Why I'm boycotting US cloud tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/08/what_about_a_us_tech_boycott/ <comment><USER2> I have always ridiculed those big European programs aimed at removing or limit the presence of google from Europeans citizens everyday life, but somehow, even if the European administrations can't manage software programs, their premises were right all along. Some friends were looking for providers outside of the Patriot Act because their customers would not accept US spying on their data, I was telling them I didn't really care, I was wrong. We might have to cut some links across the pound because our "ally" is turning less and less rational and he's massively weaponized, and take a sane route for ourselves (which is a big fight on its own).

<comment><AUTHOR> So if the theory holds true that things need to get worse before they get better, this could be good news in that it could be the motivating event in the global market for truly private cloud services.

Perhaps some European startup has a solution to our US based privacy problem that we could all migrate to for our cloud services.

<comment><USER3> As much as the US should be blamed for Prism etc., it should not be ignored that very similar programs exist in Europa as well – often in direct cooperation with the US. There might be a privacy advantage in Europe on paper but not much of that remains in daily life and business reality, it is mostly 'cover your ass' in the end.

<comment><USER2> They don't share everything, for example when they spy on a foreign company in advance for a big RFE, they won't share. But they are most likely to share real threats, because they are being judged on what they share. Then you have the game of powers, like when Europe had to surrender plane passengers personal data. Being foreigner's data, they are perfectly game for every spilling or abuse since only US citizens are a political issue, and there is mostly no way to get the US Government accountable for any international treaty.

<comment><USER4> Exactly which government can you hold to international treaties ?

Let's take a very obvious and blatant example. The government of Saudi Arabia signed the declaration of human rights, the FIRST article of which guarantees individual freedom of religion. Yet we all know they don't allow that, and they regularly execute ex-muslims for converting to Christianity, for being gay, and for a dozen other things. There's thousands of documented cases.

As if this is not bad enough, the government officials of Saudi Arabia regularly get caught torturing people they plucked off the street, apparently for fun. One of their allies, a UAE official, got caught on tape (or should we say, made a tape of him having his fun, then someone "leaked" it) [1]. This is legal (in sharia the government has the right to kill, torture and ... anyone they want).

I would say this is a far more blatant and dishonest practice than the ones you're alleging to. Yes the US spies, big whoop. They don't publicly behead people for things they signed a treaty they would not consider a crime ... And yet nobody seems to care. Yet one thing seems blatantly obvious : when it comes to human rights, the US ... is not the problem.

The truth is that outside of some of Western Europe and the US, most governments consider international treaties little more than a weapon to be used against their enemies because of the public attention they can garner using them. The most blatant violators, from Saudi Arabia to China, accuse everyone, from the US to Luxembourg, of violating international agreements of torture. Nobody should take this serious, but of course a lot of people do.

So let me know how these international treaties are supposed to work. I would love to hear how you'll get freedom of conviction, religion, politics and sexual orientation respected in the ~2/3rds of our planet that has signed an international treaty not to consider it a crime, yet kill people for it. China, just about every muslim country, Russia, ... (2/3rds, because China, India and Indonesia together form a comfortable 60% of the world, and none of them respects even basic freedom of religion. Only India can be said to give it a half-hearted attempt)

[1] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHgaMqTzWaE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHgaMqTzWaE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it will force Google (and others) to at least add OTR and ZRTP to Hangouts (enabled by default), for chats and video, and "one-click" _local_ encryption for Google drive, to make it easy for everyone to use storage encryption (it will probably need to use a plugin).

But even then this will only solve the chatting and storage problem (somewhat), but not the Gmail problem. Even with local encryption available as one-click, it seems very unlikely more than 1% of the users would use it, because they'd need to send the key to their friends, and that's just too cumbersome. And if only so few use it, then it's as good as useless, and Google still can't be fully trusted for e-mails (thanks to the US government).

What I'd like to see Google do now, is become very pro-active about this, and to implement measures like this to "give the privacy _control_ back to the people". Then maybe, just maybe, I'll _begin_ to trust Google again.

But I'm not holding my breath. I doubt it's illegal for them to do all of this, but especially if there's a legal grey area here to make it easy for their customers to encrypt stuff locally, I don't see them bothering to fight for this. The only way they might do it if there's a significant threat to their business, much like SOPA was.

That's why I'm hoping the theory put forward by the author will become reality, and this NSA story will hurt US companies' bottomlines badly, and their international relationships, because only then we'll have true competition in privacy.

It's also probably the only way to convince the government to stop doing it to this extent, because from what I've noticed they listen a lot more to money and lobbying than to citizen outrage.

<comment><USER6> Google can't offer proper encryption because most of their business model is based on analyzing all the personal data they store. At least it's very unlikely and I wouldn't hold my breath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Code, not laws.

Most foreign governments are just as bad, just with fewer resources and often with less explicit protections for privacy.

The ultimate solution would be to only use cloud servers which make verifiable technical claims about security and privacy to the level you require; otherwise, boycott the cloud.

I'm personally fine with Twitter as a publishing platform (and essentially treat my dm as "stuff which is too spammy for even an at reply".)

Facebook kind of skirts the line. It is really useful as both a way to get newsfeed updates and a messaging system. In the long run, I'd really need something like OTR to continue using messages.

My email is too private for me to want it on a cloud service without serious technical controls. No one offers this yet, so I self-host.

IM with OTR is ok for privacy, but sucks for traffic analysis still, and there are serious problems with OTR and mobile/multi client, still.

My password manager is too sensitive to live on public servers even with crypto, since I can't audit every single update to the package thoroughly enough. Same goes with "secure notes" (safe combos, etc). A belt and suspenders approach of both using crypto and maintaining access control on the file is about the best I can do so far; something like an HSM in the future.

Cellphones and voice (and presence/location) are the sacrifice I hate the most (along with finance, I guess). If I had a way to get analog one-way pager notifications of incoming messages and a wifi-tunneling tablet, I'd consider ditching cellphone entirely. This would be a moderately big deal to develop, though.

Ultimately anonymous ecash (chaumian blinded tokens or Zerocoin or something else) is the solution to financial privacy (probably not straight Bitcoin, since there will be a jihad against mixes, and without mixes, Bitcoin privacy is horrible.)

<comment><USER8> No no no. Firstly this is just an arms race between you and the most sophisticated, well resourced and technically savvy surveillance organisation that has ever existed. Secondly, this strategy might temporarily protect a tiny knowledgable fraction of the population, which is of no real consequence to society in general.

<comment><USER7> Fortunately the same principles of physics and mathematics apply to both me and Google (and the #3 or #4 most powerful/smart organization, NSA). I trust science a lot more than I trust either every member of every organization to obey the law, or the law to remain both public and supportive of my interests.

<comment><USER9> don't be so sure. The NSA is probably far, far ahead in mathematics.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely true in 1970, but probably much less true now (they probably ARE experts in traffic analysis, though, since ~no one but intel agencies cares about that yet). Academia and commerce tend to surpass the government in every OTHER area where they participate, it's just that no one cared pre-70s. I don't think they're using their huge budget efficiently, just like every other government/military program. The bulk of their budget and effort is going to collection, mainly satellites, physical installations, staffing for those, etc.

Judging by what I've seen of USG security, their COMSEC side (defense) is actually comparatively weaker than best practices in most of the high-end civilian world. Their only saving grace is a focus on physical separation and hardware implementations; otherwise they'd be totally pwned, and they seem to be moving "into the cloud" which will lose their their existing advantages.

And, if they had a magic way to factor or whatever, it would be _so_ highly classified (like Enigma break in WW2)that they could never use it on anything which wasn't totally justifiable through other plausible means, and of such incredible value (like "killing OBL" or higher), that I can act as if they can't factor.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure the NSA has an active program to recruit high-level strictly theoretical mathematicians specializing in algebra and algebraic analysis (typically at the undergrad level).

Agree that the US's COMSEC is degrading, rapidly. As is the USN's nuke reactor program. Sigh.

<comment><USER7> They do, although the _vast_ majority of NSA staff are more like computer techs/middle managers/etc. Sadly.

