Show HN: I had issues organizing my favorite recipes, so I built this - <AUTHOR> https://www.feastgenius.com/ <comment><USER2> My take was a little different; I wanted a CLI app that lets me search my recipes, put menus together, and then see views for shopping and cooking: [https://github.com/cproctor/cookbook/](https://github.com/cproctor/cookbook/)

One thing I'm looking forward to adding is tagging recipe steps as do-ahead, mis en place, early, late, and last minute. This will make it a bit easier to think through the mental gantt chart I use when cooking a dinner composed of a bunch of dishes. Also a simple scraping utility for importing.

The thing all these have in common is that they're reactions against the festering cesspool of hostile-UI, low-information-density, pages full of affiliate links that are today's cooking sites. (NYT cooking very much excepted.)

I wish we had a better mechanism for including more people in the project of iteratively refining the way we think about life tasks and improving the tools we use to think with. I think this is a great conversation and wish more people who like to cook could participate.

<comment><USER3> _(NYT cooking very much excepted.)_

This is a consistently excellent resource, and I love the many small, essential bits of polish they've applied to their iOS app, like preventing your iPhone's screen from turning off when you're reading a recipe.

<comment><USER4> Cook's illustrated/ATK as well, if you have a subscription. The quality is superb.

<comment><USER5> Cook's Illustrated is great, their equipment reviews are top notch, and their sweet potato pie recipe is my goto every year. Although like NYT they made unsubscribing obnoxious.

Something I'm surprised I haven't seen mentioned is Serious Eats. J Kenji Lopez-Alt does some absolutely excellent recipes (hello Halal Cart Chicken & Rice).

<comment><USER6> The main thing that bugs me about CI is that I subscribe to their website and they _still_ want me to buy an upgrade to access all the content. I get that there are subscription tiers but it just somehow feels a bit obnoxious to me.

Serious Eats is good too.

I used to use Epicurious quite a bit back when they were a pretty early-on serious website for recipes. But with the demise of Gourmet and other sites like the NYT upping their game, I don't consider them top-tier any longer.

<comment><USER4> I think really the most annoying thing is they try to brand themselves as having 3 distinct shows, websites, and books, but they're all the same people and company. Yet they make you buy a subscription for each separately.

<comment><USER6> As a business, the whole enterprise are really masters at repackaging and reusing to the point where it becomes more than a bit annoying. Though I like them overall and mostly more so since Kimball departed.

(Though, speaking of reuse, Kimball basically went and made an almost clone of CI that IMO was obnoxiously clode to a direct copy.)

<comment><USER4> While Kimball was kind of pompous, I like him much better as the host. Bridget and Julia just don't seem as fluid, and everything about the show feels more scripted. Although, I've watched milk Street as well, and bought the cookbook. I have to say, the quality of milk Street recipes is nowhere near that of America's test kitchen. I found the recipes to be bland and flavorless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I ended up building my own solution to this problem too (though mine is not open to public)

The main thing I wanted to optimize was menu planning. So I wrote a genetic algorithm which will generate a menu, add the score, mutate the menu in some way, and iterate. In my database I have a rough price per ingredient, and my families enjoyment of the recipe (though I have kind of a lagging gradient which reduces the score per recipe to prevent duplication). I also have included in my algorithm what I call slots. So something like a lasagna will take 4 slots where as a stir fry will be 1 slot. I sync my schedule and break it down to slots. This allows the algorithm to fit the recipe to the time available. I dont score slots though otherwise short recipes always win.

Since the algorithm optimizes based on the week, but keeps a running inventory it's pretty good at maximizing my grocery bill and family enjoyment. My average grocery bill is between $40-$60 a week. And I cook 5 times a week.

<comment><USER8> How many people can you feed on $60 a week? Is this in the USA?

<comment><USER7> I live in MA. This is for 2 adults, 1 4-year-old, 1 almost 2-year-old. I should mention, this price does not include the cost of lunches (The school provides lunch, my wife buys lunch at work, and I usually snack throughout the day instead of eating lunch). Next, I don't buy processed or pre-made foods. So I'll snack on nuts instead of chips. It started as a health thing (they're always filled with sugar, and stuff) but i've found it's also saves a bunch of money. I make my own stocks, and sauces. I cook a lot of chicken, and usually I'll buy bone-in thighs. It started as a flavor thing (I find breast meat flavorless) but it's super cost effective. A family pack costs $.99 a pound, so for less than $5 I can get 2 meals worth of chicken, some bones for stock, and some fat for schmaltz. The rest of the savings come from efficiency. My program groups like ingredients, so I have less waste. A cart full of fresh vegetables, some dairy products, a couple family sized proteins, the occasional staple, and a few bonus treats for the kids is super cheap.

My bill also doesn't include alcohol. I've given up drinking mostly to boost my night-time productivity, but I'll buy wine in bulk which I mostly use for cooking, though I might have a glass with dinner.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some Background:

Within the last year, I started down the route of eating out less and being more conscientious of what I was cooking. Google searches are a pretty good resource for finding recipes with one caveat, you can't store the recipes. I would save my favorites to a folder in my browser, but eventually, that folder became 120+ recipes links and ver time consuming to filter through when I wanted to make something.

I built FeastGenius to solve the problem of finding and organizing all those recipes. With the site, you can do the following.

\- Add your own recipes.

\- "Clip" recipes from anywhere on the web.

\- Find a recipe on the site you like? You can save it to your profile so you can easily find it later.

\- Organize recipes into collections and share them with anyone.

\- Search from 20,000+ recipes.

        - plus filter by calories or macros (if your an iifym nerd like me).

\- Find the top trending recipes added to the site.

        - Since I'm on reddit way too much I thought it would be fun to use the same algorithm they do for
          organizing trending posts.

I would love to hear the feedback from the hackernews community. I'll take the suggestions into consideration as I continue to build.

<comment><USER9> This is a clever website! I like it. One thing that would be nice is letting members directly download some sort of collection / list- preferably with formatting- so that if your site ever goes poof everyone doesn't lose all their data.

That being said, I do like this idea, and will see if I can introduce my mom to the site in a bit.

How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term?

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the feedback. I'll add it to my list of things to do in the next version of updates. How would you like to get that information, in csv format or something else?

> How do you intend to keep this site alive long-term? Currently, the site is > being hosted on Heroku so I can scale it as needed. I'll likely move it to > AWS in the nearish future, but for now, Heroku is doing the trick. As far as > longevity goes I do daily DB backups so in the case of an issue I can do a > restore. If the site picks up in popularity I could also move to doing > hourly backups.

<comment><USER10> Depending on how you're sourcing the recipes, a simple HTML-to-markdown conversion might work.

Here's one that I found but there are quite a few out there:

[https://domchristie.github.io/turndown/](https://domchristie.github.io/turndown/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I tried a few similar sites recently and settled on Paprika[1]. Not a big fan of their pricing plan (pay per client) but they work OK otherwise and I think they're probably the most popular in the space.

How would you compare your service to theirs?

[1] [https://www.paprikaapp.com/](https://www.paprikaapp.com/)

<comment><USER12> Paprika has a really nice web clipping feature. Enter a URL, and it extracts the recipe, separating out the ingredients list from the instructions. It will even extract recipe from the comments in Reddit threads. I'll be walking through the OP's site for interesting recipes, and clipping them with Paprika.

<comment><USER4> Cheftap has this as well, and it works great. Rarely you have to edit it to fix something, since most of the time it pulls it from any website properly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool project, I love that you can search by macros. A few points:

1\. Clipping recipes from different websites can be quite challenging because of the varying html structures. I recently tackled this problem and I'm curious what method you used to find recipe content within an html page? I ended up checking to see if the website followed a Recipe schema [1] and if not use a mix of heuristics to try identifying if a line of text was an ingredient. I also was considering using machine learning in there, but couldn't figure out a good way to incorporate it.

2\. Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your website?

Awesome to see some fresh sites in this space. I built Saffron [2] which is focused on organizing your recipes into digital cookbooks.

[1] [https://schema.org/Recipe](https://schema.org/Recipe)

[2] [https://www.mysaffronapp.com/](https://www.mysaffronapp.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> For this project, I used Spoonaculars API for clipping recipes. I would be very interested in creating my own, similar to what you did. That would give me more control over the process. Did you come across any open source repos when you worked on your crawler?

> Is there a reason you don't include the instructions of the recipe on your > website?

Yes, when users clip recipes from another source I want to make sure that users need to navigate back to the original page to see the instructions. This is to ensure the original author gets credit for it. If a user adds a recipe themselves to the site then it will show the instructions. Here is an example of a recipe with instructions for demo purposes, [https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk- chi...](https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/everything-nice-jerk-chicken-legs- ieb6yd).

<comment><USER13> I didn't find any good open source options

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I quite like this - I have one suggestion though. Please convert between US measurements and metric. I much prefer metric and for this reason tend to stick to UK/European websites - but occasionally there will be something on a US website I want to try - having to go through and convert is a chore.

It would also be great to be able to save known substitutions - like sometimes I have to use plain flour and baking powder rather than self-raising because it's what I have in the cupboard.

