Inside Votizen - Tech, Design, Culture - <AUTHOR> http://paulstamatiou.com/inside-votizen <comment><AUTHOR> Author here -- Please let me know what you think of this format. If it works, I'd love to do more of these immersive-get-to-know-a-startup articles with other startups. Is it too long? Does the Q&A structure work here?

My inspiration for this was The Setup (<http://usesthis.com/>), but in my own style -- focused on the startup and in my natural super-long-form.

<comment><USER2> Your webpage layout sucks: in a Browser half a window wide (Opera 11.61, 64-bit Win7, 1680x1050 resolution), the text overflows past the right margin. When I scroll it horizontally, the blue block of text ("Paul Stamatiou") and the purple ad overlap the text. This (1st line of text) is where I stopped reading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Željko, I think you could have worded that a bit more politely. Try readability, RSS or perhaps increasing the size of your browser window.

<comment><USER3> Remove "position: fixed;" from "div.left-col" in responsive-stammy.css

Unless there was a reason to break the (horizontal) scrolling.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think he meant horizontal scrolling (which is because his browser window is only 800px wide).

position fixed on the left sidebar was actually requested by many folks so they dont have to scroll all the way back up after reading a long article of mind to get to the nav

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _What are typical working hours? Can engineers work from home?_

 _Jason: 8-10 hours in office, more from home / weekends. Yes if needed but we prefer to collaborate in the office. Since we run continuous deployment speed matters, and that means you need high intra-office bandwidth._

If the bit about intra office bandwidth isn't ridiculous misdirection, then apologies... But it sure sounds like it. I think it's interesting, in an age where shops are bending over backward to rethink what makes people productive, and go above and beyond when it comes to equipment (or tequila), that telecommuting still seems to have an unfounded shroud of taboo hanging over it.

What am I missing? Please feel free to tell me why intra-office bandwidth is a really important attribute that deserves a place in the answer to this question.

(For the record Votizen seems rad, and the article is awesome. Sorry for coming off negative)

<comment><USER5> Devs use IRC, even in the office. And we do standups with some members on Skype. But meatspace still matters.

We generally prefer people in the office, all other things being equal. All other things are generally not equal, but it's a complex set of factors.

I worked as a contractor with several clients for about a year, almost all remotely from my home office. It works, but it is definitely still good to be in person.

I was able to do that because of market imbalances - I was, for some value of "better", the best available option, despite being remote. And that is certainly still true for some future employees. There's also the difficulty, when you're mostly central, that the off-site people are somehow less real or feel less ownership.

I wanted to relocate before I knew I'd be joining Votizen. It was a happy accident.

I do think, at some point, if the startup funding ramp continues, that it will just become absurd to try to pack in all the people moving here. And, of course, the world is a big place and there are more smart people living elsewhere than living here. But the density of skills and funding does matter, too.

<comment><USER4> More conjecture. I feel like the honest answer to this question would be closer to:

 _"We've been lucky enough to find smart people who are happy to come into the office so this isn't a bridge we've needed to cross, which we're happy about because we don't really have much idea how it would impact our company or what challenges it might introduce"_

It's unfortunate that the idea of remote employees is perpetrated as a compromise (we couldn't find anyone better, closer). So many of us literally make tools that throw rocks at the problem of erasing physical space (including you). I find constant inspiration in remote working that gets fed into the tools I build, and that's far from the only benefit. I'm not arguing that it's better, I'm arguing that it's not worse.. and if anything, is likely a rounding error in the equation of who the best person for your company is.

Also, all other things are never equal.

<comment><USER5> Honestly, we've been close to hiring 2 remote people in our short time. Both were because we knew how good the people were. Hiring with confidence is difficult, and canning a person shortly after you realize you made a hiring mistake is a bad outcome for both parties.

Hiring remotely makes this harder.

(Personal opinion, not my employer, yadayada but:

I've long thought that the best way to hire eng would be to have a pool of contractors, all "maybe interested in FT" in both directions of the transaction. Hire the best of the pool who are willing once you have confidence gained. Remote would be one factor to overcome in gaining confidence.