It's also a lot harder, IMO, to convince a top theoretical mathematician to go to NSA vs. remain in public, since there aren't exactly amazing resources NSA can offer (better chalk?), compared to someone who needs access to multi- million or billion dollar resources. In exchange for better chalk (and access to other classified work, sure), you can't publish, so you'll never win a Fields, be respected by your mom, etc. (A guy who really is into nuclear physics _could_ be tempted by DOE, by comparison.)

I think NSA would have a much easier time recruiting "true believers" in US national defense than anything else. i.e. "yes, you're an expert in theoretical math, but rather than doing purely abstract stuff, you can help protect your country from the evil terrorists!". An easier case when the threat was existential nuclear annihilation from a USSR your relatives may have fled in the past, than now where we're going up against mud hut dwellers who can't afford shoes and take over planes with boxcutters.

NSA also does the bullshit "EOE" recruiting, particularly in the high school and undergrad level. Sorry, but most high level math people are not particularly "diverse".

Plus, go to the math department at top universities. Find the US citizen. Find the US citizen who isn't particularly counterculture or does recreational drugs or whatever. Convince him to work for GS/GG wages (maybe $100k, tops?) vs. a tech startup or a hedge fund. With paralyzing bureaucracy, uncertain funding in the next 10-20 years, and stifling work rules.

I would not want to be the NSA's recruiting department.

<comment><USER9> good points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "but the truth of the matter is that the entire Western world owes the very foundation of its modern beliefs to the US Constitution, in my opinion."

What are those 'modern beliefs' then? Modern democracy, philosophy and human rights are not American products, but European, starting with ancient Greece, further expanded during the Renaissance and the reformations after the 2 world wars.

The fact that America is so young allowed them to choose from many of the time's political ideas. Saying what you said is like saying 'all smartphone users owe Samsung for the user experience, because they created the Galaxy S4'.

<comment><USER11> _What are those 'modern beliefs' then? Modern democracy, philosophy and human rights are not American products, but European, starting with ancient Greece, further expanded during the Renaissance and the reformations after the 2 world wars._

How Eurocentric of you.

As [http://www.america.gov/st/washfile- english/2004/September/20...](http://www.america.gov/st/washfile- english/2004/September/20040924120101AKllennoCcM9.930056e-02.html) points out, the US Constitution took some of its inspiration from the Iroquois. They provided inspiration for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, a 2 state legislature, a federal system, the requirement for an annual state of the union address, and so on.

Of course the influences you cite were also hugely important. However the USA introduced important ideas from the native Americans that had not previously been part of the European tradition.

<comment><USER12> I was curious about this Iroquois influence on the form of U.S. government, so I read Wikipedia. It turns out to be a pleasing story of recent invention.[1]

Perhaps we can say that the prominence of the Iroquois confederacy (where, although the tribes themselves had hereditary leadership, the way the tribes were confederated was vaguely democratic[2]), was used as a persuasive anchor in favor of the colonists' confederation - Ben Franklin urging: "It would be a very strange thing, if six Nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a Scheme for such a Union … and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a Dozen English Colonies."

Some excerpts:

      Rakove writes, "The voluminous records we have for the constitutional debates of the late 1780s contain no significant references to the Iroquois" and notes that there are ample European precedents to the democratic institutions of the United States.[57]

      Tooker concluded that the documents cited indicate that groups of Iroquois and white settlers realized the advantages of a confederation, but she thinks there is little evidence to support the idea that 18th century colonists were knowledgeable regarding the Iroquois system of governance.

      Tooker concludes, "...there is virtually no evidence that the framers borrowed from the Iroquois." She thinks the myth resulted from exaggerations and misunderstandings of a claim made by the Iroquois linguist and ethnographer J.N.B. Hewitt after his death in 1937.[60]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_Confederacy#Influence_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroquois_Confederacy#Influence_on_the_United_States)

[2] (from wikipedia) No Iroquois treaty was binding unless it was ratified by 75% of the male voters and 75% of the mothers of the nation.[46] In revising Council laws and customs, a consent of two-thirds of the mothers was required.[46] The need for a double supermajority to make major changes made the Confederacy a de facto consensus government.[47]

[57] [http://hnn.us/articles/12974.html](http://hnn.us/articles/12974.html)

[60] Tooker E (1990). "The United States Constitution and the Iroquois League"

<comment><USER11> Sadly as I've gone back through sources that I learned this from, the case for it is not nearly as strong as I had believed. :-(

Doubly so given that the Corsican constitution predates the US and has many of the same ideas, but clearly with no native influence.

Still, there are parallels, and the case is strong that Benjamin Franklin was personally moved by the Iroquois example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I want my private files and private communications to be private.

We should all be boycotting centralization of private communications and unencrypted file storage in the cloud as a precautionary measure. In light of NSA/Prism, especially when communicated across national borders, we should insist on end-to-end encryption: GPG/PGP, S/MIME, HTTPS, RSA/DES/etc, i.e. nothing sent in the clear.

For public services like Google+ or Twitter, the information is public anyway. Unless Google, Apple, Microsoft, et al, start implementing back doors on my devices for the NSA I don't think boycotting is the answer. The pressure has to be primarily on the politicians, hold their feet to the fire until FISA/PATRIOT acts are repealed.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'Not subject to American law' might not be possible if you want to use today's Internet in a global manner.

US citizens for example get taxed worldwide and banks worldwide have to comply with American law if they want to remain part of the global banking system (and don't want to go out of business). That's possible because the heart of the global banking system is located in the US or at least under American control.

Today's Internet is very similar and American companies are the dominating forces on the Internet anyway. And with regard to surveillance and interception, the US even has many supporting allies worldwide, just think of Echolon …

<comment><USER14> I am an American. But I don't think that the world of business will always revolve around that fact. US domination of the internet is subject to disruption, and laws which require the implementation of state sponsored spyware may place US based companies at a disadvantage in the global marketplace.

To put it another way, given a choice Gmail-private will come to be preferred to Gmail-PRISM should the user facing feature sets be comparable. And it is likely to be easier to implement Gmail-private if the company providing it is located outside the US - i.e. is not Google. The same applies to search, maps, and eventually mobile communication.

<comment><USER3> I like your – very American! – optimism.

An unpleasant fact is that the Internet outside the US is under heavy surveillance too, think of China and the Arabic world but also Europe. From a user perspective, you cannot opt against surveillance, you can mainly choose who can directly intercept your communications. And in this regard and although I don't like to be under any surveillance, the US is usually the lesser evil.

<comment><USER15> _" the Internet outside the US is under heavy surveillance too, think of China and the Arabic world"_

This is where a tragic lack of foresight comes in. In 40 years China will be the world's dominant nation. Do we want to be in that transition setting a good example or a bad example? Do we want to be setting high standards for restraint, privacy, and individual freedom, or do we want to be seen grabbing every privilege and advantage right to the bitter end?

<comment><USER16> <q>Do we want to be in that transition setting a good example or a bad example?</q>

The way you posit the question... Are you sure they care about any such example?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's funny is only China was smart enough to keep Sillicon Valley surveillance out of their country. Though it was only because they wanted to control the surveilance themselves.

<comment><USER18> > _What 's funny is only China was smart enough to keep Sillicon Valley > surveillance out of their country. Though it was only because they wanted to > control the surveilance themselves._

I wouldn't call it "only".

That's a very important distinction.

It means that on the internet, they can be a (more) sovereign state -- not depended on third countries for their internet services and life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Long ago I concluded that any of my personal data or business data outside the locked doors of my own facilities would be an open, engraved invitation for lawyers and big government to get between me and my data and cause me no end of time, effort, and money wasted, so much waste that the lawyers and big government could easily ruin both my business and my life, even if there is absolutely nothing at all wrong.

Here's the real situation: Lawyers and big government, especially the second, have unlimited time, money, effort, and powers and nothing much else to do but cause trouble, and I just do not have the resources to defend myself against them. To them a false alarm is just another project at the office; to me their false alarm is likely the death of my business and a big torpedo below the water line of my little boat in life.

