Why I Jumped Off the Ivory Tower - <AUTHOR> http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2013/10/why-i-jumped-out-of-ivory-tower.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Just a small datapoint when it comes interdisciplinarity, at least when it comes to Physics.

I'm faculty in a Physics department working in an interdisciplinary field (Social Networks/Human Dynamics with applications to Sociology and Epidemiology). Over the years I've seen reactions spanning the entire range from "how is that physics" to "that's awesome". Reactions tend to be correlated with "age". Younger faculty and students tend to love it and find it extremely interesting why Older (and more entrenched) faculty tend to dismiss it completely.

Institutionally, life is not always easy. Physics departments don't really know what to do with publications in WWW, KDD, BMC Medicine or EPJ Data Science and CS departments don't know what to do with a PRL or a BMC Infectious Diseases. Not all of these publications (CS ones in particular) are indexed by ISI so you keep having to direct people to your Google Scholar page if you don't want them to miss a large fraction of your publications.

On the bright side, being interdisciplinary means that it's easier for you to reach out the outside world and working on applications to "real life problems" means that you're more likely to actually make an impact in the world. It also means that you get a bit more of media coverage than your collegues which both helps and hurts you (hell hath no fury like a scientists ego scorned).

I have my list of complaints as many others do, but at least when it comes to research I can't really imagine myself doing anything else. Less teaching or more research funding would be awesome but (at least so far) they haven't been deal breakers.

</comment><comment><USER3> He is so right on the 'interdisciplinary' thing: as long as you try to learn something new, you are wasting your time (not only from the financial standpoint but also from the 'status' one). Even more: those interdisciplinary studies will most likely be seen as 'not interesting' by each of the 'departments' they link. So... less ranking for your possible publications.

And on and on and on. It takes guts not to grind the same mill as everybody. And of course, it requires a permanent position to begin with! Otherwise, you will not get it.

<comment><USER4> There are reasons that departments exist, and that they are primary. For better or worse, you trade off interdisciplinary studies (and organizational flexibility) when you have a tenure driven department system. My impression is that some schools (MIT & Stanford?) seem to get it right, but most don't. Of course getting interdisciplinary right could just be the job of the real world.

<comment><USER3> Oh, certainly, I am not the one to disagree on then necessity of departments.

The problem is that Rectors seem to push for "interdisciplinarity" but without any reward for it in any way. So, it is just grandiloquent speech as far as it goes on like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My impression of (tenured) academics is a lot like my impression of Microsoft: they're making out like bandits in the short-term, while seriously head-in- sand about fundamental changes necessary to tackle the long-term.

<comment><USER6> This comment sounds flippant - but it has some truth... I've had a lot of experience with many academics from many different disciplines, from science to media studies, to philosophy.

The sense in which they are 'making out like bandits' in the short term is simply the kind of isolated freedom that tenured academics have been able to enjoy for so long. They only have to talk to one another and get the esteem of their most immediate peers - but beyond that the world leaves them alone.

The sense in which they have their head in the sand is that the world is increasingly asking them to justify their existence more and more - which is forcing academics to engage in various ways more with the external world. And naturally, they don't enjoy doing this. But rather than bite the bullet and tackle full on the problem of demonstrating their value - they just become somewhat histrionic at the suggestion that they have to justify themselves... and in the end - and this is the important bit - FAIL to deliver a coherent defense.

And before you say it: "Academics need to be left alone to their own devices otherwise you won't get innovations borne of long terms motivation and incomprehensible (to the common folk) abstract thinking."

This doesn't help - even if true. Because what is needed is a cost-benefit analysis of all the wasted resources going into the research community as a result of tenured academic life vs the the innovations that this system alone could produce. I for one have no idea how to a) identify the innovations the definitively WOULDN'T have been generated by an alternative system, nor do I - b) know how to measure the costs.

However, the one group of people that probably are smart enough to figure out an answer to this are the people who don't want to even consider the question.

(If anyone knows of actual research on this question - I'd be very interested).

<comment><USER7> "I for one have no idea how to a) identify the innovations the definitively WOULDN'T have been generated by an alternative system, nor do I - b) know how to measure the costs."

Exactly. It can't be measured.

The situation is political, and the academics are right not to engage in a dialog that uses the language of market economics and 'value'. The private sector market experts are going to want to use their models and supply-demand curves to justify resource allocation to obvious industry-relevant subjects. The academics are going to use history, ethics, etc to defend breadth, freedom, and security of non-obvious inquiry.

The faculties need to take back control of the university. They're being bent over a barrel by their administrations.

<comment><USER8> If the benefits can't be measured, why are we wasting money on them? I can also give you oodles of unmeasureable and unquantifiable benefits. Just send me a big check and then don't try to box me in with oversight or accountability.

(There are of course some measurable benefits from the current system. For example: [http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04](http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=W04) )

<comment><USER9> Excellent, alongside the Humanities, then, we can also close down physics, because, clearly, if benefits can't be measured, why waste money?

Many of the "impact" arguments assume that the only victims will be the humanities, a sacrifice lots of people are very willing to make. (The original article talks, albeit not quite as strongly, of a hemorrhaging that is slowly happening in terms of funding, jobs and perspective.) However, there is some other, less obvious, collateral damage: physics, mathematics (except for applied maths), economics all share similar problems.

And here are some choice quotes about the UK's REF and its "Impact" pilot study, with "Impact" being an integral part of the future score (20%, which is going to go up to 25% for the next one) that decides about research spending from Research Councils over the next couple years, due in 2014:

> "Physicists had some particular concerns about the challenge of assessing > impact in the manner foreseen by HEFCE. 1\. The difficulty in attributing > UoA-specific 'ownership' of impact that arises from the work of a large > collaboration, either experimental (in our case, a ten-institute > international collaboration working on experiments at CERN) or theoretical > (an eight-institute collaboration using High Performance Computing > facilities).

2\. The blurry distinction between the 'use of' new high performance computers and the 'stimulation of' the development of these machines. At what point does close collaboration with a company such as IBM in the development of teraflop or petaflop computers become 'impact'?

4\. Commercial confidentiality became an issue. Even in this pilot exercise, and making use of the 'Confidential' tag on the submissions, we still had to remove some of the strongest material concerning cooperation with industrial companies because of confidentiality agreements. In REF itself, this would be a huge problem. It should be noted that this also contributed to the Institute of Physics giving up on a recent exercise to try to quantify the impact of Physics. It is impossible to quantify the impact of public understanding of science initiatives such as TV and radio appearances, popular lectures, books, etc at the scale of individuals or groups. Across the community, such work clearly has an important impact, but this cannot be sensibly quantified." (p. 29)

> "Several respondents noted that research impact was most readily observed > and measured where the distance between the two realms, research and impact, > was relatively short and the pathways rather direct: for example, applied > scientists working in collaboration with a private business seeking > expressly to translate the generic insights into commercial advantage.

The socio-economic impact of more fundamental research might go unnoticed and unremarked most of the time, reflecting the diffuse, cumulative and rather unpredictable nature of intellectual advances. Indeed, one might imagine that the occasion where a fundamental breakthrough produces a relatively immediate and direct social improvement is rare, even anomalous. In practical terms, this means the impact case studies track back to particular types of people and types of work. It might also mean that some of the most consequential socio-economic contributions will be excluded by virtue of their rather indirect link with cutting-edge research.

There was a suggestion that institutions had taken the low hanging fruit, and that in some sense the portfolio of case studies was not a good representation of the breadth of research undertaken. This sentiment appears to be rooted in a general sense that impact is most obvious in some narrow areas, within subjects rather than between them, and largely unknowable, at least in practical terms, in most instances. There were also suggestions made that a proportion of the more significant, evident impacts was linked to people and activities outside the very best academic research, albeit dependent upon that work, and which would be overlooked as a result. There is always going to be an over-reliance on a small number of sub-groups, even individuals, whose research happens to lend itself to non-academic impact. The impact submission is not necessarily representative of the UoA as a whole." (p. 30)

> "The biggest challenge was the need to acquire evidence to reveal the reach > and significance of a given impact. There were many practical issues that > stood in the way, and the response of the majority, for the pilot exercise > at least, was to firstly focus on the more obvious cases and, secondly, to > use whatever narratives, references and statistics that came to hand > readily." (p. 31)

Source: REF Research Impact Pilot Exercise Lessons-Learned Project Feedback on Pilot Submissions, November 2010 ([http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/refimpactpilotlessons- learnedfeedb...](http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/refimpactpilotlessons- learnedfeedbackonpilotsubmissions/))

<comment><USER8> I'm quite happy to cut unproductive parts of physics, math and economics. Cutting the entirety of these fields seems counterproductive, since the benefits of the fields as a whole are quite clear. Semiconductor physics alone has certainly paid for all of physics and operations research alone has certainly paid for all of math.

But if we can identify useless segments of these fields, I favor cutting them. I see no good reason any particular endeavor should be exempt from a cost/benefit analysis.

