Show HN: I built a newsletter that sends you cheap weekend trips from your city - <AUTHOR> https://briskvoyage.com <comment><USER2> You know, I really like this idea. It's simple, straight-forward, the website loads, and its demographic is mostly everyone. Good stuff. One qualm is that two scrollbars show up, probably from some overflow: scroll stuff. Would consider looking at that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'll take a look at the scroll bar issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice. How do you decide if a trip is "cheap"? Do you track an average or have a threshold?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right, it uses the 90-day average price of flight + hotel. I take the z-score relative to that and filter for trips with lower z-scores.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does it include nearby airports? I have two airports nearby that each have better deals depending on where you're going.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it uses all airports within 40 miles of your location (or your closest airport).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wait.... this is the kind of thing we hoped future technology would do in the 80's.... Well done!

</comment><comment><USER6> All the examples include a flight, is there support for local driving trips? Driving an hour is faster/cheaper than plane fare.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not currently — this is just for flight and hotel combinations. Good idea though, I want to add that along with train and boat trips.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Smart. Excited to see how this pans out

</comment><comment><USER8> Nice one. Congratulations. Which newsletter provider are you using?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks - just using Amazon SES to send the emails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work. I'm curious about how you built this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. The front end is hosted with Netlify and the back end uses Chalice: [https://github.com/aws/chalice](https://github.com/aws/chalice) It also uses Chrome Puppeteer for scraping.

Chalice is super awesome. I'm planning to write a blog post on the tech.

<comment><USER10> not your parent comment, but I think they mean how you get the data, not the tech stack</comment></comment></comment>


Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning <comment><USER2> This is relatively new:

 _> March 2015: The German Federal Office for Safety in Information Technology bans JBIG2 from being used for archival purposes. _

</comment><comment><USER3> The similar blocks technique used in JBIG2 is what's called the prediction step in many image codecs, or intra prediction in video. That specific technique is a perfectly fine idea so I've always wondered why more codecs don't use it - usually they don't let motion vectors point into the current frame.

But usually there's a step after it called residual coding, where you subtract the predicted image from the original and send the difference to make up for errors. Just leaving that out is, um, interesting.

<comment><USER4> > JBIG2, the image format used in the affected PDFs, usually has lossless and > lossy operation modes. Pattern Matching & Substitution" (PM&S) is usually > the standard operation mode for lossy JBIG2, and "Soft Pattern Matching" > (SPM) for lossless JBIG2

> Both operation modes have the basics in common: Images are cut into small > segments, which are grouped by similarity. For every group only a > representative segment is is saved that gets reused instead of other group > members, which may cause character substitution. Different to PM&S, SPM > corrects such errors by additionally saving difference images containing the > differences of the reused symbols in comparison to the original image. At > Xerox, by error the PM&S mode seems to have been used not only in the > "normal" compression mode but also in the "higher" and "high" modes.

<comment><USER3> In sensible codecs, lossy and lossless modes use all the same steps. You then make it lossy by rounding the residual values, so they fit in less bits. Here they have nothing in between 100% and 0% quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very interesting and has been resubmited a few times. Most popular: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6156238) (570 points, 655 days ago, 112 comments )

<comment> digital-rubber Thought i got a deja-vu reading the title. Thanks for confirming my memory still sort of works :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Talk from 31nd Chaos Communication Congress: [https://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6558_-_de_-...](https://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6558_-_de_- _saal_g_-_201412282300_-_traue_keinem_scan_den_du_nicht_selbst_gefalscht_hast_- _david_kriesel.html)

mp4 file has a additional english audio track.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have a pdf scan of a text book that exibits this problem. It's a complex math book with a lot of superscripts, subscripts and combinations of them. Some are the wrong symbol - eg i instead of j, etc. It was very difficult to study from not being able to trust any symbol. I put it down to bad editing of the printed original until I found out about this story sometime ago.

<comment><USER8> One of the links in the comments of the original post has a good example of that:

[http://everist.org/NobLog/20131122_an_actual_knob.htm#jbig2](http://everist.org/NobLog/20131122_an_actual_knob.htm#jbig2)

(JBIG2 discussion near bottom, rest of page is about electronics.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's not OCR, but I would call it Optical Pattern Recognition. I think it's kind of a compression, similar image segments are stored only once in memory and repeated occurrences are linked to the one stored copy. Unfortunately identifying similar image segments is not that accurate in these Xerox scanner devices.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Everyone who gets in touch with me requesting help to evaluate their own > situation can be certain not to get his identity revealed by me. I acted > this way across the entire xerox saga and I won't stop this way of acting > now. My contact data can be found in the imprint.

Can the author actually legally make this guarantee?

<comment><USER11> What is the legal issue?

<comment><USER12> Presumably a government agency could require him to disclose this information.

<comment><USER13> In that case, no one can make this guarantee. The author's home might be infiltrated, or the might be threatened with death in order to force the information.

Suppose this were to go to court. If there are multiple interpretations for a phrase, and one interpretation is not realizable (due to almost tautological reasons), then the courts are very unlikely to use that definition. Instead, they will likely say there were implicit qualifiers like "to within the limits of what it allowed by the law" and "unless believably threatened with the loss of life, limb, home, or similar serious physical threat" or "following information security principles appropriate for the expected threat model of an civil/economics topic".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Yeah, this is two years old.

</comment><comment><USER15> "OCR rot"

<comment><USER16> If you read the article, you'd know that OCR isn't used here. The issue is way more interesting than that.

<comment><USER4> Well... this issue isn't exactly unrelated to OCR. OCR compresses images of text by representing them as text, which is more abstract and therefore takes less space to describe. The particular glyphs being recognized are fixed in advance -- platonic a, b, c, etc.

Here, it would be fair to describe what's going on as OCR with the glyphs not being fixed in advance, but rather being discovered on the fly by the algorithm. The entire concept is to identify sections of the image that "show the same thing", and replace the data in those sections with pointers to a single representative patch. That's really not so different from compressing image data that looks suspiciously similar to a capital A down to the one byte 0x41. It's just that different image sections are being Optically Recognized as "similar to each other" rather than "similar to this hardcoded reference glyph".

<comment><USER17> OCR generally does not work as you describe. The common case is for the OCR system to tag charactes in an image, so that text may be selected. More advanced systems will generate fonts from the images and replace the text with those. Either way, the text isn't reduced to a single byte.

<comment><USER4> I've read plenty of kindle books that were clearly the product of OCR. True, "cl" hasn't reduced the image of a lowercase d to a single byte, but that was the intention. Don't confuse OCR, the concept, with OCR-as-implemented-in-a- particular-way, or with a-process-that-we-called-OCR-because-OCR-is-involved- at-some-point. OCR is any system that recognizes sections of image data as matching letter shapes[1].

"Generating a font from the image and replacing the original image data with that" is a very good description of what's going on here.

[1] Or numbers, or symbols like parentheses. The basic concept is letters.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why don't Amazon, Target, Walmart implement product queueing? - <AUTHOR> For products like hand sanitizer and masks, why can't there be orderly queues, with quotas, so that everyone can be treated fairly?  As a software engineer, I find myself seriously considering writing scrapers to watch over the product pages and notify my wife when something is in stock.  It's madness for her to be clicking a dozen pages throughout the day to try and "snag" a couple of these in-demand products.
It seems so easy to grab a couple of engineers and implement a rudimentary pre-order system (pretty sure they already have pre-ordering of some sort).
Anyone with the inside knowledge know what's going on?  Is this a political issue? <comment><USER2> People would forget and abuse the return policy. Also, they constantly change prices so you would either get screwed or lock into a price the seller doesn't want to offer for a billion orders.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be ok with the changing prices--I use Amazon's subscribe and save, and the price fluctuations are reasonable. If memory serves, if the price is totally out of whack or the item is out of stock, I get a notification about it.

I've also never had to return a subscribe and save item, but I imagine if the policy was the same with these "pre-orders," there wouldn't be an issue, since subscribe and save has been in place for decades.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You mean I would go on the web site and say I want product X and then I have dibs on the Nth next one to be available, say three hours or three weeks later?

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's say I want this hand sanitizer:

[https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01HEUD8YS](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B01HEUD8YS)

I should be able to purchase a quantity of 1-2, even if it's out of stock. I'm completely fine with being number 527,374 in line, but I want to be sure I will get it and only have to do this once. Instead of refreshing this page 20 times a day for a week, in hopes of hitting the several minutes when it becomes available and then inevitably sells out.

This is especially true for masks--impossible to be a good citizen and buy them, when there is no sane way of buying them and you have to jump through the hoops above.

