The Network is Reliable - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2655736 <comment><USER2> The network is not reliable, but usually the cost of manually fixing problems arising from infrequent types of instability is less than the cost of pre- emptively addressing the issue.

As a practical example, our preferred HA solution for MySQL replication has effectively no network partition safety - if a network becomes partitioned, we'll end up with split brain. However, we have not once had to deal with this specific problem in our years of operation on hundreds of servers.

That said, do make the assumption that your AWS instances will be unable to reach each other for 10+ seconds on a frequent basis. Your life will be happier if you've already planned for that.

<comment><USER3> I think there's an important truth to learn from your comment: economics actually guides better approaches to development and design and helps to avoid premature/unnecessary optimization. There are probably many great solutions that can be invented, but unless you start thinking about economics of them, you're not working on making them truly remarkable.

<comment><USER4> Yes it can be a good guide, but don't forget economics guided us to network address translation instead of ipv6. Maybe it just isn't done guiding.

<comment><USER5> Economics' guidance, like evolution by mutation and natural selection, is a random walk with a lot of local optima.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Takeaways:

* Network partition tolerance can be designed around, assuming infinite time and money

* Network partition tolerance depends on the application

* Mitigating potential failure requires having a very long view on very fine details

* Most organizations will not be able to engineer solutions to address all network partition-related outages

<comment><USER7> Sounds like the title of the paper should be "The Network is Unreliable, but it Usually Doesn't Matter."

<comment><USER6> I think it does matter, but it's good to be realistic about it.

If the availability of your application over the internet determines your revenue flow, you probably do want to try your best to make it as reliable _as practical_. Creating a mesh network to serve a large website is overkill, cost-wise. So you do what you can, and then you implement things like continuous integration, monitoring, trending, alerting and escalation procedures to be ready for the eventual failure.

In my experience, relying on a service provider designed to increase reliability (let's say Akamai) will smooth out the great majority of problems a live website might have with availability. One really reliable datacenter will keep the big problems at bay, leaving you to get good at iterating over common minor issues like maintenance and local performance issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great article. A lot of engineers don't have personal experience with these kinds of network failures, so sharing stories of their consequences means more engineers can make informed (and conscious) decisions of how much risk can be tolerated for their applications.

One thing that you could gleam for this article-and I think that this is incorrect-is that the application or operations engineer is responsible for understanding the nuances of distributed systems. In my experience the number of people who are relying on distributed systems is much larger than the number of people who understand these issues.

So what we really need are systems we can build on whose developers understand how to build (and test!) the nuances of data convergence, consensus algorithms, split-blain avoidance, etc. We need systems to gracefully-and automatically-deal with and recover from network failures.

Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at FoundationDB

</comment><comment><USER9> I feel like the authors (or someone else) can do a lot more justice to their overall objective (i.e. tease out patterns) by applying some kind of a qualitative content analysis of case studies [0].

[0] [http://www.qualitative- research.net/index.php/fqs/article/vi...](http://www.qualitative- research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/75/153January%202006)

</comment><comment><USER9> There was some discussion on a preliminary version of this article/blog- post[0] last year: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5820245](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5820245)

[0] [http://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is- reliable](http://aphyr.com/posts/288-the-network-is-reliable)

</comment><comment><USER10> Related reading on data structures that make availability easier to maintain under network partition: [http://writings.quilt.org/2014/05/12/distributed- systems-and...](http://writings.quilt.org/2014/05/12/distributed-systems-and- the-end-of-the-api/)

</comment><comment><USER11> The head states that the network is reliable, but then goes on to list lots of cases where the network fails.

<comment><USER12> The head quotes a famous list and then goes on to list where the original quote was proven right.</comment></comment>


Why "Gender" is a Text Field on Diaspora - <AUTHOR> http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2010/11/26/disalienation/

<comment><USER2> Sounds horrible to me. Gender is either male of female. There is no gender called "Ada Lovelace" and no gender called "yes" (haha, you are such a funny guy..).

Now i'd like to search for all male people from germany with interests in IT. Oh what? Some of them wrote "male" some wrote "man" and what not? Wait, that doesn't work anymore? I very much hope the freetext form is banned again.. If people want to express that they are funny or "special" they can do that in another textfield, like self description, but not in the gender textfield, that's just stupid and NOT well thought of.

Internationalization is another nightmare here. People will put the gender in their local language in that field. Great.

<comment><USER3> Gender is a more complicated issue than the question of whether or not the user has a penis. For marketing purposes it might make sense to narrow down the selections to Male, Female and Other, but if the point is to allow users to express themselves, that's inadequate.

<comment><USER4> I've seen a few sites that take a cue from Facebook and limit the selections to "male", "female", and "it's complicated".

<comment><USER2> That sounds like a good solution, i'd prefer that..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Four years ago, at my first rails job, I worked at a company with a mostly- lesbian customer base. It turns out, in that context, knowing if someone is "male" or "female" gives you almost no useful information. The lesbian community has other widely-accepted categories of gender, but the company's internal order tracking software — a well-known package from a national vendor — offered only male or female._

I kind of wished this part had been elaborated on. I think this is the most interesting and salient point in this piece.

</comment><comment><USER6> Jives nicely with this recent post about classification and allowing for ambiguity: [http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4827/data-c...](http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2010/11/23/4827/data- cleanup-and-allowing-for-ambiguity)

</comment><comment><USER7> The real answer here is to change the field name to "Sex" which only has two possible outcomes based on what biological reproductive role you fill. While it could technically be three, adding a blank would solve this.

</comment><comment><USER8> Maybe you should do a little research about Gender vs. Sex.</comment>


GitLab is working on a tool just for data teams - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2018/08/01/hey-data-teams-we-are-working-on-a-tool-just-for-you/ <comment><USER2> This looks like an amalgamation of 8+ open source projects or industries with products put forth by companies that have dozens of employees and worked on their products for years.

It also doesn't even categorize the products they compete with correctly[0].

Why not contribute some of your resources to one of the many active open source libraries already trying to solve some of these problems, and focus your engineering efforts on your core product?

[0] Fivetran is only considered "Orchestrate" but is actually competes directly with Alooma in the Extract and Load. Also, there are DOZENS of company in that space. [https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/blob/master/README.md#dat...](https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/blob/master/README.md#data- science-lifecycle)

<comment><USER3> What we're doing different is making one product that does the whole lifecycle instead of having to string tools together. It took us many months to string our toolset together and we felt there had to be a better way. Just like GitLab we try to leverage existing open source projects wherever possible.