<comment><USER10> Right, the whole problem is that most of the subfields look probably-useless until someone goes all the way down the path and discovers a use. So the benefit side of the cost-benefit looks like huge benefit times small probability, and that's a calculation that's very sensitive to error.

To continue your example: one of my ancestors worked on investigating the semiconducting properties of germanium in the '30s, but he couldn't think of anything it might be useful for. Oddly enough, he's not mentioned in the history books.

<comment><USER8> As I said, "if we can identify useless segments of these fields". I didn't say we could actually do that. I'm not a strong proponent of cutting scientific funding. Science contains a lot of stories about random seemingly useless research coming in handy in 10-30 years.

Medieval literature has far fewer stories, however.

(Incidentally, in case you think we don't currently attempt to predict the future uses of assorted subfields, you've clearly never looked at the NSF budget.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In case anyone else sees an almost-empty page, it looks like Ghostery ends up blocking all the content. Or should I say, the owner of the website has inextricably and inexplicably tied the basic functionality of their blog to an advertising script (Disqus). Very lame.

<comment><USER12> In what way Disqus is an advertising script?

<comment><USER13> It's not but if you configure Ghostery's filters strictly, it blocks a lot of third party elements that are widespread on the web and as such can be used to track you. Ghostery in general doesn't target ads in particular. That's what AdBlock is for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's hard to imagine questioning a tenure decision on your wife can ever end well. Not that you shouldn't stand by your spouse, but anything you say will appear biased. I suspect that Mizzou knew they would lose both of them.

Here is a slightly sympathetic commentary.

[http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary- ernsts-...](http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary-ernsts- accusation-of-sexism.html?m=1)

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

</comment><comment><USER14> As a recovering Academic myself I really enjoyed this post. And as good as it is, that first comment really moved it from good to legendary: "Like many career academics your pompous prose distracts from the content of your argument."

</comment><comment><USER15> What I took from this story was a first hand account of resistance to change. This does not bode well for the ability of specific academic departments to maintain relevance in the years ahead.

Experimentation in the best ways to educate has been embraced by the private sector. It will be interesting to watch the level of competition that universities can provide.

</comment><comment><USER16> >I should begin by acknowledging that I've had some major and sometimes quite public conflicts with my home department and administration, especially about their treatment of my spouse, which I strongly believe to be the result of highly sexist attitudes.

What does that concretely mean?

<comment><USER17> If you go back through his archives (which took more time than I thought it would) you find a FAQ post about an essay concerning alleged sexual discrimination in his wife's tenure hearing [1] (it's referenced here [2]). Both claim to have links to the original article, but they're dead.

EDIT: Concretely? It seems like his wife was up for tenure and was denied it on account of what the author claims was sexism, based on past actions of the administrators in his department.

[1] [http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2012/03/sex- discrimination-...](http://zacharyernst.blogspot.com/2012/03/sex- discrimination-essay-ifaq.html?m=1)

[2][http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary- ernsts-...](http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2011/12/zachary-ernsts- accusation-of-sexism.html)</comment></comment>


NASA catches UFO's leaving earths Orbit - <AUTHOR> http://www.independent.ie/world-news/nasa-cuts-live-feed-as-ufos-spotted-leaving-earth-31338252.html

<comment><USER2> The video I saw could easily be explained by two specks close to the camera, moving away from the camera. These are not uncommon.

Remember, "UFO" stands for "Unidentified Flying Objects". Every few years there's a video about spotting some sort of UFO from a NASA feed.

For example, [http://www.space.com/22478-nasa-astronaut-ufo- video.html](http://www.space.com/22478-nasa-astronaut-ufo-video.html) from 2013 is a UFO that was identified by Russian ground controllers as an antenna cover.

Here's an explanation from 1992 about UFOs that were part of an RCS plume on STS48 - [http://debunker.com/texts/sts48_ufo.html](http://debunker.com/texts/sts48_ufo.html) . That ends with:

> These ice particles, in particular, form slowly inside the jets and > elsewhere, as the fluid (water or propellant) seeps out and spreads over the > surface, They take on the shape of the structure they form on. They can thus > have just about any shape, usually flat. They have been seen and > photographed for thirty years, about as long as UFOlogists have mistaken > them for flying saucers.

The article at [http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25147760/ns/technology_and_science...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/25147760/ns/technology_and_science- space/t/why-nasa-watches-out-true-ufos/) says:

> After mysterious dots were filmed passing by the windows during Apollo 12, > NASA commissioned a special study on how to extract useful engineering data > from such sightings. Published in 1970, the report referred to such > apparitions as "moon pigeons."

> The study associated the images with known spacecraft events such as > explosive bolt initiation and water (or urine) dumps, but the authors > conceded that all observations could not be unambiguously solved.

> "In general, it takes much more information to identify an object than it > does to detect it," they said.

So there's decades of history of seeing these "moon pigeons", they can't always be explained, but they can often be explained as things coming from the craft itself.</comment>


Nvidia AI turns sketches into photorealistic landscapes in seconds - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/18/nvidia-ai-turns-sketches-into-photorealistic-landscapes-in-seconds/ <comment><USER2> Paper here: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.07291.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.07291.pdf)

Page 14 and beyond show a number of examples vs previous methods.

IIUC, their contribution is a masking normalization layer (the 'SPADE' layer [see pg 4]) that allows the network to preserve the structure of the input segmentation/mask, leading to results quite a bit nicer than previous ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> All future media should be watermarked with immutable metadata linking it back to it's original source to verify authenticity and combat fake news.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> GAN generally works very well for landscapes, which is what is being demonstrated, not so much for objects esp humans. It's still impressive though.

<comment><USER4> Aren't GANs behind things like thispersondoesnotexist.com?

<comment><USER3> Yes. But that's a network finely tuned on facial images, which is more complex than landscapes. GANs can create all types of images, it's just that landscapes happen to be the type of media currently created with the least complexity due to the more abstract nature of the details involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can't we just be honest about the current state of the art and say "near photorealistic"?

Unless you're half-blind you can tell there's something off about these pictures.

</comment><comment><USER6> How did this not get more attention??</comment>


Show HN: Code Folding for GitHub - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/noam3127/github-code-folding <comment><USER2> I think this is a nice place for a shameless promotion of my GitHub File Browser[1] (name suggestions and PRs for other languages accepted).

[1]: [http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/gh-browser/](http://fiatjaf.alhur.es/gh- browser/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice. Javascript only?</comment>


Managerial Blunders - From The Economist - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13354607

<comment><USER2> Interesting. In my experience, company leaders typically engineer discussions in order to validate what they already believe, and of course it can be a career-limiter to argue too forcefully with one's superior. I think it takes an executive with extraordinary vision to actually create a culture where dissension is encouraged and people with differing views truly engage and are fairly listened to.

I believe I've read somewhere that some high percentage of business leaders are classified as optimists, which probably creates a tendency to downplay the negatives of business situations. In an overall sense, this may be a good thing, as it leads people to attempt things that seem crazy to others, but it can obviously also lead to excessive risk-taking and sundry disasters.

</comment><comment><USER3> Juror #8 couldn't be fired by the other jurors.

If that had been a business he almost certainly would have been gone.

Which is why the only way business advances is through creative destruction.

And I've always thought that creative destruction implies that _most_ enterprises go bust.

Thus having anything too big to fail should not be allowed. Failure is essential.

</comment><comment><USER4> Designating one or more devil's advocates is a good strategy. That way the naysayer isn't perceived as a negative person.

Of course, the company culture also goes a long way in facilitating this.</comment>


Borderland Between Rendering and Editor – Part 2: Picking - <AUTHOR> https://ourmachinery.com/post/borderland-part-2-picking/ <comment><USER2> I think a word of caution should be provided. The sort of spin-lock used here while may appear to work in the vast majority of scenarios, the forward progress guarantee required doesn't exists on all (or even many) modern GPUs. It's entirely possible for the thread holding the lock to get suspended, and never resume due to another thread spinning while waiting on the lock.

I really like Tobias, and think they are doing some great stuff on The Machinery, but I think he should (and eventually will be forced to) reconsider how he is implementing picking.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. I discussed this with a bunch of my GPU buddies, and we came to the conclusion that this code is not safe in the face of lack of forward progress guarantees. Also, shameless self-promotion, I have an extensive discussion of GPU forward progress in my recent blog: [https://raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2020/04/30/prefix- sum.html](https://raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2020/04/30/prefix-sum.html)

<comment><USER2> Nice post!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice that it works with various deformations, but because of the latency and more shaders i'l skip this. I have still learned some things from this post.

</comment><comment><USER5> What's wrong with reading back an object ID buffer GL_SELECT style?</comment>


Which programming language is used to express the most anger? - <AUTHOR> http://geeksta.net/img/emotions-github-commit-messages/commit-messages-anger-percentage.png

<comment><USER2> The article is here: [http://geeksta.net/geeklog/exploring-expressions- emotions-gi...](http://geeksta.net/geeklog/exploring-expressions-emotions- github-commit-messages/)

The article has more graphs, satisfying some curiosities. This specific graph has been obtained applying a regex[1] to a sample of github commit messages.

