Launch HN: Ophelia (YC W20) – At-home recovery for opioid addiction - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
My name is Zack, and I'm the cofounder of Ophelia (https://meetophelia.com). We help people quit opioids without going to rehab. We offer online doctor's visits, medication for withdrawal and cravings, and long-term support for recovery.
There's a treatment for opioid addiction that works, and it's low-cost, discreet, and convenient. It's called medication-assisted treatment (or MAT), it reduces mortality by more than 5x [1], and it resembles treatment for anxiety or depression: medication and therapy. Yet 80% of the 3 million Americans addicted to opioids are not getting it. You can read more about MAT at [2] [3] [4].
I decided to work on this problem after my girlfriend died of an overdose last year. She wanted to quit, but she was afraid of losing her job and her privacy, and she found it easier to get this medication from a drug dealer than a doctor or rehab. The rest of the story is too sad to articulate, and I don't want this post to be about her. It's about all of the people just like her, struggling to get help today. This is why we started Ophelia: to lower the barriers to proven, lifesaving treatment.
Most Americans struggling with opioids have jobs, families, and privacy concerns that make rehab an impossible option. They want to quit, but they're afraid of withdrawal, and the medication that helps is too hard to get: doctors need a special waiver to prescribe it, which only 5% of them have [5], so most people are buying it on the black market. Yet, drug dealers aren't doctors, and the statistics support it: every 11 minutes, another American dies of an opioid overdose – now the #1 cause of death for Americans under 50.
As it turns out, rehab is not just unnecessary: the data shows it rarely works anyway [6] [7]. Without medication, 90% of people relapse in the first 3 months: yet, 2/3rds of rehabs don't offer medication, and most don't even employ doctors! Thus: 80% of people avoid getting help, and the rest succumb to pseudoscience that does nothing to address their problem.
Ophelia's mission is to replace drug dealers with doctors, without any loss of privacy or convenience. We make MAT discreet, convenient, and affordable for anyone who needs help but can't or won't go to rehab.
Our medical directors are two of the best addiction specialists in the world (Dr. Adam Bisaga and Dr. Arthur Robin Williams, both Columbia Professors and NIH-funded research scientists), and we're now treating patients in Philadelphia and New York, through a combined in-person and telemedicine approach.
There's a problem, though: we're restricted by regulations from letting people know that this treatment is available. Both Facebook and Google require a third-party certification before allowing us to use their platforms, and many sites like Reddit don't allow any advertising for addiction treatment at all.
We would love your help figuring out how to get past this bottleneck.
The other big problem is the stigma around addiction, which stops most people from sharing success stories about MAT, so its efficacy is underappreciated. If you know anyone who is personally struggling with this issue, please make sure they know about MAT. It can literally save their life.
If you have thoughts about how we can solve these problems, I would be grateful for your help: any ideas to increase awareness of MAT, or any stories you can share that may help us better understand the needs of our patients. Thank you!
[1] Effects of medication-assisted treatment among opioid users https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29934549
[2] Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) https://www.samhsa.gov/medication-assisted-treatment
[3] Information about Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) https://www.fda.gov/drugs/information-drug-class/information...
[4] We have a solution for the opioid epidemic. It's dramatically underused. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/17/18292021/...
[5] America's Healthcare System is Making the Opioid Crisis Worse https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/11/why-heroi...
[6] Lapse and relapse following inpatient treatment of opiate dependence. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20669601
[7] Does Rehab Work as a Treatment for Alcoholism and Other Addictions? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-rehab-work/ <comment><USER5> Burner account here. I've been on MAT for years, during which I've gone to grad school, worked, and otherwise lived a normal and productive life. A couple of points/observations.

1) I think an online advertising growth strategy will be hard, or really any strategy that strictly involves spending X in advertising for the recruitment of Y in revenue spend. However, people that use drugs talk to each other about where to get drugs and treatment (surprising, I know), and I would build your marketing strategy around word of mouth and patient to patient referrals. Initially reaching these communities are hard, but I would really think about how well the product can be optimized for patient -> uninitiated patient referrals, similar to "growth loops"

That said, I've worked in a start up with a similar premise, hire domain experts to give advice to customers during a life transition, and watched it fall down as the operations shook apart and the acquisition cost was very high. It's hard to get both the operations to stay great during the scale out, and keep the the marketing channels diverse enough so when you tap one out, another 5 are in different stages of life.

2) When assessing this product for my own use, the thoughts I had where: 2.1 Is this available in my area? How far would I have to travel initially? 2.2 Do they drug test me like my current place? 2.3 How frequently do I met the doc/what's the script duration? 2.4 What is expected of me to stay in MAT?

Basically, I have a provider, but with more up front information, might be willing to switch. However, the website and FAQ are pretty sparse, and I really don't feel like picking up the phone to talk to someone (flatmates, ya know?), so I feel like that's kind of a blocker.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is incredible feedback, thank you. I'm happy to hear that MAT has helped. Here's some color:

1\. We need to be licensed in each state in which we operate, which limits our reach.

2\. Our lawyers tell us that a "referral program" is illegal. Sounds stupid to me.

3\. I think you're right about the phone call. What would you recommend instead? We have the text prompt up top, but it's not the main call to action.

You seem like a great person to get to know. Email me if you're interested in chatting more. I appreciate it.

<comment><USER6> Try to uncover more angles to the "referral". Is it illegal because they receive compensation/cut? If yes, build it around "being the hero" for people not directly affected but have huge stake or motivation to help addicts (like some in this thread) - try and reach people on the edge of communities most affected by it - for example, distribute a "qualifier questionnaire" physical leaflet which gives people free consultation and 30% off list price on treatment. Your "Withdrawal Heroes" would get a pack and they could drop some off in relevant places in their communities or give to people directly - <USER2> probably know what places to hit better than you could identify effectively. The value for them is helping others; this might be your better bet anyways compared to referral $$ incentive anyways. Next step is to use people in recovery who used your system for similar little bets and more - giving talks, spreading the word in communities as part-time employees for example (some sort of "ambassadorship" for the lack of a better word). ps. I'm in Europe and only following opioid news from the distance, just want to add keep it up and good luck with the project, more stuff like this is needed happy to brainstorm or invest some more time in coming up with ideas pro bono just let me know

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sorry to hear about the loss of your girlfriend. This is an amazing way to honor her life, and important work you're doing to help solve a painful problem for millions of people. I've lost a family member to this disease, and have friends who have as well. I'm going to share this with someone I know who is also battling opioid addiction today. Thank you for building this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm so sorry to hear that, but I really appreciate your words of support, and I hope whoever you know who is struggling is doing OK. The biggest barrier to accessing treatment is just the lack of awareness that it exists. Please reach out if you want to chat or want more information as they consider options.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hello Zack! Thank you so much for working in this space. I am a recovered opiate addict, who benefited from medication-assisted treatment a few years ago. I have come a long way from being homeless and living on the street in Austin, Texas for 2 years. I am now a good father and husband, and I have a pretty damn good job too. It was truly a life and death struggle, against HUGE odds, and I'm definitely one of the lucky ones.

You're correct that this is a tough space. I've been in and out of the "recovery community" for a couple of decades, and I think you may have only scratched the surface of how complex this market is. I would love to chat. I think I may have some good ideas for breaking through those barriers you're facing. I've created this burner to respond (re:stigma)and I've also created a burner email. Hit me up at the mail service of proton with the name "30days1000nights"

</comment><comment><USER9> I've got nothing useful to add except saying that I find it inspiring that you were able to turn a personal loss into entrepreneurial energy for positive change.

Good luck to you guys. I'm certain that your endeavors would make her proud.

<comment><AUTHOR> I really appreciate that - and it's useful to me! Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > There's a problem, though: we're restricted by regulations from letting > people know that this treatment is available. Both Facebook and Google > require a third-party certification before allowing us to use their > platforms, and many sites like Reddit don't allow any advertising for > addiction treatment at all.

When you say "regulations" here, do you mean government law, or just the rules of online services as in your examples?

To advertise to addicts, go where the addicts are; bulletin boards in halfway houses, homeless shelters, probation/parole offices, and clinics that offer court-mandated treatment programs. Granted, these are the places where the most down-on-their-luck addicts will be, but perhaps they will be more open to change than the "successful" ones. That said, you might have some luck targeting those types on web forums for drug addicts and experimenters - <USER3> of these use their own in-house ad systems rather than something like AdSense for obvious reasons.

(If it sounds like I might know some things about where you can find drug addicts… well…)

I wish you nothing but the best of luck with your project.

<comment><USER11> While there are some regulations (both state and federal) around what we can and can't say publicly, most of our obstacles so far have been the policies of sites like Facebook, Google, Reddit and the like. Many of them have gotten into trouble before with scammy rehab programs preying on vulnerable populations, so they've made it incredibly difficult for startups like us who have something new to offer to even get the word out. We're working on it, but it's still hard.

