Things you should know when interviewing for a programming job - <AUTHOR> http://www.crossbrowser.net/479/things-you-should-know-when-interviewing-for-a-programming-job/

<comment><USER2> One of the best metrics I've found for determining the overall satisfaction level of a department is turnover rate.

If you ask the interviewer about their turnover rate and they hedge, be cautious. Sometimes they won't know what the turnover rate is because they're too new, or don't pay attention to it, so you can ask about the average number of years that the developers have been there (which they should know).

There are so many factors that figure in to developer happiness that it's hard to build a good checklist of things to ask about. But if you look at the evidence (how long do developers stay here?), it's very easy to tell if it's going to be a good place to work.

Of course, this doesn't work when you're talking about getting a job at a startup, but the hope there would be that you already know it's somewhere you want to work; that it's not a job that someone referred you to just because you need a job.

<comment><USER3> I personally do not feel that question will help you too much. You will be stuck within a team, say 5-10 people reporting to someone, and that is the environment you truly care about, and it's something the recruiter will not know much about. Those are the people you'll be sharing most of your time with for years and it's truly the one area you have to get right. The satisfaction level within the department is strongly secondary to that.

<comment><USER4> Right, but if there's high turnover there's got to be an underlaying cause. (Which maybe the business itself doesn't know).

Maybe they don't pay enough, or have too many deathmarch projects, or office politics gets in the way too often, or maybe a few rounds of layoffs

Regardless, if a lot of people have left before you, there might be a reason for that, or at least it will have a factor in your environment there. (Example: A recent round of layoffs might mean a 3 person department is asked to do the work once handled by a department of 10)

<comment><USER3> All fair points!

What is the incentive of the recruiter to tell you the truth? What if he says: "Everthing's great!!!", you can't really hold him accountable after you signed up for the job. They're salesmen. Is the idea to look for subtle indications of not everything being great?

<comment><USER5> Recruiters are salesmen, But the OP suggested asking the interviewer. Developer interviews often have multiple rounds with different interviewers, so you get a chance to ask the same question to multiple people. If their answers don't match, beware! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is absolutely wonderful timing for this thread to come up. I've recently started at a start-up in Beijing and have been put in charge of making a filtering system for technical applicants.

One thing I was never prepared for was the sheer number of people who just _lie_ on their CVs! After somewhat reluctantly starting to ask senior app developer and web developer applicants to write a fizzbuzz program, I was shocked to see that less than half could. This is from a group of people who claimed to be _experts_.

Since that discovery a couple of weeks ago, I've been building an automated grading system similar to the great FB's old puzzlemaster app. That way I can screen out those who can't do fizzbuzz and another trivial program or two before wasting our one iPhone dev's time interviewing them.

Those who do at least decently do get a chance to interview, but I'm hoping to add more puzzles to the auto-grader in the hopes of spotting applicants with stronger skills than is clear from their interviews. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER7> <http://codility.com>

And many, many more.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry, maybe my comment was unclear. _I'm_ writing the tests. I was looking for suggestions for programming questions (i.e. is giving them a problem that requires implementing a binary search or a graph useful?).

That link is useless to me since the site is in English and nearly all my applicants are Chinese who don't have the language skills to read it. Throwing 200 weak applicants at it would just be a waste of $600USD/month.

<comment><USER8> It's not that hard to come up with programming questions. It's harder to come up with relevant ones. What sort of algorithms do your devs actually use?

Do you need to know if they can write parameterized queries in SQL? Do you need to know if they can do simple web crawling or scraping? String manipulation? Or do they need to know how to do linked lists, hashes and binary searches?

I think you'd do better if, rather than making them redo old CS assignments, you focused on job-relevant tests.

<comment><USER9> Do better at _what_? The kind of test we're talking about here is just a bozo filter. It's designed to keep out the flagrantly awful candidates who can't even write a simple program, not to test for actual job suitability.

<comment><USER8> The original test is like that, but I don't think that's the question GGP was asking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It also doesn't hurt to simply practice programming problems and revisit old academic excercises.

Make some flash cards with datastructures on them and use them to try and recall as many of their useful properties as you can (eg: Binary Heap, binary tree with x constraints, O(n) search, O(log n) insert in worst case; etc).

The advice in the article about honestly answering, "I don't know," is key -- don't pretend to know. You'll get called out and blow the interview. Instead, explain what you do know and think out loud when you walk through the problem with them (or how you'd go about solving it).

One way I've practiced "thinking out loud" is to get a white board and pretend you're a professor. Try to explain the solution to some problem you are familiar with in layman's terms to your pretend audience -- but do it out loud. Then find a problem online that you're not familiar with and do the same thing. Pretend you're a professor or engineer or some sort of brilliant person and walk through the problem with yourself -- out loud. Write diagrams on the board, explain your every step to your pretend audience, and really get into it. I found it helped me quite a bit and I frequently use the technique to walk through problems I'm not familiar with in my own studies.

<comment><USER10> > One way I've practiced "thinking out loud" is to get a white board and > pretend you're a professor.

This.

I'd never done "whiteboard testing," and I still hate it, but a lot of people use it apparently. I remember the first time having to do it, and I was so focused on the white board, and having my back turned to the interviewer, and just the odd sensation of everything (not to mention very little sleep the night before) that I was drawing blanks on the most basic of questions.

<comment><USER11> I guess here's one advantage of trying to get a job coming out of academia: We do that kind of whiteboard discussions all the time. I'm actually surprised that you wouldn't have done this ever at a normal job either. I mean, how do you hash things out with your coworkers?

<comment><USER10> There is a big difference between hashing things out with coworkers and trying to write that will run without a typo. I have no problem using a white board, and throwing up examples, etc. But actually writing out variable declarations, assignments, etc?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also, be aware that it is OK to bomb an interview. The point of interviewing is to find a match. If you and the company do not have a cultural fit, it is better to find out and both go your own ways. So I recommend above all to simply be yourself.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know man, the interviewing process is just so broken. Maybe because interviewing in general is so broken or maybe it's because software development is such a new industry.

Either way, isn't it strange that the best advice for doing well at interviewing is to practice. Practice so you become better at interviewing, not necessarily better at your job.

<comment><USER14> I think it's a byproduct of the education system. When you are young, you are taught to do well on exams instead of having a deep understanding of the material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Also, when they do ask you about how much money you want, give them a range > or a baseline (ex: I had X at my previous job, so I expect at least X or > from my research people doing this job receive between Y and Z, so I'd > expect something in that range). Let them come up with a number.

I don't understand this advice, if I say I expect 'at least X', then it's me coming up with the number, not them. I have always just said I'll comment on what is offered.

<comment><USER16> Furthermore, if you say "at least X", then guess what: their offer will be "X"

<comment><USER2> I have given people more than they've asked for a couple of times (usually if they've asked for something that I know to be under market rate and I don't want them jumping ship in a year). But yeah... as a hiring manager I want to know what your expectation is because that's what I'm going to take into consideration when I compare you against other people I've interviewed.

i.e. Dev A has everything but costs 20% more than Dev B, who I think can pick up everything we need within a year's time. Or, Dev C has claimed to have done all of these different things, but is asking for an amount that is suspiciously low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Interviewers who explicitly phrase the 'how would you move Mt. Fuji' or 'here's a development task outside of your stated competencies, how would you do it?' as hypotheticals or thought exercises, could save a lot of heartbreak. I can see the rationale behind those questions, but any experienced interviewer should know how tense people get during an interview: allowing interviewees to perceive those questions as being about the literal answer, rather than about the process, is kind of a jerkface thing to do. Besides, people who can't coherently explain their thought processes are going to bomb on that question anyhow - have some courtesy and give a leg up to people who are merely nervous. I'm grateful to the interviewers I've had in the past who have come out and said "this question is about the process, not about the result".

I think it's very important to reduce the tension level, because if you're asking someone a question intended to show _how_ they think and reason, especially with some level of creativity, you risk getting a useless answer if they're tense and antsy. Nervousness and pressure often kill creative thinking: this is well-established.

</comment><comment><USER3> Or interview at companies that aren't software giants that will actually spend time getting to know you and your past work rather than processing thousands of developers each year through standardized programming tests that do not prove anything about your capabilities as a software engineer.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm going to an interview this week. One thing I think that's missing in topics like this is that you are going to work for a company. This means that you need to look beyond the immediate position and take a large view to the business. I'm going to ask questions like "Why did your last custom stop using your product", "What is the company's vision for the next 3-5 years", "What are your revenue streams and how stable are they".

Knowing what dev process they use, tools, etc are all really good questions. But don't forget that the money they pay your salary with comes from somewhere. Knowing this internal information is just as important as knowing how Git works.

</comment><comment><USER19> The bottom line, in the interview process you need to adapt to the people you are talking to.

The possible pitfalls are endless for both the interviewer and the interviewee.

And sometimes the interviewer will bomb the interview more than you. You don't see people often write about making sure the person doing the interview is any good at it.

Getting good people is really important. Possibly one of the most important things you can do for a business.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've never come across an _interviewer_ who is formally _trained_ to do the interview.

</comment><comment><USER21> With some of those "un-answerable" questions that come up in interviews I've had good mileage from just turning them around back on the interviewer. After all, a lot of the time these interviewers just ask the question because it's part of the "process" or something without fully understanding the question themselves. However, you have to read the situation well in order to get away with this!