So, my 'tactic' is just to do nothing wrong, certainly have nothing wrong in my data, try to remain mostly anonymous, stay the heck below their radar, and keep my data inside my own four walls.

I can still be vulnerable to various false alarms. And if my business is at all successful, I may have to become something of a 'public person', that is, not so anonymous, and, then, be on the radar of various people who would like to cause me trouble. There could be news reporters looking to 'manufacture' a scandal for a 'scoop'. There could be politically motivated attackers. And there could be just common shakedown artists who want me to give them something and else trigger some false alarm to have big government cause me trouble. One false alarm could cost me my business, years of time, millions of dollars in legal fees, all for nothing substantive at all.

Just as for anyone, any of my data outside my four walls is just raw meat for lots of people who could do me harm. So, no 'cloud' servers; no 'cloud' file backup; little or nothing on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+; all blog posts anonymous; mostly don't let browsers accept cookies,; etc.

Let lawyers and big government go after easier targets. I remember the old joke that don't have to outrun the angry bear; instead, just have to outrun the poor other guy trying to outrun the angry bear.

<comment><USER20> This is what I term "Professional Paranoia" and as long as you can be unemotional about it, it can be an exceptionally useful mindset. I have internalized the Moscow Rules[1] and I constantly remind myself of what Bruce Lee said, "Be like water".

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

<comment><USER19> I'm not at much risk (except for maybe some of my HN posts!) and am not very safe, but I'm safer than I would be trying to be a public figure speaking out.

At times I have heard suggestions that I should start a blog, but then I'd be closer to being a public figure and more at risk.

Again, if my business is successful, then I will be less anonymous and sometimes have to hold my tongue!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any email provider out there in a 'safe location' that can compete with GMail? I'd really like to move the GMail Acc. I use for some of my mail, but every option kinda feels like moving from smoke to smother.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use Fastmail, owned by Opera Software- out of Australia.

Been with them for a decade, always been extra happy with it.

<comment><USER3> Australia should not be considered a 'safe location'. Australia closely cooperates with the US and is even one of the core members of Echolon. And the FastMail server are located in the US anyway …

<comment><AUTHOR> Good to know- I didn't know. Thanks.

<comment><USER22> Good to know Fastmail location for me, too. In recent weeks, I was considering Fastmail over Gmail and upon receiving the NSA news, I was more inclined to make the switch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you boycot US cloud, you surely will come into contact with it and therefore have your info stored by US tech companies. Ex. I live in Slovakia and I send an email from XYZ email service to someone who uses Gmail, does that not fall into the US cloud spider web?

<comment><USER23> You've touched the web long before getting to a Google server.

National borders have always been special demarcations and so any crossing, physical or digital, is subject to special examination.

The nature of modern digital communication has blurred the borders somewhat and perhaps more significantly has made it easy to forget when your digital actions are transgressing those borders.

In the physical world we've accepted that there are border control stations on roads, at airports, and ports. Some of the surveillance mechanisms that have been in the press lately are the digital equivalent. Some seem to be much more than that.

It is going to take some serious public debate and some enlightened leadership to reign in our surveillance state and to come to a better public consensus regarding what privacy standards we want to embed in domestic and international law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> If you live outside of the States, aren't you already boycotting US clouds because of the latency? I think I only use Tarsnap for any remotely sensitive data.

Otherwise, I keep it as close to home as possible. It's a pain to use a VPS in America for example. Even with Mosh.

<comment><USER25> Here in Denmark, use of Google services is extremely common, even in companies and universities. Lots of people are slowly migrating everything to Google Docs and Gmail, latency notwithstanding. There is some worry that this is de- facto watering down rules around things like privacy of student data, since that data is now ending up on services that don't implement European data- protection rules.

Gmail was disqualified from the bidding to provide a hosted email solution for the university I work at, for that reason, but Google services are nonetheless pretty widely used by individuals, even for official purposes. The contract eventually went to Microsoft's Office 365, which claims to comply with EU data-protection best practices (I believe the servers are also physically hosted in Europe): [http://office.microsoft.com/en- us/business/office-365-trust-...](http://office.microsoft.com/en- us/business/office-365-trust-center-eu-model-clauses-faq-cloud-privacy- FX104033856.aspx)

I would guess that the promise is not particularly solid if the U.S. government wants to siphon off data from Microsoft, though. In practice I think it does provide some protection, but mostly against commercial use of the data: Microsoft has contractually agreed to certain rules about data- mining and data-sharing that Google hasn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Suddenly, the rush to abandon private forums for "social media" seems, foolhardy doesn't it?

Of course discussion of specialized topics were spread out over a million places, but that was a million places - many of which were spread over different countries - someone would need to look (and get a warrant) to access data.

The down side to homogeneity is that it takes just one infection to bring down the lot.

</comment><comment><USER27> You might as well try boycotting US customers as well -- both are phenomenally impossible to accomplish but the end-goal is still the same.

<comment><USER28> Boycotting US customers should be easy. After all, US companies have perfected the art of boycotting non-US customers...

Anyway, boycotting US cloud tech is not that hard, albeit a bit inconvenient in some cases. In many cases putting data within legal reach of the US government is simply illegal, so an entire market has sprung up to offer services that guarantee non US ownership and no data and services within US jurisdiction.

And this is just for the sake of regulatory compliance. In fact, it's probably the #1 selling point for non-US cloud services already. The NSA shitstorm is not exactly going to have a negative impact on that market...

<comment><USER29> Isn't it already being done? Don't gambling sites have to block US users?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > _' Not subject to American law' \- the next desirable IT feature_

We have seen in the past how the US Government overreaches to take down any website no matter where it's hosted. If you want to be "not subject to American law" you need to build an .onion torsite.

</comment><comment><USER31> You can be assured that the partner nations of the UKUSA not only have access to these NSA programs, but probably also participate. And then what non-shady nations are you left with? Israel? Please.

This isn't just the US folks.

</comment><comment><USER32> And how will the author boycott the NSA's cloud tech?

</comment><comment><USER4> Since this is probably the 20th PRISM story today, here's a pitch for a new startup:

darkness.io is a incredible startup that is a complete game changer. I founded darkness.io after realizing that there is an untapped 383221 billion dollar opportunity in removal of prism stories from the web.

I can't tell you the details about our platform because we are currently in stealth mode, but we are the only player in removal of prism stories which we will completely disrupt in 3 months. At darkness.io we believe that everyone deserves less prism stories. Our product will bring together prism annoyance, anti-prism and boredom to introduce synergies that will democratize, and revolutionize removal of prism stories.

This idea is so potent yet so deceptively simple that it has the capacity to produce an unlimited amount of profit.

We haven't created our product yet, so we are looking a real javascript samurai to join our team so they can build it for us. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity for you to be a part of the next big thing. We have free food, unlimited vacation, generous equity compensation. Also each week we give you a new iSpy just for being amazing.

If know javascript and 'want in', just tweet me and you'll be on our uber game-changing, revolutionary, disruptive team in no time, helping us change the world!

<comment><USER14> The alternative is much simpler. Base the business in Europe or elsewhere outside the US. The US is a big and important market, but there is nothing preventing cloud services on the scale of AWS moving offshore just as manufacturing has and professional services are.

If it introduces latency and "credit card call center" style interface barriers, that doesn't mean it cannot be profitable.

There is a large market which sees itself as receiving no benefit from the American military-industrial complex as it is manifesting itself on the web. The laws which enable PRISM may place US companies at a disadvantage. PRISM affordance is not a feature in most people's minds. Indeed, it is a bug in many.

<comment><USER29> Europe yes, UK no. Our government will happily funnel over anything the US asks for, including actual people(1).

I'd go French. Because as Eddie Izzard put it (roughly), "the French are so.... _French_ "

(1)Yes, I am aware of the one single exception. Who I'm not so sure the US Government wanted to really that bothered with. Bad PR and all that.

<comment><USER14> The political will to align the UK's interests with the US is just that - political will. It depends upon a mandate from the people, not the law of gravity. Political constants are lexically scoped within representative forms of democracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is the same absurdity as boycotting airlines because of TSA. Boycott your government.