Even so, there are structural problems with this; it's hard to take that course in hiring as the first-mover. People don't like to quit jobs - even in this awesome job market for devs - without a bird in the hand.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _David: One state had its voter file arrive on a magnetic tape format called > 128 CPI — characters per inch of magnetic tape (same format that was used by > UNIVAC in 1951) — which is probably how Auric Goldfinger stored his data. > Converting it to something useable was more expensive than acquiring the > tape itself._

That's amazing. I wonder which state it was.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone else find it odd that Votizen wants you to share your political views with your social network friends? Political views, for me at least, have always been an inherently private subject matter. Sure, I have my friends who I'll talk politics with, but I don't espouse candidates on my Facebook profile.

I have a feeling that other people might feel the same way: [http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking- an...](http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Social-networking-and- politics.aspx)

<comment><USER5> Hi, I'm a dev at Votizen.

I haven't read that study yet - it's on my list - but I tend to agree that existing social ties are somewhat orthogonal to political views. We are surprised by our friends' views precisely because we don't feel comfortable discussing things. This limits communication and understanding. The two-party winner-take-all system, combined with slow feedback loops (I won't vote for Pelosi because she supported warrantless wiretaps, but she doesn't know that and therefore doesn't care about it) mean that the messaging for campaigns to succeed depends on wedge issues and vilification.

At the same time, our social connections (be they online or off) do inform our positions and views on ranges of acceptable behavior. See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window> and [http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks- Friends-...](http://www.amazon.com/Connected-Surprising-Networks-Friends- Everything/dp/0316036137/)

Connectedness in a network increases the transitivity of ideas. Now what we need is a forum/channel/model for expressing our political positions/desires/demands and we should see the political process get less hierarchical, more responsive, and more accountable.

So yes, "please vote for my candidate" via online channels is v0 of the overall goal. We want to flip it, "take my position if you want my vote", but to get there, we need campaigns to recognize the influence of their electorate that social networks (again, online or offline) provide.

<comment><USER8> Don't you think your efforts will just be co-opted though?

I've got a number of friends on social networks who don't hesitate to share their political views now. The problem is that they're doing so by whatever divide-and-conquer meme the political masters are spinning this week. It's the same as it ever was, only faster and 10x as annoying. I've actually hidden a couple of people on my FB timeline because of it.

What do you think will make it possible for your efforts to avoid being co- opted into more of the same old trap?

<comment><USER5> It's a risk, but it's one we recognize. We're in this to disrupt hierarchy and broadcast-as-politics. I think that peer re-broadcasting is basically incompatible with the spirit of the interaction. The medium is the message, and the message is formed by the medium.

I don't think you can successfully run a broadcast system on top of the peer- based medium. The transition may be slow[1] and painful[2], but the change is economic (in terms of transactional overhead and diminishing returns); it's hard to see how it could be avoided short of censorship and regime[3].

If these peers are just spouting the message (the easiest thing for them to do - RT "yeah!") that will not be persuasive. The angels don't need to be saved.

What's new here is that collaborating on issues can span time and space; group-forming doesn't need a reason before it can happen. The reason can be discovered.

[1] <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100284>

[2] <http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4517>

[3] [http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls- and...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2012/01/newspapers-paywalls-and-core- users/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> They claimed 2B rows for their voter database. If I understood that correctly, that means they know about 2 billion people.

Do they cover countries other than America? Because the population of America is only 300 million or so; even accounting for false positives (failing to sync two accounts as one person) or fake identities (pet dog has an account), I don't really see how you can get from 300m to 2b.

<comment><USER10> I'm a developer at Votizen.

Just our voter history (whether a voter actually voted in a particular election) is, on average, 10 rows per voter record. 200 million voter records * 10 history records per voter = ~2 billion rows.

<comment><USER9> Ah, okay. That makes more sense. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really dig posts like this. As an engineer, this is the kind of stuff that makes a startup a really attractive place to work.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! We are hiring! <https://github.com/votizen/careers>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> So question 1, what do they do exactly? I can't quite parse it out from the article. Can someone who doesn't use facebook frequently still use this?

<comment><USER12> We can scan your social networks for registered voters you know. Once you know who they are, you can affect their vote by asking them to turn out for who you want. I think the discovery piece is very interesting, even if you're not ready to ask anyone to help you elect a candidate yet. We'll be building more uses in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Also how are they allowed to get voter registration data? Is that public information?