</comment><comment><USER5> People are on their best behavior with they are being interviewed. My manager suggested that if you notice any rude or peculiar behavior during the interview, multiply it 100x and consider whether you would want to work with _that_ person one year from now. I've interviewed people who would arrogant or would talk over the interviewer. Needless to say, those hires did not work out. <:)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it worth asking about the programming environment if you're already in the office and can see evidence of it all around you?

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess that depends on your powers of observation. But even if you trust in your powers of observation, it is an excellent opportunity to compare what you observe with what they say. If things don't mesh, you have to wonder.

<comment><USER23> Agreed. And remember you're only seeing a little snapshot in time, so there are probably quite a few questions you could ask regardless of your observational powers.

Do you eat lunch together? Is dress always this casual? How often do you refresh your equipment? How often do people work in groups vs solo? Do you encourage working in pairs? How geographically distributed are project teams, typically? Do people take personal calls at their desks? How do you manage shared resources like conference rooms? At my last job, everyone stood up and belted show tunes for a 1/2 hour at tea--do you have such a program?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 This advice seems like it would be applicable for an interview for _any_ type of job.</comment>


JPMorgan fund eyes 10% stake in Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/618e0bb4-42a9-11e0-8b34-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1FD052YQE <comment><USER2> Valued at $4.5BN? So much for Lou Kerner at Wedbush "America's top social media analyst" [1] saying twitter was valuing itself internally at $8BN-$10BN.

Anything to get some press I guess.

[1] [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/twitter- valu...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/twitter- valuation-100-times-expected-revenues-2213067.html)</comment>


Amazon Wants to Put a Camera and Microphone in Your Bedroom - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/amazon-echo-look-bedroom-camera <comment><USER2> More like NSA and Amazon want to Put a Camera and Microphone in Your Bedroom</comment>


When Too Cute Is Too Much, the Brain Can Get Aggressive - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/12/31/679832549/when-too-cute-is-too-much-the-brain-can-get-aggressive <comment><USER2> Perhaps it's simply play drive, much like this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6olQ- GGfCJE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6olQ-GGfCJE) ("corgimorphization")

Cuteness makes us want to hug, tease and whirl around the little being (basically an adaptation for the offspring to be encouraged to test social boundaries, individual limitations, and explore how the world works), but if it's too small or fragile for that or just a picture on a screen, then one gets a little angry for not being allowed to do so (like seeing delicious food and not being allowed to eat it). At the same time one is primed for playful action (biting, pinching, squeezing), so anger already is nearby in the space of emotions. This might also be aggravated between different species as the reactions might not match the expectations.

</comment><comment><USER3> I buy the "overwhelmed by positive emotion" explanation. As a parent I've seen this in my daughters, specially in the first years. They would hugh you strongly and in ocassions even bite. I've always understood this as some emotional overflow with no harm intended. Which makes sense, since managing emotions is not easy for toddlers.

<comment><USER4> In Indonesia there is a word for this aggression (Gregetan). Is there a word for this type of aggression in english?

<comment><USER5> I don't know if this official or publicly traded knowledge but I believe it's, "Put that toddler on Adderall / Ritalin!"

<comment><USER6> This is acurate. Sadly so.

I have had three daughters who exhibit what was stated above about super hugs, clenching teeth with saying "i just looove you soooo much" and shaking....

I was aware of this as a positive thing forever. And its lovely as encouraging them to be emotionally engaged with the world is important part of existing.

I threatened to disown my parents when they were deciding to put my younger brother on ritalin when he was a child because they were being told he was hyper, adhd, etc. i told them they needed to stand up to bullshit medicating of him just because teachers said whatever... (no need to go into details, but the schools and teachers in the late 80s were victims of pharma snake oil bullshit, which is why i havent taken even as much as an aspirin or advil in 20 years)...

Children need to thrive, engage, be encouraged to explore all aspects of life, but we have architected our entire society to supress the natural human condition.

But ironically, as a cyberpunk nerd of the 80s i somehow thought that smart drugs and neurotropic enhancement agents were going to be the future hotness. Where is my damn eye implant?

<comment><USER7> EspeciLly in school where ADHD is overdiagnosed when the real problem is an environment with hardly any physical play and mostly sitting quietly for 7-8 hours.

I had a debate with someone where I argued that adderall and others are basically methamphetamines, one atom away from cocaine. Am I right?

<comment><USER8> Cocaine is a substantially different molecule, but yes, Adderal is amphetamine, and methamphetamine is effectively just an extra carbon atom (along with the extra hydrogens that go with it).

Arguably meth would be the better treatment...

<comment><USER9> > arguably meth would be the better treatment

It's available but pricey and not available in a variety of dosages.

See, desoxyn

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I feel like nobody is offering the obvious evolutionary explanation: you certainly don't gain anything by wanting to kill/eat human babies, but it's a completely rational impulse to want to kill/eat baby squirrels or rabbits or deer or any other thing a human hunter-gatherer might run into. "Cute" in this case means "defenseless", which means "a free meal."

<comment><USER11> "Obvious evolutionary explanations" by laymen tend to be just-so stories.

<comment><USER12> This comment adds nothing to the discussion. Instead please explain why you think it's not a potentially valid explanation instead of just attacking the OP for being a laymen(something you didn't verify).

<comment><USER11> I invite you to apply critical thinking as to why someone's declaration of the _OMG obvious_ evolutionary explanation for a still dimly-understood psychological phenomenon is fundamentally dubious. Tossed-off evo-psych ideas like that are the _playground_ of laymen geeks when it comes to biology. They contribute nothing except a false sense of understanding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Relevant Key and Peele skit: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6iC0Vi1yEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6iC0Vi1yEg)

</comment><comment><USER14> This isn't unlike.."these are tears of joy. I am SO happy that I am shedding tears". Same phenomenon.

The one about 'tears of joy' is something I chased down the rabbit hole. It has to do with lachrimal glands which are basically our tear ducts. Turns out each 'type' of tears has an unique signature. And it's prettt distinct and recognizable under a microscope.

They are connected to fight/flight impulse ..our adrenals..cortisol levels or stress situation. One can cry from relief post-stress or from sadness or from joy. Or from pain after stubbing a toe or cutting oneself. And they are all different.

More here: [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the- microscopi...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-microscopic- structures-of-dried-human-tears-180947766/)

So..I want to say that this expression of seeming violence after seeing something cute can be traced back to the same pathways.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm curious as to how gender and testosterone levels correlate with this. It appears that this dichotomy isn't limited to aggression, but to more emotions [0].

This article looks informative about the topic [1]. It poses the question of how disorders such as conduct disorder might affect this. That'd be a really good question to answer.

[0] [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761456104...](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614561044)

[1] [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.0030...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00300/full)

<comment><USER16> Apparently in the underlying paper they did a chi-squared test on gender and didn't see a significant difference (so also didn't report the raw data), this was surprising since I've only really seen something like this aggression affect in women and everyone's anecdotes seem to be of women. (Or maybe I'm just overly separating the desire to "tightly hug" and "squeeze until they burst".) Would be interesting to get a sample of male anime fans and their reactions to cute anime girls and see if the distribution is normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Reminded of Agnes from Despicable Me when I read this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SI6rhotAkE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SI6rhotAkE)

<comment><USER18> I was reminded of Lonesome Lenny: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZi- Ilcr47Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZi-Ilcr47Q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm pretty sure this is just a subset of Intrusive Thoughts ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought)) which affect all people equally.

<comment><USER20> I've heard that when people are afraid of heights, when they come close to the edge of a bridge or a building they feel irresistsble desire to jump. I wonder if these two are related.

<comment><USER21> Conjecture, but I believe this is due to disordered preference for orienting oneself perpendicular to converging lines. Imagine yourself standing on a long straight road. Now imagine yourself looking over the side of a building, which is equivalent to looking along a similarly flat surface but from a much reduced height, as if you were lying on the road and trying to look at it over the tops of your feet.

A maladaptive orientation instinct might be caused by overcompensation for astigmatism or other distortion, or a strong preference for one kind of visual cue (converging parallels) over another (the more abstract knowledge of gravity and the associated impacts.

There is some evidence to suggest that premature babies are more likely to be subject to such disorders. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cliff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cliff)

<comment><USER22> The problem is that l'appel du vide does not just apply to jumping off a cliff. It tends to pop up in situations where somebody could take a very simple yet extremely dangerous or guaranteed life-ending action. The other common case of l'appel du vide is the thought of just letting the car swerve into a tree or pole.

<comment><USER21> I know, but I don't think that is the only factor in play. You could have vertigo without ever having the inclination to step in front of a train.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Couldn't help thinking of _Bambi meets Godzilla_ : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wUdetAAlY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wUdetAAlY)

<comment><USER24> Wow, there's a good Youtube comment in that thread:

 _I remember meeting Mr. Newland in BC back in 2007 where he explained that this was made in the last minutes for his final project in animation school. He ran out of time helping his fellow classmates with their projects and had nothing to make. That 's why this has no colour. It had to be 1 minute 30 seconds long so he lengthened the movie with text and nail movement. Thinking nothing of it, he passed his class, and this was submitted and won an animation award._

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> You know, I've noticed that I sometimes laugh when I hear about horrible news. I've never understood why - since there is nothing funny or laughable about those bad things. I wonder if this is related?

<comment><USER26> My wife does this too. It's a horrible source of embarrassment because it evokes laughter at highly inappropriate times (such as the delivery of terrible news, such as death of a loved one).