<comment><USER15> Chiming in as another American who prefers metric measurements in the kitchen.

I do a lot of baking (mostly things made of sourdough) and always appreciated that King Arthur offers the conversion on their recipes; So much so that I'll generally check there first. When I'm working out a new recipe from multiple different ones, I convert them all to metric in my own version.

I think the only thing I don't use metric for is <= half a teaspoon, because the measuring spoon is far more efficient than trying to measure out 2g on a kitchen scale that has a minimum of ~2g. And it seems silly to me to break out the scientific scale for a 1/2 tsp of whatever.

<comment><USER16> Volume conversion to grams would be great for automation. I love how much less dishes there is when you can use the scale for everything. Just zero the scale and pour in flour. Zero again for the butter and so on.

<comment><USER14> Definitely - I currently do this by having a notebook where I write down conversions, having worked them out on a calculator. Being able to do this automatically would rock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is it possible to promote some kind of consistency in measuring? My wife disregards a lot of American cooking sites (am based in Australia) because the conversion of cups/teaspoons etc is sometimes open to interpretation and can lead to a disaster.

<comment><USER18> I cannot understand how anyone puts up with measuring stuff by volume (other than liquids). 1 cup of flour is a hugely variable amount depending on how compressed it is. Don't even get me started on heaped cups. For baking in particular where everything needs to be very precise, it's bonkers to see recipes without weight measurements.

<comment><USER19> In the US a kitchen scale is a relatively uncommon piece of equipment. I own one, but that's primarily to service what some might call an unhealthy obsession with coffee. Thinking through the kitchens of friends and family, I can only think of one other that is similarly equipped. And that friend shares my coffee hobby.

Some of these friends without scales bake quite a lot, and do a very good job of it. I guess they're doing it on "hard mode" but they acquit themselves very well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tangential rant:

The publishing industry pushes more and more cookbooks every year, and between traditional cookbooks and more recent YouTube channels, most recipes are much more fantasy entertainment than serious attempts at trying to get people to take more control over how their food is made.

The problem is that cookbook recipes distort the flow of food preparation:

Find an appealing recipe -> look up the necessary ingredients -> buy the ingredients -> take the ingredients home and make the recipe

This motivates people to purchase ingredients which are not in season, i.e. purchasing tomatoes to make tomato salad when tomatoes are not in season. This generates demand for produce which is lacking in flavor and nutrition, with an outsize environmental impact due to being shipped thousands of miles[1].

The proper flow is to go to a local farmer's market -> buy what is local and in-season (with a side benefit that it will be cheap, since the farmer has little control over the date of harvest and everything has to be sold before it rots) and in great quantities -> figure out how to make it once you get home, taking advantage of other produce which is in season, fresh ingredients which are available all year round (i.e. meat, dairy, eggs), and shelf-stable pantry staples.

This flow yields food which is simultaneously tastier and more affordable - but you have to learn how to cook as an independent life skill, and not constantly rely upon recipes.

[1] See e.g. [https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture- Des...](https://www.amazon.com/Tomatoland-Industrial-Agriculture-Destroyed- Alluring/dp/1449423450)

<comment><USER21> What kind of solutions do you think are possible for this issue? I can totally see your point, but I am unsure how to fix it for a person who really isn't interested in learning tons of recipes for each season.

I think the first flow is still fine, but maybe should just include going local and buying in-season items.

Knowing what you eat is important but I can understand why people are drawn to the easiness of a cookbook filled with recipes from any season.

<comment><USER22> A reverse cookbook app, I have these ingredients, what can I make?

<comment> 52-6F-62 Dieticians of Canada released a website and mobile app that does this. I use it from time-to-time: [https://www.cookspiration.com/](https://www.cookspiration.com/)

Edit: the site seems to work differently than the app. You can search by ingredient in the app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apparently the motivation behind creating Elasticsearch was also organizing recipes.

[https://www.elastic.co/about/history-of- elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/about/history-of-elasticsearch)

<comment><AUTHOR> TIL. It's funny because one of my motivations for building this site was to have a project that allowed me to work with ElasticSearch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pretty happy user of anylist[1] here: contains all my recipes, when I go to the shop I just select a few recipes and have a shopping list.

[1]: [https://www.anylist.com/](https://www.anylist.com/)

<comment><USER25> I haven't used the recipe feature yet, but AnyList is my go-to grocery list app. Big fan of rearrangeable aisles, preferred stores for items, and the ability to check off items in real-time on two devices in-store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I never quite liked the traditional way of how recipes are written. Ingredient list followed by instructions. I hate it when I get to a point in the instructions like "add the eggs" and now I have to check the entire list of ingredients to see how many eggs the instruction refers to. It's a pointless indirection.

What I do is what I call inline recipes. It's just the instructions, but whenever an ingredients is mentioned, it also has the amount. E. g. "add two eggs". Every amount+ingredient is underlined in red. That way I can skim over the recipe easily when I'm preparing my shopping list.

</comment><comment><USER27> Great work. I love coming across projects like these. Inspires me to "hack" and generally maintains my enthusiasm when the job doesn't.

A suggestion: \- remove the delayed image zoom when hovering over a recipe. It's a bit jarring and it makes the webapp feel slow when it isn't. I'd explore another way to display the information or just remove the delay entirely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. This indeed was a hack project that I would work on in front of the TV when I had time after work. It feels good to have it in a somewhat "showoff-able" state. I think what made me stick to this project as opposed to the number of other ones I've given up on is that this was something I was using throughout the entire development. So I've been building something that I want to use. To your comment on the animation delay, I agree with you. I'll remove it in the next few days in favor of a better way to display the information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The main problem I've had with recipe sites is that phones and tablets do not mix well with kitchens. I end up printing everything out anyway and then no matter how organised it is online, I end up with a pile of paper. The paper gets wet and the ink runs in critical places.

Anyone got a solution to that one?

(Edited for long sentence)

<comment><USER29> I tried mightily to go all digital with recipes, but ultimately I went back to 3" x 5" lined note cards with optimally abbreviated instructions and measurements. I use small magnets to attach them to the vent-hood over the stove to keep them from becoming sullied. Using the refrigerator any other magnetic surface obviously works equally well. All the recipes are stored in an easily accessible wooden box that was handed down to me by my grandmother. I find this to be the best solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> [https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot- xs...](https://www.feastgenius.com/recipes/javascript-alert-quot-xss-quot- cjagaq)

You might want to add/move up reporting to the feature list -- this recipe is currently on the front page.

</comment><comment><USER31> Nice work.

Since you've got this far I'll tell you about an idea I've had in the back of my mind for years:

1) Slurp in as many recipes as possible from the internet.

2) Create a way to build a Food Framework by having a whitelist, and/or black list of ingredients.

So, for example, a great way to eat if you have diabetes is plant based low fat.

In this case you could create that Food Framework by whitelisting all vegetables and grains.

Or let's say you wanted a paleo diet, then you could blacklist grains.

Or vegan, blacklist meat, dairy, eggs, etc.

Or no peanuts (for allergies etc)

3) Save your Food Framework and then the site only shows recipes based on that framework.

I like the idea because

1) It can appeal to lots of niche groups who don't have great options for something like that.

2) If you stick to the right food framework for you it could help you get healthy, loose weight, etc.

Anyway, great work. Features you have there are great already.

<comment><USER32> Sounds like the app I'm building now. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! If you want to chat feel free to reach out to me. There are some really good api's out there to help speed up the process.

<comment><USER33> I'm also working on something like that for myself (because of a colicky baby and hearing that low FODMAP diets help). Right now I have basic schema.org recipe ingestion working.

I'd be interested in chatting about it, but you dont have any contact info listed in your profile.

<comment><USER34> Also working on some NLP and ML for parsing recipes at bite.ai so would love to chat as well.

if you're using schema.org there's a nice filtered data dump from the common crawl available here:

[http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2018-12/stats/schem...](http://webdatacommons.org/structureddata/2018-12/stats/schema_org_subsets.html)

<comment><USER33> Oh man. This is such a great resource. I wish I could give you multiple upvotes. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is neat!

When I was eating keto, I got frustrated with how bad the search functionality was on all the keto blogs, so I made a similar tool It's a keto recipe searcher/aggregator:

[https://ketohub.io](https://ketohub.io)

During this, I ended up going down a long rabbit hole trying to figure out how to parse recipe ingredients properly, and eventually spun off a separate ingredient parsing service:

[https://zestfuldata.com](https://zestfuldata.com) (the service)

[https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/](https://mtlynch.io/resurrecting-1/) (a 3-part blog series on how I built it)

OP - if you're interested in adding ingredient parsing to the site, I'd be happy to work with you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Zestful looks awesome! I'll take the chance to look into it more over the next few days. But looks like something that I would benefit from using :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> For those who are price sensitive like me but want all our macros; my personal app also scrapes the flyer for local grocery stores for ingredient prices and runs a knapsack algo to reach my cost threshold and tells me what things I can make

</comment><comment><USER37> If anyone is interested in building a similar site themselves, there is a static site theme for hugo[0] and jekyll[1] called chowdown. They both use the Recipe schema[2] so importing and exporting recipes is easier.