I agree with you about getting the word out in a grassroots way, and we've definitely been to some of the hardest-hit areas out there. The problem is that 80% of opioid users aren't currently seeking treatment and are just like you and me, but living with a secret problem. Those are the people we want to reach and let them know there are options for them.

<comment><USER12> Maybe see if you can partner with a national pharmacy to put flyers in opioid prescription bags. Not sure of the pros and cons but it would really get the message out.

<comment><USER10> If you can get a pharmacy on board with the idea of encouraging their customers to stop buying their products, sure, but most of the worst ope addicts aren't getting their pills from pharmacies…

<comment><USER12> Don't be so cynical. I sell drugs in my practice. I don't want any addicts buying them.

I think the current opioid problem in the US _is_ a prescription opioid problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Reach out to Scott Adams. He is passionate about this topic and signal boosts startups he believes in.

With that in mind, also look in to podcast ads, or doing interviews wherever interviews are done, as there is enough human interest to make that possible.

<comment><USER14> podcasts are a great idea, I'm sure there are a several big ones dealing with addiction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hi, Tony here, Flower Co W19

I'm really keen on what you're working on. It's fantastic. I am a big believer in what you're doing.

I have some marketing ideas for you. I work in cannabis so I face all these same challenges of closed tech platforms.

Email is in profile, let's talk

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Tony, your support means a lot. I will email you to continue this conversation. Looking forward to hearing more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> >There's a problem, though: we're restricted by regulations from letting people know that this treatment is available. Both Facebook and Google require a third-party certification before allowing us to use their platforms, and many sites like Reddit don't allow any advertising for addiction treatment at all.

Those limitations were added as a response to real abusive and harmful practices [0]. Just changing the advertising rules hasn't solved the problem, now almost any drug related search has had the results SEOed into complete uselessness by rehab companies. The answers they give to basic questions (what doses are harmful, is it safe to mix these substances) are usually misleading and sometimes explicitly false in order to maximize their conversion rates.

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me- go...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16257412/rehabs-near-me-google- search-scam-florida-treatment-centers)

</comment><comment><USER17> >> We would love your help figuring out how to get past this bottleneck.

Can you restructure the strategy so that the business can operate with a low (initial) growth rate ? You might find success by partnering with regional public health officials, who would sponsor or subsidize real world advertisement.

I live in Europe and last time I was in NY the subway was full of public health billboards encouraging people to carry naxalone.

Maybe you can convince one official or non profit somewhere to subsidize those billboards for you. You're not only solving a personal problem for the addicted, your solving a societal problem. I imagine that if you can show efficacy in one or two pilot regions, you'll have an easy time partnering with other ones / raising money (maybe non vc) / funding acquisition yourself.

My $0.02, hope it helps and good luck, nice to see startups doing important things.

<comment><USER11> Appreciate these thoughts talolard. I like the idea of partnering with local governments and non-profits, and would welcome any introductions or suggestions there. As you mentioned, most would want to see efficacy in a few pilot regions first, which is what we're currently working on.

<comment><USER18> You're working on proving your process.

Do you have enough patients to do that ?

If you do, why do you seek growth? Isn't it better, in the long term, to prove yourself, build a stable foundation and a good reputation among clinicians and than scale ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am really excited for this startup. Opioid crisis needs to be addressed and I think this is one of the many steps that can help the people/families who are suffering.

</comment><comment><USER20> As a pain specialist, I ask you to strongly incorporate one more element:

Make it ridiculously easy for the patient to put your docs in touch with (other docs). At some point they will land in the hospital, and ONLY having your doc talk to the attending on the other hand will save them from under treatment and withdrawal.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great feedback. I would love to talk more about this. If you're open to it, send me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Have you seen this? Not sure if it's helpful for your regulatory problem, perhaps you could reach out this guy:

[https://onezero.medium.com/900-000-americans-tell-google- the...](https://onezero.medium.com/900-000-americans-tell-google-they-want-to- try-buy-or-quit-heroin-every-year-48f725ee5db9)

<comment><USER11> Wow this is great. No I hadn't seen this but I'll definitely be reaching out to him. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Congrats on the launch Zack!

Possible G and FB have gotten faster and better with their detection of health specific ads, but up until about a year ago, one temporary workaround (while waiting for legitscripts) was to create an Instapage or Leadpages landing page with a subdomain (eg. lp.meetophelia.com) and direct ads there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! That's definitely a good suggestion, but there's always the risk they disapprove of something like this and then reject our certification - <USER4> would make it not worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Thank you for building this. I lost my best friend, someone I'd known since I was 2 years old. It is painful to learn that MAT could have saved him, but also uplifting to think of the people who will be saved by this.

With that said, I work in healthcare and want to warn you about the HIPAA implications of using Google Analytics (which is not HIPAA compliant nor covered under a Google BAA) on your scheduling form for consultations. This can connect PII to a health condition in Google's system by means of a Google universal identifier.

I am the CTO at a healthcare startup and sincerely wish you the best in this venture, and will gladly/freely offer any knowledge I have to you - let me know if you'd like me to elaborate by email.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the tip, would love to chat further if you want to shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think this TED Talk did a great job of describing why this is such a huge issue, and how people get into the state of addiction [https://www.ted.com/talks/travis_rieder_the_agony_of_opioid_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/travis_rieder_the_agony_of_opioid_withdrawal_and_what_doctors_should_tell_patients_about_it?language=en)

What you're doing is incredibly inspiring. I have a friend who ha to kick their morphine addiction alone when the medical system wouldn't support anything other than continued medication.

I can only assume your girlfriends name was Ophelia. What an incredible tribute to her memory.

</comment><comment> VvR-Ox Please do not feel offended by my words but I would never ever use a service like this.

The question in most cases in my opinion is not "will there be a data breach?" but when it will occur. Leaving this kind of data on some servers of some company just opens the door for patients to be extorted etc. in the future.

I like the idea of apps and computers helping us with problems like that but in our world services and devices are just not trustworthy enough for my taste.

Maybe a desktop app on a device that has no internet connection would be a reasonable alternative.

I wish you good luck with your business though and keep my fingers crossed that somehow your data remains secure.

</comment><comment><USER25> When I was trying to kick a Doctor-originated benzo habit, I spent a lot of time on a community forum called BenzoBuddies, and it was a life-line for me and many other users. There's got to be a glut of opiate-focused boards? I think if you can establish legitimacy with them, building a direct advertising relationship with them might help?

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm going to get needlessly harsh here.

Is this a for-profit company?

Do you think for-profit companies should be able to advertise medical products? Because in my view they shouldn't, full stop.

So you're up here telling us that one of your challenges is that you can't advertise anywhere, and to that I say "good."

Perhaps you and your 81% white male team/advisors (with zero female/minority people with executive level decision making ability) could answer to some of that.

My condolences to your girlfriend, but this isn't an issue that a web CRUD platform is going to solve and seeing it laid out in typical Silicon Valley marketing copy is kind of sickening. It reminds me of some of those less than stellar web therapy platforms that seem like another way to Uber-ize the professional therapy workforce into poverty.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm glad you're working on this. I was given opiates as a child and not getting shot at, beaten, living outside in a northern winter, doing things that make me horribly ashamed today, could make me quit but Suboxone got me living a regular-ass life in about a year.

It's been 6 years since I last had any dope, I've achieved so many of the goals I thought I had abandoned. I still use the subs though, I've tried kicking and I just can't seem to function even coming off a near homeopathic dose.

For anyone still in it though it's amazing how fast stopping drugs can improve your life. Someone out there would be happy if you could even put a few days together, tried treatment again, or just called.

</comment><comment><USER28> We're in a similar place in terms of restrictions on promotion -- we can't advertise on any of the major platforms, at all, ever.

One thing that has worked for us is directly reaching out to community groups or (and I hate that I'm about to use this word) influencers. I'm sure there are plenty of sober / in-recovery people out there with large followings and/or community connections who believe in your cause.

It can be tough, because people who dive bomb into a community for the sake of self-promotion are gross and deserve to be shunned, but there's a balance there where you're actively participating, and helping, and also telling people about the thing you're doing to help.

</comment><comment><USER29> Hi Zack and the Ophelia, congrats on the launch! It's great to see others tackling important problems in the healthcare space. I'd love to see if there is a way for my team at CareDash to help out. We are a data-driven health tech startup (the fastest growing doctor review site in the US), and we are very fortunate to have a scale to impact lives positively. Feel free to get in touch with me at rcarlton(at)caredash.com.

</comment><comment><USER30> Which medication(s) are you using? My personal experience with both Suboxone and methadone were absolutely horrible and made my getting clean 10x worse.

<comment><USER11> We're primarily focused on medication-assisted treatment with Suboxone. Sorry to hear about your experience irscott, it's certainly not the right solution for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In the Netherlands anyone can get drugs tested for free and anonymously. I believe this is a very important point of contact for health officials.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's not clear from your post what you're implying when you say you're restricted by regulations. Are you saying they are regulations you're unable to comply with? Why?

It's also not clear what the relationship is, if any, between those regulations and third-party certification. Likewise, is third-party certification something you're unable to comply with? Why?

