Type 2 diabetes: NHS to offer 800-calorie diet treatment - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-46363869 <comment><USER2> About 3 years ago (late 2015 now) I was quite overweight, had a knee injury that limited my mobility (stairs mostly) and had a fasting glucose and post- meal readings that indicated I was nearly pre-diabetic (T2).

So, I cut out out all sugary drinks, refined carbs, late night eating (!!) and tried various intermittent fasting / time restricted feeding techniques (5:2, alternate day, one-meal-a-day) and after about 3.5 months my glucose readings returned to the "normal" range. (Which is WAY more tolerable than sticking to a low-calorie diet every single day IME. I still had pizza and cheeseburgers on occasion, just no soda, fries, "junk" etc.)

After around 6-7 months I'd lost 40+lbs, my knee stopped bothering me and no longer had to entertain the idea of fixing it with surgery. I'm now down well over 60+lbs without having put in hardly any effort to exercise (occasional walking) - pretty stunning to me.

<comment><USER3> > I'm now down well over 60+lbs without having put in hardly any effort to > exercise (occasional walking) - pretty stunning to me.

Losing weight despite not exercising isn't surprising. Exercise, even intense cardio, burns far fewer calories than most people think. I'm about 240 lbs, 5'8", 36 years old, and according to this calculator [0], if I ran a 5k at a fast-paced 10 mph (6 minute mile), I'd only burn about 250 calories. That wouldn't even be enough to burn the calories in the energy drink I might drink before it!

Great work on the weight loss. I was 255 lbs at the beginning of the year and switched out my sugary sodas for unsweetened tea or occasionally a diet soda and lost 15 lbs in 4 months. I plateaued because I haven't changed much else.

[0] [https://www.freedieting.com/calories- burned](https://www.freedieting.com/calories-burned)

<comment><USER4> Most exercise based weight loss isn't about the actual exercise it's about the changes the intense exercise makes to your body that causes you to burn more calories while resting. Exercise often tunes your body to burn calories at a higher rate as you gain muscle and / or increase muscle health which requires more energy to support even while resting. So while you don't NEED exercise to lose weight it certainly is a super important part of weight lose for most people.

<comment><USER5> Some recent research contradicts those ideas.

Contestants on an extreme weight loss television reality show saw their resting metabolism drop after a rigorous program of exercise.

>The group as a whole on average burned 2,607 calories per day at rest before the competition, which dropped to about 2,000 calories per day at the end.

Six years later, calorie burning had slowed further to 1,900 per day, as reported in the journal Obesity.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after- the...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/6-years-after-the-biggest- loser-metabolism-is-slower-and-weight-is-back-up/)

Another recent study showed that diet effected metabolism.

>a large new study published on Wednesday in the journal BMJ found that overweight adults who cut carbohydrates from their diets and replaced them with fat sharply increased their metabolisms.

After five months on the diet, their bodies burned roughly 250 calories more per day than people who ate a high-carb, low-fat diet

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/well/eat/how-a-low- carb-d...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/well/eat/how-a-low-carb-diet- might-help-you-maintain-a-healthy-weight.html)

<comment><USER6> That research on the biggest loser participants has since been disproven. Sorry can't pull up those studies easily by mobile do I'll try to update wheni can.

<comment><USER7> Every time the Biggest Loser study (PMC4989512) gets cited someone pops up and mentions that it's been disproven but I've never seen any citation or followup. In fact, from my research I've seen lots of studies that show that there are long term metabolic changes (PMC6033771) related to adaptive thermogenesis/fat oxidization that is a fat-free mass independent effect on REE (doi: 10.3945/ajcn.115.109173).

Other studies seem to show that the lowered RMR doesn't seem to happen either doing a ketogenic diet (PMC5816424) or with ADF (PMC5042570) vs CR. I also think that the Biggest Loser results are in large part so unsuccessful due to their "crash diet" nature and the lack of any healthy habits being built for maintenance.

* [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4989512/)

* [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6033771/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6033771/)

* [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26399868](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26399868)

* [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816424/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5816424/)

* [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5042570/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5042570/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The 800 calories they are eating doesn't seem terribly healthy: "patients were asked to follow either a 'home-made' milk- and fruit-juice-based diet (811 kcal/day, 64 g protein, 132 g carbohydrate, 6 g fat) with a multivitamin/mineral supplement (Forceval® [Alliance]), or a micronutrient- replete commercial LELD (832 kcal/day, 87 g protein, 120 g carbohydrate, 12 g fat).

I imagine these people are probably staving... I'd rather go low-carb myself.

This is the study, DiRECT: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4754868/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4754868/)

<comment> village-idiot Generally agreed, but with a caveat: diabetics are at risk of ketoacidosis on low carb diets. They would need to measure their blood ketones and moderate carbohydrate intake to keep their levels down below dangerous thresholds.

Personally when I went low carb, I got blood (not urine) ketone levels up into the range that would kill a diabetic quickly, think in the 7.0 range. Even as someone well adapted I regularly hit the 3.0s when fasting.

Obligatory: I am not a doctor.

<comment><USER9> You dont get keto acidosis by eating low carb, that is misinformation.

<comment><USER10> Source? From my read it looks like you absolutely can.

[https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc052709](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc052709)

<comment><USER11> That's a case study of a single patient. Main takeaway:

>Benign dietary ketosis resulting from restricting carbohydrates could, theoretically, cause ketoacidosis in persons with a predisposition to the condition.

<comment><USER12> That sounds very much like what they were saying. "Theoretically" is closer to "can" than it is to "cannot".

<comment> village-idiot Also, I said that it's a risk to be managed. People are acting like I said that it's a certainty and that not eating sugar constantly as a diabetic will kill you instantly or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think that this is effective because it reduces the carbohydrate load. Protein and fat consumption also increase insulin response but not nearly as much. Type 2 diabetics could get most of the blood sugar reducing benefit of this by just removing/replacing the carbs. That has been my N=1 experience with both fasting and carb restriction.

<comment><USER14> Well reversing is different but most cases can be reveresed with dietary/lifestyle changes.

On the other hand prevention of type2 is N=100% with these changes. I know people, especially in the US consider it thier right/freedom to eat what they want and live how they want, but in my mind it's deeply disturbing especially because children don't have any choice (it's parental).

I think as soon as a child is diagnosed with fatty liver disease...there should be some mandate on parents to "treat" their child with diet (which I know is probably equally disturbing to people, government dictated diet).

<comment><USER13> In the US the official nutrition advice has been both wrong and corrupt since the 1970s. Gotten wrong by sincere hard working scientists with the best intentions. Corrupted by corporate capture of regulatory bodies and funding of exculpatory studies.

These same forces would choose what is mandated. That is horrifying. Not only could they give bad advice, they could compel ever larger fractions of the population to follow it.

Far better to let parents decide, so when they get it wrong we can learn from it, and don't all get it wrong at once.

<comment><USER14> >Far better to let parents decide, so when they get it wrong we can learn from it, and don't all get it wrong at once.

The problem is the disease is growing in epidemic proportions, no one is learning from mistakes.

The government got it wrong sure, but let the doctors prescribe the diet and government won't dictate the diet only mandate following doctor prescribed treatment/diet (and this too I know has flaws).

But here is the thing, say a child does get diabeties and the doctor prescribed insulin, but the parents think they know better and refuse the treat their child. Should government be able to step in or allow the parent to withhold insulin treatment based on their freedom? Legally parents can refuse (life saving) treatment on religious grounds, and that arguement comes into play in diet, but I've also been involved in a case where a 13 year old was pregnant with HIV and was refusing court ordered treatments so the baby would be born without HIV, legally and morally they are complex issues.

<comment> village-idiot Americans have by and large followed the recommendations of the government: meat and saturated fat consumption is down, and we eat way more "heart healthy" whole grains and polyunsaturated seed (excuse me, "vegetable") oils.

Lots of people followed the advice, because lots of people wanted to be healthy. The advice was just garbage.

I was under the impression that parents could not decline life saving treatments for minors, and that the state had the right to step in.

<comment><USER15> Honestly curious, where should a layman go to for nutrition advice if they can't rely on their government?

<comment><USER14> You're initial steps depend on your starting point/goals.

Are you a body builder trying to go from 10-12% body fat to 7% for competition.

Are you obese? Do you have chronic diseases or metabolic issues caused by diet?

I personally focus on ATP/krebs cycle, cellular health, dietary inflammation, liver/kidney function...I experiment and consume information mostly from athletes. I myself am a ultra runner but only started running 5 years ago and wanting to be a better runner is what got my to begging taking nutrition seriously. I was 192 4 years ago, I've been down as low as 133. I experiment a lot but it's hard because I feel you must commit months to a diet to really have insight on the effects on your body combined with lifestyle. That seems to be the same conclusion as the other reply to your comment, but whereas they say give is weeks/I'd say give it months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am not a doctor. This is what I have learned so far (there are no references here - sorry, I will need to dig up the material to substantiate this if you ask):

The upshot: Managing diet is not sufficient (for type 2) remission. The damage is at cellular level. That damage needs to be reversed. Therefore muscles need to be rebuilt. Even for the over 60 years!

The thinking: Diabetes Type 2 is the end point of years of abuse the body endures with elevated insulin and the _extent_ of insulin resistance the body progresses to. Diabetes therefore is a spectrum - the end point is when the pancreas bonks out and refuses to produce any more insulin. It's a tiny tiny organ and I think it's fragile. And it's threshold is also genetically determined. The interesting thing is that we all (including healthy folks) have levels and sometimes acute bouts of insulin resistance! The thing that made sense to me, reading about this, was that insulin resistance is a function of your _muscle_ cells denying entry to glucose. And the insulin concentration in the bloodstream is a direct function of the concentration of free flowing glucose. Poor Pancreas is only doing its job but the muscles are not taking in any new glucose. They are refusing (resistant). Pancreas tries its best by pumping more insulin and for longer but the adamant muscles are the contract breakers in this arrangement - they don't open the gates for glucose.