[1] (?i)\b(a+rgh|angry|annoyed|annoying|appalled|bitter|cranky|hate|hating|mad)\b'

</comment><comment><USER3> Surprising that the numbers are so low. It is frustrating to program as the devil hides in the details.

</comment><comment><USER4> I recall PG wrote somewhere that Perl looks like a cartoon character swearing.

<comment><USER5> The Python Paradox[1]

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html](http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html)</comment></comment>


Effects of a Year in Ketosis [video] - <AUTHOR> http://quantifiedself.com/2015/12/effects-year-ketosis-jim-mccarter/ <comment><USER2> 2 weeks in ketosis, all I can say by now (and this only applies to me of course):

1) It was far easier than I thought it would be (some fatigue 5-6 days in, but that was quickly gone)

2) I have less meals (usually 2 meals, I am totally fine with that)

3) I have no cravings (the famous midnight snack is no more)

4) No side effects so far, not even constipation which I read some people have.

5) It requires creativity in the kitchen (or else you'll be sick of eating the same things again and again).

I supplement with Calcium-Magnesium-Zink and Multi-Vitamins.

For me personally it is easier to loose weight on a ketogenic diet than with a carbohydrate-rich diet. Especially due to no cravings, that probably due to more stable blood sugar. That being said you can loose weight with any diet of course.

Interestingly Ketosis is nothing "new", it has been used for a very long time in younger patients with regular seizures, as ketosis reduces the amount of seizures significantly[1]. A lot of interesting research will follow in the near future. For example whether a ketogenic diet reduces the risk of some form of cancers (it might "starve cancer cells"), if there are significant long-term side effects, et cetera...

[1] [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001903...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD001903.pub2/abstract)

<comment><USER3> 7 months in ketosis, and I can confirm all of your points. I don't bother with supplements though. Well seasoned meat has everything the body needs.

<comment><USER4> Go easy on the red meat; research is starting to show it can cause colon cancer in certain quantities. Use whey or soy protein for some (not all) of your protein macros.

[https://www.pcrm.org/health/cancer-resources/diet- cancer/typ...](https://www.pcrm.org/health/cancer-resources/diet- cancer/type/colon-cancer)

[http://www.health.harvard.edu/family_health_guide/red- meat-a...](http://www.health.harvard.edu/family_health_guide/red-meat-and- colon-cancer)

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309174014...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0309174014000564)

[http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Pages/red- meat.aspx](http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/Goodfood/Pages/red-meat.aspx)

<comment><USER3> I hardly eat any red meat. It's expensive, and there just isn't enough fat in it. Pork, fowl, and fish are more than enough options for hitting a protein target.

<comment><USER4> Do you like eggs? They're a fantastic protein source! Also, fish (I see you mentioned that) is helpful for omega-3 intake.

<comment><USER3> Ah, I forgot about eggs. Not sure how though; I eat at least one every day. They're so versatile, and they literally have all of the nutrients required to build a functional chicken. Nutrient density is an underrated metric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Can I say: people seem surprisingly emotionaly invested in arguments for or against certain diets. I expected more presentation of data and less ad hominen from HN on a subject that as far as I knew wasn't the most contentious our society was facing.

<comment><USER5> Casual observation, but hackers seem to gravitate toward vegetarian and caveman diets more so than the general population, which is probably why this thread is so frothy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that too. Myself included. I really wonder why?

Some form of anarcho-primitivism that comes from working so closely with the most advanced tech?

<comment><USER5> I think because the body becomes something to hack, they're often already adventurous eaters, and smart people sometimes fall into the trap of believing their intelligence applies equally well to areas outside their expertise (ex: the physician who thinks they can pick stocks, or the programmer who thinks they know more about cholesterol than a cardiologist.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm. So you don't believe in polymathy?

<comment><USER5> I don't believe that people who aren't medical researchers can argue against the prevailing theory of dietary cholesterol any more than a layperson can go head to head with climate scientists and argue against global warming.

Ironically, I eat a high cholesterol diet because I believe I'm not a so- called hyper-responder. But also because my doctor says "keep doing what you're doing" every time I get a lipid panel.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, isn't it really their data that are going up against each other and not the people themselves or their credentials? The guy from the video has a PhD in Medicine and an MD but people without degrees are making the same arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm currently a month into a ketogenic diet. I've lost 10 lbs so far (moving average, not spot measure). I had done it once before, 5 years ago, for a length of 3 months, where I lost 30 lbs, but then I gained it back over the course of two years after getting married.

Hydration is extremely important in any diet, but this particular diet on me seems to especially need it. I get extremely lethargic if I don't get enough water. I also find I have to force feed myself. To have enough energy and therefore willpower to avoid carb-loaded food, I generally have to eat 50% more than I feel like I "want" when first sitting down to a meal. I find myself getting bored with the food before I'm done.

But it works for me. If I play by the rules, it's the only diet I've been able to see results and thus stick to.

I've been lazy lately and eating a lot of deli meat, so I need to reduce my sodium. Otherwise, I eat a lot of ribeye steaks, porkloin steaks, chicken thighs, eggs (often fried over easy and served on top of the steaks), peppers, onions, broccoli, spinach, romaine. Small amounts of cheese, beans, and tomatoes. Lots of spices.

And that's about it. Probably most of the weight loss is the fact I'm not drinking beer or eating cheeseburgers all the time. An ounce of lean protein is only about half the calories of an ounce of bread. Does one feel different than the other in the stomach? I think I'm probably de facto calorie reducing. But whatever. I don't care what the mechanism is. Leave that to the researchers. I just care that my knees don't hurt as bad and I have more energy.

<comment><USER4> > or eating cheeseburgers all the time.

Cheeseburgers are okay! Just hold the bun and the ketchup. One of my favorite keto meals is a double cheeseburger with bacon, mustard, extra mayo, lettuce, and onions from Five Guys or In-N-Out.

<comment><USER6> Why go through the bother of deconstructing a meal to receive what is ultimately a low-quality piece of meat? I love me a burger, but let's face it, grinding beef is a means to save tough meat. And these chefs who are making burgers out of Wagu should be considered a criminals.

I keep steaks in the fridge at home. Four minutes a side is a lot faster, less effort, and tastes better than driving down and pulling apart a Five Guys burger.

<comment><USER4> Different strokes! I prefer a quality hamburger over steak unless the cut is filet mignon (slum it or rock it; no inbetween).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From what I've seen, it doesn't seem that carbohydrates are necessarily bad; it's that they are so calorically dense that cutting them out and replacing with something else less intense (like lean meat or relatively healthy fats) makes a difference.

I've lost 30 pounds while baking as a hobby and reducing meat intake to accommodate a family member; my carb consumption is way up. This is in part because I know what I'm eating, in carbohydrate form, and am conscious of the quality and quantity.

I'm not necessarily recommending that as a diet plan for anyone; I'm presenting it as a counter to the keto diet items that show now.

</comment><comment><USER8> What is wrong with having a well balanced diet? Some days eat lots of fats, some days more carbs, etc. Extrema are not good for your health.

<comment><USER9> The whole question is determining what "normal" (and thus "extreme") actually is, so statements like "extrema are not good for your health" are just plain silly in this context.

In fact, it's even sillier than that since extreme bursts of energy (which most of us call _exercise_ ) are demonstrably very good for your health.

If by "extrema" you meant "excessive things", then your point is tautological.

<comment><USER8> Well, I do believe there is such a thing as a "well balanced diet" which includes food from all groups.

<comment><USER9> That's nice, but you've said basically nothing.

What are the food groups? What's the right proportion? Does it vary with age/ethnicity/nurture?

These are precisely the questions being examined, so telling people to eat a balanced diet without telling them what that actually _is_ , doesn't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This presentation conveniently forgot to mention the ill effects, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer, resulting as a consequence of getting "80% of your calories from fat" and just how unsustainable this way of eating is. I much prefer a high-carb, low-fat vegan diet which has many more benefits and is overall healthier, more sustainable. It's strange people still go for low-carb, ketogenic diets given how much research shows its harms (for example, [http://atkinsexposed.org/](http://atkinsexposed.org/)). It's also puzzling why one would not prefer the only diet clinically proven to reverse heart disease, the top cause of death in the US.

<comment><USER2> We know far less about nutrition than we think we do. So if you know about risks and are careful about it, as far as I am concerned, there is nothing wrong with trying out various things. Regarding meat though, a lot of it is panic.

The problem is that it's very hard to conduct proper studies analysing this. 'Observational studies' are useless, because if I take a randomized group of meat-eaters versus vegans, of course the latter group will be significantly more healthy. Vegans are most likely more concerned about their health in general which means less smoking, less alcohol being consumed, healthier sleep, they buy higher quality food in general, due to lack of choice when out in public they cook more themselves (they won't stop at a fast food restaurant), et cetera ... and then there is the Placebo effect, which is very powerful and should not be under-estimated.