<comment><USER34> Your government is owned by your corporations. Thus, the best way to get to your government is doing something the hurts your companies' bottom line.

<comment><USER35> Because.. yours isn't, maybe. ha ha ha.</comment></comment></comment>


Former Mexican president pushes for pot legalization - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/30/us/washington-marijuana-fox/index.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_latest+%28RSS%3A+Most+Recent%29 <comment><USER2> It is easy to push for such stuff when you are out of power and don't have the paralysing loyalties that force those in power to make compromises.

Let's see someone in power push for legalization.</comment>


The study of acoustic signals and the supposed spoken language of the dolphins - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405722316301177 <comment><USER2> There are a few issues i can see here.

1\. (meta-science) If this result mattered, it would be published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society (JASA), which is where all the good marine mammal acoustics work is published. This appears to be a private journal of a particular russian university, which is less than convincing, and single- author papers are always (fairly or unfairly) subject to higher scrutiny. Other weirdnesses: the paper was submitted on 16 AUG, accepted the same day, and "reviewed" within 5 days. This suggests a certain laxity of rigor.

2\. This work was done in a small highly reverberant concrete-walled pool. It would be more convincing in free-field, as much of the analysis here is tightly coupled to notions of coherency, which reverberations blow right (so to speak) out of the water. Why their analysis is done in pascals SPL and not dB re 1uPa SPL (as everyone else does) is confusing.

3\. There is little to no quantitative analysis of spectral features in the results or discussion. There are also multiple sentences that involve the phrase "we can assume", which I would argue is certainly not the case.

4\. That dolphin clicks are spectrotemporally complex is a boring result. The authors fail to demonstrate, and in fact basically don't even claim, the assertion in the HN title.

</comment><comment><USER3> I am saddened by how long we've known about cetacean communications--decades-- and how little progress there's been, given the giant strides tech has made in DSP and pattern matching. If only we applied a fraction of the tech effort we put into cell phones or weapons.

<comment><USER4> Crazy idea: Crowdsource it.

If we can gamify protein folding ([https://fold.it/portal/](https://fold.it/portal/)) and find scientifically useful answers, why not the same with cetacean languages?

<comment><USER5> The reason that protein folding and other large-scale projects (e.g. SETI@Home) work is because there's enough data to go around. I think that these projects are likely bound by the fairly small bits of data they have available.

If we could get an open dataset of cetacean sounds along with a tagged assessment of the scenario (i.e. how many were around, were they agitated, etc) then this kind of project could be very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If (like me) you mainly wanted the conclusion, here it is:

> As this language exhibits all the design features present in the human > spoken language, this indicates a high level of intelligence and > consciousness in dolphins, and their language can be ostensibly considered a > highly developed spoken language, akin to the human language.

And:

> The results obtained in this study suggest the existence of a similar highly > developed spoken language in toothed whales (Odontoceti), based on the > similarity of their acoustic signals and morphology.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've wondered if dolphins speak to each other (assuming that they do) in a serial flow of abstract symbols-- words, like we do, or if they use their sonar to project 3-D 'holograms' of objects and shapes to each other.

Maybe even both. What a wonderful day when we crack the code.

<comment><USER8> Possibly both. Like ideo-gram writing (Egyptian, Chinese) that started as pictures but became abstract.</comment></comment>


In 2010, I had good union health insurance. Obamacare was the law of the land - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/DuBarryPie/status/1231669876122505216 <comment><AUTHOR> For the record:

Her final tweet is a political endorsement. That is not why I posted this.

I wasn't going to say anything because I didn't really expect this to get traction. But now it has comments.

<comment><USER2>
      I didn't really expect this to get traction

Most of your submits anymore are just tweets, and most of _those_ have been both inflammatory and unvetted. Some were even deleted the same day.

I think it's time that Twitter and Reddit be disallowed as submit sources. If a submitter can't find _one_ actual source article or even a blog entry (or bother to write one themselves!) with supporting references or corresponding content, it doesn't belong here.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are tweets that do well here. I've had tweets I posted hit the front page.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=doreenmichele+twitter.com](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=doreenmichele+twitter.com)

This is a large enough forum that it's reasonable to assume by default that most posts will not get traction.

I go through periods where I mostly post from Twitter, but that doesn't constitute the majority of my submissions. I don't post stuff to be inflammatory. I post stuff I think is interesting for some reason. Just because I think it's interesting doesn't guarantee it will be interesting to anyone here.

I'm perfectly happy to write and post original content, but I also get crabbed at for submitting blog entries I wrote myself. At least some of that appears to be a case of "sexism is alive and well."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> "Obamacare was the law of the land."

In fact, Obamacare didn't _begin_ to take effect until 2014, 4 years later.

</comment><comment><USER3> These stories of how predatory the American health care and health insurance system is, never fail to disgust me.

</comment><comment><USER4> Something fishy about this story, but let's presume it is 100% true. Medicare for all would be much bigger than Obamacare; in fact, the physical infrastructure and the workforce infrastructure is not in place to service the entire population. Most people on Medicare today have to wait months for doctors and surgeries. VA hospitals have trouble servicing veterans in a timely and professional manner.

To have Medicare for all would require a Doctor and Nurses Corps, thousands of hospitals would have to be erected and staffed. It's not going to happen, especially with a hostile Senate and no mandate from the public at large. A public option remains overall more popular than Medicare for All, according to a Kaiser Hospital poll.

<comment><USER5> Why couldn't all the existing doctors, nurses, and hospitals be used? There won't suddenly be double the population.

<comment><USER4> Population growth would not surge, but demand for healthcare would. If the Veterans Administration hospitals and local community hospitals cannot adequately service the health needs of their respective communities quickly, that indicates to me more infrastructure and medical personnel have to be created. Doing this would be is a good thing. This infrastructure should be rolled out with deliberate thought rather than by the stroke of a pen.

Some people want to keep their employer insurance due to quality and service. They don't want to see their employer cancel it to save money once Medicare for all is in play. When healthcare in Great Britain or Sweeden is mention as a solution, it looks and sounds good on paper, but the US has over 327-million people versus Great Britain's 67-million and Sweden's 11-million population.

From Wikipedia" "...The Swedish health care system is mainly government- funded, universal for all citizens and decentralized, although private health care also exists. A shortage of medical personnel is a major problem. The health care system in Sweden is financed primarily through taxes levied by county councils and municipalities." I can't imagine what the shortages of doctors and nurses in the US would be. YMMV.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It sounds great until the govt decides you aren't viable, or you're to old or young to be worth financials strain put upon the system.

Perhaps you're of the wrong political, religious or cultural persuasion and a bureaucrat determines that you aren't selected for treatment.

Ultimately, the people get what they deserve i suppose.

<comment><USER3> > _" It sounds great until the govt decides you aren't viable, or you're to > old or young to be worth financials strain put upon the system."_

I think you mean "insurance company", not "govt", there. Private insurers in the US have a history of doing stuff like this. Government-run health insurance systems tend to cover everybody with a lot less red tape than this.</comment></comment>


Introduction to Tries - <AUTHOR> http://drmcawesome.com/IntroductionToTries <comment><USER2> I've recently been working on directed acyclic word graphs. They are a small modification to tries and can be built with (I think) the same time complexity. For each node, count the distance from EOW when building, maintain a list of nodes with the same EOW distance and merge the ones that are equal strings. They use much less space by sharing suffixes as well as prefixes. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_word_graph>

</comment><comment><USER3> for an excellent example of a trie implementation, the haskell bytestring trie datastructure is really nice to look at. Its docs can be found at <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/bytestring-trie> and the very readable sourcecode at [http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bytestring- trie/...](http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/bytestring- trie/0.2.2/doc/html/src/Data-Trie-Internal.html)

edit: note that its not strictly a trie, but can be used as one, in general its more like it does a trie-like key value lookup.

edit: it is also worth noting that its pretty fast, counting reading data in from the file system and other overhead, loading 1.5 million key - value pairs of realworld production data into the trie, and then making my first query, in under 30 seconds. And thats without even doing the sort of preprocessing that can make it much much faster! (namely, lexigraphically sorting the strings I'm using as keys before doing the k-v insertions)

</comment><comment><USER4> personally I prefer this intro: <http://marknelson.us/1996/08/01/suffix- trees/>

or this one which is slightly harder: <http://linux.thai.net/~thep/datrie/datrie.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> _"First, lookup time is O(1) in the size of the trie."_

The article skims over the tricky part - the dependency on the size of the alphabet. Which you can no longer treat as insignificant in the days of unicode.