The only way to change direction permanently in type 2 is to rebuild muscles which will have better insulin receptors to allow glucose to be shunted into the cells. For this to happen you have to do strength training. Lift sufficiently heavy. (No, not Arnie levels by any measure.)

(I recently read a study that administering testosterone to type 2 diabetics improved their insulin resistance. What happens with testosterone and anabolic steroids? New muscles, that's what.)

<comment><USER12> Yeah... Also get a lawyer, quit Facebook, and start dressing for the job you want!

<comment><USER16> I don't quite understand.

<comment><USER12> It's a joke based on the perception of crackpotishhness I got from OP's advice.

<comment><USER16> I admit that it does sound crackpotish [sic] - I am the OP.

Is this better? ->

The common understanding of T2DM is that it is a problem of sugar and therefore diet. That's only half of the equation of the physiology leading to T2DM. We have to also understand the _cause_ of excess free circulating blood sugar and excess calories: _muscle cells that have lost their ability to receive sugar_. Muscle atrophy and poor muscle composition has to be the second half of understanding and therefore part of management of T2DM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's great that they teach the idea that Diabetes (type 2) is preventable and even treatable with responsible eating habits. Too many people believe it's just something your doctor is supposed to treat with a pill.

Food companies often push the idea that all you need to do is exercise more. Whilst exercise might be a great thing: it alone can't fix the problem. You still need to learn how to eat.

</comment><comment><USER18> Makes sense, it is a diet related illness, so it should have a diet related treatment. Instead of treating the symptoms, treat the cause.

<comment><USER19> > Makes sense, it is a diet related illness, so it should have a diet related > treatment. Instead of treating the symptoms, treat the cause.

Type 2 diabetes isn't _caused_ by diet. Certain diets can increase the risk of Type 2 diabetes, but it's not a foregone conclusion, and it's not uncommon to develop Type 2 diabetes despite an otherwise healthy diet.

<comment><USER20> T2D is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors such as diet, and you're correct that someone can get T2D based mostly on genetic factors alone. It is however very uncommon, and diet plays a role in the majority of cases. There are several studies that show this.

<comment><USER19> > It is however very uncommon

It is _not_ very uncommon, and in fact the most recent (last ~decade of) research has actually caused us to question the extent to which people genetically predisposed to diabetes can mitigate their risk through diet and lifestyle choices.

<comment><USER21> My Dad and his brother both have T2D. My Dad is 75 and my uncle is going on 60. They are both very active, in shape, and not overweight at all. e.g., My Dad was playing tennis 4 times a week when he was diagnosed. He's probably cut down some since, um, he's 75, and has had two hip replacements, but he's in way better shape than I am.

Neither were significantly overweight when they were diagnosed. In fact, my Dad has been trim for decades, and while I don't see my uncle often, he was always thin and very fit-looking when I have seen him.

There _has_ got to be a genetic component independent of lifestyle and diet choices. Me? I have no excuse. I'm overweight and not active and I know I need to change that.

edit: Didn't proofread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Type 2 diabetes is currently on track to bankrupt the world's healthcare system. Easily 60% of the US residents reading this comment are already insulin resistant, they just don't know it yet. Many of those will progress to full blown T2DM in ten to fifteen years. It used to take a very expensive sequence of blood tests involving injecting glucose and tracking the concentrations of glucose and insulin over a few hours. Lately the tech has improved and there is a single blood test that can give an "insulin-resistance score", LP-IR[0][1]. While Peter Attia showed this test in a blog post from 2012[2], it seems to be getting more attention lately[3]. Just because your blood glucose after fasting is "normal" does not mean you will not get T2DM. Just ask Tim Noakes, world class exercise scientist and medical doctor, who finished more than 70 marathons and still woke up one day with diabetes, just like his father.[4][5]

[0] [https://www.labcorp.com/test-menu/31976/nmr- lipoprofile%C2%A...](https://www.labcorp.com/test-menu/31976/nmr- lipoprofile%C2%AE-with-graph)

[1] [https://www.walkinlab.com/media/attachment/file/1/2/123810.p...](https://www.walkinlab.com/media/attachment/file/1/2/123810.pdf)

[2] [https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol- pa...](https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-part-iii/)

[3] [https://www.managedcaremag.com/archives/2018/4/new-test- diag...](https://www.managedcaremag.com/archives/2018/4/new-test-diagnosing- insulin-resistance-could-turn-tide-against-diabetes)

[4] [https://www.diabetes.co.uk/in-depth/tim-noakes- challenging-d...](https://www.diabetes.co.uk/in-depth/tim-noakes-challenging- dietary-guidelines/)

[5] [https://www.amazon.com/Lore-Nutrition-Challenging- convention...](https://www.amazon.com/Lore-Nutrition-Challenging-conventional- dietary/dp/1776092619/)

</comment><comment><USER23> When I was first diagnosed with T2 I did some reading around. Interesting history, especially pre- manufactured insulin.

For example, war is "good" for reducing incidence of diabetes, because famine.

<comment><USER24> Two minor points: T2 isn't controlled with insulin; it's a syndrome of insulin resistance and other metabolic dysfunctions. And "manufactured insulin" came on the scene in 1922. Before that, T1 diabetes was universally fatal.

<comment><USER23> My T2 is not treated with insulin today, but it could be later if it gets worse. And I am indeed talking about history pre-20th century.

For example, diabetes used to be diagnosed by peeing on the ground and seeing if ants we attracted to it. According to whatever diabetes history book I checked out of a medical library on inter library loan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> When people will realize that carbs are the only non-essential macronutrient? The sports community (especially bodybuilding) knows that for decades.

If an athlete says to me that a thing he does to his body work 95% of the time, I would consider to try it, and already did, some things against over- the-counter conventional medicine like this no-carb diet.

<comment><USER26> Bodybuilders eat plenty of carbs.

<comment><USER27> No they don't. A bodybuilding diet is mostly protein, then certain fats, then starchy carbs at the right time (breakfast and post-workout).

<comment><USER28> > A bodybuilding diet is mostly protein

Bodybuilders typically consume about ~30% protein. Where did you get the idea that it is mostly protein? Not to say that there aren't outliers obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This sounds pretty similar to some of the things Dr. Valter Longo has been mentioning in his book the longevity diet where a part of it are also occasional 5 day fasts with 800 calories, that (supposedly) have great benefits. Great to see this being tested with the general public.

</comment><comment><USER30> My mother suffered Type-2 diabetes for almost 20 years. I put her on an extremely strict raw food diet three months ago and stopped injecting insulin. Her fasting blood sugar level is now in the 90-110 mg/dL range. I now give her some steamed potatoes also.

I too follow the same diet to give her company.

Elimination of oil, sugar and dairy has helped, I believe. She is a vegetarian, so flesh was never in the picture. I do not have to restrict calories with raw food. Eat as much as you can.

No juicing, however. That is a totally not allowed.

<comment><USER31> I'm glad your mother is improving, but there's no real evidence that raw vegetables are better for blood sugar levels than cooked vegetables.

<comment><USER30> Raw fruits are what I feed her. No vegetables at all. I started giving her some steamed potatoes recently. Bananas have become her staple food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Losing a lot of weight with very low calorie diets is hard, but not regaining it over the next couple of years is next to impossible.

Your body will try all the tricks in the book, it will reduce your metabolism to way below that of the person of the same weight, it will amp up your hunger hormones so much that you will think and dream about food 24/7.

Only 5 to 7% of people that lose a large amount weight are able to keep it off successfully in the medium and long term. Hope there is more research into this mechanism.

<comment><USER33> And that's why weight loss techniques need to be treated like a new lifestyle, instead of a goal you hit and then finish. I lost 60 lbs a couple of years ago and found that 20 of those had recently crept back on, so I went on another shorter diet to get myself back on track. It's totally doable. You have to be aware and keep correcting.

<comment><USER34> > And that's why weight loss techniques need to be treated like a new > lifestyle, instead of a goal you hit and then finish. I lost 60 lbs a couple > of years ago ...

Firstly, fantastic achievement. I'm curious as to what motivated you enough to put in the effort (I'm assuming it required effort).

Secondly, I wonder if the speed/drastic nature of the weight-loss can be counter-productive. When you think about people don't become over-weight overnight. Perhaps a more gradual pace with some time for settling at various stages of the process...I'm thinking losing weight over a couple of years as opposed to over a couple of months.

<comment><USER33> It was my health. My snoring was bothering my wife, and I was exhibiting sleep apnea so I knew I either had to lose weight or go to a doctor, and I hate visiting the doctor.

And the time is certainly a factor - people have to set up weight loss scenarios that are sustainable over the long term. My weight loss goal was 1-2 lbs a week, so that was aggressive, but I am large enough that I can lose weight on enough calories to not feel deprived. By counting calories and making sure I had enough to enjoy myself it was a relatively easy process, once I got used to the counting and accountability.

<comment><USER35> For some people, I think they shouldn't be given the false hope that "enough to lose weight" and "enough to enjoy myself" go together. Part of losing weight is a fundamental rewiring of what is "enjoying myself".