My daughter also does it. When she's in big trouble and mom and I are very mad, she will often laugh at our anger, despite knowing that it will escalate the situation. It took us a little while to realize what was happening, and that she wasn't trying to be a punk.

<comment><USER27> I do that too, really upsets my wife when I just can't help but laugh when I have angered her. I have taken to apologizing while laughing and saying that I acknowledge my response is inappropriate, but I can't help it. Helps sometimes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I feel as if this is just a trend in the way people communicate. It's common in the U.S. to describe cute animals and babies this way. It might've stemmed from pop culture (i.e. movies, TV shows).

</comment><comment><USER29> I remember there was a commedian who said "you ever see a kitten so cute, you just want to strangle it death?" or something to that effect. The audience seemed to relate.

<comment><USER30> I think it was Sarah Millican who said that. Her sketch is here (NSFW due to language) - [https://www.facebook.com/BritishComedy/videos/sarah- millican...](https://www.facebook.com/BritishComedy/videos/sarah-millican- loving-pets-too-much-contains-strong-language/1938862052997757/)

<comment><USER29> It wasn't. I think it was Bill Burr or Louis C.K. Some sort of short, fat, bald comedian, I guess. I get them all mixed up. And it could have been a kitten instead of a baby. But I remember it because, yes, I have felt a bit like Lenny from Mice and Men and wanted to cuddle a cute thing too violently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I have cute aggression. I learned about that in [https://priceonomics.com/why- do-we-smother-cute-things/](https://priceonomics.com/why-do-we-smother-cute- things/) which was published in 2014. So why does this article say Yale researchers first describe it in 2015?

<comment><USER32> The article says they first presented in 2013.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> we call this "gigil" in the philippines [http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170714-an- untranslatable-...](http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170714-an- untranslatable-word-for-pure-joy)

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a similar effect mostly experienced by women: they want to eat babies. Not really — there's no danger — but the idea pops into the head. My wife had our daughter seven weeks ago and noticed it, we've had friends say things from the common, "I want to eat you up" to an outright faux aggressive "I WANT TO EAT HER" from one of her friends. Some articles claim it has something to do with the way they smell. [https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0923/Why-do- people-wa...](https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/0923/Why-do-people-want- to-eat-babies-Scientists-explain)

</comment><comment><USER35> This is normal behavior among my family. I've always been like this. I also know many people like this. Very odd to hear people needing to vouch that it's real.

<comment><USER36> It's best not to take your own experiences with acceptance about literally any matter whatsoever and use it as a lens to fathom what it's like for other people.

<comment><USER37> The problem is that plenty of people flat out don't believe a behavior exists when it clearly does, just because they themselves don't experience it or behave that way. It happens so incredibly often - like people who think it's normal to have to sneeze when they go out under the sun and others who then need incontrovertible proof that this happens. I'm not sure what to call it. A lack of empathy or imagination? Lack of respect for different experiential points of view?

<comment><USER38> Most people are suprisingly callous to anything that doesn't directly affect them. While some is inavoidable, much is just taught as 'common-sense selfishness'. Common in china, and becoming common in the usa. 'CYA', Look out for #1, Pay yourself first, are all good advice but also self-serving to a fault. We here on HN are certainly only rarely exceptions to this. We just hyperfocus on our domain and wonder how 'everyone else' can't see whats obvious to us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I frequently remark on how cuteness is treated differently in different cultures, and I really wonder if it plays a role in how cute aggression affects people.

</comment><comment><USER40> That's the difference between [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine)

</comment><comment><USER41> Anecdata - the thing is real.

I consider myself to be a well adjusted person, but I have a confession to make.

Whenever I find myself i a toy store in a 'too cute' section, I feel tension to grow inside me. I have a compulsion to arrange toys in sexual-situation- resembling poses, stage simulated toy-crashes or break the cute atmosphere in similar a way.

<comment><USER42> > _I have a compulsion to arrange toys in sexual-situation-resembling poses, > stage simulated toy-crashes or break the cute atmosphere in similar a way_

Why must this be a compulsion? If you had something else to do at the time, would you be unable to do it without first re-arranging the toys? If not, it strikes me as normal self-amusement/play more than anything else.

<comment><USER43> I mean isn't it kind of normal? I've wandered across many a random sand- penises sculpted on the beach, and come across campsites having crude stickmen with oversize penises. And of course, everyone has heard countless sexualized jokes in their life.

I think the OP has some confirmation bias going on. Taking the conclusion and using it to narrate his/her behavior. Unless OP _only_ does that as a response to cuteness stimuli, but the crass behavior seems normally present in people without cute stimuli.

<comment><USER21> "I feel tension to grow inside me" suggests the impulse cause OP discomfort or anxiety until resolved, and OP seems fully aware that the juxtaposition of sexuality or mortality with cute children's toys is considered inappropriate because of the potential to create distress for children who encounter it.

OP, if this is an unpleasant compulsion rather than an occasional whim you might want to dig into it with a therapist, either in search of a cause or a coping strategy as you prefer.

<comment><USER43> Yea you are right, come to think of it, the most important thing here is, as you said, if this is specific to children's toys OP really should seek professional help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I bet future machine consciousness learning will result on machines thinking we're so cute they'll destroy us

</comment><comment><USER45> I think this can be a learned response as a self defense against the constant barrage of "cuteness" we encounter through marketing. When you see it as manipulative it's easy to see why you might get angry.

I know I have the same reaction to all of the lullaby music in commercials.

<comment><USER46> Article isn't about getting angry. And it's not necessarily about volume of cuteness, but rather intensity of a singular moment of cuteness. When my wife hugs our cat and he's being all cat cute like, she'll remark how she wants to squeeze the life out of him because she just can't stand how cute he is. I feel like that's rather common, and has no tie to anger or actual physical aggression.

<comment><USER45> The article is about over stimulation of the emotion and reward systems of the brain and how negative thoughts can help neutralize that over stimulation. I'm suggesting that same pattern may be represented by a self learned behavior that's adapted to being overexposed to cuteness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxvzEfI0BFU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxvzEfI0BFU)

</comment><comment><USER48> hah, this is so true, I've never given much thought as to why its happening, but I have got a newborn about a month old, he's very cute that when he with me and wife is not around, I try to bite or squeeze him :)

</comment><comment><USER49> Aggretsuko

</comment><comment><USER50> I said something similar to a girlfriend once. She didn't take it too well...

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't like kittens because I feel like they are too qute and I feel like strangling them -- I thought I was insane, phew, glad I'm not.

</comment><comment><USER52> I've never had that trait, but I suspect it is caused by a resentful feeling of being treated like an infant.

<comment><USER53> Nah it's not like that at all.

My girlfriend does this all the time. She sees puppies and shit like that on Reddit, and always does this like "growl" and says how she wants to "squeeze the shit out of them." It's not like she really wants to squeeze them and kill them, and it's not actually anger.

It's just a really intense feeling of joy and wanting to take care of them and play with them. If there's any true aggression there, I feel like it's a result of being protective. It's probably a very biological reaction to seeing a small cute creature or person who needs care.

<comment><USER54> It seems likely to me that it's an expression of L'appel du Vide, or The Call of the Void. You ever stand at the edge of a tall building or bridge and feel the urge to jump? It's that feeling. One hypothesis is that our brain does this as a way of making itself more aware of the risk. It makes sense then that when we see a small and fragile thing we wish not to damage, it would trigger this mechanism.

<comment><USER55> I've never really bought that "Call of the Void" explanation. You can imagine fairly easily what will happen if you jump from a tall building without having the urge to do it. I've always viewed it as a legitimate momentary urge, just one that conflicts with almost every other urge we have to live, so we don't do it and don't even acknowledge the urge as legitimate (most of us, anyway).

<comment><USER37> "Call of the void" isn't an explanation. It's just a definition and a label for an observed behavior/thought. There's nothing to buy.

<comment><USER55> Perhaps some poor grammar on my part. I was responding to the post with a hypothesis as to why some people experience the "call of the void": to make us more aware of the danger of doing an action that would kill us. My opinion is, this makes no sense. You can imagine what would happen quite easily without having the urge to do it. This is the "call of the void" explanation which I do not buy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Is that like when I hear a British person speak and I just want to smother them in hugs and squeeze their cheeks saying "YOU'RE SO ADORABLE!"?

EDIT: Joking about self control aside, I don't think I'll stop smiling for a long while afterwards if I ever visit England.

<comment><USER57> The times when I've visited the USA, folks there commented how much they loved my Scottish accent.

<comment><USER58> ...are you Scottish?

<comment><USER57> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> FYI to readers: The article gets unnecessarily graphic about violence against animals.

<comment><USER60> How are first hand accounts of a psychological phenomenon in an article describing said psychological phenomenon unnecessary?</comment></comment>


Hashcat 2017 – OpenCL cracks 10 digit WPA2 passwords on a modest laptop - <AUTHOR> https://meanderful.blogspot.com/2017/03/hashcat-2017.html <comment><USER2> > Despite XKCD, beware of pass-phrases thanks to modern markov chains and > dictionaries. XKCD's 2^44 is only slightly better than ten random > hexadecimal digits. Though, in good salt we can trust

How do markov chains and dictionaries help with diceware passphrases?

<comment><USER3> If passphrases contain 'memorable' word-like sounds, predictable structures or real words as a basis they can be attacked more efficiently. Often password generators have such modes.

