America Is Drowning in Milk Nobody Wants - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/america-is-drowning-in-milk-nobody-wants <comment><USER2> Planet Money recently had a great episode about "Big Government Cheese", which covered the Carter administration's proposal to subsidize milk, which created a milk surplus so big that it had to create a bureaucracy to grade and store cheese, and then eventually, to repackage and give it away:

[https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...](https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=643471690)

> _DUFFIN: By the early 1980s, the dairy support program was costing taxpayers > around $2 billion a year. The government was buying 1 in every 4 pounds of > the country 's cheddar cheese. They actually had to rent out space in > multiple caves. At one point, the government was storing two pounds of > cheese for every single American citizen._

</comment><comment><USER3> There have been dairy issues since forever.

It works like this, if you just let the market decide then a few big dairy producers will drive all of the other dairies out of business and the only milk products on the market will be of lower quality than they are today. If you prop up the market with subsidies and minimum prices you force the cost of milk to rise and natural economics causes people to substitute something else that is less expensive. But if the subsidies are paid to the farmers, and not to the consumers, the farmers keep producing milk products even when the market doesn't want them at the price they are producing them.

Places that would like dairy products outside the US are already protecting their own dairy farmers and so they are tariffing the heck out of milk (see the Canadian discussion as part of the USMCA proposal).

Many dairy products are perishable with a short life although a big chunk of my uncle's dairy output ended up as non-fat dry milk. This makes it harder to store over periods of lower demand, and cows produce at a fairly constant rate whether you like it or not. Supply management is tough.

Milk and cheese would be a good candidate for a basic income sort of scheme. Where everyone would be issued milk and cheese vouchers every month that could be exchanged for milk and cheese at the local package milk store. People who didn't want their coupons could give them to people who did. That would create a 'base layer' of milk production and consumption that would keep dairies around but take milk and cheese out of the cost of living equation. I'm sure there are other reasons why this is impractical but the whole problem is fairly intractable as it is without putting farms out of business.

EDIT: One interesting thing would be to tie the price of sugared drinks to the price of milk. So it wouldn't be cheaper to give your kids soda than milk. Again, impractical but it is a challenging problem.

<comment><USER4> > _Milk and cheese would be a good candidate for a basic income sort of > scheme_

Why milk? Vegetables make more sense.

Milk is not a necessary foodstuff. Creating labelling standards for high- quality milk and letting the market do its job would be the most-reasonable outcome.

<comment><USER5> Vegetables aren't necessary either. Historically, humans (at least in Europe) consumed much more more milk than vegetables, deriving probably an order of magnitude more calories from dairy than from vegetables, because you could get more calories from an acre of cattle pasture than from an acre of grains fiels, and an order of magnitude more than from vegetables. Milk is also more nutritionally valuable, containing carbs, protein, and fat in very good proportion compared to vegetables. This is no surprise, since milk literally is produced by cows to be consumed by calves as their sole food.

I don't think basic milk vouchers is a good idea, but basic veggies is even worse.

<comment><USER6> "Orders of magnitude" sprinkled generously make this sound more factual than it is.

Even though modern fruit and vegetable farming systems are highly industrialized, relying on vast monocultures, fertilizers, pesticides, and tillage practices that require heavy machinery and plenty of fuel, they still produce more calories per input than beef and pork.

Most views are 2x - 4x people fed per acre from plants versus meats, with milk and eggs splitting the middle.

That said, even our current 'lacto ovo vegetarian' compromise diet is likely not sustainable.

[https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010](https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/78/3/660S/4690010)

<comment><USER5> > they still produce more calories per input than beef and pork.

True, but irrelevant. I never said anything about meat. Since the advent of agriculture until modernity, most humans ate very little meat, this is definitely true.

> Most views are 2x - 4x people fed per acre from plants versus meats, with > milk and eggs splitting the middle.

True, but irrelevant as well. Not only I never said anything about meat, but the discussion here is about milk vs. vegetables. Plants today are better yields in terms of calories per acre due to fertilizers being abundant, pesticides being available, and cultivars having been improved for better yields. However, it is irrelevant for the discussion at hand, because the plants that are better than milk are corn, soy, etc., not vegetables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Dairy farmers are free-market guys—they don't want to be told how much to produce,"

Sounds like a contradiction - if no one else, free-market will tell you how much to produce. Does not look like farmers are listening.

<comment><USER8> No, absent collision and when you have fixed costs, in a free market any individual producer ends up producing as much as possible. The market regulates production by people going out of business entirely.

This is why the EU built a complex production management system.

<comment><USER9> That might be how the free market is explained to a tenth grader, but it's not remotely the full picture.

\- Do you spend on production or ramp up marketing instead?

\- Do projections support taking out a loan to expand future production?

\- Do you have other products where your capital would be better directed?

\- Is there a point where marginal cost exceeds sale price?

The list of further considerations is endless. Nobody is just blindly producing as much as possible.

<comment><USER10> It's definitely not how it's explained to a tenth grader. In high school economics classes I was definitely introduced to marginal cost curves for firms in perfectly competitive markets, like so: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Economic...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Economics_Perfect_competition.svg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Excess milk? Make cheese curds and sell poutine. Never understood why it hasn't caught on much in the USA.

<comment><USER12> I'm actually surprised as well. Totally a match for the American diet. Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.

It might have more to do with the image of poutine. It's gravy, cheese, and fries, it looks messy and unhealthy. I'm not sure about the messy part (forks maybe), but sprinkle some chives on top (mostly for color) and most people will be fooled.

<comment><USER13> <off topic>

> Meanwhile in Alphabet City, NYC a restaurant sells it for $20 a pop.

Brindle Room, right? I've only had their burgers, but Mile End also has poutine for $9 and I can confirm that it is authentic enough for this Canadian.

<comment><USER12> I was blanking on the name when I was originally writing this, but yes it is Brindle Room.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Switzerland has had the exact same problem due to heavy dairy subsidies. Besides scaling back on subsidies, Fondue and Raclette was pushed heavily in marketing, which is probably why these are staples of Swiss food nowadays. I'm sometimes asking myself whether tabletop style Raclette couldn't be popular in the US. How strong is America's distaste for cooking food at the table (I'm just going by Lost in Translation here)?

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

<comment><USER15> Is this why Costco stores have so much cheap Jarlsberg Swiss?

<comment><USER16> _Jarlsberg Swiss_

??? Jarlsberg is a region in Norway not Switzerland?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This must be why the US wants to force Canada to get rid of it's milk supply management system.

[https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1254398531823](https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1254398531823)

</comment><comment><USER18> I switched to fortified vanilla soy milk about 2 weeks ago, (from 1% milk), and holy moly what a difference. I have a big bowl of breakfast cereal and milk for breakfast, and also milk in a morning latte and a mid-day latte. Switching to soy milk:

\- in 2 weeks I have lost about 5 lbs (all other food, and exercise routines, stayed the same) \- I feel less bloated after breakfast and after coffee

Maybe I was dealing with a slight lactose intolerance, I dunno (is there such a things as a "slight" lactose intolerance??). Anyway, I'm not switching back.

<comment><USER19> I've always avoided Soy as I read a long time ago that it contains plant based estrogen and can be a problem for men like gynecomastia. Of course, I have no idea if that's true or not but I'd rather not worry about it and just pick up Almond milk instead.

<comment><USER20> Humans don't digest soy in the same way as animal models - studies found no hormonal impact on a heavy soy diet. If hormone absorption was that readily influenced digestively one should only eat meat of the same sex and athletes should be eating rocky mountain oysters and spotted hyena meat frequently as a loophole for steroids as it is just food that happens to have testerone and not drugs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The first graph, "New York's Shrinking Dairy Herd Starts To Grow Again", has a Y-axis starting at 610,000 and a maximum of about 627,000. I expect Bloomberg to represent a 2.5% change more honestly.

<comment><USER22> It's common in financial publications, and in other publications with numerically literate audiences, to focus statistical graphics on the region of interest (except in bar charts, in which bars are expected to sit on a baseline of zero). For example, stock charts, one of the most common plots in financial publications, follow this practice:

[http://google.com/search?q=GOOG](http://google.com/search?q=GOOG)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Surprised there was no mention of non dairy milk. Almond, soy and others have all taken over much of the aisles, has to leave a mark I would imagi ne.

<comment><USER24> Keep in mind it often has a much longer shelf life so the shelf space is not a good measure.* Also, my local store has milk cart shelves on wheels that can be restocked much faster than fixed shelves.

Tip: the same non dairy milk can be found a smidgen cheaper non refrigerated

<comment><USER25> I've never seen it on sale refrigerated, really. It's generally shelf stable; why would you bother?

<comment><USER26> At Costco, they sell box type non-dairy milk as room temp and shelf stable, while other almond and coconut milks are in half gallon form and refrigerated. Not sure whether the latter actually require refrigeration before opening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm sure with falling prices the market will correct itself.

I was going to make a snarky comment about US dairy subsidies, but aside from a billion dollar giveaway in 2009, those are almost nothing today. $370,000 in 2017.

<comment><USER28> It sounds like these dairy subsidies fluctuate greatly.

 _In 2016, the dairy industry asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for a staggering $150 million to buy their excess cheese. A spokesperson for the National Farmers Union said they were disappointed to receive "only" $20 million._ [0]

And according to this 600 page Canadian report, indirect subsidies are also a huge factor and contribute to 73 percent of producer returns coming from subsidies. [1]

 _The American government contributed around $22.2 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to the dairy sector in 2015._

[0] [https://thehill.com/opinion/energy- environment/377406-dairy-...](https://thehill.com/opinion/energy- environment/377406-dairy-industry-doesnt-deserve-american-taxpayer-bailout)

[1] [https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy- subsidies-...](https://www.realagriculture.com/2018/02/u-s-dairy-subsidies- equal-73-percent-of-producer-returns-says-new-report/)

<comment><USER29> If you're interested in this you can dig deeper at [https://farm.ewg.org](https://farm.ewg.org)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This made me think of this incredible piece of art by Mishka Henner that I saw in Edinburgh at the Scottish National Gallery: [https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots](https://mishkahenner.com/Feedlots)

<comment><USER31> what _is_ that?