I really don't want to write a scraper because it seems unethical, to get a "leg up" on the non-tech savvy people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://www.nowinstock.net/](https://www.nowinstock.net/)

This site does something similar to what you want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you; for me, it's an ethical issue to use something like this. Some old lady who's not tech-savvy would "lose her spot" to me. I'd like to understand why the ecommerce giants can't institute a "fair for all" system.</comment></comment>


Fletcher: A framework to integrate FPGA accelerators with Apache Arrow - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/johanpel/fletcher <comment><USER2> A great project. Here is more info:

[https://openpowerfoundation.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/J...](https://openpowerfoundation.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/04/John-Peltenburg.pdf)

The conclusion is as follows:

\- Serialization may cause significant bottlenecks in big data frameworks

\- Prevents effective deployment of accelerators in some cases

\- Apache Arrow can help to alleviate bottlenecks

\- We created an FPGA interface generation framework for Arrow

\- Fletcher works with SNAP

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for providing more details.</comment></comment>


China releases its own programming language Mulan - <AUTHOR> https://cntechpost.com/2020/01/17/china-releases-its-own-programming-language-mulan/ <comment><USER2> Anyone have a source where a person could try it?</comment>


On MBA's - <AUTHOR> http://ghostwriter.posterous.com/on-mbas

<comment><USER2> Quite a good analogy (special forces) although maybe a little stroking self ;)

It's probably worth mentioning the "T" skill set where startup employees _can_ do lots of tasks very well, and also dive deep in a specific skill.

</comment><comment><USER3> The debt that MBAs leave school with, and the peer push towards making it big (the finance crowd) create guys are just too singularly focused on the financial aspects of a situation, whereas many developers are happy to simply be working on a cool or interesting problem. Personalities can also be totally in conflict as the author mentions (I certainly wouldn't want to spend considerable time with the MBAs he describes), which can be a pretty terrible recipe for a startup "team."

I wonder if the higher ranked entrepreneurial MBA programs are better at producing more palatable characters for startups.

</comment><comment><USER4> The plural of MBA is "MBAs". Adding the apostrophe makes it possessive, not plural.

Grammar police out!

<comment><USER5> I prefer the apostrophe-free version myself, but for what it's worth, apostrophes for plural acronyms seem to be fairly accepted. Here's an example from an nytimes blog: [http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&...](http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=blog.nytimes.com/freakonomics&pos=Bar1&sn2=4c064693/12cbd2ee&sn1=830c3a64/99f17898&camp=nyt2010-circ- tr- bar1_international_366RU&ad=093009-TR_bar1_366RU&goto=http%3A%2F%2Ftimesreader%2Enytimes%2Ecom%2Ftimesreader%2Findex%2Ehtml%3FcampaignId%3D366RU)

Grammar public defense attorney out :-)</comment></comment>


Show HN: My project is a top comment in Reddit's top story  - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to get some input on my project from the Hacker News community.
The Reddit thread can be found here: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/j5bl3/can_whoever_makes_browsers_please_consider_adding/
The extension itself is located here: http://www.mutetab.com/
Basically, my project is a Chrome extension that attempts to provide browser-wide sound management to the extent possible within an extension.  It helps a user find what is making sound by identifying what is possibly making sound, allows automatically muting background sounds, and provides a context menu with sound management commands that will use JavaScript where available and otherwise hides elements from the page.
It does not solve the more general "mute tab" problem -- if a plugin instance doesn't have a JavaScript API, then the only way I can mute it is by hiding it from the page (like Flashblock does).  This is unideal because if it is a game or a video, hiding and reshowing it will restart it.
I'm most interested in getting technical feedback (please read the FAQ since I mention some ideas that I haven't heard anyone discuss) but am also interested in feedback about how I am presenting things (what I'm doing might be too complicated for many users to understand) and general feedback. <comment><USER2> This was rejected by Chrome developers because it wouldn't work with Flash. How does yours handle this?

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't solve that problem.

"It does not, however, universally allow muting a video or game so that it can be played silently while listening to background sounds coming from another tab. (This is not possible in Chrome without either plug-ins such as Flash being updated or Chrome's plug-in architecture undergoing an unlikely major redesign.)"

Instead, it:

"is a Chrome extension that helps you manage the sound coming from tabs in Google Chrome. It helps you to find which tab(s) are making sounds and provides browser-wide management of tab muting (calling JavaScript functions where available, otherwise hiding it from the page), including automatically muting all background tabs."

Basically, the problems mentioned by the Chrome devs are real (at least without modifying Chrome to use a separate Flash process for each tab or updating Flash itself), but it is still possible to give users more control over browser sound than they are currently presented with.

(Updated submission to try to make this more clear.)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> On front page of Slashdot now, too

<comment><AUTHOR> And gizmodo, lifehacker.</comment></comment>


Hourly 4-second sprints prevent impairment of postprandial fat metabolism - <AUTHOR> https://journals.lww.com/acsm-msse/Abstract/9000/Hourly_4_s_Sprints_Prevent_Impairment_of.96302.aspx <comment><USER2> 'Hourly 4-second sprints' is actually 5 times an hour 4 secs (bicycle) sprints. So it is more precisely about every 12 minutes. I do not understand why it says 'hourly'? Because it sounds less often?

<comment><USER3> It must be one set of 5 reps per hour, not one sprint every 12 minutes.

That's how exercise usually works, and the study is concerned with the "least amount of exercise that can acutely improve fat metabolism and other aspects of health". Activity spaced out every 12 minutes would be disruptive and defeat that purpose.

<comment><USER4> Article states 4s activity followed by 45s seated rest, repeated 5 times. So you're actually occupied with the workout task for 4m+05s every hour, even though only 20s of that is sprinting.

<comment><USER5> And it's not an activity you'll do at or near your desk, so you're going to have to travel somewhere to do it.

<comment><USER6> It depends on your desk.

<comment><USER5> True. And the location of said desk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This study determined if the interruption of prolonged sitting (i.e.; 8-h of > inactivity) with hourly cycling sprints of only 4-s duration each (i.e.; 4-s > x 5 per h x 8-h = 160-s per day; SPRINTS) improves PPL. The 4-s sprints > employed an inertial load ergometer and were followed by 45-s of seated > rest.

So you would need to take a 5 x (4-s sprint + 45-s rest) = 245 seconds exercise break from work every hour and in return you could get the following results?

> No differences (p>0.05) between interventions were found for plasma insulin > or glucose AUC. However, SPRINTS displayed a 31% (408±119 vs. 593±88 > mg/dL/6h; p=0.009) decrease in plasma triglyceride incremental AUC and a 43% > increase in whole body fat oxidation (P=0.001) when compared to SIT.

Does "whole body fat oxidation" mean that the an average male calorie burn of 2500 per day would be multiplied with 1,43 to 3575 calories per day?

<comment><USER8> > Does "whole body fat oxidation" mean that the an average male calorie burn > of 2500 per day would be multiplied with 1,43 to 3575 calories per day?

It seems extremely unlikely to me. I hesitate to bring up the 2nd law of thermodynamics because I know if frustrates a lot of people in these discussions. However, bear with me.

"Calories" in this context refers to kilocalories. Burning 1 kilocalorie produces enough energy to raise 1 kg of water 1 degree C. So burning an extra 1000 kilocalories per day means producing enough heat to raise the body temperature of a 100 kg person 10 degrees over the course of a day. Although our bodies are really good at cooling, that's not an insigificant amount of heat. It's of a magnitude that is relatively easily measured.

If such a phenomenon were to exist, it seems inconceivable to me that the researchers would not try to measure it. I mean it is literally the holy grail of dieting. I think it is considerably more likely that the effect they are measuring is very interesting, but does not extrapolate out to this logical conclusion.

<comment><USER9> Your analysis seems to be in the right direction but I think that the body uses this energy in many more ways than just heat. Moving muscles, pumping blood, keeping ionic gradients in the kidneys, and in cells, producing waste products, do seem to take energy. Also, consider the water we lose due to evaporation just by breathing, we are constantly creating a significant amount of heat and dissipating it into the environment. This extra 1000Kcal would be roughly a 50 watt increase in average metabolic rate during a whole day.

It does seem a bit high but anecdotally, my body temperature is 1C higher on days I do some tennis early in the morning. And more importantly my oftenly cold hands go away, so radiating more of it away.

<comment><USER8> The thing is that because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, that energy does not go away when we use it. Moving muscles, pumping blood, etc uses energy and transforms it to heat. It's a bit weird that energy doesn't go away when we "use" it, but that's how the universe works :-) What _can_ happen is that energy is locked up in chemical structures (or, I guess as physical potential energy). So if you evaporate water, the energy goes into the water and stays there until the vapour condenses. Things like that. But it's pretty easy to isolate a person and measure the amount of heat they produce (to a gross level like we are talking about here).

But, yes. Exercise will drive your metabolism and cause you to be warmer.

<comment><USER10> It's easier to measure the volume of exhaled air and extrapolate calories from that, via CO2 expelled.

<comment><USER11> Different fuels create different amounts of CO2 per joule though. This is not just a truism in combating climate change but also a key tool when observing metabolism. Whenever someone gives numbers for how much of some exercise energy consumption is from fats and how much is from carbs it is determined by measuring CO2 output and comparing that to measured energy output.

<comment><USER10> Oh huh, I hadn't realized that, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ah, the sprint is being rediscovered once again for it's ability to squeeze maximum effect into minimum working time.

If you get a chance, try to find a copy of "A System of Multi-year Training in Weightlifting" by A.S. Medvedyev (a translation of the 1980s Soviet Olympic Weightlifting program for coaches).

It's the culmination of decades of studies across the entire Soviet athletics program about what works and what doesn't.