<comment><USER11> Oof, where to begin. There are regulations around what states we're allowed to operate in, what kinds of clinicians are able to see patients, how we have to treat patient data, and what the clinical protocols have to look like.

In terms of regulations restricting what we can say publicly, besides FDA regulations around medical claims we're allowed to make, our biggest obstacle is that many of the common channels available to startups for building awareness are restricted or blocked entirely. Facebook and Google, for example, both require LegitScript ([https://legitscript.com/](https://legitscript.com/)) certification. We're in the process of going through that and it may take several months. That's also a requirement for us to be able to do payment processing through services like Stripe, since we qualify as a "high-risk business" since we do both telemedicine and addiction-recovery services.

But even when we do have those certifications, Google, Facebook, Reddit, and many other sites have a blanket ban against targeting users who are part of addiction and addiction-recovery groups.

It's not that we can't comply with any of these regulations (and in fact, we're working on many of them as we speak), but many of them are really onerous and time consuming for a startup given the stage that we're at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> >There's a problem, though: we're restricted by regulations from letting people know that this treatment is available.

On this, do you have yourself published research on how effective your particular application of this treatment is, how many patients stick with it, or anything else along those lines?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great question. Our medical directors have published a lot of research on this protocol (MAT). If you're interested, I recommend this book by Dr. Bisaga: [https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Opioid-Addiction- Authorita...](https://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Opioid-Addiction- Authoritative-Therapists/dp/1615194584)

More generally: MAT is very well researched, vetted, and accepted by the medical community. Our innovation is in the delivery of this treatment, through ways that make it easier to opt into and stick with. MAT has historical adherence rates of 60-70% (same as diabetes and depression), but often people drop out because they grow tired of visiting a clinic regularly for group therapy, just to get their medication refilled. We think we can increase adherence rates by making MAT less of a burden to people, particularly as they enter into the later stages of treatment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Have you considered using kratom to assist with weaning or helping with withdrawl symptoms?

<comment><USER11> Mattan here (co-founder of Ophelia). We're certainly considering any options that are scientifically backed and evidence-based. Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) is the standard in the medical community among addiction specialists and it's proven to be the most effective solution.

Kratom is certainly one of the solutions that people trying to overcome opioid addiction are resorting to, but it's unclear whether it's effective — not enough studies have been performed, and it's not an FDA-approved treatment for opioid use disorder. There's also some evidence to suggest that kratom actually leads to more health problems than it solves [1].

[1] [https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/prescription-...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases- conditions/prescription-drug-abuse/in-depth/kratom-opioid- withdrawal/art-20402170)

<comment><USER34> Yeah, I see the issue with relying solely on anecdote.

Re: safety of kratom itself: AKA ([https://www.americankratom.org/](https://www.americankratom.org/)) has had independent physicians look into each reported death involving kratom in the US, and all have involved various other substances of abuse, none have been exclusively cause by kratom.

When taking powdered leaf itself, OD is pretty much impossible since you end up vomiting. There are many extracts and such on the market, but most people I know partake of (including myself) are wary about strength and clarity of said extracts.

I'd love to see more of a push for some legitimate research, I think it's something that could be very effective in this space. Good luck with licensing and I'll be sure to share the service with ones I know are currently trying to kick opiods.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. I'm interested to see how kratom fits into the longer-term solution. An issue right now is that its formulation is not standard, so there are different brands with different concentrations, which makes it difficult to "prescribe" as medicne. Another problem is that it's sold at smoke shops along with vape pens and paraphernalia, so people who aren't already using opioids are trying it out of curiosity and becoming accidentally dependent.

<comment><USER35> Are you implying that you think kratom should not be available otc? If so you're completely going against your mission of helping people get off opiates. I can add to the pile of anecdotes that I personally know 10-15 people who've used kratom to kick serious years-long addictions to oxycontin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hi, I have over a decade of experience working with addiction treatment centers and getting around these type of issues. The problem is the certification, I'd be happy to provide some guidance.

<comment><USER11> That would be great! Mind shooting me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Could you explain more by what you mean by Facebook requires a third party certification? What type of third-party certification and why are you having trouble getting this certification?

<comment><USER11> Facebook and Google both require LegitScript ([https://legitscript.com/](https://legitscript.com/)) certification. We're in the process of going through that and we're told it may take several months.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> This is great work!

I really like the site design and snappy fast pages too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much. The brand design is really important to me, so I am glad that it resonates with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think about this short doc from a decade ago all the time

Last Minutes With ODEN

[https://vimeo.com/8191217](https://vimeo.com/8191217)

Best of Luck ;)

<comment><USER11> Wow. That's beautiful, thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I just wanted to chime in and say that this is incredibly inspiring and I hope it takes off.

</comment><comment><USER41> ibogaine ? theres strong anecdotal evidence for this and while it isn't possible in the US, there are many countries in the world besides the US. Have you looked into this?

<comment><USER11> Yes! MAPS has conducted and collected some really great research around psychedelics and their use in the treatment of things like PTSD and addiction. Specifically, Ibogaine Therapy has shown some real promise around drug addiction [1].

Unfortunately, it's going to be quite a while before any psychedelics are FDA- approved. Right now, MDMA and Psilocybin are both in FDA trials (Phase 3 and Phase 2, respectively) but I think Ibogaine is still quite a ways out.

Interestingly, in terms of your comment about Ibogaine's use outside of the US: other countries besides the US (and Canada) have not really seen quite the same problem in terms of opioid addiction as we have here in the US. This is mostly due to American pharmaceutical companies historically having been really successful at convincing US doctors to prescribe opioid-based pain medication [2], and due to the fact that pain was added as a 5th vital sign in 2001 by the Joint Commission [3]. That isn't to say that other countries haven't had problems with opioid addiction, but it hasn't generally been at nearly the scale of the problem in the US, and other countries have had varying rates of success with solutions that haven't been possible in the US thus far.

[1] [https://maps.org/research/ibogaine- therapy](https://maps.org/research/ibogaine-therapy)

[2] There's a really great John Oliver segment about this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qCKR6wy94U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qCKR6wy94U)

[3] [https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth...](https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/publichealth/57336)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Former IV opiate addict here. Medication is great and important for breaking the physical addiction. But it does nothing to resolve the mental health issues that led to the dependence in the first place.

Buprenorphine helped me get into a state where I could deal with my mental health issues with a professional. But until I began to deal with the mental stuff, I was still very unwell. Addiction is transitive, it pops up in new and unexpected ways.

Discontinuation of use is only a small aspect of recovery. Don't get me wrong, I think what you are doing is great. Access to medication is definitely an issue in the USA. But in Canada, we have easy access to addiction doctors in urban areas, and we haven't ended addiction yet.

A big part of the problem is general ignorance. Most people still think addiction is a moral issue. Shame and guilt are fuel for addiction. So hiding away and getting help in secret compounds the problem both for the individual and society at large. When people start to see that it affects many people close to them, that is when the stigma is destroyed.

You wouldn't say you are too busy to get treatment for any other life- threatening condition.

All treatment centers are not alike. Some are downright harmful. There is a heady mix of science, mysticism, greed and benevolence. There can be benefits: removal from environmental stressors, reduces shame by showing you are not alone, learning about the neuroscience of addiction, bonding with people over a common struggle, a chance to feel good about yourself.

The human mind loves to simplify things. Oversimplify and your model does not reflect reality.

Recovery from addiction and underlying mental health issues is not a simple process. It requires a multifaceted approach, strong personal support and constant honest self-evaluation. It requires letting go of shame and guilt. It also requires, of course, discontinuation of use and withdrawal management.

I could go on and on about my experiences and what they have taught me. One day I might write it down. I want nothing more than to make the road a bit easier for others. I have spent thousands of hours trying to distill what I have learned into some sort of essential truths. I haven't got there yet.

I'm going to have to stop myself there. To anyone out there interested, my email is in my profile. To anybody struggling out there right now: Be kind to yourself. Find your own path and make your own honest definition of success. I found keeping track of days of abstinence to be actively harmful. It resulted in more severe and longer relapses. So I stopped counting. Some said this was bad, but they were wrong because it worked for me. I identified that the shame and guilt of "losing" all those days was more harmful than motivating. It's been a long journey, I couldn't have done it without the support of family. I wouldn't change a thing though because I finally like myself.

Addiction is a symptom. Treat the symptom while working to address the underlying causes.

Thank you for your work.

</comment><comment><USER43> Might want to reword this sentence in the FAQ under "Who do I see on the first visit?":

"It is the law, the first visit be in person."

<comment><USER11> Fixed! Thanks for catching that Brian.