[0][https://github.com/seanlane/gochowdown](https://github.com/seanlane/gochowdown)

[1][https://github.com/clarklab/chowdown](https://github.com/clarklab/chowdown)

[2][https://schema.org/Recipe](https://schema.org/Recipe)

</comment><comment><USER38> This looks pretty cool. I have been using a more pen and paper type method. If I find a recipe I want to make, I will print it out. As I am making it, I will note an adjustments I make.

If the family likes it, I will do a reflection on any further adjustments. Finally I copy it into a hard bound book with lined pages.

I don't add too often to this book as the initial filtering keeps average recipes off.

</comment><comment><USER39> I usually save the recipe from the site directly instead of bookmarking it. I've been burned a few times by a few of the big, spammy recipe sites (Allrecipes, etc.) when they've taken a recipe down. No idea why, but all it did was reduce my visits to their site from a few times per month to zero.

</comment><comment> m-p-3 I like that you decided to not force users to connect to a social login, but I would have liked the option. Not a problem for me as I use a password manager, but having that convenience would be nice.

Also, I registered an account with my email address but it never asked to validate my email address, it just created it.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is really awesome! I'm building something similar, but more focused on weekly meal planning and weight loss. It's kind of amazing to me how many people in this thread have all created their own systems for managing food/recipes/meal plans.

</comment><comment><USER41> This looks pretty nice. Is it only available as-a-service? I'm not satisfied with the recipe server I'm currently using, and would love to entertain an alternative (writing my own is about 30th on my to-do list).

</comment><comment><USER42> This site on a 24" 2560x1440 display feels like I'm using binoculars to browse it: [https://i.imgur.com/bCDCDah.png](https://i.imgur.com/bCDCDah.png)

</comment><comment><USER14> Another wish would be able to export (email) to my kindle. Using a normal device is kind of a pain but I can let my kindle keep the screen on for a long time and it's readable even at a bad angle.

</comment><comment><USER43> FINALLY, a recipe site, which is not drowning in ads! How refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is interesting but I just use my bookmark manager Bookmark OS for organizing recipes [https://bookmarkos.com](https://bookmarkos.com)

</comment><comment><USER33> Ha. I started working on something similar recently. Many of the current sites are hard to use, so it seems the space could use some fresh contenders.

So kudos, it looks nice - I hope you find success.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I think theres a lot of improvement that can be done in the space. Reach out to me if you want any advice on helpful api's I came across when building feastgenius. I'll be more than happy to chat :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> How is this different then the app/website CopyMeThat? I use that app all the time on my ipad to save recipes from random sites to my own "recipe book"

<comment><AUTHOR> I've never used CopyMeThat but I just looked through it quickly. It looks like a good app for solving a similar problem that feastgenius is solving. I think the difference with what I built is that it also calculates the nutrition content per serving. This was important for me personally because I use the app to search for recipes in certain macros ranges. For example, Finding chicken recipes in a macro range of (carbs:30-50, protein:20-40, fat:10-20). The search for feastgenius was built on top of elasticseach and in the near future I'll be building out more features based around really robust searching. I'll also be focusing time on building features for discovering new recipes. I hope that answers the question :)

<comment><USER45> Thanks for the great reply! Question: Answered!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Looks great! Personally I just use a markdown file and a bash script to find and log recipes. Helps keep it offline when I need it and make quick edits to recipes.

</comment><comment><USER47> Very nice app. I built something much cruder in HyperCard when I was 7 and it is nice to see something with modern UX (and color photos). Well done.

</comment><comment><USER48> Why are you not using Google's _Rich Snippets_ for individual recipes? It will not only help to get more traffic but also to rank better.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for pointing this out. I was not even aware of rich snippets. I'll update the site to use this formatting as soon as I can.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is there any app/website that allows you to put what ingridients you have, and shows you what recipes can you make with that?

<comment><USER50> There's several sites like that. I've used Supercook

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Very cool, a similar site I use is: [https://onetsp.com](https://onetsp.com).

</comment><comment><USER52> How do you obtain the macros? Via API to MyFitnessPal or a similar service? How do you make sure macros are accurate?

</comment><comment><USER53> I'm frequently frustrated at how unoptimized meal planning and preparation is. Glad to see work in this space.

</comment><comment> yoz-y Looks pretty neat. One thing that could be useful would be to able swap between metric/freedom units.

</comment><comment><USER54> Nice tool, I'd love to try it. Is your sign-up broken? It just comes back with an empty red alert.

</comment><comment><USER55> People hijacking the thread with their own program without even commenting on the submission. Nice.

</comment><comment><USER56> I would use this if you had a category/filter for plant based recipes.

</comment><comment><USER57> I use eatyourbooks.com

</comment><comment><USER58> Nice, What did you use to make it? backend/frontend?

</comment><comment><USER59> Did you use any UI or CSS framework for this look?

<comment><USER60> This is based on Material Kit. [https://www.creative-tim.com/product/material- kit-pro](https://www.creative-tim.com/product/material-kit-pro)

<comment><AUTHOR> exactly. I don't have a lot of talent when it comes to front end design. Having Material kit as a starting point was a huge help for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Thanks for this! I could really use it.

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't know how anyone can follow a recipe which use "cup" as a unit of measurement.

</comment><comment><USER63> Did you try using google keep? Works really well for this kind of stuff ;)

</comment><comment><USER64> This looks like a copyright nightmare.

<comment><USER65> I don't know exactly what you mean, but recipes cannot be copyrighted in many jurisdictions. Images are of course a different matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> A while ago, I tried using various recipe apps. Then decided to build my own. While sketching what I wanted I realized everything I tried to come up with was overkill. There's a reason grandma uses a card file for storing her recipes. But, I still wanted something on the computer. So, I just use a wiki hosted on my server. I have a page that keeps bulleted wiki links to recipes for each day of the week, for months and months. I also store the shopping list. I can recycle a weekly meal plan just by copying and pasting it under the new date. So easy and I can plan meals for the week in just a few moments. The recipes are super easy to read on phone, tablet, computer or even printed out.

For meal planning:

\---- ===== October 05, 2019 =====

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

== Shopping List ==

      * [[ShoppingList10052019:shopping_lists|Shopping List]]

\----

===== September 28, 2019 =====

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

* [[recipe:recipes|recipe]]

== Shopping List ==

      * [[ShoppingList09282019:shopping_list|Shopping List]]

\----

For Recipes:

</comment><comment> Broccoli and Cheese soup </comment><comment>

</comment><comment> Ingredients </comment><comment>

      *     1 tablespoon butter

      *     1/2 onion, chopped

      *     1/4 cup melted butter

      *     1/4 cup flour

      *     2 cups milk

      *     2 cups chicken stock

      *     1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped broccoli florets

      *     1 cup matchstick-cut carrots

      *     1 stalk celery, thinly sliced

      *     2 1/2 cups shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

      *     salt and ground black pepper to taste

</comment><comment> Directions </comment><comment>

      -     Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet over medium-high heat. Saute onion in hot butter until translucent, about 5 minutes. Set aside.

      -     Whisk 1/4 cup melted butter and flour together in a large saucepan over medium-low heat; cook until flour loses it's granular texture, adding 1 to 2 tablespoons of milk if necessary to keep the flour from burning, 3 to 4 minutes.

      -     Gradually pour milk into flour mixture while whisking constantly. Stir chicken stock into milk mixture. Bring to a simmer; cook until flour taste is gone and mixture is thickened, about 20 minutes. Add broccoli, carrots, sauteed onion, and celery; simmer until vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.

      -     Stir Cheddar cheese into vegetable mixture until cheese melts. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Super simple and it works really well for me.</comment>


Ask HN: Community of Car Buyers that Share the Price of their Purchase? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a community on the web where recent car buyers share the type of car they purchased, the price payed and at what dealership?  Feels like sharing this information could help others in negotiating a better deal.. <comment><USER2> I misinterpreted the meaning of this thread, but it occurred to me the misinterpretation was also a great question-

Is there any site where different prospective car buyers can pool or "mob shop" their purchases in order to get a volume discount?

(e.g. I want a new 2013 Chevy Cruze, and so do 49 other car buyers; when a critical mass of 50 is reached within 3 months, the "tilt" buy takes place and we all pay 0.90 * dealer invoice). GM (or one of their high-volume dealers) makes next to no profit on each vehicle but they keep their numbers up. Could perhaps even Hotwire-style it and limit it to (again, for example) "Chevy Cruze, Ford Focus, or Toyota Corolla" where you don't get to pick which.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm working on whathavei, a personal inventory and social shopping app for people to track and share information about all the products they own. I definitely want to incorporate information about what people paid for and where they bought things. <http://www.whathavei.com/>

Let me know what you think about having this app, and specifically about this feature and for cars. Thanks

</comment><comment><USER4> You can go to any car forum and ask the people there what they paid or the best price you might be able to obtain. They're generally willing to share and happy to get someone new into their communities enjoying the same car they are passionate about.