The scientific data is not as clear as one might think, and "nutritionists" in general are pseudo-scientists at their best since you can find a study for anything. If not with humans, then with mice, or maybe just some study with some cells. The same with internet sites by the way. And Atkins strictly speaking is not the same as the traditional Ketogenic Diet. Regarding books about nutrition for example, I happen to agree with this reviewer of "The China Study" (not the original one, you'll see) [http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer- reviews/R3UR35AKTEYW43/ref...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer- reviews/R3UR35AKTEYW43/ref=cm_cr_pr_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1932100660#R3UR35AKTEYW43)

If anyone wants to find serious information about nutrition, you should search for meta-studies, for example by the Cochrane Collaboration, and then you should read the abstract very carefully and not insert your wishful thinking into it.

<comment><USER10> There is a lot of damning evidence against eating animals and their products, yet none seems present against eating whole food, high-carb vegan. This much seems perfectly clear from scientific literature and has been for decades. The review you agree with has no citations, lacks credibility and makes dubious claims, like "Researchers still have trouble proving high cholesterol is associated with heart disease" which are patently false.

<comment><USER2> Well, I understand why the reviewer did not feel the need to make a scientific rebuttal out of a book review. It was not the reviewer who convinced me by the way, I had a look at this book myself. And the claims made compared to the studies cited to support those claims, it's fraudulent, I can't put it any other way.

I will not be able to convince you. Nutrition for many is such an integral part of who they are, that it is similar to criticising someone's religion and they are deep believers. If it works for you, I congratulate you (and I mean that, honestly). Nor do I want a debate in which everyone cites studies left and right that he has found on the internet, and then it is my job to go through dozens of them to find out exactly what they are saying and assess their methodological quality. I don't have the time right now, nor the motivation.

Let me just say: Science is hard, studying nutrition is very hard and especially regarding nutrition, there are so many things to think of and to take into account. And nutrition is also an individual thing, I doubt there is a one-size fits all. I was not the one speaking of truths where in reality we should be more careful about such claims.

<comment><USER10> You can't deny the fact certain foods, like processed meat, surely have a causal relationship to cancer, probably also heart disease and diabetes. As I've said before, the evidence against animal products and processed food in general is damning, but I've yet to find a single case study of someone getting fat off eating fruit, getting cancer from tofu, or becoming diabetic from eating too many vegetables.

<comment><USER11> >You can't deny the fact certain foods, like processed meat, surely have a causal relationship to cancer, probably also heart disease and diabetes

Based on what? Your gut feeling?

>getting cancer from tofu

There aren't case studies of people getting cancer from anything. There are studies of large population behavioral patterns and comparisons of cancer rates between patterns. So to check the tofu thing, you need people that consistently eat tofu compared to people that behave the same in other regards except for the tofu. That's very difficult because someone who eats tofu is generally going to have a significantly different diet from someone who doesn't.

<comment><USER10> [https://www.iarc.fr/en/media- centre/pr/2015/pdfs/pr240_E.pdf](https://www.iarc.fr/en/media- centre/pr/2015/pdfs/pr240_E.pdf) is a good starting point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Local Marketplace App Yardsale (YC S11) Launches Nationwide - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/21/yardsale-launches-nationwide/

<comment><USER2> Ok, I am fine with the need of something better than ebay and craiglist but would someone explain me why does it have to be a mobile app? why? i think that this services need to reach the larger audice they can. Making it an app does not do that..it is limiting IMHO. Why I, android and PC owner, should be excluded? i understand you will (maybe?) make it available in future for other platform even porting it to android cuts out all those people who want to do things on the PC, which is the biggest part of the userbase I think.

<comment><USER3> Because they need to do one thing and do it well. They don't have a 10000 person team to venture into "larger audiences", they do one specific thing or they die.

People don't wake up one day and think "oh hey, I'm in the market for a craigslist alternative, let's look for one". They need to be told that Yardsale exists, and it needs to find a place in their minds. The best way it can do that is to do one thing well.

As for why it's mobile specifically, look for why people do anything on their mobile phones.

<comment><USER2> Ok, as I said i am fine with alternative, and I understand that they are not a huge company and they wanted to make a good thing, but why a native app? This app will probably run only on the most recent iOS versions, so this also cuts a part of "old" iOS users. Instead a website, maybe optimized for mobile(there are tons of way to do this, nowadays it's not hard) would have been avaible to everyone. Therefore the can expand easier, mostly because everyone WANTS an alternative.

From the article i get that this way they try to encourage people to take photos. This is good. But it's not worth all the market you are cutting out, especially you are cutting out people who wants to buy, they have no reason to be forced to browse from the app. An alternative would be make the website available to everyone and suggest(not force) people to use the app just to make the advert. Maybe even by applying a little "tax" to those who use the website. This way i think you would have the same effect but a larger audience.

<comment><USER4> I think I have to agree with that. Doing one thing well is good and all, but for an app like this it might've been prudent to do the web site well first, and pending the success of that move onto devices.

 _Warning_ \- Rant:

This strikes me as typical of two things that seem to be trending -

1). Build platform-specific (be that HTML5, Windows, or iOS or whatever) that cuts out otherwise interested users.

2). Make sure it's "social". That word right there is starting to turn me away from apps. I have enough "social".

<comment><USER5> I heavily agree with your rant.

Many apps are just brushing old ideas with new social, mobile or html5 coatings. Ignoring the fact that the idea is still the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> the thing with marketplaces, is that the ui itself doesn't matter...what matters is having buyers.

sellers will post where the buyers are, and it doesn't matter if UI is crap. So craigslist wins on that by a huge margin. Add the fact that it's free, means that they have a pretty entrenched position.

To me, eBay and Craigslist have an insurmountable first mover advantage. They are already established in our culture as the place for auctions/classifieds, you can't undermine that with some flashy UI or a few extra features. And since you need people to sell/buy, you don't have the same viral effect that allowed Facebook to take out Myspace.

The only way I see going at them, is thru incredible service. Rent a huge warehouse. Hire a few drivers.

Charge a fee for someone to come to my house to collect all my spare stuff, take good professional photos. Then list them for sale. Charge a % for all items that sell. Let buyers pick up the stuff at the warehouse instead of having to deal with shady sellers. Offer to ship to buyers. Offer credit card processing etc. Send a check to the seller.

Sure it's a bit more effort than slapping together a website. You'll need to go state by state, renting warehouses and hiring a lot of people to do the legwork and will need to spend the money on marketing. So your profit margins will be closer to a real business than a website(franchising might work for something like this). But if you want to crack the Craigslist nut...you need to put in the extra effort...otherwise you are just one of the hundreds of people who think they are the ones to beat Craigslits

<comment><USER7> You are right and wrong.

In the beginning the UI doesn't matter. But with time it begins to matter as more and more items become available.

Its nearly impossible on the Apple Store to get any sense off what is good or bad there.

The reviews are not really that useful.

All design systems have a limit to how much they scale. Apple should have been re-designing theirs a long time ago.

<http://www.crosswa.lk> is at least an attempt to fix some of it.

<comment><USER8> Hopefully Apple's acquisition of Chomp will improve discovery as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I created something similar ..check out <http://www.peeqshare.com>

</comment><comment><USER10> Got excited about this, grabbed it for iPhone.

Launched it, got error that it can't connect to server. Will probably be deleted now. You got the one chance to get my attention, and it got blown.

Edit: I tried reconnecting 4-5 times, still failed.

Edit2: Reading the TechCrunch article, they want to take 10% from the seller at some point in the future? For a craigslist style thing? How does this make sense?

<comment><AUTHOR> Really sorry about this. We're on it now!

Edit: to answer your question on fees, we're still considering how we roll them out. Appreciate the feedback. We felt strongly that we wanted to build a service worth paying for. We also didn't want to bait and switch users, so we do mention fees when you post, but the entire experience is free. When you try it, I hope you'll agree that it's a lot better than the one for which you pay 40% at a consignment store.

<comment><USER10> When you frame it against a consignment store it makes sense. When you frame it against craigslist, it doesn't.

Sure buyers flake, but ultimately I haven't had much issue with that selling lots of items on craigslist. The beauty is that good deals are to be had because there is no middle man. I know that doesn't work well when trying to run a business there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was submitted on another thread, but this one seems to be getting more traction, so I'm reposting my comment here to add to this discussion:

"The app is set up so you can easily cross-post your item on Craigslist, too."

I find that statement extremely interesting. The problem with apps like this is they're only as good the volume of people that use them. YardSale sounds to me like a more beautiful, mobile centered Craigslist. But YardSale is only as good as the number of people who have it installed an use it.

I'm in the process of moving and we're getting rid of a bunch of random furniture. Where did we post it?

Craigslist of course. Because when you need to find something, you go to Craigslist.

I don't envy YardSale. Craigslist has a not-so-pretty interface and it's not exactly the most intuitive.