The summer programming shifts almost exclusively to sprinting, and only a few hundred meters per day, because that's what they found is enough work for anyone who isn't a specialized running athlete.

I follow it as soon as I can ever summer and it's immediately obvious that my metabolism increases.

IMO the secret about sprinting vs distance running is that your body can't optimize for efficiency. You can marginally increase ATP capacity, but the only thing getting better at maximum effort sprints does is make you able to produce more power while doing maximum effort sprints. It stays hard, without needing to increase volume much over time.

<comment><USER13> Can you plz share how do you incorporate sprints in your training plan?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Four men and four women participated in two trials"

I'm not a medical researcher; is this a normal size for a study?

<comment><USER15> Say you are trying to distinguish between a placebo and a cyanide pill; test subjects are young rats (base rate of death extremely low). How large of a sample size do you need? I think one control, one test subject is enough to be certain, because the base rate of death is insanely low, when measured on a per-minute basis.

Sample sizes can be small and still very significant when the effect is large.

<comment><USER16> I would want about four of each rat still. The control could die of something else...

<comment><USER17> I'm quite confident the only reason to use four rats in a study of cyanide is that you really want to kill two rats.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, because you already have a very well-established prior on the effects of cyanide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> And here I thought this was about software development.

<comment><USER20> According to the [site guidelines]([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)):

> Hacker News Guidelines

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes > more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the > answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're > evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or > disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's > probably off-topic.

I'd say this falls under "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

<comment><USER21> I think they were trying to make a joke about sprints and agile software development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm 7 pounds into the "Covid 15" despite daily exercise. I may give this a try and see if I see results

<comment><USER23> Right before the pandemic, I entered a body composition challenge that just ended. I lost ten lbs of fat and gained one lb of muscle. Another guy lost 6 lbs of fat and gained 4 lbs of muscle. You can't trust your scale. Go by the scale in addition to how you look, how your clothes fit, and your body measurements.

For better data, get a Dexa body scan.

<comment><USER22> There's only a handful of them[Dexa] in the USA, if I want to find something local (Kansas City) what should I be looking for?

<comment><USER23> I'm from Utah, so I really have no clue, but a quick search revealed this: [https://www.dexafit.com/locations/kansas/kansas- city](https://www.dexafit.com/locations/kansas/kansas-city)

<comment><USER22> NICE, thanks, something I'll look into

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now _that 's_ Agile

<comment><USER25> We've found that continuous flow works better than 4-second sprints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This study used cycling sprints. I wonder if a similar effect would be observed with say, a set of pushups or squats every hour

<comment><USER27> Leg muscles are a lot larger. You can easily stay warm while cycling or walking at a brisk pace in the winter. Less so when standing still and doing pushups or situps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Who has time to do 4s sprints???

<comment><USER29> yeah because after my 4s sprint it will take me 20s to walk back to my desk.

<comment><USER5> Past the rest of the open office floor-plan as sales stares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It was strange at first, when everyone got their Apple Watch and started standing up, seemingly at random, in meetings. "Gotta meet my stand goal!"

Gonna be really weird when they go tear-assing down the hallway

<comment><USER31> Oop, someone's got the zoomies!

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ok 4s/hour. 8 hours/day of sitting. So 32s day of total exercise!?!

Still probably will not do it.

<comment><USER33> That is also how I initially read it, but the paper states that there were 5 sprints per hours for a total of 160 seconds a day.

From the paper:

> i.e.; 4-s x 5 per h x 8-h = 160-s per day

<comment><USER34> Still probably would not do it. But why?

I wonder what other exercise modality this could be replaced with. Do 3 squats?

<comment><USER35> 1 flight of stairs.

<comment><USER17> a good comparison!

Sprinting up a flight of stairs, then walking back down, and repeating it five times, once an hour.

That I have a good gauge of. Yeah, that would feel good. Pity I live in a first-floor flat...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Don't we need to warm up before doing any max intensity exercise to prevent injury.

<comment><USER37> I've read conflicting information about warming up over the years but it at least appears to me that the consensus is slowly moving away from several common exercises such as stretching, which apparently even seems to have negative effects.

<comment><USER38> Static stretching should be avoided at the beginning of a workout.

I had assumed this was about sprinting in the sense of running as fast as possible, which would be absolutely insane to do without a warmup. I take around 20 minutes to warm up for sprinting, doing very specific exercises to prepare.

On a stationary bike though, because the range of motion is much more controlled, I can see it being a little less of an issue.

<comment><USER12> Since you're doing this every 12 minutes, you'd stay relatively warm all day. American football players don't need to warm up every time they come off the sidelines

<comment><USER38> But they do... lots of teams have stationary bikes on the sidelines. No athlete would sit motionless for 12 minutes in the middle of a competition, not too mention that players would go through a much longer warm up before the game.

But I agree that going full force very briefly on a stationary bike with no warmup is probably fine for most people.

<comment><USER12> Fair, but a lot of them do sit on the bench and do some moderate walking at most.

I'd expect people doing these regular sprints to be more aware of their body and move around more in anticipation of the next set.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I am curious if the same effect could be achieved if I just jump on jumping rope for 20 sec every our? I can even jump for a minute!

</comment><comment><USER40> The control group was asked to sit for 8 hours straight, whereas the experimental group sprinted five times. It would be more interesting if they compared it to standing up.

<comment><USER41> > whereas the experimental group sprinted five times

Per hour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> If tried an intense exercise, regardless of how long, without warming up I would hurt myself really fast.

</comment><comment><USER43> Searching for exercises having an efect and taking as less time as possible looks like panacea.

</comment><comment><USER44> OK, so what's a "4-s sprint"?

I presume that this employs a stationary bicycle. But against what resistance? Also, four seconds hardly seems enough to even reach maximum exertion.

</comment><comment><USER45> Jumping cold out of your couch/chair and sprinting 5 seconds every hour, multiple times a day, sounds to me like an optimized 'quickly destroy most of your body joints' routine.

<comment><USER46> To me - it sounds like a great way to throw up or at least get stomach sickness.

I can't imagine going full send with no warm up and not suffering some sort of issue after stopping.

<comment><USER12> Your warm-up accrues though. You're doing a little bit of exercise every 12 minutes for 8 hours.

You're not going to get sick.

<comment><USER47> Nitpick: the 4-second sprints weren't evenly distributed into each hour. They were done in sets of 5 with 45-second rest periods between sets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> How about jumping jacks?

<comment><USER49> Probably not, jumping jacks don't take much effort. Think about for how long people can sprint at their maximum speed: 3 minutes would be world class. But doing 3 minutes of jumping jacks is pretty easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> TL;DR:

An hourly ~5min cycling exercise on a stationary bicycle trainer results in a 31% decrease of area under the curve (AUC)* of postprandial triglyceride levels in blood plasma and a 43% increase in whole body fat oxidation.

The cycling exercise consisted of five 4-sec all out sprints followed by 45-sec rests.

The exercise was performed once per hour during 8 hours of sitting and compared to 8 hours of pure sitting.

[*]: [https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/132777/what- does-a...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/132777/what-does-auc- stand-for-and-what-is-it)

</comment><comment><USER51> > Four men and four women participated

Is all exercise science this weak?

<comment><USER52> sadly, almost all of it is based on samples around this small.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> p(0.05) and p(0.0001) with 8 people sample? It is hard to understand those probabilities.

</comment><comment><USER54> I'm confused. "Hourly 4s sprints" sounds like one 4 second sprint every hour but the second paragraph of the summary says

> Purpose

> This study determined if the interruption of prolonged sitting (i.e.; 8-h of > inactivity) with hourly cycling sprints of only 4-s duration each (i.e.; 4-s > x 5 per h x 8-h = 160-s per day; SPRINTS) improves PPL. The 4-s sprints > employed an inertial load ergometer and were followed by 45-s of seated > rest.

That's 5 per hour not 1 or once every 12 minutes

<comment><USER55> Every hour, they do a workout that consists of 5 repetitions of 4s sprints.

<comment><USER56> Ah, this is probably what they meant. Very poorly explained by them.

<comment><USER57> Jira is confusing too.

<comment><USER58> Especially if your sprints are four seconds long

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> > "Prevent Impairment"

So, is that a double negative and this would mean it improves fat metabolism?

</comment><comment><USER60> This was done on purpose Every hour but you can get similar results with one longer Training session. Heck I only train 3-5 days per week and problem burning fat with enough intensity or volume.

</comment><comment><USER61> >> _" Four men and four women participated in two trials"_

My uncle smoked 3 packs a day and lived to 90.

other than that, maybe just getting up and putting strains even for seconds might do the job /trick our body.

</comment><comment><USER62> I think this is mostly a curiosity.

Why do people think this is relevant for HN? Is people seriously trying to "hack" their metabolism? What for? Being able to spend, say, 16 hours sitting in front of a computer typing code away?