<comment><USER33> Oh yeah. As a sweet freak, for me "enjoying myself" is a cup of frozen yogurt at the end of a day full of chicken breasts, not a plate of nachos or a whole pizza.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> In July I was 203 pounds which for a 5'6" frame, put me in the "obese" category. It was the highest weight I had ever been, and I felt I occupied more space than I should in the world ( not in a good way ). I follow a youtuber on Indian cooking and for whatever reason this woman mentioned how she recently started eating in a more "Keto" way. This woman is thin as a rake. She mentioned she was doing this for mental clarity. On a whim, I decided to try it. I literally threw the little debbie box I had my hand in, in the garbage that day. Today, I am 166 pounds, still "overweight" but this is the most amount of weight I have ever lost. I feel so much better and healthier, and its true about the mental clarity. My unsubstantiated hypothesis is that it takes away the emotional swings insulin give you. I eat till I am full. Honestly. There is not a day that I "think" about what I am eating other than keeping sugar and carbs out my month. I could not be happier. I am a 38 yo technology professional, and I imagine many others here are similar. I have nothing to sell. I just want to make people aware of a lifestyle that may help many of us who sit all day for a living.

</comment><comment><USER37> From what I've read about starving yourself vs fasting and my own experience 800-calories sounds like HELL.

I can fast for 2 weeks no problem (although that's kinda long and I wouldn't do it if I didn't have enough body fat to sustain it. If you're skinny and don't have fat to spare better not stretch it unnecessarily).

I'm eating keto and I usually only eat once a day.

Fasting _feels good_. Starving yourself feel horrible.

</comment><comment><USER38> The 800 calories number indicates that this might be related to the Fasting Mimicking Diet of Valter Longo. Since actual fasting has a "scary" reputation among some patients and doctors, Valter Longo developed a 5 day fasting like protocol with severely restricted calories that appears to have similar benefits to fully fasting for 5 days. It looks like this modified version of complete fasting is gaining popularity among the medical establishment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valter_Longo#Fasting_mimicking...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valter_Longo#Fasting_mimicking_diet)

[https://www.marksdailyapple.com/does-the-fasting- mimicking-d...](https://www.marksdailyapple.com/does-the-fasting-mimicking- diet-live-up-to-the-hype/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Loving the broscience takedowns of this NHS pilot program about how "this won't work!", or "low carb / keto is the best way!"

If only doctors knew how to read internet forums, then they'd be as knowledgable as all the armchair docs here, few (none?) of whom seem to have any actual training or T2 diabetes themselves.

</comment><comment><USER39> Could be feasible due to [https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/267241.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/267241.php)

</comment><comment><USER40> You absolutely don't need such caloric restriction to revert diabetes. All it takes is a very low carb or keto diet. Even without exercise.

<comment><USER41> Problem is keeping it, as almost everyone can keep the diet for a few months. We all know what we should do but don't, sometimes until is too late.

The person that invents a pill to trick our genes not to seek what was once rare (fat, sweets, carbs etc) will be a trillionaire. When our current genes were stamped "we" maybe had to hunt for days to eat once. Now we drive to McDonalds, order our or open the fridge door. Maybe something that puts our metabolism on steroids?

<comment><USER42> Many drugs that put our metabolitism on steroids cause deaths from overheating - the energy has to go somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ouch, this is going to be hard on me.

</comment><comment><USER44> This sounds to be marketed as some scientific potion to cure diabetes or at least rid the need of medication. All it comes down to is cleaning up your diet (e.g. eating the right amount of calories for your body and eating nutrient rich foods). There's no one diet fits all but getting a good balance of proteins, carbs, and fats is all this is doing for these people. NHS is simply doing the leg work. I control my weight by counting calories and macro- nutrients. If people could figure out how to do that own their own we'd see a huge decrease in Type 2. It's true, a cleaner diet tends to be more expensive and requires more work than the convenience of a fast food diet - but at the the end of the day we're trading diabetes so we can be lazy with our diet and health.

<comment><USER26> 800 calories per day for three months is hardly just "cleaning up your diet".

<comment><USER45> Exactly. This seems like an Onion headline: "We have your cure for diabetes! Just eat a ridiculously low amount of food, fatso."

I don't mean to sound like a whiner, but ... if it were that easy to cut down my food consumption, I wouldn't be going to a doctor in the first place!

It's like telling people with extreme loneliness or social anxiety to "just strike up a conversation with someone!" Or PTSD suffers: "Geez, just don't freak out so much, take a deep breath or something."

Or narcissists/sociopaths: "Just, you know, think more about how your actions hurt other people."

Given Herculean willpower, most diseases of civilization can be conquered. Don't pat yourself on the back for calling it "prescription".

<comment><USER46> It's not like that because it's all about how you approach the problem. It's easy to do all those things if you have the right mindset. Creating that mindset isn't easy, but wording everything in the worst possible manner is a sure way to make it more difficult.

In the case of diabetes, it's saying: here's an alternative prescription that will cure you, we have good evidence it will work, you can afford it, here are the steps to follow, each of which looks easy by itself...

<comment><USER45> >In the case of diabetes, it's saying: here's an alternative prescription that will cure you, we have good evidence it will work, you can afford it, here are the steps to follow, each of which looks easy by itself...

We had "just eat less, weak-willed fatso" fifty years ago. This isn't progress.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> How will they make sure people don't cheat and eat more anyways? 800 calories a day for an overweight person requires some serious will power.

<comment><USER48> I found it easier to do via intermittent fasting and then eating all of my calories in one meal per day. Something about completely abstaining from food is easier for me psychologically than having multiple tiny meals and making myself stop eating when I'm not full.

<comment><USER49> It's also easier for me. I have no problem skipping breakfast and then skipping lunch takes a little willpower but I'm often distracted by work. I have friends who find it easier to eat a big lunch as their only meal. Worth experimenting for each person to find what works best for them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Or in other words: Type 2 Diabetes is a normal metabolic state of humanity (or at least some significant parts of it), it's just that we're too goddamn fat

<comment><USER51> ? you mean, it's a consequence of being fat

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Calories are not the core problem - carbohydrates are. The research from VirtaHealth.com makes this clear. They are getting T2 diabetics off of insulin within a week, while still giving patients the satiety they want from meals.

<comment><USER53> Heh. Whole company launched based on single study with short duration, no control group and big drop-out rate.

But when you add long list of citations for medical literature it looks valid. Even when those studies don't directly validate your approach. People don't look at what the studies actually say.</comment></comment>


What Libraries Can (Still) Do (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2015/10/26/what-libraries-can-still-do-bibliotech/ <comment><USER2> One admirable thing about librarians is the committment to patron privacy as part of their professional code of ethics. They take that stuff _seriously_ ; the new Librarian of Congress famously fought Ashcroft over provisions in the Patriot Act that required librarians to violate it ([https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/15/carla- hayden...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/15/carla-hayden- librarian-congress-first-woman-african-american-post-interview)).

The Library of Congress has some remarkable collections and APIs available online; it's worth poking around their site ([http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch- digital.html](http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html)).

They also have an "Ask a Librarian" service that connects you with expert research assistance in any domain, for free, over the Internet. ([http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/](http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/)).

<comment><USER3> As a teenager, I had a part time job at my local public library, shelving books and working at the front desk. The librarian was an absolute privacy freak. A couple of anecdotes:

Once I commented on a patron's choice of books, and he went into a fifteen minute tirade about his topic of interest, an elaborate Communist plot against the US. The librarian pulled me aside afterwards, and said: "You're not even supposed to notice what they're checking out. It's none of your business. Hope you learned your lesson." To this day, it kind of bugs me when the library workers comment on my kids' book choices when they check out, even if it's harmless chatting.

This was during a time when an organization called Moral Majority was reportedly going to libraries and asking for circulation records, pertaining to some book that they considered to be offensive. Some people showed up while I was on desk duty, and asked to see the records. I invited them to sit in the librarian's office while I fetched her from the stacks. She went in, closed the door, and you could hear her hollering from down the street, then the visitors quietly left.

My other duty at the library was sending out the overdue notices, so I had access to the circulation records. They were kept in a bizarre way, and I filled out the "overdue" postcards by hand. We disposed of records after they were no longer needed for that process. After the incident, I commented to the librarian that I didn't think it was even possible for someone to figure out who was borrowing what books without a pretty elaborate effort. She said: "Now you understand."

Her career lasted well into the computer age, and she was always opposed to electronic circulation systems.

The experience influenced my thinking fairly deeply.

As a side note, libraries can (still) serve as a physical access point for bringing together people who need certain kinds of help, and staff / volunteers who can help them. When I worked at the library, things like the civil service exam study guides were in heavy circulation. Today, at the same library, there are several computers, and a bunch of volunteers who can help people use them. My mom maintains them.

<comment><USER4> That sensitivity to privacy seems to be a US phenomenon? At least, I never noticed that in Germany.

<comment><USER5> I work as a developer at a German library and privacy is taken _very_ seriously here. We're not allowed to store full IP addresses in the logs (they have to be truncated to /16). Google Analytics is out of the question (we have to use self-hosted Piwik), as are direct social media buttons, we have to use wrappers that only load the JS after a user clicks on it, and even that has to be approved by the "Datenschutzbeauftragter". Even external links have to be explicitly marked as such so users know when their Referral information is leaked to other websites.

<comment><USER4> That mostly is just implementing EU law. Good to know that it is taken seriously. Maybe others are more relaxed about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I live in the Bay Area and never understood the coffeehouse work culture. Libraries have better internet (usually), more available desks, are quieter, often have better parking, don't have a coffee tax just to use it, and doesn't reek of coffee.

I recently discovered the local library, and it's probably my favorite spot in the city. It's brand new, and internet speeds hit 200mbps. I shelved my unused kindle and picked up reading real books -- got nearly 50 books in the last 2 years.