I agree Fivetran also belongs in extract and load and updated it [https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/commit/1df9813f5ab42c4479...](https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/commit/1df9813f5ab42c4479120f4d7e9f6f8e8a06a1ae) Do you think it should be removed from Orchestrate? Any other suggestions for proprietary products in that category?

<comment><USER2> As someone who works very, very closely in this industry, I would just be very careful how much of this you think you want to bite off.

Consider how you trust using dbt more than rolling your own transformation tool. Why wouldn't this apply to the rest of your stack? The 10+ companies that offer data extraction and loading are likely a better choice. Again with Analytics - the dozens of companies that offer BI tools are probably going to be the better choice.

Maybe you can build all these tools better than the hundreds of companies with thousands of employees and millions of dollars. It just seems like the odds that you build the best of each is so unlikely.

I would have been more impressed if your team had designed some API that other tools/platforms could plug in to coordinate a lot of the above jobs with your CI system. There is a SERIOUS need for that and I've had a lot of conversations with companies about what that would look like.

To answer your quest, no, Fivetran does not currently belong in the orchestration area, IMO. I've heard they are soon to release some sort of orchestration tooling to compete with dbt, but it isn't the type of orchestration you get with Airflow.

<comment><USER4> slap_shot one of our major goals is to provide a solution that startups and small companies can utilize to start putting their data to work.

It shouldn't take weeks of effort, a data engineer, multiple proprietary solutions, and tens of thousands of dollars to answer key questions like CAC or the efficiency of a given marketing campaign.

We're hoping to lower the barrier to entry in both cost and effort, by providing an open source pre-packaged solution.

<comment><USER2> [Obligatory: Someone is downvoting you, but it isn't me. I upvoted you]

Yeah, I get that. The analytics space is very complex and companies, even ones with good engineering teams, don't have the internal knowledge or resources to typically put all this together.

In addition to working in this space, my copmany helps companies set up their analytics stack.

We typically set them up with one cloud-based data integration tool (the one with the most # of integrations they need at the best price), dbt, and one BI tool (usually Looker or Periscope, in that order). All in, that takes us a few weeks to get them set up and going.

I applaud your effort. I just struggle to understand why you accept punting on transformations (and using dbt (amazing library, by the way - great choice)), but then try to tackle something like integrations or BI tools. The complexity of both of those is massive and there are great open source efforts already out there.

I'm eager to see where this goes.

<comment><USER3> "but then try to tackle something like integrations or BI tools. The complexity of both of those is massive and there are great open source efforts already out there."

I would love to hear your suggestion for a great open source BI tool. We tried Superset and Metabase but both didn't came close to what we could do with Looker. That is why we're giving Meltano Analyze a shot.

BTW Do you want to do a livestreamed video call to discuss further in the 30 next minutes? You have a lot of knowledge. If so please email me and comment here.

Update: He did email and livestream will happen on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8tEDq3K_pE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8tEDq3K_pE)

<comment><USER2> Sure - just shot you an email at firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER5> What a great interview. @slap_shot, you had great questions and you are so well spoken. Really appreciate the feedback. We're all taking notes here. Hope you will keep an eye on our issue tracker for Meltano and give us your feedback as things come up.

<comment><USER6> I have no horse in this race, but this is so cool that one minute you're exchanging comments on HN and the next you're livestreaming a conversation on the topic! What a world :)

<comment><USER3> Glad you like it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I can't understand why GitLab thinks they have to embark on a new project every so often instead of focusing on their current product and features. There is just a lot to work on, so many of the current features/products are half assed. At my place we moved to GitLab 2.5 years ago and updates where smoother back then but the past few months we had to hire a new sys admin for our build machines and GitLab server to follow on new issues created on GitLab.com and decide if it's safe release and even then he still reports 4-5 issues to GitLab support after every update. We were expecting it to be an easy `yum update` like a normal package but it's just getting worse update after update. It's so bad that my manager asked me to look into GitHub + another CI/CD solution.

<comment><USER8> Agreed - our company moved to Gitlab about the same time (2.5 years ago) and it's very clear from their updates that their focus has splintered in different directions. Our company has recently moved to more Microsoft products so I am pushing our CTO to move to Github.

If the CEO is following this, please improve basic user stories like:

* As a user, I want to easily know who has approved my merge request. Note the word "easily". The UI lists the people who did not approve next to label "Approved" and the people who did approve next to the label "Approved by". Makes absolutely no sense

* As a user, I want to see all the merge requests that I need to review because I am listed as an approved (it boggles my mind that this doesn't exist)

* As a user, I want to be notified by todos that only have any pending actions on them

* As a user, I want to disapprove a merge request

There are so many basic areas of the core product that are almost unusable. All of our engineers who have to regularly switch between github and gitlab prefer the github ui.

<comment><USER9> Loading a Merge Request with 168 changes, basically breaks a 4cpu's 4gb instance on gitlab, so yes, "the most basic areas of the core product is almost unusable".

And while some integration is good... A lot of recent stuff is just "we try to grab the easy money"

<comment><USER3> Yep, load times of large merge requests was a big problem. In 11.1 we launched a refactor of merge requests to solve this [https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/22/gitlab-11-1-released/#me...](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/07/22/gitlab-11-1-released/#merge- request-comments-vuejs-refactor)

That got the time down for the worst case we measure from 15 seconds to 3 seconds, see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17671300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17671300)

<comment><USER9> we are on 11.1 and it takes way more than 3 seconds (or even 15 seconds) (Request takes around 7 seconds and parsing it, and parsing it takes 10 seconds).

(P.S.: I also have the same source in gitea of a way less powerful instance which basically renders the whole thing in way less than 1 second.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Data pipelines are not a great subject for an open-source project. We've been building these for the last 3+ years at Fivetran, and I can tell you that the challenge is:

      - Studying each source to figure out the right data model
      - Chasing down a million weird corner cases
      - Working around dumb bugs in the data sources

This is the kind of problem where paying for software really works better. When people build data pipelines in-house, they tend to hack at it until it works for their use case and then stop. When we build data pipelines, we map out every feature of the data source, implement the whole thing at once, and then put it through a beta period with _multiple_ real users. This is easy to do when you have a tight-knit dev team; much harder for a group of part-time open-source contributors.

<comment><USER11> I think the point is to provide a set of tools for people that build data pipelines. Period. The software being open source don't reflect in any way WHO will use this tool. Depending on the success of this project, it might be that you could switch your team to this new tool at some point.

Personally I work as a "lone wolf" (to my own complains) because I'm in a small company that can't afford a huge team. Most of my (ETL) Transforms are done in SQL which happen to be pretty standardized as opposed to many ETL products I've seen so far.