<comment><USER63> As I get older, I more and more realise the negative health impacts of a mostly sedantry job - anything to offset that is surely in the interests of most HN readers</comment></comment>


How accurate is weather forecast in your area? - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes I think weather forecasts are useless for me. Rarely our previsions are confirmed. For example, yesterday they said that todays temperature would be 17º to 29º (celsius) and 90% of chance to rain. Until now, no rain and temperature was higher the 25º. This forecast is accurate for you? <comment><USER2> Hi I think this is a really interesting topic. At metwit (where I work) we are building a tool that helps verify the accuracy of weather forecast

<http://metwit.com/business/forecast-validation/>

The idea behind it is quite simple: Verify on a hyperlocal bases wether forecast were correct or not using crowdsourced data.

We are prototyping this tool here in Italy with the help of the national council of research . They think it's useful to have feedback on forecasts so that they can know and study critical points in their work.

From an end-user perspective this tool will also allow us to understand which providers are better in forecasting weather for a specific area.

If you have feedback to share please do!

Mike</comment>


Ask HN: Please review my app - LoveLogger.com: World's First Pair-Blogging Platform - <AUTHOR>

I am launching private-beta of my app LoveLogger.com : Pair-Blogging Platform, where ONLY a pair of users can register to blog together. The two can share their interests, experiences, difference of opinions, memorable times they've had together or just about anything the two can blog on.
It could be you and your friend, you and your spouse/lover, you and your mom/dad/child, you and your siblings, you and your business partner or you and your student /teacher.
Please visit:
http://lovelogger.com/private-invite.php
and enter the activation code as 'ycombinator' to review my app.
I feel HN is the only place to get geeky and the most valuable suggestions. Thanks. <comment><USER2> Hey, I never got an activation email ... I checked my spam box too. Not there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Satyajit, sorry for the inconvenience. Can you please try using other mail id.</comment></comment>


NamePros: Obscure Nginx FastCGI bug uncovered in the aftermath of Duck.com move - <AUTHOR> https://www.nameprosstatus.com <comment><AUTHOR> Duck.com domain name transfer hammered NamePros servers so hard that it singlehandedly uncovered a fairly obscure bug in Nginx's FastCGI caching. It's gone unnoticed for years, including during rigorous load testing.

Preliminary evidence suggests that fastcgi_cache_key doesn't handle $cookie_* variables correctly. If the cookie doesn't exist, it seems to result in a unique key every time. (The workaround was to assign the $cookie_* variable to another variable and then use that in fastcgi_cache_key.)

If anyone is curious what sort of increase in traffic you should expect from a link to your site appearing on HN, NamePros is getting about 230 additional backend requests per second--that doesn't include anything cached by Cloudflare.

Live Monitor: [https://www.nameprosstatus.com](https://www.nameprosstatus.com)

source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665292](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665292)

</comment><comment><USER2> I appreciate the interest, but this is definitely premature. I still haven't been able to reproduce it in controlled tests. As I said in the thread to which you linked, I'll follow up once I've fully investigated.</comment>


Submitting to the App Store as a minor - <AUTHOR>

Hi everybody, Does anybody have any experience with publishing an application to the App Store while being a minor?  I would publish the app under one of my parent's names, except I would not want to pay taxes under their tax bracket.  Is there a way I could publish the app and be taxed in my own bracket (which is much lower than my parents').<p>Thanks! <comment><USER3> Assuming you're in the US (you don't say), here are the IRS rules on if you need to file a return (essentially if you have earnings on the app store of over $5700 in 2010, and probably near the same amount in 2011, _and_ your parents continue to claim you as a dependent.)

<http://www.irs.gov/publications/p929/ar02.html>

But the Ts & Cs of being an Apple registered developer (which you need to be in order to become an iOS app developer state that):

       You certify that you are of the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which you reside (at least 18 years of age in many countries) and you represent that you are legally permitted to become a Registered Apple Developer.

       Unless otherwise agreed or permitted by Apple in writing, you cannot share or transfer any benefits you receive from Apple in connection with being a Registered Apple Developer. The Apple ID and password you use to login as a Registered Apple Developer cannot be shared in any way or with any one. You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your Apple ID and password and for any activity in connection with your account. Notwithstanding the foregoing restrictions in this Section 1, if you are the parent or legal guardian of individuals between the ages of 13 and the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which you reside, you may allow such individuals to share your Apple ID and password for their use solely under your supervision and only in accordance with this Agreement. You are responsible for such individuals' compliance with and violations of this Agreement and any other Apple agreements.

So, in essence, your parents have to be the 'Developer', and you can share their credentials. Your "parents" will need to submit the app to the App Store, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I am located in the US. Say my parents are the 'Developer'. Will I have to file the taxes under their tax bracket? Again, the biggest problem is tax- wise. It's not as a big deal that the app will say my parents published it. Does Apple deal with the taxes? Do they just send the full 70% that one is entitled to? Or do they ask for tax information?

Thanks.

<comment><USER3> If you make more than the minimum, you have to file (if you don't make more than the minimum, you don't have to file.)

Since your parents are the 'developer', they can probably depreciate the Mac you're using, and write off the $99/year fee.

Yes, Apple sends the full 70%. Yes, they want a SSN (or EIN) so they can tell the government (IRS) what they paid (your parents).

Are your parents technically sophisticated enough to deal with Apple, etc? Perhaps a better option would be to find a kind soul who is already an Apple registered developer who can publish your app, and pay you a (high) percentage of the proceeds.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean by the last statement? Of course my parents can sign off on contracts, etc.. They're not programmers, but they don't have to be - <USER2> all, I am the one developing the application. My point is that I do not want to pay taxes under their bracket. They can submit, etc.

<comment><USER4> I think he's trying to indicate that your parents may have some trouble dealing with Apple if they're not technically inclined. It just depends on their personality, they definitely don't have to be programmers, but they should be able to reason through a process, deal with third parties (potentially several people within third parties), and be willing to take on the potential legal and fiduciary burdens without getting frustrated or giving up.

Anyway, my advice is dangerous and I know little about tax law, but if you can afford to register an LLC for your projects, you definitely should. It's only a couple hundred bucks in most states and you can get tax ID numbers from the feds and the state. These are accepted in lieu of SSN and other personal tax identifiers. You can file as a disregarded entity and avoid most of the business-related tax overhead (as long as you register the LLC properly), and it will just be less confusing all around; the IRS won't have incongruent numbers for your parents, you won't get taxed outside of the correct bracket, and you don't have to have anyone's personal info floating around out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not the app store in specific, but I remember as a minor the whole "not being able to enter into a contract" causing me a few problems.

It may be a long shot, but I'd look into having someone help you set up an LLC that might help you get around some of the issues of being "just a kid".

I know, it's damn annoying being not quite a person, but fight the good fight and don't be discouraged.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the words of encouragement.

I was thinking about setting up an LLC, though I'm not sure if it will be worth it in the long run. I would have to pay to start the company, and then hire an accountant to help file my finances every year.

I am considering it, but it would be better to find another workaround.</comment></comment>


How to end the Fail Whales? With Blue Whales. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9827

<comment><USER2> Summary: IBM consultant who could barely design a system that handles 18 million weekly transactions lets Twitter know what they need to do to "scale". His advice is IBM main frames. Probably Oracle too. Yes, this is still the year 2009.

This was a very weird article:

> I had just completed a project for a large government agency that needed a > system that could accomplish approximately 5,500 database row inserts and > reads per second, or approximately 18 million transactions per week.

Not even close--5,500 a second comes to over 3 billion weekly transactions. 18 million transactions is nothing, that can be handled on a VPS.

> And as a customer requirement, we had to do it with COMMODITY HARDWARE.

Here's his idea of commodity hardware:

> The heart of the "beast", as those of us referred to it, was comprised of 4 > Unisys ES7000-based Oracle 10g RAC nodes, each using 256GB of RAM and > sixteen dual-core Intel Xeon processors, and the most sophisticated, high- > performance Cisco 10Gbps Ethernet switching that money could buy which was > available between all the main clustered and load balanced tiers of the > system — Web, J2EE Application Servers, Messaging Queue and Database.

Probably a million dollars in hardware and it barely was able to do 18m weekly transactions. Now for his advice to Twitter:

> No, there's only one systems architecture that will solve the Fail Whales > once and for all. As much as I hate coming off like an IBM commercial — cue > the blue background and jazz music on Tech Broiler — the solution to the > Fail Whale is a Blue Whale — an IBM System Z. A Mainframe. Or two. > Preferably in a SYSPLEX configuration.

"Enterprise" people really grind my gears. Google started with servers in LEGO cases. Even today they just use tons of not very important hardware. The solution to scaling Twitter isn't throwing $2m to IBM, it's not trying to run it out of a RDBMS.

In the long run you won't be able to buy your way out of a shitty foundation.

<comment><USER3> Actually for twitter it could very well be the cheapest option when you consider what their imminent scala debacle will cost them.

When you fail for _three years_ to stabilize one of the simplest imaginable architectures (pub/sub) then throwing some money at IBM to run your broken app off a big iron that "just doesn't care" doesn't seem unreasonable.

It could just buy them the time they need to cash out and be done.

<comment><USER2> > Actually for twitter it could very well be the cheapest option when you > consider what their imminent scala debacle will cost them.

Why is re-writing some of the system in Scala a debacle and or expensive? I haven't followed it too closely, but I got the impression that they have had success with it so far.