<comment><USER32> Massive cattle farms according to the text below the pictures.

<comment><USER31> It looked so disconcerting I clicked it away immediately. I was so sure it was a tiled wall of some kind in a slaughter house - and a nightmarish rendition of a cross section of a heart or an animal or a clogged vein.

It was all of these things

<comment><USER32> Yes. The pictures look strange indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm curious how much of this is because of demographic trends in America-- Lactose intolerance for adults is relatively common among everyone except northern europeans.

Would especially explain the decline in liquid milk consumption (and also part of the popularity of greek yogurt, which is pretty low in lactose content).

<comment><USER34> everyone except

1\. northwestern Europeans, centered around Belgium

2\. The Maasai tribe, of Kenya and Tanzania

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Stop breeding milk cows...

<comment><USER15> A supply side solution to a weakening demand? That's just logical enough to work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The funny part is, in Asia, Dairy is a premium. Look at Philippines for example, stagnant production since 1995-

[http://www.nda.da.gov.ph/images/2017/data/Phil%20%20DAiry%20...](http://www.nda.da.gov.ph/images/2017/data/Phil%20%20DAiry%20Update%202017.pdf)

I'm not Filipino, but, hell I would love to manufacture milk products.

The thing that fuels it is A: local population isn't used to dairy. B: Yogurt and such are considered high premium -- a half kilo of yogurt at the store costs $5-7$, a kilo about $10, from Australia.

<comment><USER36> [https://gain.fas.usda.gov/Recent%20GAIN%20Publications/Dairy...](https://gain.fas.usda.gov/Recent%20GAIN%20Publications/Dairy%20and%20Products%20Annual_Manila_Philippines_10-3-2017.pdf) Better article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I had a thought the other day. Did we convince people that fat was bad, and then used that to water down milk so that from one harvest we could sell more watery milk and other dairy fat products?

<comment><USER38> They skimmed the fat so it could be sold as cheese and other dairy products, yes. Americans basically didn't even reduce their dairy fat intake, they just increased how much $$ they were spending on it across more dairy products.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Chobani is mentioned so many times that this must be paid for by that company. The article is a dress that barely covers an advertisement's bare bottom.

</comment><comment><USER39> Do farmers ever learn? Bandwagoning onto the latest food fad is the failure story that just repeats itself over and over again. Farms are firms in a perfectly competitive market: why invest oodles of capital to chase what is basically noise in the market? Why is anyone surprised when the market contracts?

</comment><comment><USER40> They could have export more milk, UHT, Cream Cheese, Butter etc.

Instead they won't interested. They won't interested in completing against EU, AUS, New Zealand's dairy products. I doubt they will lose any money if they were priced competitively against it, they are just likely to have less profit margins.

Actually that is not a totally fair assessment, since a few of them did complete on price, but their quality won't as good. And they blame it on their international sales staff, which has since changed hands multiple times.

P.S Those companies do not include any Multinational like Nestle USA, Danone, and Kraft Heinz.

</comment><comment><USER41> I found accidentally many of my digestive problems gone just after I stopped consuming milk-based products for a week. I wonder now how and why our diet has evolved in that way.

<comment><USER42> The ability to digest milk's lactose in adults is only retained in some Northern European and African (notably cattle raising cultures like the Maasai) descendants who traditionally drank milk as adults. It's genetic AFAIK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> China is a massive consumer of dried milk powder. I wonder if the trump tariffs have anything to do with the changing demand for US milk.

<comment><USER44> Bound to be, but also some competitors on the international market like New Zealand (which has no government price supports or subsidies), have free trade agreements with China.

If you become insular and erect tariff walls people play where there are none and they make more money.

The real problem is govt price supports, often brought in to tide people over for a year, once people start to depend on them they really stop working, you get stuck with inefficient industries when people should be growing something else, or simply be in another business. When NZ cut all farm subsidies back in the 80s farmers formed farmer cooperatives, in the dairy industry they now own most of the back end milk processing infrastructure, they're big enough that they are big players on the world markets, and the profits go back to their owners

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If I were the milk industry, I'd heavily promote meal replacements that use milk as a base. Especially in places where milk is cheap. I love Milk Fuel(formerly Schmilk) and I think it would be a good breakfast replacement for the masses.

[http://superbodyfuel.com/shop/milk-fuel/](http://superbodyfuel.com/shop/milk- fuel/)

</comment><comment><USER46> We just opened up the Canadian market.

<comment><USER47> (Not sure who 'we' is but,) in the recent renegotiation of NAFTA, Canada did surrender some additional access to their domestic dairy market. The USA was demanding 100% access, but got only a couple of % more. But CETA, CPTPP, and USMCA combined get only 10% total of the total Canadian market.

Basically, Canada prefers to have its supply management system, and the USA prefers have its massive subsidies.

<comment><USER48> Canadian here. Although my personal politics tends to be CENTRE-right (note the capitalization) and favouring market forces, I do see some merit in supply management to avoid the extreme pain being experienced by the American dairy farmers mentioned in the article. Yes, we mostly do prefer supply management, paid for by dairy consumers, than massive subsidies, paid for by all taxpayers and leading to wasted output.

For details, read Wikipedia [0]. Some quotes:

\- High (tariffs) are only placed on imports above the quota, not on all the dairy products sold to Canada.

\- Canada's milk quota system is butterfat-based so the highest TRQ is on butter at 298.5%.

\- By 2018 the United States's quantitative (tariff) threshold for the import of milk products is 3% and Canada's is 10%.

\- designed to prevent shortages and surpluses, to ensure farmers a fair rate of return and Canadian consumer access to a high-quality, stable, and secure supply of these sensitive products.

Mr T, in his incendiary speeches to his tribe, was selective with his facts. The 300% tariff does not apply to all dairy; only butter and only when exceeding USA's quota (Canadian farmers who exceed their quota cannot sell at all). The threats and beatings delivered by Mr T's negotiators did "open up" the Canadian dairy market a little, but supply management is still intact and "diversification" is now on the minds of many Canadians.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_(Canada)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_management_\(Canada\))

<comment><USER49> As a sidebar, the US has its own 'supply management'-style policies in place for markets like sugar, where Canada's access was limited to 0.1% of the market, pre-USMCA. [0]

I wonder what will end having greater economic impact in the long run: the relatively minor 'tweaks' USMCA makes in these markets, or the extent to which Mr T has shaken the foundations of Canadians' relationship with the US.

[0] [https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/f...](https://business.financialpost.com/commodities/agriculture/forget- canadas-dairy-producers-the-u-s-sugar-cartel-has-an-even-sweeter-deal-from- its-government)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> What about turning milk into a biofuel? Can yeast grow in milk and produce alcohol?

<comment><USER51> Seems like that would be awfully inefficient. We use oil (fertilizer) to grow corn and soybeans, which we then feed to cows, which then convert it to milk. Each step in the process reduces the efficiency. Why not just use the oil for fuel? Or convert the corn the ethanol if that type of oil is not useful as fuel? The efficiency of ethanol is already in question due to the use of corn.

<comment><USER52> It could be a way to use the excess or that milk which is about to spoil. There's a large amount of fat left over from the production of skim milk. This fat usually gets turned into cheese, that's why pizzas are more cheesy than in the past.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Didn't read the article. Just saw the "Bloomberg" in parentheses and thought "ah some reporter at Bloomberg is trying to get his yearly bonus by moving the dairy market."

Which is irrational and silly. But it's amazing the way something like the controversy around "The Big Hack" brews suspicion.

<comment><USER54> > _Which is irrational and silly._

Not really irrational. Half of what's published is PR in one form or another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I wouldn't expect Bloomberg to represent anything honestly.

<comment><USER56> I wouldn't read Washington Post for technology: I read it for politics. I don't read Bloomberg for technology news, I read it for investment news.

Well, there's certainly a problem with Bloomberg's technology / cyber-attack division. But Bloomberg as a whole is one of the better investment newspapers. IMO, Bloomberg probably should just stop writing about cyber-attacks. They're clearly incompetent at that and its causing people to lose trust in the greater newspaper.

But I won't go to Ars Technica to read about insider Washington politics. Its a matter of recognizing what these papers are "good" in.

<comment><USER57> Haven't you seen that idea, that you might know some media sucks in tech, but think is ok in other stuff, because you are an expert in tech, but not in that other stuff? E.g. Bloomberg might suck in everything, but you'd only see a problem with tech.

<comment><USER56> I'm not an expert in finance / investing. But I think I'm good enough to see that Bloomberg has great economic analysis and breakdowns into company financials.

Here are some key quotes from the article in question that demonstrate Bloomberg's research ability into financial / investment matters.

> From April 2017 to April 2018, sales of Chobani products grew only 1 percent > while sales by all companies in the segment slipped 2.2 percent.

> The key ratio of income-to-feed costs reveals that dairy farmers have very > little margin left these days, said Bill Brooks, an economist at INTL > FCStone. Feed such as alfalfa and hay are more expensive than last year, as > are labor and energy expenses.