<comment><USER43> You are welcome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Link: meetophelia.com

<comment><USER45> Added above now. Thanks!</comment></comment>


What We Could Have Done with the Iraq War Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.good.is/post/on-american-priorities-10-things-we-could-have-done-with-the-iraq-war-money/ <comment><USER2> Dig the anti war message of these type of posts but in reality, we should have just not borrowed/printed the money at all. All of this supposed opportunity cost is nonsense.</comment>


Two Out of Three Young Millennials Now Use an Ad Blocker - angry-hacker http://www.scribblrs.com/millennials-ad-blocker/ <comment><AUTHOR> As the most technical person in my network of friends and family I'm often the one they go to for computer help. For years one of the first things I do if I touch their computers is install uBlock.

Lately a couple of them have gotten new computers and mentioned that they think it came with a virus because there ads everywhere on the internet.

<comment><USER2> Do they ever ask what's going on when a page complains about running an ad blocker?

<comment><USER3> No. They do what you do: Leave the site and go somewhere else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Even my grandfather (in his 80s) uses one and when I asked him where he got the idea for using it he said "I got sick of all the spam and thought I might get a virus so searched for ' block ads / pop ups and installed the first one I found, I guess it could be doing bad things itself but websites load so much faster now!" \- pretty amazing invasive ads are now that they lead the elderly to a search engine for a fix! (Not an easy thing to do at the best of times!)

<comment><USER5> I really wonder in what % of the elder people your grandfather is and what does that mean evolution-wise e.g from an end user perspective, how much of that is google accountable for or, if you prefer, any other search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I browse most of the time without extensions other than a cookie editor, since I've encountered a number of weird bugs in my company's own product that turned out not to be bugs but weird interactions with browser extensions I was running. I also read a lot of news articles both on big sites like the WSJ and whatever regional news outlets turn up in my news searches. That is to say that ad networks should (presumably) have a _great_ profile on me and be able to show super-relevant ads.

But I still get Linode ads for weeks if I make the mistake of visiting Linode outside incognito mode (I've been a customer there for 5 years; I don't need another ad prompting me to sign up). I still get ads for things that I've just bought instead of complementary goods for the things I've just bought.

I still see absolutely insulting garbage ads for One Weird Trick that $GROUP hates. It's the offensively stupid Taboola/Outbrain etc. bottom-of-the-barrel ads that repulse and puzzle me the most. My memory says -- and scanned newspaper archives confirm -- that back before online news was a thing, regional newspapers had plenty of advertising but it was advertising for normal goods and services: snow tires, a clothing sale, lawn care, oil changes, etc. Shortly after the turn of the millennium I thought that online advertising was going to be kind of scary due to the profiles advertisers could build up on me but also kind of nice because I'd always see ads that aligned with my interests, instead of e.g. randomly bombarding me with ads for baby diapers in hopes that I am a new parent. Ha, if only.

The most noticeable difference between small news outlet ads now and 30 years ago isn't that the ads I see are now all eerily aligned with my interests; it's that worst of them are aggressively misaligned with my interests and with the interests of anyone who's not a total fucking rube. Who actually believes that they've won the iPhone giveaway contest or that they need a weird trick to clean the dangerous fluoride toxins from their tap water? I've never clicked on this trash but I appear doomed to encounter it forever.

<comment><USER7> I often joke that I'll believe "The machines are taking over" immediately after I get a relevant ad on Facebook. Of all places - they should know exactly what I like and what I would buy. They haven't got a clue.

<comment><USER8> I just finished "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" and there is a discussion about this in there. Turns out its very hard to get from "what you like" to "what I want to buy." Google actually has an advantage here, in that it is easier to identify search phrases that are part of the pre-buying process.

<comment><USER7> I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's even harder to get to "machines are taking over" from "here's a bunch of networked processors". :-D

Thanks for the book recommendation - I'll have to read that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Young Millenials?

Are they different to "Young persons"? And what is an "Old Millenial"?

Why not just describe the group of 18-24 year olds as "Young adults", which is what they are.

<comment><USER10> "Millenials" is always used in combination with derogatory terms like "entitled, lazy, hopeless". Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's workplace and how little power you can hope for, regardless of how much you work.

<comment><USER11> > Sometimes I wonder if boomers have _any_ idea of the frantic pace of today's > workplace and how little power you can hope for, regardless of how much you > work.

Millennials have as much or more power than the boomers did when they started working. The difference is that they _expect_ more, because they spent their childhoods getting participation trophies and being waited on hand and foot by adults concerned for their comfort and 'safety.'

In the real world, the reward for doing exactly what is expected of you isn't promotion: it's that you keep your job.

In the real world, sometimes you're expected to sacrifice for your goals.

<comment><USER12> > The difference is that they expect more, because they spent their childhoods > getting participation trophies and being waited on hand and foot by adults > concerned for their comfort and 'safety.'

Bullshit. If millennials expect more, it's because they see the standard of living their parents and grandparents have and have had their entire life. They own homes that have gone up in value 5 fold. They owned homes at an early age. They got high paying jobs easily and costs of living were low.

Youth and young adult unemployment rates are shit if you don't ignore the "discouraged workers". We have expectations for young adults to take on tremendous levels of debt like never before. Housing prices are higher than ever before. Healthcare is more expensive than ever before. Millennials are having to pay into a social security system they see their parents or grandparents benefiting from, knowing (or often not knowing) they'll never get those same benefits despite all the money paid in.

The baby boomers are handing the millennials an entirely fucked up world. The environment is a disaster, politics are a disaster, the perpetual war and crony capitalism of the MIC is a disaster. Things will only get better once the boomers die off and we can rid ourselves of the "fuck you, got mine" generation.

<comment><USER13> > politics are a disaster

If things go the way of the old white people we'll probably get one last gift of a trump presidency.

<comment><USER12> It's a disaster either way, just in different ways.

HRC wins and we continue to kill civilians by the tens of thousands overseas, destabilizing entire regions in the Middle East. All the problems of our current status quo get worse. People in power continue to cement their position there. I don't think HRC is going to be any different from Obama and I can't imagine she's going to do anything positive he hasn't already done.

Trump wins and we get a likely ineffective commander in chief and congress becomes a useless sack of potatoes, getting upset that their bullshit has been called out and going home with their toys. Definitely hope for withdrawing from our perpetual war, fixing our election and campaigning systems, and making future elections much better at representing what most people want.

Between the two, I go with Trump, if nothing else because it means more hope for a future of better elections and putting an end to blowing up women and children every day with drone strikes. Yeah there are some bad characters in his supporter base and some of what Trump says is equally as stupid as what HRC says. At least I can believe Trump sometimes, which isn't the case with HRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I temporarily disabled ghostery yesterday and ended up visiting the LA Times. Without an adblocker the loading / performance / experience was horrific! Long live the ad-free web!

<comment><USER15> Would you use LA Times if we'd convince them to implement the following user experience:

[https://demo.adtechmedia.io/atm- core/nytimes/www.nytimes.com...](https://demo.adtechmedia.io/atm- core/nytimes/www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/technology/why-tech-support-is- purposely-unbearable.html)

NOTE: Above article is from NY Times and is ONLY for demo purposes :)

<comment><USER16> I thought when I first saw that page that it could be defeated with a simple inspect element, but it looks like when the atm-blurry is removed from the paragraph id's that the paragraphs themselves were all gibberish! I wonder if the text is randomly generated or if it's some kind of text-cypher.

Either way, this type of paywall experience is significantly less annoying than a pop-up, but I personally would still be unlikely to pay for a subscription

<comment><USER17> Interestingly the text is garbled after it's loaded. So if you view the page with JavaScript disabled, the original text is completely readable (no blur effect either). I assume this is an attempt to make the page accessible to robots but not to humans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I use an Ad Blocker, but happily unblock sites that ask if I see they are not running a large number of scripts.

However the reason I installed the Ad Blocker in the first place is the way some local newspaper sites in the UK (run by [http://www.localworld.co.uk/](http://www.localworld.co.uk/)) will try and run 50+ scripts and make it almost impossible to read the article.

It was a defence reaction to abusive web sites.

<comment><USER19> It's baffling how bad news websites can be, it almost seems intentional. Displaying text is one of the simplest jobs, and yet somehow your typical local news website is one of the most complicated, infuriating and burdensome websites out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm not where my position is relative to the rest of my generation, but for me it's all about practicality. I have no vendetta against advertising and I don't think it is inherently evil. I don't think it makes for a good content publishing model, but that is the content publishers choice. What bothers me is how intrusive and obnoxious they are. Large ads that pop up or take up 3/4 of the screen, can't click out because the [x] button is too small, making me wait to watch an ad with no escape hatch, video with loud volume, popunders, etc. it just got out of hand, so I opted out completely.

<comment><USER21> I don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads. 90% of the sites I visit (i.e. google, facebook, stackoverflow, reddit, hackernews, xkcd, netflix, etc...) don't have annoying ads.

Oddly enough the only times I have really regretted turning off my ad blocker is when I'm watching videos where an unskippable ad longer than 10 seconds comes up or I go to some news site (which seems to 3/4 of the time have some full page popup or autoplaying video).

<comment><USER22> > I don't have any moral problem with ads and companies need to make money so > I don't have an adblocker and I just don't visit sites with obnoxious ads.

