I want to contribute to keeping foreign armies off our soil? Sure! Do I want to contribute to drones blowing up weddings? Not really.

Maybe if our government would stop abusing our military so horribly, it would find more American experts willing to support that military.

<comment><USER4> The issue is that what you end up defending is the right of _more_ malicious actors to acquire technology from the US below cost through low-cost, high- yield hacking.

<comment><USER5> Do I? Or do I just not help to murder civilians on the other side of the planet? How can you be so sure that I'd only be helping the good side of the DoD?

<comment><USER4> Let's assume there is no good side of the DoD. Let's assume that the military is 100% teeth-gnashing devil dogs with nuclear weapons. Which is what they aspire to, I assure you.

Two things, 1) whether they have a $700 budget or $700B budget, the DoD executes the orders of elected civilians.

2) Don't you still want to make it as expensive as humanly possible for other countries to get the plans to those weapons? Even if you live in Paraguay, rouge states with nuclear weapons increase the cost of international economic collaboration and thus decrease your quality of life. Securing the US Government's weapons information is in your best interest.

<comment><USER5> You didn't answer my questions at all.

<comment><USER4> I did answer your questions. Perhaps I didn't convince you to reject your previously held views, but I did answer your questions.

> How can you be so sure that I'd only be helping the good side of the DoD?

I answered this by asserting your premise, the DoD has a good side, is unnecessary. I further allowed for the possibility you're not even American.

> Do I [end up defending the right of more malicious actors to acquire > technology from the US below cost through low-cost, high-yield hacking]?

I answered this by posing the leading counter-question, "Don't you still want to make it as expensive as humanly possible for other countries to get the plans to those weapons?" And that appear to be the fairly strong position it is, considering I rejected your requirement of there being anything good about the DoD, and further rejected any implication that you're even American.

<comment><USER5> Then you've superficially answered the literal questions without actually getting at the underlying point.

The point is this: if I help them, how can I ensure that this help goes towards things like preventing other countries from obtaining nuclear weapons, and not blowing up weddings?

<comment><USER4> It's offense vs defense, and in this situation, those are highly separable domains.

Concretely, blowing up weddings is a failure of guidance systems, that's an offensive problem. Those are avionics and fire control problems, not network security problems. Avionics and fire control are highly specialized domains. You don't accidently write some code that helps with those problems. They have their own languages, their own compilers, their own chip architectures. The developers work in places you hear about on the History channel, like China Lake.

Conversely, the defensive work of improving the network security that protects the plans and software for offensive systems, including those avionics and fire control software repositories, is good for everyone not just the rabid dogs of the DoD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hackers breaching US Navy contractors tells us one important thing: That the US Navy is not doing adequate due diligence on the firms it allow to be contractors.

This story is part of the campaign to present China as an unethical, capable adversary and threat. In reality, China wants to trade peacefully with the US and the aggression is nearly 100% on the US side and is meant to garner all the benefits of threat-oriented chest pounding for US politicians.

The #1 rule of being a citizen should be "don't let them tell you who to fear or who to hate". Sadly, the NYT, Bloomberg, and the WSJ are all telling us to hate and fear China, when it's obvious that the US has domestic political motives in mind.

In the US, leaders need an enemy or the conversation might turn to things like "why do we have poisonous drinking water?" or "Why has there been a trend of downward mobility?" or "Why didn't anyone get punished for Snowden's revelations or for the lies that led to the Iraq war?"

<comment><USER7> > _In reality, China wants to trade peacefully with the US and the aggression > is nearly 100% on the US side_

You don't need to make this claim to support the rest of your point. I agree with the gist of your comment but think this point makes it easier to attack the overall message.

Personally, I think China is trading with the goal of jump starting their economy, and then seeing where they end up. China's incentives aren't to _act within_ our paradigm of free trade, but to attempt to _operate on it_. If free trade is truly a Schelling point, then we'll remain there. Otherwise at the end of the day, holding currency or title to imaginary property won't matter, but where the factories are located will.

But that isn't really relevant to the larger point that all this finger pointing at China (or Russia, depending on the month) is just basic scapegoating to cover the asses of negligent contractors and corrupt government.

<comment><USER6> > You don't need to make this claim to support the rest of your point.

True

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The victims have included large contractors as well as small ones, some of > which are seen as lacking the resources to invest in securing their > networks.

That does not compute. If they want to become a defense contractor, it stands to reason not spending resources on securing their network (and educating their employees against phishing attacks) is a non-starter.

<comment><USER9> Why? You can be a "defense contractor" as a one person show out of your garage.

The requirements for selling _a toilet_ to the navy were written at a time when these issues didn't exist. That the biggest bureaucracy on earth doesn't respond well to new threats seems _ecpected_ not odd.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Legit anyone can bid on these contracts and the DOD is finally starting to crack down on "Confidential Unclassified Information" and the contractors that handle that data. It's wild how many small companies have no security infrastructure

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Do procurement contracts have clauses that discount the purchase price when proprietary information is lost to reflect the diminished value of the product?

<comment><USER12> I wouldn't be suprised. I've done some unclassified govt contracting and it wasn't uncommon for them to include clauses in software purchase contracts that they had to be re-imbursed a certain amount of money any time a security vulnerability was discovered in the purchased software. The reasoning was that they had to spend money identifying, reporting, and updating systems, so the vendor had to pay for wasted resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> At what point will the gov actually do something meaningful here? I know security is hard, but so is putting a man on the moon. This is insane the amount of hacks without consequences.

</comment><comment><USER14> Is this a surprise? I imagine many powerful countries' cyberespionage groups are going after the other side.

</comment><comment><USER15> Paywall workaround: [http://archive.is/KMi5Y](http://archive.is/KMi5Y)

</comment><comment><USER16> A slightly different headline would be "Navy has lousy security practices especially regarding contractors"

I'm pretty sure the CIA and NSA do their utmost to spy as much as they can on the Chinese and Russian Navy.

<comment><USER17> @snowden sold us out to china when he fled in 2013, by revealing details about our spying operation on them. apparently they bolstered their defenses after this, due to this information, meanwhile stepping up offensive attacks against the United States

<comment><USER18> According to the NYTimes they also killed over a 100 CIA assets in China. So we went in the dark for a while as the whole batch was compromised. We didn't retaliate either. The Snowden thing wasn't the cause of that but I bet the Snowden thing compromised other assets.