But when it comes to selling/buying things, Craigslist simply works. Really well.

<comment><USER12> Big things have small beginnings.

I know these guys and they're doing a very good job of tackling a tough problem - creating a market in an area where CL has critical mass.

They are doing it by both expanding the market by making it super simple to snap a few photos on your phone (something you can't do on CL) and by creating such an awesome experience that eventually people will switch over.

As we've learned with Yahoo, Microsoft and MySpace a market leader that doesn't innovate is eventually going to get toppled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not sure I'd be comfortable hiring someone who claims to be able to "understand undocumented libraries and code bases in a day".

</comment><comment><USER14> <http://www.garagesellr.com/merchants/1> (very early stages); it is essentially craigslist but allows anyone to accept credit cards using stripe (I charge 1$ per transaction, and stripe charges their usual fees). Every time you list, you will have the option to tweet/FB it; You can only login with FB or twitter to buy, sellers login with stripe/fb/twitter. You "make an offer" and the seller decides whether they want to accept or not, based on your FB friends etc, to eliminate scamming. Every seller has their own "merchant account" through stripe.

I started building this, then stopped due to a lot of negative feed back, anyone think this is worth pursuing? Anyone have any feedback?

</comment><comment><USER15> I support any startup wanting to go after fees-heavy eBay.

<comment><USER16> If the article is correct, Yardsale will actually have higher fees than eBay.

<comment><USER17> eBay fees are variable. You can pay 25% for a $50 item or as low as 4% for a $1500 item. You can't compare the two easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Check out Rumgr.com

</comment><comment><USER19> Can someone link to a Craigslist post created by Yardsale? I'm curious to see one.

<comment><USER20> I posted an item yesterday to try out the service, but noticed that it was including a link to a zoomed in map hovering right over my house in the post (the same map is included in the "yardsale" version of the post). I'm a little cautious about posting my location/address on a site like CL (though I use the site frequently).

I promptly deleted the post and notified the ryan of my concerns; he promptly replied to my email and mentioned that he "fuzzed" my location details so that my perceived location was not so pinpointed. I haven't reposted anything to verify, though.

Here's a gist of the auto-gened CL post:

The title is essentially an ellipsis'ed version of your yardsale post (it cuts off at some character count, not sure the exact number). It uses the price you set as the CL price. Here's the post body:

"Hey everyone, I've got a [your yardsale post auto-inserted here]

Interested? Get in touch <shortened link to yardsale post>here</link>

<another yardsale link>View All Images</link> / <link to map>show map</link>

Posted with <link to Yardsale homepage>Yardsale</link> (free!). lovingly made in San Francisco.

Thanks for looking!

\- [your first name auto-inserted here]"

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems kind of lame that an apparent competitor already owns yardsale.com.

You'd think that even if you couldn't get the domain you wanted, you'd try not to drive people to a competitor.

</comment><comment><USER22> question for the founders I'm really curious about because you probably get asked it a lot (and it probably has a great answer): why would I use this over CL?

</comment><comment><USER23> Congrats Ed and Ryan! Great idea and great team!

</comment><comment><USER24> How is SimplyListed (also with YC) doing? Seems like they tried tackling similar problem earlier.

</comment><comment><USER25> I look forward to yet another HN thread about why a startup won't work.

</comment><comment><USER26> Congratulations, Ryan and Ed!

</comment><comment><USER27> So...it's competing with Craigslist by building an OS-limited mobile app that posts items to Craigslist. And they want 10% of any sales.

Craiglist is accessible from any device, and it is free.

They really need to put more thought into their business model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we actually never set out to compete with Craigslist. We built Yardsale as a way to list and sell for all the items that don't get posted on Craigslist or eBay, because it's too painful. So really, at least in my own personal experience, the choice is to get nothing for an item, or to list and sell it to a neighbor and make money that I wouldn't have otherwise.

<comment><USER28> But you are competing with Craigslist. Not to mention the App store has no shortage of classified apps.

Posting to classified sites really isn't that difficult. For some people, sure, but enough to justify a company? The proof is in the marketplace with the lack of traction for Eggdrop, Antengo, and the numerous other apps that claim to make posting items for sale easier.

I would stick to the community aspect. I don't know if there is anything there, but at least it is different then what already exists in the market.</comment></comment></comment>


IPv4 Space Shrinks To 5% – Final Addresses To Be Issued In Early 2011 - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/18/ipv4/

<comment><USER2> I know this is going to sound silly, but it runs through my mind every time there's an IPv4/IPv6 discussion:

Consider a pair of random IPs in standard written form:

       v4: 220.127.116.11
       v6: 2001:db8:1f70::999:de8:7648:6e8

From a purely aesthetic standpoint, IPv6 addresses _look nasty_. They vary in length, they're hard to remember, they're a little bit harder to parse and print than v4s. Much like an email address, an IPv4 address is iconic (to the right people) and immediately recognizable, whereas it would be easy to confuse a v6 for a MAC address. Is it at all possible that this is hampering adoption of IPv6?

<comment><USER3> It is, but not in the way you think. IPv4 addresses are also cognitively nasty (try to remember two of them, walk to the other end of your building, and recite them from memory). People don't often use them directly.

The problem is that IPv4 addresses happen to fit in machine registers, and so virtually all of the world's networking software has been written to assume that they are just a gossamer-thin semantic layer on top of a scalar integer. IPv6 addresses emphatically do not work as scalar integers.

It's not just that this means you can't do math on an IPv6 address (though without a bignum library you can't). It's also the case that, as far as a lot of C programmers are concerned, you can't even directly assign them; they're "memcpy big".

When Daniel J. Bernstein talks about the "IPv6 mess", this is one of the things he's talking about; it's not just that the whole world needs to be renumbered (note: hasn't ever been done before), but also that all our software needs to be upgraded.

<comment><USER4> Do you think it would have been better if they'd gone to a 64-bit format instead of 128-bit?

<comment><USER5> No way! It took us almost 20 years to start moving towards IPv6, at great costs. It was better to exaggerate on the address space so that to we don't have to bother with another transition for a long, long time. I don't expect the next transition to happen before we start colonizing Alpha Centauri.

<comment><USER3> You realize that just like 64 bit addresses presume we'll never have a 18446744073709551616th host, 128 bit addresses presume we'll never have another network layer, right?

Have you considered whether we're putting entirely too much emphasis on whether or not there is an end-to-end "Internet Protocol" Internet with a single coherent address space? Most people don't use Internet addresses. In fact: most people already use an _entirely application-intermediated address format_ : it's called "the first 4 results on a Google SERP".

<comment><USER6> right. but the old internet... the way it used to be was that there was no real difference between a "client" and a "server" - an IP address was an IP address. Yeah, for most people, the Internet is the web, and that's enough. And nat works great for that.

The problem with enforcing this idea (that you have "clients" with private addresses behind a NAT and "servers" with public addresses) is that this won't be able to change. Doing peer to peer gaming, filesharing, video chat, etc... through multi-later (or carrier) nat is very difficult. It works through our home NATs right now, well, sortof, because there is one public IP for 2 or 3 computers. Upnp and other tricks can usually handle getting through a single layer nat with only a few private IPs behind it. If your ISP owns the nat and has hundreds of people behind the same v4 public IP, or in a double layer nat, where the ISP gives you a private IP behind a nat (that obviously doesn't support Upnp) suddenly this is going to work a lot less well.

Now, you can solve the problem by just making everything client-server. Want to video chat or game? each person needs to connect to a server with a public IP and talk through that server. It's doable, but it means that the Internet the next generation grows up with will be a different sort of network than the Internet I grew up with. This network will be one where you are either a "server" or a "consumer"

Some people say we've been moving in this direction for a long time, but this doesn't make it any less sad.

(also note... it's not just nerds that get screwed... if anything, gamers will get screwed more than nerds. Nerds can get VPSs that work just fine for most anything a nerd would want to do. VPSs, generally speaking, make shitty game servers, though.)

<comment><USER3> This is exactly the opposite of reality.

In reality, having an IP address does _not_ put you on an equal footing --- in a service model sense --- with other servers or companies that have paid massive amounts of money for peering. BigCo IP addresses are already "super- addresses", because they're BGP-advertiseable, and yours aren't.

So long as "full membership in the Internet" means "publicly routable IP address", you're going to get what your ISP is willing to give you and nothing more. This is true even in an IPv6 world! I'm not comfortable with this and you shouldn't be either. IP addresses are what network operators are giving greybeards to geek out over while they continue gobbling up the Internet.

What we need to do is accept an IPv4/NAT IP layer, define a minimum acceptable service model for ISPs to offer over it ("access to the web" being a good starting point), and then build application-layer overlay networks that provide the real services applications want, like broadcasting, peer-to-peer, location, presence, automatic configuration, and multihoming.

This isn't my crazy pie-in-the-sky idea (though the first startup I personally cofounded got this idea funded for several million dollars during the bubble). Is also the MIT PDOS RON idea, which Paul Graham's friend Robert Morris helped oversee.