This solution is probably far from being ready, but I find this approach quite interesting, because it look like a code based ETL that use SQL for transform (so I might be biased). Overall this might result in a more maintainable/versionable data pipeline model than GUI-first ETL which usually generate spaghetti code. Because you are usually forced to regularly adapt data-pipeline to unstable external inputs, being able to easily diff ETL process would be a blessing.

<comment><USER12> The scope of Meltano isn't limited to just data pipelines, though that is the first major part of it.

One thing that gets me really excited about it is the way we want to build version control in from the start. To give you an example of where that's really powerful - we have a bunch of dashboards in Looker. Right now, figuring out what Looks/Dashboards rely on a given field is very challenging. If I change a column in my extraction, right now I can fairly easily propagate it to my final transformed table (thanks to dbt!) and even to the LookML. But knowing what in Looker is going to change / break if I change the LookML is way harder.

But if everything was defined in code from extraction, loading, transformation, modeling, _and_ visualization, that'd be really powerful from my perspective.

The Meltano team has several user personas that they're looking at focusing on, data engineers are definitely one of them, but data analyst/BI users are as well, and we want the product to work well for the whole data team.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wish they would focus on making a fast, stable, GitHub alternative.

<comment><USER14> This is Gitlab taking stuff they were doing already internally and making it available to a broader audience.

Once you take VC funding, you gotta go where the money is. Everyone wants/expects "fast, stable, like Github" for free unless you have special needs. So, you do analytics on what people are doing with your free site, you offer enterprisey features, you get into the "platform" business etc.

I think Gitlab distracts itself, spreads itself thin, and isn't great at partnering, its ambition to do-it-all knows no bounds, which is both commendable and a smh moment. It's not likely sustainable or scalable. They're definitely trying to "go big or go home" as a company, which is not how most originally felt about Gitlab (a fast, stable OSS alternative to Github).

At the same time, I can't blame them. I think it comes down to: Don't hate the player, hate the game.

<comment><USER3> We are building a fast, stable, GitHub alternative.

We have hired 3 times as many people in our security team for GitLab.com (not our product team for security) as are working on Meltano.

We have hired 3 times as many people in our SRE teams as are working on Meltano.

And we still have a lot of vacancies for both [https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/](https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/)

<comment><USER14> I meant no offense. But you're also dabbling in building your own k8s distro / platform, you have your own CI/CD , Jira storyboard , and data science stuff, etc.

My point is that you're aiming a lot broader than Github ever did - you are competing more as a suite than as a focused product.

And I've seen personally this impact the support side with customers, partnership side, etc. I help maintain a medium-large Gitlab for one of your bigger customers. Anyway this isn't the place for me to get specific, I am just saying that you are taking a risky path in terms of sustainability IMO as a rando on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is there any example of an open source software company that has taken on so many products at once, so early in its life, and succeeded?

<comment><USER3> We did [https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/11/from-dev-to- devops/](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/11/from-dev-to-devops/) when we where at 50% of our current number of engineers. So far so good.

<comment><USER16> Really no, look at all the comments here (and this is only from techies): you have lost us, we don't know anymore what you are doing, or even trying to do.

<comment><USER3> We are trying to make a single application that covers the whole DevOps lifecycle, from planning your change up to monitoring its effect.

We're doing it because we believe there are emergent benefits to having the lifecycle in a single application [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/single- application...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/single- application/#emergent-benefits-of-a-single-application)

<comment><USER16> The idea seems great, but it's not working: there is no single application that can fit all uses, and you are loosing most of the users on the way.

I'm using Gitlab, btw, but only for the self-hosted git and it's user interface (ie. your core). All the other parts (bug tracking, CI, chat, ...) are in different and more appropriate tools for each of our use-cases... because most of yours are not complete enough, or sometimes it's not even clear how they actually could work for us (mattermost for example).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Taylor from GitLab here! Happy to answer any questions about what we're doing.

<comment><USER17> Kudos to you for trying something new!

<comment><USER12> Thanks so much!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> GitLab's usage of team members in marketing material is creeping me out (as does the whole team page[0]).

[0] [https://about.gitlab.com/team/](https://about.gitlab.com/team/)

<comment><USER3> We say team members instead of employees because some are contractors. Why does it freak you out?

BTW We don't call it a family [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#management- tea...](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#management-team)

<comment><USER18> I wouldn't want to have that level of public affiliation with my employer (no matter who that employer might be).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://quiltdata.com/](https://quiltdata.com/) ticks a lot of boxes in this space for me.

<comment><USER12> This could potentially become part of the Meltano stack. At GitLab, we're not at the phase yet where we're in need of data versioning. But I could imagine a data registry that's integrated with the workflow of data analysts/scientists to easily link versions of code and data.

Thanks for the link - we'll definitely keep an eye on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Reading this I was concerned that it would be written in Ruby. While Ruby is a reasonable language for server development, it has almost no data science community when compared with some other ecosystems.

I was very glad to see this is Python! Python has some of the best data tools out there, and a mature ecosystem for solving all the engineering problems that go along with a great data stack.

<comment><USER21> I am on the opposite side, Given Gitlab is a Ruby house I was secretly hoping some innovation coming from Ruby Data Science.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is there some resemblance with Floydhub [http://floydhub.com/](http://floydhub.com/) ?

<comment><USER23> Does anyone have a comprehensive list of similar offerings to floydhub? or OSS alternatives?

I think this market is not being served properly, most of them seem to still require most of the heavy lifting to be done by the ML practitioner.

I suppose I would even be okay with a service that just saves all my graphs from tensorboard for later reviewing.

<comment><USER24> I am interested in knowing more about how you think FloydHub can better serve the market. FloydHub does have metrics support for later reviewing: [https://docs.floydhub.com/guides/jobs/metrics](https://docs.floydhub.com/guides/jobs/metrics). Are you only interested in using tensorboard for graph viewing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The page talks mentions MVC, and the issue page[0] keeps mentioning MVC as well. Was this supposed to be MVP, or something else? Model-view-controller doesn't make sense in the context.

[0] [https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/issues/10](https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/issues/10)

<comment><USER5> We use the term mvc here, as "minimal valuable change", in a recognition that it may not be a product yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do you see this as a (future) competitor of Airflow/Luigi type workflow tools?

<comment><USER3> Yes, the orchestrate part (working on GitLab CI) is an alternative for Airflow. Also see [https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/blob/master/README.md#dat...](https://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/blob/master/README.md#data- science-lifecycle)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Be interested to know all the competitors in this space. [https://data.world/](https://data.world/) is one I am most familiar with.