<comment><USER19> It's interesting how much people still talk about metadata collection (protected behind the requirement of itemized FISA court approval) because "big mean US is evil" while ignoring events like this.

<comment><USER20> Events like what? That people committing capital crimes for money are being caught, and convicted of... Said capital crimes?

If you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime. You don't just stumble into being an informant for a foreign power.

<comment><USER19> > Events like what?

Killing dozens of people in secret without a proper trial.

And the fact that it isn't an uncommon occurrence.

<comment><USER21> >Killing dozens of people in secret without a proper trial.

To be fair, they also executed some of them in public ;)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia- spie...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies- espionage.html)

>From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.'s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Piximity – Location-based photo feeds - <AUTHOR> Just updated Piximity - it lets you view location-based picture feeds such as sports, concerts, festivals, and many other events, as well as create your own feeds that others can join.<p>https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/piximity/id916510829?mt=8 <comment><USER2> great app!!</comment>


A Quasipolynomial Time Algorithm for Graph Isomorphism: The Details - <AUTHOR> http://jeremykun.com/2015/11/12/a-quasipolynomial-time-algorithm-for-graph-isomorphism-the-details/ <comment> s-phi-nl Prof. Richard Lipton of Georgia Tech has an interesting series of blog posts on this result. See:

[https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/a-big-result-on- gr...](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/11/04/a-big-result-on-graph- isomorphism/)

[https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/the-world- series-o...](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/the-world-series-of- complexity-theory/)

[https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/a-fast-graph- isomo...](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/11/11/a-fast-graph-isomorphism- algorithm/)

I expect he will post more as he gets more information.

<comment><USER2> Conjecture from the first link: "Raising questions about other problems. This a surprising result. Is a similar result for factoring around the corner? [...] Placing factoring in this complexity class would be a huge difficulty for cryptography."

If factoring is indeed in the quasi-polynomial class, the above may well be the understatement of the decade.

<comment><USER3> Yeah. But as Scott Aaronson points out, GI has a very different feel to factoring. A randomly chosen number will be hard to factor, but it's actually quite hard to come up with examples of GI that are hard:

> But then again, in practice, graph isomorphism has already been "basically > in P" for decades! If you have two large graphs for which you actually need > to know whether they're isomorphic, just download NAUTY and run it.

> This contrasts with the case of factoring, for which I'd personally say that > it remains much less clear whether it should or shouldn't be in P.

[http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2521#comment-889824](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2521#comment-889824)

<comment><USER2> Well, we're resting at least a trillion-USD economy on that "much less clear"; probably more. Given that, bad actors are properly incentivized to work on factoring, and we can take comfort that we haven't yet heard any evidence yet of a (quasi-) polynomial solution. That is assuming someone couldn't keep something like that a secret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I learned linear algebra and spectral graph theory from Babai, and he also taught a notoriously difficult combinatorics class. It was a rare privilege to be taught by someone who was doing brilliant research and also cared deeply about undergraduate students.

<comment><USER5> I sat in on a couple of those classes. At the beginning of the class there were 50-100 people registered. At the end, there were 6 (including graduate students).

<comment><USER6> 50 -> ~10 students standing was my experience with laci's algorithms class. He's still an excellent instructor, though. Willingness to do hours of background and follow-up reading outside of class was a requirement if you wanted to get a deep understanding of the material, and it pays off well. (He was very approachable though, not at all the research professor stereotype.)

(HatLab, what a small world... :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In Our Time (BBC R4) did a recent episode called "P vs NP" [1] which talked about graph isomorphism, and might serve as an introduction to this.

There's an MP3 download at the link. I don't think it's UK only.

[1]: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06mtms8](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06mtms8)

</comment><comment><USER8> Very nice write-up, Jeremy! Too bad you won't be able to make it to the second talk.

Also nice disclaimer at the end:

 _At the time of this writing, Babai's work has not been peer reviewed, and my understanding of his lectures has large gaps and may be faulty. Do not put your life in danger based on information in this post._

<comment><USER9> It really sucks that he can't make the second talk. It was a really good write-up and finding someone who both communicates well and can understand the material is tough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _I also hear that some people use graph isomorphism to compare files, do optical character recognition, and analyze social networks, but it seems highly probable to me that GI is not the central workhorse (or even a main workhorse) in these fields._

Can somebody in HN more familiar with this add a comment about this?

<comment><USER11> Maybe there is somebody who uses GI to do those things, but that is not a standard method and likely a bad idea. For comparing files the standard method is just a diff based on Levenshtein distance, and the standard methods for character recognition are various forms of machine learning (e.g. SVM, NN).

<comment><USER12> Social networks sounds like a likely application though.

Consider "Graph A is Alice's network of friends; B is Bob's. Do they know exactly and only the same people?"

That might be slightly contrived. But it could be used to indicate how introverted a certain community is!

<comment><USER13> In your hypothetical case the vertices would be labeled by friends' names or ids. So you only have to check whether the obvious isomorphism applies i.e. that the graphs are equivalent as sets.

<comment><USER12> Ah, yes that's true of course - I clearly wasn't thinking..

Well, then I can't even contrive an example! Still, it's interesting; I wish I had the background to understand it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Lemmas aside, how is this different than only checking repeated prime cycles in conjunction with one of the existing partition algorithms like NAUTY? Laci personally rejected my note submitted to Information Processing Letters saying the lower bound formula was "trivial", [https://oeis.org/A186202](https://oeis.org/A186202)

</comment><comment><USER15> For those who have really difficult time to understand this... I find [http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2015/11/mathematician- claims...](http://news.sciencemag.org/math/2015/11/mathematician-claims- breakthrough-complexity-theory) opens a small door. I still have tons of questions, probably due to my failure of completing my complexity class in undergraduate.

</comment><comment><USER16> There are 140 comments in the blog of Scot Aaronson about this topic: [http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2521#comments](http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2521#comments)

Personal Opinion: Perhaps the Complexity Hierarchy is going to collapse since intuition is not so clear and perhaps the distance from P to NP is shrinking.