It is also, for what it's worth, the logical conclusion of Saltzer and Reed's "End to End Argument In Systems Design". When you meet a challenge with a lower-level protocol, the answer tends to be to dumb it down to a point where you can build multiple variants of "something smarter" on top of it. We're at a point now where IP is simultaneously getting less relevant (organically, as more intelligence moves into HTTP-driven protocols) _and_ more important (as we run out of addresses). The answer is not investing more effort in IP.

From a pragmatic perspective, the nice thing about this strategy is that it requires _nothing_ from normal people. They'll use whatever IP their ISP gives them (NAT'd or otherwise), and it won't matter; it'll work just fine for the web today, and it'll work just fine for the TCP/SCTP/whatever-driven overlay networks we come up with tomorrow, where all the real action will be anyways. It's also nice to sit back and not worry about the IPv4acolypse and concentrate on building stuff instead.

<comment><USER6> >In reality, having an IP address does not put you on an equal footing --- in a service model sense --- with other servers or companies that have paid massive amounts of money for peering. BigCo IP addresses are already "super- addresses", because they're BGP-advertiseable, and yours aren't.

Ok, I often find I need to check myself before calling someone out on hacker news... several times I've found myself arguing with someone who was way more qualified than I was on the subject at hand.

but this is the exact opposite of what I understand "peering" to mean. From what I understand, settlement free peering is just that... it's free. Each party pays for half the cost of maintaining the line between them and packets bound from the customers of one peer to the other and vis-a-vis can traverse that link for free.

Generally speaking, when you pay for transit, it's called transit rather than peering.

(Now, my understanding is that there are cases where you would pay for peering... in this case, say you want to shave miliseconds off your ping time to some stock exchange... you can essentially buy transit that is limited to just the customers of your peer. In this case, there is "settlement" based on the number of packets going one way or the other. But, my understanding is that this isn't how it's usually done. Normally you look people up on peeringDB, and if you are exchanging enough traffic for it to make sense and you are on the same exchange, you set up a settlement-free peering agreement. Of course, all this shit is covered by NDA, so all we really have is hearsay)

Also, uh, all IPs are BGP advertisable. If you are small, your ISP does the BGP advertising (and the peering) I mean, if I buy my connectivity from above.net, they peer with everyone, right? so that's pretty close to me peering with everyone. Now, if you buy connectivity from a poorly connected ISP, sure, your network is going to be slightly slower... but it's still certainly BGP-advertiseable - it's just that you've outsourced the management of that BGP advertisement to your ISP.

Right now I'm working on moving the BGP router into my control, so I'm getting first hand experience with things I've watched people do in the past. And really, unless your primary business is infrastructure (and, well, mine is) it often doesn't make sense for you to run your own BGP router. I mean, it's one of those easy to screw up things. Most places I've worked that did their own BGP had more outages due to the new guy jacking with the router than due to upstream outages (which controlling your own BGP router, assuming you have multiple transit providers, can protect you from.)

<comment><USER3> Say you want to run an app out of your house. You can trivially afford both DSL and cable. Can you multihome your app using IPv4?

Your IP addresses aren't (in all likelihood) portable. If you have less than a certain number of addresses, they're actually _not_ advertiseable, because ISPs will filter smaller announcements. Even if you have a portable allocation, you may find it difficult (ie, expensive) to get your ISP to advertise it.

It is obviously possible to overcome all these problems with skillful application of money, but that's my point: the IP address itself isn't giving you this power, but rather the juice you pay to your ISP to make that happen.

(It's been over 10 years since I had to configure default-free BGP4 anywhere, though I've spent a lot of time working with BGP4 since then. Feel free to call me out on any of this.)

Now consider your cable connection, your DSL connection, and BitTorrent. BitTorrent can trivially scale across multiple Internet connections. You don't (heh) have to ask your ISP for permission to multihome it. That's because BitTorrent lifts the task of endpoint rendezvous out of IP and up to the app layer.

The future belongs to things like BitTorrent, where the average user never has to care whether packets are being carried by IPv4 native, IPv4 NAT, IPv6, or carrier pidgeons.

<comment><USER6> >Your IP addresses aren't (in all likelihood) portable. If you have less than a certain number of addresses, they're actually not advertiseable, because ISPs will filter smaller announcements. Even if you have a portable allocation, you may find it difficult (ie, expensive) to get your ISP to advertise it.

Yes, my home IP addresses are not portable... but IP portability _doesn't matter_ until you have a large number of IP addresses. Ok, so I have to renumber the 8 servers I have in the garage, big deal. Now, if I have to renumber the 1000+ virtuals I've got in the data center, that is a big deal. But my understanding is that everyone filters what's smaller than a /24, and some people filter below a /22... but at a bit over 1000, you are pushing a /22, so by the time that renumbering becomes a really impossible task, nobody filters you any longer.

Now, if you are multihoming for reliability rather than ease of switching ISPs, yeah, you have a good point. DSL has been neutered in that regard, which is really fucking irritating... but I understand why they did it. You know as well as I do that every route eats up a few bytes of ram in everyone else's BGP router, and TCAM is fucking expensive, so having a grand a month barrier before you can start adding your data to every bgp router in the world seems reasonable to me.

On the other hand, the barrier to getting some data center space and a multihomed /24 is pretty trivial by bay area sysadmin salary standards. Over the next week, that's one of my projects. One of my customer has an old /24 of swamp space he wants me to announce. It sounds like a good deal all around just 'cause my BGP foo was never good and what experience I have is old, so I get to practice on something I can break, and he gets to play in his swamp. It's going to cost the guy nothing 'cause I want to play around... It'd probably cost him something around a grand a month if he was going with someone more professional than I am and/or if he didn't already have the swamp space.

But my point was that if you pay for an ISP with good connectivity, you get all the benefits of their peering efforts. You are outsourcing your BGP management to your ISP, which for most people is going to result in better service than doing it themselves.

I think you can get 90% of the benefits of running your own BGP with a lot less hassle out of a $200/month co-lo plan. (just to be clear, that won't get you BGP you control or portable addresses, but if you've only got a few addresses, and the isp you chose is competent, well, that doesn't matter all that much for at least 90% of use cases.)

Edit: I know little of the bittorrent protocol... but my understanding, and this may be incorrect, was that bittorrent from one computer behind a nat (without upnp or the like) to another computer behind another nat (again without upnp or a port forward or the like) did not work well or at all... if you were behind a nat without a port forward (or upnp) you could only talk to peers that were on a public IP or had a port forward.

<comment><USER3> This thread is officially unwieldy. I think you know what I'm saying now (even if you don't agree with it). My contact info is pretty easy to find.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't think my router even supports IPv6. This is going to be -such- a fun transition.

I really thought people would get serious about it 2 years ago.

<comment><USER8> Devices that don't support IPv6, or don't have IPv6 enabled, will just share an IPV4 address in a NAT pool at the ISP level. It's not pretty but it works.

<comment><USER9> Sort of. There are some very real limitations what what how much you can NAT too.

Never mind what happens when various services break due to double NATing and the various port filtering, think VOIP and the like. Probably not terribly difficult for a few P2P programs to DoS your ISP wide NAT as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are a lot of addresses that should be 'reclaimed' . These days, most enterprises really only need a few public addresses, and many of them are 'sitting on' large chunks of addresses they acquired in the 90s.

<comment><USER11> It would be a better use of everybody's energy to actually get to work on the IPv6 transition, rather than trying to squeeze another couple of years out of IPv4. I think it should be pretty much obvious to everyone by now that until we actually hit the wall of IPv4, no one is going to get serious about the transition. NAT is not a great solution - it's a hack, and as anybody that has had to set up a server behind a NAT knows, it can be a real pain.

<comment><USER3> I'll wager that most residential Internet users are NAT'd, as are most corporate Internet users. The Internet works _better_ today than it did back in 1996, when virtually nobody was NAT'd (back then, the big imposition was dynamic addresses instead of static).

<comment><USER12> NAT'd by their own router you mean? Because that seems like a world of difference from ISP-level NAT which I can imagine breaking a lot of shit.

<comment><USER3> When people argue that IPv6 is necessary because NAT is a terrible hack that breaks applications, they are talking about the concept of NAT, the thing that makes it hard to pass a callback address in protocols they design and that requires their routers to peek into their FTP traffic.

I'm sure ISP NAT is at some level worse than home NAT, but the point is, we _can_ scale our IPv4 address space if companies stop, for instance, spending /19's to give every one of their desktops a routable IP address (which are then firewalled off the Internet anyways). We'll simply have to accept some form of self-managed NAT to do that.

I'm fine with that. We're freighting IP with too much responsibility and it's holding us back. We'd have multicast in several different service models by now if people would just stop trying to get Cisco IOS routers to do it for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm already on IPv6. Find yourself an old 486 in the trash somewhere, get an OpenBSD install CD, and you can be too.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if it wouldn't just be cheaper to design NAT-friendly apps. By the looks of it, the transition would last a decade and there would still be large legacy infrastructure in place after that. So why not learn to love NAT and ipv4?