How do you keep track? What about drive-by exploits that could infect your computer on first visit? Or mobile ads that redirect to the app store?

<comment><USER21> I know to just avoid most news site except for maybe 5 or 10 that don't have terrible ads (5-10 isn't that hard to just remember). Mobile ads that redirect to the store are annoying and there's no great way to deal with them but I don't seem to run into those much where I go (maybe happens to me twice a week). Other than those the only real concern is drive-by exploits from legitimate ad networks, which doesn't seem to happen very often in the wild.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> An interesting point came through on Twitter yesterday: ads for/on TV are increasingly seen only by "the olds". This is going to be a _fascinating_ turn of the worm as cord-based TV implodes further.

<comment><USER24> I've cut the cord 10 years ago, and (because I don't watch any sports) I _seldom_ watch live TV (Oscars, New Year's Eve, Thanksgiving Day Parade are some notable exceptions.)

My son (who never had broadcast TV) learned how to push the "skip ad" button on Youtube years before he could read.

<comment><USER25> Same here. I think the only time my son sees traditional advertising is at a movie theater. However, I have noticed more "native advertising" in his favorite youtube channels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I hate Ads as much as next guy, but what will be the future of the internet without the Ads? where the revenue comes from? do we have to pay for every site that we use? I prefer a free content internet with reasonable amount of ads!!

<comment><USER27> Same as the past probably before Ads.

I'm willing to pay for content, but honestly only up to how much a site would get from me for an ad impression. I am not going to do $N/mo/yr for X sites however.

Once I found out the sum total of what my ad impressions for every site amounts to about $10/yr, I am really annoyed that the ad industry and content publishers aren't coming up with their own google contributor type deal.

Free content isn't worth the cost in Ads. By this I mean the bandwidth, the cpu/energy use, and the cognitive cost. The monetary cost for people is insane. I'd pay $20/year to tell ad companies to go away and let companies replace my ad impression with a micro transaction equivalent.

Until then, screw the whole industry, ad blockers it is. Give me a real choice or accept that reality.

<comment><USER28> What is your source for $10/year? That's quite interesting

<comment><USER27> [https://air.mozilla.org/subscribe2web/](https://air.mozilla.org/subscribe2web/)

It was actually $6.20/year at that time. I've been generous with the $10/yr. I also consider $20/year a win for consumption companies as that would mean we could outbid ads for our own eyes. It seems stupid to have to say that but you'd be surprised how little money an individual makes on their own.

<comment><USER28> Thanks. I definitely hear "nobody would want to actually pay for what their advertising value is actually worth" all the time. Personally, I'd happily pay more than $10 for the benefits.

<comment><USER27> Yep, I'm willing to concede this isn't fully accurate. But if we don't have numbers at all its not even a point worth arguing. If anyone has other numbers please post them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ad blocking is a textbook case of "prisoners' dilemma". And as someone that uses an ad blocker, I find the increasing popularity of ad blockers unnerving.

<comment><USER30> This is why I self-host my advertising and try to make them as high quality and relevant as possible (no animation, popups, etc). I have no idea if the concept could be replicated to other content verticals, but it has worked well for me.

<comment><USER25> Thank you. I really hope that you set the trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Now if only there was a feature on ad blockers that blocked all the crummy youtube videos my daughter watches that are effectively 20 minute ads of people playing with toys.

<comment><USER22> You are the ad blocker! But really don't worry, it's nothing new. The 80s and 90s were filled with advertisements-as-TV-shows.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> If you're in my house and got your IP address from my DHCP server, you're ad blocking without even having to lift a finger, thanks to dnsmasq and several volunteer-maintained ad blocking hosts files. Similar method to what Pi-hole [1] does. It doesn't get everything but it's a nice default starting point.

1: [http://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide- with...](http://jacobsalmela.com/block-millions-ads-network-wide-with-a- raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/)

<comment><USER33> Whats the throughput? Can it handle speedy internet?

<comment><USER32> It operates at the DNS level, preventing known ad hosts from even resolving, so it should have no negative effect on your throughput. It could only speed things up since requests to those domains are never made.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> They make you do it. I just installed Adblock this morning, actually. I have been holding out this long. But some horrible -- I mean, truly horrible -- browsing experiences on a couple newspaper websites this morning pushed me over the line.

One can only take so much.

</comment><comment><USER35> Of COURSE we do, half of the websites you visit these days will _crash the browser regularly_ if you don't use an ad-blocker!

(half is probably an overstatement ;) Nevertheless, I was resolutely trying to be 'moral' and not use and ad blocker until my browser began to regularly crash and I traced the crashes to ads. That issue may be fixed now for all I know, but I can't really go back, though I still try to whitelist sites that I want to have a bit of support, and pay for others somehow, here or there. :) )

</comment><comment><USER36> There needs to be a balance between wanting things "for free" and viewing ads (especially for news sites).

It's gotten really aggressive the past few years, especially for local news, mostly because they were ill-prepared for the shift in advertising.

Staff cuts (as ad revenue plummeted) surely included all of the "web people" with that work being outsourced.

Many local news shops are hanging on by a thread; unfortunately that thread is reinforced by their website carpeted in advertising.

</comment><comment><USER37> What's the sample size here?

</comment><comment><USER38> Who in that age cohort didn't experience the wild west days of shady Flash and Java applets, Punch the Monkey games, RealPlayer, Shockwave, Internet Explorer and all the other insecure crap we used to deal with.

Raise your hand if you never got a virus and almost bricked the family computer doing something mostly innocuous...

Ad-blocking may not be as essential to self-defense as it used to be, but old habits die hard.

<comment><USER39> _> Ad-blocking may not be as essential to self-defense as it used to be, but old habits die hard._

Possibly even more relevant nowadays than it used to be with more drive-by malware, 0-day exploits, and more and more people using the internet.

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

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites- hit-b...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/03/big-name-sites-hit-by-rash- of-malicious-ads-spreading-crypto-ransomware/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> there is a reason for this, and that reason is ABUSE. you know... one or two small well placed ads fine.. but what you get are situations where content is tiny, and really it's just about seeing who can spam you the most ads half of which serve malware.

</comment><comment><USER41> I started using an adblocker in the aughts after a site I frequented served up a drive-by download from an infected ad network. Because of this, I never disable it even for sites I like.

</comment><comment><USER42> Not so dumb after all!

        Blo-cker! Blo-cker! ... who o o uh-oh!
        G  - E    G  - E        A   C D E-D

(Repeat, _ad nauseum_ ).

</comment><comment><USER43> What's a "young" millenial? Isn't the term a derogatory for someone born in a specific decade already?

</comment><comment><USER44> I keep sayin', they're not ad blockers, they're HTML firewalls.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's about to get interesting. A lot of internet services depend on ads.

</comment><comment><USER46> Question: How do companies that rely on ads plan to make money in the future?

</comment><comment><USER47> Everyone should install Millennials to Snake People. It's a great addon that makes the internet way better.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to- sna...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/millennials-to-snake- peop/jhkibealmjkbkafogihpeidfcgnigmlf?hl=en-US)

<comment><USER48> Is no one else concerned about granting this extension a permission to "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit"? This is a joke extension and nothing is stopping the author from selling it to someone who might have more sinister uses for it.

<comment><USER39> It needs that permission to read the page and perform the text swap. Text swap is change data, the DOM needs to be read.

This is a big reason to support open source add-ons (not sure if add-on is, might be since it was forked? No idea.) You can see if they're doing anything malicious on the side.

<comment><USER49> Extensions are so broken. They can update at any time without your knowledge or permission. There is a whole market of selling extensions to malware companies so they can put malicious code in an update.

But besides that, most the extensions I use have serious bugs. I'd be willing to fix them, but there is no ability to do that. Chrome makes it difficult to view the code and there is no ability to edit it or copy it. Let alone submit pull requests to the author, unless they happen to have put the code on github also.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Finally fired after 6 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4km3yc/finally_fired_after_6_years/ <comment><USER2> This is blogspam of a Reddit post. Original post: [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4km3yc/f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4km3yc/finally_fired_after_6_years/)

<comment><USER3> URL changed from [http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2016/05/programmer- fired...](http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2016/05/programmer-fired- after-6-years-realizes-he-doesnt-know-how-to-code). Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They fired the only guy who automated all his tasks, and did it so well nobody noticed for 6 years. They are idiots. They should have assigned him to automate the hell out of everybody else's tasks and gain tons of additional work-hours for free. This reminds me of that guy several years back who outsourced all his tasks to China and was employee of the month again and again. They also found out via IT dept, checking his strange VPN traffic. And again, fired the one guy who would be a perfect Outsource Lead. Oh well, the bots are coming, automation will rule them all, and those companies who are devoted to lines of code and employee keystrokes... Well, they will become obsolete.

<comment><USER5> I've heard that factories will rotate lazy people around the factory floor because the method that requires the least amount of effort to achieve the needed result. Then the company can teach the lazy person's method to their less lazy/less creative employees.