<comment><USER17> I don't know why you would think this. There was strong empirical evidence (in my opinion) for thinking Graph Isomorphism was easy. NAUTY (and SAUCY) were good practical implementations that found solutions efficiently (except for some harder class of graphs, maybe). GI was known to be in NP and co-NP which is usually a red flag that the problem is not NP-Complete. For example, linear programming, integer polynomial factorization and primality testing were all in this NP and co-NP region (also discrete logarithm but that's still open).

Though extremely informative, there's no reason that GI is polynomial (or pseudo polynomial) would give serious reason to believe that P is anywhere near NP.

<comment><USER18>
      > NAUTY (and SAUCY) were good practical implementations
      > that found solutions efficiently (except for some
      > harder class of graphs, maybe).

There are good practical implementations of SAT solvers as well (except degenerate cases), even though SAT is the canonical NP-Complete problem.

<comment><USER17> Fair enough, though I think the problem space is substantially different (though I didn't mention it above). It's much easier to make (random) 3-SAT difficult instances whereas for GI you needed highly structured graphs. Apparently Johnson graphs were one of the classes of graphs that caused people problems in GI.

<comment><USER19> There are other NP-complete problems, where really hard instances are a lot more rare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Update: a video of the first talk has been posted on Laci's website: [http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci/2015-11-10talk.mp4](http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~laci/2015-11-10talk.mp4)</comment>


"Give me the 100 most recent messages" / syncing channel posts in buddycloud - <AUTHOR> http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/%E2%80%9Cgive-me-100-most-recent-messages%E2%80%9D-or-why-message-synchronisation-so-difficult-open-social-n

<comment><USER2> step 7 would be a lot nicer with message estamates.

Even a poor estimate will reduce the amount of data you have to shuffle around a lot. Just a simple moving average of the last 5 posts would give great results.

something like

      for(Channel c : channels)
      {
        messages = c.requestLastNMessages(estimateForChannel(c))
        c.messagesPerHour = requestsPerHour(messages)
        totalMessagesPerHour += c.messagesPerHour
      }

      for(Channel c : channels)
      {
        updateEstimate(c, Math.max(5,c.messagesPerHour/totalMessagesPerHour))
      }

I think you want to keep the moving average in case something bad happens. a buddy might update once a week, but after an accident or something, might update very quickly. you'll want to track that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the solution is to build caching into the "home server" - it keeps a copy / can quickly retrieve messages from a remote server.</comment></comment>


Amazon's Cloud Is One of the Fastest-Growing Software Businesses in History - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-15/amazons-cloud-is-one-of-the-fastest-growing-software-businesses-in-history#r=read <comment><USER2> AWS is doing some great stuff, but this is a really misleading article.

Ignoring the obvious issue that AWS is a service and not a software business (and they have very different growth characteristics), the data on the graph is incorrect. Perhaps calling it a "tech" company would have been more clear.

AWS's $3.1B revenue in 2013 would be year 3 of the graph. Everything after that is speculation, but is compared to actual historic data from other companies (without explanation).

Several of the other companies lines seem significantly off also. For instance MSFT's first billion dollar year was 1990. By year 3 they were making $2.76B, not the just under $2B shown. By year 4 they were showing $3.75B, not the under $3B shown. By year 6, MSFT was making $5.94B, not the $4.5B shown. Similarly, the lines for CRM and VMW are showing lower revenue numbers than the actual ones for the later years. For instance CRM should be $3.72B in year 4, not the $1.75B shown.

If you stop the graph at year 3, where actual AWS data stops, AWS has grown only a little bit faster than MSFT. Also, the periods graphed for MSFT, CRM, and VMW all include recessions, whereas AWS is growing during a boom.

<comment><USER3> Furthermore, if you inflation adjust all of the numbers, AWS's graph will deflate further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm not surprised at all. When I design a web app, I'll design it around AWS infrastructure so that they're the "Ops" in my "DevOps" title. They handle everything about web app development that I don't care to.

<comment><USER5> I wanted to come and type that up here; when we do apps, web, scaling, cdn, file storage, trivial SSL etc we just prep for AWS. All the scripts are there as most people ask for it and it always works. With their solid offerings and constant price drops I would see no reason to ever move. It's all the stuff so painful once and now is all such a warm bath.

<comment><USER6> > "I would see no reason to ever move."

(Obligatory) Apart from the single political point of control. AWS is to web apps what GoDaddy is to DNS and Verisign is to SSL.

<comment><USER7> You're right, actually. I've dealt with all three, AWS is definitely more friendly (if we're talking about support here) but they all have the monopoly. AWS, honestly, is the only one that actually has an advantage. Verisign is overpriced, GoDaddy is just a typical domain registrar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It isn't particularly surprising, but it would be much more interesting to look at margins vs revenue. What is the margin on that $5B vs the $3.1B? I'm guessing that given the recent price cuts in between Amazon, Google, Softlayer, and others that the margins are starting to get squeezed down a bit.

I find that particularly interesting when looking at the relative success of Docker. The reason being that IBM's Z1 mainframe seems to have better operational economics near full utilization than rack and stack servers do. You can see how that works by looking at where the OpenCompute stuff takes out cost, no more sheet metal around servers, shares power supplies etc.

Makes me think that 'blade' computing should have been 'building sized' from the beginning :-)

<comment><USER9> Aren't those like $75,000?

I'm curious what you are basing the operational economics statement on.

<comment><USER8> I currently have about a thousand servers that do Blekko's web crawl in a colo facility, they are pretty modernish (westmere vs Ivy bridge but similar configuration), the operation economics for running those is a couple million a year fully loaded. My particular application is a 'bad fit' for services like AWS due to its large storage foot print and the fact that it constantly churns through petabytes of data but were we to host web servers w/ Docker or the equivalent we could probably provide something like a 100K web hosts. Doing that $5 'droplet' style with Digital ocean would be say a half a million a month so pretty good margins (caveat all the things like racks and drive replacement and floor space) but when those margins got squeezed something like an equivalently sized Z10 could shave operational costs from both a operator perspective and a power/cooling perspective. (total watts per delivered core-gigabyte-megabit of compute delivered to the Internet)

At web scale, costs shift in interesting ways, operator time is much more valuable than say the cost of hardware power, and cooling overwhelm floorspace costs etc. Luiz Barrosa is an engineer who gave a talk titled Data Center sized computers which alluded to some of those shifts, Urs and Luiz updated it a couple of times.