> The amount of milk dumped by farmers in the U.S. Northeast reached almost > 145 million pounds through July—the most in at least a decade—including 23.6 > million pounds that month alone.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment>-

These are specific statistics. And sure, they may be available from publicly available research sources, but they contribute to the article's primary thesis. Knowing what statistics seem relevant for a particular article is what Bloomberg is good at.

Besides, these individual statistics are relatively easy to check. The main benefit of Bloomberg is their ability to collate various information sources together into a singular article.

</comment><comment><USER58> I found this article unreadable as Bloomberg's relentless assault (of ads) on my eyes nearly gave me a seizure. Note to self: Don't read Bloomberg.

</comment><comment><USER59> The US dairy industry and the USDA have a large operation to promote cheese. With everything. Over half of Dunkin' Donuts offerings now include cheese, and they are rebranding to "Dunkin". Cheese filled tacos are now a thing.

I recently chewed out a restaurant manager of a "natural" and "green" restaurant when they started putting cheese on a piece of plain salmon on top of fresh greens. That's a chef problem - they have to add something to justify being paid more than McDonalds.

<comment><USER60> You yelled at a restaurant manager for putting cheese on your salmon? Wow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> > For decades, yogurt was runny and high in sugar. "Then Chobani comes onto > the scene and changes the idea of what yogurt can be."

Um...

Plain yogurt from Chobani: serving size 150g, of which 15g sugar. ( [https://www.chobani.com/products/greek/plain/non-fat- plain/](https://www.chobani.com/products/greek/plain/non-fat-plain/) )

Cookies-and-cream flavored yogurt from Yoplait: serving size 170g, of which 19g sugar. (All yogurt in the same product line has the same amount of sugar, but it's more fun to quote it for cookies-and-cream. [https://www.yoplait.com/product/regular-original-cookies- cre...](https://www.yoplait.com/product/regular-original-cookies-cream) )

Chobani didn't change the idea that yogurt is high in sugar. What was that comment about?

<comment><USER62> There's a chance that is lactose, which, per the FDA [1] counts as sugar for nutrition labelling purposes.

[1] [https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/interactivenutritionf...](https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/interactivenutritionfactslabel/factsheets/sugars.pdf)

[2][https://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/johannah-sakimura- nut...](https://www.everydayhealth.com/columns/johannah-sakimura-nutrition- sleuth/dont-sweat-over-sugar-in-plain-dairy/)

<comment><USER63> > There's a chance that is lactose, which, per the FDA [1] counts as sugar for > nutrition labelling purposes.

I'd expect most sugar in yogurt to _not_ be lactose: part of the point and advantage of yogurt and other fermented dairy (and they're commonly consumed in places with low to no lactase persistence) is the cultures break down much of the milk's lactose into simpler sugars. In fact, the chobani nutrition section quotes 6g carbs, 4g sugars, less than 5% lactose.

More to the point, unsweetened yogurt should contain about the same sugar ratio as milk (4~6% by weight on average), >10% (the yoplait one) is way above the upper end and indicates added sugars. GP misread the chobani's nutrition label though, they quote 6g carbs (4g sugars) per 5.3oz (150g) not 15g.</comment></comment></comment>


What CEOs are reading in 2017 - <AUTHOR> http://www.mckinsey.com/global-themes/leadership/what-ceos-are-reading-in-2017 <comment><USER2> The 'new' trend of 'Reading your way into success' is quite interesting. Not really sure if I have any more additional comments than so for now, but it is something to see how it will evolve.</comment>


Spotify hit the 10 million users milestone - <AUTHOR> http://eu.techcrunch.com/2010/09/15/spotify-10-million/

<comment><USER2> I recently unsubscribed from Spotify after being a premium subscriber for more than a year, and here's why:

* First, their library is not big enough. Many albums (especially from independent labels) are only added months after release, if at all. Some titles are removed after a while for apparently no reason (I'm still pissed off that Psychic Chasms from Neon Indian was removed as it is one of the best albums of 2009).

* The iPhone app simply sucks. Sure it looks nice, but dear lord it eats a lot of battery. On my iPhone 4, listening to Spotify during my morning commute consumes about 20% of the battery as opposed to <1% of the iPod app. This is simply unacceptable. I guess this must have something to do with Spotify not being able to use hardware decoding as it uses Ogg Vorbis, not MP3 or AAC.

* The 3 devices limit for offline tracks is not enough. I've got a work desktop, a home desktop, a notebook, an iPhone and an iPad. That's 5. Meaning that I cannot use the offline tracks feature on the desktops (as those ones have the most stable Internet connection).

I might subscribe again in the future if they solve these issues, but at the moment, in my opinion, it doesn't worth it.

</comment><comment><USER3> And with good reason.

The service just do everything right (and apparently have no problem with agreeing on a model with FB)

I think it is very likely spotify will be huge if they can get their rights issues managed (yes that's perhaps a big if)

<comment><USER4> Why is that "a big if"?

They seem to have good contracts with all of the major record labels.

And, the artists like it too. Some musicians here in Norway are reporting that they are now receiving more money from Spotify than they are from iTunes.

I don't have any doubt that they've got things under control on the rights side.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think he means regarding the US...

<comment><USER4> But if Spotify has successfully negotiated rights with the labels in the UK, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, France and Spain, is there any reason to suspect that they won't be able to reach an agreement with _those same labels_ in the US?

<comment><USER5> Since Spotify hasn't launched in the US yet, I would guess that the negotiations are not really going forward. Daniel Ek said in an interview that they hoped to launch in the US soon, and that was more than a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't have much money to throw around these months, but I subscribed to Premium yesterday. In my opinion, the service ia probably worth £100 per month or more. It just seems like such an obscene luxury, being able to plug a small device into your hifi then listen to virtually anything you want at a high bit rate, for as long as you want. I was reading a radio stations Top 1000 tunes and decided to get a month's subscription because there was a Spotify playlist for it. I mean of all the things I might spend £10 on, that is _easily_ worth it. Then there's the other types of listening it makes possible, like listening to dozens of different versions of the same jazz standard, or compilation box sets you'd never find (I recommend the John Lennon covers one, it's from a series of charity releases I think). Just add a few more features like more metadata for the tracks and it will be perfect.

That said, at the same time I think it is insane and surely unsustainable. If someone records a great record, why should the whole world get to listen to it completely free (well, there is advertising money but doesn't anoint to much from what I'm lead to believe), makes no sense. And on the other hand, if they don't release their record to Spotify, they are still facing economic competition from the service. Faced with a choice between Spotify's enormous database and some particular new single, I'll take the former and forego the latter.

Perhaps they will change it though, like force a certain number of purchases per month to maintain the service, or limit the number of plays a track can get before it becomese unavailable.

</comment><comment><USER7> I now subscribe to the £5/month unlimited service and I'm so glad that I signed up. I listen to new music pretty much all day at work thanks to Spotify and now I don't have to turn the volume down on my headphones whenever an advert comes on. It really is a small price to pay considering the vast amount of music that you get access to.

Having said that most people I know don't pay the subscription but I believe adding a small extra incentive such as 2-3 free songs per month might well convert them to becoming subscribers.

<comment><USER8> I'd pay GBP 5/month for premium - ie, phone access - but GBP 10 is too much. An ad-hoc survey of my friends show most of them are in the same boat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Any app that makes you go "Whoa" when you first use it, and then only impresses you more and more as you use it has to be on to a good thing.

It's a simple app, does exactly what it says on the tin - and is fast as hell. Brilliant. The fact that the free model plays adverts every once in a blue moon (significantly less than commercial radio) is a massive boon.

Well done Spotify, and good luck!

edit: typo

<comment><USER10> I couldn't agree more. I've been a Spotify premium user from day one (I loathe commercials), and it's absolutely worth the monthly fee. As a premium user you also get the iOS/Android app, which lets you cache up to 3333 tracks on your mobile device for offline playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I can't use Spotify in Belgium. How does it compare with Grooveshark ? It looks to be the same concept, one is a desktop app, the other a webapp.

Grooveshark doesn't have audio ads, no limit (that I know of) but does not seem to have a mobile app. What makes people pay for Spotify's service compared to what Grooveshark has to offer ?

<comment><USER5> One really big selling point for Spotify is the quality of experience. For example, the median playback latency for starting a track is just 265 ms.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How Much Software Do You Build Before Attempting to Sell It? (B2B) - <AUTHOR> As B2B SaaS founders, how much product have you actually developed, before trying to secure B2B commitments from potential customers? <comment><USER2> Always be selling. You'll know when customers start paying or don't.

The big thing to watch out for is becoming a custom development shop for your first, or largest, client's. Because they helped "make" you, you'll feel loyalty towards them. They can certainly help solidify you product, but make sure what you build can be used by all clients.

</comment><comment><USER3> You just need the core of what your product does, it doesn't need polish. Minimum Viable Product is the term you're looking for, just build it modular so you can customise it for different clients.

</comment><comment><USER4> Very good q, I am curious too.</comment>


Experimental device generates electricity from the coldness of the universe - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-05-experimental-device-electricity-coldness-universe.html <comment><USER2> I've thought of trying this before with a toy sterling engine and a tinfoiled satellite dish. You can make ice that way when the air temp is up to 9 or 10 celcius if you put a shot glass of water in polystyrene foam with an opening at the focal point of the dish.

<comment><USER3> Wait what?

Wouldn't the infrared reflectivity of the parabola concentrate heat energy _in to_ the focal point?

<comment><USER2> You point it at an empty patch of sky.

edit - have a go at pointing an infrared thermometer at an empty patch of sky on a clear night.

<comment><USER3> Oh, right, I understand now, thanks.

<comment><USER2> I love radiative cooling. When you first realise what the hell is going on, it is one of those 'aha' moments of real deeper appreciation of a subject.