Perhaps the story is apocryphal, but I think there is a grain of truth in the story. Managed properly, laziness can benefit the company. The problem you run in to is that lazy individuals are difficult to manage properly. A company isn't going to realize the benefits from a lazy individual if they aren't permitted to find their own solution to problems, and the shortcuts lazy individuals take can be dangerous depending on what shortcuts they are taking.

I wouldn't want to work for a company that is willing to fire someone for not doing anything for six years because you wrote a script that did basically everything. It implies they value the effort pertaining to my work rather than the actual output, which is insane. That just reeks of terrible management.

That being said, I don't want to imply that all lazy people make great employees. I've definitely worked with people who were just completely unwilling to do anything but the bare minimum, if they did any work at all. I don't think individuals who actively avoid all work without coming up with an alternative are of much use to any organization.

<comment><USER6> I heard there are four types of people who work for you. In order (from most preferred to least preferred) are:

1) The smart and lazy---they'll find the easiest way to do the job (or automate it).

2) The dumb and hardworking---you an tell them what to do and they'll do it exactly how you tell them to.

3) The dumb and lazy---they won't help, but they won't necessarily hurt either (just the bottom line).

4) The smart and the hardworking---terrible combination.

I actually have experience with the fourth type of person. Twenty years ago I was doing some consulting work for a bank and had to convert a printed training manual into HTML (mid 90s). The person helping me was very smart _and_ hardworking. I'm smart, but a bit lazy. I had to argue with the person _not_ to dive into one process (linking each word in the text to an entry on the glossary page) because it would take _hours_ to do by hand (around 100 files, perhaps 100 vocabulary words). We actually argued _longer_ than I took for me to code up the solution (using lex---we were working on a Unix system).

<comment><USER7> This is attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a German general in WW1 and WW2.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein- Equord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_von_Hammerstein-Equord)

<comment><USER6> Heh. Funny that it's a different order, but the smart and lazy are still at the top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Instead of asking what else he can do, or provide more value or grow into more responsibility, he sat on his hands and played League all day?

I'm disappointed it took them 6 years to act on it.

<comment><USER9> Well he was 22 at the time, so that makes a bit more sense.

Honestly I've had times on one of my jobs where I just had to kill time all day and I _hated_ it. It's one of the reason I later decided to leave.

<comment><USER8> We've all had times where we're not fully invested in our work. Sometimes even weeks, maybe months in extreme circumstances. 6 years is absurdly bad. I can't imagine the management getting off lightly here either.

<comment><USER9> Either his manager needs some serious training (or a new job) or he just fell through the cracks and ended up in a position where no one was in charge of him and no one realized it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel mostly sorry, not jealous for this guy. Even though he plays it cool, I'm sure he lived in constant fear of being discovered for six years and being speechless any questioning.

<comment><USER11> Plus.. I actually enjoy coding. I wouldn't even want to automate my job. I know that in the past I've wanted ways to escape working, but now that I'm a developer I couldn't imagine finding ways not to work (I guess except for browsing HN)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why the hell didn't he freelance or try to start a small business on the side. He could have made double or triple the money!

Also, I wonder how IT eventually found out.

<comment><USER13> You may have missed the part about him being lazy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> if he did nothing but play league of legends for 6 years how good is he at it?

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-ways-to-earn- money-p...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-ways-to-earn-money- playing-League-of-Legends)

<comment><USER2> OP does actually answer that: [https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4km3yc/f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4km3yc/finally_fired_after_6_years/d3g4pmi)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Dude has 200k in the bank. If he's found motivation, he can just do a masters course. That will teach him a few things and get him back in the coding saddle, and give a plausible reason for why he's looking for work afterwards.

What's scary is the people who actually have been coding for several years and still don't know how to do it. No version control, no idea what common patterns are, ridiculously complex spaghetti code. We all know them.

</comment><comment><USER16> I find it hard to be sympathetic. Why is he sad? 6 years of playing video games on someone else's dollar is fantastic. Be glad it lasted more than 3 months. People who slog away for 50-60 hours a week on drudge work still find time for self-improvement. If you want to get kudos for automating your job away, tell your boss and their boss. That's how you get promoted.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure if I should ask this - but any guesses on which company OP was working for?

"I got a job at a company in the Bay Area, CA that was completely unknown 7 years ago but is now incredibly well known. It is actually quite hard to get a job here now, from what I hear."

I'm not from the Bay Area, so I can't think of a company (other than Facebook) that fits that profile.

</comment><comment><USER18> I consider myself smart and lazy as well. Cut down the time required by predecessor to do the work from 8hrs to 2hrs. But was lucky my boss realized that as well gave me more responsibilities and a promotion few months into the job. Though we have regular arguments about me streamlining other peoples work as she does want to change herself.

</comment><comment><USER11> I guess the biggest question here is - does OP even want to be a programmer? Maybe they'd rather do something else in life.. but e.g. for me, it's been my goal of the past two years (which I'm finally s/realizing/achieving/)

</comment><comment><USER19> If he can automate his work, milk it for the weekly paycheck, and do it well enough to stay around for six years, more power to him. He made his laziness pay off.

Least amount of non-automated work for the most amount of pay off, I respect it.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Now we had a chance to meet this young man, and boy that's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him."

</comment><comment><USER21> > doing Quality Assurance work

So I am guessing if he was actually a developer to begin with his job would have been a bit harder to automate.

<comment><USER2> Speaking as a QA Engineer myself, QA is as rigorous and important to the software lifecycle as development.

The continual disrespect for QA engineers is somewhat frustrating.

<comment><USER21> The point I was making is you don't become a tennis player by kicking a football.</comment></comment></comment>


With $10M and a long list of investors, Opendoor is almost open for business - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/07/with-10m-and-a-long-list-of-big-name-investors-opendoor-is-almost-open-for-business/

<comment><USER2> 10 million dollars?

Gee, that will allow them to buy what... like 5 houses in the Bay area?

(It's a cool idea...hope it works out. I just think they need a lot more money).</comment>


Developer's RegEx Survival Guide - <AUTHOR> http://blog.smartbear.com/development/the-developers-regex-survival-guide-15-rules-for-making-sense-of-regular-expressions/

<comment><USER2> One weird regex issue I ran into recently: in php you need to use 4 backslashes to match a backslash in preg_match.

<comment><USER3> Learn this one weird trick to match a backslash!</comment></comment>


Arrow of time and its reversal on the IBM quantum computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-40765-6 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378567](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19378567)

</comment><comment><USER3> Always fun waiting for Scott Aaronson to explain why the latest QC paper is bullshit. Until then can any Quantum Information experts here provide some background? I read the paper but don't trust my intuition with these kind of things.

<comment><USER4> Essentially it seems like they are exploring ways in which for certain computations a solution can be found before the computation has actually finished, approaching something like O(1) performance.

<comment><USER5> No, the experiment takes "2t" time, "t" in the initial part and "t" in the backward part. I wrote more details in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20491309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20491309)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _The exemplary outcome probabilities 𝑃𝑖𝑗=|⟨𝑏𝑖𝑏𝑗|𝜓̃ 0⟩|2 and 𝑃𝑖𝑗𝑘=|⟨𝑏𝑖𝑏𝑗𝑏𝑘|𝜓̃ > 0⟩|2, 𝑖,𝑗,𝑘=0,1 obtained in a real experiment for the 2- and 3-qubit models > are shown on the Fig. 3E. One can see that the probability for observing the > correct final state |0…0⟩ is less than 100% and for 2- and 3-qubit > experiment are given by 85.3±0.4% and 49.1±0.6% correspondingly._

Does this mean that the 3 qubit model is predicted to only get the correct result for less than half the times it is asked?

</comment><comment><USER7> Relevant data structures lecture :

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yzrZL1py0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T0yzrZL1py0)

</comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone break this down into something non-clickbaity?

<comment><USER9> I think a non clickbaity version of this article would look something like the following:

<comment><USER10> Lmao. Your reply should be the top comment on a lot of articles that get filtered before they make it to the front page. Apparently, some that do make it, too.</comment></comment></comment>


Commercial support made easy - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
We at Baikal have been working on a communication and transaction platform targeting software project maintainers.
The idea is to streamline the professional support process and provide a single platform where programmers can communicate, come to agreements, make payments, etc.
We'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts, and implore anyone to try out the service and send us feedback.
We've also started a promo event giving away cash :-). Links below.
Thanks for reading!
baikal.io <comment><USER2> From the website, it's not immediately clear what the Baikal platform does, how it is used, and who would use it.

As best I can figure, a programmer can offer various levels of paid support for a piece of code and payment is processed through PayPal without any sort of additional fee.

I think it's a two sided marketplace, but there doesn't seem to be clear calls to action and explicit onboarding mechanisms beyond the $100 offer.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you brudgers for kindly visiting the website and giving feedback.

Yes, we're currently shaped like a two-sided marketplace, where transactions center around "price plans" in relation to some "piece of code" that sellers can customize to their liking.