<comment><USER6> Good luck building a Unicode trie -- the branching factor would be too high, never mind lookup time. Instead, you'd make the trie of an encoding, probably UTF-8 (off the top of my head) that would enable you to keep the branching factor at 256, which is already rather large but doable (You can switch to Judy arrays if the wasted space bothers you.)

Does anyone know, is there a Unicode encoding that enables you to map arbitrary ranges (so I can, for example, use the greek alphabet only at 1 byte per character or less)? I suppose UTF-8 is already hard enough to decode.

<comment><USER7> Ternary search tries attempt to solve this problem (among others):

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

<http://www.strchr.com/ternary_dags>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is interesting. I wonder if you could use the a similar algorithm for mapping sentences. That is, construct a ternary DAG and keep inserting words (rather than letters) into the trie.

<comment><USER9> Yes, of course. You can index tries with pretty much anything, though elements with constant-time comparison (individual bytes/chars, pointers, hashes, etc.) will have less overhead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is "trie" pronounced? Like "try"?

<comment><USER11> According to Wikipedia:

 _Following the etymology, the inventor, Edward Fredkin, pronounces it /ˈtriː/ "tree".However, it is pronounced /ˈtraɪ/ "try" by other authors._

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is it me or there's no RSS in the site?</comment>


Find love overseas: simple ways to make people outside the US love your product - <AUTHOR> https://certsimple.com/blog/product-development-for-non-us-markets <comment><AUTHOR> Author here: just wanted to reiterate the final point from the article: being aware of country-specific stuff doesn't mean you have to spend massive amounts of time in IFDEF hell.

> Know what your largest non-US markets are, and put a little effort into the > things that will make a big difference for them.

The reverse is also true: if you know you can't properly cater to a market - in our case some governments are particularly difficult to work with when validating customers for EVs - then save your support staff time by filtering those countries out in your sign up process.</comment>


The secret to a long and healthy life? Eat less - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170601-the-secret-to-a-long-and-healthy-life-eat-less <comment><USER2> Good overview of the benefits of calorie restriction, but doesn't touch on two of the most important schools of thought of the past couple years.

1\. Calorie restriction is almost impossible for most humans to follow long term

2\. Many of the same benefits of calorie restriction may be achievable through intermittent fasting, which is much easier for people to follow. I've been experimenting with a daily 16 hour fast (all calories consumed within an 8-hour window) and have seen small improvements in my energy and general well- being, although it's decades too early to say how this will impact my longevity.

Relevant articles: [https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33739](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep33739) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622429/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622429/) [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hunger- gains-...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-hunger-gains- extreme-calorie-restriction-diet-shows-anti-aging-results/)

<comment><USER3> Have thought about the fasting as well, but isn't it basically the same as skipping breakfast?

<comment><USER4> Fasting is by definition skipping break fast.

<comment><USER5> technically correct and also not very helpful :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few thoughts.

It seems that "calorie restriction" is a misleading term. If these funds are correct, CR should be considered the norm/ideal. That means the majority, currently, over-consume.

That aside. I wonder if it's also related to modern food, and the production there of. If inflammation is the root of most disease, and CR, I presume, reduces inflammation, then what is it about our foods that trigger so much inflammation?

Finally, when all said and done, I predict this will be found to connect with gut bacteria in some way. That is, CR effects the gut, and that effect is ultimately a positive for the whole body.

<comment><USER7> A CRON or calorie restriction optimal nutrition diet is a thing, not only eating fewer calories but what you do eat has to be absolutely perfect in nutrition.

Micheal Mosley on BBC interviewed a CRON advocate he are an apple peel but threw away the inner part.

I've read that a rumbling stomach is necessary for gut health without it your microbiome suffers, CR may incidentally do that.

<comment> kyle-rb >he ate an apple peel but threw away the inner part

I can do reduced calories, but that right there just sounds miserable.

<comment><USER8> I saw the program, the guy actually had a giant bowl of fruit, mostly frozen berries(!), and yes, apple peel. He seemed pretty cheerful, and it didn't look like privation.

I do remember reading the blog of some guy way back around 2007 or so who was on a 1000 calorie per day diet. One of the most miserable things I ever read. The highlight of his week was 1 square of 100% cacao chocolate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> About five years ago I switched to one large meal per day (dinner) with a snack or two. Prior to this I lost nearly 40lbs by shifting my diet toward dominant protein and smaller portions. I also added in a good 30+ minutes of walking per day. Nothing fancy.

I also dropped almost all of my sugar intake. I drink about 3L of water per day and have one cup of coffee in the morning.

I've been able to maintain a healthy weight (6'4" tall, ~185lbs) and I rarely feel truly hungry. On the days where I have more than one large meal, I tend to feel tired and foggy.

Its completely anecdotal, but this pattern has worked out well for me.

The main issue with articles like this is that they propose lame diets that strip out enjoyment. If you want to eat eggs basted in butter, do it -- but balance that out with exercise or somewhere else in your diet. No use suffering so you can live a few extra years at the tail end of your life.

<comment><USER10> I've settled into a similar pattern and have found it the most sustainable out of all the diets I've tried. I also recommend a few multi day water fasts a year as a sort of 'soft-reset' of your appetite/digestive system. You learn the difference between cravings and hunger and how marvelously tuned your body is for dealing with caloric deficiencies. People get so anxious and scared of hunger when it's no big deal. You're basically asking it to 'garbage collect' to conserve the energy you're burning which it doesn't seem to do normally when food is coming in every few hours.

<comment><USER11> Also, most hunger is really thirst, but your body will output the same sensation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I checked out the recipes on the iDiet website recommended in the article, and I'm feeling sad and deprived just reading them. I'm willing to suffer for better health, but I'd hate to suffer through a life of egg whites and margarine and then discover in the end that the science was wrong.

<comment><USER13> Even if it means dying a year earlier I'm going to eat salted butter and drink red wine and enjoy it. Better to enjoy less than to have more you don't enjoy?

<comment><USER14> I think the dynamics are more complicated than that. Some diseases seriously mess with your quality of life, whether it be chemo for cancer or blood pressure medicine with nasty side effects for heart disease. Or my least favorite, a decade of Alzheimer's.

I heard the ideal death described as pretty solid health up to a very rapid decline, healthy food probably helps that.

<comment><USER15> Yep, totally agree. If you got acid reflux, you cant enjoy coffee or spicy foods at all.

If only if it was as simple as enjoy junk food and your life and die a few years younger.

<comment><USER16> Exactly. The first 70 years of a 75-year life is probably more enjoyable than a 70-year old life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> My father has had a low calorie diet all of his life. At 78, he is in perfect physical and mental condition. His doctor had only one concern; he is slowly losing weight each year and needs to reverse that. The doctor wanted to prescribe an appetite enhancing drug but my father explained he can not simply gain weight by eating more. It's as if his digestive system is already at a maximum threshold.

I wonder if habitual CR inevitably trains the body to stabilize its weight and if that can not be undone if practiced too long. That then put you at increased mortality risk when you start losing body mass in old age. Caged animal studies might miss this risk because a valued lab rat won't suffer sudden injuries and the resulting prolonged hospital visits.

<comment><USER18> >The doctor wanted to prescribe an appetite enhancing drug but my father explained he can not simply gain weight by eating more. It's as if his digestive system is already at a maximum threshold.

It's more likely that his weight set point has been lowered, and now his hormonal hunger indicators are defending that set point.