<comment><USER4> My favorite demo is an electric stoves, turn it on and stare at it from a point along the plane that it's on and you start to marvel at how much heat can be transferred by radiation.

<comment><USER3> Isn't that convection? The air coming in to contact with the hot surface rapidly heats and rises and cooler air rushed in to replace it.

I thought that's what we saw as per your instructions? I thought air (mostly nitrogen and oxygen) is mostly transparent to infrared radiation?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe one reason we can't detect advanced civilizations is because they're capturing and recycling all their waste heat & waste EM.

We could start looking for cold spots that should be warm.

<comment><USER6> Could be. I never bought the whole Dyson spheres idea.

A truly advanced civilization wouldn't need that much energy (they would be very efficient), and certainly wouldn't need to "kidnap" a start for that.

A single digit percent of the Earth would need to be covered with solar panels with today's technology for our energetic consumption, I don't see why advanced civilizations would need let's say 10% of the energy of a star (let alone need to capture it)

<comment><USER7> > they would be very efficient

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

> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) > occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the > efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for > any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to > increasing demand.[1]

> In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that > technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to > the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued > that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be > relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.[4][5]

With enough energy crazy things are possible. Terraforming planets, human- lifespan interstellar travel, swarms of space habitats allowing everybody to have their own ecosystem changing to their will. Assuming people won't do it because they don't do it now (when energy is limited) is unwise.

Don't you think some rich people would like to have their own space habitat where they can change gravity, day-night cycle, and the whole ecosystem at will? It's possible with current technology, just very expansive. It creates new real estate from scratch. With enough energy everybody could have one.

I don't see any point at which people decide "this is enough". Always there will be some people that want more.

BTW I agree it won't be a Dyson sphere, it will probably be a Dyson swarm. Much easier to start, cheaper, and has all the benefits of a sphere.

<comment><USER6> That's a good comeback

The counterproblem is: capturing energy from a star is one thing, transporting it to where it can be used a different problem (as we even see today with electric cars)

Or maybe they will just mine bitcoin with it, who knows

<comment><USER8> Transporting energy from a star is simple: concentrating the light. The most basic incremental design for a Dyson sphere would be a swarm of mirror satellites.

How do we see energy transport problem with electric cars? That's only a matter of the right sockets not being available. The power grid is there.

<comment><USER6> Can the grid handle 10% of cars moving from gas to electricity? 50%? 90%?

Not to mention battery issues (range, charge time, safety, etc) which are getting better, no doubt about it

It's not only a matter of having the right socket

<comment><USER7> It's complicated, for sure, and will need changes in the infrastructure.

But it has some advantages as well. Imagine 10 000 000 cars with 50 kWh battry capacity each connected to the grid and letting 10% of their capacity to be used for balancing of the network. If the grid has excess power - charge to 100%. If the grid lacks power - discharge to 90%.

That's 50 GWh of balancing capacity.

It basically solves the problems with unpredictability of most of the renewable power sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This isn't new. In fact the same authors already started a company called Skycool that was featured here in a story like 2 years ago. It uses a special coated/layered radiative plate that's specially tuned to an atmospheric transparency window to dump heat to the sky.

The problem is that where this would be economically viable, you would generally already choose to use solar panels for the electricity -- cheaper and similarly/more efficient.

<comment><USER10> Whilst the raw efficiency of peltiers and solar panels weigh in the favour of solar panels - this design just has to point to the sky. Which for some situations, may make it more viable after all. Ships may be a use for this.

But then I'm not up to date on the state of play in peltier advances. I've read some fascinating developments in rectenna's, though no efficiency numbers jumping out. But something that could completely change this whole area of electricity generating. Could this design be adapted to any new tech though if something wow around the corner jumps out as being x better than the best peltier. Maybe from what I can tell, but for now it has some niche uses without a doubt, but you won't see them in your neibours back yard or roof anytime soon if ever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So a thermoelectric generator? Saying this is using the "coldness of the universe" is technically true, but it's a bit of a grandiose way of describing the fact that nighttime is colder than day. It would be pretty neat to harvest the natural nighttime cooling of panels though.

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

<comment><USER12> I don't think it's grandiose at all, this TED talk explains the effect pretty well [https://youtu.be/7a5NyUITbyk](https://youtu.be/7a5NyUITbyk)

Radiative cooling functions both during night and day.

<comment><USER13> Not sure if it is mentioned in the video you linked, but a Stanford team has been doing interesting research into this type of thing in recent years;

[https://news.stanford.edu/2017/09/04/sending-excess-heat- sky...](https://news.stanford.edu/2017/09/04/sending-excess-heat-sky/)

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/532826/material-cools- bui...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/532826/material-cools-buildings-by- sending-heat-into-space/)

[http://web.stanford.edu/group/fan/](http://web.stanford.edu/group/fan/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good thing the universe is expanding, or else the void would be overflowing with photon waste from projects like this.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps that's why it is expanding.

<comment><USER15> Oh... messing with the ontology. I like it.

<comment><USER2> We'll probably find out eventually that the whole cosmic accelleration thing is a side effect of the use of FTL drives by advanced civilisations.

edit - with pan-galactic tickets getting a little bit more expensive every visit.

<comment><USER8> Better than (minor spoiler for Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy) finding out that the universe used to have many more dimensions, but in some past wars, dimensionality reduction weapons were used.

<comment><USER2> I just like the idea that somewhere out there in the universe, there is a minor business envoy to the q'Zickl floating in a waiting lounge, complaining that 'There's much less tentacle room these days than there was a millennia or two ago when hopping business class to Miami. Yes, that Miami, the one in the Horsehead Nebulae. I know, they've made the shuttle smaller due to the greens regulating inertial mass per passenger again. I'd feed those greenshifters to unts.'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So they're cooling the Earth to make energy.

You could imagine a dystopian sci-fi novel where "at the end of times" the only source of energy available is this - slowly leech heat out of your planet to make some energy. Decisions, decisions...

<comment><USER17> I've always wondered if some far future civilisation grappling with the heat death of the universe will judge me harshly for mixing hot and cold water together just to make warm water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I always thought someone would make a device that can suck heat out of the air to make electricity.

(Kind of like a heat pump, only that it could completely power itself from the heat in the air instead of needing to consume electricity.)

<comment><USER19> Electricity cannot be generated from ambient heat. There must be a temperature differential.

<comment><USER18> Is that a physical limitation, like the speed of light? Or is that a limitation of our current knowledge?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's close to the same energy solar panels should produce from starlight. So, hard to find a useful application.

<comment><USER21> Starlight plus airglow is at least 6 orders of magnitude below sunlight. Granted, it goes all night, but it seems like 4 watts per square meter is still 3 orders of magnitude above photoelectric gathering of starlight.

That 4 watt number comes from a confused paragraph and it is possible the journalist broke some numbers while handling them.

<comment><USER20> Yea, I was using 64 nanowatts * (1,000,000 making what assumptions?) = 0.064 watts vs a theoretical ~.001 from starlight.

It seems unlikely you could improve the system by 64,000,000 using ambient temperature at night, operating extremely close to a theoretical maximum regularly, and be cheap enough for 4w/m to be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> (research) Full Text : [https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5089783](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5089783)

</comment><comment><USER23> vis a vis global warning, would it be better to just let that energy go out into the universe without harvesting it?

<comment><USER24> Assuming there is a demand for energy (given) than generating energy to meet that demand (e.g. by burning coal or gas) has a much larger negative impact I would imagine.

It's sorta like capturing braking energy. This used to be dissipated as heat but now can be turned into energy which improves MPG and therefore reduces the need for fossil fuels, no?

<comment><USER23> Thanks. I follow your reasoning. The "if" is key: will humanity just add, or actually substitute, this source of energy?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: I built a site that IMO can be huge. How can I promote it? - <AUTHOR>

I love to build stuff on the Internet so I created http://guyshelpmedecide.com - A place where you can easily get advice from your friends on buying decisions
It is still kind of a pet project, but I do believe on its potential to go viral
The problem is that I'm a coder and I don't have a clue on how can I promote it.
Maybe trying to contact blogs/media and hope they write about it? Or it is better to create a facebook Ads campaign targeting amazon fans?
I really appreciate any ideas, feedback on the product or whatever that can help me to make this site huge <comment><USER2> I think this is a cool concept. Let me caution you that I worked on a similar project about 3 years ago. What we found out was that most people that solicit advice, ignore it. We used affiliate links to monetize, and didn't find social feedback to be significantly better at converting than blog posts, or anything else.

What that meant was that we were in the same eyeballs rat race that everyone else is.

If what you are asking is how do you become the next pinterest, in terms of viral growth, it's a lot of hard work and a dash of luck. Shake and hope it turns into gold.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thx for commenting.

I'm using affiliate links to monetize it too, but it definitely it is not a company or something that needs to break even in x months. Actually I had a great time coding it and I learnt a lot about the technologies it uses (facebook open graph, amazon apis, twitter bootstrap...) so in terms of ROI it's already covered by far.

Being said that, of course I want it to be huge. Not as the next pinterest because it'd require lots of resources and energy but more like a bootstraped project that grows organically and we'll see.

In other words, I built something that I want to use (no other ambitions), and right now I am wondering if it could be something mainstream or not

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Interesting, though I would like to caution you regarding your assumption that it may go viral. In the world of business - assumptions are very dangerous.

Let me give you an example of what goes viral. I recently came across an app for calling a cab using a smart phone. They advertised it very cleverly. They said, think about you are stuck on the road at an unknown location. It is 2:00 AM in the morning and there's no one around! With our app, you can call a cab with a single click without knowing a thing about your location. All you have to do is click the button, stay put and a cab will be there promptly.