There are lots of perks to having a free membership too -- I get free online access to dozens of magazines, the NYTimes, ridiculously cheap book sales ($5 per bag full). Plus, there are the occasional exhibits with 500K+ year old human remains, artists sharing their work, and live local orchestras playing inside.

The best news I've heard all month is the city allocated another $400K/year to increase its hours/week by ~14.

Disclaimer: I didn't read the article. I just wanted to share.

<comment><USER7> This sounds like a kind of library utopia I'd readily pay for. But, from my experience in the UK, our libraries have evolved from a quiet reading/reference resource to 'everything for everybody' places that are the exact opposite of what you describe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What libraries are, really, is reading rooms. Even in college, in the 90s, I never went to the library for access to the books.

I love the UCSD Medical Library. They tore out literally tons of shelves and it is now effectively a vast reading room with 20-foot ceilings and huge amounts of soft, natural light coming in through windows and skylights.

Look at the old libraries, how they obsessed with high ceilings and walls lined with books. Not deep warehouse shelving, but glorious, spaces _lined_ with books.

The reading rooms. It's about the reading rooms.

Museums would do well to understand this better also. The National Portrait Gallery in DC does a pretty good job of it.

To sit among the cultural artifacts as you make your own artifacts, or wonder about others, is the beauty of the thing. That's what these post-WWII cinderblock-and-steel-shelving libraries got wrong.

Look at the reading room of the National Library of Medicine. Go to the Library of Congress. The reading rooms, people. It's not about the musty old stacks. It's about the reading rooms.

<comment><USER9> While I understand where you're coming from (and deeply enjoy marvellous spaces like the Rylands Library in Manchester), I have to recognise that libraries have a multitude of uses, of which "providing reading rooms" is just one. For many lower-class folks, _free_ access to information is actually more important - and that's where the "shelving" comes in. A beautiful reading room with little to read for free, wouldn't be very useful to a lot of people. When I was a kid, scavenging my local library for fantasy and sci-fi, the most assiduous patrons were lower-class, the elderly and the borderline homeless, who would come in every day to read newspapers and check out books _for free_. They wouldn't have come otherwise, regardless of how beautiful the reading room might have been (well, maybe the homeless, but that's it).

These segments are now better served by what the NYT dismisses as "a Starbucks wannabe": a free internet node, possibly with curated portals. It might look unfashionable to the NYT, but it's the hard truth. This can absolutely be intersected with your "reading room" concept; I just don't think either concept can survive on its own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The future of libraries is one of the topics I'm pretty obsessed with, probably because I loved them growing up and I've always found they had a huge unexploited potential.

First of all, I don't think it's fair to lump the "big boys" (Library of Congress, British Library etc) with smaller city libraries, because they are huge brands that will forever survive as nexus of scholarly research, no matter what fancy media we move on to.

It's much more interesting to look at small city libraries. Their main roles, traditionally, were:

\- free access to information

\- safe space for reading and studying

\- preservation effort for local culture / warehouse for commercial culture

\- community point-of-interest for aggregation.

In many places, the preservation element had often got too prevalent for its own good. Now that effort is not necessary at all - that's better left to the big boys, who can leverage a large pool of skills in big cities and archive all tweets for the rest of us, so to speak, with individuals submitting pointers of local relevance ("please archive this and that").

The free access to information is split into two: access to the internet, and access to commercially-available resources. The first is solved with the "starbucks wannabe" model, the second is being discussed with commercial players and we'll have to wait for that - but it's easy to imagine something like patrons getting a locked-down kindle from libraries to borrow ebooks, once the hardware is cheap enough.

What is really interesting is how you can perform the other two roles (reading space, community aggregation) in new ways, now that we're free of warehousing duties. Libraries are now free to experiment with spaces that want to draw people together regardless of the media they consume. I'd love for some local authority to be bold and try out "bookless libraries" concepts that can work _through the decades_ \- there is no point, for example, building a library around iPads, because they'll soon be obsolete; but you still have to provide _something_ or people won't come. When you figure that out, you have what is effectively an "engine for meeting minds" which could potentially be much more significant than universities, shaping the relationship between citizens and state/community as well as generating culture.

That's where the fun is.

</comment><comment><USER10> So far, we don't have any other proved examples to pass knowledge especially between generations than books.

<comment><USER11> Proved in what sense? Are you saying that because the internet and digital data hasn't been around for multiple generations, we don't know that it is up to the task of storing data for the long term?

It's certainly proven that digital data can survive moving from one storage media to another (such as when the first becomes obsolete), and can be protected by redundancy, and so on.

<comment><USER9> _> the internet and digital data hasn't been around for multiple generations_

The internet has been around for more than 25 years (which is what we commonly refer to as "a generation"), and digital data has been around for almost 50 years now.

It is patently obvious that we've done a very poor job of preserving digital data and internet artefacts, and little is changing. Sure, _in theory_ preservation can be done, but _in practice_ the required effort, cost (in both time, manpower and materials), lack of skills and the breakneck speed of technological change, are impeding most long-term preservation efforts. Even when all planets align, we often find that our tools are not as reliable as we thought (like CDs decaying and becoming unreadable).

The loss rate for analog media is still extremely good. I can read loads of books from the '90s in their original editions with moderate effort, while most of the '90s (and even '00s) internet was literally wiped out. That is a huge problem, and archive.org on its own is not the answer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've spent probably ten hours in the last week doing market research for my startup pitch deck in the SFPL. I have five books checked out and more on hold. Anyone who isn't constantly using their library is both wasting money and missing out.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love libraries! I wish they were more prevalent. Sometimes I just want to study something outside of my apartment and there's no where I'd rather be.</comment>


Typesafe Launches ConductR - <AUTHOR> http://typesafe.com/products/conductr

<comment><USER2> Nice to see Typesafe slowly rounding up their offering.</comment>


Chernobyl's Hot Mess, "the Elephant's Foot," Is Still Lethal (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/chernobyls-hot-mess-the-elephants-foot-is-still-lethal?utm_source=frontpage&utm_medium=mview&utm_campaign=chernobyls-hot-mess-the-elephants-foot-is-still-lethal <comment><USER2> I think this article is very well-written overall. However, there are still a point that could use clarification.

> During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl > Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency > shutdown. It did not work.

Calling the incident a _routine test_ greatly mischaracterizes what they were doing. This wasn't some sort of daily safety checklist test nor a safety margin test, this was a full-blown _experiment_. Yes, like a science lab experiment, but with a fully fueled commercial RBMK reactor. This is important because the author falsely makes _routine_ nuclear powerplant operation seem unsafe.

To properly characterize the experiment on fair grounds it is nice to mention that the experiment they wanted to test is started by carrying out a simulated emergency shutdown. This is huge. You don't call an emergency shutdown of a gigantic plutonium-making-machine "routine" (Note: RBMKs have a thermal power output on the high side). However, the bigger problem was that the authorities running this experiment treated it exactly the same way the author did.

If the authorities did care, they would have properly trained the night shift personnel with the experiment (or delayed the experiment altogether). The fact that the experiment continued with the night shift that was poorly trained for the experiment operations points to a "this is routine and should not be a big deal" vibe of whoever was in charge. I dislike how nowadays others (such as the the author) looking into the reactor accident keep espousing this giant red flag.

<comment><USER3> They were doing things in their routine. Thus it's routine.

You're misrepresenting things.

<comment><USER4> I could write "Conduct improv brain surgery on the guy sitting next to me" in my daily planner and it doesn't make it routine. Calling a knife a fork doesn't make it so, and calling something routine that isn't likewise doesn't make it so.

<comment><USER3> If you conducted brain surgery on the guy next to you routinely then it makes it routine. Even if it's a really silly thing to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While the article does contain some interesting details, I fundamentally disapprove of it's anti-nuclear moralizing. It's the constant trickle of articles like this that maintain public paranoia about nuclear power. This matters, because nuclear power allows us to meet today's power demands with today's technology without releasing CO2 into the environment. Alternative power sources are still some ways from meeting humanities power needs on their own, but every megawatt of nuclear power produced keeps carbon in the ground and gives us extra time. Yes, many will point out that several alternative power generation sources could be scaled up to meet all of humanity's demands right now. However, it's not being done because it's economically and technically challenging and would take decades.

Meanwhile, fully operational nuclear power plants are being shut down. After the Fukushima incident, Germany and several other countries caved into irrational public fears and have begun to phase out nuclear power, replacing it with much more immediately dangerous power sources such as coal. (It should be noted that there are relatively few reactors in Germany that are likely to be hit by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami.) That's carbon emission free power that's online right now, being destroyed out of irrational fear and replaced with what is possibly our dirtiest source of power. This is what is going on in the world, but the author has published yet another fear-mongering article anyways. It's downright despicable.

<comment><USER6> I don't like fear-mongering either. But nuclear only looks cheap because a lot of costs are externalised. Prudent calculation of costs of insurance against accidents and waste storage for centuries make it unprofitable. Improvements in reactor safety often leads to humans behaving more carelessly. It is a penny-wise, pound-foolish technology, especially in densely populated areas.

<comment><USER7> Many of the existing reactors were designed in the 50s and 60s, and are overly complex; they grew out of designs that were used for production of nuclear material for weapons, and safety features were bolted onto the side (this was an era when seatbelts weren't required on automobiles!). More recent designs are significantly and inherently safer and simply _can 't_ get into the same kind of trouble that the older designs can.

Yet we treat all reactors the same. Nuclear = bad for some reason.

I'd much rather be getting rid of coal plants (which are _far_ worse for us than nuclear plants in terms of carbon emissions, pollution and actual emitted radiation) and have a national resolve to build safer, modern nuclear plants. But the fear-mongering and bad politics make this impossible.