<comment><USER3> _Why is re-writing some of the system in Scala a debacle and or expensive? I haven't followed it too closely, but I got the impression that they have had success with it so far._

Well, when you have a track record of screwing up on a fairly simple problem for 3 years straight then a switch of programming language will not magically solve that for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Anyone else find it funny that this post coincides with COBOL's 50-year birthday?

It's a good PR move, though. By showing that mainframes work for Web 2.0 (even with a faulty argument) they'll probably score a corporate sale or two.</comment>


Best startup advice of the month - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/KathySierra/statuses/930604039

<comment><USER2> This doesn't strike me as a common failure path for startups, hence not super helpful advice. Being awesome is always a prerequisite. But, being first does offer huge advantages. First movers often have a surprising amount of of staying power and really raise the bar on subsequent offerings.

</comment><comment><USER3> On these types of submissions I think the message is not aided by the site... so.....

"Wish more startups focused on _what can we be AWESOME at_ rather than _what can we be FIRST at_. "First-mover advantage" can be a trap"

 __doesn't this conflict with "Release early and often" mantra?

<comment><USER4> _doesn't this conflict with "Release early and often" mantra?_

Not really. Releasing early doesn't necessarily mean releasing first. Moreover, by exposing you to the demands of real customers, releasing early is often the best way to make an awesome product.</comment></comment>


How the wrong decision in Schwarzenegger v. EMA could kill freemium online games - <AUTHOR> http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/09/27/how-the-wrong-decision-in-schwarzenegger-v-ema-could-cripple-video-game-innovation/

<comment><USER2> He states that all freemium games will have to get credit cards to validate the age of their players.

That's not true!

They'll only have to do that to Californians. Nobody else has that law.

And for that matter, why can't they do just like videos online and ask their user's age? If the user lies, is that the fault of the game's creator? To buy anything, that user will still have to have a credit card.

There's also the matter that someone isn't a 'customer' until they've bought something. Can you be forced to restrict usage of your product from someone when that someone hasn't paid for anything?

How does this apply to free games? Open source games?</comment>


How I keep my mom updated on my travel schedule with Python, Twilio, and GCal - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/2018/06/how-i-keep-my-mom-updated-on-my-travel-schedule-with-twilio-and-google-calendar.html <comment><USER2> Am I the only that read this and thought, "or you can do what people have been doing for thousands of years and just have a fucking conversation with your mother every once in a while." A relationship with a parent that includes a dynamic where the parental figure enjoys knowing where the offspring is at, normally likes having a conversation more than once a year. Pick up the phone and fucking talk to her? Pretty sure you have the technology to accomplish that. Seems easier too.

I'm all for ridiculous projects that automate things in unnecessary ways. Kind of like that girl that makes those terrible robots on YouTube. Awesome stuff. But this whole never talking to people thing is getting out of hand. Like, talk-talk. With your voice and face. This post just helps proliferate the concept of "maybe it's okay to never hold a conversation longer than 30 seconds and consider myself socially intelligent because I have a bunch of friends on social media and watched a 5 minute youtube video on how to be socially intelligent."

By the way, that's not okay. In case you were wondering. Get some sun and talk to people. You have anxiety because you don't talk to people and think computer screens are your friends.

<comment><USER3> Parents love to see kids indulging their interests/hobbies. I'd be very excited if my daughter made a computer program to tell me where she was. That doesn't mean we wouldn't ever have another conversation.

<comment><USER4> When I was in high school and getting involved in student hackathons, I wrote a similar program to keep my parents updated with my whereabouts when in different cities.

Both my parents weren't technical and had very little idea what I was actually doing at these events. This was a great way to engage them & they told me the conversations we had around it helped them better understand what I was doing with my time.</comment></comment></comment>


Tyrus Wong, 'Bambi' Artist Thwarted by Racial Bias, Dies at 106 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/30/movies/tyrus-wong-dies-bambi-disney.html <comment><USER2> Just saw the news, never heard of his name .. his art had, and still has, a poetry that sings deeply to my mind:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Tyrus+Wong+art&iar=images&iax=1&ia...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Tyrus+Wong+art&iar=images&iax=1&ia=images)

</comment><comment><USER3> While the characters in Bambi always seemed to have the same "flat" quality to them that characters had in all the other animated movies Disney made back then, I always thought the settings and backgrounds in Bambi were amazing and beautiful. That's where Mr. Wong's talent really stood out for me.

Thank you for adding beauty to the world, Mr. Wong. May you rest in peace.

<comment><USER4> Are you familiar with Eyvind Earle? He created the beautiful backgrounds in Sleeping Beauty and I have a feeling you'd appreciate his work too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So sad. One of the greatest artist of his generation. I did not know that 'Bambi' was created by him. RIP.

<comment><USER2> I take solace in the fact he lived over 100 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> An extraordinary artist. I'm glad he was able to be honored at the Chinese American Museum before his death.</comment>


Dieter Rams designed products to last, is horrified how we throw things away - <AUTHOR> https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-06/dieter-rams-the-braun-design-who-made-products-to-last-lifetime/10970850 <comment><USER2> speaking from experience as an engine mechanic, this type of disposable consumerism is absolutely rampant in luxury vehicles. im not sure if its designed to be an expression of luxury, or if the designers just dont care, but it shows in the quality of the final product that most of these icons of performance and opulence are due for major service every few thousand miles.

plastic oil filter modules: absolute garbage but Chrysler fell in love with them during the Daimler years and now they show up in basically everything built off the E series chassis. BMW also use them, and they hold up to thermal stress very poorly. can not be recycled in the US like metal filters and have to be shipped, if you want, to germany.

plastic water pumps/plastic cooling systems: notoriously BMW, but also show up on Maserati so im told. they leak like a sieve and youll replace a major part of the system every 5k miles. cannot be recycled.

cheap hydraulics: im talking about that paddle shift dual clutch weirdness that shows up in high-performance mercedes 6 liter v8 engines with the double turbos. You build an engine that costs 3/4 of the vehicle value and you cheap out at the last minute with pot-steel roller bearings? in an engine that delivers north of 500 horsepower? tapered rollers or even high nickel needle bearings would keep the hydraulics running for years, but the hydraulic actuation assembly for the paddle shift stuff is an absolute dumpster fire. you cant disassemble the actuator, or service the bearings. the whole thing gets thrown out and replaced.

death by cad: this is more 'right to repair' but engines that were designed in a laboratory by a grad student from Malaysia who was told to 'make it work.' to service the turbo on some lexus F sports, you must disassembly the entire front of the car. headlights have to come off, the radiator and forward steering linkage too. its a $400 part, but thats $2300 in labor.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity, are there any brands which don't do this? I'm a little dismayed that even Lexus does this.

<comment><USER4> Anecdata says that Japanese cars are the most reliable ones. (Old) Toyotas in Africa are a must. They endure and can be repaired in a local car workshop.

<comment><USER5> So what happens to Africa when the old cars finally completely disappear, and nothing can be repaired in any reasonable sense of the word?

Probably hard to know, but by now, we're already seeing that blu-ray players are rendered nearly useless by lost remote controls (because they ( _all_ blu- ray player manufacturers) no longer build adequate physical playback controls into the set top box, and 99% of blu-ray on-disc software requires a directional keys and an enter key to trigger playback of the main content, which can only be found on remote controls), leading to a necessity for bootleggers that can rip and recopy the main content of the movie to a version stripped of menus, that immediately plays automatically upon insertion.

<comment><USER6> >blu-ray on-disc software

It's shocking to me that this is even a thing. I looked it up and apparently Blu-ray players are required to execute Java off the disc! How far we've come since the Sony CD rootkit days...

A cursory read over the spec on Wikipedia indicates (among other horrifying things) that it is possible and supported to release a Blu-ray that contains no media, but instead streams it over the internet from the studio's server.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J)

<comment><USER7> > _Where can I find more about how it works? Is there a VM of some sort?_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu- ray#Java_software_interfac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu- ray#Java_software_interface)

<comment><USER6> Ah, sorry, I looked it up myself and edited my comment. Bad habit of mine. Thanks anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is something that bothers me as well, though my reasons are slightly different. It feels that every new product that is released now is purely designed to drive new sales for some flashy feature that actually make the product worse and less reliable. I'm just not interested in things that have IoT/"smart" features added on, I want something high quality that works reliably and well because it is designed thoughtfully.

I realize that these desires simply go against the shareholder mindset that a corporation must be constantly growing and releasing new products in order to be viable. So we aren't likely to see any shift anytime soon.

<comment><USER9> Reading the article the thought occurred to me that "disposable" is probably more a factor fo cost + materials (and obviously related). By that I mean, if a thing is cheap and "plasticy" it really doesn't matter how beautifully designed it is — it will feel throwaway. Make the thing from aluminum, glass, magnesium, steel ... the price goes up (the durability goes up) but the value (both perceived and monetary of course) go up as well.

While Apple (as an example) try to tempt their customers each year with something new and new-featured, I'm not actually aware of people tossing out their old iPhones (or MacBooks for that matter) even if they do in fact spring for the latest. Instead they seem to get handed down or repurposed (media center, man-cave, etc.).

I don't feel the same way about my $150 plastic Chromebook.