Now, I travel a lot so I realized that this could be really nice and handy. So, I immediately downloaded the app. I spoke with my wife and guess what? She downloaded it as well as she thought this could come in handy for her as well. My wife is more social than I am so she posted this newly found app on FB and within no time, most of her friends had downloaded this app as well.

The important thing I am trying to convey about virility to you is that it has to have two key ingredients - utility and the sense of urgency. If you can effectively communicate those two ingredients - your app will go viral. Otherwise, it's a rat race so before you develop it a whole lot - test out the concept and its virility!

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree with your virility point.

Perhaps the title of my Ask HN is too much ambitious. I't be better something like "how to make it start getting traction" (more convenient than getting viral)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think it looks great!

In order for other people to start using it, it needs to look like it's being used. I think that you should create about a 100 users and add a few hundred products and comments. It'll take you a few hours of work, but it'll make the site appear to be much more successful, thus bringing in more users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree, right now the site doesn't look like it's being used. In fact it isn't cause it's brand new.

However I don't want to make all this monotone work. Do you know any place where I could outsource that?

<comment><USER4> In all honesty, I'd just go ahead and do it yourself. It's easy mindless work. Put a movie on the tv, sit back with your laptop and just go at it. You'll get more done by the end of the film than you'd think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want my friends advice on buying things. I want expert opinions from places like Cnet and ConsumerReviews.

Also word to the wise don't focus on trying to get your app to go viral, it really doesn't tend to work like that. Also success in general - real success - is almost by definition a slow process.

<comment><AUTHOR> I probably prefer expert opinions while buying tech products (for example a new HD TV), but I'll give much more credit to a friends' first hand experience on that same TV than the expert advise. That's the base idea of guyshelpmedecide.com

And as for the success opinion I fully agree with you. I don't pretend to create an overnight million dollar business from that, it was just an experiment that looks nice for me

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Have you figured out your target market and validated it?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I just built something I wanted to use but I'm not sure at all if the market is worth the try

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is an amazing idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm glad you like it! Now I have to find a way to attract users and see if they like it too :)

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't necessarily target specific markets. Things I've purchased in the last year that I would have used this for:

1\. Herbal teas

2\. A camcorder

3\. A digital camera

4\. A laptop

5\. Console games

6\. A new phone (which I still haven't bought, because I can't find one I'm comfortable with)

Most of those are electronics, but I'm sure that if I thought about it longer I could come up with a bunch more.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not targeted. Users can add any product as long as amazon sells it

<comment><USER3> My question is - if they are buying a product from amazon - why don't they check product reviews posted right on amazon? Why do they need a different site? I do agree that opinions from friends and family counts a lot but the concept has many unknowns.

1\. You need to communicate (with friends and family) what product you want buy from amazon 2\. Then your friends and family need to have purchased the same product 3\. Now, when you are looking for a product, you need to drive them to make a recommendation.

I think you should quickly test the concept and obtain some real feedback before scaling it up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that you get the whole thing wrong. GuysHelpMeDecide is a tool where you enter a question for example:

* What iphone should I buy?

And lets you enter 2 or 3 choices:

* iPhone 4S 16GB white * iPhone 4S 16GB black

The key here is that the search for this products is light fast and easy. It grabs from amazon.com the title of the product, image, description and even the price, but let's you modify it (if you don't want the price to be public or you want to customize the description with your opinion on that product).

Once created the poll it appears on your facebook friends wall, if they click on the story they'll see the page with the question, the choices and they'll be able to vote and to comment.

See a quick iPhone color example here:

<http://guyshelpmedecide.com/uA7L>

None of your friends needs necessarily to own an iPhone for providing a valid opinion.

I have endless conversation with my geek friends about the new LCD HD whatever 3D tv and none of us have ever tried it.

Hope it gets clearer now

<comment><USER3> I am sorry, I was out of town. My bad, I now see what you were suggesting. I am much clear about the concept. I also looked at your source code and I am assuming that amazon is paying you CPA right?

May be you should apply for shopping.com partners program and negotiate CPC payment based on their rate card. That way, you immediately start making CPC money when you drive traffic and you are not just bound to amazon. Though, amazon is good starting point as Shopping.com will ask to see your website (as a small demo). They are little slow but you can also try shopzilla affiliate program (CPC only).

Once you get good traction and traffic starts building, you will start getting offers straight from various merchants.

Hope things work out well!

Good luck :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I am using amazon affiliates, which pays me a 4% on all the purchases we refer.

Thx for the info on other shopping affiliate platforms (I didn't know them), but right now my focus is on trying to get traction and traffic to the site. After that we'll see the best way to monetize it</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Dutch graduate wanting to work at FAANG but not getting invited, why? - <AUTHOR> I studied a bachelor/master CS in amsterdam (and master game design). Did a couple of side projects, have 1 year full-time TA experience, 9 months full time coding bootcamp experience and 7 months full-time programming experience. And yet when I send my resume and cover letter to FAANG Amsterdam and FAANG USA, I never get invited.<p>Why is this? <comment><USER2> Let's turn this around: why would they invite you? What makes your application stand out from the dozens/hundreds similar applications they receive every day? Were you top of your class? Do you have specific domain knowledge? Do you know someone on the inside?

Not to bash you, but these companies get to pick the best candidates. Just the education and some experience alone isn't enough to get you in, you have to stand out in some way.

</comment><comment><USER3> It depends a lot on how you present yourself. I am presuming that you applied through their websites and have not heard back from them? Did you try contacting recruiters? Do you have friends/colleagues who could provide an internal reference?</comment>


Top ten open source gifts for the holidays - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.com/life/12/11/top-ten-open-source-gifts-holidays

<comment><USER2> Lots of good open hardware in there. Raspberry Pi, MaKey Makey, etc.</comment>


OAuth is a pain to use for desktop applications - <AUTHOR> http://www.ownedthx.com/blog/2009/05/10/oauth-is-a-pain-to-use-for-desktop-applications/

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure the author understands the benefit of OAuth. here's an analogy:

First, let's assume that the end user uses the same username/password combination for every website, which is quite common. Also, assume that twitter and your server accept the username/password combination as a basic auth encoded string. What you have, in OAuth terms, is a universally acceptable auth token, without the shared secret (similar to an unsalted password hash). Anyone in possession of this token can access any resource on any website as the end user (assuming they have a single username/password everywhere).

So OAuth allows you to take this universal token (or at least the information contained in this token: username/pass), and generate a new access token which can only access a limited resource for a given service, sometimes for a limited period of time. Also, it has a shared secret, so it's harder to abuse.

For the end user, it's actually much safer to keep the access token & secret locally vs. making them login to your central service with a username/password. If the username/password gets out, they no longer control their identity online. If the access token/secret gets out, they no longer control the resource.

<comment><AUTHOR> A good summary of OAuth, but as the author, I assure you I do understand this key benefit of OAuth. Admittedly I didn't make a point of it, but there are alot of sites that do a good job of explaining this (as well as your comment).

The issue of the article isn't that. It's when one is actually building a desktop application from scratch. You end up building a web site with a user login... just so you can store the application secret securely!

Note that when I say application secret, I'm not referring to the user's access token & secret that you point out. I agree that storing that info locally on the desktop is fine.

Thanks for replying.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure I understand why a desktop application needs to authenticate itself with your server via a username and password in order to use OAuth. Could you explain further?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you can agree that there is no way to safeguard the application secret key other than keeping it on a server (no matter how u try to bury it in the desktop application, it could be hacked no?), then you have to let your desktop application 'instances' use some sort of API to get their messages signed.

But, you don't want to let anyone just come in and hit this API! That could be expensive, in terms of CPU, bandwidth, and hosting costs. So you want to make sure the desktop application is indeed authorized to do so. So then you need some sort of authentication scheme between your desktop applications and your server... username/passwords being a common such way.

<comment><USER3> I'm afraid I still don't quite understand how a username and password is required.

If it is free to sign up for a username and password, then people could just sign up with your service and then hit your API directly. All you've added is an inconvenient barrier for your users that wouldn't stop an attacker. After all, if the attacker can be bothered figuring out how your application talks to your server, he or she can probably be bothered signing up for a username and password.

On the other hand, if your application costs money, then why not require a valid license key to access your server. True, you'll get the problem of people pirating software and reusing the license key, but it shouldn't be too hard to monitor your server logs and ban any license key that is submitted by a large number of unique IP addresses in a short period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "You put it on a server, because it's the only place you can ensure that it stays safe."

Uh, what? If on OS X or iPhone, use Keychain. If on something else, do whatever makes sense there. There's really no need to stick it on your server, that I can see.

If the user loses it, you just generate a new one, right?

<comment><USER5> The author is not talking about the per user secret key. He is talking about a secret API key that is used to encrypt all the communications from his application. If you store that locally you run the risk of having anyone with a decompiler be able to reverse engineer your specific API key.

<comment><USER4> Wow, okay. I hadn't dug into OAuth enough to get to that point. Is there any reason the client token isn't authentication enough for the server to decide to sign the request? If the app (client+server) has control of the authentication flow, it shouldn't need another set of credentials to figure that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This could be easily simplified to "OAuth is a pain to use". Bouncing the user back and forth between consumer and publisher of the OAuth key is too long, too complicated, and too confusing for use by the average consumer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tend to agree. I think some better documentation would do go a long way, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What about open source apps. Do you force your users to register for their own consumer key just to use your application?</comment>


Facebook lets advertisers exclude users by race - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race/ <comment><USER2> The complaint is that facebook gives you the option to display your ads only to a particular demographic. Then they substantiate the idea that this is a Fair Housing Act violation with this:

> The Fair Housing Act of 1968 makes it illegal "to make, print, or publish, > or cause to be made, printed, or published any notice, statement, or > advertisement, with respect to the sale or rental of a dwelling that > indicates any preference, limitation, or discrimination based on race, > color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin."