2^44 = ~10 hexadecimal digits, but to be fair the example was purely alphabetic and about double the length, so this is apples and oranges.</comment></comment>


Quitting everything to go to Nepal was the best thing I've done. - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/travel-writers/f753fa208322

<comment><USER2> I feel bad for the poor guy described as "good enough." It sounds like he was abruptly dumped on a whim. I'd like to hear more about him.

In general, these types of travel blog, feel good, live life, highly SEOed, entrepreneur on the beach writers are all just playing to your discontent with XYZ in order to sell you an e-book about a life you probably only enjoy reading about anyway.

It's not empowering, it's a marketing ploy.

</comment><comment><USER3> If she was so happy, why did she come back to the US?</comment>


Graphically Design the Database for Your Django Code - <AUTHOR> http://mmcardle.github.io/django_builder/#/models <comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know this existed, and I've looked for something like this.

If you are even remotely interested in coding anything in Django, I would check this out.

I am not, in any way, affiliated with this tool or the team behind it. I don't know them.</comment>


Google to use HTML5 in Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178558/Google_to_use_HTML5_in_Gmail?taxonomyId=11&pageNumber=2

<comment><USER2> Link above takes you to page 2. Here's page 1:

[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178558/Google_to_use...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9178558/Google_to_use_HTML5_in_Gmail)

I was hoping for a more in depth description of why or how CSS3 increases speed so much.

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess there will be more. They target a load time of under a sec.

I find it remarkable, that they rely on well-documented "hand-written" JavaScript for their flagship product although they have GWT.</comment></comment>


Netflix to cut streaming quality in Europe for 30 days - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51968302 <comment><USER2> I've been having major internet issues lately (Seattle area), have had 4 techs come try to figure it out. Yesterday's tech finally correctly diagnosed the problem as happening before the connection reaches our home but was unsure of the cause. He called his supervisor to investigate, and they found that the capacity for our neighborhood's node was nearly at 100%, while ideally it should always be under 80%. Fortunately they said they'll be able to fix it within a few weeks by doing a node split. The tech mentioned he'd never heard of capacity issues before in his ~20 years as a tech and that some smaller ISPs have been having issues keeping their internet up and running at all.

I've been tracking the performance with PingPlotter, if you're curious how bad it is right now here's the last 10 minutes: [https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png](https://i.imgur.com/AnUqv3j.png) (red lines are packet loss) Pretty interesting how current circumstances are pushing even tried and tested infrastructure to their limits.

<comment><USER3> I've worked at a major ISP, for a decade, and spotting something like this should be so easy to spot. There are tools on monitoring of load all the time, and areas are routibely getting split etc. to improve bandwith, so I think your ISP are basicly amateurs..

<comment><USER4> Alternatively, load has gone up across the board in a short period of time, so that preventive scaling has fallen behind and are in recovery mode.

<comment><USER3> Yes it can, but why would it take several techs, to spot something like load, which is the first thing you would do, it should take no more than 10s to look it up in a tool.

<comment><USER5> A "last foot" tech might not even have access to those tools, much less know how to use them.

<comment><USER6> Rolling out that tech has got to be more expensive than checking the load first.

<comment><USER7> Dunno how it is in the States, but here in UK rolling out the tech is basically the first thing they do after the unavoidable "have you tried turning it on and off again" phone call. They just don't trust the customer to have any clue and maybe don't want to waste time doing troubleshooting at their end when it's "probably" a downstream issue.

<comment><USER8> Network Operations should be raising _known problem_ issues to front line call centre staff.

Network congestion issues shouldn't be handed off to field techs to check local loop (last mile) and CPE (Customer Premises Equipment.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure it's standard practice at these companies to never let front line call center staff acknowledge known problems. Sometimes, the automated phone menu will give you a recorded generic message that they are currently experiencing a service issue, but that's intended to convince you to hang up and patiently wait for them to sort their shit out. I've never had a front- line rep be at all useful in diagnosing a real problem.

<comment><USER8> Yeah true.

I guess I need to remember the ISP I work for here in Australia (front line tech support, and then network operations physical security and infrastructure) was widely recognised as the best ISP in Australia multiple years running, so I shouldn't use it as a baseline expectation.

<comment><USER10> So how was life at internode or aussie?

<comment><USER8> Internode.

Yeah, was a good place to work. I was in their Adelaide data centres when iiNet acquired the company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Paying isn't enough to get what you paid for, so...

[https://github.com/SickChill/SickChill](https://github.com/SickChill/SickChill) \- automatically download TV episodes (about Linux)

[https://github.com/CouchPotato/CouchPotatoServer](https://github.com/CouchPotato/CouchPotatoServer) \- automatically download Movies (about Linux)

[https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent](https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent) \- torrent client for downloading your Linux tv/movies...

<comment><USER12> Sonarr and Radarr are 10x better.

<comment><USER13> New here. What's the difference between these two?

<comment><USER14> Sonarr handles TV shows and Radarr handles movies.

<comment><USER13> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> BenJong-Il A few months ago there was blog post posted here from a guy making movie reviews. In the blog post he described how he managed to get 4k Netflix screenshots on his Chromecast. The effort he made was enormous and involved reverse engineering the Netflix data protocol (I probably worded this wrong).

When doing that he found out that Netflix streaming in 4k isn't actually 4k.

Again not exactly sure how this worked but that was the result. And he put some kind of device between the Chromecast and the TV. And at the end of the post he shared his top movies of the year or in the previous post.

Does anyone know what I am talking about? I've thought about this pist several times in the past weeks.

<comment><USER15> On a related note, if you watch Netflix in Chrome or Firefox then you're only getting a resolution of 720p.

        Google Chrome
            Up to 720p on Windows, Mac, and Linux
            Up to 1080p on Chrome OS
        Internet Explorer up to 1080p
        Microsoft Edge up to 4K*
        Mozilla Firefox up to 720p
        Opera up to 720p
        Safari up to 1080p on Mac OS X 10.10.3 or later

        *Streaming in 4K requires an HDCP 2.2 compliant connection to a 4K capable display,
        Intel's 7th generation Core CPU, and the latest Windows updates.
        Check with the manufacturer of your system to verify specifications.

From: [https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742)

I really wish they'd just allow up to 4K streaming on all main browsers. The Windows 10 app is awful and very buggy for multi-monitor setups. The two main issues I run into with it are:

1\. The video will stutter unless I set both my monitors to the same refresh rate. As you can imagine, it's somewhat annoying to have to lower the refresh rate of my main monitor from 144Hz to 60Hz whenever I want to watch Netflix.

2\. When playing in fullscreen on one monitor, the video will randomly minimize if I interact with _any_ applications on my second monitor! So if I want to look something up online or whatever as I'm watching, I _have to_ switch to windowed mode or I risk having the video just minimize and mute itself.

<comment><USER16> This is really driving me nuts... Netflix is consistently giving me subpar resolution in firefox. It's quite rare that I even get 720p. Yet switching to microsoft edge, boom suddenly it's great.

There used to be some extensions to switch the resolution up on chrome and firefox, but I do believe they're not working anymore.

Another case for piracy I guess.

<comment><USER17> Change user-agent to impersonate Edge.

This is why I won't pay for premium resolution upgrades. It's too much of a hassle to ensure the entire video chain is providing what I paid for.

<comment><USER18> It's more than that, Edge has far more DRM in it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Maybe if we had kept using bittorrent for TV distribution we wouldn't have so much global traffic downloading "The Avengers" for the millionth time, you would just download it from the nearest host (also the way the internet worked before HTTPS, there used to be way more local caching of content being downloaded over and over again)

<comment><USER20> Except residential upload speeds are usually only 1/10th of the corresponding download speed.

<comment><USER21> Maybe 10 years ago? I don't know anyone with a connection that badly asymmetrical.

<comment><USER22> My connection is 1000/50 – theoretically.

On a good day, that works out to about 100/2, thanks to my provider vastly overselling their shitty overcongested network as "fiber to the home". (It's just cable.)

<comment><USER23> So you've got a "gigabit connection" (in marketing terms), yet worst case your upload speed is like that of ADSL. That's unacceptable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is pure bullshit. If Netflix won't commit to it's part of the deal (FULL HD and 4K) then why should I commit to my part (13.99 monthly)?

You cannot decide by yourself to lower the quality of your services and keep the price same.

Sometimes I wish I had enough money and time to seek "legal retribution" from these type of situations. I would love for this case to make it to the European Court in Strasbourg.

"The video-streaming provider said lowering the picture quality would reduce Netflix data consumption by 25%.

But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good."

How would they know what I find still good, if I found it still good than I wouldn't have taken the premium plan!! So many fallacies in this way of thinking..

<comment><USER25> During a pandemic which has forced a huge number of people to stay at home and is currently crashing the economy and costing hundreds of lives per day, it could help to be a little more sympathetic to measures like this. They might not be perfect, because everyone is having to react so quickly to what is going on, but we can appreciate that this is not a normal event and the vast majority of companies have never planned for it (random ISPs, for example). If this article [1] from Netflix is to be believed, 4K uses _five times_ the bandwidth of HD, and is surely an easy target for something that can be traded off while not affecting people's moral wellbeing too much.

Suffering a video quality decrease would seem a small price to pay for not causing further problems, and perhaps once this is all over, or at least we've stopped flying by the seats of our pants, we can see if people should receive refunds of a few dollars a month.

[1] [https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306)

<comment><USER26> Except, people are PAYING for that upgrade.