<comment><USER14> Sort of. You have to pay a nominal fee for it and sign some documents indicating that you have a legitimate (political) use for them and won't use them for commercial marketing, etc.</comment></comment>


Leelbox q4 Rockchip RK3288 firmware download - <AUTHOR> https://www.CNX-Software.com/2015/08/16/Rockchip-RK3288-vs-rk3368-Benchmarks-Comparison/ <comment><USER2> Title of the page is 'Rockchip RK3288 vs RK3368 Benchmarks Comparison' and last updated year 2015.</comment>


Decentralized Trusted Timestamping Using the Crypto Currency Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04015 <comment><USER2> How does this differ from proofofexistence.com?

<comment><USER3> This is just publicity for [http://www.originstamp.org/](http://www.originstamp.org/) ; skimming OP, the only thing they seem to do differently from the obvious 'hash, turn hash into Bitcoin address, send satoshi' is they batch up a day of submissions into a single hash/address for efficiency:

> To reduce operating costs, the server collects submitted hashes, > concatenates the hashes, and generates a single aggregated hash. By > performing additional hashing and encoding operations, the 4 aggregated hash > is converted into a Bitcoin address . To this new address, the smallest > transactionable amount of Bitcoins (0.00000001 BTC) is transferred. Each > transaction requires a fee of currently approx. 0.0001 BTC (3 US cents). By > including only the aggregated hash in one Bitcoin transaction per 24 hours, > the total transaction costs are less than 10 USD per year. Users are given > the option to include their hash in a transaction that is performed > immediately for a fee of 1 USD. To provide non-paying users with immediate > evidence, their hash is published to Twitter right after submission.

Plus a nice web UI.

<comment><USER4> [http://virtual-notary.org/](http://virtual-notary.org/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://virtual-notary.org/](http://virtual-notary.org/) has been in this business since 2013. It allows more than simple document uploads and will notarize weather, exchange rates, Twitter feeds, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> 7 transactions per second.

<comment><USER6> Inane comment.

The limit will be changed before you know it.

<comment><USER5> That hasn't happened and operators are already having trouble even getting 40% throughput on that 7 transactions per second.

[http://hashingit.com/analysis/33-7-transactions-per- second](http://hashingit.com/analysis/33-7-transactions-per-second)

<comment><USER6> Sure, but why can't it be increased? Aren't they already working on increasing the block size substantially? Why wouldn't that work for now?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The History of Asphalt - <AUTHOR> http://www.asphaltpavement.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=21&Itemid=41 <comment><USER2> I'm fairly sure than in the UK, Asphalt aggregates are made with a planned obsolescence in them.

Of course, I only have my own personal experience and just a little probing of someone who works in the industry who has evaded my questions about it...

However, despite the large amount of traffic, I can't explain why _new surfaces_ will disintegrate in about ~4 years. We're in 2017; some roads that have been made 50 years ago are still good to go, while others, new ones just fall apart as soon as there are a couple of days of frost.

My take on this is that it's all made by the large contractors to get more or less unlimited work from the councils, as the roads needs to be repaired every few years...

Am I being cynical? ;-)

<comment><USER3> The volume and weight of traffic has changed too - with more and heavier cars, trucks and buses on more roads - and this will have affected some streets more than others. Quiet residential dead-end streets will barely change, while rat runs and secondary routes may be seeing significantly more traffic than they were ever designed for. Equally, main roads may have been massively overengineered at some point in the past and therefore able to cope with the increase. There's a lot more going on there than just the layer at the top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Talking about Asphalt, Here is a cool video of Asphalt Road Systems In Australia - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnXvBuQsYak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnXvBuQsYak)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you visit Los Angeles, check out La Brea Tar Pits (- which is asphalt not tar)

Asphalt still bubbling from the ground; lots of fossils from since the last ice age.

</comment><comment> alex- When I see speed bumps/humps/ramps I sometimes think of all the effort that has lead to durable, smooth roads.

While these traffic calming methods no doubt work, a badly made road would also slow drivers down.