We'll take what you've said into consideration as we continue improving the product. Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> page: [https://baikal.io/](https://baikal.io/)

cash giveaway event: [https://medium.com/@baikalio/promotional-event-for-all- open-...](https://medium.com/@baikalio/promotional-event-for-all-open-source- developers-7458ce799280)</comment>


Ask HN: Do you sign NDAs up front? - <AUTHOR>

I've recently been looking for some side iOS work.  It seems that everyone wants to protect their idea with an NDA <i>before</i> even talking. <comment><USER2> I would never sign an NDA without at least a high-level overview first... how can you say you won't disclose "their" idea when it could be something completely trivial that 100 people have thought of? Signing an NDA under circumstances like that is just begging for trouble.

Now if they can make it clear that there actually _is_ some sort of "secret sauce" that's likely to be a truly unique idea, with some reasonable degree of specificity, then sure, I'd consider signing an NDA (depending on the exact wording). To that point, it might be worth having your own NDA drawn up, where you know in advance that the language is reasonable, and proactively offer up your own NDA to these folks, instead of having to wrangle of the language in their NDA.

<comment><USER3> Good point. I say I never sign an NDA, full stop. There's no way that I can know their competitors are working on the same idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Only if there is an explicit guarantee of work. They are asking you to give up something, you should be compensated for that. I would get them to sign an intent before I would sign an NDA. This way they are bound to contract you if they move forward with the NDA. You still have a right to say no to the work, but they are protected from you saying no and then implementing their idea. I think it is a fair middle ground if they have a problem with the intent they are just wasting your time anyways.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is a great article that I identify with: [http://blog.jpl- consulting.com/2012/04/why-i-wont-sign-your-...](http://blog.jpl- consulting.com/2012/04/why-i-wont-sign-your-nda/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I would never sign an NDA with exception to acquisition talks or something important. Things like this, I'll pass.</comment>


Here comes another bubble - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I

<comment><USER2> Do you get that eerie feeling that a bunch of that quantitative easing is ending up in the valley?</comment>


Why Bottom Posting Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://www.molly.com/2009/09/29/why-bottom-posting-sucks/ <comment><USER2> I concede that scrolling through pages and pages of previously seen text on a small device, ony to get to the one new line that says "Yup - I'm on it!" is a strong argument for deprecating bottom posting.

However, it's an even stronger case for applying some common sense in quoting. Why should you quote page after page after page, when quoting the subject, one line of context, and then your one new line, is not only enough, but time saving and preferable?

The answer is obvious - people are simply too lazy.

There is a less obvious (to me) answer. If it all goes horribly wrong, you can't be blamed if you didn't cut. If you quoted everything, you've covered your six.

For most people the combination of making sure youdon't get the blame _and_ not having to think is simply irresistable.

Yup, long and pointless quoting is here to stay. Anyone with a workable replacement will have an overnight success, even if it takes 10 years to come.

<comment><USER3> I sometimes solve this problem with

        > Stuff I'm responding to...

        My response to stuff...

        ==== Original message follows ====
        All the original content, including stuff I copied
        and responded to at the top of the message...

This has the disadvantage that it creates two copies of the text I'm responding to; but in cases where I'm responding to one or two lines out of a much larger email (but where having the entire email copied can provide helpful context) it seems a small price to pay.

<comment><USER2> I almost alwayswork in-line, cut the pieces that are superceded, irrelevant, agreed or otherwise unnecessary to this email, and keep it short. I hadn't thought of keeping all of the quoted original as a backup, because I don't bother to cover my six. If someone wants to call me out, as has happened, I quote the entire exchange and add a context-sensitive summary and commentary.

I'll think about keeping the original, but for me, I don't think it will be relevant.

Oh, and I up-mud you, so I don't know who down-mud you. I thought your comment added value, and I'd love to know why someone thought it did the opposite.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekend Nostalgia Project: SeinfeldQuote.com - <AUTHOR> http://seinfeldquote.com

<comment><USER2> Would be cool to be able to navigate through the keyboard arrows!

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed. I'd actually thought of that, but didn't have the time to implement it before my hacking time was over.</comment></comment>


A pragmatic toolchain: TeX and friends and friends of friends [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8lH9e2cXEk

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that the Pragmatic Programmers books are made with LaTeX, so I was curious to know what kind of toolchain they use. In this video Steve Peter shows their toolchain.</comment>


Software tricks people into thinking it is human - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20865-software-tricks-people-into-thinking-it-is-human.html

<comment><USER2> The last two sentences of the exchange quoted:

        New Scientist: No, but you have – do you think you passed?

        Cleverbot: I am, but I'm too lazy to do anything with it.

The "I am" is ungrammatical, and exactly the sort of error you expect with a hyper-souped-up-eliza-with-tweaks.</comment>


GNU Guile 2.1.1 released - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2015-11/msg00007.html <comment><USER2> From the announcement:

 __Complete Emacs-compatible Elisp implementation

Thanks to the work of BT Templeton, Guile's Elisp implementation is now fully Emacs-compatible, implementing all of Elisp's features and quirks in the same way as the editor we know and love.

So where's my guile-based emacs build? Not holding my breath, but it certainly would be a very nice christmas present (not sure about the year though)!

(yeah, I know emacs is a lot more than just it's elisp implementation...)

<comment><USER3> Cool, so if/when the guile vm is default, does that mean we could finally get better process control in emacs?

Honestly I love emacs but it is not the most performant thing on the planet. Redrawing taking tons of time bugs that have existed for years, non blocking i/o to things like processes doesn't really exist etc...

It could do for a lot of spit and polish in the concurrency/threading land.

<comment><USER4> How much of that is limited by the C core as well? Waiting for that to be fixed seems like another level of infinity than guile-emacs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Awesome. I worked on Guile almost exactly 20 years ago. It's probably very different from what it looked like back then. Emacs-on-Guile was one of Stallman's ideas back then, as well as using it for a GNU tcl implementation. Sounds like we're half way there!

<comment><USER6> Some old GNU ideas are popping again. Guile as a system language in GuixSD. Hurd too. Funny times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The new website looks much better than before, great job. I am planning to build something using Guile, but sadly my time is limited.

<comment><USER8> I agree, but I'm also a bit (selfishly) sad to see that the old logos have disappeared (I was the one who redraw them in SVG, before only bitmap formats where available).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> the website looks great. But it's always so confusing that GNU's language of choice doesn't seem to be used by anyone. The marquee projects listed as using guile seemed a little underwhelming

<comment><USER10> It is a Scheme implementation. At very least many universities do use Scheme.

<comment><USER9> its a flavor of scheme. But it was made to be the language of extension in GNU projects. I've just never heard of anyone actually using it. And the projects that seemed to have embraced it seem rather small for the banner or marquee projects on their website.

<comment><USER11> There's also Lilypond (lots of Guile) and Gimp (a little bit of Guile), which are both pretty well-known projects. Guix itself is a large project. GDB has Guile scripting support as well.

The website could feature a few more projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> nice website! for some people this makes a huge a difference.

BTW, what's this 2.1.1 vs 2.2 thing? I see they are used interchangeably.

<comment><USER13> This is the not-entirely-unique practice of using odd minor numbers for beta releases and even minor numbers for stable releases.

Gnome does this as well - 3.17.x was beta, 3.18.x stable.

Linux was one of the first projects to use this pattern, but hasn't since early 2.6.x.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Guile compiles to bytecode, is there a way to then link that to guile to create a standalone executable?

<comment><USER15> Not that I know of, but Racket and Chicken, and I believe newer versions of Gambit, can produce executable from their version of scheme. Scheme was originally meant to be embedded so compiling to an standalone executable was never part of its goals.

[http://racket-lang.org/](http://racket-lang.org/)

[http://www.call-cc.org/](http://www.call-cc.org/)

[http://gambitscheme.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page](http://gambitscheme.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)

<comment><USER16> There's also Stalin, an extremely optimization-heavy compiler for Scheme to C; [https://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi/software.html](https://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi/software.html)

The 'website' is really just Jeff Siskind's page with a listing of what he's done.

It seems mostly dead nowadays and there's very little info to find on it. The following page is pretty much the most amount of actual information I could find:

[http://community.schemewiki.org/?Stalin](http://community.schemewiki.org/?Stalin)

<comment><USER17> Keep in mind that Stalin is a very small subset of R4RS (note that the current is R7RS-small), and in many ways becomes a very small portion of an already small language. This makes it easy to optimize, but can be annoying if you're coming from other languages that are less spartan.

As for using Stalin, I would argue that nowadays it is better to use the CHICKEN port of Stalin [1], as it is a bit more up-to-date and provides some extensions (such as using '\n' in string literals, something Stalin didn't provide from the outset!!!). In any case, it's nice to see the variety in Scheme implementations, but in the case of Stalin I personally turn my nose up, as CHICKEN is often fast enough on it's own (or can be made to be), without restricting myself to a very tiny set of tools and libraries. That's not to say the work on Stalin hasn't been appreciated, I'm sure Gambit and CHICKEN have taken their fair share of ideas from Stalin as time has gone on.