But displaying ads only to white users is not at all the same thing as printing "whites only" in the ad.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then again , do print magazines provide (or are allowed to provide) ethnicity demographics to potential advertised companies?

<comment><USER3> Does Facebook? They merely show ads to selected audiencies.

And in any case race on Facebook profiles is not quite a secret.

<comment><AUTHOR> As per the article, they provide the option to only target (for example) African Americans (or to exclude them)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This isn't a big deal in my eyes. If you're advertising a product that appeals predominantly to certain races, why waste your dollars advertising it to all races?

If you're promoting a Charlie Daniels concert, for example, blacks almost certainly aren't your target demographic. Why throw your dollars away by showing your ads to people who very likely don't want your product?

This seems like common sense but because the word "race" is in there people want to make a big deal out of it.

With regard to the specific example in the article, it's up to the advertiser to ensure they're compliant with the FHA, not the publisher.</comment>


Title: Himu Retsu do: an art for Hackers - <AUTHOR>

#!/bin/cat # Title: Himu Retsu do: an art for Hackers
Hi.
I would like to infect you with an idea that came to my mind afteru week of time spendage with my dog, Krissy (Christiana, Kristiana). She's a fine young (1.3y+) Old German Shepherd with quite an intelligence, attitude, and a noble relaxed character. {Mind you, this is Sci-fu, like Sci-fi, but frighteningly close to reality}
She taught me everything... there is to know about Re-tsu-do and it's pronunciation Himu-retsu-do using her Humi-kumi.
In the beginning, me and her were pretty much at odds, and ALL my commands were final, non-negotiable, and required synchronized immediate responses from my pet, and I was it's Sole Master when I was with her...
She responded sometimes with obedience, sometimes with total not-caring-outlook (careless, and a bit condescending look on her face), and sometimes (which I sensed later as some kind of a joke and mockery) with a dumb face looking stUpid like a puddle...
But I digress... <comment><AUTHOR> Needed materials:

* Humi Himu: Humi (a girl. hair, beautiful hair, braided hair?) Himu (A string. {of something... doesn't matter that much })

Take a long piece of string and cut it in three parts (you can use a single knotted humi if you wish, but this is more practical, as you can have 3 separate himu's). Tie them into a knot at one end, and make sure you don't knit/knot it too tight.

this is your Versumi *(A beautiful piece of String tied with a knot)

The Versumi is a piece for meditation, but Also a piece for training your memory and your dexterity. Start braiding it like a little girl... Don't think "That's gay"{, you rather BE gay (if you wish it so) }

Humi-retsu-do: (Kata)

As you descend down into the braiding process, sooner or later you would be faced with your limitness and you will make a MISTAKE in the braiding (it's gotta be either on the left or on the right).

If you are perfect, then MAKE the mistake on purpose. You have got to have at least ONE mistake in your Versumi, otherwise it's just a simple braided himu (string) and you are probably wasting your time

      ! Make a mental note of this mistake, and continue braiding. What spurred the MISTAKEing is not important and usually distractive.

<comment><AUTHOR> * Re-tsu:

Sooner or later, you're either going to make a second mistake, or you're going to repeat the previous process. Doesn't matter. Before you continue braiding, NAME the first mistake "Ai"... Say it as if you're training Aiki right now! say "Ai!" {you can even shout out it like "Aa-a-a-yi!" with all your lung's might at "a-yi!", and increasing "aaa")

      One mistake, one KNOT  {on a random side of the Humi)
      One Glyph: Ai (A/a or Aa/aa, short A)
      One Gesture: {up-left, to, down-right} hand opened as if chopping.
        Meaning:
        "Ou..." "ah!", "Owye!", "I say,... is ...", etc.

After some more braiding, and your impetuous "Ai!" battle cry (if retsu- do.ing, always check for people nearby ;)), Wait for a second, meditate, fix your breathing (you shouldn't be breathing w/ ?presekulki? interruptions and breath-holding)

Then braid out a "Ki" inside your Himu:

      One mistake on a random side & one mistake on the other
      One Glyph: Ki (K-hh-yi, "khi")
      One Gesture: {up-left, down-right, up-right} hand opened as if chopping.
          Meaning: "Matter/Energy/Inner/Outer Force?... my ass..."
          Ki means many many things with your _intent_ in mind
          "Does", "Do", "Doing", "This", "this-doing", "this-does?", "what?", "what is that?" "Queee?" "ke-pasa"

Continue braiding without any mistakes for now. Increase your technique, when you feel ready, BRAID out a DO (method, The Way, way, Way) Random. Opposite. original side.

Now you're ready. For Kimu-retsu-do (or mindful Aiki)

Once you catch the basic Language you can "upgrade it" with combinations of knitting and mistake knots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ups! I almost forgot! We need a Trusty separator with meanings:

-Tsu Glyph (Tsu-ki, Sun-tsu, Lao-Tsu, Tsu-nami, etc etc.) now Tsu-ki is a DIRECTED KI at the "enemy" without specification on how exactly (usually a forward boxing "tap", straight forward, bight might be a jab)

Tsu is something you place while thinking ABOUT something else (meta-glyph if you will) So you have MANY type of Tsu's with ya, and Tsuki is just an example for your own futrhter Tsu-king...

It is also the first TRUE not!Vowel. Some-thing.

      Form an Ai, and then Form a doubled Ki (Aa then Ki Ki)

This is your Alphabet. Now we need some Grammar and Syntax.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Something TO HACK and to DEVELOP YOUR minds WITH

I do not feel the shame of self-promotion, thank you for not annoying me with downvotes, much like Reddit.

Goodbye, Hacker-News, It's been a blast with you. I am not going to post anything else here, expect only comments. Sometimes, when you care for something or someplace, I think, it is normal to react with EMOTION. Emotion is the key feeling of Desire (or Lust), and is the driving force behind "attraction" and "dis-traction" of everything, therefore, My emotions here (if you can detect any) are dry, and it's time to move on, for me.... Ki..

Something to ponder WHICH exactly COVERS your idea of hacking:

Himuretsu (The Speach of the String, {for remembering passwords, and other shit for instance):

[http://imgur.com/a/avNvd](http://imgur.com/a/avNvd) = http...-tsu-ki'o'co'mo ai-sla-tsuki-ai-vai-Ni-tsu-vai-do-ka

Goodbuy.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> * Now that you have your Grammar, Tools, and Language base

you can start practicing

 _in Three Areas:

! Desire (lust & will, ...)

        Knowledge is Power, but Lust For knowledge always beats Power of Knowledge

! Power (strength & endurance, ...)

        Power is Knowable, but the Seduction of Lust for Power is greater that Know-how

! Knowledge (meaning & clarity, ...)

        Knowledge CAN be POWERFUL.

_Coming soon:

! Machinistic Codification. ! Photographs and Pictures. ! A folder packed neatly

Enjoy!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> !!One suggestion HN:

It wouldn't BE HARD to simply process the GIANT post of over 9000 chars in small GULPS placing them in the NEAT cells of your SQL DB (of 2000 chars)!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Full text on: [http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=WLyZtk2Z](http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=WLyZtk2Z)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I am hiring...

Text me at dekaroffskye ona gmail com(pany)</comment>


Github: Soft-wrapping on prose diffs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1707-soft-wrapping-on-prose-diffs

<comment><USER2> Not sure if related to my comment [1] or not, but thanks Github! :)

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6833785)

edit: def related

<comment><USER3> Not quite (we've been meaning to ship this for awhile now), but we were definitely delighted by the timing of your comment. :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: "Blackboxing" an on-premises application - <AUTHOR> I had a discussion today with a friend of mine who's tasked with delivering an on-premises installation of their web app to a "BigCo" (think server-side web app + a SQL database).
Now, the database actually contains some proprietary data (which is the biggest concern). The worry is that once the client gains access to the system (it's gonna be installed on a client's server), they can extract the "trade secrets", so to speak.
What would be the most efficient way to complicate direct access to the data? It's clear, as long there's direct access to the hardware, there's pretty much no way to restrict access as such. The question is in increasing the difficulty of doing so. <comment><USER2> Your first line of defense will be contracts/lawyers. Make it clear unauthorized access is stealing of trade secrets or such. You can encrypt the file system which needs somebody to type in a password (via a remote console) after every reboot. Ideally it's rare and you have two servers of course.

</comment><comment><USER3> I doubt it's worth your time to do this, but it depends on who (and where) the customer is. I'd leave this up to the legal agreement and consider part of the (high) price tag to be compensating you for the (low) likelihood of wrongdoing on their part.</comment>


Cause of YC/HN outage discovered - <AUTHOR> http://www.archub.org/ycoutage.txt <comment><AUTHOR> Things should be back to normal now. Trevor just moved www.ycombinator.com to Slicehost, and I just told HN to refer to static stuff there instead of serving it locally.

Interesting how easy it is to move your whole web site. Good customer service is important when users can switch so easily.

<comment><USER2> Any particular reason for Slicehost as opposed to any of the other similar options (Linode, prgmr)? I'm not affiliated with any, though I run my site on VPSes from Linode. I was convinced by a Dec 2009 post by an HNer, uggedal: <http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison>

<comment><USER3> Me too. That post was detailed & fair. On slicehost I had a 256MB slice which I upgraded to 512MB slice to host 2 small websites. After the post got a 360MB linode VPS instead and am very happy with it.

Edit: Slicehost help articles & resources, well organised & exhaustive is a plus though.