<comment><USER27> Two or four euros per month. Call the army! I would start a class action suite. /s

This stupid selfish attitude is not helping. Netflix will probably issue a statement that they will refund all those affected. And if you don't like it, downgrade! You probably have plenty of time if this is an issue for you.

<comment><USER28> If two or four euros is so little as to be entirely negligible, and if anyone who would care about throwing such a small amount of money away deserved to be ridiculed, why does Netflix ask for it? They could just let the customer keep the money since it doesn't matter, right? If fact, everyone could just send _me_ this silly sum that doesn't matter and they shouldn't complain about.

<comment><USER29> Exactly, this is less than a single one of the overpriced Starbucks coffees that those same people probably purchase without spending a single thought on it.

Being empathetic to these measures is the right call, although I do find that much more important for brick & mortar businesses than Netflix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There seems to be a big divide between two groups:

One is of the mind that we should be empathetic and since it's not a lot of money, people shouldn't complain.

The other is of the mind that, Netflix can certainly take those actions but shouldn't pass those costs on to the consumer.

I'm in the second camp.

In Holland, all the big gym companies still charge their memberships even though the gyms are closed. Since they're legally required to refund the money, they hide that from the consumer and get ahead of it by offering to 'give' consumers their own money back on their membership card. Thus not losing any money.

I think that people in this thread don't have a problem with the measures being taken, but specifically with companies not eating the cost and trying to pass those on to the consumer. That's the shady part and it's not right IMO.

I also find it fascinating that people don't have an issue with paying for services that they didn't receive if they're on a subscription yet they wouldn't pay an invoice should their favorite club(s), restaurant(s), etc. start sending them those.

While I'm open to having my mind changed, all of these practices do strike me as kinda unethical. It appears to me as taking advantage of the user in order not to sacrifice revenue and I think that that's what most people here are objecting to.

edit: My perspective on companies whether the P&L of a company should be taken into account.

I don't believe so.

I think people should be given the option to make an informed decision. Actions like these feel like they're purposefully designing a choice architecture such that there's an asymmetric information flow that can be taken advantage of to serve one's own needs as a company. That's unethical IMO; not unlike a shady 20th century used car dealer.

<comment><USER31> Hard to draw a line, but there's a key difference between Netflix & gym memberships/restaurants/… for me:

Gyms are forced to close, and are losing money in the process. As a consumer, I can sympathize with the situation. Netflix is having issues because they are _thriving_ , not because they're having a hard time.

<comment><USER32> This was requested by the EU, not their own decision. NetFlix has historically always had more than enough capacity, it has always been ISP's that are lacking with bandwidth.

<comment><USER33> Well, in this case I don't see why a customer should stick with the ISP if it doesn't deliver. In Germany, there are several examples where the termination of contract was judged as being okay if the bandwidth regularly fell below 50% of the promised capacity [1].

Therefore: Although the Netflix cut was triggered by the EU, it might actually have been a successful lobbying action by the ISPs.

[1] [https://praxistipps.chip.de/internet-recht-dsl- geschwindigke...](https://praxistipps.chip.de/internet-recht-dsl- geschwindigkeit-langsamer-als-bestellt-das-koennen-sie-tun_46134)

<comment><USER34> But switching your ISP will take a week at best, likely multiple.

Right now politicians don't want me to enjoy the perfect weather outside but instead to stay indoor and play online games or program something. Both I'm less likely to do if my neighbors clog my internet by watching ultra hd streams, apparently.

Don't think "the market will solve it" is best approach right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> There's so much that seems wrong about this.

1: home network capacity used to be at peak around 7PM IIRC. There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working day.

2: Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited. The smart move would be to tell Netflix to downgrade more aggressively, on the theory that would allow more "important" traffic to get priority, while still allowing people to watch Netflix (important to keep people from social contact!), and not affecting quality for consumers where ISP capacity isn't an issue (edit: added clause).

3: Allow individual ISPs to ignore agreements and bandwidth limit Netflix traffic from their POPs, if ISPs are having capacity issues.

This seems political, possibly pushed by Netflix so they can sell more subscriptions while having a third party to blame for reducing service levels. Or maybe just knee jerk dumb reactions from politicians - stupidity seems like an option too!?

Edit: I keep being amazed at how consumerism drives side benefits. Without Netflix and gamers, how much worse off would we all be right now?

<comment><USER36> > There should be significant spare headroom on the network during the working > day.

Remember that essentially every kid in Europe is home from school right now.

> Netflix already downgrades when bandwidth is limited.

It downgrades when bandwidth constraints and congestion start bothering _it_. By the time all the Netflixes which are competing with you do so, your Zoom conference will be long gone. Netflix is quite tolerant of an unreliable network. Many work-from-home things, VC in particular, less so.

<comment><USER35> Re 1st point: and kids are often heavy bandwidth users in evening. Network bandwidth is mostly about supporting peak usage, a pipe with capacity per second and not a fixed volume per day. Plans often regulate by volume cap, but high capacity networks regulate by bits per second peak usage.

Re second point: you are misquoting, and making a point that is obvious. The next sentence is "The smart move would be to tell Netflix to downgrade more aggressively" to help your canonical zoom conference (which is a super poor example - apparently Zoom failure is due to Zoom and not network capacity).

<comment><USER36> While the widespread zoom problems are due to issues with zoom, highly latency sensitive applications like VC will be degraded before a Netflix client even realises anything is happening on a network reaching saturation. It's very hard for the client to be a good citizen in this situation. Network-level QoS would help, but is a massive moral hazard (and generally illegal in the EU, anyway).

<comment><USER37> What is "network-level QoS"?

<comment><USER38> The opposite of net neutrality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Are there any illustrations of the volumes of traffic that are being sent through core networks for netflix? I was under the impression the vast majority of traffic was served at the edge.

<comment><USER40> I think that's what they are relieving...edge traffic volumes. If the local ISP cache box lowers it's maximum quality, the ISPs get relief.

The ISPs oversubscribed, and can't deal with this many people being at home all at once.

<comment><USER41> Citation needed. In the UK...

"UK broadband companies say they can cope with increased demand as many more people stay at home during the coronavirus crisis."

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51870732)

<comment><USER42> That's what they say now. Give them a few weeks and they'll start squealing. Every ISP oversubscribes for consumer segments. In the UK I guess not enough people are quarantined.

<comment><USER43> Some ISPs like Andrew & Arnolds don't oversubscribe, but they dont have unlimited plans either

<comment><USER44> It's not true to say that A&A don't oversubscribe. Instead the situation is that they're happy to buy more capacity to fulfil their offer, within reason.

If A&A subscribers could in theory move 10Tbps (if they all simultaneously did some sort of download from a hypothetical unlimited source) but in reality they never do and it peaks at something like 100Gbps, A&A are fulfilling their promise by ensuring they've got 100Gbps to do that.

Typically you'll never notice the difference, except on your bill, because if they had 100x more bandwidth upstream they'd pay a lot of money for that, even though it was unused and they'd have to pass that to you in the medium term.

However, the reality is a little closer to oversubscribing. Suppose A&A are paying for 10Gbps on a particular port somewhere, and at their busiest time of the week it typically runs at 9.8Gbps. Unfortunately the company selling it only wants to offer 100Gbps as the next step up, for five times the money. Another 10Gbps port isn't an option as there are no 10Gbps ports free. So A&A decides to sit on the problem, nobody is suffering at 9.8Gbps.

Next week it hits 10Gbps and seems likely it'd have gone to 11Gbps if that was possible. Oops. The firm they're buying that capacity from still has 100Gbps available, but they agree at last that they could add more 10Gbps ports, and will do so for the same price as the existing port. Unfortunately it means buying a new Cisco router, which Cisc says is on back order, it'll arrive in July.

Are A&A going to throw five times the money at the problem for this burst of maybe 30-40 minutes per week? Or are they going to tell you sorry but it'll be July and until then bandwidth at that peak across that particular link isn't what it ought to be? They're going to do the latter. Because at the end of the day it's a business. RevK is a good guy, but he's not looking to bankrupt the company to make some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is this for the entirety of Europe? Because I imagine we're not having any issues with this in Finland.

<comment><USER46> It's a made up problem. In Germany, journalists asked the network providers and they said everything is fine.

Such a ridiculous and pointless thing to do by the EU. Especially since all the apps drop the quality automatically anyway if the connection is slow.

<comment><USER47> Here in Berlin my DSL connection has been awful since the social distancing began. And many of my friends have complained of similar problems. Frequent disconnections, broken up zoom calls. Though ironically the streaming has been fine from both Netflix & Amazon.

<comment><USER48> I've had disconnected Zoom calls here (Netherlands) as well, but it seems that's just Zoom not being able to handle the traffic because Google Hangouts and MS Teams are both fine. And Netflix and Disney+ are also working fine.

<comment><USER49> It could be that they don't have local edge servers in the Netherlands, we are using Zoom very heavily here in the UK and its working well with our colleagues here and in the US but some European countries including Netherlands are breaking up or disconnecting. I think Zoom are using AWS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> When I had my Internet from Cox here in Phoenix and they started to invoke data caps, I was forced to rate limit my TVs here in the house.

I have to say, Netflix does a GREAT job making sure their content works well under lower bitrates as compared to HULU and Amazon Prime.

I was getting pretty good 1080 quality at 2.5mbs. If I didn't do the caps, Netflix (and other services) will stream as fast as they can.

<comment><USER51> I have Cox in Rhode Island, ostensibly 150 mbps but meanwhile my TV buffers on simple medium quality content. I am wondering if the apartment building's connection isn't prepared for so many streamers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Does anyone know of public ISP dashboards that show used/total capacity on their network in terms of customer usage?