</comment><comment><USER3> For used car prices, check out Carsabi. They got acquired already, but the site is still up. <http://carsabi.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.truecar.com/></comment>


The Science of Citizenship - <AUTHOR> https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-science-of-citizenship/

<comment><USER2> Citizenship is something that hn tends to underestimate given that most people here already have a favourable starting point on that front.

Growing up in a 3rd world country - but with a powerful passport really drove this point home - it can make or break your life.

<comment><USER3> A fair point, and you may have been misled by the title, but the article is actually about education, science, and a citizenry somewhat disengaged from both.

A confusing title. Interesting piece, though.

<comment><USER2> >education, science, and a citizenry somewhat disengaged from both

They are not. Despite optimal conditions I (with powerful passport) still ended up hitting the deck when those assault rifles rounds came flying my direction. People tend to talk big until they experience that reality...</comment></comment></comment>


Why Germans work fewer hours but produce more - <AUTHOR> http://knote.com/2014/11/10/why-germans-work-fewer-hours-but-produce-more-a-study-in-culture/

<comment><USER2> I think its about time everyone seriously considered learning this lesson from Germany and improved their work ethic. It's amazing that a culture could be so generally efficient. Compare that with typical work culture elsewhere - grossly inefficient. We all know this to be true. I worked in a few places and witnessed how half-assed things could get. It's frustrating and pathetic to see coworkers stream tv shows for hours, read books, take naps, go out for coffee 5 times a day, and ultimately accomplish nothing while making 70k+. This is most prevalent in large organizations with big bureaucratic structures. I would welcome this change. Focusing on task, eliminating distractions, having greater accountability, being straight-up, and getting to the point are all wonderful ideas which should be emphasized and practiced. A lot of workplaces are great, but a lot still are poor.

<comment><USER3> > _It 's frustrating and pathetic to see coworkers stream tv shows for hours, > read books, take naps_

Just curious, where do you live? And in what sort of companies is such behaviour common?

<comment><USER2> Toronto, Canada. I worked as a dev in a fairly big software company which made B2B software. There was a dev who would literally do nothing for half the time. Their productivity was extremely low. They would only work enough to appear to management that they are busy, but ultimately had the rest of the department pick up their slack. Of course, management didn't have a clue about what competent dev work ought to look like and were themselves incompetent, like most management is. This person worked at the company for years before being let go. I think this problem stems from management not being able to relate to the work. I worked at a web dev firm which would contract me out to a partner company to design websites. I would literally have no boss, or anyone tell me what to do. Try as I might, I couldn't get clear-cut work assigned to me from management, who were not devs and thus could not relate. There was poor organization. I would waste time worrying that I'm not being productive. I hated the experience for all those reasons. My girlfriend works at a hospital and tells me about coworkers who work for 10% of the day. They have been working there for over a decade. A lot of people are hard working, but most are not. I think given the opportunity, most would slack off, this is inherent human nature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> They don't. Germany's GDP per hour worked as % of USA = 90.9%.

[http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL](http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL)

<comment><USER5> First, you can't really tell from this data whether an American actually produces more than a German _in the same job_. The data covers all the jobs in the country, and if the US happens to have a higher fraction of employees in highly paid jobs like investment bankers, lawyers, doctors, etc., it would raise the average.

Also, do the data for the US account for all the work that employees do after hours, like answering e-mails and phone calls? Since the kind of employees that do this are usually exempt from receiving overtime pay, these extra hours wouldn't be recorded anywhere.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> French are in the same case as the Germans: they work less hours but have one of the biggers productivity in the world.</comment>


Show HN: One Adaptive API for Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive - <AUTHOR> http://cloud-rail.com

<comment><USER2> A little less "we are changing the world", a little more "we offer a JavaScript SDK for file storage accross many services".

That's the short version. I initially wrote a long comment with a list of things I don't like, but I decided I was being too harsh so I removed it. If you're still interested, I can mail it to you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we have a vision. What you see today is the first little step into this direction. The goal is to release more SDKs and gateways besides cloud storage. Of course, we are very interested in your feedback. Please mail it to firstname.lastname@example.com. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great idea.

We (JotForm) spend so much time implementing and maintaining integration with these services.

You definitely need pricing information. If you want to keep it free at the beginning you can say something like "we are free until 2016", but many people might avoid using you because there is no information on how much it will cost when you go out of beta.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I already added some basic pricing information on the product page. We'll update it after the end of beta.

<comment><USER3> Please also consider adding cloudrail integration to JotForm. We do have a self implementation API: [http://developers.jotform.com/integrations/](http://developers.jotform.com/integrations/)

Then we can tell people to use you when they request say "OneDrive" or any other cloud storage service you will add in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. Can you please send me a quick note to email@example.com? One of our developers will then get in touch with you asap. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks neat! This sounds very similar to the concept of unhosted.org[1], where the user provides their own data storage location. Being based in Europe, have you had any interaction with the unhosted team or their remoteStorage.js[2] library? It seems like they are trying to integrate in Dropbox/GoogleDrive into that library, too.

Also, you mention encryption in the Example Applications section. I've been working on a similar concept of having a client-side javascript library that creates an encrypted filesystem on Dropbox/Google Drive, called Bring Your Own Filesystem[3]. The most interesting thing with the system is that these storage locations allow for public files, which means you can set up end-to- end encrypted communication between two Dropbox accounts[4]. I'd love to learn more about your implementation of the encryption layer and how you plan to develop that further. What plans do you have for privacy/encryption?

[1] - [https://unhosted.org/](https://unhosted.org/)

[2] - [https://github.com/remotestorage/remotestorage.js](https://github.com/remotestorage/remotestorage.js)

[3] - [https://github.com/diafygi/byoFS](https://github.com/diafygi/byoFS)

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

<comment><USER5> I've been using a similar system on my own machines, by combining Dropbox with a userspace encrypted filesystem (encfs).

<comment><USER6> In case you use an Android device, I wrote an app to use encfs on Dropbox/GoogleDrive:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mrpdaemon....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mrpdaemon.android.encdroid)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cool. There's definitely demand for a unified cloud storage API. Kloudless ([https://kloudless.com](https://kloudless.com)) provides one as well, with some open-source UI tools. Disclaimer: co-founder here.

I'd suggest making the docs more easily accessible for developers looking to get a better understanding of CloudRail. In addition, the link/magnify icons on the cloud storage logos on the product page seem unnecessary, since the logos could just link to their individual pages.

</comment><comment><USER8> Good idea!

And a small feedback;

\- Please fix your scrolling on the page. It is not a pleasing scrolling experience.

\- Slider interval is quick, kind of disturbs while reading, do not auto-slide at all maybe.

Edit: Sorry for not going into detail about scrolling.

I am using Chrome on Mac OS, and when i try to scroll on the main page, whoops!, I am at the end of the page, it feels like scrolling sensitivity is too high and i need to tap it once more to stop scrolling. It may give different experience with a mouse maybe but using touchpad gave me this experience.

<comment><USER9> For the sake of the OP can you go into more detail about the bad scrolling experience? The scrolling is fine for me - so I'm guessing it is fine for him/her as well.

In general I hate when sites modify default scrolling behavior - and that absolutely is not pleasant, but I didn't notice that here.

<comment><USER10> Not thread-parent, but it has somehow drastically modified my scrolling speed. I immediately and jarringly ended up at the bottom of the page. Two-finger scrolling on a Macbook Pro, this is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A friend of mine is on the team for Kloudless ([https://developers.kloudless.com/](https://developers.kloudless.com/)). I haven't actually used it, but the marketing material tells of the same value prop as your project. Have any quick summary of the differences?

<comment><AUTHOR> As I understand it, Kloudless uses a middleware to convert the data. So data flows from your app trough the Kloudless cloud to e.g. Dropbox. Means that you really have to trust them. We are doing all the conversion in the client. No data ever flows via our servers and no third party can read your transferred files ;)

<comment><USER7> (Kloudless Co-founder here)

Congrats on the beta release! I'd suggest making the docs available without having to sign up.

I noticed the docs indicate unsupported features for each service, such as creating Dropbox links and downloading OneDrive files. A benefit to managing the integration is that you would be able to provide full functionality for all the APIs you support. This is one of the primary reasons we chose to adopt the architecture we currently have in place.

This would also let you fill in missing features such as Event Notifications and Search even if the underlying storage service doesn't provide it. For example, we support event notifications for SharePoint.

A side-effect of this is that developers would not have to worry about OAuth tokens expiring or having to be refreshed, since token management is handled for them. UI tools such as authenticator widgets and file explorers ( [https://github.com/kloudless/file- explorer](https://github.com/kloudless/file-explorer) ) can also be integrated pretty easily since authentication is managed.

As you pointed out, client-side solutions provide additional security guarantees. This is one of the reasons our enterprise plan features an on- premise version of Kloudless.