Alternate sources of energy can be _worse_. For instance, when you look at the total cost of solar cells (lots of end-to-end industrial infrastructure involving toxic chemicals and energy-hungry manufacturing) and deaths from installers falling roofs, nuclear starts to look a lot better, even with plants we have today.

But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries.

<comment><USER8> The person you are replying to didn't say anything about Nuclear being bad. They made a point only about cost.

<comment><USER9> Consider that the cost of coal, solar, wind, hydro is under-estimated because we don't take into account the externalized environmental issues and excess deaths.

If we're going to try to account for externalized costs for nuclear, we need to do it for all the others too, and the results would not be pretty.

<comment><USER8> Huh? We have a pretty good understanding of the externalised costs for these. There is no mystery for storing waste and there is a very strong understanding of how easy it is to decommission. What externalities are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess it is how you look at it. Much of this article has issues but one of the most glaring is this one:

 _" Born of human error, continually generating copious heat, the Elephant's Foot is still melting into the base of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink."_

One of the things this 'foot' proved was that the supposition that a meltdown would have a core melt through the ground and down into the center of the earth, aka the "China Syndrome" was false. The reason was of course that once the core became molten it begins to mix with the materials around it, that causes it to become diluted until it drops below criticality and then it ceases to be a threat. All western reactors (and all of those in Japan) have a pool of borosilicate sand underneath the reactor as just such a final safeguard. Should the core melt through to that, it turns the sand to borosilicate glass which kills neutrons and stops the reaction. Leaving behind a solid, cooling glass chunk. _Not_ contaminating any groundwater and generally not going any further afield. It remains to be seen if any of Fukishima's core material made it as far as the sand underneath those reactors.

The 'foot' at Chernobyl isn't going anywhere, and in a couple of decades will be safe enough to chop up and dispose of more permanently. Unlike radioactive dust in the plant which was getting carried out of the containment building. I expect that within my kids lifetime people to be living once again in the surrounding area.

<comment><USER11> I saw a documentary that showed squatter-types already were living in the surrounding area - whatever the exclusion zone area was. They interviewed them, but they were 'meh' about the risk. They had the place to themselves and were pretty happy.

<comment><USER12> I envy the ignorant people, for they are happy...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > a testament to the potential dangers of nuclear power.

A list to remind us of the real dangers of coal power: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_i...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal_mining_accidents_in_China)

<comment><USER14> Ditch both.

<comment><USER9> For what magically safe alternative?

(no, you don't avoid all deaths with hydro, wind or solar either; in fact hydro has historically been one of the deadliest power sources thanks to the Banqiao accident where a dam failure killed 171,000 - even excluding that, though, hydro is far from free of deaths)

EDIT: Since I was being a bit snarky: The point is last I heard the number of deaths from installation of rooftop solar is higher than the number of deaths from nuclear power plants for equivalent amount of energy. Nuclear gets the headlines because the nuclear incidents we hear about are big and scary and _rare_ and get hyped up.

You don't get massive worldwide news coverage because some guy fell off a roof while mounting solar panels and died. But he's just as dead, and it adds up.

You can't ignore the small incidents if their rate is high enough.

Overall, you could have meltdowns on a regular basis and nuclear would still be one of our safest alternatives. Chances are it will also be one of the alternatives with the lowest environmental impact: Less radioactivity released than coal, by orders of magnitude; far less land area affected by development than hydro, wind and solar.

<comment><USER15> Fusion. Every ten years, plasma physics say that we would have fusion on the next ten years. :D

<comment><USER16> Maybe if we funded it appropriately. Actual funding has been really low:

[https://imgur.com/sjH5r](https://imgur.com/sjH5r)

<comment><USER17> It is quite depressing. The other day I've been reading an article about MRAP vehicle program - Wiki said the cost was estimated to be 50 BILLION

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So it's now almost 30 years after Chernobyl, so if I read this naively:

> When this photo was taken, 10 years after the disaster, the Elephant's Foot > was only emitting one-tenth of the radiation it once had.

the Elephant's foot will currently have 1/1000th of the original radioactivity it had right after the disaster, and 10 years from now it will be down to 1/10,000th. At that rate it would be indistinguishable from background radiation within a century or so (just guesstimating here, but that's a lot of powers of 10 -- I'm probably being pessimistic).

I'm guessing that this is wrong, though, and that the radioactivity from longer half-life radionuclides will eventually start to dominate and the "effective half-life" will be much longer.

Does anyone have any idea how long it will be until Chernobyl blends into the background radiation?

<comment><USER19> You are right, in that your guess is wrong ;-).

Total activity decrease in realistic "atomic waste" is not at all exponential.

Try a simple example:

Take a mixture of two isotopes. The one isotope has a half-life of 1 year and there's so much of it, that the activity is 10 decays/second. There's also a second isotope in the mix, with a half-life of 100 years, but there's 100 times as much of it, so that in total, you also get 10 decays/second.

After 10 years, the first isotope will be down to 2^-10, so only 1/1000th is left, it will be hardly measurable. But the second one will have decayed only 1/10th of a half-time, almost everything is still there: You are now down to half of the original activity.

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaUhDCUXNJCTjNKNFNxdDhuLTA...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxaUhDCUXNJCTjNKNFNxdDhuLTA/view?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER20> It's more complicated than that. As you point out, you don't have just one isotope, you have a whole grab bag of stuff. Here's the wrench in the works that adds the complexity, when a radioactive isotope decays it doesn't just go away, it decays into another isotope, sometimes one that is also radioactive and with its own half life.

What yoU end up with is a system of differential equations, which are actually easy to solve if you know how, but that level of calculus is beyond what most folks have studied.

Anyway, a situation that tends to be common is that you have one sort of longer lived isotope which ends up producing another isotope which decays fairly fast along a multi-step chain. This ends up producing a fairly high level of radiation for a significant time in a pseudo steady state. But it depends on the details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Related video, also workers at Chernobyl, but another piece of the reactor: the roof.

[https://youtu.be/FfDa8tR25dk](https://youtu.be/FfDa8tR25dk)

"Military people call such places "FRONTLINE", liquidators who worked at the Chornobyl nuclear station called it "ROOF COATING". It was the most contaminated, and therefore the most dangerous, place in the zone. The remains of the roof coating of the 4th reactor. The operation on decontaminating the roof lasted more than five months. We will tell about only two days."

</comment><comment><USER22> Seems silly to me to just leave it sitting there for decades if its internal heat is being generated by how the isotopes are in close proximity to each other. Or I might be misunderstanding why it's generating its own heat.

Could they contain and cool down the waste by slicing off chunks of the mass and containing each chunk in lead-lined boxes? Essentially re-processing the lump into crude 'control rod' sized chunks and storing them in little lead boxes to contain the radiation being thrown off.

<comment><USER23> I think the main issue is that no one wants to get anywhere remotely near it.

<comment><USER22> Clearly you wouldn't send people in there.

Is there too much radiation in the room for robots with radiation-shielded electronics to operate?

<comment><USER9> Consider that each passing year reduces the problems of dealing with it. They'll want to wait as long as they can before doing anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Particles emitted from radioactive atoms are a form of ionizing > radiation—they have enough energy to scramble atoms and molecules they crash > into. (This is different from non-ionizing radiation, like the kind emitted > by your cell phone, which does not have enough energy to break bonds.)

I think this is a poor explanation. Radiation from your cell phone is electromagnetic radiation. This is far different from a radiated particle, an actual proton or electron flying out.

Essentially a particle vs a wave, which is more of a difference than "not enough energy". Is that correct?

<comment><USER25> Gamma radiation (i.e. ionizing radiation) is just a highly energetic photons. Alpha and Beta particles are not photons, and are not referred to as ionizing radiation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bit off topic: On the first picture right at the top you can see through the workers. I read that this was caused by radiation, but to me it looks more as if they (or he) was simply moving during a longer exposure?

<comment><USER24> Agreed. Anyone find an authoritative explanation on the photo? I couldn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is nuclear energy above or below break-even, as a whole? Or has the _cost_ of the mess created by nuclear industry accidents and other indirect costs swamped the profits?

</comment><comment><USER28> A disturbing thought is that Fukishima is an even more dire situation. The Pacific ocean will never be the same.

Which of the 507 other plants will be the next go into meltdown? I wonder how many of these disasters the planet can handle before it becomes inhabitable to all life.

<comment><USER29> The pacific ocean isn't really noticing any effects. Water is great at stopping radiation. In fact, open pool reactors like this one ([http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/45495/OPAL_...](http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/image/0009/45495/OPAL_pool_ALT_1700.jpg)) are serviced by scuba divers.

The increase in radiation in the pacific is lost in the noise when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. There are some areas directly around Fukushima where that is not the case, and it is a big mess, but I would happily eat fish from the vast majority of the pacific.

A far bigger threat to our ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

<comment><USER19> Whiel I agree with your statements, it should be noted that _sometimes_ scuba- diving in nuclear reactor's pools isn't as safe and fun as originally intended.

[http://www.isoe- network.net/index.php/component/docman/doc_d...](http://www.isoe- network.net/index.php/component/docman/doc_download/1756-ritter2011ppt.html)

[A diver not briefed on avoiding unknown objects picked up a highly activated bolt laying on the pool floor and received a substantial amount of radioactive dose.]

<comment><USER30> This just verifies that water is a good shield against radiation. The slides explained that any proximity to, not to mention physical contact, with the object would be highly dangerous but having a mere 1.4 meters of water in between the human and the object the dosage would be negligible.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hyperopt: Optimize your machine learning parameters automagically - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/hyperopt/hyperopt <comment><USER2> Practical Bayesian Optimisation of Machine Learning Hyperparameters [1] was a great recent paper on this topic that looked to have very nice results in practice across a range of models. Is there any interest in implementing that algorithm in hyperopt?