<comment><USER10> The retina MacBook Pro is by far my favorite machine. I remember for many weeks, being delighted every time I saw it, which isn't an experience I've had with any other kind of laptop.

I also tried an iPhone for a while, but couldn't get the hang of iOS. The physical device itself, though, was great, not just visually, but the tactile experience is spot on. I wish I lived in a world where Apple made Android phones.

<comment><USER11> > _I also tried an iPhone for a while, but couldn 't get the hang of iOS._

Huh? It's a much more designed and coherent experience than Android.

<comment><USER12> It really isn't. My girlfriend is a committed iOS user, I'm not. She recently got a new iPhone. Her apps and info transferred over through iCloud, kind of (certainly wasn't as smooth as setting up a new Android device, but it mostly worked), but she couldn't sign into email through Apple's app. There was no setting in the app itself to manage accounts. So we went to the settings app, searched for the email app entry, no dice. Eventually through trial and error, we discovered some obscure entry in the settings app to manage accounts. It makes no sense at all. Literally none. Why not just manage email accounts through the email app? In the Gmail app, want to add a Hotmail account, it's in the fucking Gmail app's settings, where it makes sense. Not in some god forbidden obscure entry 4 layers deep in the OS settings app. No, it's in the email app, where is the first place every sane person would assume.

<comment><USER13> A top level settings item called "Passwords and Accounts" is obscure?

<comment><USER12> Why wouldn't you manage email accounts through the email app? It makes enough sense that it's what all other email apps do...

<comment><USER14> Because "email" accounts aren't actually email accounts. They typically include Notes, Contacts, Calendars, and many other associated pieces of functionality that span multiple independent apps, and you don't want to have to log in 4 different times.

<comment><USER12> On an Android phone you don't have to re-log in. You can share accounts across apps. Accounts are also in the settings. You can still manage your email accounts through the emails apps however, and the makers of most apps allow you to manage your account in the app itself, even if the login spans multiple apps. It just makes no sense to not have it in the app at all.

<comment><USER15> Sharing accounts across apps also works on iOS, FWIW. Most Google-branded apps will offer a "Continue as _____" button on the first open if you've signed in to another one of their apps.

<comment><USER12> That's not the issue. The issue is the lack of account management in the Apple email app itself. For example, let's say you're using mail to manage a Gmail account and Outlook account. You can't simply manage those accounts from the email app. Odds are you don't have an Outlook login across multiple apps on an iPhone (fuck MS), so why can't you access it from the app itself?

Anyhow, this is becoming circular. I guess if you've used an iOS device forever you get used to its quirks, but it makes no damn sense if you use other OSes. Gmail, you can manage accounts within the app. Apple's app, you can't. Makes no sense.

<comment><USER13> > Odds are you don't have an Outlook login across multiple apps on an iPhone > (fuck MS), so why can't you access it from the app itself?

HUH?? This is exactly why Accounts are a global setting.

What you are describing it literally EXACTLY HOW IT WORKS on iOS. Set it up once and it will work in Mail and Calendar

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've wanted to buy durable items - far from luxury cars, things like lawnmowers and chainsaws etc. What I've realized is that durability seems to come from having simple mechanisms that are relatively easy to service and maintain. But that implies that you have to maintain the machines. You have to clean your chainsaw regularly, you need to know how to adjust the carburetor, you need to take the time to sharpen the blades etc.

For the luxury market, that probably means the customer pays someone to do that work. Maybe it's just cheaper to put in disposable parts that are replaced, since labour costs are pretty high these days.

<comment><USER17> The buyers of these cars only keep them for three years. That's their design life.

Huffy bikes were only ridden for 50 cumulative miles over their lifetime and were designed for just that.

<comment><USER18> Was that a typo, or is there a bike that is literally only expected to be used for a couple of bike trips?

<comment><USER19> In fairness, they'll last much more than 50 miles if kept inside and properly lubricated.

However, they use notoriously non-standard parts. So, if you want to fix your $100 bike, you're looking at paying for someone to custom machine the replacement part.

You can't even just find an old huffy and scavenge parts off those, since the geomoetries / threads / etc change constantly, so you'd need to find one made in the same production run as the one you are repairing.

They are disposable kid bikes. They don't even make frames big enough for 6' tall men. (and it is not even close; not sure what the cutoff is. 5'9", maybe?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not completely related, but... I always wanted to try an experiment: Don't buy any dishes. Adapt whatever packaging that you buy your food with to use as dishes. So a yogurt container becomes a bowl. The styrofoam trays that have meat on them become a plate (don't forget to disinfect it first...) Plastic drink bottles become cups (you can make a surprisingly nice wine bottle out of the top of a soda bottle). I wonder how long it would take you to kit yourself out with a complete set of dishes...

I often think that even as late as 20 years ago, you could go to your local tofu maker here in Japan with a container and they would put tofu in it for you[0]. If you imagine that you would only need 1 tofu container for your whole life, you could afford to have a _really_ nice tofu container.

Out of stubbornness (and the fact that I live in a country that is hot most of the time), I wash _all_ of my containers before I throw them out. I get sad, though, that I have all this stuff which is perfectly usable, but if I'm honest I don't want to use because it is crappy. I want that lovely $100 tofu container rather than the $0.00001 plastic wrapping. I want to look at and touch and enjoy nice stuff every day. It seems to me that it's kind of what it's like to be super rich, where you _never_ see the garbage -- everything is repackaged into lovely containers for you.

Of course, in reality, the Andy Warhol-esq lifestyle we live, where everything is commoditised and you can't buy a $10,000 bottle of Coke that tastes different from a $1 bottle of coke is built upon the efficiencies of being able to dispose of these transitory containers. I wonder how much we lose as a society for running virtually every price to the lowest possible level.

[0] - There is a small family run tofu maker in my town and I'm always tempted just to show up with a tofu container that I could buy at an antique shop just to see what they would say. Maybe they would sell me tofu... That would be awesome.

<comment><USER21> I always wanted to try similar experiment - to see what I can build for the house out of used packaging; in particular, large plastic bottles from soft drinks (we already drink filtered tap water instead of buying bottled). The amount of plastic packaging I find myself throwing away weekly is ridiculous, and it's really hard to avoid it. We segregate trash, but with the stories breaking out recently that recycling is a code word for "shipping out to poorer countries to be dumped all over the place", one wonders what's the point.

> _I wonder how much we lose as a society for running virtually every price to > the lowest possible level._

We're losing the habitability of our planet.

I thought long about this in the past, and honestly - disposable packaging wouldn't be a bad thing _iff_ it was efficiently (and actually) reused or recycled after being disposed of, and if we didn't have problems with energy security and fossil-fuel-induced climate change. 24ᵗʰ century humanity from Star Trek would be able to use disposable packaging to their heart's content (and note that in the show, _they didn 't_). Our Earth can't afford this. And yet we do, and it's a market failure.

<comment><USER22> Make the producers take back garbage that's not recyclable/biodegradable as condition for selling.

Market externality now internalised.

Imagine garbage bins gone from streets, only green/recycable bins. Yes, consumers have to return garbage. Otherwise, those with long term goods have to subsidise those that throw out garbage (rates/taxes for gatbage trucks/landfill).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Rams has contributed valuable lessons to the design community. You can read more about how his work influenced Apple products here: [https://www.cultofmac.com/188753/the-braun-products-that- ins...](https://www.cultofmac.com/188753/the-braun-products-that-inspired- apples-iconic-designs-gallery/)

His utopian perspective only works if a designer of his caliber is balanced with a visionary CEO. He had a chance to work with such a CEO at Braun. The last time we had such a magic duo was with Steve Jobs & Jony Ive.

<comment><USER24> the same Ive who prided himself in designing the PoS macbook keyboard. I remember when they were first launching that new keyboard there was a video of him touting its revolutionary new design.

He is a good designer but needs to prioritize reliability/longevity a bit more.

<comment><USER25> That's the point, you need a counter weight on the product management side. Jobs/Ive also made marvels like the 12inch powerbook or the iPhone 3GS or the swivel-LCD iMac. Not all was great but there was a high number of winners coming out of that duo. The only thing since then that's on par are the Airpods IMO.

<comment><USER26> The swivel-LCD iMac was terrible, it was almost impossible to service or adjust and didn't hold up for very long. I had to wedge the arm to keep mine upright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love my Nikon D80, a fairly mid-range to high-end DSLR from 2006. It might be challenging to repair (since it is full of a ton of complex and tiny mechanical and electronic components), but it has lasted me over a decade and still competes favorably with smartphone cameras (despite the huge advances in sensors [the D80 has a CCD] and processing since then). I haven't needed to repair it and haven't really considered replacing it for the last 12 (going on 13) years.

It wasn't too cheap, but it was obviously meant to last. Nikon has since made cheaper, junkier consumer cameras (basically anything without the sub- command/aperture dial, which is under the shutter button), but the slightly higher-end models have stayed very similarly long-lasting and well-designed as my old D80.

The question is: will any smartphone ever begin to compete with that kind of longevity?

<comment><USER27> To that point, I'm linking here are a couple of images I took with my Pixel 2 phone while I was on vacation last year. The post-processing technology in the modern cell phone effectively compensates for intrinsic shortcomings in things like the tiny and shallow lens.