I'm excited to see more development in this space, and looking forward to your launch!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Open for any feedback you might have ;)

<comment><USER12> I'm a little confused - it's an auto-updating JS library with a price tag? Is the end-to-end encryption done in JS? Is it OSS, or is the source minified and obfuscated?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a JS SDK which can be included in your software. This SDK can download special definitions to adapt to e.g. the Dropbox API. E2E encryption depends on the provider. It should just express, that we have no middleware in between. So data flows P2P between you and the e.g. Dropbox and can be easily encrypted.

<comment><USER13> P2P is a very bad choice of words for what you want to communicate.

You have to say something like "Your data will not pass through CloudRail".

<comment><USER14> Not sure if he meant P2P as peer-to-peer or point-to-point. The latter seems to make more sense. But P2P is most commonly used to mean "peer to peer". (also pay-to-play in the games space)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good idea. Where is the pricing information? For some reason if you cannot create a sustainable business will you open source it? Good luck with your endeavor.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is pretty great. It would be nice to see support for OneDrive for Business (Office 365) as well.

</comment><comment><USER17> Your fontawesome icons are displaying as boxes. Looks like a CORS issue.</comment>


Ask HN: Why work hard on creating a product? - <AUTHOR>

I have heard of many sites which do nothing except posting "viral" content from other sites and work on viral marketing from facebook and their revenues from adsense are huge, as high as $2000 / day.<p>Although, I agree such revenues might not be sustainable for a long period of time but still, it makes me question why should one work hard on creating  a product, its marketing, customer acquisition? when there are people earning huge revenues without doing much. <comment><USER2> The reason why you often hear about these kinds of stories is because you are actually being advertised to. The business is in selling advice or tools, and not the actual thing being described. The success stories used to sell it to you can be entirely true, just not _indefinitely_ true. One moment it can be a boom, the next moment, a ghost town. So if you take on this type of business, it's best to think of it as a way to learn some things and hopefully make a good income for a few months or years, but only as a stepping stone to the next thing in your career; it's not an endpoint.

Products differentiate you. They make the business more "real" and sustainable. You get to develop actual relationships with customers. And they're a lot more scary to think about because you're doing more of the pioneering.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know of a few people that are doing variations of what you say.

Many of them engage in illegal and unethical practices - most are elaborate schemes to steal money from advertisers, others steal intellectual property (whatever your stance on that is, it's still either illegal or inmoral).

And, as chipsy says, most of their practices are not sustainable - one guy I know made US$ 2000/month, not daily, and he got busted and is blacklisted by most everyone. Ad networks and others evolve and leave those shady practices behind - a few enterprising blackhats might prosper for a long time, but they probably are good enough to make good money ethically.

The acquaintance I know that does best doing this kind of get-rich-fast schemes is a black-hat marketeer that has and incredible knowledge of people's psychology, and manipulates them into buying crappy ebooks or products (often the hard-to-cancel credit card subscriptions). But even though he's making good money, I think he's very insecure and doesn't live a good life (my girlfriend's sister found his profile on a dating network, and he had to show off his Mercedes and bling, which is IMO a signal of insecurity). As I mentioned, he's good enough he probably would make good money as some kind of marketing consultant, but he decided to go the black-hat way.

I'd rather build a product that helps others, instead of guilt-tripping them into something they do not need.

The one software product I'm putting off building is something I find myself needing often and I know will help others, and while it will take a long time to monetize (if ever), I will feel good doing it. And if it does take off it would be amazing :)

</comment><comment><USER4> I think those stories are apocryphal. But regardless, the reason to work hard creating products is because it's intrinsically satisfying to do good work and be productive.

Build something to amuse and delight, to help people be more productive, to solve a problem, or to hone your skills. Making things is wonderful. Stealing other people's content and profiteering is pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER5> You pointed to the answer in your question: It's about sustainability.

You work hard at it because you're genuinely trying to build something that will last vs the kind of crap you alluded to that will come and go as long as there is money to be made.

To say it more specifically, you're not busting your hump PRIMARILY for money.

If over 95% of startups fail then the odds are stacked against you before you even begin. On top of that, if money is your primary motivation the odds of you sustaining your interest in this startup are almost guaranteed to fizzle away.</comment>


A battle over solar power in Nevada - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-solar-power-buffett-vs-musk/ <comment><USER2> The problem here stems from two things:

1) Net metering means that the power company is required to buy electricity at retail rates from their customers instead of wholesale rates, which puts quite a burden on them. Why should they have to buy at a higher rate?

2) Electric companies for decades have been rolling the cost of transmission into the variable rate portion of people's bills. This means that larger consumers (who tend to be richer) have been subsidizing the poorer customers. This is generally considered a good thing by most, since it allows poorer people to have electricity (because you don't want to live in a society where some people have electricity and some don't). The solution here is to raise the fixed portion of the bill to cover the true cost of transmission, and then place a tax on those who go "off grid" to straight out subsidize the poor, so it's more obvious that is what is happening (And presumably most people would still support).

<comment><USER3> One reason net-metering is close to fair is that we are talking about delivered electricity. Every unit I send back to the grid is a unit that doesn't need to be delivered by the power company but the power company can sell it to my neighbor for retail price.

A second reason net-metering is close to fair is because mid-day units of electricity are more valuable. Solar production peaks midday while household usage is U-shaped, so most production flows out to the grid during the high- price periods. Rates average peak and off-peak pricing so rate customers typically don't see that.

In other words, solar production produces high-value kWhs the utility can sell to my neighbor for retail, even though they don't have to generate or deliver it themselves.

<comment><USER4> I don't understand your logic for "more valuable" \- there's more electricity at midday (because sun) and less usage (because sun and people are at work), so more supply & less demand => price drops, not rises!

<comment><USER3> Well in general demand peaks midday while household usage is u-shaped (morning and evening peaks). This makes sense, since when people go to work they are not at home and their work energy use tends to be higher than home energy use. But if you don't like that explanation, simply look at any price curve for any of the organized electricity markets (they are public) and you will see demand and price peaks mid-day.

<comment><USER4> Aha... so do you have a typo in your answer?

> Solar production peaks midday

should have been

> Solar _consumption_ peaks midday

?

<comment><USER3> No. Solar consumption does peak midday but that is trivial because electricity is nearly always used when it is produced. Electricity demand, which is basically the same thing as consumption, peaks midday (as do prices). And solar production peaks midday. The fact that solar production matches demand is a nice feature of solar that I think militates in favor of net-metering policies.

<comment><USER4> Ok, I get it... I misread and misunderstood your comment in a few different ways :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Germany, wholesale power prices can actually go negative on sunny afternoons. Conditions in the US are trending towards that.

Why should actual generators get paid low (or negative) wholesale prices at the exact same moment that some consumer gets paid full retail rates? It doesn't make sense.

Very practically, this is illustrated by California's duck curve. Also from Bloomberg:

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/california...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-21/california- s-duck-curve-is-about-to-jolt-the-electricity-grid)

It has nothing to do with Musk and Buffet. How do you price power, both wholesale and retail, in a way that recognizes that there's a need to provide power even when it has been overcast for three weeks? It's crazy to unfairly penalize power companies just because the public loves solar power.

It's a complicated question.

<comment><USER6> Specifically: [http://assets.bwbx.io/images/ilVXr6BF7iAU/v4/-1x-1.png](http://assets.bwbx.io/images/ilVXr6BF7iAU/v4/-1x-1.png)

<comment><USER7> It's a little weird that the article claims that the problem is worst in winter, when there is least sun.

Also, that graph is unreadable? I'm already aware of what the duck curve is, and I can't make head nor tail of it.

<comment><USER8> I bet it's a problem in the winter due to A/C and electric heating. When it's sunny in summer, solar production goes up but it also makes people use A/C more. There is significant canceling out.

In winter, solar production goes up, but people use less energy due to electric heaters not be as needed since it's warmer. Not a lot of the country uses electric heaters, but it's enough to add to the problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This whole article is weird to me as a New Zealander, since most of the problems comes from weirdly, not letting the market set the buy-back rate of electricity.

I worked for one of New Zealand's largest electricity generators and retailers, and we investigated a solar market. Here's how it works.

Electricity is broken up into generation costs, distribution costs, retail costs, regulatory costs, and profit.

Generation capacity goes up and down throughout the day, as does demand. In New Zealand an automated auction happens 30 minutes where generators bid in electricity at a price. The system operator then buys capacity required at any particular area at the cheapest price that is available. This sets the wholesale price of electricity.

This then gets distributed by the system operator throughout the country to a local lines company. They maintain the power lines to your house, but also to that person in the middle of nowhere.

The energy company figures out how much you've consumed, and bills you. Of course, when you have a problem, you call them, so there's a call centre always available as well.

Finally, there are taxes and levies that the government applies.

After all that, if there's anything left over between the retail price, and the sum of those costs, well, that's the profit.

The weird bit is, where do you set the buyback rate for solar? The retail price? But there's so much expenses there, not all of which are the retailer's cost. The fair price of the market is the generating price, or wholesale price. But, there maybe political incentives to set a higher rate, as well as cap the number of people who can get that higher rate.