As I've gone from NetApp to Google and now to Blekko it has been interesting to me to watch how the multi-core, large memory, SSD changes have pushed around system design like this. And I was thinking that back in the day the "big problem" with blade computing was that using 20 blade chassis an install with 20 blades was cost effective but one with 21 blades was not. The virtualization wave made that moot since you only install full racks/chassis as demand calls for it, and current container wave adds to that single OS type installs for even better cost savings. Fun times.

<comment><USER10> Why do you think AWS is a poor fit for your workload? There are customers who churn petabytes in S3. If I was running a crawl and indexing operation, I'd put the bytes in blob storage like that, and aggressively negotiate better pricing with Amazon.

There are some pretty obvious reasons mainframes aren't the server format of choice for today's cloud. The people who are building to today's cloud grew up in a world where fast desktop computers running linux were ubiquitous and cheap (important for poor students learning to ship code on a budget) while mainframes were something you couldn't easily get access to even while waving large sums of cash at IBM.

No doubt there could be warehouse scale systems that were more efficient, overall, compared to the current designs that the cloud providers use. Every bit of the stack could be squeezed to provide exactly the hardware you needed for a particular problem. It doesn't seem like the economic incentives exist at this time, for a provider like Amazon (I imagine they make far more money on modest VM configs with no GPUs or Infiniband than they do with the high end stuff even if the latter has a higher profit margin, because volume wins in cloud)

Multi-core-large-memory-SSD is just the latest architectural evolution. We've just been pushing the bottleneck between the various parts of the computer, and custom manufacturers have grown rich and then out of business producing a system that had 30% more "X" than what you could buy top-of-the-line from Dell (Bull will sell you an x86 system with 24T of RAM!). Right now the pain point is having many memory spaces across machines, rather than a single super-fast RAM you can access from any processor (the laws of physics and cache coherency suggest this is a pretty hard problem), because multicore and SSD got so big and fast.

<comment><USER8>
       > Why do you think AWS is a poor fit for your workload?

Every time I've done the math it comes out 10x as expensive, and I've done the math with pretty much everyone from the CTO down to the guy who is "sure we can do it cost effectively."

Generally folks who have petabytes of data in S3 don't have large amounts of read/write change. So a typical file or image sharing site like Imgur or Github will be 'read mostly'. When you're doing search you crawl billions of documents, often replacing 30 - 40% in your store, and you are constantly re- reading them as you index and rank them. Further, as you process the data what you really want to do is push your computation out _to_ the data rather than pull it over the wire, mutate it, and push it back over the wire. Processing through 1 petabyte of data, on a 10gbps backbone where you pull it and then push it, running full duplex (so you're pushing and pulling at the same time) takes a million seconds at a gigabyte per second. That is 11 days, 13 hrs, 47 minutes. That is what happens changing 1/3 of a 3PB data set. Pushing the computation _into_ the data (which is to say running the processors where your data is actually stored on disk) you can process a petabyte (assuming your data distribution algorithm is good (and ours is)) in about a day and a half. Not quite 1/10th the time.

If you want to coordinate 10,000 worker threads which are working through your data, you need to be able to share messages between them, they don't have to happen a lot but their latency adds up if they take too long.

You end up asking for the same system built in the "cloud" that you've built in a colo; Dedicated "fat" machines with lots of memory and disk, all within easy network 'shouting' distance (aka a non-blocking full crossbar bandwidth network) from each other without any confounding network traffic going over your back bone. And when you arrive at that inevitable conclusion, the actual loaded cost of the machine falls right out the bottom and lands in the customers lap including all the loaded up margin costs. Three months or so ago (right after the last price war) we ran all the numbers again, Amazon would cost about $1.5M/month to let us do what we want to do.

Now as I point out to cloud sales guys, and to you, this isn't "bad" or actually a problem, building search engines requires an extraordinary amount of horsepower to be brought to bear on a very large, very noisy, data set. There is absolutely no rationale for making that configuration cost effective, its an outlier, the number of people who do that you can count on one hand. But it is the same reason that people don't just pop out the AWS toolkit and poof crawl and index billions of web pages :-)

       > volume wins in cloud

I don't agree with that, I think what 'wins' in the cloud is the ability to oversubscribe the hardware. Just like Comcast sells everyone on the street 50 megabits of internet knowing darn well that more than a handful use that much at the same time everyone will throttle down, cloud providers sell you an 'instance' which probably spends most of its time not doing anything at all. And while it isn't someone else is. _That_ is the 'magic' that makes this stuff so profitable for Amazon. Not people like me who have 100GB memory machines running at 85% utilization 24 hours a day[1]. It would be like everyone on the block signing up for high speed internet and every one of us downloading a copy of the entire Internet Archive :-) Not a likely situation, so rarely considered something the infrastructure needs to support.

[1] To be fair, they don't do that continuously, crawls start and stop and we switch things around, but when they are in the fetcher/extractor phase and running at R3, its a wonder to behold :-)

<comment><USER11> > what 'wins' in the cloud is the ability to oversubscribe the hardware

We're increasing compute exponentially, so it makes sense we'd want to over subscribe it as much as possible. Demand is like a dog nipping at your heels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> a couple of points about aws:

1\. it's not really a software business. their marginal cost of products sold is nowhere near that of software. the software they develop facilitiates the sales/leasing of hardware and networks.

2\. it's a division of a much larger parent company that poured billions into it. it's a "business" but not a company, which is what they're comparing it against.

<comment><USER13> I agree with the department versus a business. No other startup could've done what they did, providing the tech knowhow, logistics (always a big issue at that scale), and the brand.

EVERYONE willingly gives their credit card info to Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> One of those rare examples where the best product is winning in an entire category.

<comment><USER15> I don't know if they're the best at everything. I've been using Google Compute Engine extensively lately and I think it is a lot more polished feeling at times than EC2.

<comment><USER16> I am interested to know which part of the GCE is a lot more polished than EC2.

<comment><USER17> One data point: On AWS, a hardware outage takes your machine down (with notification). GCE offers live migration, which you generally don't even know has happened. See [http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-industry- insights/googl...](http://www.rightscale.com/blog/cloud-industry- insights/google-compute-engine-live-migration-passes-test)

<comment><USER18> You should be building your AWS infrastructure around failure scenarios, and while you should be notified of a failure, your app should continue to chug along.