It takes multiple images at different exposures, detects edges/objects, and automatically composes the images to deal with backlight: [https://i.imgur.com/01kVB3O.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/01kVB3O.jpg)

It simulates portrait photography by detecting which objects are close and which are further away, applying various levels of blur to several composed layers: [https://i.imgur.com/M5h2q3r.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/M5h2q3r.jpg)

In hindsight, I have no regrets using my phone rather than dragging along my DSLR on my vacation, particularly because I'm one of those ultralight "take only a 19-liter backpack" types. I just don't see the marginal benefit of whatever that bulky 15-year-old technology has over today's ML-enhanced technology.

But I guess your point was about longevity. For me, my phone serves many more functions than just photography, and so I feel that I get so much more out of it than just that one thing. In that sense, it's hard for me to tease apart the camera from the rest of what the phone does when I make the decision to upgrade it. I suppose I can give some signal there, in that I haven't found any reason to replace my Pixel 2 yet.

<comment><USER28> i agree with your sentiment. until i zoom-in on one of those photos.

<comment><USER15> I'm afraid that has more to do with Imgur than the original pictures.

<comment><USER28> i was referring to RAW. just take any pixel or iphone photo and zoom-in. now zoom-in on a photo taken by a dslr.

<comment><USER27> I totally agree about the amount of detail being much higher on DSLR. However neither I nor anybody I've shown my vacation photos to have wanted to zoom in on any of them. And there exists commercialized ML technology to actually increase detail: [https://topazlabs.com/gigapixel- ai/](https://topazlabs.com/gigapixel-ai/)

I'm sure larger lenses with higher resolution sensors will always have a place in photography. Just not on my vacations.

<comment><USER28> i agree with your comment. for me vacations are tricky. for some all i need is a phone. for others i simply can't take photos without a proper dslr/mirrorless (safari) or sometimes a gopro (underwater).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've started to wonder if designing things to last is truly the best option. Sometimes well built things out live their usefulness and then you have this well built paper weight. Braun razors are a good example. I have one that still works, but I stopped using it after several years. No one wants a used razor, so what happens to it? I think we need to stop trying to make things a permanent as we can and start thinking more about sustainability.

<comment><USER30> _No one wants a used razor_

This attitude is part of the problem. Maybe you're right -- although there are 450 listings for used men's Braun electric razors on eBay right now so it's a bit stark to claim that "no one wants a used razor" \-- but being squeamish about stuff like this is a silly attitude that we should change. "Eww skin cells and hair" is not a valid excuse to throw away functioning things. We have running water, dishwashers and disinfectants.

I don't mean this as an attack on you, but on this prevalent attitude in society that makes you feel like your used razor is worthless.

<comment><USER31> Medical professionals say that a used razor can transmit infections and recommend even monogamous couples don't share them. They wouldn't re-use a razor more than they'd re-use a needle. You need to apply a little common sense beyond saying re-use everything.

<comment><USER32> #notallmedicalprofessionals, says my SO. Needles get thrown because they're cheap, and expensive instruments get sterilized. Boiling will kill the few things that can survive on stainless steel, like the virii that cause hepatitis.

But we don't need to nitpick one tree, and miss the forest of products can be designed better for reuse. The central issue in my mind is that companies are usually incentivized for obsolescence.

You have exceptions like Patagonia with strong DNA for societal good, but companies generally need some extrinsic motivation. What could be effective here? I can see service models working, as the company providing hardware would want longevity to save costs, but I don't want my stuff's lifespan to be connected to its manufacturer.

<comment><USER33> Surgery tools are a common application for ultrasonic cleaners, because "only an ultrasonic cleaner actually gets in all the small nooks and crannies of a complex instruments and removes blood and tissue from those" (or words to that effect).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I watched a video today or something where you can see human beings testing a kids toy. You know that those humans spend there life building or testing plastic toys for kids in europe etc. which will play with it for a short time and wouldn't care for the world if that toy would be something else.

I feel sometimes bad hiring someone to do something i can do. I do know that a professional painter can paint my walls better and quicker than i can and thats probably okay but it still feels weird.

I also visited a 1 Dollar Store in US because we were looking for some tweezers and found them there. Those have been so bad, they couldn't hold onto anything. I also saw a cable adapter thingy which was 100% not functional as i was very aware of both plugs.This broken shit made it half around the world to be thrown away by me.

We should stop producing shit just because we can.

<comment><USER35> I have a pair of tweezers I bought from an electronic supply house 30 years ago for what $10. They are hard nickel tool steel. Sharp as ever.

The ones we buy at work last about 6 months before the tips get ruined. Why because it's cheaper to make them out of soft stainless. And there is no competition they are all crap.

<comment><USER33> Similarly it is basically impossible to buy good files today, because they're all somewhat dull and don't last. I have German, French and Swiss made files from well over forty years ago, which I received in their original wax paper packaging. They are much sharper now and seem to last longer than what I can buy new from the same German manufacturer _today_.

It is like someone forgot how to make proper file steel. Real shame. You'd maybe expect them to get a little bit better, for them to last longer, because more modern steels and better process controls for heat treating etc. may be used, but evidently this isn't the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Hustwit's documentary is quite wonderful.

[https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ramsfilm](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ramsfilm)

</comment><comment><USER9> Just cosmopolitan enough to know who he is, not cosmopolitan enough to know he is still alive. Fun read.

<comment><USER37> I can't figure out if you're referring to yourself or Mr Rams as cosmopolitan

<comment><USER38> > Just cosmopolitan enough to know who he is, not cosmopolitan enough to know > he is still alive. Fun read.

Replying in case others may benefit from the brief explanation. JKCalhoun is describing the degree to which he, JKCalhoun, is cosmopolitan--based on the amount of knowledge he had about Rams. It's missing an implicit "I'm".

The sentences can be fully formed as this: "I'm just cosmopolitan enough to know who he is, not cosmopolitan enough to know he is still alive."

<comment><USER9> Yes, thank you. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm not sure if I completely buy the premise of this. We certainly have a lot of cheap, disposable things in our lives, but we also have plenty of durable items as well.

Most of the things that I own that are more durable are low-tech, like kitchen items. Yes, you can buy cheap, semi-disposable frying pans, and budget appliances, but that's always been the case, even back in Rams's day. I've owned and used the same cast iron pans, ceramic coffee mugs, drinking glasses, silverware, etc. for in some cases decades. They work and there's no reason to upgrade them.

I've got tools that I've been using for decades. Some were inherited from my father. Some I purchased myself. Manual tools can last nearly forever. Plenty of power tools last decades (decent brand drills, circular saws, etc). This hasn't changed. You can also buy cheap, poorly-built versions of many of these things, if you either can't afford or don't need better quality. Again, this has always been the case, even 50 years ago.

There's a lot more stuff now, and a lot more cheap stuff to be sure. This creates a disposable culture, but it's not that high-quality, repairable items have disappeared completely; it's just that now people who don't need or want them have more cheap alternatives to choose from.

Electronics are an exception to this. Computers and phones in particular are semi-disposable, over a few years. This isn't because they're shoddily-built and unrepairable, it's because they become obsolete. I still have 15-year-old computers that work fine, and have some components that are 20+ years old. They're sturdy, they function just as well as when they were made, but they're obsolete. My primary gaming desktop is nearly 10 years old, though, and it's still going strong. I've upgraded the video card and storage a few times, but other than that, it's almost all original 2011 equipment, and it still plays all modern games. That's totally repairable and self-serviceable.

I've heard people bemoan modern quality and disposability before, but I really don't see it as the modern plague it's described as. Plenty of junk was manufactured 75 years ago, but the things that have survived were the items that were built well and had timeless value. I bet Rams has thrown out his old black & white TV, and that photo of him sitting on his cheap, disposable plastic patio furniture shows that he's prone to the same price-vs-quality decisions as the rest of us.

<comment><USER40> To me, a fascinating angle is when the electronics obsolescence curve runs into the mechanical one. Cars are filled with that kind of thing, but two more interesting ones are products like sewing machines and power tools. Both used to be overdesigned, now they have have additional features and underdesign enabled by built-in microcontrollers. In drills, for instance, it'll back off on the power where an earlier model needed to be able to handle an animal wielding it.

<comment><USER39> This is often a good thing, as it can add some valuable functionality, but it drives me nuts when it goes wrong. I've had to deal with washing machines where the mechanical bits were perfectly fine, but the electronics fried. That can be expensive to fix, to the point that throwing it out and buying a used one off Craigslist is the more economical option. Same with modern stoves. I have never in my life gotten any benefit from fancy electronics on a washing machine, and the only sensible reason for non-mechanical parts on a gas stove is a timer, but I'd honestly prefer a simple pure-mechanical one that is going to last forever.

<comment><USER40> It'll be interesting to see what a 12 year old Tesla is worth.

Electronic control boards on ovens is a terrible idea. Guess what usually breaks on one (like mine, we don't use it so it's been broken for 4 years).

<comment><USER41> We have an oven at home that's about to be worthless because of a proprietary electrical ribbon intermittently failing. Sigh

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> The relationship with Apple products only stop at their look: Apple products were never meant to be repaired.