<comment><USER4> I came to similar conclusions myself:

<http://journal.dedasys.com/2008/11/24/slicehost-vs-linode>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dear Pair Networks,

I'd like to highlight this lesson in how to loose (or not gain) customers by randomly shutting down technology sites that serve the decision makers you wish to influence.

Tom

P.S. Well done Slicehost.

<comment><USER6> 150K hits in 30 minutes is 83 hits/second. That's a lot to ask for from a shared-hosting account.

When the traffic starts to impair neighboring sites, something has to be done. Just about any ISP will do the same thing: block the site with the surge, that could possibly make other arrangements, rather than inconvenience other customers whose traffic is as expected/usual.

The detail missing so far is why Pair noticed today, if it was the same level of traffic as before, or a slow build. Was a new threshold crossed? (Did someone's HN-focused tool go haywire?)

The Pair message suggests end-of-day logs will be the way to tell for sure.

<comment><USER7> So let's see... you're hosting a website that has gotten large; that is, it's grown to the point that it will need higher-cost services in order to meet demand. You have a chance to add a valuable customer to your client base. How best to handle this?

a) anything

b) except

c) killing their service

<comment><USER8> _How best to handle this?_

Of course, the flip side is that leaving it running adopts an attitude of "screw all our other customers, they can eat crappy service while we kiss up to the popular guys who are chewing up everybody else's server resources". Which isn't what I'd look for in a hosting provider...

<comment><USER9> False dichotomy. The correct way to handle this would have been to temporarily move the shared server to hardware where it won't impact other customers and notify YC that they need to move their server to a bigger server or the site will have to be shut down. Presumably with an ultimatum of a week or whatever.

<comment><USER10> Agreed - the whole reason you pay a host is that there's some level of management and responsibility there. You're not just renting hardware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I typically don't tell other people how to run their businesses, but if a similar issue brought my website down and I were to post about the cause _s_ , I might focus more on my failures in capacity planning, vendor selection, and monitoring rather than on my vendor's lackluster customer service. User- visible failures are, ultimately, process failures on my part, regardless of the surface cause. A nice side effect of this philosophy is that improvements to my processes help with all sorts of surface causes whereas if I were to address surface causes individually it would be like playing whack-a-mole. Bad vendor _whack_ , hard drive failed _whack_ , traffic spike _whack_ , poor customer service _whack_ , out of memory exception _whack whack whack_ \-- why is everyone conspiring to keep me from getting any work done.

<comment><AUTHOR> It didn't bring HN down. HN deliberately didn't rely on that server for anything except hosting static content that was also duplicated on this server. I planned in advance for the possibility that the other server wouldn't be usable, by writing the code so that I could switch to serving the same content off news by changing one variable, which I did. As a result service was barely affected.

In short, Pair flaked, but we had in fact planned the system in a way that protected us against it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Shared hosting is generally sucky for anything remotely successful. I'm amazed you got away with storing your static assets there so long! When I got 100k hits in a day on my first blog, Dreamhost promptly shut it down without warning (in the middle of a slashdotting!)

<comment><USER13> Dreamhost? Their main advertising point is UNLIMITED TRAFFIC!!! I guess I'll scratch them off the list of potential hosts.

<comment><USER14> No, they they're careful to say unlimited _bandwith_ (and storage and such), but not unlimited traffic. When I was looking around dreamhost docs/FAQs/something either right before or right after signing up, it did say somewhere that they might ask you to move up to their VPS if you're using too much CPU, which could happen just from a whole bunch of static hits.

It's nice for your hosting all of your little sites and getting them up in basically 0 time, even if you need wordpress or something. The panel's pretty nice. I'd at least sign up when they have one of their crazy deals (I got a year of hosting with a free domain for $9.something, which basically means you pay for the domain and get the hosting for free. It's a good way to give them a try with the main cost being that they'll suck you in and get you paying $9/month after your cheap price expires.)

<comment><USER15> I was told in a friendly conversation with one of their service reps that shared accounts get roughly 200-250MB of total memory usage (Ruby on Rails bumped me over, for example) and a "certain amount" of 95%ile bandwidth averaged over some time. I have a feeling they sort their customer list based on these two values every once and a while and send the top X accounts a message.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Kinda funny and sad that so many people here only see this as some sort of stupid or unfair action against HN, seemingly without even acknowledging that every single other customer on that shared server had as much right individually, and more right collectively, to not have _their_ performance negatively impacted by HN.

Yeah, it sucks that one of our favorite tech news sites was impacted by this, but how impacted were all those other customers?

It is easy to make a smartaleck comment about how Pair was trying to upsell by doing this, which is preposterous. Pair is a well-respected provider with many more years providing good service at a fair price than HN has existed, and I'd be willing to bet will be around after HN has peaked and begins to move back to the traffic load that might make sense on a shared system.

But the fault here ultimately lies with the folks running HN who thought it was wise or appropriate to host any of its content on a shared server that likely cost them less money per month than most of us spend on soft drinks in a week.

<comment><USER17> Strawman. Nobody's saying HN/YC should be allowed to overuse resources (then again, I don't know the terms they had agreed to). But not giving a warning is _crappy_ customer service, no matter how many other folks do likewise, how many years Pair has been doing other stuff well, or however else you want to spin it. In this case, it also happens to be a big sales screwup.

<comment><USER16> Well, you didn't identify what I said that you think is a strawman, but I'll point out yours.

Fine, nobody's saying HN/YC should be allowed to overuse resources. I didn't say anybody was saying that.

Not giving a warning probably doesn't count as great customer service, but then again, once the problem had been identified by Pair, and once they knew of the negative impact HN was having on every _other_ paying customer on that server, what kind of customer service to those other customers would it have been for Pair to fire off an email to HN then wait an hour, or thirty minutes, or ten minutes, before shutting it down?

How long should Pair have allowed HN to impact other customers to satisfy folks here? And what makes HN more important than any other paying customer on that server?

Oh right, it's because you read and like HN, which, ironically, so do I.

As for it being a sales screwup, maybe. I kinda doubt there is a great deal of overlap between HN readership and the average potential Pair customer. We could also suggest that Pair taking action to protect all those other customers on the server is an example of how they would provide good service to the many when they're being hammered by one overpowering fellow customer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "We just figured out what caused the problem. Apparently Pair Networks' procedure for requesting that users upgrade to a dedicated server is to shut down their site without warning...."

I think you should upgrade to a more "dedicated provider" rather than a "dedicated server"...

But seriously, not even a warning?

<comment><USER19> I think this is pretty common. When Joyent shut down my shared account way back when, I discovered it in a comment in my httpd.conf

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Guys, shared hosting is designed for the 99% of non busy sites, say under 1,500 unique visitors a day, with the level of traffic HN is doing I'm surprised Pair didn't warn you earlier. A site this busy needs a dedicated server or virtual server.

That is why shared hosting is cheap, you start with it and once you are successful or starting to get slashdotted you buy something bigger that can scale.

<comment><USER20> Also, just going to point out here that Pair.com has had a great reputation in the hosting industry, and has for the last 10 years.

I've been in the industry for 10 years and worked for quite a number of hosting companies, not Pair though, and when you have 150 shared clients on a machine and 1 client is causing the problems you do your best to deliver the warning before it gets out of hand but it is very hard to do.

<comment><USER21> When I emailed Pair.com to tell them that my site was about to get a writeup in the Wall Street Journal, they moved my site to a dedicated server within an hour, left it there until the spike of traffic was over, then moved my site back to a shared server--all at no charge. If you use Pair.com properly, they are more than excellent.

<comment><USER17> They could have a small pool of servers where they could move problematic sites until the customer has had a warning and a fair chance to react to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is almost as bad as the reason for my server's downtime recently: <http://beerpla.net/wp-content/uploads/img_2958.JPG>

My server literally had its plug pulled.

<comment><USER23> Are we at the point were we have to deal with robotic janitors too?

Geez, and I thought that watching the janitors while the work was over the top, now I gotta watch the rumba too :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm not sure what is more ridiculous: that they disabled the site without warning or that they were too lazy to look at their logs or do a simple Google search to find out that Hacker News is real site with lots of regular traffic.

<comment><USER25> What I really loved is that they just demonstrated a fair degree of incompetence to a site used pretty much exclusively by people who are very good potential customers! This site is a wet-dream for their marketing department.

What they should have done is upgrade the website to a dedicated server for free and let that news hit the front page.

<comment><USER26> Well, maybe upgrade for free, with a time limit, and an email saying "if we don't hear from you in x days, we'll shut 'er down."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Thats some good customer service there Lou. (Said in Chief Wiggims voice)

Seriously-they couldn't just email the account holder?

</comment><comment><USER28> This site was on a shared hosting box?

And of course they are going to disable it without warning if it's causing problems for all the other customers on that box...

<comment><AUTHOR> Not this site, www.

There was no sudden spike in traffic. If they'd bothered to check the logs they'd have found that the load, whatever it was, was no higher than it had been.

<comment><USER29> So were they just jerking you around then?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not deliberately. I think they just don't have a very high standard of customer service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This makes me think of a little side project I've been chipping away at called InstaCDN.

It makes it easy to minify, combine, gzip and push your css, js and image assets into the Amazon Cloudfront CDN with far-future expiration headers. It also automagically detects background images referenced in your css, and puts them in the CDN. It rewrites the css to use the new CDN image urls.

It's all done through a trivial REST API.

Would love some feedback, and to find out if/how it's breaking any of your complex css/js.

<http://www.instacdn.com/>

<comment><USER31> That looks really cool. I'll be in a position to give it a go in a few months. One thing that would make me hesitate though, is not knowing what the potential pricing would be when you move from non-free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> And the Darwin award, category marketing, goes to...