<comment><USER2> This projects competes with too many industries to really give a succinct answer, but here's just Extraction/Loading and Analyze:

Extraction/Loading Dell Boomi SAP SAS Pentaho Domo Oracle IBM Microsoft Informatica Talend JitterBit SnapLogic Mulesoft SyncSort Information Builders Actian Attunity Datameer Alteryx Striim Treasure Data Cask StreamSets Snowplow DataTorrent Astronomer Panoply Apache Nifi Stitch Data FlyData Bedrock Data Alooma ETLeap Fivetran Xplenty MethodMill Celigo TerraSky DBSync Youredi Scribe Civis Analytics DataScience Dataloader.io datorama Astera

Analyze Microsostrategy GoodData Sisense Looker Power BI Wagon Birst Tableau Qlik Domo Hue Mode Chartio Periscope Pentaho

The amount of hype and BS in the Notebook space would require me to spend some time combing through that again.

<comment><USER28> slap_shot, I agree and as I disclaimer I also work at GitLab. There is no shortage of data tools in the space today. A majority of my career has been spent in the data & analytics space and I've talked / worked with at least 60% of the companies you mentioned. At the end of the day, these are the questions I've asked over and over again.

1\. Do we have enough money / budget for a tool like this? 2\. Can we derive enough insights from this product fast enough to make a good ROI? 3\. Does this tool use a proprietary language that no one wants to learn or can I code in a language that is relevant? 4\. In all honesty, can I get insights faster in a spreadsheet than these tools? 5\. What is the learning curve? 6\. Can I answer the business question that was originally asked?

Open to more discussions around the topic as it is a lot harder to answer than a few philosophical questions, but it certainly resonates with many data & analytics professionals. A nice goal would be to have project where you can stand up a business, turn your data pipelines on, ingest the data, and view the insights needed to make a business decision all within a short timeframe of when a business goes live.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Looks like gitlab just wants to be in news since Microsoft's aquisition of GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER30> Are you releasing/sharing any of the extractors you built for various services?

<comment><USER5> All of our extractors are available in our source code, which is open source. [http://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/](http://gitlab.com/meltano/meltano/). Right now we are working towards an MVP, so things might be in flux, but we value any feedback you have.

<comment><USER30> Thanks. I had looked but only saw one for fastly, am I missing others somewhere?

<comment><USER30> Apologies, I found them in another repo - GitLab Analytics. Thanks

[https://gitlab.com/meltano/analytics/tree/master/elt](https://gitlab.com/meltano/analytics/tree/master/elt)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Don't Quit Your Day Job to Start Something New - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/talentworks/article.php?article_id=131219 <comment><USER2> I've done both the "work and start a start-up" and the "quit and start a start-up" thing, and I wouldn't ever do the double work thing again.

When you're first starting a tech start-up you need to go through an intensely creative period to help you figure out what exactly you're going to do at the beginning. After that you need to put a ton of time into making things happen.

In my experience, your day job will suck so much life out of you that your start-up will pay a huge price during this crucial early period.</comment>


Book - Refactoring for Software Design Smells, with Foreword by Grady Booch - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/refactoring-for-design-smells-book-review

<comment><AUTHOR> Great read. Helped me understand real world scenarios and usecases! Also the book is well structured. Really Cool..

\- Difficult design concepts and smells explained in a very easy manner \- Examples are quite helpful to understand the concepts better \- The explanation flow in each chapter is consistent for easy understanding \- The Anecdotes are quite interesting :)

</comment><comment><USER2> I can answer the questions on refactoring and design smells. The recent ACM Computing Reviews book review for the book is here: [http://t.co/A6FfjZjJd0](http://t.co/A6FfjZjJd0)</comment>


Memory Unsafety in Apple's Operating Systems - <AUTHOR> https://langui.sh/2019/07/23/apple-memory-safety/ <comment><USER2> This is great, and pretty damning evidence of traditional, unsafe languages.

Do we have any data on how much of iOS is implemented in unsafe code vs in macOS? In particular, I want to know if the difference in memory safety ratio correlates with a language choice ratio. I don't think sufficient information to make that determination is public, but I would love to be wrong about that.

(I guess one of the problems with that measurement would be is that it's hard to tell if an ObjectiveC file has parts of straight C in it, which you'd expect more of in system code.)

<comment><USER3> As far as we know the entire kernel for both is memory unsafe.

It's not clear to me how much Swift is in use internally for things besides apps (e.g. is there a future where Window Server is Swift?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can also compare the valgrind suppression files for the various versions of darwin, vs Linux glibc known vulnerabilies, mostly memory leaks. Darwin is just horrible. Even if it just copied Freebsd's libc, it managed to add so many mistakes with everything they touched. glibc is mostly fine

<comment><USER4> see [https://github.com/LouisBrunner/valgrind- macos](https://github.com/LouisBrunner/valgrind-macos)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Yes, of course migration is difficult! Any company doing it will need to > retrain people, make toolchain changes, and undoubtedly invest in improving > both the compiler and language itself. If only there was some enormous > company with vast resources and a commitment to privacy and security who > could embark on a journey like this…

You mean Swift?</comment>


Raising a Botnet in Captivity - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/26938/?p1=A2

<comment><USER2> This was an XKCD in 2007: <http://xkcd.com/350/>

</comment><comment><USER3> "To our knowledge, this is the first such realistic experiment."

I find it hard to believe that nobody has tried this before in a closed lab setting. Perhaps the scale (3000 installs on 98 machines) is the differentiating factor. Or perhaps the others were kept quiet.

<comment><USER4> I read this wondering why it's news. I'm certain this has been done numerous times before. Unfortunately I don't have any links to back that up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This has been posted a few times already.

<comment><USER6> Its been posted twice in the past two days, neither story getting attention, a single comment or more than one upvote between the two stories combined. I think a repost is OK here.

// edit: <http://searchyc.com/Raising+a+Botnet+in+Captivity></comment></comment>


Becoming a new American Airlines - <AUTHOR> http://dcurt.is/american-airlines-brand <comment><USER2> What does this guy have against American Airlines? As if getting one of their designers fired from his day job [1] wasn't enough.

I personally don't see what is so bad about the new redesign. I guess I just have horrible taste.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/6531610/America...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/6531610/American- Airlines-worker-fired-for-replying-to-web-user-complaint.html)

<comment><USER3> How is the designer responding to Curtis' complaints of his own free will, and then Curtis decrying AA's firing the designer "getting [the designer] fired"?