/DevOps

<comment><USER19> Isn't he just saying that Google does this automatically for you?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Amazon's cloud services are a software business in the same way a utility company that wrote software to automate some management tasks is a software business.

<comment><USER21> I had to call a human being and use a fax machine to get my power turned on with the local utility. I can spin up an EC2 cluster with an API call.

<comment><USER9> Heh. I signed up on a website and put in a requests to turn my utilities on.</comment></comment></comment>


Judge Koh suggests Apple is "smoking crack" in Samsung case - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgear.com/judge-koh-suggests-apple-is-smoking-crack-in-samsung-case-16243128/

<comment><USER2> That's ridiculous. Apple has more than $100 billion in cash, surely they can afford something better than crack.

<comment><USER3> Of course, judge Koh was just refusing to recognize their design supremacy by not mentioning their inhouse brand, iCrack.</comment></comment>


Man hand-builds Lamborghini Countach, from scratch, in his own basement - <AUTHOR> http://carscoop.blogspot.com/2008/10/man-hand-builds-lamborghini-countach-in.html

<comment><USER2> This could serve as a great example of illustrating the difference between theft and copyright infringement.

Theft would be stealing somebody's Lamborghini. Copyright infringement is building your own.

The standard argument against copyright infringement is that Lamborghini lost a sale by him building his own. However, how likely is it that he would have bought a Lamborghini if he could not build one?

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure that this is a great example, because it muddies the difference between trademarks, copyrights, and patents (i.e. there may be issues with all three here, and maybe the biggest issue is on the trademark side).

<comment><USER4> Actually it doesn't have a single thing to do with copyright as it isn't a creative work, it's solely under a patent. As long as he doesn't go around calling it a "Lamborghini Countach" he isn't breaking any trademark laws.

Finally a patent only extends to cover something that is in itself patentable. Nintendo is taking forever to get patents on it's DS game cartridges because they're based off of an SD card. If its not found to be useful or inventive then it's not patentable.

Inherently most vehicles are non-patentable as they all serve an identical purpose and relatively few are at all inventive.

Quite simply a patent can be invalidated by someone simply inventing it themselves, which turns something from 'original' to 'obvious' and thus non- patentable.

Vehicle patents are very complicated to enforce, namely because if anyone ever tries to enforce one they can actually end up getting it invalidated (which in patent law, abolition happens more than enforcement). Lamborghini might not be able to enforce a single patent because a court might find it an obvious improvement over Henry Ford's original patent or is outright patent infringement of Fords. It's a serious lose-lose business.

<comment><USER5> > Inherently most vehicles are non-patentable as they all serve an identical > purpose and relatively few are at all inventive.

I would guess Lamborghini is one of the few that does. Look up "design patent" in wikipedia: "a patent granted on the ornamental design of a functional item". If the shape and components of a top sports car don't meet this description, it's hard to imagine what would.

In fact, it's not too hard to find automobile patents, e.g., <http://www.google.com/patents?id=XR87AAAAEBAJ> (DeLorean) or <http://www.google.com/patents?id=TvZ7AAAAEBAJ> (Lotus?) -- but these patents seem to have a 14-year term, so even if Lamborghini did patent this shape, the patent (at least in the USA) has probably expired by now.

<comment><USER5> Followup: looks like the Countach is <http://www.google.com/patents?id=y9EpAAAAEBAJ> \-- patent number D324007, granted Feb 18, 1992 to Chrysler for a period of 14 years.

<comment><USER6> Well, that's interesting. Looking further into it, the Countach had been built since 1974, but they never applied for this US design patent until Lamborghini was bought by Chrysler in 1989. By 1992, when it was actually granted, the Countach had already been discontinued.

Wait... looking at the pictures again, I'm pretty sure that's actually the Lamborghini Diablo -- that would make more sense with respect to the timing, since it was made from 1990 to 2001.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's actually possible to do this with 1st generation Camaros (1967-69). Someone thought ahead and saved the original tool and die casts before GM destroyed them. Some googling will find you sources for parts: from frame and body to seats adn trim. From what I've read, it costs somewhere in the realm of 12-20k. Not bad for a clone of what is the most fantastic American muscle car to ever be made with modern reliability.

<comment><USER8> 12-20k + how many man hours? More for me, all this programming doesn't help my mechanical skills :).

<comment><USER9> Assembling a batch of nice fresh parts is a lot easier than you think. Unless you have to assemble/rebuild the whole engine by hand, you will probably spend more time waiting for the paint to dry than you will putting it all together.

<comment><USER10> Not necessarily; ever put together one of those Saga electric guitar kits? I've spent maybe 5-10% (out of maybe 15-20 total build time) tweaking and adjusting, finding they didn't drill all the holes in the right places, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That's someone who doesn't let anything, including his basement, get in his way.

</comment><comment><USER12> After seeing the movie tomb raider I became obsessed with Lara Croft and hand built a detailed model in my basement. I think I'll keep it down there.

<comment><USER13> at least give us the formula for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> To me the coolest part would be the ramp and the new door in the basement. Ordinary Ken slips down to the basement of his ordinary suburban house and, like the bat cave, a Lambo comes roaring up out of the secret lair! Sweet.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this is kind of a shame. The guy has insane amounts of motivation, insane skills, and even funding for his project, yet he makes a copy of something else.

Seems all he was lacking was a great original idea.

<comment><USER16> _Seems all he was lacking was a great original idea._

I dunno. Maybe he wasn't lacking it? Maybe he had one and it wasn't what he wanted? Maybe what he wanted was a Lamborghini?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> if I was hand building a car from scratch I'd try for something a little bit more exotic. Fiero kit car Coutnachs are all over the place(not really, but its a pretty common kit).

Personally I'd go for something like an F50, because the kit cars for those usually look like ass because the dimensions are way off since the donor cars are shorter.

But still huge props from the guy, it probably took him 5-6 years to finish this(unless he was doing it full time)

<comment><USER18> The post says 17 years - definitely not an easy feat.

<comment><USER17> ah..makes sense that its not an F50 then...they were around from 95-97, so they weren't around when he started. F40s were around since 87, but I bet the behind the scenes prep work for the Countach took him a couple of years too so they were probably not around as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _"Once he finished the car there was one itsy-bitsy problem; the fact that the faux Lambo was built in the basement meant that there was no conventional way to take it outside of the house..."_

That's some extreme lack of foresight...