[1]: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2944.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1206.2944.pdf)

<comment><USER3> From the documentation: "Hyperopt has been designed to accommodate Bayesian optimization algorithms based on Gaussian processes and regression trees, but these are not currently implemented." [1] So it sounds like they've at least thought about it.

[1]: [http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt/](http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt/)

<comment><USER4> For those that don't know: a Bayesian optimization approach based on Gaussian processes has been implemented in Python by the author of that paper [0].

Here's a nice blog post with some information on some problems it can run into in practice [1].

[0]: [https://github.com/JasperSnoek/spearmint](https://github.com/JasperSnoek/spearmint) [1]: [http://fastml.com/tuning-hyperparams-automatically-with- spea...](http://fastml.com/tuning-hyperparams-automatically-with-spearmint/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Because your 400 gazillion degrees of freedom machine learning core was not already ill conditioned enough for you?

<comment><USER6> The purpose of a hyperparameter opt algo is definitely to have fewer than the thing it is configuring, and definitely for it to be faster to get a good model by just running the default search policy than by trying to rig up your own meta-algorithm on top of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There seem to be a lot of hyperparameter optimization software packages, presumably implementing different algorithms.

Is there some software that will run all of them, and pick the one that gives the best results?

<comment><AUTHOR> So you want a optimizer for hyperparameter optimizers? This is getting quite meta.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice if something like the Efficient Global Optimization Algorithm were implemented. In my opinion this would be the "automagical" way of optimizing hyper parameters.

[1] [http://www.ressources- actuarielles.net/EXT/ISFA/1226.nsf/0/f...](http://www.ressources- actuarielles.net/EXT/ISFA/1226.nsf/0/f84f7ac703bf5862c12576d8002f5259/$FILE/Jones98.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I filed this as a hyperopt ticket [1]

My hunch is that this algorithm, like GP-based strategies will excel in small numbers of dimensions, but struggle in high numbers of dimensions, especially with conditional parameters. But it's a classic algorithm, and a great fit for some problems, so it would be a nice addition to the lib.

[1] [https://github.com/hyperopt/hyperopt/issues/177](https://github.com/hyperopt/hyperopt/issues/177)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for the HN post @chewxy. I just wanted to mention a bit of progress status. The version on pypi has been a workhorse.

We're currently working on a not-so-minor update that will include a major upgrade in code quality, better documentation, probably include two new optimization algorithms, and come with a wrapper around scikit-learn. All that should be happening by February.

Sign up for [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/hyperopt- announce](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/hyperopt-announce) for project updates.

</comment><comment><USER9> This looks nice, though I feel like this is one of those cases where it's easier to code it yourself than to learn and use the library API. At least until the BOA stuff is implemented, and perhaps even then.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> An introduction is here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp1xnPfE4PY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp1xnPfE4PY)</comment>


$19 billion raised for wireless spectrum auction? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/technology/19fcc.html

<comment><USER2> Wow, i wonder how long after 2009 will we see the real effects</comment>


Fred Wilson: Social Status For Social Good - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/01/social-status-for-social-good.html <comment><USER2> Digital analog of bumper stickers and Armstrong bracelets?</comment>


Show HN: Play-money prediction market for Game of Thrones - <AUTHOR> https://gotpredictions.org <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all, we are a couple CS researchers and made this game purely for people to have fun.

It's designed to be accessible to anyone who has never heard of a prediction market. In fact, I would love to hear if you think this is a good prediction- market tutorial.</comment>


Ask HN: IT/Network setup for our 15-20 person office? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
Can any networking experts here help? My company is about to move into a new office from old, shared space where all IT was taken care of. I've been put in charge of the phone and networking in the new space.
Our office is 15-20 people, plus visitors fairly frequently. The office is primarily developers and will have a FiOS connection with plenty of bandwidth. The electrician we've hired will take care of the actual ethernet wiring.
I'm a developer, and am somewhat familiar with networking but at a smaller scale. Can anyone provide some advice about what the best setup for this is along with recommended vendors/models without spending a fortune? I don't mind learning how to configure them.
My assumption is that the network will basically look like this, but please feel free to correct me (we don't have any on-site servers; just computers and mobile devices):
Incoming ISP/Verizon -> Router -> Firewall (?) --> Switch --> Cat5 to computers and SIP phones
Will most routers (or switches?) take care of the wireless connection or should we use a separate device (attached to the switch?)? Are there generally good manufacturers and product lines that we should look at? I assume my usual household choices aren't right for this.
Also, we're planning on using a hosted VoIP system so will need to set QoS for that.
Thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> Verizon FIOS modem -> Firewall --> Switch --> Cat5 to computers and SIP phones, wireless access point

* You absolutely want a firewall. Defense in depth. A firewall that supports a VPN that runs on your office's laptops is very handy for working from home or the road.

We have a Watchguard Firebox firewall. It works well but is very annoying to configure: the primary configuration mechanism is a Windows program, but I run linux, so that just pisses me off. The secondary mechanism is a web page running Flash (I dislike flash). The configuration is a very leaky abstraction, with further pisses me off.

* For the switch(es), you definitely want a "small business" managed switch ($500 and up) that supports RMON/SNMP. (We have some old Linksys/Cisco "managed" switches with no RMON - cannot tell me where my traffic is going - and can only be configured with IE 7 or older(!!!) POSes!!!).

* For wireless, I installed the Ubiquity UniFi wireless access points (threw away some older Cisco WAPs that were POSes). If you only have one AP, this is overkill... we have several of them to cover our facility. The system is very reasonable and the central management is very very convenient. The primary interface to the software is Flash (ugh) - but it works well enough. There are other ways of interacting with the controller, but I have not much that way (I have written some MongoDB scripts to extract useful information nightly).

* You are also going to need DHCP, DNS, etc. Windows Server with Active Directory is dominant at businesses. Linux and OSX interoperate fairly well with AD. LDAP (and Kerberos if you want single-sign-in) would be the alternative to AD. Being a linuxhead, I would run a Debian/Ubuntu server with bind (DNS) and isc-dhcp-server (DHCP) - that is what I'm running at home and it works well. You will probably (eventually) want to run Icinga/Nagios/equivalent and Cacti/equivalent to monitor your systems on this server as well.

* I assume your SIP phones will be using a SAAS outside company PBX. I don't have experience with that, we have an on-site PBX (predates me, and is now obsolete).

</comment><comment><USER3> If it were me:

      FIOS -> Cisco ASA -> Cisco switch -> PCs & IP phones

You may not want to spend the money on Cisco gear. I'm an ISP/Enterprise guy and my customers expect their shit to work, so we do.

The switch should be managed so that you can put your PCs and VoIP phones (and on-site servers, if you have them) onto separate VLANs.

You didn't mention what OS your users will be using. Hopefully, however, you can avoid Active Directory.</comment>


Show HN: Jam.now.im – Multiplayer HTML5 audio - <AUTHOR> http://jam.now.im/c/Hacker-News?mode=auto <comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to play with new toys, so here's a little app that lets you build and synchronize a playlist with other people. Open the page in a few more tabs/computers for more fun. Thanks for playing :)

Limitations: It relies on HTML5 audio, so it probably only works well on Chrom{e,ium}, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. Content comes from YouTube, so Firefox might have trouble with AAC when WebM is unavailable. Mobile devices are remote control only.

[http://jam.now.im/c/Hacker-News](http://jam.now.im/c/Hacker-News) (hacker jam!)

[http://jam.now.im/c/Hacker-News?mode=auto](http://jam.now.im/c/Hacker- News?mode=auto) (play old stuff if there are no requests)

[http://jam.now.im/c/Hacker-News?mode=rc](http://jam.now.im/c/Hacker- News?mode=rc) (remote control only, with no audio)

Replace `Hacker-News` with your channel name.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for all the awesome feedback! I'll collate some of them here:

1\. It's confusing

\- This is also my concern. It diffs/merges playlists, so it can be confusing how your requests map to what's actually playing. The other thing it does is count votes and exclude below-average tracks.

2\. Thumbs up/down

\- Thumbs up votes for an encore/repeat. Thumbs down votes to skip. It weighs your votes against the number of requests for the track.

3\. Song length limit

\- That's actually a great idea, to keep things moving along.

4\. It's annoying when people skip lots of tracks

\- Indeed, perhaps a rate limit per user would be a good idea?

<comment><USER2> I think that the "thumbs up" vote should be separate from the possible "encore/repeat" vote.

People probably vote thumbs up just to counteract other's thumbs down (inevitable once there are enough participants), then, if a track makes it through the battle without being skipped, an awkward situation is created when it starts looping but nobody wanted it to loop.

As for the skipping situation, maybe if tracks started off with a default of one "thumbs up", then you would need at least two people to skip a track. Just one possible solution.

<comment><AUTHOR> Got it. It seems that it would be more intuitive if the thumbs up just added that track to your requests. The encore button should definitely not look like an upvote button. I'll look into making it harder to skip tracks. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Not bad. Seems somewhat lighter featured than plug.dj and other community dj rooms, but I think the nice thing is that you're just extracting the html5 audio tracks as opposed to playing the entire video. Could make it easier to port to mobile.

I'd like to see more sources than youtube though - soundcloud specifically.

Any plans on open sourcing this?

<comment><AUTHOR> SoundCloud is in the works. It needs a (client side) metasearch function, which I think lunr.js could help with.