<comment><USER4> It isn't. He asked if the guy was OK having his mail published. The guy said yes. Anyone who says Curtis got him fired is saying a lot more about their biases than about anything that happened.

<comment><USER5> You're conveniently ignoring the fact that he explicitly called for AA's designers to be fired without understanding how a big company operates: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4996236>

<comment><USER4> I'm ignoring it because it's a stupid point. AA did not fire anyone because Dustin Curtis is an authority on UX. They fired the guy --- stupidly --- for airing dirty laundry on the blog of someone who just wrote a rant about their UX.

Only on a nerd message board would this be a point that even bore argument. What, are you scared Dustin Curtis is going to get YOU fired next? OOGA BOOGA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've never seen a major brand complete a redesign without at least a little backlash. People have a natural preference for what's familiar, but in time new brands tend to grow on you.

<comment><USER7> You must not be familiar with the history of the American Airlines logo. It's iconic, like the cursive Coca-Cola logo. An evolution would've been better than a complete overhaul.

<comment><USER6> The same could be said about IBM, UPS or BP, all of which had iconic brands. We now recognize and associate with the new brands, with minimal thought given to what came before.

<comment><USER8> "Had?" Check out the corner spot on IBM's page, they actually run though _all their previous logos_ , winding up on the iconic one.

<http://www.ibm.com/us/en/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you future may require another taxpayer bailout, best to drape your identity even more in the flag, to raise the emotional stakes in your favor.

</comment><comment><USER10> I always thought it was un-American how bad American Airlines was. As a country we should prohibit them from using our name...

<comment><USER11> Honestly none of the US legacy carriers are very good. Southwest, Alaska, and Virgin America are really the only US flagged airlines I'd fly, given a choice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hi, I am Dustin Curtis. I just throw vacuous statements around something to sound profound and edgy.

<comment><USER4> Markov Dustin Curtis hater strikes again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I actually like the "flag" on the tail... it's bold and I think a nice abstraction of a flag; I like the way it completely fills the tail and doesn't use gradients (the most annoying of modern airline logo fads..."hey guys... we can do _shading_ now... go wwwwwild!1!").

The rest of the new design is complete crap, of course ("bluh" is a good description, I think), especially that they got rid of the eagle, which was bold, iconic, and managed to combined modernity with a sort of 1930s vibe (i.e., "classic"). Other than the flag, the new design just reeks of risk- averse 1980s corporate mediocrity.

</comment><comment><USER14> American has been dead to me ever since they got rid of their 'more room throughout coach' tagline. As a taller guy (though not _that_ tall), it basically pushed me to United and their Economy Plus seating, which I love and happily pay a little extra for.

I mean, it's not as nice as, say, SAS's normal economy class, but for a US carrier, it's as good as I've gotten without flying business/first.

</comment><comment><USER15> It reminds me of older Greyhound bus logos. I guess if you're trying to make people think you're a bus line in the sky, that's a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER16> For some reason, I never liked the American Airlines logo. Sure, it's historic, but it always felt too corporate and stiff to me. A big part of what I disliked about it was the colours. Overall, I think the new one is better looking, however I understand why some designers despise this change.

<comment><USER17> As a foreigner I just look at the new design and cannot help but agree with the overly patriotic pig lipstick comment at the end of the article.

It is almost like the designers were asked to "Remake the brand in a more 'America, Fuck yeah!' manner, that is trendy right? It will get people to identify with us patriotically and forget out infamous service"

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At first, I hated it, but looking at the linked article, it's not terrible. I prefer the iconic logo, but they could have done a lot worse with this rebranding. It feels fresh and modern, rare for an airliner.

<http://www.aa.com/newamerican>

<comment><USER4> I like the livery (unlike Curtis, who calls it "patriotic lipstick" but ignores the positioning statement it makes, or the fact that the new livery is much more easily identifiable than the old one, which just set the logo on the tail and gave the planes racing stripes).

I hate the new logo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't have anything against the redesign. The one element of their branding that I love (unpainted aluminum) remained, which makes up for anything else. I do kind of miss the "AA" part, though, but the flag and eagle are nice too.

</comment><comment><USER19> I like the new design, to be honest, I think it looks pretty great. On the other hand, I like the existing logoscript better, and I find the flag-on-the- tail placement, to be just plain tacky.

</comment><comment><USER20> We gotta do some soul searching if this is hitting the HN frontpage.

<comment><USER4> Why, because Kennedy's secret plan to stage false-flag military attacks on gulf coast cities is germane, but graphic design isn't?

<comment><USER20> My thoughts:

a) Assuming the link you mention was low quality, that doesn't justify low quality here.

b) Interface design has a broad appeal, it involves reasoning about utility and aspects of the human experience we all have access to, but often overlook, like biases and perception. Graphic design involves subtler distinctions in a subset of the above.

c) I enjoy visually understanding concepts and making comparisons. I like when designers take an opportunity to represent their personal taste. Standing up for your taste involves personality, your ability to put yourself in context, and some vulnerability. That is real to me. This article contained none of that depth-- only two words in the stub-- "corporate lipstick" referenced the new design.

Whats your take on it?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why would or wouldn't you distribute modules on GitHub instead of NPM? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The biggest thing to me would be if they offer a verifiable way to tie the modules offered in GitHub's package manager to the source hosted in GitHub. NPM's had a lot of weird issues with package takeover or malicious insertion, and GitHub, being where the source code generally is, has a real opportunity to address that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure why we still use NPM. It's a total mess.</comment>


Zuckerberg: more mobile web Facebook users than Android & iOS apps combined  - <AUTHOR> http://digitallife.today.com/_news/2012/10/02/14184243-mark-zuckerberg-confirms-i-wear-the-same-thing-every-day

<comment><USER2> I believe it was noted in some older thread that the reason a lot of people use the web version, is because the native versions were so slow and unresponsive. So there are lots of web users, party because they were pushed away from native — not because they chose web.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is one conclusion (and I would agree true for some users), however I think Zuckerberg sees this as a more complex than just slow apps. Here is a quote from the article:

"And the thing that I think a lot of people don't think about is that there are actually more people in the world using Facebook on mobile Web, right, so not using the apps on iOS or Android, but actually just going to a browser on a phone. There are more people doing that than the iPhone and all of Android phones combined, right? So it's actually a pretty diverse ecosystem."

<comment><USER3> >actually just going to a browser on a phone. There are more people doing that than the iPhone and all of Android phones combined, right? So it's actually a pretty diverse ecosystem.