<comment><USER20> For a dude who builds a super car, by hand, mostly by himself, it is merely a technicality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool...still, I couldn't help but think that having to cut a large hole in the _foundation_ to get it out showed something of a lack of planning and foresight. :-(

</comment><comment><USER21> That's so badass! This car has always been one of my favs.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is that wood?

<comment><USER23> The wood is only there while fashioning the sheet metal for the body. The wood was then removed and replaced with the frame and suspension from a Corvette.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> That is one ugly car. Bad taste. I would rather build a Porsche 911.</comment>


Ask HN: I've been asked to give a speech: I am terrified. - <AUTHOR>

In one month I should give a speech in public -- my first speech in public -- for a big event.
The problem is: I am psychologically unstable, last year I suffered from a major depression which degenerated into agoraphobia. For a long time (~5 months) I was unable to leave my house. Now I feel better (I didn't see any psychatrist), and I thought I was ready for "regular-life" activities, but receiving this invitation had led me down again.
I've always been a shy, introvert person, and -- given my recent past -- I don't think I'm ready to talk to hundreds of people, even if I have good experience on the speech's subject.
Any advice? Should I go?
Thank you. <comment><USER2> If you feel you cannot do it then don't do it. There is no reason to torture yourself psychologically and physically if its not something you want to do.

I see a lot people writing comments about how to improve your speaking skills (which could be something good to do but...) while ignoring the fact you're basically worried about breaking down again from the pressure.

Please take care of your basic needs and mental stability before worrying about satisfying others. If you feel you can do it, give it a shot. If not, save yourself (and the organizers) grief and bow out now.

Please be well and take care of yourself.

<comment><USER3> >before worrying about satisfying others Exactly. Sounds like you got sucked in to something. Ask yourself if this is something _you_ want to do or something _someone told you_ you should do.

Edit: In case you want to learn more about 'traps' one can fall into, I suggest this book: [http://www.amazon.com/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree- World/dp/0965...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Found-Freedom-Unfree- World/dp/0965603679)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If there is a local Toastmaster's club I would recommend going: [http://www.toastmasters.org/](http://www.toastmasters.org/) there are other clubs but they provide a very supportive environment for starting to speak in public.

I've been lucky enough to speak at a few conferences, and if you're confident on your subject, which I am sure you are, you should just think of it as you passing on your experience. Don't think of it as a judgement of you or your past, people there want you to do well, you're up there for a reason which is because you're the one who can give them the information they're there to hear.

I say go for it, if you can go to a speaking club near by to get constructive criticism and help your confidence

Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER5> The problem, in your own words, is your present psychological state.

Irrespective of whether you give the speech, you should see a psychologist or a psychiatrist as soon as possible. There is no substitute for having an experienced, rational, objective and trusted person working with you to resolve your concerns.

The thought of confiding in an expert like that may be a source of discomfort for you. It is reasonable and natural for you to want to try to resolve your concerns on your own. But you say that you were unable to leave your house for a period of some five months. On any rational view, the time for self-help remedies is long past. You need to have this resolved if you are to get on with your life. Don't question it: just do it.

If you do it soon, you may find that you are in the same position that many other first-time public speakers have found themselves in, with the result that there are plenty of well-worn strategies available to you to tackle the speech you've been asked to give.

But you need to divide and conquer: solve the other problem first.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've found it's always easier to argue your way round to /not/ doing something, rather than the reverse, and in doing so opportunities are lost.

I think you should stand and give the talk. My reasoning is as follows:

If you don't do it, those that could listen to you and learn from you, won't be able to. If hundreds of people are going to be there, a few are going to come away having learnt something they didn't expect to. You wouldn't have been asked if the person asking you didn't feel you had the knowledge to impart. Being shy and introvert is absolutely fine, although this talk sounds like a one off, and then you've done it, tick that box. You either love it, and really find your stride, or hate it, and have a more legitimate reason for Never Doing One Again.

That's my opinion, however, you also asked for advice.

One of the games I was forced to play in school involved the teacher bringing in something horrifically ordinary and covering it with a towel. Us kids would file in, sit down and the teacher would pick one of us, who would then stand up, and look under the towel. They had 5 minutes to create a 15 minute talk on the item. This exercise, which is quite quick, will teach not only how to create a presentation, but will put you in the horrible situation of, "Where do I start?", "I don't know anything about that", "I do know something about _that_ , but there's masses, where do I start?". It'll also teach you to link one section to the next. You've got 5 months - do it as a party game, write a blog. You don't need to give the talk, you just need to write it as though you were.

A pertinent questions here is naturally - How long does your talk need to be?

It'll be interesting to see what the rest of HN suggest, and maybe tell us where it is so people can go and support in person?

</comment><comment><USER7> If you are going to bow out, it would be much better to do it sooner rather than later - so as not to leave the organisers in the lurch. Giving a public speech would be a big deal even if you were fine with other "regular-life" activities - so I don't think you should beat yourself up over it.

If you think you can do it, then I'd strongly recommend getting the talk together well in advance, and practice it a number of times - the more often, the better.

I'd second the comment about Toastmasters, although that might be more useful for preparing for similar events in the future, rather than for the immediate one.

</comment><comment> atom-morgan I used to be in the same boat as you although not nearly as bad. I hated public speaking and I was extremely shy.

But in my freshman year of college, I had to write a one page double spaced paper about anything every week. On Friday, we'd all read it to the class out loud. Looking back on my college experience, it was probably the single most valuable course I took just because it made me practice speaking in front of other people. As you'd expect, practice makes perfect (or improvement) and it's now one of my greatest strengths according to those around me and it's a great skill to have!

I wrote a letter about this class and teacher if you're interested: [https://medium.com/dear-blank/dc36bb5d403a](https://medium.com/dear- blank/dc36bb5d403a)

</comment><comment><USER8> > I've always been a shy, introvert person

One of my favorite memories from college was when a very shy woman had to recite a piece from Shakespeare and chose King Henry's rousing speech to his troops. She belted it out and by the end we were all about ready to go fight the French army! So, just because you're shy in normal life doesn't mean you might not really find strengths you didn't know you have in front of an audience. Stranger things have happened.

</comment><comment><USER9> When you talk about what you. know... the content is easy. when you talk about what you love... then passion is easy and the audience likes it. Finally practice practice practice.... with friends.. with a smaller audience (maybe a classroom), with a webcam... just practice.