But if you want it sustainable for everybody, then using the wholesale rate makes more sense.

<comment><USER10> What you just said is that the buyback rate should be somewhere between wholesale rate and retail. There is no clear cut way to figure out what it should be so regulators and politicians get involved in setting the rate.

"Sustainable for everybody" argument can be used on both sides - if rate is set too low, the solar panel owners subsidize the rest of the customers if it is set too high then other customers subsidize solar panel owners.

So the argument is not as clear as you tried to make it sound.

<comment><USER9> There is a clear cut way - the wholesale rate. In New Zealand, an auction happens every 30 minutes where demand is tallied by the system operator (Transpower) at a Grid Extraction Point, and generators bid in what they think it's worth.

The system operator then purchases the cheapest electricity available (taking into account demand is different throughout the network, and the network can't transfer all electricity to all parts of the grid because of line constraints).

This is the cost of the 'raw materials' of the retail electricity price. A solar panel on your house really isn't any different that a little power station. You still have to transport that electricity somewhere, maintain those lines, maintain the voltage, run a power station when it gets dark, bill you, etc.

It's not a big conspiracy, it's just that the cost of energy makes up about half the costs of the electricity system. If you set at a rate higher than the wholesale rate, then there must be other reasons to do so rather than pure financials.

A good example would be if an Energy Utility wanted to attract solar customers, sell them solar systems, and put it on the bill to make them more sticky customers.

<comment><USER11> That's not quite what the wholesale rate means in the US; we have what you describe but it's typically referred to as the spot market. The wholesale rate when used by politicians and the media here usually (as far as I know) refers to the monthly auction clearing rate, which is much more stable. There is also a day-ahead wholesale rate, but the net metering rollback bills I've read recently are all based on the monthly auction rate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Haven't finished the article yet, but that animated gif of Warren vs Elon is... something special.

<comment><USER13> Skip the article, view the gif... [http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-solar-power- buffett-v...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-solar-power-buffett-vs- musk/img/buffett_vs_musk.gif)

<comment><USER14> Or don't unless you want this image for ever burned into your retinas....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The long term question here is will solar be distributed or centralized? I think the answer is distributed like the model Elon and solar city are using. It just doesn't makes sense for the old power companies like Buffet's NV Energy to maintain all the transmission lines when the cost of batteries falls.

<comment><USER16> Couldn't one argue exactly the opposite? Since, due to physics, electricity is very hard to store and there are already transmission lines, why not use them?

There are going to be factories that probably can't realistically be supported by batteries. Another alternative is to run only in the summer and on sunny days. Or to do all heavy industry/manufacturing close to hydro, nuclear or geothermal power sources. In a sense, it would be a return towards the old mill brook economy.

They recently opened a big subsea transmission cable between Netherlands and Norway. Norway has mountains for hydro load balancing while Netherlands has wind turbines for volatile production.

<comment><USER17> The factory nearby here (a paper mill) has a larger power plant than the ~35,000 people that live in the area.

They aren't going to switch to something less reliable than the natural gas line feeding the plant, nor are they going to switch to something more expensive.

It typically only shuts down for several weeks a year and isn't all that profitable (at least, the owners keep going bankrupt, 4 or 5 times in the recent 20 years), I doubt running less would help.

<comment><USER16> Paper has become a worse and worse business since electronic media has taken over gradually.

But the "turn factories off" was a bit of a joke. Though Nordpool does have its spikes and it indeed makes sense to sometimes turn off factories. Depends on your process.

Nowadays they run data centers in some old paper factories here (since the electricity is cheap). So in a sense the old industries are gone, from lack of demand, and new industries have gone where there is cheap power available.

<comment><USER17> The thought was that industry doesn't necessarily care about the grid, it just treats it as an option and calculates whether it is a good one.

(hence pointing out that it was the largest energy consumer in the area and had already opted out of buying grid power, that it's not in a great industry strengthens the point)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > All this has enraged independent, free-market, and environmentally conscious > Nevadans.

I'm all for green energy, but how is leasing solar panels that are government subsidized and then having companies forced to buy back electricity at a set price considered part of a "free market"?

<comment><USER19> They might be more upset about being forced to pay to not be connected to the grid. It's not free market if a customer can't refuse to be connected to the grid and refuse to pay for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "All this has enraged independent, free-market, and environmentally conscious Nevadans."

...

"Nevada forces utilities to buy the excess energy at rates set by regulators"

How was the government forcing utilities to buy excess energy at mandated rates "free market"?

<comment><USER21> Plus there is the fact that utilities are state-regulated monopolies... Until you have competing utility providers, it isn't much of a market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> We changed the title so it wouldn't be ludicrous linkbait. If anyone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) title, we're happy to change it again.

Submitters: the HN guidelines ask you not to use the original title when it is linkbait or misleading. Please change it in such cases, preferably using a subtitle or representative phrase from the article. (I couldn't find one in this case, but if anyone else does, let us know.)

</comment><comment><USER23> Here's the problem with Net Metering: suppose you have two neighbors with exactly the same sunlight conditions:

1\. A person whose house is large, inefficient, and uses a lot of electricity

2\. A person with a small efficient house.

If both of these people buy the exact same solar panels and generate the exact same amount of electricity, then the utility has to pay #1 a _lot_ more money than #2. (If you really want to ramp up the rhetoric, call #1 rich and #2 poor, and ask why the rich guy gets paid more for his solar power)

How does this happen? In order to encourage conservation, we have different price tiers. The more electricity you use the higher the price per usage is. When the solar "rolls the meter backwards", it's rolling away the high-cost tier from the wasteful guy, and the low-cost tier from the conservationist.

We want to encourage solar generation, so it makes sense that solar generators should be paid more per kWh. Net Metering is the Wrong Way to accomplish this goal.

</comment><comment><USER24> Meta comment : it's always surprising to see how different is the destiny of a submission based on timing and randomness. For example, my previous submission of this link got only one vote. ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11052575))

</comment><comment><USER25> On a second thought, the utilities should have never been privatised.

</comment><comment><USER26> It reminds me of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court after the Interdict came down and stopped all that progress. Our Interdict is the PUC, regulation, lobbyists and corrupt political decisions, then subsidies and more counter subsidies. No, rooftop solar is not a no brainer anywhere. Try to figure in the cost of energy storage which is still astronomical in price. Or jump into 100 years of utility regulation fights when all we need is power generation that should be just based on common law rights etc and competitive capitalism only.

</comment><comment><USER25> "For years the state provided rebates for homeowners who wanted to go solar through a lottery system."

What the heck...</comment>


MIT can honor Aaron Swartz by fighting to make journals open to everyone - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/aaron_swartz_jstor_mit_can_honor_the_internet_activist_by_fighting_to_make.single.html <comment><USER3> > Third, MIT should instruct its deans and other officials to no longer look > favorably upon the mere fact of publication in a "prestigious" journal when > making hiring and tenure decisions. Instead, promotions should be based on > the quality of a person's work, wherever it's been published. (This sounds > obvious, but most people in academia will tell you that where you publish is > just as important as what you publish.)

I wish I liked this article, but it seems that Manjoo has failed to appreciate why this problem is difficult, and therefore, why it has not been solved already.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the casual suggestion that MIT should try to badly damage the careers of most of its faculty (presumably causing them to leave) suggests that he hasn't thought about this problem very long or talked about it with many people. As much as I dislike academic publishing, the last thing I want is to have deans and their staff evaluate the merits of research on a case by case basis. It sounds nice in theory, I guess, but they're people with agendas and biases too, and even setting that aside, they don't have the time or the training to do it. (as an, I hope, neutral example: could a dean trained as an economist really evaluate the relative merits of 15 different experimental physics papers? Could a trained physicist really evaluate the contributions of 15 different economics papers?) (note that this all applies to deans at _other_ universities. The deans at _my_ university are of course exceptional and above reproach).

So, on the one hand, even MIT probably can't unilaterally make a lot of progress on this issue. On the other hand... almost every recent paper I've ever been interested in is available from the author's webpage (making this quote: "much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who's not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" ring hollow to me), all of the work to produce the journals is done for free or nearly free by researchers, and (anecdotally) everyone prefers electronic copies of the journal articles anyway. It seems like open access publication is almost inevitable.

A more manageable (but less sexy) step might be for MIT and other universities to defray the admin costs for some of these flagship journals that want to go open-access. The article mentions the _American Historical Review_ as having annual (editorial) costs of about $500k [1], which is tiny for a university.

[1] From this post: [http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on- schola...](http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on-scholarly- journal-publishing)

<comment><USER5> You're right that the central challenge here is helping academics evaluate each other's work without relying so heavily on journal titles, closed access journals or otherwise. There is some movement here. Increasingly hiring committees are taking other reputation metrics into account when evaluating work (inbound citation counts, readership metrics, follower counts - <USER2> that may make the job of an evaluation committee a little bit easier).

The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free. Institutions pay $8 billion a year to subscribe to journals, and they would be only too glad to cancel those subscriptions if they could.

<comment><USER4> >The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free.