I can't make sense of that quote. More people are on the mobile web version than there are iphones and android phones combined. Either very few people are on native apps, or there are sizable WinPhone and Blackberry componets.

<comment><USER4> It's not WinPhone and Blackberry that cause this statistic, it's the (literally) billions of featurephones that just have crummy Java applications and a mobile browser. There are twice as many featurephone users in India as there are humans in the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> One of those mobile web users would be me, because their android app permissions suck</comment>


Ask HN: Stanford GSB vs HBS?  - <AUTHOR> I was wondering whether any alumni (or HN users) from either of these schools could tell me about which is better ? At least what are the advantages of one over the other ? I got accepted into HBS for 2012 through their 2+2 program, and I can't decide whether I should apply to Stanford ? I have heard that the Stanford program takes in a relatively small number of students (250+ vs 900+ @ HBS). I am going to start working at deloitte  (starting this July) and though HBS is a great business school, I'd love to consider other options. Please let me know your opinions. Thanks. <comment><USER2> I went to HBS so I can tell you a bit about it. The people there are extremely talented and driven, but the student body is somewhat overrepresented by bankers and consultants. Quite a few HBS students want to get into technology but don't really have the background for it. The most likely career path for HBS graduates is banking or consulting, or maybe private equity/VC for a smaller percentage. But Reid Hoffman articulated very well the sentiment that those who are likely to get into a school like HBS have managed their career and education very closely their entire lives, and many may not have the appetite for risk that is required by entrepreneurs.

If you can get into the GSB, I would highly recommend it. It is much more plugged into the startup scene and I think you'll definitely get a richer tech-oriented experience.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think you may be asking the wrong crowd -- this is primarily a community of entrepreneurial developers. If you're at school, you're not coding. If you're paying for school, it's not going towards a startup. I think I'd go nuts at a biz school thinking "I could be building something right about now."

I also know a lot of us write off business school's actual real-world value, but I won't weigh in on that debate, because I'm sure someone else with more to say on it will.

Here's the advice I'll give: 1) Business school is about connections and reputation. You're going to make great ones at either of those two schools.

2) It entirely depends on your goal. Stanford is closer to the entrepreneurship and tech scene, Harvard is closer to the financial and academic scene.

</comment><comment><USER4> Umm, I'd hate to assume that you are necessarily interested in tech (judging based on your profile and no prior comments with posted username). If you are into the tech scene in one way or another (startup or not), GSB is the way to go. Obviously, the networking itself outweighs anything else you'll likely get out of the program.

Judging on rpark31's comments, HBS may be suitable if you'd like to break into the financial sector. Of course, the logic there is also networking. But, I don't see why you can go wrong with either of these schools. Personally, given such a tight race, I'd go for one with non-academic perks - weather, extra curricular activities, and a chance to absorb in the school atmosphere (yet have the suit in the closet).

If you are techie, then, take a look at this:<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=168635>

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I certainly don't want to knock HBS by any means for technology. The school is big enough that a sizeable proportion are still involved in the tech industry. So there are significant networking benefits if you want to go into tech.

But if you are doing a straight comparison between HBS and GSB, the nod goes to GSB.</comment></comment>


FBI has database of 640M photos for facial recognition - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/technology/446921-watchdog-fbi-has-access-to-640m-photos-for-facial-recognition-searches <comment><USER2> How many does Facebook have? It has often seemed to me like the best way to identify criminals would be to get special access to the Facebook face matching service for photo tagging and go from there.</comment>


Type 2 diabetes can be reversed with a low-calorie diet - <AUTHOR> https://discover.dc.nihr.ac.uk/portal/article/4000931/type-2-diabetes-can-be-reversed-with-a-low-calorie-diet?utm_content=bufferf8b4a&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer <comment><USER2> The headline is a bit misleading. We have previously known diabetes is reversible with low calorie diets. This study was notable for two things:

(1) finding that this holds true even six years into mild diabetes (previous studies were on much more recent diagnoses). This is useful information because of the widely held misconception that type 2 diabetes is just a disease of insulin insensitivity. Actually, over time, islet amyloid peptide is deposited in the pancreas where it slowly kills off beta cells and removes your ability to actually produce insulin. In effect (though not literally nor in every particular), type 2 dm slowly transitions into type 1. So it's useful to know that six years out the pancreas is functioning well enough to allow dietary reversal.

(2) being funded by a private company pushing a meal replacement-and-weight loss coaching program, which used this private program as the intervention arm. Turns out that, yes, if you live on slimfast for 3 months you'll lose weight and your diabetes will calm down.

That Lancet didn't exactly lead with that latter point, oddly enough. The co is pushing for the NHS to fund their program in more locations, under the argument that bariatric surgery isn't available to everyone. This is part of their PR push.

<comment><USER3> Bariatric surgery (not personal experience, but secondhand) is not a picnic and requires a large/equal amount maintenance/discipline post-op to not harm yourself or regress. Again, admittedly 2nd hand and would love to be corrected.

<comment><USER2> The more recent generation of bari surgery approaches are more gentle than the first generation. That said, I agree, it's not a free pass.

Thing is, we have about half a century of consistent clinical findings saying, without exception, no diet-based approach shows long term weight reduction. The most successful have zero effects by 5-10 years out.

Bari surgery is the first and only intervention we've had that has shown sustained weight loss over 10 years.

I don't mean to in any way understate its dangers or its difficulty. But from a medical standpoint, I have to raise a red flag when someone says "hey, instead of using the only treatment that's ever been shown to have a sustained effect, you should use a variant of a treatment we've spent half a century proving doesn't generally work."

The linked article phrased it as being for people for whom bari isn't an option, but even the Lancet article proper - iirc, as I read it at the beginning of the week - phrased it as, "there aren't enough bari surgeons to go around, so in the meantime..."

<comment><USER4> > Thing is, we have about half a century of consistent clinical findings > saying, without exception, no diet-based approach shows long term weight > reduction.

This baffles me, because these results are trivially disproved. It's not particularly rare for people to lose weight and keep it off long term by changing their diets. Are the studies poorly constructed or are they just being misinterpreted?

<comment><USER2> You're begging the question. You assert it's not particularly rare for people to lose weight and keep it off long term, and therefore it's trivially obvious to prove that it's not particularly rare. Except that all studies to date show that it -is- rare, especially for the group of people that are candidates for an intensive intervention like medically managed weight reduction or bari surgery.

The data show that over ten years average sustained weight loss in diet-and- lifestyle interventions is zero (actually, there's usually weight gain). That doesn't rule out particular rare exceptions, but they're just that, and not useful for evaluating the intervention as a whole.