</comment><comment><USER43> Patagonia embodies these principles far more than Apple

</comment><comment><USER44> Wow, he looks a lot like Chevy Chase.

I like his message, though. We should throw away a lot less stuff.

\- Saves natural resources \- Reduces landfills \- Provides jobs (the repair technicians)

Seems like a good future trend.

<comment><USER4> ... And reduces corporations profits. They want to sell you the same product cyclically, not once in your lifetime. Corporations don't give a f*ck about saving resources, reducing waste or providing jobs to repair technicians unless it hurts them economically or they take a cut somewhere in the process. That's the 'bad part' of capitalism.

Anyway I agree with you. It's a pity that open source hardware is still in the infancy. Software shows us that open source can be unbeatable and even corporations have to comply if they want to survive.

<comment><USER45> Why can't they run the repair shops? Alternatively they can run things like the old ATT and lease better built but more expensive items?

<comment><USER4> As a last resort they can - if the market forces them to - but I suspect that is less profitable than selling new stuff cyclically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Well I know what I'm watching tonight.

</comment><comment><USER47> Article by Buffy Gorrilla, huh? I like it.

</comment><comment><USER48> Remind yourself daily that a better way to effect change on this matter is to choose to buy things which are not intentionally disposable.

If you have the cash, it is your responsibility to lead the way as a consumer, people will only try to make a living in industries where people are spending money.

</comment><comment><USER49> What are some new products that 20 years from now will be heralded as design icons?

</comment><comment><USER50> [https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/light-bulb- conspiracy/](https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/light-bulb-conspiracy/) is my favorite documentary on this subject.

</comment><comment><USER51> Today, I couldn't find a steel wire brush although it labeled "steel wire brush". The bristles were some type of polymer designed to fail after 1 use. I didn't buy it.

<comment> bash-j Maybe because people who use them to clean their BBQs have been getting steel wires stuck inside them. Probably too much a risk now for the companies who used to make them?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12409425)

[https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-13/barbecue-brush- bristl...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-13/barbecue-brush-bristle- injures-mans-pancreas/8516800)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Are there examples of products made today that have this ethos of lasting for a lifetime?

As a side note on cars, what are some cars that would last a long time and are made of parts that are serviceable?

</comment><comment><USER53> Stop buying laptops, and buy a PC with expansion slots, so you can upgrade your computer for a while instead of buying a new one every year.

<comment><USER49> I used to buy new computers whenever the new one was twice as fast as the old one. In the 80's that sometimes meant every year. At some point the clock speed stopped going up and more cores were added instead. I think that's about the point I stopped feeling the need to upgrade due to speed.

Now I do it more out of reliability concerns. Replacing my desktop after 5-6 years might be a waste of money, but if I'm down for a day or two that will cost me more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> If you haven't, make sure to watch Gary Hustwit's doc on Dieter. Really great.

</comment><comment><USER55> He has also designed some fantastic disposable toothbrushes and razors.

</comment><comment><USER56> Where can I view the documentary Rams?

<comment><USER57> [https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ramsfilm](https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ramsfilm)

They have a Vimeo Apple TV app, or download the mp4 etc when purchased there

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Amen

</comment><comment><USER59> Better end capitalism if you don't want planned obselessence. Rams shouldn't give himself a hard time over that.

<comment><USER60> Capitalism itself isn't the problem it's our refusal to change market forces to force companies and individuals to pay for the disposal of the stuff when we no longer have a use for it. This could easily be done if we had the political will power. all the solutions to this exist currently we just aren't taking advantage of them.

<comment><USER59> Even if we had all the perfect excise taxes, there's no theoretical reason planned obselessence would take place in other ways. (E.g. company buys your trash and recycles it into new thing they sell you at profit.)

The imperative to get more revenue always points towards rent seeking. I'm not even sure how to theoretically separate planned obeselessence from other forms of rent seeking.

The left is derrided for wanting to abolish private property, but the irony is capitalism itself tends towards concentrating ownership away from all from most of us.

<comment><USER59> I wonder how often incandescent lightbulbs are/were recycled. That is probably as closest example in reality to my planned obselessence + recycling example. (Certainly glass and iron are relatively easy to recycle, not sure about tungsten.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Today's product improvements happen faster today and many of the improvements are driven by software not just hardware. I get a new iPhone every two years because it is significantly better than the last generation: faster, longer battery life, bigger more vivid screen. Also newer cars are increasingly safer than older cars. And if I want the latest car why should I pay more for quality today when it's only going to be beneficial for the next owners?

<comment><USER62> > And if I want the latest car why should I pay more for quality today when > it's only going to be beneficial for the next owners?

Because you're already eating the bulk of the depreciation on it anyway?

You pay for quality today because you intend to still be using and maintaining it in 20 years.

Buying new makes no sense at all when "next owners" are even a factor in the equation. You might as well just lease.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> > _" They built those things to last, last a lifetime," Hustwit says. "And if > they did break, they built them to be repaired very easily."_

You know. Kind of like a MacBook.

<comment><USER64> I don't have much experience with MacBooks, but ThinkPads (at least certain lines) are very much of this nature. I have a 2008 ThinkPad which is still usable and in great condition (I've upgraded various things on it, which the design also makes relatively easy).

<comment><USER65> In the relative scheme of things, ThinkPads are easier to repair/upgrade than other computers, but still colossally wasteful compared to desktops and many non-computer devices. There's no way to take an old ThinkPad and add anything to the motherboard without replacing it entirely. Today's devices have even more forced-obsolescence, wtih DRM-locked BIOSes to stop upgrading components, NVidia Tegra processors won't even let you upgrade the OS. With the ubiquity of copyright enforcement, devices are increasingly forced to comply with remote deletion of copyrighted works. OpenWRT may soon become illegal under FCC rules.

<comment><USER64> The T-series can have the CPU upgraded at least. I'm not convinced they're any more wasteful than desktops, which will need upgraded motherboards after some time.

Also, compared to non-computer electronic devices, I'd say ThinkPads fare well. Microwaves don't last 10 years anymore, for example.

<comment><USER66> I have long been looking for notebooks where the CPU can be upgraded. Do you have any specific model/manufacturing year where this is possible?

<comment><USER64> T430, W530 at least. See, [https://medium.com/@n4ru/the- definitive-t430-modding-guide-3...](https://medium.com/@n4ru/the- definitive-t430-modding-guide-3dff3f6a8e2e) , for instance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Search vs. Social: viral is the new SEO - <AUTHOR> http://measuringmeasures.com/blog/2010/6/17/search-vs-social-viral-is-the-new-seo.html

<comment><USER2> SEO is not dead, social media is not a replacement. Ignore SEO to your own detriment.

Real life example: My startup, DoLeaf (<http://doleaf.com>). We get the majority of our sales via SEO/Google. All we had to do to get there was to make sure to follow basic SEO guidelines (title tag, h1's, etc.)

People find us by searching on Google for very specific plants. They see a result that says "Buy XXX on DoLeaf". Click result, click checkout, done. Google sends high quality, high conversion traffic. Once we set it up, it required no further work on our part. Day and night, Google is sending us sales.

Contrast that to social media. Do we entice people to tweet about our plants? Add them to their Facebook profile? What? And how to do it? Successfully spinning up a viral loop is difficult to do and difficult to track. Finally, social media mentions grow stale pretty quick, so you've got to constantly feed that machine somehow to stay relevant.

We're not planning on ignoring social media, but you definitely should not ignore SEO. It hasn't been replaced by social media, just augmented. A different tool, a different purpose.

<comment><USER3> Cool example. Interested in doing a guest post about it?

<comment><USER4> Great quality post @BradfordCross.

I've been thinking about the value of social sharing. Especially, quantity vs quality.

Broad social sharing ('quantity' AKA buzz, tweet, like, etc) returns little back to me. I've shared tons of links on twitter and essentially nobody says anything in return. But i check bit.ly (by adding a '+' to the url) and see some real use. I feel an obligation to only tweet interesting links for reputation purposes but it's not apparently rewarding.

Contrast forward to HN (quality). Far less traffic, but great community interaction with the content. For me, the discource here is more valuable. Heck, down voting my comments is really valuable feedback (notice how on twitter you never get someone replying back to you with "that tweet sucked" (exception being, you threaten their reputation). Thus, HN completely alters how i interact with content.

HN is only good at distributing certain things and we try to keep it unique here. For content creators, HN can be part of the social strategy but for content consumers on HN each comment seems more valuable than a retweet. Maybe that's why we are not tweeting links to HN discussions (things get less valuable in public).

Does the quality of the HN community hurt the potential quantity of links spreading virally?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook driving more traffic than google, no chance.

This article is pure linkbait.

If you think you survive without google traffic just block google bot in your robots.txt

</comment><comment><USER6> Making a campaign and calling it "viral" doesn't make it so.</comment>


Treating acute psychosis with drugs can prolong the anguish - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/treating-acute-psychosis-with-drugs-can-prolong-the-anguish <comment><USER2> Several good points in this article, thanks for the link.

I think that psychosis is a symptom of exhaustion. It's never appropriate to treat exhaustion with sedatives ("anti-psychotics"). I posted about this yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12331317)</comment>