He needs to power through it and eat more, even though it's going to feel like he's uncomfortably full all the time. I went through the same thing. It's all mental. It has nothing to do with the digestive system.

<comment><USER19> Note that he doesn't need to eat _much_ more. A few hundred kilojoules a day will do the trick over time - he could reverse such a slow trend by something as small as switching from low fat to full cream milk, or having a couple of Tim Tams with his morning coffee.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Assume that you had a garden with acres of produce all perfectly grown and in season. If you wanted orange juice all you would need to do is walk out into this garden, pick some oranges, bring them back to the kitchen and manually squeeze them into a glass.

Now imagine if you wanted to have a bit of toast, maybe with some chocolate- hazelnut spread. All you would need to do is walk into the garden, grab some hazelnuts off the tree and some cocoa beans, perhaps with some cane sugar for good measure. Some blender in the kitchen would be able to make your hazelnut spread, just so long as you shelled the nuts first. Similarly with the bread, in this garden, free for the taking would be some strong wheat that you can put through some kitchen appliance, then after a few hours with the breadmaking machine the bread would be good to eat. Butter would be equally simple too, you just needed to milk a cow, put the milk in some glorified washing machine with a bit of salt, then wait a while to get the freshest butter ever tasted.

Would you be able to complete all of these tasks by breakfast? Would you really bother to shell all of those hazelnuts? Would you question why it is that you have juiced 14 oranges when actually just the one orange, non-juiced was satisfying enough and didn't require all that effort dicking about with juicing?

Of course people have allotments and smallholdings so this does happen, albeit with greenhouses instead of some magic 'always in season' aspect. But my office workmates of the obese variety have no idea of the effort needed to get their food, even if it is healthy food. The connection is not there.

One of my dream is to rock up at the doctors one day having eaten too much fruit and veg. For the doctor to recommend me to stay off the veggies and eat some sugary snacks instead. I am fairly sure that no amount of fruit and veg would age me, not in the way that sugary snacks, beef products and everything processed would.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does that imply that lifting, building up one's body and consuming excess calories to bulk up is somehow stressful for the body's metabolic aging process?

<comment><USER22> whether you are muscular or skinny, you have the same set of organs. The fact you are 30 percent bigger in mass means all your organs (heart, liver, kidney, muscles, ...) are working much harder than if you had less mass.

<comment><USER23> >your organs are working much harder

That's very misleading logic. You make it out that your organs working much harder is a bad thing in all cases. That's not true.

When you exercise, your organs work much harder. Yet it is much better to exercise and have your organs work harder than to not exercise at all.

<comment><USER24> It's probably not so simplistic one way or the other. However, some organs do function as filters, so overloading them would be detrimental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In addition to differences in recommended calorie intake, is there a good, scientific, international comparison that puts dietary guidelines side-by- side, nutrient guidelines, balanced meal?

It's amazingly difficult to find clear information anywhere. For instance, CDC Nutrition guidelines?! It's an example of something that, in trying to be comprehensive, results in a mess of awkwardly qualified terms and difficult to digest (couldn't help it) high-level recommendation.

USDA Food Patterns, Healthy US-Style Eating Pattern. [https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/appendi...](https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/guidelines/appendix-3/)

Meat poultry and eggs in the same line? They are completely different foods with wildly varying nutrients.

[UPDATED: good start] - Pictorial Nutrition Guidelines: [http://www.fremont.k12.ca.us/cms/lib04/CA01000848/Centricity...](http://www.fremont.k12.ca.us/cms/lib04/CA01000848/Centricity/Domain/189/pictorials_nutrition_guides.pdf)

\- Comparison of International Dietary Guidelines and Food Guides in Twelve Countries across Stages of the Nutrition Transition [http://www.fasebj.org/content/29/1_Supplement/898.36.short](http://www.fasebj.org/content/29/1_Supplement/898.36.short)

</comment><comment><USER26> Most articles on eating tend to focus on weight, drawing the conclusion that weight (fat) is the problem, not eating. This article provides a refreshing perspective:

> _But the latest results suggested that significant health benefits can be > garnered in an already healthy body – a person who isn't underweight or > obese._

The take away here is that the problem with excessive eating isn't just the weight gain. There's something about eating itself which is stressful. Restricting calories is good for you even if you're already within a healthy BMI. This means that just because you can eat anything, doesn't mean you should.

<comment><USER27> > Restricting calories is good for you even if you're already within a healthy > BMI.

How much of this study, and your statement, applies to highly active individuals, and atheletes? I box and train 5 - 7 times a week, and spar (high intensity with protective gear) twice a month.

I tried restricting calories to lose fat and "lean out" but I find that I am constantly hungry (even after consuming proteins) and like someone else has mentioned here, I don't get good sleep when I eat less...

<comment><USER26> If you're highly active you will definitely need to eat more to support the repair of muscle and bone. Assuming you're already within healthy BMI (don't need to lose fat) then I doubt anyone would suggest you restrict calories while physically active. You need food to support the repair of muscle and bone - there's no getting away from that.

What is up for consideration is how MUCH food do you really need? The general takeaway from the article which can be broadly applied, is that less food is probably better for you. So if you have a large need for nutrient restoration (from high intensity sports) then try to eat nutrient dense, quality food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It is pretty ironic and sad that following a healthy diet, including CR, is much harder in Western nations and esp in the US.

\- Processed food costs less than fresh food. \- Multiple generations of people have been conditioned to eat processed and junk food. \- People believe in the myth that 'cooking takes too long' \- People are lazy and don't want to spend any time on cooking/food even when living a life of luxury compared to the rest of the world.

All of which is the opposite of most developing countries. US and UK are very close in this respect. Even many European countries value shopping for and eating fresh food much more.

CR, and eating in general should be about buying nutrient dense but low caloric foods - which is a mostly plant based diet of fresh food. The exact kind of food which is artificially expensive and considered a 'fad'.

<comment><USER29> If you're concerned about the "Western Diet", Michael Pollan wrote an interesting treatise on it, called _In Defense of Food._

His arguments are very similar to yours.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can't find the study right now, but from what I understand it is only really beneficial to animals the size of a mice, as soon as you move to bigger animals the effect is sharply reduced, and experiments with monkeys (or was it even primates? I don't remember) didn't find any real life prolonging effect. So you might be subjecting yourself to not enjoying food for no real benefit after all.

<comment><USER17> I recall watching a video of an engineer practicing CR. He looked miserable and older than his years. He was constantly cold and had chronic sore feet because the soles of his feet were too thin.

When I don't eat enough, I don't get hungry, and I don't loose much weight, but I do have trouble sleeping which results in daytime fatigue and depression. For me the happiness/sleep threshold is sharp, so I eat just above that threshold.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure if you skip breakfast, but if you do, you are missing a strong signal to your circadian rhythm. What happens is you end up sleeping later and waking up later as the rhythm shifts towards your first meal of the day.

<comment><USER32> Do you have any source of proof of any of this? I have no problem waking up at 630am after 7 hours of sleep and not eating anything until after noon.

Thinking to premodern humans, do you think they would frequently have food waiting for them as soon as they awoke? Some days maybe, but then other days probably not.

<comment><USER33> > _Do you have any source of proof of any of this?_

Of course not. There's never been any significant evidence of health benefits from breakfast.

<comment><USER34> Why the snark? No need for that. There are many studies that show a link between meals, especially breakfast, and our circadian clocks.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4078443/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4078443/)

[http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/03/05/eating-times- affect...](http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/03/05/eating-times-affect- circadian-rhythm-study-finds/)

Here's a HN discussion regarding a Harvard study on the subject, from 7 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=199394)

Please provide some evidence that these studies are insignificant and incorrect.

<comment><USER33> Because people have claimed for decades that breakfast is the most important meal and that you have to eat breakfast and made all sorts of unfounded claims with no evidence.

I have no trouble believing that breakfast is relevant to circadian rhythms. This is far different from saying that skipping breakfast inevitably results in "sleeping later and waking up later as the rhythm shifts towards your first meal of the day." This is a very strong claim that demands strong evidence. Some studies linking circadian rhythm to meals is not sufficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> One detail that isn't explicitly stated, but seems like a bit of a blind spot, is whether there's an age-appropiate aspect to this behavior.