<comment><USER4> That's not what 'begging the question' means. If you say "iron doesn't rust" and I show you a rusty piece of iron, that's not 'begging the question' regardless of how many studies you can cite that show iron not rusting under various conditions.

And 'average sustained weight loss over a cohort' is the wrong measure, especially if your cohort are candidates for bariatric surgery (ie. pre- selected for being medically recognized as incapable of losing weight voluntarily) rather than just overweight people in general (a fair few of whom _do_ choose do get back in shape.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ...or you could not starve yourself on <900 calories a day and instead be a sane person and just eat low carb: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13300-018-0373-...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13300-018-0373-9) _" Insulin therapy was reduced or eliminated in 94% of users; sulfonylureas were entirely eliminated in the CCI. No adverse events were attributed to the CCI."_ Wow, that's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? Every single person in the non-control group eliminated the need for sulfonylureatic compounds and a massive 94% reduced their insulin level or completely got off insulin altogether. All with no adverse affects being recorded.

You don't need to starve yourself or go on some ridiculous diet. You just need to eat low carb and eat clean (a.k.a. "real" food) and your body will begin to heal in nearly every case. I suspect the few test cases that didn't improve were so far gone they were too metabolically impaired to achieve any positive results. The damage was likely too extensive and age possibly played a factor. For everyone else, it appears they can get rid of diabetes...if they actually care enough to do so.

<comment><USER2> Repeated studies have shown that weight loss plays a bigger role than carb restriction. The article you linked showed a 12% weight loss in the experimental group, which also had continued support by a health coach throughout its duration, which was the actual intervention.

You make it sound like the intervention was carb elimination, rather than weight loss with a health coach. It was not.

<comment><USER6> I've been on keto (carb restriction) diet (lifestyle?). Just some thoughts learned from the experience: it is _incredibly_ easy to lose weight on carb restriction since hunger goes away and relationship with food changes.

I still like to eat but it's become more a number game. I eat once a day and structure my meal to hit my macros. Just figure out how many calories and protein / fat ratio and I can usually hit close to it with 1 meal and top up calories with butter coffee.

Also, I can instantly do a 1-day fast. It doesn't bother me at all. Every few days I stretch my intermittent fast to proper "just coffee and water today" fast. It's very refreshing.

Calorie restriction on carbohydrate heavy diet sounds like hell. Food cravings. Starvation.

Fasting on the other hand is a different story. Zen.

<comment><USER7> Yea, the shift in your eating habits is really kind of astounding.

I'm not even that close to keto levels of carb intake[1], but I've been progressively minimizing any processed carbs since college (and I'm lucky enough to have been raised eating fairly healthy, so my baseline was decent). At this point, there are certain foods that all my friends feel are impossible not to crave and give into occasionally, that I simply just don't enjoy. One of the biggest examples is fat+grain in its various forms: pizza, grilled cheese, many pastas, funnel cakes, etc etc etc. Don't get me wrong: I'm not completely incapable of enjoying these categories of food. It just needs to actually be well-made and have some flavor: by contrast, most of the people I know enjoy the wireheading effect of this combo per se. To me, this seems like the difference between eating a nice dessert and eating a bowl of straight white sugar.

This is something I think about a lot: there's so many unhealthy food items that I find pretty gross at this point that most of my well-educated, high- income social circles have resigned themselves to being a completely unavoidable flaw in the human brain[2]. It's kind of eerie to think about; My diet isn't even amazingly healthy, and I've already found myself brushing up against the "eccentric abstemiousness" that pg mentions in his essay on addiction.

[1] every time I lift weights, I crave carbs too much to drop them entirely: most of my carbohydrates come from beans, pulses, and certain green veggies.

[2] IMHO, this is the source of the popular-on-HN sentiment that each and every one of us are hopelessly devoid of agency when it comes to resisting the power of corporations to exploit the way our brains' taste centers work. The theory isn't implausible to me, but my experience indicates that you really don't need superhuman self-control to change your diet: it just takes time and patience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> We've known that low-calorie dieting has this effect for some time; unless I'm missing something, this looks like solid confirmation of this point but isn't adding much knew to our understanding of diabetes prevention. The big challenges in this space are adherence, scaling access to treatment and creating long-term lifestyle change that will help the patient maintain the weight that is lost.

There's good evidence that ketogenic diets have an additive metabolic effect beyond pure calorie restriction which is exciting. Virta Health is doing some interesting work here and just published some results that speak to this: [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13300-018-0373-...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs13300-018-0373-9)

<comment><USER9> Well, the more the merrier is as true for scientific studies as for sex parties. The point is that no two studies are going to be set up in the exact same way, so it's interesting to examine the results of slightly different experiments.

But probably more importantly, because there is no study that can claim 100% certainty for anything, having many studies confirm the same effect is always a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Sticking to a very low calorie diet is super hard. You'r body starts producing all kinds of hormones to get you to eat more. I fight against this every day. So, I've created a tool that shows me all the lowest caloric density foods and ranks. It also ranks foods by nutrients too: highest nutrients per calorie: [https://kale.world/c](https://kale.world/c)

</comment><comment><USER11> It seems that a keto diet/lifestyle does this in a far more enjoyable way than restricting calories to such a low level. Mixing in restricting to zero calories (aka fasting) also helps. Either way I'm so happy to see people start to attack this problem with smarter food choices.

</comment><comment><USER12> Nutritional ketosis was also recently shown to reverse type 2 diabetes. That approach might be more sustainable for some patients.

[https://blog.virtahealth.com/one-year-clinical-trial- outcome...](https://blog.virtahealth.com/one-year-clinical-trial-outcomes- provide-evidence-for-changing-the-way-we-care-for-patients-with- type-2-diabetes/)

</comment><comment><USER13> (2017) (At least the study itself: "Published on 10 December 2017.")

Previous article: [https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/05/radical- diet...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/05/radical-diet-can- reverse-type-2-diabetes-new-study-shows)

And discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15873389](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15873389)

<comment><USER14> > (2017) (At least the study itself: "Published on 10 December 2017.")

So, two months ago? Who cares if it's on the other side of an arbitrary point in time?

<comment><AUTHOR> loeg is politely pointing out a large, recent, discussion. That's a useful thing to do.

<comment><USER14> I quoted the specific portion because if the propensity of people here to immediately jump in and "tag" articles with the year they were published. If loeg had left the quoted line out if its post I would not have mentioned anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know what the UK NHS means by a 'formula diet'? The overview says,

> The program involved... going on a formula replacement diet. This consisted > of 825 to 853 calories per day...

and the published abstract also refers to

> ...825-853 kcal/day formula diet...