[1] [http://wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/4/stalin](http://wiki.call- cc.org/eggref/4/stalin)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> First time looking at Guile and I see this:

> (use-modules (srfi srfi-19))

Couldn't they have picked a better name for these modules? seems like it would be quite obnoxious to remember all these by their number instead of a nice name.

<comment><USER19> The SRFI numbering is Scheme-language-wide; it's not a Guile thing.

SRFIs (Scheme Requests for Implementation) are something like RFC's for the Scheme language.

They are proposed features that are not standardized in the Scheme Report. Their numbers identify the proposal.

So if we see srfi-19 being referenced in Guile code, it is cryptic, but it references the proposal which gives the requirements for that feature.

If you're porting code from Guile which depends on srfi-19 to another Scheme, the consistency of the reference will make it easy.

<comment><USER18> That makes a little more sense. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Scribe: Transporting petabytes per hour via a distributed, buffered queueing - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.fb.com/data-infrastructure/scribe/ <comment><USER2> braggy PR is misleading: the 25GB/s coming from CERN is after they filter the data down from 600TB/s because there are no commercial systems that can capture data at higher rates.

<comment><USER3> This is a good point!

Just for fun, for more perspective on big data, a human body generates around 1-10M new cells per second, and a cell contains about 10-100GB of information. So a single human is generating 1-100PB/s of data just in the new cells! (Give or take a few OOM)

<comment><USER4> Are you trying to quantify the "information" by the size of the DNA? I think this is a pretty meaningless number to multiply since most of the DNA will be exact copies and DNA alone doesn't capture all the information about a cell.

OTOH the amount of "information" needed to perfectly simulate a cell is probably unbounded. Just a corollary of the fact that we currently don't know how to perfectly simulate reality. Even a single "real" number can take up infinite space.

<comment><USER5> > OTOH the amount of "information" needed to perfectly simulate a cell is > probably unbounded. Just a corollary of the fact that we currently don't > know how to perfectly simulate reality.

This is a very good point. The 'information' in a cell isn't the base pairs in its DNA, but all the atoms that make up the whole cell. And then each atom encapsulates properties such as position, velocity, charge, van der Waals radius etc.

However this considers atoms with classical mechanics. In a quantum mechanical representation it would be very different again and you can start asking really hairy questions about whether information can be created or destroyed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Keep in mind the network cost of petabytes per hour cross continent.

Those of us who don't own our own cross-ocean fiber can't afford to design systems like this.

<comment><USER7> Never underestimate the bandwidth of a cargo ship full of SSDs.

(I'm paraphrasing an old, old joke.)

<comment><USER8> Fairly high latency though I guess.

<comment><USER9> using jet for trans ocean data delivery gives you several hours latency - acceptable for the logs - at the cost on the scale like $0.1-0.3/TB (really depends on the napkin used for the estimations)

<comment><USER10> Big capital costs in setting up the number of parallel writers required on one end and readers required on the other, though. And presumably human "IT teamster" labor, hooking and unhooking drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Naming is hard! Facebook used to have a _different_ Scribe ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(log_server)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_\(log_server\))).

We used it at a company I worked for, but it had long-since been deprecated, so I was confused when I saw this Scribe.

<comment><USER12> This is the same scribe. Facebook closed-sourced it because it was too hard to maintain an open version and a version that addresses Facebook's needs.

<comment><USER13> I wonder why couldn't they just make the open source version address their needs...

<comment><USER14> The version that was open-sourced kept evolving and integrating with other internal systems at Facebook. That's what made it hard to continue open- sourcing it (why the open-sourced version was discontinued) and why the current version is also hard to open-source.

Maybe one day we'll have a version available. In any case, one of the larger parts of the system (LogDevice) is open source :)

(disclaimer: I work in Scribe)

LogDevice: [https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/open-sourcing- logdevice...](https://engineering.fb.com/core-data/open-sourcing-logdevice-a- distributed-data-store-for-sequential-data/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it normal for these internal system to not implement any kind of access control? From the post it seems every reader can access every stream?

<comment><USER14> That's actually not the case, there's access control :)

The article just focuses on certain areas of the system and doesn't go into the security and privacy parts, that's all.

(I work in Scribe)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> why can't Producer/Scribed write directly to LogDevice storage. Any reasons for routing through WriteService.

<comment><USER17> That's a good question. There are multiple reasons for this. I'll briefly mention two of them. One is the high fan in ratio - millions of machines are writing relatively small blobs of data, so the middle layer serves as an aggregator (which saves backend's IOPs, number of connections, etc). Another reason is the volume of metadata - it would be inefficient to keep all the LogDevice-level metadata on each of the producer hosts.

<comment><USER16> Will the WriteService(Aggregator) make sense for environments having thousands of machines(not in millions) and they are all within the DataCenter. In our company, we are moving away from this design of having aggregators, to directly writing to Storage whereever possible, as it reduces the message loss.

On the volume of metadata held by Producers, will there be any significant difference between holding WriteService & LogDevice meta.

<comment><USER17> The devil is in the details probably, but if you have a single datacenter and all writes are coming from thousands of machines ("edge"), yes, it may make more sense to set up a single LogDevice / Kafka cluster and have all the edge hosts write to it directly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, if I'm reading this correctly, 2.5GB/s of log data being generated? If we assume (aggressively) that they have 5mil machines in their infrastructure, doesn't that mean that each machine would have to be generating 500kB/s of log data?

Despite that, I find the claims to be underwhelming. So your system can process massive amounts of data by scaling massively horizontally...neat.

<comment><USER14> The number in the article is 2.5 TB/s, not GB/s :)

(disclaimer: I work in Scribe)

<comment><USER18> Right—sorry. But point still stands. Under what circumstances was that much data being generated from (what I'm assuming is) normal logging?

<comment><USER14> I'm not following. I understood from your first comment that you think the amount of data is low ("underwhelming") and from your last comment that it's a lot ("that much data").

In any case, the data is "whatever needs to be logged".

And it's not "server logs", which is what I'm interpreting from your comment. Scribe transports most data at Facebook to be processed by real-time systems (e.g. Puma, Scuba) and also "batch systems" (data warehouse). So, it's quite a lot, being "the ingestion pipe" for Facebook.

Does this answer your question? :-?

Puma: [https://research.fb.com/publications/realtime-data- processin...](https://research.fb.com/publications/realtime-data-processing- at-facebook/)

Scuba: [https://research.fb.com/publications/scuba-diving-into- data-...](https://research.fb.com/publications/scuba-diving-into-data-at- facebook/)

<comment><USER18> > So, it's quite a lot, being "the ingestion pipe" for Facebook.

I see. I walked away from the article with the impression that it was meant to be a log aggregation service a la flume, splunk, or logstash.

> the amount of data is low ("underwhelming") and from your last comment that > it's a lot ("that much data").

I was remarking on the numbers in regard to generation, not consumption. Based on the article, my estimate is pointing out that generating 2.5TB/s of transactional logs and telemetry data using "millions" of machines would be technically possible but not reasonably practical...and thus likely not real ;). But, you corrected my understanding: That number isn't based on a different use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> How does this compare to a robust Splunk infrastructure?

<comment><USER20> For what you'd pay for a Splunk license that can handle petabytes/hour of data, it would probably be cheaper to just buy Facebook and use Scribe. :-)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Redistats - Web stats using Redis - <AUTHOR> https://redistats.com/

<comment><USER2> Seeing as this is software as a service and not open source, whats up with the name? Why does it matter that you are using redis? I see you mention it in the "modern proven technologies" section, but that's not a selling point(to me anyway).

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. That I am using Redis is more to appeal to the HN crowd ;) For the user it does not really matter.

I like the name, it is difficult to find names you like available with .com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was hoping for a software distribution. Looked pretty neat and then saw it was similar to Analytics, etc. where it is hosted. Any chance you guys will be offering a self-hosted version?

<comment><USER4> Same here, I'd happily give it a go if it were self hosted since I was planning to build one from scratch, specifically with redis.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any suggestions on how such a license system can look like? We spent 2 months developing this, I would not like to give away it for free / open source.

<comment><USER3> Well, with other software distributed versions of software where it's licensed I generally have seen a 'maintenance' fee yearly for distribution, meaning that technically the software itself is free, but you're charged yearly/monthly to continue receiving updates to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone find it a little odd that in their demo from fullmovies.cc they are publishing the IPs from hits? I don't think the users would really appreciate that.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right, fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Latest technologies" might want to say "Proven technologies" since latest can imply bleeding edge and possibly unreliable to some folks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perhaps yes. But I feel SPDY and Redis are more "latest" than "proven". I will have to think about this.

<comment><USER4> Redis is very much proven, tech giants are using large redis databases for quite some time now, see e.g. Instagram or StackOverflow.

Maybe go with "Modern, proven technologies"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks and corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Been testing the beta out, very very good stat system, will definitely convert from Analytics.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Let me know what you think. I will listen to your feedback.

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks interesting, I will check it out.</comment>