Your audience then will love your speach and you will be glad that you didit.

</comment><comment><USER10> [http://www.ethos3.com/2012/03/presentation-lessons-from- wins...](http://www.ethos3.com/2012/03/presentation-lessons-from-winston- churchill/)

Practice!

Create a persona in your mind and be that person on stage. You don't have to be "you".

</comment><comment><USER11> How to Be the Best Public Speaker on the Planet: [http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/10/how-to-be-the-best- publ...](http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/10/how-to-be-the-best-public- speaker-on-the-planet/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Always start the speech off with a quick joke. Hearing everyone chuckle kindly always eases the nerves. Something easy like "They said that winning this award would take hard work, but no one told me I'd have to give a speech too!".

</comment><comment><USER13> By the way, Mark Jason Dominus (the guy who wrote High-Order Perl) has a presentation on giving presentations. I've only seen the slides, not the YouTube, but there are some handy tips.

</comment><comment><USER13> Practice in front of friends, repeatedly.</comment>


Https://angular.io (Angular2) is built with Angular1 and not even minified - <AUTHOR> https://angular.io/resources/js/controllers/app-controller.js <comment><AUTHOR> Well, all the best practices seems to not needed for angular.io.

I can't complain about performance and they definitely do some serverside rendering.

Any thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://github.com/angular/angular.io](https://github.com/angular/angular.io)</comment></comment>


FDA approves new treatment for adults with migraine - <AUTHOR> https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-new-treatment-adults-migraine <comment><USER2> Growing up, I had multiple friends die from brain aneurysms. Those start with a bad headache.

That has lead to me avoiding all medicines every time I get a headache (yes, I understand correlation is not causation).

My primary route to solve any headache is hydration. Adding electrolytes is also important because too much water without them can also give you a headache.

My experience has also lead me to focus on consuming the healthiest diet I can find (currently intermittent fasting + keto with intermittent-vegan weeks, mostly organic, with all nutrients from food sources).

On the other hand, my mother, who could convince the majority she's healthy based on her weight and latest diet buzzwords, has had migraines for the past 30 years, maybe longer — even landing her in the hospital on many occasions.

A migraine is your body telling you something is wrong with your most valuable asset.

Are you sure you want to sweep this problem under the rug?

There is a documentary on Amazon called "Fat". It illustrates how many children with epilepsy were harmed by the combination of 1. lack of understanding food and 2. pharmaceuticals with side effects that render them permanently disabled.

Good luck with your search for health and wellbeing.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Migraines for 30 years. Painkillers allows you to keep up with whatever wrong you are doing.

So if you have migraines, it is not normal. It is not incurable either. Use pain killers when you must, but keep looking for a solution.

The solution can be different for everybody. Start with diet, it's a very common cause for it. Don't limit yourself to what you think is right. Try things, even weird ones. Took me 3 decades of trials and errors to not need pain killers.

<comment><USER4> If pain killers worked for your migraines, they were extremely mild migraine.

OTC pain killers (and even prescribed pain killers) don't really do anything for the 3 people I know that get migraines. These people have to lay down under their sheets to block all sun light, they can not do absolutely anything at all during the episode but block sunlight and hope whatever medicine sort of worked last time will work this time.

Preaching and generalizing from your mild case helps no one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've had migraines since I was a kid and have been fortunate to have identified my triggers(caffeine/cacao) and found medication that works when one comes on.

I can't imagine how awful it is for folks who have no respite and hope this treatment can provide some relief.

<comment><USER6> I used to get horrible migraines from high school age on, my triggers were bright reflections and too much MSG (I kept track of what I ate and then tried to avoid anything that triggered) and generally I was useless for at least 4 hrs several times a month. If I was really quick a single Vicodin would at least make it manageable but generally I could keep nothing down. As I got older the headache itself got less and less and mostly what I get now is the aura (freaky lightshow in your eyes) and a single Tylenol is fine. But for 20 years it was not a fun experience at all. I know people with way more frequency to the point of being unable to do much at all.

One summer in college for a month I got a cluster headache every morning. 20 minutes of absolute agony that made migraines seem like a walk in the park. Thankfully those never came back.

I am glad research has been finding more ways to treat and even stop them.

<comment><USER7> > As I got older the headache itself got less and less and mostly what I get > now is the aura (freaky lightshow in your eyes) and a single Tylenol is > fine. But for 20 years it was not a fun experience at all. I know people > with way more frequency to the point of being unable to do much at all.

I also started getting mine in high school (sophomore or junior year, I think?). Never had them frequently, just once or twice a year, which is plenty. I too have noticed a shift in their effect as I get older, away from my predictable blind-spots-followed-by-pain to a wider variety of visual effects and usually just feeling really weird and "off" for the rest of the day.

Oddest one so far involved fairly bad tunnel vision, which was new and I've not had again since, plus the usually just-off-center-of-vision blind spot I get, followed about a half hour later by needing to sleep. It wasn't the same feeling as being very tired, exactly, but I just _needed_ to get in bed and go to sleep. No pain, just that. So weird.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Diclofenac works very well for me. Tablets work within an hour most of the time, and intramuscular shots work within about 20 minutes every time. But the long term potential side effects aren't great, so new options would be fantastic.

<comment><USER9> How do you get the shot, logistically?

Once I have a migraine, travel is exceedingly difficult for me.

<comment><USER8> It was always terrible. I used to live half a block from my doctors office, so I'd just (slowly) walk then. Now my wife will drive me (probably only need a couple of them a year though).

Basically it just sucked. Especially sitting in the bright waiting room, sweating bullets, trying not to throw up before I was seen. My most serious migraines can last a couple of days, and are just awful. Making it go away almost instantly was alway worth the hour or so of additional suffering to get a shot. I've also got a rather high pain tolerance, and tend to only get worn down by pain that lasts a long time.

I don't know if it would be as effective for anybody else, but if you get migraines that seem worse than death, I'd recommend asking your doctor about it.

<comment><USER10> How does cannabis affect your symptoms, if you vaporize some of that instead of heading for the Dr?