</comment><comment><USER6> And I thought it was about the game!

</comment><comment><USER7> "National Asphalt Pavement Association", it's like America has a lobby for everything.

<comment><USER8> T-shirt: "One world. One people. One slab of asphalt. Committee to Pave the Earth, Newark, NJ."

As a kid, I visited an US Army Corps of Engineers training base, and they gave us the bituminous vs rigid pavement training talk, with two sergeants arguing the benefits of each.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hot Asphalt [https://youtu.be/vjVwi-kxLFI](https://youtu.be/vjVwi-kxLFI)</comment>


Quipt: Client side javascript caching - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/quipt/ qUIpt is a small library that is capable of caching Javascript files inside the users browser - even if SSL is active. qUIpt helps the site owner by reducing traffic costs and the user with faster page loading. <comment><USER2> Jesse Rudermann pointed out a nasty security concern on my blog: <http://simonwillison.net/2008/Jul/4/quipt/#comments>

Basically, if you have a single page anywhere on your domain that doesn't run the script, a malicious site could load up window.name with something nasty and then send the user to that page - if they then followed a link to a page that did execute the script the malicious code would be executed as an XSS attack.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand the value of this library. For non-SSL static files, the usual techniques apply: long-term expires headers, gzip compression, combining multiple scripts, CDN, etc. For SSL content, IE7 and FF3 will use disk caching for static files if cache-control is public (FF2 requires a configuration change). Is there a use for this I'm missing?</comment>


Building Lob's API - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lob.com/post/61597473247/building-lobs-api <comment><USER2> > Pretty print by default is one of those small things but makes your API that > much easier to use. It makes it easy for customers who are debugging to > easily read data and pleasant to use.

A pretty print option should be available, but the extra whitespace adds to the content size, which is obviously a bad thing when you have any real volume. As the primary consumer of a production API is not a person, pretty print should _not_ be the default.

> Do not return total counts or loop through entire databases to get the large > count.

The data that is available to consumers of an API should be based on actual use cases, and there is often a reasonable need for a consumer to have a total count. If there are performance implications associated with generating this, which won't always be the case, it's better to address those than leave the consumers of the API without the data they need.

<comment><USER3> gzip compression kind of minimizes this issue.

<comment><USER2> There's still no reason to add additional whitespace to a response that isn't going to be consumed by a human.

Also, it's worth pointing out that not all of your API consumers will necessarily support compression. The best practice is to use an Accept- Encoding header to allow the consumer to explicitly request a compressed response. This ensures that you can still serve uncompressed responses where necessary.

<comment><USER3> >There's still no reason to add additional whitespace to a response that isn't going to be consumed by a human.

The point is if you don't know which requests are going to be consumed by a human, and which are being consumed by eyeballs of developers testing your API, it's a legitimate design tradeoff to consider printing your responses in a human readable way. (And yes, "?pretty_print=1" is another option, but of course this has its own set of obvious tradeoffs.)

You seem to think that a <1% hit on (uncompressed) response size doesn't outweigh the benefits of such a design choice. But the problem is you're not expressing this as an opinion but as a fact. There are plenty of scenarios (I'd argue the majority) where a tiny increase in the % of bytes you transfer is worth making it so developers can easily debug your API. Particularly when you are an API-providing startup with a few people and minimizing support-side touch points is crucial to scaling.

<comment><USER2> What I wrote is based on a) best practice, b) the understanding that the vast majority of APIs are, in production, consumed by applications, not humans, and c) the knowledge that, in high-volume production environments, small inefficiencies can add up to larger inefficiencies.

Finally, I don't know where you came up with your 1% figure but I just ran a test on an API I use and the uncompressed pretty printed response was 24% larger than the uncompressed non-pretty printed response because of all the whitespace. I'd challenge you to find a scenario under which a pretty printed response of reasonable size is only 1% larger than its non-pretty printed counterpart.