I'm sure its trivial for an internal employee to pull up solarwinds or whatever, but I'd be curious to see if these ISPs are merely running above normal, running hot, barely hanging on with intermittent "isp brownouts" etc.

This is probably a pipe dream but not gonna get any questions answered if I don't ask.

<comment><USER53> The largest backbone in the world publishes statistics:

[https://www.de- cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...](https://www.de- cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statistics)

<comment><USER54> For clarification, this is not a "backbone" \- it is an exchange fabric.

<comment><USER55> And for further clarification, you won't see much Netflix traffic there because the big ISPs have Netflix caches within their infrastructure.

<comment><USER56> The big German ISPs don't have Netflix caches within their infrastructure, which might be part of the problem here. Last mile infrastructure might be even worse though.

<comment><USER54> Germany is rather odd compared to the other countries with its adoption of broadband tech - for example you see a decent bit of FTTH/FTTx in NL, NO/DK/SE (muni owned, early adopters), etc.

Then you go to Germany and it's mass of DSL (and some areas cable). I wonder what happened or why?

<comment><USER56> Not an expert on the topic, but IIRC this is the rough outline:

\- The main ISP of Germany is Deutsche Telekom, a formerly state-owned company that was privatized ~25 years ago, which Germany still holds stock in

\- In the past Telekom was awarded big contracts to expand broadband access across the country

\- Telekom is/was really slow at fulfilling those contracts, and at the same time behaves in an anti-competitive manner towards any independent ISPs that try to fill the void

\- The government doesn't punish any of that behaviour like they rarely do with a big German company, even more so with privatized ones that they have a stake in

To also be fair towards Telekom a bit, Germany is a very decentralized country, which is a boon in a lot of situations, but also challenging for any infrastructure projects. Part of the contracts was that they also have to expand broadband access in all rural parts of Germany.

<comment><USER57> I'm not sure that's (entirely) it. I don't know if this is why Netflix doesn't do it, but Germany doesn't have the same First Amendment laws as the US. In particular, there are some writings that are illegal under German law. Thus, locating a box in Germany that could potentially hold material that is illegal under German law is ill advised. That the box is operating simply as a local cache doesn't seem to change the lawyer's perspective.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re- unifi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#Re- unified_Germany_\(1990%E2%80%93present\))

<comment><USER55> Akamai has hundrads of cache boxes at German ISPs, including at this one.

There are some issues at play here:

1\. This ISP in particular has extremely weird peering rules, they only do paid private peering (more expensive than other transit providers) and even deny access to Tier 1 networks. For a long time YouTube was almost unusable due to weird routing - they even had a website explaining why YouTube was broken (Google doesn't want to pay _crycry_ ). Same with several popular gameservers. Due to their market position they are completely fine with being the bully.

2\. They have their own streaming and TV offer so they don't have many reasons for making the Netflix experience better.

This information might be outdated, I don't live in Germany anymore and it seems that they now have some sort of partnership with Netflix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> That explains a lot. Fair enough though

> But it said viewers would still find the picture quality good.

I beg to differ and I'm watching on my tablet in bed and it reminds me of the Avi files we used to watch on lan networks in the 90s.

<comment><USER59> Are you in Europe? I'd love to know how are services like Hulu or YouTube holding up?

<comment><USER58> Bulgaria. YouTube is King still. To my knowledge, Hulu is a US only thing so...

<comment><USER59> Gotcha!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> On totally unrelated news, Popcorn Time 4.0 was recently released and using it is decriminalized in many European countries (but not in others, so stay safe):

[https://popcorntime.app/](https://popcorntime.app/)

<comment><USER61> What is the advantage of this over simple old torrenting?

<comment><USER62> you can start watching immediately as it is downloading and it has a player built in, whereas the traditional torrent client needs to finish the video first and you need a separate video player.

<comment><USER63> Most torrent clients have a "download in sequential order as far as feasible" feature, addressing the first issue.

<comment><USER64> It's generally a good idea to download the first and last pieces first when doing sequential downloading to ensure that the file doesn't appear too corrupted.

Also, always using sequential downloading isn't very good for the swarm; it means that disproportionately fewer seeders are available for the later chunks of a torrent.

I'd recommend downloading the first episode or two sequentially, but downloading the rest of the torrent normally (or perhaps just first/last parts first).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Treating Europe as a one block seems like very low resolution decision. Netflix content delivery network is sufficiently large in Europe to take into account much smaller areas.

<comment><USER66> Yes, I doubt this was a very well-informed request by the EU as much as a PR move. I doubt the fiber between me and Netflix's edge cache at my ISP is significantly more saturated due to more people staying at home.

<comment><USER67> You might have missed it but yesterday it was all over the news that the EU had asked Netflix to do something. Here is one of many articles: [https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/19/eu-netflix-sd- streaming-...](https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/19/eu-netflix-sd-streaming-to- conserve-internet)

Today the Australian government is making the same request.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Isn't this sort of rationing exactly the thing that anti-Net Neutrality advocates have been warning about?

<comment><USER69> No, that would be the ISP playing "you can't use Netflix or Zoom unless you pay for Super Premium." This is the services themselves downgrading to handle the highest peak service they will ever see.

<comment><USER70> Not just that. Eyeball network ISPs also shake down companies like Netflix with extortionate fees when peering points are overloaded to upgrade the connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> This drives me fucking mental.

It's not about being insensitive about the quality reduction, I KNOW PEOPLE ARE DYING, I KNOW that's more important than Netflix.

I don't care if they stop ALL services, but DONT FUCKING CHARGE ME THEN.

<comment><USER72> Well if 'doing your part' only means 720p instead of 1080 or 4k at the same price for a little while, I think that is more than acceptable

<comment><USER73> I don't understand that. It's not like Netflix is saving lives or is a non profit. Why should it be our responsibility to subsidize their baseline? The nature of business is that you're taking risks. Offloading that risk to your customers is bad taste. Netflix doesn't share its profits with its customers so why should we be shouldering their losses/subsidizing them as paying customers?

<comment><USER71> Precisely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> Interesting counterpoint to the "broadband is so much better in Europe" trope. Unless of course we are under strain here in the US as well....

<comment><USER75> Isn't the trope "broadband is better somewhere else" for most places? Anecdotally, most people I know complain about the connection where they live.

<comment><USER76> Moving from Sweden to the US (Florida) I can't say I've noticed much of a difference in connectivity. 100, 200, 300 & 1000MBps is readily available in both places but usually around at 3x the price in the US.

Rural America seems to be an entirely different story.

<comment><USER77> 15M down / 768k up checking in from rural america. I have to stop my camera on video conferences if i want to talk.

<comment><USER78> My parents have been trying to get high speed internet for years. They're in a semi-rural, but suburbanizing area. They are surrounded by houses that have cable, but their house is older so it doesn't have it.

They had microwave for a while, but it didn't work in bad weather, and then the trees got too tall. They've finally resorted to _paying the cable company_ thousands of dollars to bring cable to their house. It's such a ridiculous opaque process though that my mom basically has to stalk cable vans in her area and give the tech an earful to get status updates. The good techs know how shitty the process is, and one even gave her his personal phone number. However, it's not his department, so his ability to make things happen is limited.

She made the payment back in November, they got permits in January, and she hasn't heard from them since. I asked about how to get this done on DSLReports a while back, and the answer was to just keep calling them over and over and over, because every now and then you'd find someone with a clue.

<comment><USER77> I'm probably going to end up dropping $8-10k into a tower and point to point microwave links to two different cities. The ISP i'm on now wants $30K to put fiber in my house, but their network is so bad at the edge that i'd still need to get a loop to something else to get reasonable performance.

I'd still do the tower and resell b/w to recoup some of the costs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I was working with a semi-competitor of Netflix a few years back and their tech is great of course, their product offering is amazing, but their real magic is with their contracts with ISP's.

I don't know the details of the contracts of course, but they are likely to get a dedicated bandwidth within the ISP, if that comes under strain, of course, that contract comes into play. So I think it's not just the datacenters involved..

<comment><USER80> [https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> The reality is that there is no capacity issue. ISP networks are perfectly capable to handle the demand (spoiler: it hasn't increased much, see public IX stats). This is an attempt to revive the net neutrality debate from big ISPs through the EU. This is about the wish of ISPs to double-dip (be paid once by their end users, and another by the content providers).

</comment><comment><USER82> Does it mean they'll pay me back for the 4K package?

<comment><USER83> Why would they? Do they pay you back when your ISP can't provide enough bandwidth for 4K? How much is 4K on top of regular Netflix service? Is it worth worrying about?

<comment><USER84> Why would they? Because they charge extra for it and they're themselves have stopped providing this service.

<comment><USER85> >and they're themselves have stopped providing this service //

Is it them, or is it overselling by ISPs?

<comment><USER86> There's no evidence the ISPs were overloaded by Netflix traffic recently. Note that this conversation was with politicians, not ISPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> So they are rolling out gigabit fibre in homes but 5mbs is overloading the system?

<comment><USER45> Just because they're selling you Gigabit, doesn't mean that they actually have the capacity to provide you a guaranteed Gigabit pipe. They're overprovisioning their network and hoping that not enough people want to max their connection out at the same time.

<comment><USER70> In other words, a bill of goods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> So they are throttling because they can't fulfill the demand and want to save money on network traffic?