</comment><comment><USER19> And this is why I don't recommend shared hosting for anyone

<comment><USER20> Because everyone you know has one of the busiest sites on the net?

<comment><USER19> Anyone can get slashdotted. And my time is valuable -- I'd much rather pay more for better service.

<comment><USER20> Ya but if your dad wants to put up his pictures you go tell him to buy a nice scalable hosting product instead of a cheap shared hosting account for $5 to $10 a month?

<comment><USER33> No. I'd tell him to get a Facebook/Picasa/Flickr/Twitpic account.

Dad _used_ to get a shared hosting account for things like that, but now we have services that host content for free. They are much easier for Dad to use as well.

In this age of $20/mo VPSs and free content hosting, I'm honestly not sure how shared hosting survives. It's not as flexible as a VPS for hosting sites (and with more than two sites, isn't even as cheap), and it's not as easy to use (or as free) as Facebook.

<comment><USER11> _I'm honestly not sure how shared hosting survives._

John Smith Plumbing's five page brochureware site doesn't need the headaches of having a VPS but also won't accomplish business needs on Flickr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The real WTF here is why HN considered it appropriate to run a production site on a shared host. Shared hosting is a bad idea all around if you are even slightly concerned about reliability. You don't control the server, so any 60 year old woman running a photoblog with a vulnerable WordPress version can bring your site down just by getting hacked.

</comment><comment><USER35> The email sounds pretty generic and policyish, which leads me to suspect it was auto-generated rather than typed out by some hapless sysadmin who's never heard of HN.

<comment><USER36> There are too many grammar errors for it to be auto-generated (I hope).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Really, we are all guilty. If we'd just get back to work, HN wouldn't have this problem. ;)

</comment><comment><USER38> I actually find it quite embarrassing that the guy had no clue what HN or YC were. He had absolutely no idea... and he works for a hosting company. It's quite a shame. I really got a kick out of the fact he questioned the legitimacy of traffic as well.

<comment><USER39> I don't really see why every hosting company employee out there is supposed to know about a certain small american investment firm started in 2005 and its associated news aggregator... we're probably an order of magnitude or so less popular than Reddit, which is itself rather niche. It's a small dot in the web world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So your network traffic is guilty and sentenced until proven innocent.

</comment><comment><USER41> The thing I can't believe is that nobody at Pair Networks that was involved with this actually knew about Ycombinator or Hacker News... otherwise they wouldn't have shut down such a popular site. Somebody needs to hire real hackers

<comment><USER20> do real hackers like working customer service :)? customer service is 80% of a good hosting company.

<comment><USER41> Somebody had to pull the plug, and it wasn't some customer service guy with a headset...

<comment><USER20> Sure it was, customer service just means a tech who can talk to people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> To be fair, if I was another customer on that shared host and you made my side crawl through no fault of my own, I'd want your site disabled asap too.

VPS or cloud is dirt cheap these days, no excuses for not planning growth?

</comment><comment><USER43> If I ran biz dev at _any other hosting company_ I would offer to host the site for free in exchange for a little logo on the bottom of the page.

</comment><comment><USER44> Complete failure on the part of Pair Networks.

</comment><comment><USER45> "Biting the hand that feeds you" seems like an appropriate analogy for arbitrarily shutting down this site without warning.

</comment><comment><USER46> I'd suggest this as a business opportunity, but I suspect non-sucky shared hosting is a hard sell.

</comment><comment><USER47> Hrmm....HN was hosted on a shared server. That's pretty impressive..if I must say so myself.

</comment><comment><USER48> No company worth their weight should be using off the shelf shared hosting.

</comment><comment><USER49> HN has been pretty sluggish for a little while now. If you rewrote it in Rails you could it host it on Heroku and get back to not worrying about scaling!

<comment><USER50> Please tell me you're not serious.</comment></comment>


Rakuten to trial drone delivery - <AUTHOR> http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/04/26/business/tech/rakuten-trial-drone-delivery-chiba-golf-course/#.VyA4W9R961s <comment><USER2> The golf course seems like a niche market where the economics and physics of drone delivery might make sense. It's a high yen controlled environment where the customers are at leisure.</comment>


We're about to add more items to BEG FOR iT. - <AUTHOR>

Looking for advice on what you'd want to see on there? http://facebook.com/begforit <comment><AUTHOR> We're beta testing the product/item submission process now. Here is the link for the details <http://www.begfor.it/contact>

</comment><comment><USER2> <http://begfor.it> and <http://facebook.com/begforit> I understand…</comment>


Sergey Brin's relief mission to Haiti - <AUTHOR> http://too.blogspot.com/2010/01/hope.html

<comment><USER2> How does the U.S. effort in Haiti compare to the U.S. effort in New Orleans?

<comment><USER3> He didn't say "death toll" or "long term economic effects", he said "effort". The question posed is about the U.S. effort. Has the U.S. effort in Haiti been significantly more impressive than it was in New Orleans? If so,is it just because different authorities are involved? Presumably FEMA has no involvement in this one? Maybe lessons have been learnt from New Orleans?

<comment><USER4> Understood.

However, when making a comparison it's generally safer to take into account the context of what you are comparing. In this case the effort, both private and public needs to be presented within the backdrop of what exactly is happening.

Because as you analyze the effort and its accompanying effectiveness you're also going to have to put that effort in context. If in Haiti there are X number of injured people treated and in Katrina there were Y number, how do you establish a direct comparison? Like what percentage is Y in relation to total injured? How's X compare to that?

You can go down the list, and you'll eventually have to come to quantifying the catastrophic event in order to put the response in perspective and measure its effectiveness.

<comment><USER2> Let's say that I don't want to be safer, and choose to live dangerously. I have no interest in comparing the number of people injured in each. I am not looking at this stage for context.

I want to have an absolute comparison - has the U.S. been better organised in their Haiti relief mission than in the New Orleans one. If so, why?

<comment><USER4> So are you mostly concerned about organization? Or also in terms of support given?

Looking at the numbers ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina_disaster_reli...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina_disaster_relief)) I would be incredibly surprised if the Haiti relief efforts even come close to 1/10th of what was given to support Katrina (~$52 billion).

As far as organization, from what I've heard from people I know who are there helping, some parts are completely chaotic especially the farther away from the capital. In other areas people have had to step in and assume authority due to the government being non-existent.

There isn't even any clarity as to who controls the relief operations UN or US. And there are definitely various roles that were filled in by the US (air traffic control).

Maybe others can help chip in information?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LikeALittle (YC W11) Builds on Quick Growth of College Flirtation Site - <AUTHOR> http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/20110502/meet-evan-reas-of-lal-and-his-proximity-based-social-graph-for-colleges/

<comment><USER2> LikeALittle had 20 million page views in their first 6 weeks (<http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/19/likealittle/>)

Also, really cool story about Evan from his childhood, from Startups Open Sourced: 'When I was 16 or 17 I convinced my parents to give me $10,000 to invest for them; two weeks later I lost $8,000 of it. I put it in all these ridiculously risky stocks. I was really confident, lost 80% of it, and was at $2,000. For the next few months, every week my dad would say, "So how is the portfolio doing?" and I would say, "Oh, good, very good," and I was totally lost and didn't know what to do but was determined to figure it out. I studied the market relentlessly to try and figure out an algorithm to gain money back; I got back up to $10,000 within the year so finally, I could tell my dad, "yeah, we're at $11,000, we're good, we have a 10% return so far." So, I didn't tell them that I actually lost most of it, initially, but that experience ended up teaching me so much that I actually took the $10K to about $200,000, over the next couple of years.'

These 1 page press stories never do justice to the founders.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm just seeing a lot of lonely-sounding dudes. A missed-connection site without the womenfolk isn't likely to have much staying power.

<comment><USER4> You know, that's strange, because I first heard about this site nearly a year ago through somebody on IRC. When I first heard of it, I thought the same thing - this is going to go nowhere. Then a few months later I recall seeing them make a post on HN about their growth, which was pretty good at the time. I remember thinking, even then, a second time that they were going to go nowhere. That was probably half a year ago and I haven't heard a single thing about the site until now. I've never once heard it mentioned in person, via my friends or on campus. I'm in Texas, which apparently has a large user-base for the site ... still, never heard this site mentioned by friends. I don't know what they're doing or if the site is any good, but I feel like they're the sleeping giant type of website. Like, they're just going to come out of nowhere and post some usage stats about their millions of college student users or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, Floxx.com is the new incarnation of FitFinder - without being glibb about LikeALittle's success, they seem to skirt the issue of how many users they actually have...

Not to mention that Floxx, as FitFinder did, does have a lot of female (well, or gay...) users - this will doubtless keep the guys interested for longer...

</comment><comment><USER6> This site kind of reminds me of fitfinder which got shut down at UK universities.

</comment><comment><USER7> Alright, someone smarter than is going to have to explain the popularity of this site... I checked it out real briefly and didn't get the allure. Is it just like the misconnections section on cragislist...only this is for a specific college campus? I thought there was also a UK company doing something similar as well...

Is it a "billion dollar" idea?

<comment><USER8> I'm a college student and I thought it was pretty cool--like omegle.com except I'm actually chatting with people who are close to my age and live nearby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This site seems like a curiosity to me, and Alexa would agree.

However, they could potentially turn the traffic into something real in the campus dating space.

I'm not long, but it's a cool idea and a nicely executed site.

</comment><comment><USER10> My opinion is that this is not web 2.0 at all. The moment you start selling anything on this site, i have a feeling these college kids are going to turn their heads away. It will be only a matter of time before horror stories of stalking sprout up!</comment>