<comment><USER8> I only smoked weed when I was young, but it would generally make it worse (and would sometimes add nausea). I have some pretty good pain management techniques I use, and I think being high just takes my focus off them. I also can't stand the dopey feeling and won't even take opioids unless I really need to. I broke my leg a while ago and limped home on it thinking I'd just sprained it, eventually went to the ER and it took about 18 hours after the accident until I gave up and asked for some tramadol. The downside is, if I tell a nurse or doctor that I'm in extreme pain, they tend to not fully believe me because I'll look quite calm.

<comment><USER11> Would you mind elaborating on the pain management techniques?

<comment><USER8> Mostly slow deep breathing and focusing on relaxing and trying to lower your heart rate, basically just trying to calm down. Pain is just signals in your brain like any other though or feeling. I'm pretty convinced you can exert a reasonable amount of control over it. I'm no expert on the subject and I haven't trained to do it or anything, I've just injured myself a lot and that's what has worked for me. It's gotten me through a fair amount of serious injuries without much stress, the only trouble I've found is that I need to continually focus on doing it, and if I've been up in the hospital all night, I'll eventually get worn out and exhausted, and it won't work quite as well.

I don't think there's any limit to how proficient you can get at it. I think about that Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire and managed to calmly sit through burning to death, there's no way anybody could do that without having total control over their pain response. I've obviously never experienced anything that traumatic, but I have been in situations where I felt the symptoms of shock setting in and managed to calm myself down enough to get on with things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Does anyone know if they publish details about the size/strength of the effect anywhere or a link to the actual numbers for the study population?

<comment><USER13> Looks like it "works" (2-hour pain free marker) for ~10% of people.

[https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/news/snippets/ubre...](https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/news/snippets/ubrelvys- winner-not-long)

<comment><USER14> It might not sound impressive, but I think this is great news for two reasons:

1) Even if only 10% of people respond, this is likely going to give thousands of people for whom nothing else works a drug that actually does something.

2) Nearly all existing migraine meds fall into the "triptan" class of drugs. This is an entirely new class (CGRP antagonist), and may pave the way to new treatments even if this specific iteration isn't as effective as future ones.

<comment><USER15> for 2), this is not news, back in October 2019 Lilly got their drug approved as well in this class: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-28/eli- lilly...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-28/eli-lilly- migraine-drug-approved-and-will-be-free-to-patients)

<comment><USER16> The news here is that ubrogepant is a tablet taken as an abortive, while emgality etc are injections taken as a preventative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've had migraines for 40 years, and suffered much before being prescribed Sumatriptan. It relieves the migraine completely in about 30min. Doesn't work for my wife who also has migraines but an alternate formulation, Rizatriptan, does. My migraines have also evolved over the years from intense day long affairs to duller 3-day ones. Sometimes I need a subcutaneous triptan shot which relieves it in, I kid you not, 1 minute.

I tried preventative medications but the cure seemed worse than the disease. One, Topiramate, made me forget things and lose my train of thought. No thank you.

I also tried keto for a while and noticed that I hardly had any migraines while on it.

There are a lot of options available now. If you suffer from migraines, go talk to a neurologist with current knowledge, not something they learned 30 years ago.

<comment><USER18> Topiramate (topomax) is the antidote worse than the disease. It turned me into a zombie, literally living in my head but too dead to even open my mouth to say "hi" or "good morning" when I made eye contact with a stranger (yes, I'm from the Midwest and we do that here).

(Venlafaxine on the other hand is like a shock collar wrapped tightly around your brain waiting for you to miss a dose by even two hours, after which it'll punish you for the next twenty four hours with electric shocks and spasms _in your freaking brain_. It's a real pity it actually kind of worked :/ I still don't know if I would ever do it again.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> About a year ago there is this one... [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/31/first- ever-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jul/31/first-ever-pill-to- prevent-chronic-migraines-approved-by-eu)

</comment><comment><USER20> I've also had migraine on-and-off, and I had one even this night. So I went up and took my medicine, and I can function fairly well today.

Before I had this medicine the whole day would've been ruined, and I would be very inefficient and lazy tomorrow as well. While I don't get migraine that often, it makes a world of difference when I do get them.

<comment><USER21> Triptans changed my life in this way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Moderate to heavy doses of psilocybin at quarterly intervals can eliminate migranes and cluster headaches.

<comment><USER23> They are somewhat chemically similar to triptans, and consequently usually do not work for migraines resistant to triptans. But then, there's a lot of variance there.

But yes, they do sometimes work and when they do it's relatively long term compared to regular triptan use. And allegedly they're much more potent, especially when it comes to aborting migraines. Some non-hallucinogenic chemical variants are being also researched, both of psilocybin and LSD. LSA has also shown effectiveness sometimes.

At least 3 phase 1/2B-style RCTs of hallucinogens are under way. (Finding working doses, schedules, cataloguing side effects.) Expect results of one for psilocybin mid 2020. There's also long running RCT of LSD, finishing in 2023. I think both of these are for cluster headaches rather than migraines, but close enough.

Pilot trials have been done a long time ago by MAPS, with success. Now it's time for bigger science.

The link is also somewhat interestingly tenuous with ECT and seizures. (In that migraines and seizures rarely coexist, but share symptoms in some cases.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> had to go to wikipedia for the MOA

> It is a small-molecule calcitonin gene-related peptide receptor antagonist

</comment><comment><USER25> If only someone would remove the headache of pharmaceutical companies artificially increasing the costs of drugs, particularly when drugs like triptans reach the generic market.</comment>


Stock Exchange Hacking - Know which analysts are giving you bad advice - <AUTHOR> http://blog.tipranks.com/

<comment><USER2> This looks like spam.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're a young start up trying to innovate in the financial business. We're trying to have investors accountable.

I'm sorry if it seems like spam - I just wanted to share the fruit of our labor at our start up this last year and a half.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Know which analysts are giving you bad advice

Check if their lips are moving. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think every decent investor would have own judgment and will be able to spot lies easily. So can we say taht your customer is one who fully realies on analyst suggestions, it's quite interesting how you target him?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone using :)?</comment>


Russia: Telegram block leads to assault on freedom of expression online - <AUTHOR> https://www.article19.org/resources/russia-telegram-block-leads-widespread-assault-freedom-expression-online/ <comment><USER2> duhhhh</comment>


Pixie Scheme III for iPad - <AUTHOR> http://www.speakipad.com/ipad-apps/pixie-scheme-iii-education <comment><USER2> Is there a reason this will not work on the ipod touch?</comment>