Do non-growing adults (30+ years old) enjoy greater benefits than small children who have faster metabolisms and growth spurts ahead of them?

My inutition says that even if the concept still fits well with growing children, that their cycles are different, and closer together in frequency. Maybe they don't eat more calories, but eating several times a day might possibly tie into cycles of blood serum nutrient levels properly based of weight and activity.

</comment><comment><USER36> There's an old joke about eating etc habits and longevity, it goes like this:

\- Doctor, if I don't eat any sugar or salt, don't smoke, don't drink, don't have any sex, will I live a hundred years?

\- Well, even if you don't, it will sure feel like a hundred.

Meaning: food is one of the pleasures of life. What the hell is the point of living to a ripe old age if your life is going to simply suck for longer?

And then of course you read some interview with a super-centenarian who goes "my secret is that I drink a small glass of wine after lunch and smoke a cigarette before going to bed" and realise that it really doesn't matter what you do, you just won't live forever, so enjoying your limited time on the earth is a much more realistic goal.

</comment><comment><USER37> Doesn't really seem like calorie restriction. The monkeys who died younger would have definitely been considered unhealthy and gluttonous.

And it's no secret that being overweight causes premature aging, health problems and eventually premature death.

<comment><USER38> Totally agree. If you look at the two parallel studies, it seems like diet had a huge effect on the outcome. The NIA study found no significant difference in both groups, and fed the monkeys varied source of protein. The UW study found health improvements in the CR monkeys but fed them 'significantly higher amount of sucrose compared to the NIA diet'.

[https://www.nia.nih.gov/newsroom/announcements/2017/01/calor...](https://www.nia.nih.gov/newsroom/announcements/2017/01/calorie- restriction-improves-health-survival-rhesus-monkeys) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28094793](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28094793) [https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14063](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14063)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Drift: Maybe a longer life of great experiences is better than a shorter life of great experiences, but a longer life at the price of greater experiences? Nah, hope I die before I get old. Case in point: [http://io9.gizmodo.com/men- can-live-20-years-longer-but-ther...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/men-can- live-20-years-longer-but-theres-a-high-cost-1678274234)

</comment><comment><USER40> Some references for those who want to dig in.

Will calorie restriction work in humans? [http://dx.doi.org/10.18632/aging.100581](http://dx.doi.org/10.18632/aging.100581)

Caloric restriction improves health and survival of rhesus monkeys [https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14063](https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14063)

In general, the consensus in the research community is that we shouldn't expect more than an additional ~5 years from the life-long practice of calorie restriction. The evolutionary argument is that the calorie restriction response evolved very early on in as a way to enhance fitness given seasonal famines. A season is a long time for a mouse, not so long for a human, so only the mouse evolves a very plastic lifespan. The practical argument is that 5-10 years is about the largest effect that could exist and still be hard to pull out from existing demographic data of restricted calorie intake in a bulletproof, rigorous way. Obviously any much larger effect would have been discovered in antiquity and be very well known and characterized by now.

So that said about longevity, it is very clear that calorie restriction does better and more reliable things for health in ordinary humans in the short term of months and mid-term of few years than any presently available enhancement technology can replicate.

A good deal of research into aging is focused on trying to recreate the calorie restriction response. So far this has consumed billions with little of practical use to show for it beyond increased knowledge of some thin slices of cellular biochemistry relating to nutrient sensing and energy metabolism. It has proven to be very hard and very expensive to get anywhere here.

So calorie restriction itself is free and reliable in its effects. Everyone should give it a try. There are, however, far more important areas of aging research to direct funding to instead of trying to recreate this effect with pharmaceuticals. In an age in which meaningful rejuvenation is possible to create in the years ahead (see, for example, clearance of senescent cells, something that calorie restriction can only slightly achieve in a very tiny way, while drug candidates are managing 25-50% clearance) it seems just plain dumb to instead be chasing expensive, hard ways to only slightly slow down aging.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if Americans' declining life expectancy¹ is due to them eating more and more.

¹ [https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us- li...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-life- expectancy-declines-for-the-first-time- since-1993/2016/12/07/7dcdc7b4-bc93-11e6-91ee-1adddfe36cbe_story.html)

<comment><USER42> My guess is that excising less and less will also be a factor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Perhaps eating is just one of the most common ways of getting dangerous toxins into our body?

<comment><USER44> What toxins?

<comment><USER45> Pesticides are showing increased evidence of hurting society through the foods they protect. In fact there was a post here on HN today regarding this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Due to social conditioning, It's not commonly known, but you don't actually need to eat every day. You could lose 10 lbs in just a couple of weeks of not eating any calories, but I would recommend eating 1 lbs of spinach and maybe a combination of other green, red and orange vegetables: that will keep your calorie count under 200 for the day. Drink lots of water.

I know the hunger will drive you crazy in the first few days, but your body gets used to it and it's not so bad, after 3 days.

The first time you do it, perhaps start off with some 16 hour fasts at first for a few months till your used to that, then you can increase it.

<comment><USER47> This kind of aggressive diet is usually followed by gaining back the weight.

<comment><USER48> I have to agree with this. However it's not because it's aggressive. It's because he's recommending eating at all. When you eat very little, your body's metabolism drops to match the new standard energy intake.

A much preferable recommendation would be to simply water fast for the same time. Lose even more weight (mostly water weight), then eat normally. Much more natural in the context of evolution. Periods of eating, periods of fasting. The practice is as old as time itself.

<comment><USER49> I've found that I can manage a day without taking in any calories, if I'm willing to feel really tired and have a moderate headache by ~1pm, and be horribly brain-fogged and useless by ~2pm. I've got a job and kids to take care of—I can't afford to have days like that very often. The hunger's not a problem—it's that I feel rather _ill_ by mid-afternoon.

FWIW I rarely eat breakfast, so I guess I'm usually doing the (lame, IMO) "16/8" fasting pattern, though I'm skeptical that has any benefit.

<comment><USER48> The reason you feel sick is because you're body isn't used to the shift from carbohydrates for energy and ketones as energy (body fat). You get brain fog because only fat in the form of ketones can cross the blood brain barrier. So adaptation to ketones are vital. You need to work into it. No different from exercise, or climate adaptation.

Having cold showers shifts your body into using ketones more and more.

Regarding not eating breakfast, watch these videos from FoundMyFitness:

Dr. Satchin Panda on Time-Restricted Feeding and Its Effects on Obesity, Muscle Mass and Heart Health

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R-eqJDQ2nU)

Ruth Patterson, Ph.D. on Time-Restricted Eating in Humans & Breast Cancer Prevention

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qlrB84xp5g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qlrB84xp5g)

Time restricted eating, AKA your 16/8, is VERY important. Even if you don't immediately notice changes. Those changes could begin to occur 2 to 8 years later. Depending on adherence. Also based on Dr. Ruth Patterson's advice, skipping breakfast leads to eating late into the night, which is not good for your health generally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> While eating less and having CR and IF is important, equally important is the actual process of eating.

Most of the articles focus on results, but not on the actual process.

If one is eating sitting on the couch, watching television, completely oblivious of the activity, it is not going to help.

There is nothing absolute in nature, everything is connected.

How do we eat is far more important than how much we eat.

One simple experiment one can do at dinner is to sit alone, without any distraction with the dinner plate and for every morsel one takes in, chew it till you count 20 and then swallow.

Notice what happens...

</comment><comment><USER51> Does this surprise anyone? Humans did not spend millions of years eating 6000 calorie hyper refined lab perfected highly processed meals three times per day. We did evolve foraging, hunting, gathering, and eventually and much more recently farming, all of which would naturally include a ton of physical activity and occasional bouts of not eating if a meal was yet unavailable, which we now call "fasting" as if it is some harsh or deprivational activity.

</comment><comment><USER52> anecdotal datum: A few years ago I lost about 40 pounds (230->190ish) in a little over a year by limiting the amount of food and not caring about the type of food.

steak, sandwiches, cheese, potatoes, all good. salad, bananas, cereal, all good.