So what's the formula? Was it a commercial feeding formula such as Ensure? Or a dietician's list of approved foods? What was the macronutrient ratio?

<comment><USER15> I found this announcement of a follow-up study [1], which

> will see 140 people with Type 2 diabetes spend between eight and 20 weeks > consuming just 800 calories per day, mainly in the form of nutritionally- > complete formula shakes.

The phrase "nutritionally-complete" indicates a meal replacement; probably not Slimfast or Ensure, neither of which is suitable for 100% meal replacement, but something like Huel or Soylent, which are. However, being a medical operation, I would bet it will be some hospital-approved TPN [2] such as Jevity [3].

[1] [https://www.diabetes.org.uk/About_us/News_Landing_Page/Low-c...](https://www.diabetes.org.uk/About_us/News_Landing_Page/Low- calorie-liquid-diet-study-launched)

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

[3] [https://nutrition.abbott/uk/product/jevity](https://nutrition.abbott/uk/product/jevity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I think the conclusion is false and the real culprit is low-sugar, not low- calorie.

Insulin production is directly influenced by sugar levels. It is not influenced by caloric intake. I didn't read the whole article but I bet their method is flawed and further study is required.

<comment><USER17> I did read it. They might have other method issues, but not that one you mention. In this analysis the did not focus on insulin secretion or sensibility.

You are right in a sense. The authors used to say that it does not matter what you eat, as far as is a lot of caloric restriction. That was back in 2016, when I interviewed them. I hope now they will disagree if someone comes with a 800 calorie diet made of sugar only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Weight loss of 15kg or more was achieved by 24% of the intervention group > compared to none of the usual care group.

> Diabetes remission occurred in 46% of the intervention group compared to 4% > of the usual care group. It only occurred in people who had lost weight.

Unless the people with type 2 diabetes were fit and going underweight for the experiment, instead of implying overweightness is normal, could we say that a high calorie diet can maintain or accelerate diabetes?

This rephrasing suggests prevention.

<comment><USER19> Fair, but I think there's something to the opposite tone. A lot of people know that if you're healthy, you can generally avoid type 2 diabetes. Saying it basically 1:1's with weight issues is... important. Prevention is important, but there's this idea weight loss is impossible, or keeping weight off is impossible, and boy howdy that isn't true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's fantastic news.

I do have a question, how safe is 830 calories/day for a diabetic? For an otherwise healthy person I can see it being safe with medical supervision but for an individual already seeing blood sugar spikes due to diabetes, I wonder about the dangers?

I guess what I am getting at is that this intervention for diabetes might only be safe enough to try in early stage even if it would work for more progressed diagnosis.

<comment><USER21> The subjects were under medical supervision ...

<comment><USER20> I never claimed they weren't.

I asked about the safety of diabetics on low calorie diets. I have no idea how stringent the entry criteria was for this study, they could have picked the [otherwise] healthiest diabetics they could find.

Which brings us back to the question I asked, which was how this could scale to older or in worse health individuals suffering from type 2 diabetes? Even with medical supervision.

<comment><USER22> It would only be a problem if you took insulin and then did not eat. Given that type two diabetics cell's are stuffed full of sugar from insulin resitance, not eating or eating less can only help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I lost 60kg in the last year after being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, following a moderated carb and low calories diet, with 1h of gym almost every day of the week.

The latest HbA1c was 5.5%, which is inside the range for 'normal' people ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycated_hemoglobin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycated_hemoglobin))

</comment><comment><USER24> I gained ~50 kg after quitting tobacco. But I'm not sure that it'd work the other way around. I do recall that "feeling hungry" and "needing a cigarette" were quite fungible. But then, smoking is obviously a huge cancer risk factor. Maybe vaping isn't so bad.

And for what it's worth, testosterone supplementation disappeared my prediabetes. Also less white hair, and better muscle health.

</comment><comment><USER25> And Type 2 diabetes can be entirely prevented thru low sugar diets.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hello,

I see many people on here deriding low calorie diets as "starving." As someone who was 100+lbs overweight I can attest that low-carb, diet, exercise, weight training were not sufficient to help.

For whatever reason, genetics combined with work and lifestyle, I was unsuccessful with any commonly recommended diet for reducing body mass, I tried for years.

Recently, I lost 40lbs using intermittent fasting and then continuos fasting. The experience was night and day, I have written about my experience here: [http://rexstjohn.com/thoughts-fasting-part-iv-lost-40-lbs- tw...](http://rexstjohn.com/thoughts-fasting-part-iv-lost-40-lbs-two-months- now-want-answers/).

Starving is the wrong way to frame this diet approach. I want people to change their minds about how they frame the problem of obesity. If you have 10 lbs of excess body fat, that represents 35,000 stored calories. Your body is used to doing much more work and exerting much more energy to locate food than what we do in modern society. If you wanted an Apple 100 years ago, chances are you had to walk for 30 minutes.

Furthermore, our bodies are adapted to numerous days of fasting. If you are hunting a wounded deer over rough terrain, you don't have room to carry a refrigerator with you - you burn stored reserves. If your crop fails and you have to wait three months to eat again subsisting off of grass and worms for vitamins, your body can do that too (I don't recommend it).

In my research I have found numerous examples, personal blog accounts and scientific studies backing them of people fasting for a week or greater and suffering no ill effects. The real issues with fasting occur only after many weeks, with low vitamin / potassium / electrolyte consumption or when you fast while having low body fat resulting in true starvation.

In the example of the man who fasted 360 days and lost 350+lbs, doctors had him eating supplements and brewers yeast (protein, low calories) and they documented very few noticeable negative side effects which were addressed by adjustments to supplementation.

Starvation is when your body consumes itself. This happens when you completely exhaust your stored fats. Fasting becomes riskier after the first 21 days, the really dangerous effects such as referring syndrome only occur in extreme situations where you had indeed been starving for a period of time before eating.

I have lost 40lbs in the last year using these approaches and recommend them to everyone I meet. Fasting is a skill anyone can learn.

I believe fasting is the best way to lose weight, don't call it starving.

</comment><comment><USER27> Water fasting. But people don't want to listen.

<comment><USER28> Flat assertions of efficacy unadorned by empirical support may not be well received. However, I am sure that the idea is taken seriously by most, and that supporting evidence would be of great interest.

<comment><USER27> I used to back it up by quite a bit of data but I get downvoted to oblivion regardless of all the effort. Why bother anymore. I put it here, whoever is interested can research on their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> TL;DR

If pancreases produces less insulin, eat less calories.</comment>