<comment><USER15> Because then we're still loving NAT and IPv4 in 2050.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> _Every host on an IP network, from servers to personal computers to networked printers, is assigned an IP address, a unique identifying number that is used to communicate with other hosts on the same network, or globally._

This is misleading: computers (and especially printers) attached to a local network do not deplete public IP addresses, even if the network is connected to the global internet.

Should not the TC crowd be a little more computer savvy than this?

<comment><USER17> > This is misleading: computers (and especially printers) attached to a local > network do not deplete public IP addresses

A device connected to a LAN in someone's house will often just have a private IP and go through a NAT for its internet access.

However many big organisations will have been allocated a large address space at some point, often the size of a Class B. Their machines internally will often use a global IP address. The printers I use at university have their own public IPs. I'm guessing that's not unusual.

<comment><USER16> Good point. I thought that there is not much use for a public IP for a printer, but I did not think about big address allocations.

But is there any convenience in this? Can't they just switch a private LAN infrastructure connected through NAT?

<comment><USER18> Printing from off-site is easier with a public IP, I don't know how often that is necessary.

<comment><USER17> This would be better done with a VPN than simply allowing external access to your printers.

<comment><USER19> That works until you're sitting behind another NAT that uses the same internal IP range as the one you connect to over VPN - which is very likely since everyone uses 192.168.0.0/24.

<comment><USER17> Assuming the VPN server doesn't just allocate from a pool of public IPs owned by the organisation you're connecting into (the scenario I had in mind here) then yes this is an issue.

<comment><USER19> I'd guess that the NAT+NAT problem is more common than the enterprise variant, since very few companies other than enterprises have more than a few IPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Haven't we been told that IPv4 will run out "next year" for the past couple of years?

I mean, yeah, it's a legitimate concern and all, but if you keep crying wolf...

<comment> mike-cardwell <http://ipv6.he.net/statistics/>

Check the "v4 Exhaustion" widget on the right. It currently reckons there are 228 days left. I wrote an article about it on the 28th of May this year, and on that date, the widget calculated there were 427 days left.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Most recent previous discussion <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1742305>

</comment><comment><USER22> I just keep thinking about some of the "greybeards" as @tptacek said. The US Dept of Defense owns TEN class A blocks. HP owns two class A blocks, due to acquiring DEC (indirectly) Do they need that much space? I doubt it. Getting them to give back some space is not a long-term solution, but it would give this a little more time

</comment><comment><USER23> Can I buy cheap IPv6 SSL certificates yet?

</comment><comment><USER24> Will it be auctioned on eBay?

</comment><comment><USER25> I can't wait for the last IPv4 address to be handed out. There is going to be so much opportunity for profit here.

<comment><USER13> I already got 2^33 entire IPv4 spaces for free. I only need about 3 addresses and I have 36893488147419103232 of them. Not sure how you're going to monetize that ;)</comment></comment>


Iridium Completes Constellation Replacement - <AUTHOR> https://www.flyingmag.com/iridium-completes-constellation-replacement?cmpid=ene20190117&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=email&cid=46955&mid=405018335 <comment><USER2> There's an excellent and fascinating book that describes, among many other things, how the satellites were saved from being "de-orbited" (crashed) about 20 years ago. It's called Eccentric Orbits.

[https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John- Bloom/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John- Bloom/dp/0802126782)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I was at Motorola when they were supposed to be deorbited. I knew a guy that worked in the lab when they went through the lab to start to destroy all the equipment as part of the liquidation process. He saved one of the iconic brick handsets for me. No sim card. Just Accelerated Life Test Unit 4. It's been a proud possession of mine for years.

<comment><USER4> Please make sure it ends up in a museum eventually.

<comment><USER3> I believe the Computer History Museum already has one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone know a good source of info on the Iridium Certus service they are supposed to start offering with this new constellation? Based on the marketing material I could find it seems like the upstream is only ~350 Kbps even though there are plans to offer 1.4 Mbps downstream service eventually. Hard to understand why someone would pay for that over the other services out there where the upstream bandwidth scales with the downstream.

<comment><USER6> > Hard to understand why someone would pay for that

Friend was telling me about the cost of internet on a superyacht...holy shiiaatt.

<comment><USER7> But wait, back up a second to the cost of the superyacht itself, then the internet costs are piddling in that frame of reference. And I suspect that the cost of the superyacht is piddling for the kind of person who buys one.

The 0.1% really do live in a different world.

<comment><USER8> You can buy pretty decent yacht for 50-100k to live in for the rest of your life.

Doing web dev over satellite would cost same as on superyacht.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a shame Iridium flares are quickly becoming a thing of the past. If you've never seen one, it's about time!

<comment><USER10> Well if the entire constellation is replaced, that's too late for that isn't it ?

<comment><USER11> Replacements are in orbit but originals haven't been all deorbited yet.

<comment><USER12> There are still other interesting things to see, Equisat has LED flashers: [https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2576.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm curious how a rocket delivers multiple satellites spaced around a single orbit. Anyone know of something for laypeople that describes the process? I think it's really cool.

<comment><USER14> I don't have a good article on this but I'd assume the rocket delivers the satellites to an orbit slightly below the target one. The satellites can then move to the final orbit on their own (small transfers take much less energy than one might guess). Since lower orbits are faster than higher ones spacing on the final orbit can be controlled by the timing of the final transfer.

<comment><USER15> You've given basically the right answer for changing phase within the same orbit, i.e., if you start with multiple satellites near each other on the same circular path, and you want to space them out evenly along that path. However, the Iridium Next satellites have enough fuel to change ('migrate') to the next orbital plane over. They save fuel by using some tricks involving the non- uniform nature of the Earth's gravitational field, which only works because the migration can be done slowly.

There are 6 planes in the constellation and the satellites were delivered 10-at-a-time on 7 launches, plus 5 satellites on an 8th rideshare launch. There are 11 operational satellites in each plane (plus 9 spares distributed over the planes), and it's easy to see that migration is necessary to fill out all 11 slots in all 6 planes given those launches.

More info:

[http://www.rod.sladen.org.uk/iridium.htm](http://www.rod.sladen.org.uk/iridium.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Low latency connectivity in the middle of the ocean?

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow, that was like the first article in years which managed to load ads through uBlock origin while giving my CPU a nice increase in load. Does anyone know how they do that?

<comment><USER17> I've seen sites use websockets</comment></comment>


Should You Pay to Pitch Your Startup? - <AUTHOR> http://www.betabeat.com/2011/12/12/pay-to-pitch-how-much-is-too-much/

<comment><USER2> It's a sign that you're entering hugely, hugely seedy territory if you ever are asked to pay to receive offers of employment, scholarships, or investment. First, _many_ out-and-out scams operate that way. Second, if the opportunity were legitimate, there is an adverse selection risk. Meritorious candidates for employment/scholarships/investment have no interest in paying to get a chance at them, so those candidates would avoid that opportunity like the plague. The decisionmaker, if they have two brain cells to rub together, knows this _and charges anyway_. Why would you ever take investment from someone who had a declared policy of only entertaining pitches from the bottom of the barrel? (Plus, egads, what does that say about you to follow-on investors or other parties you need to sell?)

<comment><USER3> Uh oh -- The downvoting has started. Feel free to do that but please explain where I'm missing the mark. Thanks.

\-----

I'm really not sure why entrepreneurs who I'd suspect believe in free markets need to be coddled and "protected" from pay-to-pitch programs which at the end of the day are just another business - some good and some bad.

Just because you're a struggling entrepreneur doesn't mean other people shouldn't charge you or you're entitled to anything. At the end of the day, it is the entrepreneurs' choice. If you don't have the money or if the program doesn't seem legit, don't pay. And find another way to reach investors. If spending $50 or $100 gets you a credible chance at $500k of seed funding and helps accelerate your path to getting that money or getting feedback, that seems fair.

Some pay to pitch programs may add value. And some may not. If an entrepreneur learns that the hard way, so be it. Nobody ever said being an entrepreneur would be easy.

<comment><USER4> It's not about being coddled, it's about exploiting entrepreneurs who are either desperate, or new to the game. We don't want to encourage that type of behavior in our community.

"entrepreneur learns that the hard way, so be it."

That attitude is like saying children should learn to look both way before crossing the street the hard way...by getting hit by a bus!

<comment><USER3> How is anyone being exploited? You have a choice to pitch or not. It's not blackmail. It may be foolish to pitch at these events, but as far as I know, nobody is being forced into pitching or being told "you can't research this event and our track record before signing up."

<comment><USER4> It's like a scam...no one is forcing you to be a victim of a scam, you just don't know better. reply

<comment><USER3> "You don't know better." If an entrepreneur is that helpless, paying-to-pitch is the least of their problems.