The source is in the pipeline, but not quite ready yet! This is actually a rewrite of an earlier project of mine and shares most of the ideas: [https://github.com/jyio/jamwithfriends](https://github.com/jyio/jamwithfriends)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome. I just got Weird Al's "The Saga Begins" to follow Don McLean's "American Pie". It's like riffing with whole tracks. It'd be wonderful if everyone could agree to riff on each track, rather than just injecting their favorite stuff and breaking any overall unity to the playlist.

</comment><comment><USER5> Love the idea, but I'm having trouble getting the audio to play. After searching for and adding songs, they are listed but the "There are no requests" message is still displayed, and nothing is playing. Am I missing something?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to investigate this. What browser and OS do you use? Thank you for the help.

<comment><USER5> I'm on OSX, I've tried it on both Firefox (36) and Chrome (41.0.2272.118 (64-bit)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Love how simple and friction-less the UX is! Also, search auto-complete is really fast, how did you do that? (wouldn't suppose you cached entire YouTube's index)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It queries YouTube's API so it doesn't hit my server at all for these requests. Ractive.js makes it easy to show search results using a consistent interface.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looking pretty good for a first run, of course UI updates will have to happen, as it took a bit of clicking to figure out where i was at and what i was actually doing. Still confused as to what control/endless and just the normal room grant.

Either way, I started a room in [http://jam.now.im/c/bass](http://jam.now.im/c/bass) and its basically just bugged out. The track that i put in first (of course) is throwing a 500 when it tries to play `Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 (Internal Server Error)`.

You might need some sort of fail handler to ensure a room doesnt just get flat out bugged.

Either way, thanks, and I'll be watching closely :) Plans to open source? Or you more like planning to make $$? :P

<comment><USER7> We have a few ppl in [http://jam.now.im/c/bass](http://jam.now.im/c/bass)

Join up if you like bass music (dubstep, trap, future bass, glitch hop, chill bass, and the like) so we can test this with some dope tracks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does not work for me:

\- Chrome Version 41.0.2272.118 (64-bit)

\- MBP 2014 MAC OS X 10.10.2 Yosemite

Also tried latest version of Waterfox.

Having a rather poor internet connection here, but kept the page open for more than 5mins without any music playing.

Any suggestions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for reporting this. Did it give you a playlist at all, and was there any chat history on the right side of the page?

Even though HTML5 audio support is pretty good, we're running into problems with Google's location-based restrictions and audio formats.

<comment><USER8> I'm from Germany, if this explains it then.

Other than that, it played some little music after 10-20mins idling in my tab bar I guess. Then it stoped again...

Chat is showing, Playlists are showing. There are no errors in the js console and no scripts are being blocked as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> It actually tries to detect country-restricted tracks and proxies them (so it's good that there aren't too many of these... yet).

When I encounter one of those, I refresh with the console open and find a request to *.googlevideo.com/videoplayback returning 403 Forbidden. It's hard for me to debug this in the US, but I'll look into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I request songs, it shows up at the top section and then grays out. And it looks like there is no way to add the song to the queue. Is there a reason for this? Otherwise, this is something I always wanted every since we lost turntable.fm :(. I never got into plug.dj.

<comment><AUTHOR> I, too, loved turntable.fm and wanted something similar. When you request a track (add it to your list), you upvote the track; if votes >= median, it gets queued in the master playlist (thumbnail appears in the header), or else it appears gray on your list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It does not look like an on-demand music player. Is it true?

Another question if someone can answer here - it looks this site is playing just audio from youtube music videos. How can you do that? Is it a hack or youtube api supports some type of parameter?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's only really on-demand if you're the only user requesting tracks (e.g. you're using your own channel). YouTube offers video and audio content separately at various bit rates[1].

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_Adaptive_Streaming_over_HTTP)

<comment><USER10> Thank you so much. It is going to help me in a big way. Appreciate your response.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not bad at all. I'll have to pass this around with my coworkers and see if we can get a room going.

I'm also pleasantly surprised that I'm not the only one around here who likes Yes. :)

</comment><comment><USER12> If someone wants something similar, but for their local music collection, check out grooveshark -- it features a web UI and streaming to any number of connected hosts, along with a (primitive) permissions model and allows uploading of new tracks to the music library through the web UI.

</comment><comment><USER13> WOW! You just made the worlds best music discovery service! Too bad that was the easy part ...

<comment><AUTHOR> ... the hard part is monetizing it so it doesn't go the way of turntable.fm :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is really cool, I've just played about 10 tracks with it. A little bit confusing though, not sure what BlueberryJam means in the top left corner, is that my channel name?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, that's the default channel. I'm working on the confusing bits! Thanks for playing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's blocked by our corporate web filtering service.</comment>


Google ditched tipping feature for donating money to sites - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/23/google-contributor-donate-tips/ <comment><USER2> > _When asked, Google confirmed that the designs were an internal idea it > explored last year but decided not to pursue as part of [Google Contributor] > and Google Funding Choices, which lets sites ask visitors to disable ad > blockers, or instead buy a subscription or pay a per page fee to remove > ads._

Could this be built on Web Monetization API (ILP (Interledger Protocol)) and e.g. Google Pay as one of many possible payment/card/cryptocurrency processing backends; just like Coil is built on Web Monetization API?</comment>


LinusTechTips deepfaked a video without Linus - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/G0z50Am4Uw4 <comment><AUTHOR> End result: [https://youtu.be/34AmKPJNfCg](https://youtu.be/34AmKPJNfCg)

The video is approaching uncanny valley. The audio isn't there yet. Interesting how far laymen can get with this already.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm impressed with their results. Makes you wonder what might possibly be deepfaked.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is the whole video a deep fake? or just Linus' face and voice?</comment>


Notes on entropy - <AUTHOR> https://invertedpassion.com/notes-on-entropy/ <comment><USER2> Many subtly and less subtly wrong ideas, mainly the misconception that thermodynamic entropy is somehow different (more "physical") from information theory entropy, rather than its application to a specific type of system (atomic vibrations with the accompanying special concept of temperature).</comment>


Tesla Solar Roof Tiles Vaporware? - <AUTHOR> https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-the-solar-roof-tile-fraud/ <comment><USER3> Short much?

<comment><USER4> I'm sure than there are indeed problems here, but I agree, it's weird - <USER2> time I read one of these vehemently anti-Tesla/-Musk blog articles, I can't help feeling like I'm somehow in an episode of Billions - and this is all negative publicity deliberately generated by hedge funds, or big oil, or big auto, or whoever.

It's not that I'm drinking the Musk Kool-Aid (I think/hope) - but it just feels like there have been so many relentlessly negative and apparently biased anti-Musk articles out there over the past year or so --especially related to Tesla, as they're struggling but eventually managing to up their Model 3 output-- that they're far outweighing any positively-biased content his PR machine can generate.

(That said, he doesn't always make it easy for himself...)

<comment><USER5> I think in his eloquent essay "Short much?", OC wuschb referenced the recent development on the wall-street.

(where people crashed betting on Tesla shares going down, when Elon rose the price by pondering about a $42*10 re-privatization)

<comment><USER3> So go watch the Falcon block 5 landing simultaneously on 2 pads reducing the cost of space launch by an order of magnitude, and call him a fraud. He modern Howard Hughes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Their first car demo [for the Model S] was held together by magnets." Umm and look where it is today.</comment>


Ask HN: Why Did Your Business Fail? - <AUTHOR> We only hear about the successes, but I would like to know what took your business down. Why did it fail.<p>Perhaps, by bringing this data together like accident investigation reports, we can find the common thread. <comment><USER2> Successful businesses are all alike; every failed business is a failure in its own way.

</comment><comment><USER3> My business failed because I'm unintelligent, lack business acumen and do not have a good network.

<comment><USER4> This is false. It's not about being intelligent, it's about being resilient and open to learning.

Everything starts with 0, and everyone can learn.

I'd be happy to chat with you 1-1 and talk you through this.

<comment><USER5> Defs agree. I run my own business and work with other business all the time.

The secret sauce formula is rarely heavily weighted towards general intelligence.

All the dumb things will kill your business way before you have to be the smartest guy in the room . And I think that's probably true for most the super competitive businesses too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first failed cause I listened to people who told me to not continue, and lacked a deep enough network, while trying to pay my day to day bills out of pocket. I should never ever have.

On the cusp of creating another.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's a very similar thread here just last week: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19141968](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19141968)

<comment><USER8> That thread seems to be mostly about personal failures rather than businesses failing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Digital marketing + website development. I wasn't aggressive enough with acquiring new clients and went for too much low hanging fruit (people seeking my services but unable to pay standard rates). I'd spend too much time working to pay bills and didn't have enough time to hunt for new, most financially stable, clients. Voluntarily terminated the business after 15 months to join a digital agency.

</comment><comment><USER10> 1\. I wasn't a professional and had no ability to act like a professional while creating quotes or selling my services. 2. My co-founder lied and didn't manage the marketing spend for ten months while saying he did. 3. Php Scripts that aren't Wordpress Plugins are hard to sell. 4. I shut down a website after calling off a wedding and being too emotionally drained to work on it.</comment>


Google's Sundar Pichai Is the Most Powerful Man in Mobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-24/googles-sundar-pichai-king-of-android-master-of-mobile-profile/?hn <comment><USER2> Sundar is the kind of guy who gives you hope that the world is working as intended: Smart, kind, humble, hardworking.

Several of my friends work for him. They all love it. It's great to see him getting his moment in the spotlight.

</comment><comment><USER3> Good article, I hadn't realized that the seemingly kind of sudden lack of hostility and conflict between Samsung and Google was pretty much all Pichai's doing. Before, Samsung seemed all but ready to do a full-strength push of their in-house OS and was using it primarily on their watches. Now, that seems to have fallen down to be more of a side project, and they seem to be going all-in on Android with their smart watches.