I'd love to see data on this, so I can see _why_ my experience is atypical: are conventions different in some fields than others? Do I just have good luck? Am I misremembering or just wrong (which is possible)? The original article states, "Much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who's not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" and I'd really like to know exactly which articles Manjoo has looked for and been unable to find w/out a university license. Institutional access needs to be a lot more comprehensive than what almost any individual needs access to, so I don't think that their subscription costs really are compelling evidence against my experience.

I'm kind of surprised that no one's pointed out an easy and really effective step MIT could take unilaterally: make all of the journals the MIT Press publishes open access (MIT is also a publisher). Some of them are among the best journals in their fields (e.g. the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_ is one of the 4 most prestigious journals in econ and the _Review of Economics and Statistics_ is very very good).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a fan of linking major cultural or ideological issues to specific tragedies in this way. If open access is a good idea on the merits, then the merits are where the battle will be won or lost.

The article points out one reason to not provide open access: the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free. If there is not a good solution for that problem, the emotional appeal of "do it for Aaron" will not be enough to win--especially because the people who feel the greatest emotional attachment to Aaron are the people who already agreed with him.

The rallying cry "do it for [person]" is usually only effective at rallying the troops who are already on your side, not convincing the other side.

<comment><USER7>
        | the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free

note, though, that scientists are not paid to edit journals nor peer-review articles in them; the publishers collect their cut simply for hosting the article on a website (and printing physical copies, but basically nobody uses them anymore.)

If the publishers were more honest, and allowed people to download papers for the cost of the bandwidth plus a small contribution towards a sysadmin's salary, say 20 cents, and charged the full $10 wack for physical subscriptions/prints, we would have app-store economics and much, much less of a problem.

Of course, people with a monopoly don't tend to reduce their prices voluntarily (apart from Amazon..) and full, free, open access (at least for publicly funded research) is a very reasonable demand.

<comment><USER4> This doesn't affect your argument at all, but academics _are_ sometimes paid a small amount to edit journals; not enough though (AFAIK) to affect their decisionmaking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content since all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion. The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in such a journal and do so willingly and fully aware that someone else will make money from the work via selling subscriptions etc

A better idea would be to invest the effort and money in building free alternatives based on alternative business models and working out how to incent authors to use them. This doesn't involve the breaking of any contracts or dishonouring agreements and is actually addressing the root cause rather than engaging in journal by journal skirmishes.

<comment><USER9> "I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content"

Well I guess that depends on what you base your morality on. I am of the view that it is inherently immoral to base a person's access to education on their wealth, because it ensures that wealthier people will have an easier time remaining wealthy and that poor people will have a harder time becoming wealthy. That applies equally to grade-school mathematics and reading texts as it does to academic journals.

"all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion."

Failure to publish means losing your job as a researcher; how is that not coercive?

"The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in such a journal"

Which is detrimental to the quality of research, and by extension harmful to society. By making publishing so prestigious, we have encouraged researchers to tackle only smaller, safer problems, to avoid questioning the validity of commonly used research techniques, and to waste resources by publishing minute variations on a single idea over and over again. Since copyright itself exists "to promote the progress of science," it would seem that correcting those problems would be of paramount importance -- and the prestige associated with publishing in a "big name" journal is one of the factors that created this situation.

<comment><USER8> On your first point about access to education being based on wealth: education and knowledge are products just like any other and cost money to produce. Hence, it is perfectly moral to charge for access and indeed it is necessary to ensure that others invest the time and incur the opportunity cost of doing things that further human knowledge. If we make education and all knowledge free, how do you propose that the costs of producing this knowledge are offset? Taxes? Personally, I would rather that research and knowledge is entirely funded by private money and the private sector than by government fiat.

With regards to your second point, failure to publish may mean losing your job but then that is because publish is part and parcel of your job. Failure to teach, turn up in the morning, wear decent clothes and a plethora of other things could likewise cost one their job but this still doesn't constitute coercion because the person is still free to work elsewhere.

As for your last point, I fail to see why this is an issue. Publishing is prestigious because it is a proxy for the endorsement of ones peers and a form of validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a person's relative performance as a researcher. Maybe the issue isn't publishing per se but rather that journals are not exclusive enough and hence accept lower grade research. Maybe there is a market then for a journal to be even more selective -- and therefore even more prestigious than its competitors -- and by doing so incent a higher level of research.

<comment><USER9> "education and knowledge are products just like any other"

Not in a democracy. For a democratic system to work, the entire population needs to be educated well enough to make a rational choice when they are asked to vote.

If you want a system where knowledge is a "product," what you want is a plutocracy: a system where the wealthy rule, because only the wealthy are educated enough to rule. I cannot speak for you, but I live in a country that was founded on a principle of representative democracy and which has a constitution that is meant to prevent the establishment of any sort of aristocracy, plutocracy included.

"it is necessary to ensure that others invest the time and incur the opportunity cost of doing things that further human knowledge"

That is not what the subscription fees for academic journals are for; the authors of scientific articles are almost never paid by the publishers who collect fees for access to those articles. The purpose of journal fees is and has always been to monetize the publishing industry itself; once upon a time, before there was an Internet or a Web, that was the best known method of mass- distributing scientific journals and other academic writing.

The "opportunity cost" of research is paid for by the government and by the researchers themselves. The overwhelming majority of professional researchers are being paid less to do their research than they would to work in private industry. Graduate students, whose work constitutes a sizable portion of the research work that is done, are paid almost nothing -- barely enough to live on. There is no "return on investment" to speak of; all a researcher gains from publishing a paper, in strict economic terms, is a padded CV that _might_ help that researcher advance their career (but which will do little to help them make as much money as they would in a corporate job). Researchers are willing to forgo a higher salary for various reasons, but there is a common theme, which is a high philosophical ideal: the work is more intellectually interesting, there is a chance to contribute to the greater pool of human knowledge, working as a university professor allows one to impart knowledge onto the next generation, there are bigger problems to solve than what corporations are doing, etc.

"I would rather that research and knowledge is entirely funded by private money and the private sector than by government fiat."

There are two problems with that:

1\. The private sector tends to focus education on vocational training. There is certainly a place in the world for such training, and we could not have a society of specialized workers without some form of vocational training, but we need more from our education system than job training. Again, if we want to even pretend that we are a democracy, we have to at least have a populace that is able to read and understand the implications of major political issues.

2\. Private sector research tends to shy away from big, risky lines of work that may have no payoff at all. There are few exceptions to this rule; the most prominent is Microsoft Research, which is one of the only "academic" research labs in private industry and which is a place where researchers are doing things nobody else is willing to touch. The development of things like the Internet, nuclear power, the space program, genome mapping, and other "big ideas" would almost certainly have not been possible without government funding, because the key, foundational work of these things had _no commercial value whatsoever_ , with commercial value being realized only after a great deal of risky research.

"failure to publish may mean losing your job but then that is because publish is part and parcel of your job"

Except that people are not paid to "write papers," they are paid to "do research," which is supposed to be reported on by writing papers. Researchers who are under pressure to publish more papers can always use "old tricks" like taking a single good result and splitting it into multiple small results that can be published one at a time, or publishing a good result and then publishing multiple tiny variations on that result. As I noted above, researchers do not generally choose their careers because of the pay; it is equally true that researchers do not choose their careers because they are excited by the idea of publishing a lot of journal articles.

"this still doesn't constitute coercion"

I think you should look up the definition of "coercion" in the dictionary:

<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/coercion>

Threatening someone with unemployment if they fail to do a particular thing is coercion _by definition_.

"validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a person's relative performance as a researcher"

Counting the number of journal articles a person published is not even a remotely objective method of judging their performance as a researcher. It is on the level of counting the number of lines of code a person writes as a measure of their performance as a programmer. The only reason it is used as a measure of anything is because the people in charge of hiring decisions often lack the time or expertise needed to closely examine a researcher's work, so they just combine the number of papers published with the perceived prestige of the journals those papers were published in and use that as an approximation. I have seen good work get rejected from top journals, and I have seen mediocre work get accepted to those same journals, just like I have seen 10 lines of code that does more than 1000 lines of code in the same language.

I doubt there is a market-based solution to this, because it is not an economic problem. It is an academic problem that stems from the policies and approach we take to judging the quality of research for employment purposes. When a university is considering hiring a professor, they do not ask their faculty to read that professor's published work thoroughly; instead, they ask the faculty to judge whether or not that professor will bring in grant money (it is unlikely that private sector funding would truly change this; you see similar patterns of behavior out of the private sector, on both sides), if that professor can increase or maintain the school's prestige, etc. Teaching is low on the list of priorities, and a person who spends all their time chasing after big, difficult, and risky problems has a lower chance of being hired than a person who follows tried-and-true approaches to research strategy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I say screw the existing journals and encourage publishing academic work on new, free journals.

There's nothing that says "existing journals must change or we have no other option"

<comment><USER11> The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the established, old-guard journals.

It will take longer than just providing another avenue to publication.

The incentives for publishing need to be addressed adequately. It's relatively easy nowadays to figure out how to produce articles for publication cheaply.