<comment><USER89> The EU asked them to. They were having no problem keeping up.

<comment><USER88> Why would anyone in Europe ask for that. All ISP publicity said they have more than enough capacity available.

Also it would be the first time that a U.S net company does something voluntarily just by kindly asking.

<comment><USER89> [https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/tech/netflix-internet- ove...](https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/tech/netflix-internet-overload- eu/index.html)

"European Commissioner Thierry Breton, who is responsible for the EU internal market covering more than 450 million people, spoke to Netflix (NFLX) CEO Reed Hastings on Wednesday and again on Thursday about the strain video streaming was placing on networks."

Apparently the EU thinks it's a problem.

The truth is that this will probably make little difference, but it makes sense for Netflix to do this since it doesn't cost them anything and now they are owed a favor by a regulator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> Let's first address the elephant in the room.

If it weren't for the ridiculous power of the copyright industry, there would be no problem.

Because _non-live streaming doesn 't make sense_ except as an artificial way to control copyright.

There literally is no other reason why you would download an entire movie _and then throw it away_.

Instead of this bullshit, people could easily have a small box of microSDs with their favourite films and series. You could exchange them with friends, it would be fun. Again, why did Netflix used to be mailing around DVDs instead of much more efficient read-only SDs? Oh yeah, copyright bullshit.

It's very easy to forget that everybody together made up this one completely artificial rule that, unlike normal data, this is "magical data" that we have to pretend cannot be copied or stored. What ever.

</comment><comment><USER91> What an utter joke. This is only needed because unlike the backbone operators who are pushing ridiculous record traffic through the IXs these days and don't even hit any limit on their capability, the last-mile operators have _not_ done any major investments in their infrastructure.

Cable TV internet is horribly oversold - Kabel Deutschland was already infamous, when they got bought up by Vodafone shit got even worse. DSL ... let's just say most of Germany is happy to have 16/1 ADSL. I have 100/10 FTTB via M-net and even they have load problems.

Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly expensive in Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that anyway...

tl;dr: it's not Netflix fault, it's last mile telcos who have done jack shit the last decade to build out new FTTP infra coupled with appropriate uplink capacity to the nearest IX, but people are too dumb to understand this and blame Netflix instead of directing their anger towards politicians and telcos where it belongs!

<comment><USER92> > Cellphone internet is even worse but as data is horribly expensive in > Germany no one dares streaming Netflix over that anyway...

Luckily we have net-neutrality infringing features like Telekom's "Stream On" where it's included /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> It is kind of unrelated to this, but I am asking maybe somebody could help me. Do you guys know where can I read and learn more about the details of the Netflix network? I looked at their technical blog, but I wanted something more detailed and technical. Is there something like Netflix research papers (e.g. Google published Bigtable IIRC).

<comment><USER94> Its not a whitepaper, but look into OpenConnect, since i believe thats how they serve a majority of traffic

[https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/](https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I don't quite understand the "how dare they!" attitude some of the comments here convey.

If you want to talk legality etc., most contracts have a "force majeur" clause that would cover this sort of thing. And even if it didn't, if enough businesses start having to modify or break service agreements in these ways through a world-wide crisis then governments will step in and legislate them out of liability. There won't be too much sympathy for the "victims" of Netflix either. Not from the general public, especially those who lose friends or family to the pandemic. Not over someone's pixelated experience of End Game or The Office. I know people who are sick, one closely, and I don't know if they're going to survive. Suffering through SD quality (or worse!) isn't what I concern myself with at the moment.

<comment><USER96> Yea. And what was the process here? One guy told another he's afraid. That's not how we in EU are used to governing. This is not a dictatorship.

There is absolutely no legal reason to downgrade performance of service. It's a big WTF.

What's next. A guy telling other to sell lesser quality of what?

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> Are they gonna cut my bill also? I would hate to pay for a service i a, not getting (4k streaming)

<comment><USER98> You will still get 4k resolution. Just at 25% less bitrate. But since the thing that's necessary to fulfill your contract is the number of pixels, which have not changed, you are out of luck, unless you find some clause in your contract with Netflix that guarantees a certain bitrate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> Torrent as means of distribution would have been just perfect for the bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER98> I am really wondering whether this means they have to re-encode all the streams at 25% less bitrate, or whether they already have them available at that exact bitrate and can thus just change a default.

Because what I usually observe when Netflix compromises the streaming quality because of bandwidth problems with my connection is a far larger drop in quality than would be expected at just 25% less bits - it normally feels more like 75% less bitrate, if it doesn't switch down from HD to SD entirely.

<comment><USER89> I'm sure they already have the entire library at that bitrate as one of the standard bitrates.

In fact, you've probably gotten that bitrate in the past and just not noticed, because you have to be looking hard to see the quality difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> It won't be just for 30 days. How can people complain about Netflix quality now? I will be grateful if we have anything still working in a few months...

<comment><USER84> Noone is complaining about quality, people are complaining about having to pay for quality they're not getting. Netflix can easily charge everyone the SD package price during this time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> Reminds me why I love my ISP. My residential fiber ISP in Rochester New York, Greenlight Networks, decided to give everyone symmetric upload connections for free upgrade in the name of Corona Virus (used to be 10:1 download:upload). So now I have a 1gbps symmetric for only $100/mo as their mid-tier option. They even have a 2gbps symmetric option also. That is how ISPs should be handling this.

</comment><comment><USER102> I dont understand the issue here, as far as i am aware Netflix installs media boxes at the data-centers of every ISP. And a video demand from netflix device is directly resolved to these media boxes instead of resolving the content and downloading through Internet. So arent they already saving Internet bandwidth and rely on a Intranet like solution for distributing its contents?

</comment><comment><USER103> Netflix is full of BS anyway. I have yet to see a single instance of 4K despite paying for it & having suitable gear and fiber line.

<comment><USER89> Go to [http://fast.com](http://fast.com) and see what bandwidth you're getting.

There is a good chance your ISP is limiting your bandwidth to Netflix, preventing you from getting 4K.

If you get a good speed from that test, you should call Netflix customer service to help you diagnose.

<comment><USER103> 970 mbps.

>good chance your ISP is limiting your bandwidth to Netflix

Possible, but unlikely. Forunate enough to be in a jurisdiction where broadband generally does what it says on the tin.

Also using the netflix win10 app and hdcp screen so that I can get all that juicy DRM.

>you should call Netflix customer service to help you diagnose.

Yeah probably a good idea

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> This is interesting, would YouTube cut the quality too? If no, does this mean Netflix has much higher traffic than YouTube?

</comment><comment><USER105> Comcast has been doing some emergency maintenance and/or upgrades with 1-2 hour downtimes for the last week or two in San Francisco. Haven't noticed any slowdowns here though. I imagine they had a few upgrades ready to go and decided to pull the trigger on them/roll them out ahead of schedule.

</comment><comment><USER106> With Netflix having content caches this seems like incompetency from the EU commissioner paired with an openness to virtue signaling in this time from Netflix. Isn't it the job of the ISP to shape the traffic accordingly if they overprovisioned and are now failing their customers due to that?

</comment><comment><USER107> If there ever was a quintessential example of a "first world problem", this is it right here.

</comment><comment><USER108> Lately i was looking for internet transfer data for last, say, 60 days per day to confirm / reject claim transfer is higher now in Europe. But couldnt find it. And broken Google results does not help much. Do you know of any of such resources?

</comment><comment><USER109> Makes one wonder, why doesn't europe have a netflix of their own?

Considering europe has a GDP comparable to the US and a few hundred million more people, you'd think they'd have one or two or more netflixes of their own.

</comment><comment><USER110> Time for the Negroponte Switch [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negroponte_switch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negroponte_switch)

</comment><comment><USER111> Swede here:

Ok, I'll unsubscribe from Netflix. I've been eying those HBO shows anyway.

Edit: 8-year running subscription now cancelled. I have no polite words for what I feel for this action by Netflix. Fxxk them.

</comment><comment><USER112> Kind of off topic, but has anyone used Nvidia's Shield TV "AI Upscaling"? Super curious if it would make the viewing experience better for situations like this.

</comment><comment><USER113> similar to the other discussion thread about this.... what is this based on? Who's pressuring who to get a meeting with Netflix to make this kind of request?

</comment><comment><USER114> Well, I hope Netflix is going to cut prices just as well.

</comment><comment><USER115> Had my first Netflix problem today at 5pm. Has always been solid before today. Other streaming services were good (though YouTube searching etc looked loaded)

</comment><comment><USER116> The real news is that Europe's internet backbone cannot handle this stress test. Once this blows over that needs addressed.

</comment><comment><USER117> And this is how I will switch to lower tier plan. As paying and not getting service seems to be unfair even with COVID-19 in sight

</comment><comment><USER118> BBC: It is not clear if this applies to the special snow flakes on the island off of Europe.

Netflix: You're Europeans again, England. Suck it.

Scotland: Ha ha.

<comment><USER119> Actually, we've never NOT been Europeans, and we've never NOT been in Europe. Europe's just a continent ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe)).

However, we did recently leave the European Union. (See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union.)) Completely different thing, but very commonly confused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER120> Kodi and mpv continue to work as normal...

<comment><USER121> Jellyfin is _really_ nice if you have a semi-powerful, wired-network machine to run it on. Former Kodi user, now a convert.

Kodi on an Rpi makes a good cast target for it, though.

<comment><USER122> What is semipowerful, approximately?