I had to make sure to look at the nutritional info. If the food was small but energy dense you have to eat less of it.

</comment><comment><USER53> Investigation into calorie restriction isn't at all new. Roy Walford wrote five books about it, dating back to 1983.

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

</comment><comment><USER54> I eat a protein & fat heavy breakfast & dinner, & skip "lunch". I find it to be highly effective at keeping me productive through the day (both more time & more steady energy cycle).

</comment><comment><USER55> CR Red Wine and Weed are the secrets to a long and healthy life.

</comment><comment><USER56> Maybe the more you eat the more chance you eat crap that is adverse to your health hence the variations

</comment><comment><USER57> What if you're already eating less? It should say: eat the right amount.

</comment><comment><USER58> If you haven't watch this documentary on the topic: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihhj_VSKiTs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ihhj_VSKiTs)

</comment><comment><USER59> A remarkably click-baity food "science" head line, especially for the BBC.

Edit: "Permanently [...] may turn out to have a profound effect on your future life, according to [...] scientific studies."

And that's a Bingo, folks.

</comment><comment><USER60> There is lots of proof now that obesity is not caused by "more calories in than calories out", it is caused by hormone reactions to what you eat (esp. insulin). Just read the books by Gary Taubs for zillions of details and references to studies.

So the "eat less" claim in this article is again back to the old MD advice, "eat less and move more". Not going to work if you don't look at your macronutrients.

<comment><USER61> That doesn't mean that "more calories in than calories out" is wrong... it means that "calories out" is FAR more complex than people give it credit for. We don't even know all the variables yet. Taubs' writings do bring to light some of our unknowns. We keep finding more variables for the equation, but that doesn't mean the equation is wrong... just incomplete.

<comment><USER62> Not to mention that if the "more calories in than calories out" people aren't measuring the calories in their excrement or (in the case of diabetics) the amount of glucose in their urine, then they aren't getting the complete picture anyway regardless of what gets stored where. They would also have to factor in how many calories are burned to process each type of food.

As you say, it appears to be more complex than just watching how much you take in.</comment></comment></comment>


I was at Occupy Los Angeles all day yesterday and would love to answer questions - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Did you go as a spectator? Or where you actively involved? What do are/were you trying to accomplish, and how successful do you think you were? will you attend more of these events?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was there mainly as a spectator, but did get on the mic for about a minute to share a few thoughts. My main goal was to converse with people on a individual level.

My personal goal is to wake people up to the brokenness of our political system and to inspire everyone to change it together. This is only a start but I'm very optimistic.

I will definitely attend more events, but more importantly, I plan on talking to people I know and care about to understand what they think and to help them see why I believe this is so important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How would you describe the fit of the people to the following ideologies: libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, left-anarchist, socialist?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's hard to say. There were definitely representatives from every part of that spectrum. I think the important thing to grasp is that this movement transcends ideologies. The main commonality is that people believe the system is broken and want to break the stranglehold of monied interests over the government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How many people are there? Did you get the feeling that there was a lot of steam left in the crowd to keep the protest going or do you think it will peter out soon?

<comment><AUTHOR> I would guess 500 or so. I think people still have a lot of enthusiasm, but camping out and taking care of all the practical details is exhausting and that is starting to show. I think it's extremely important that this movement gets moved online and finds a way to exist permanently. The camping at City Hall will eventually end, but I don't think that will be any type of failure of the movement. This is something that will take years to fully manifest itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I visited the DC protests, and the main takeaway that I came home with was that most of the people there weren't really sure what they were protesting.

Chants ranged from as vague as 'Tax the rich' to 'Abolish Corporations' to 'Feed the poor'. What do YOU feel is the main purpose of the protest, and did you find that other protesters were in alignment with your ideals or was it as ambiguous as what I witnessed?</comment>


Y Combinator Startups Now Have A Combined Valuation Of $13.7 Billion - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/25/y-combinator-13-7b-valuation/

<comment><USER2> And Sequoia backed startups now have a combined valuation of almost a trillion. These statistics are a bit meaningless. I'll wager that the median YC company has a negative opportunity cost for the founders.

<comment><USER3> You complain about meaningless statistics and in the next breath introduce one of your own.

The median outcome of asking someone out, applying for a job, learning an instrument, starting a side project, writing a novel, picking up a sport, learning a language and any other of the thousands of things that make life interesting are all negative.

You fail, yielding zero value, and you could have done something safer with your time instead. But that's not a reason to not take chances.

If your startup fails, you can always go back to that cushy job at Microsoft. You're out 6-12 months - who cares?

Do you believe that the median YC graduate regrets their decision to enter the program?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a great headline for TC, but looking at the numbers from a slightly different perspective it wouldn't be hard to make a negative case either. Airbnb+Dropbox probably account for at least $8 billion, perhaps more. Figure that another 10 companies probably have Heroku-sized valuations and you're close to $11 billion. Now you're down to $2.7 billion spread among 500 or so companies. In any case, YC is in great shape, but don't be surprised if you see headlines equating YC founders to share croppers if YC is ever perceived to stumble.

</comment><comment><USER5> Holy negativity. Why is the overall sentiment of the comment pool so cranky and skeptical?

1) YC startups have a combined valuation of $13.7B. Fact - groups of investors have valued YC startups individually, and in aggregate the current known valuation of the collective is $13.7B.

Does that number mean that much by itself? Perhaps not. Let's see what else we know.

2) That valuation has grown by $2B since June. Also fact. And pretty incredible, that's a 17% growth on valuation in 4-5 months.

Without making any comments on whether or not YC's success rate is higher/lower than average and whether or not YC is a benefit to the entrepreneurs it invests in (there's no data presented here to make that assessment, but I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to do), what YC has done in a short amount of time in helping build a tremendous amount of value in its companies is noteworthy - and that's what I take away from this article.

</comment><comment><USER6> These statistics are very meaningful because of YC's transparency. The math is simple: YC has invested in 511 companies, this calculation uses an investment of $18,000 (the max YC investment) per company, equaling $9,198,000 total YC investment. YC investment results in an average of 6% ownership, 6% of $13.7B is $822,000,000. That ROI is phenomenal.

I personally believe YC is in a more enviable than Sequoia. Further, YC or at least the partners are in a position to participate in future rounds of funding for the YC companies, of course they will likely be paying a lot more for a lot less at that point...just like Sequoia.

<comment><USER7> "YC investment results in an average of 6% ownership, 6% of $13.7B is $822,000,000." \- this statement is not actually correct. YC ownership averages 6% at the time when YC enters but that doesn't mean that YC gets 6% of $13.7B. Companies contributing most of these $13.7B have probably gone through additional financing rounds diluting YC's stake. But even if YC is diluted 10x, it's still remarkable ROI.

<comment><USER6> Confirmed YC ownership is subject to dilution. I appreciate your tact in pointing out my error.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And combined revenues of???

<comment><USER9> better yet, combined profit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5798512) for previous discussion on a related article.

</comment><comment><USER11> The real question is how much of that is actually real?

Any VC can buy 10% of a company for $10 million. Doesn't mean that it's worth $100 million.

Valuations are usually complete bullshit. I wouldn't rely on their proxy. They're just another example of the anchoring bias.

<comment><USER12> I would argue that they're definitely made up, but not completely bullshit. It's a yardstick for a sale price: if the investors need to get out at least X, then that's a good starting place to start shopping the company around. If the entrepreneur is forward thinking it also means they know they need to find a way to get annual revenues up to $Y to justify the investment and give back any semblance of a return. So not a great judge of a company's "worth", but outside of revenue, probably the best thing we have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> There should be a YC startup stock exchange, even if it was with virtual money, just to see what happens.

<comment><USER14> Not only YC, but still: secondmarket.com</comment></comment>


The Story of Fortran - <AUTHOR> http://www.fortranlib.com/FORTRAN-1982.wmv

<comment><USER2> Clicking downloads big WMV file.

Please don't do this on HN.</comment>