I think it's a huge win for the overall openness of the ecosystem to have everybody using the mostly-open Android rather then all develop their own in- house solutions because they're trying to hard to win points off of each other.

<comment><USER4> The article is public relations from Google, I wouldn't draw any conclusions from it.

<comment><USER5> Really? In what terms?

Can companies do that? I mean, are you suggesting they basically orchestrated this whole piece -- they have that much power over journalistic outlets?

I actually believed it, my friends at Google pretty much say the exact thing the article was saying, that Sundar is a very non-confrontational and amicable guy who wants everyone to get along.

<comment><USER6> I think the way it usually works is the company will craft a compelling narrative summary that paints the company in a good light and contact bloggers their PR people have good relationships with. Then when one blogger bites, they give them exclusive access, quotes, sound bites, etc. The blogger then writes their own story the way they see it, but they are primed to write the article the company wanted. At least that's the rumor I've heard about how it works.

<comment><USER7> It may be worth mentioning Paul Graham's "The Submarine" here. [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

A choice quote: _" A good flatterer doesn't lie, but tells his victim selective truths (what a nice color your eyes are). Good PR firms use the same strategy: they give reporters stories that are true, but whose truth favors their clients."_

I'm sure Sundar's a great guy. Meanwhile, I have no information on this subject that everyone else doesn't already have, so I shall refrain from generating any further information-free noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "I would challenge you to find anyone at Google who doesn't like Sundar or who thinks Sundar is a jerk," ... I wonder if this is a good thing ...

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder if he's sidelining Google+. There was no mention of it at IO this year, as opposed to the last one, where Google+ got it's share of attention.

</comment><comment><USER10> He tried for CEO of Microsoft.</comment>


Why is it so difficult/expensive to make your own clothes (or have them made)? - <AUTHOR> http://chezskud.com/2013/11/17/why-is-it-so-difficult-and-expensive-to-make-your-own-clothes-or-have-them-made/

<comment><USER2> Hackers + uses clothes = related to hacker news?

<comment><USER3> Depends on how narrow your definition of hacker is.

A cogent explanation about how the technology behind a multi-billion pound industry affects pricing, distribution & product types - and how it means that certain market segments aren't served well… seems pretty darn on-topic to me ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A nice post about the differences between traditional and modern day clothing production, however, I was expecting to find an answer to 'Why is it so difficult/expensive to make your own clothes (or have them made)?'</comment>


Google Bans JSONView – Extension Contains a Serious Security Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> https://jsonview.com/ <comment><USER2> Info about this issue including a test case: [https://github.com/gildas- lormeau/JSONView-for-Chrome/issues...](https://github.com/gildas- lormeau/JSONView-for-Chrome/issues/75)

I started using "JSON Formatter" instead ( [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- formatter/bcj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- formatter/bcjindcccaagfpapjjmafapmmgkkhgoa) ) and it seems to work fine.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd really like to know more information about the vulnerability but can't seem to find anything online.

<comment><AUTHOR> mjamin opened a bug on GitHub, perhaps we'll get an update from Ben or a contributor. [https://github.com/bhollis/jsonview/issues/135](https://github.com/bhollis/jsonview/issues/135)

<comment><USER4> This git repo is the repo of the firefox extension. I opened the same ticket for the chrome version [https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/JSONView-for- Chrome/issues...](https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/JSONView-for- Chrome/issues/75)

<comment><AUTHOR> Nice! Seems you managed to get some traction in the proper place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> But it's still available on chrome web store [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jsonview/nckmconeh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jsonview/nckmconehaglkoocmmldmilnnpdagigh)

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems this version by Ark may have been a copy, in their description they point to the "original", [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jsonview/chklaanhf...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jsonview/chklaanhfefbnpoihckbnefhakgolnmc), which directs to the version claimed to have a security vulnerability and appears to have been pulled.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Decent alternative [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- viewer/gbmdgp...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- viewer/gbmdgpbipfallnflgajpaliibnhdgobh)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I attempted to load something and realized the extension I had just previously been using stopped working. [screenshot of the disabled extension]([http://imgur.com/jBmnwf4](http://imgur.com/jBmnwf4))

<comment><AUTHOR> The link from Ben Hollis's site, [https://jsonview.com/](https://jsonview.com/), to the Alternative/Unofficial JSONView for Chrome 404's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Annoying...doesn't seem to be working on firefox either... for the time being, use this as a work around [http://codebeautify.org/jsonviewer](http://codebeautify.org/jsonviewer) ...

</comment><comment><USER8> Do we have more information about this? Is Google correct and should we switch to something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> The work must go on. I ended up installing JSON Formatter. Appears potentially abandoned though.

source: [https://github.com/callumlocke/json- formatter](https://github.com/callumlocke/json-formatter) extension: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- formatter/bcj...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json- formatter/bcjindcccaagfpapjjmafapmmgkkhgoa?hl=en)</comment></comment>


Conference Radar: Open Source Map Listing for Tech Conferences - <AUTHOR> https://conferenceradar.com/ <comment><USER2> The first 2 links I clicked on were either 3 years old or went to the wrong site. Cool concept though. Just wish it was updated.</comment>


Show HN: location-based messaging - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN - this is something our team (a bootstrapped startup based out of Berkeley and SF) has been working on for the past couple months. Basically, Crumbs is a mobile app that lets you leave notes for friends in at a location, which they pick up later. Its useful for reminders, discovery, and can be all around fun.
We'd love to get some feedback from the HN crowd. We seem to have trouble getting trouble getting traction, but so far feedback from users and testers has been very positive.
find us at: crumbsapp.com Thanks! <comment><USER2> In the crowd of Facebook Places, Gowalla, Foursquare and many other location based services companies. You may find difficult to get traction initially. Because,people are afraid of trying one more location based app unless, it is completely different or keep them engaged all timer or their friends from other social networking are participating in it or if they get filtered and appropriate data, rather thank junk notes.

If you can add some more aspect to it like photos, offers or tags etc and most importantly market it well. Let people know something like this exist, let them try at least once.

Then you well get traction and from there you learn from feedback. It's only about passing first hurdle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://crumbsapp.com/>

I think it is a cool idea but that its success will come down to how non-geeks adopt it. If you can get that large pool of non-geeks, whose interaction with the web is dictated by Facebook & Google, to feel incentivized to place notes to their friends then I think it could be a hit. There are also potentially interesting opportunities for local business owners to get 'spontaneous business' via notes placed around their business.

How would you describe your differences from a service like <http://geoloqi.com/> ?

</comment><comment><USER4> I like the idea, but what is the relevance of the location? Notes have a time component, are the notes time independent?If so what is the situation where I would use them? I think the friend aspect might be too limiting, but could be an addon.

I might be more interested if they were just notes from anyone like "look up and notice xyz", especially if I was someplace new. Kind of how there are guest books in a bed and breakfast.

Possibly a new kind of location based virtual graffiti even for places where I live, with poetry, call XYZ for a good time etc.

<comment><USER5> The time aspect is pretty huge - the examples they were using were pretty much time dependent.

However, I could see this being useful for groups of friends who decide to split up during a group outing. Traversing a huge outlet mall or large park or something. Imagine walking past a playground and you find a note from a friend "Hey guys, we're meeting at this playground at 5pm." That would be pretty neat.

However, outside of that, I'd love to hear more examples from the creators as to what else it would be good for!</comment></comment>


Delaware C incorporation foreign co-founder might generate later troubles? - <AUTHOR>

We are about to get incorporated in Delaware with a C corp. One cofounder is a green card holder about to become citizen, the other is on work visa (H1B). Can any of the paperwork related to the incorporation present future challenges when it comes to have the company sponsor a green card for the second cofounder? Or even just support the H1B so the other cofounder can be dedicated full time to the venture? Interested in any ressources we can find. We plan on using Clerky, but unless I missed something it doesn't go that far into incorporation explanations. I feel like this kind of legal information is always so hard to find, even with hundreds of Delaware C corp in SF... <comment><USER2> Our startup is a Delaware C Corp and we are all foreign citizen. We haven't had any problem related to the fact of being foreign. On the VISA we are all on E-2 because it was easier and we avoided the lottery of the H-1B. For what I remember the point is if the H-1B holder could be fired from the company. Here are some information from the USCIS: [http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa- guide/entrepreneur-visa-guide](http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa- guide/entrepreneur-visa-guide) and [http://www.uscis.gov/news/public-releases- topic/business-imm...](http://www.uscis.gov/news/public-releases- topic/business-immigration/uscis-initiatives-promote-startup-enterprises-and- spur-job-creation-fact-sheet). Notice that the same point are valid for sponsoring the green card (EB visas).

</comment><comment><USER3> If you have concerns about this, you should be asking an attorney, not random people on HN. I'd guess that the H-1B issues are governed by Federal law, but there may be other things about corporate officers who are non-citizens that may be specific to Delaware law. It sounds like a complex situation, and using off-the-shelf forms from Clerky could easily get you in trouble if you don't have competent legal advice.

</comment><comment><USER4> Clerky cofounder here - we have a very brief support article that highlights what you may want to discuss with an attorney on this topic:

[http://support.clerky.com/customer/portal/articles/1175815-w...](http://support.clerky.com/customer/portal/articles/1175815-what- if-a-founder-is-located-outside-the-us-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I is seeing that article that made us think there might be complications indeed.</comment></comment>


Google Cloud Platform – The Good, Bad, and Ugly (It's Mostly Good) - <AUTHOR> https://www.deps.co/blog/google-cloud-platform-good-bad-ugly/ <comment><USER2> 2018\. Things have certainly improved since then!</comment>