<comment><USER121> The main thing is being able to handle transcoding for certain clients that need it. I've got it in Docker on an oldish workstation I bought for like $100 on eBay and threw an SSD in for the OS, but that thing's surely serious overkill. If you're only streaming to one or two clients at a time, being on a wired network and having hardware support for any codecs you'll be dealing with are probably the most important factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> Should we look forward to a 25% discount too? :-) Hopefully this is not going to be downgrading to SD.

</comment><comment><USER124> Such a shame that multicast never took off.

Would save tremendous amounts of bandwidth in times like this.

<comment><USER125> This may work when a live stream is being watched at many locations from a single or few sources, but in the case of video on demand, the utility of multicast would be very limited – maybe some folks would coincidentally request the same packets at the same time, but the chance of that should be vanishingly low.

</comment></comment><comment><USER126> Best approach is just cancel Netflix (saying this was the reason) and go back to the torrents -- they will still have the best quality.

They are lowering quality (of service or the catalog size, not always video) and keeping or increasing the prices for a while. Using a global pandemic as an excuse is just a new low.

<comment><USER127> Hogging bandwidth is detrimental to everyone, especially emergency personnel. Please don't do this. The government wouldn't ask if there wasn't a need. The alternative is having everyone's internet cut outright.

<comment><USER128> I'm sorry - I'm sure you mean well, but this is downright false. This is not the US. In most European countries bandwidth is plentiful and this is completely unneeded political intervention based on not understanding technology. ISPs do actually upgrade their infrastructure without it being past collapse in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER129> Is it just me or has Hulu been down entirely for the past couple of days?

</comment><comment><USER130> And Disney+ hasn't even launched yet. March 24th will be interesting

</comment><comment><USER131> I'm curios to what load the cellular networks are seeing

</comment><comment><USER132> Are they going to deliver the lower quality videos with AV1?

</comment><comment><USER133> 2020, year of the VHS

<comment><USER134> We still subscribe to the Netflix DVD service. Now filling our queue.

<comment><USER133> such a luxury

<comment><USER134> It works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER135> Anyone know where that remote is from in the picture?

</comment><comment><USER136> If we have Ultra HD plan, should we downgrade?

</comment><comment><USER137> i severely lucked out being in a college town during all this, so many people just left the town, our networks are blazing :P

</comment><comment><USER138> Everything in AtOmXpLuS.CoM

</comment><comment><USER139> Crazy

</comment><comment><USER140> man everyone here's an expert all of a sudden.

</comment><comment><USER141> Netflix forced to give customers a lower quality product instead of ISPs forced to give customers the product they're paying for. Classic!

</comment><comment><USER142> That's all that you need to know about the efficiency of remote work

</comment><comment><USER143> This is totally offtopic but since bunch of people are talking about torrenting here I figured I'd ask - are you getting subtitles from somewhere?

I think my English is pretty good but still watching shows without subs feels like it takes more work and doesn't let me focus on the content.

I used to use opensubtitles.org but it's gotten from difficult to use to impossible to use due to all the popups and crap like that.

</comment><comment><USER144> This sucks. If bandwidth were metered, the market would ration is appropriately. Generally speaking, anything "free" or "unlimited" gets misallocated. When you put a price on something, it gets better.

<comment><USER145> What's the point of rationing something that costs a hundredth of a cent per GB?

You get 10TB of bandwidth for a dollar. Once average usage per subscriber goes over that, then we can talk.

<comment><USER9> I think the real problem is that the supply is too inelastic. The marginal cost of delivering more data is trivial, until part of your network gets congested, and then your short-term options are limited. This is the same problem that water utilities often face: it's cheap, until you run out.

Assigning a single rate ($/TB) requires you to make some assumptions that are at risk of being violated in exceptional circumstances. Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours is too complicated for consumers to keep track of and their options for changing behavior are limited, so this earns the ISP more money but doesn't eliminate congestion during peak hours.

<comment><USER144> > Using variable pricing to charge more during peak hours is too complicated > for consumers to keep track of

Why? It works for electricity.

<comment><USER9> Peak vs off-peak prices for electricity aren't that far apart—up to a factor of 3 in my area for residential service. And that's for a fixed schedule of peak/shoulder/off-peak hours. More dynamic demand-based pricing of electricity _doesn 't_ work all that well for residential service; it basically requires automated load-shifting that's far more practical for industrial customers than residential.

The cost curve for internet service during peak hours is a lot steeper. I think it would take much more than a 3x price multiplier during peak hours to get any noticeable demand reduction beyond what streaming applications already do by dropping down to lower resolutions automatically. (Assuming that the base cost for off-peak usage is remotely realistic, ie. orders of magnitude lower than the metered prices we pay for cellular data in the US.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER146> Makes you think, how much further we could stretch things if we were all using the Nims/C/C++ of the world instead of the Ruby's.

Please don't immediately flame, I'm just saying objectively, we could stretch hardware out much further. What do you guys think about this?

<comment><USER147> I don't think C++ generates more efficient packets than Ruby.....

<comment><USER148> In fact they are more efficient, but not as elegant.</comment></comment></comment>


Forcing myself to learn RoR - <AUTHOR> http://blog.daemonl.com/2013/02/forcing-myself-to-learn-ror.html

<comment><USER2> He wants to learn RoR because he wants to learn "a new language" but by the sounds of it he isn't too psyched about learning a whole new web framework. I don't blame him, once you have seen one MVC framework..

So, why not just learn ruby but learn it in a context that has nothing to do with web frameworks? For example a program that can play music, a terminal script that automates something or a program to procedurally draw fractals.

You will learn ruby quicker because you won't have to get bogged down in details about how rails decides to do things.

If you find that you like the language more than what you are used to and wish you could write your webapps in this language you now have a solid reason to learn rails.

<comment><USER3> > You will learn ruby quicker because you won't have to get bogged down in > details about how rails decides to do things.

Exactly! ... one of the most confusing things about Rails is how much you're told not to understand some of the heavy lifting done by the framework, the monkey patching and all kinds of magic tricks all over the place.

I've done webapps programming for long now and I recently followed the Rails tutorial from beginning to end just to make sure I could remember some now obvious stuff about testing, etc. and I understand it can be completely overwhelming if you try to learn all the Ruby + Rails + RSpec + SCSS + jQuery combo at once.

Try something simpler, build something with Shoes (<http://shoesrb.com/>) or if you're into web apps, something like Sinatra would be a better fit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shoes looks fun! My to-learn list just grew heaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been using RoR exclusively for a few years building fairly complex companies - and still not a big fan - I think the Rails way only works in certain shops. Agreed that Rails is moving more to be the API provider only.

What Rails does for me is help with the mindset of a structured framework of good practices that is otherwise easy to let slip. So you can transition those to (say) Express.js , and then you value frameworks like Tower.js more (IMHO).

Start with Sinatra (it's more the Express of Node). Rails is great, but it's very convoluted and heavy. Ruby is a great language, so make sure to bifurcate the two.

<comment><USER5> I highly recommend skipping sinatra for padrino for anything beyond a simple site/api. It's sort of the happy middle ground between rails and sinatra.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here's a hint: If you want to learn a language or framework, pick a problem (not a stupid trivial problem like 'hello world', a real problem, like, a kandan clone, or todo list you can append to via email or something) and solve it using that language and framework.

That process will give you an understanding not only of the sort of ways the framework is useful, but the sorts of people who answer questions about it on stackoverflow, the community, tutorials, existing basic MVP bases, etc.

Code jams are great for this sort of thing.

...but, what? You want to learn it because you don't want to, and want to add the 'rails' checkex to your CV? O_o

Do yourself a favour and don't bother.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's good advice.

Not the CV, couldn't give a rats, I build every project in the language I think it should be built in, but basically because some people I respect say it's cool, and I'll never know if I don't learn it.

I'm not so keen on the meetup scene in Melbourne, but I suppose that's another thing to try.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My advice would be to learn Sinatra first. The time investment will be much lower than with Rails, IMO, and will let you know if Ruby is a good fit for you.

You might even find that Sinatra does everything you need. :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Seems to me that you think that all server-side stuff is all the same.

Learn Haskell.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm. Ok. I will. I don't even know what 'purely functional' looks like. That sounds like a much bigger and less boring stretch. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Do u know what source for the data Axios is using? - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-cases-spike-in-texas-oregon-and-arizona-1819ce9f-8565-483a-b367-b678a607154d.html <comment><AUTHOR> found it [https://covidtracking.com/api](https://covidtracking.com/api). Is it the same as viriustracking.net ?</comment>


Ask HN: How to solve the pay inequality in Tech? - <AUTHOR> Hi fellow hackers,
A thread has been trending on Twitter about pay inequality in Tech since yesterday. Looking at the salaries that people are getting in tech especially in Bay Area, US and many parts of Europe, these salaries are pretty high, I would say 8-10 times what an engineer generally makes in other "not so developed" countries like India(I'm from India). Well of course the cost of living is significantly more in US and Europe. Still i feel there's a big gap in the salaries paid.
I feel it's very unfair for good engineers to get paid less. How do we solve this problem?
I have been thinking about remote work for sometime now. I've read some companies pay same salary regardless of location. I wonder how many companies actually do this. There's another option of freelancing through platforms like Toptal, Freelancer.in etc. However these options are not practical for an average engineer.
What other options are there through which a good developer can make same salary as that of an US engineer? <comment><USER2> Pay is based on supply and demand economics, not fairness.</comment>