<comment><USER12> > The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the > established, old-guard journals.

True, just like Wikipedia lacks prestige and "credibility" now.

I'm willing to wait +/- 20 years until all those old folks die off or become irrelevant and today's late teens can't remember a world without Wikipedia and have never seen a printed encyclopedia.

<comment><USER13> But the academics can't "wait +/- 20 years" --- they have careers to build now. Grad students, post-docs, and junior faculty have to build a portfolio of work that will be impressive across many institutions where they might get tenure, or just their next gig. (Most would love to get promoted at MIT, but the odds are against that.)

If most of those institutions are looking at the same set of prestigious, closed journals, avoiding those journals is not an option for an ambitious academic --- and if MIT starts insisting they must, good talent will go elsewhere.

That's why this is hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "are giving their work away to journals for free"

You know, the funny thing is that this pretty much describes the business model for all websites with user-generated content.

<comment><USER8> It is also a fallacy that they are giving it away. They must be deriving some non-monetary value from doing it else they would not do it since they are free to decide not to publish or select a particular outlet. The fact is that authors are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in a journal.

<comment><USER9> In theory, researchers publish their work in order to make their knowledge available to others. In theory, the more people who read a published paper, the better, regardless of whether or not the researcher who wrote it is even alive. In theory, the only reason researchers put their name, affiliation, and contact information on published papers is so that they can answer questions other people might have after reading the paper. It's a great theory...

In practice, researchers publish their work because their jobs and livelihoods depend on it. In practice, researchers publish the same paper with minor tweaks in multiple journals because they need to pad their CV. In practice, most of humanity cannot read journal articles anyway so researchers are only really communicating with each other when they publish -- and they already know how to contact each other.

So that is the value researchers derive from publishing their work: failure to publish means failure to advance one's career. It makes no difference _what_ a researcher publishes, and so researchers tend to gravitate towards problems that do not seem very hard (but they make it sound very exciting in the titles and abstracts of their papers, because the people with hiring/firing power usually can't get through the introduction).

<comment><USER4> Whose theory are you describing in the first paragraph? Yours? In practice, the needs of society -- new freely available knowledge -- match up imperfectly with the needs of the people who can or should do the research: money, recognition by their peers, time to spend on fun problems, and general satisfaction (which can and almost always does come from a large degree from _learning something new that other people will want to learn too_ ).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They can further honor him by putting some reins on their legal team.

<comment><USER16> Well he did sneak into a closet and cause JSTOR to threaten to cut MIT's access. After things settled down, MIT dropped all charges. I think that was pretty reasonable.

<comment><USER17> Where have you seen that they dropped charges? Everything I've read has indicated exactly the opposite.

<comment><USER16> MIT dropped trespassing charges. (JSTOR also dropped their charges after Aaron deleted the files and promised not to do it again or something.) The feds got involved with the "hacking" because it crossed state lines, and the district attorney in Boston continued the criminal case after both JSTOR and MIT had settled with Aaron out of court.

<comment><USER18> And according to what the Aaron's lawyers have said, the prosecutors pursued the case because MIT behind the scenes wanted them to.

MIT is not necessarily blameless here. I for one will be reading that report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Well, some people are already on it, whether or not MIT chooses to do anything about it: <http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/>

</comment><comment><USER20> Not to be insensitive to Aaron, but even if this could be pulled off, which it wouldn't, this might encourage copycat suicides to produce change. Suicide should not be encouraged. Often change can happen without any harm to self or others. Sacrificing oneself because there is no other option is one thing; but suicide to make journals available was probably not Aaron's intent.

</comment><comment><USER21> I strongly believe that publicly funded research should freely available to the general public. I use the <http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/> daily to help continue Aaron's fight.

Could someone please explain what is stopping arXiv from filling the role discussed in this article?

</comment><comment><USER22> MIT is far more likely to come up with an exonerating report rather than an excoriating one.</comment>


Is the TechCrunch50 DemoPit worth it? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.expensify.com/2009/08/19/is-the-tc50-demopit-worth-it-in-short-yes/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting advice on how to make the most of the DemoPit. It seems like a complete scam to me - anyone not accepted into TC50 is invited to pay $3,000 for what will likely be nothing of value.

But if you take the approach this startup did, practice your pitch until it's rock-solid, then innocuously latch onto each passerby with a unique presentation, then you may actually end up with something of lasting value.

Even so, it's likely to end up a bitter disappointment for most, who I suspect are expecting much more from it.

<comment><USER3> Actually, a ticket to the event is $3k so we give these DemoPit tables away as a GIFT to the startups. They get a demo table for one day and TWO tickets. So, it's $6k worth of value...

HOWEVER, you have to be under $500k in angel startup to get them. so it's not like IBM or Google can buy them and put out Google Maps API or something.

Anyway, I understand being skeptical... the event business is filled with crooks like the DEMO conference which charge startups $5k for two minutes on stage or $20k for six minutes!!!

Mike and I started TechCrunch50 to destroy DEMO and that payola model. As a four-time startup founder/CEO I HATE folks asking me to pay... i came up with the idea for TC50 and pitched it to MIke to solve this problem.

all the best, Jason

<comment><USER4> Can a Demopit company that gets the last presentation spot win th competition?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you were an east coast startup (or really from outside California) I could see the value, but if you are a startup in the Valley, it does not seem to really make sense. If you can't hustle and make the right connections, then what you are working on probably is not headed in the right direction.

</comment><comment><USER6> We(nobodies from east coast) were a demopit company in 07. What it led us too was...

\- Being featured on many of the high profiled tech blogs \- Being invited to present alongside MS & FB at an event \- Being selected into one of the incubators & some other things

Did it make our company a huge hit. No, but it indeed put us in the spotlight and made it easier to get press & some funding. Also, it was an amazing fun journey!

<comment><USER3> There are a TON of stories like that.... folks meet VCs, angels, partners, get press and find team members at the event. Networking is WELL worth it from my standpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Off course not!

If you really want to participate TC50, you should try everything else. Talk yourself into TC50, leave a comment on every TechCrunch article for the next 14 days and ask for a ticket or an invite, wait in front of 635 8th Street and pitch to angel's you recognize the day of the conference, dress like a Janitor with an old college ID and a van to get in.

Invent something but do not spend 3K just to be on the DemoPit. The area no one cares about that day anyway. Leave the 3K in your bank account and be happy to have more runway, or get a freelancer to do "that thing" that will make your product that much better.

Basti.

</comment><comment><USER8> Save the money for food/beer......</comment>


Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-it-faster-to-process-a-sorted-array-than-an-unsorted-array <comment><USER2> My intuition for what was going on here was close on a conceptual level but off by a mile in terms of the implementation detail, which turns out to be something I was dimly aware of but should have known much more about. Very enlightening. No spoilers for 'comments first' consumers. Read and enjoy!

</comment><comment><USER3> This needs more attention than 3rd page.</comment>


(2014)Silicon Valley's most celebrated CEOs drived down 100,000 engineers' wages - <AUTHOR> https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/ <comment><USER2> DOJ estimates that $9 billion in wages were suppressed from 2005-2010.</comment>


How Cloudflare Helps Serve Up Hate on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/how-cloudflare-helps-serve-up-hate-on-the-web <comment><USER2> I generally believe in transparency. But I would resist transparency with someone that exhibits this attitude:

Andrew Anglin, the owner of The Daily Stormer, has been candid about how he feels about people reporting his site for its content. "We need to make it clear to all of these people that there are consequences for messing with us," Anglin wrote in one online post. "We are not a bunch of babies to be kicked around. We will take revenge. And we will do it now."

</comment><comment><USER3> Another Free Speech literally equals Nazis article. Are you serious? Yes, Cloudflare, like every other host, complies with the law, specifically when requested to by the very people whose privacy they are claimed violating. This article is bullshit, and the author should be ashamed, if not mortified for his career.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do people complain when blogs submit referral links. - <AUTHOR>

I have seen multiple instances where people complain when they post a tutorial or a reading list and point to amazon or other shopping sites. And people get a lot fussy when the links have referral links in them. What is wrong in the blog author getting some money when apparently you are not losing any. In fact you are gaining some knowledge. This is a win-win situation. I am pointing you to the correct resource and cashing in on the fact that I pointed it to you. Isnt a search engine or some discovery place you use doing the same thing? <comment><USER2> _What is wrong in the blog author getting some money when apparently you are not losing any._

Lack of disclosure. If the author is not making it apparent that they are profiting from the blog post, it makes the credibility of the post disputable.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds fair. Isn't advertising on the blog an advertising and the user doesn't disclose anywhere that he will earn money when you click on the ad. Even though its obvious, shouldn't he be disclosing that? If he has referral link in a post, its same right? We now know that all ads earn the blogger money because its the norm. So, even if people don't complain, mediocre blog posts never have a lot of readers. so, should we be having a practice where the user has an asterisk near the link and the asterisk should point to small unreadable text at the bottom of the page? Im not saying you are wrong, but Im trying to make a argument so I can have a better understanding.</comment></comment>