<comment><USER5> So it's better that you get your hand in their pocket before someone smarter comes along the relieve them of that burdensome wad of seed capital?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I started my very first web business and didn't know any better, I almost blew $1000 on a couple angel groups that I know with the wisdom of hindsight would have been a complete waste of money. For someone who didn't know any better, it seemed like a good deal.

The worse part isn't that it preys on startups, it's that it prays on startups and new entrepreneurs that aren't plugged into the HN/SV scene (I was looking at angel groups in TX).

I don't think that a nominal fee (~$10 - $20) is necessarily a bad thing (but really, why bother?), but anything on the order of $100 or more is too much for a startup to be spending on that type of thing- a definite red flag. What investor would want to invest in a startup that spends all of its money looking for financing rather than creating a great product/service?

</comment><comment><USER7> In general I think pay-to-pitch is highly suspicious, but I'm sympathetic to Graham Lawlor and Ultralight startups. He charges a small fee to cover expenses and make sure people are moderately serious. There's no way he's getting rich off of it. Pizza is included. The feedback and exposure are well worth the minimal cost. If the fee still bothers you, then just don't pitch there.

<comment><USER8> Thanks SemanticFog, I appreciate the kind words.

Running good events is very time consuming, more than people often realize. And yet my landlord continues to "prey on" me by demanding that I pay rent. Somehow, he fails to see comrade Calacanis' logic that everything should be free...

Graham Lawlor - Ultra Light Startups

<comment><USER9> Are you in the event planning business or something? Isn't the idea for investors to make their money via return on the investment they make in startups?

That said, charging enough to cover the cost of pizza and what-not, that seems reasonable. But any outfits that are charging more than a nominal fee are highly questionable to me.

<comment><USER8> Yes, planning events (Ultra Light Startups) is a full-time job for me. I need to cover pizza, etc - and my rent...

<comment><USER5> If you are playing a valuable role to investors by providing them access to interesting new startups then they should be the ones paying you, not the startups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm a VC and these pay-to-present groups disgust me. People who charge pitch fees aren't investors - they're in the business of nickle and diming entrepreneurs who don't know any better.

The culture of feedback and mentorship in the valley is what makes entrepreneurship flourish here, decade after decade.

</comment><comment><USER11> It is not only an East coast thing.

I met with the folks organizing Band of Angels in the valley and after multiple meetings and phone-calls they told me that we had been selected to present at their event. It was free to pitch apparently but dinner was $80.

I was tempted to turn down dinner and offer to bring my subway sandwich.

I didn't end up going... for all the reasons patio11 points out.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am not a founder looking for an investment (at least, yet), but $50 in USA does not sounds bad for a lean start up. It act more as a filter than as an income for event host IMHO. Founder probably will spend more on a hotel alone.

On the other hand, practice of not disclosing fees and charging in the range of $1.000 - $8.000 definitely look shady.

Just my .05

<comment><USER13> what do you think it filters? Do you really think there are a large number of low-quality companies that would be deterred from pitching by a $50 entrance fee?

<comment><USER14> Well.. Let me show you it this way - If someone offered me a free 32" LCD good TV - I would definitely take it. Just because it is free and it feels like it have value.

If someone offered me it for $25 - I would pass it, since I have no place to put it nor I have time to watch it.

Similar could be observed in .99 games at any app stores. While 99 cents is really close to 0 cents for most US persons, still .99 games will have much less downloads. But ones who downloaded had much bigger motivation to actually play it and not just check it out.

Most of things should have associated costs. At least nominal. In case of such events it is good for both pitchers and for public listening to them. It is different topic if costs should be in dollars or some sort of efforts tho..

IMHO, as usual :)

<comment><USER13> oh man, your example really hits home:

>If someone offered me it for $25 - I would pass it, since I have no place to put it nor I have time to watch it.

Growing up, I hunted down free and really cheap computer hardware. I've always had a sizable stash of equipment that I'd play with, learn about, and eventually use to run services. As I've grown older, the initial purchase price has become less important, and the storage cost has become more important; my current workshop/office is maybe 200-300sqft, and it's got two people and a lot of hardware in it.

The thing is, here the cost is time, not storage space; and I think people learn the 'time is valuable' lesson sooner. But yeah, you would be keeping out 12 year old me, which is fine. Personally, I would think that the majority of people at these events would be past that point. dono.

You'd certainly need to apply another level of filtering; obviously you don't want to listen to a pitch from every joker with fifty bucks, the question then would be how much easier would that filtering process be if you first filter out all the 12 year old lsc types for whom the fifty bucks is a big opportunity cost. Personally, I don't think it would save you much time, but I could be wrong.

<comment><USER12> >> But yeah, you would be keeping out 12 year old me, which is fine. Personally, I would think that the majority of people at these events would be past that point. dono.

Judging solely on all rage I see about costs associated with giving a speech at such events, I can see how it might filter non serious people. I am not saying that $50 or $8000 is right/wrong. I am just saying - it is filter. Even small bump in requirements tends to filter out non serious people.

Here is simple way I look at it - if you can remove 5% of total noobs and get $1000 to spend more on marketing materials, why you shouldn't do it?

<comment><USER13> >Here is simple way I look at it - if you can remove 5% of total noobs and get $1000 to spend more on marketing materials, why you shouldn't do it?

depends entirely on how many good prospects also get removed. A grand in marketing materials is not a big deal if you have enough money to invest.

If it removes more unsuitable than suitable candidates, then it's a good deal; I'm just not convinced that is what happens. I think you get some adverse selection- The sort of people you want to invest in are going to be focusing on their business rather than focusing on getting investment, so I suspect you'd get vastly better results making your event 'invite only'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's the kind of crap we have in Chicago. <http://fundingfeedingfrenzy.com/present-your-company/>

$330 early bird special... :(

That and "entrepreneur networking" events that are full of service companies or software shops trying to drum up business. Lame.

<comment><USER16> As someone who produces events for entrepreneurs in Chicago and charges for those events, I'd love to learn more about what your ideal event looks like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This attitude also exists in other industries[1], and while it is shifty, it's relatively common to the degree where it's not even given a second thought or whimper. This to me is quite unfortunate, especially considering where I am in my life and my economic standing and I can't help but think of all the other people in my position. Really though, the best you can do is hope that there's good people out there that are willing to GIVE you a few minutes of their time, and not charge for it--and then when you're in that position you remember where you came from.

[1]Sundance Film festival charges $75 to submit a feature length film for consideration. I've come across many film festivals, writing contests, art shows and the like that charge you to "pitch your work". People are always trying to pick on the starving artist eh? (Callback to PG's Hackers and Painters).

<comment><USER18> I can actually understand this. If you're running an awards ceremony, then the payback from the winner of the competition is relatively low - hopefully they go on to great things, and you helped them along, and establish your reputation that way. But the costs of having 10x as many entrants is pretty high - each of those entries has to be evaluated, hopefully by multiple people. Each entrant is another contact to be managed, another bit of IP to keep track of. The most important role of the fee is to reduce the number of entrants without reducing the number of genuinely awesome entrants. That's why Sundance's entry fee is so low - it makes it a reasonably expensive whim, but if you're honestly got a shot, it's obviously worth doing. It still sucks, but it's for sensible reasons, and not just for the actual revenue stream.

[Edited to add: But if anyone is charging more than a nominal fee, run away!]

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The truth of the matter is that unless you have massive amounts of traction, investors won't really care about your product at such an event. Personal introductions into VC's is the best way to get your funding, and it acts as the first screen of your hustle.

If you can't hustle, find someone you know in common with a VC, and convince them to make an intro, you might not have what it takes to launch a startup. (Hint: It's all hustle).

Get on LinkedIn, use Meeteor.com, and start uncovering the relationships that can help you. It's not that hard, it just takes effort.

</comment><comment><USER20> Anyone who pays to pitch their startup doesn't deserve to be funded.

</comment><comment><USER21> Betteridge's Law strikes again!

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

</comment><comment><USER22> No.

</comment><comment><USER23> Easy answer: $0.

Anyone who says otherwise generally benefits from the result.

</comment><comment><USER24> Waitaminute. Paying to pitch?? I thought ideas were a dime a dozen!

</comment><comment><USER25> > _"It's low-class, inappropriate and predatory for a rich person to ask an > entrepreneur to PAY THEM for 15 minutes of their time," he wrote._

LOL it's _predatory_? What exactly do they think the VCs' business _is_?</comment>


Releasing BadgerDB v2.0 - <AUTHOR> https://blog.dgraph.io/post/releasing-badger-v2/ <comment><AUTHOR> Just wanted to call out and thank the badger authors for a great key value store! :)

I'm using badger at work (for an event aggregation system), and I've been able to get a throughput of 200k writes per second without any tuning on a single machine (4 SSD's on raid 0).

We're also planning on using it for OctoSQL[1] and are basing all our exactly- once streaming efforts on Badger transactions. (we'll see how that pans out in the future!).

[1]: [https://github.com/cube2222/octosql](https://github.com/cube2222/octosql)

<comment><USER2> That's great to hear! Let us know if you need any support with Badger</comment></comment>