<comment><USER4> To add more data to this discussion, I've been playing with the GitHub Issues API recently, which pretty-prints by default. I grabbed the last hundred open issues from the Mozilla Persona repo, and found

            == Uncompressed ==
      Pretty Printed: 312,556 bytes
            Minified: 272,604 bytes
                      </comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-
               Delta:  39,952 bytes (+14.66%)

Not as bad as a 24% hit, but that's all moot because gfodor very explicitly discussed using gzip when pretty-printing. Let's see what happens there:

               == Gzipped ==
      Pretty Printed:  41,748 bytes
            Minified:  40,648 bytes
                      </comment><comment></comment><comment>-
               Delta:    1,100 bytes (+2.71%)

Not as good as the original claim of <1%, but still pretty darn negligible.

Data derived from this API endpoint: [https://api.github.com/repos/mozilla/browserid/issues?per_pa...](https://api.github.com/repos/mozilla/browserid/issues?per_page=100)

<comment><USER3> Thanks. My <1% claim was ill-founded, I was assuming the use of tabs and trailing braces to minimize single-character lines so a little arithmetic in my head pointed to a small relative cost. But out of the box pretty printing does not try to minimize whitespace characters like this. Seems like it could be a worthy hack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Do not return total counts or loop through entire databases to get the large count"

How do you achieve this on a practical level? I'm pretty new to this kind of thing and I've been coming up against this in my code, getting the totals have been a headache.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish they would have elaborated on to why not to return the total counts. Does anyone have any ideas why this is a bad idea? I thought it would be useful for the consumer so that they can account for pagination?

<comment><USER7> Founder here. Returning total count is a very expensive action and most users don't use the result. Therefore, by returning paginated results you can allow the users that need that data, to loop through all the paginated pages and get the total count. It may add an extra step but for 98% of users the API will run faster.

<comment><USER2> Assume that I am building an interface that displays data I have retrieved from your API.

Are you saying that your API would require my interface to mimic your pagination, as opposed to being able to retrieve data in such a way that I could paginate as I saw fit?

<comment><USER7> you can paginate however you want. The default is the return 10. You can return an amount 1-100 and use the offset parameter to get the next X results.

<comment><USER2> Maybe I'm missing something, but how can I display pagination _of my own choosing_ if I can't calculate the total number of pages that exist?

More importantly, let's say that I am retrieving the default 10 results per request. Let's say there are 15 results. If I request the second "page", what will the next_url value in the response be?

In other words, how can you provide an accurate next_url in your responses if you're not calculating the total number of results? At some point, aren't you providing a next_url that will return 0 results?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Where's the HATEOAS?

</comment><comment><USER9> Bob Loblaw Lob Blog</comment>


Ask HN: Which tech jobs allow for the most freedom outside the workplace? - <AUTHOR> Where Site Reliability Engineering / DevOps on-call is a 10 on the scale, what is at 0?
Is this more a company culture thing? Are managers at tech companies who are managing software engineer employees able to turn off their phones and walk away during the weekends? Are there any more universal roles where this is the case?
I ask this as a web developer a few years into my career, and I don't want to spend the next 30 years on-call. It seems like there would be little necessecity to call up a datascientist at 1am to urgently report on some numbers, or a hardware engineer can answer the questions when he gets back into the office the next day? <comment><USER2> I also looking for an alternative after been devops/sre/systems for 10 years.

Want to have life outside work, wonder what job and positions allow that

<comment><AUTHOR> I also wonder how much of this is self-inflicted by programmers and company culture re-inforces it. I am not one of those people who _love_ to code in their free time. I like to close the lid of my computer and go outside and work out and smell the air and watch the clouds. The less eyes on the screen the better. I get the feeling that most programmers are not this way.</comment></comment>


Negative Interest Rates Are Going to Ruin Everything - barry-cotter https://prestonbyrne.com/2020/01/10/nirp-is-going-to-ruin-everything/ <comment><AUTHOR> I really believe this premise. I really believed this premise 10 years ago and I believed it would be nearly impossible to continue 10 years further on our current path without facing serious consequences.

One thing I learned in the last 10 years is that reality doesn't care that much what you believe and markets can stay irrational vastly longer than you can stay solvent, if not indefinitely.

And that's the interesting takeaway to me. What if all of this is nonsensical insanity but it's nonsensical insanity that is capable of reaching some local equilibrium that is stable for an extended period of time.

Or what if these central bankers are geniuses manipulating the quantum mechanics of our economy in a way that will just always seem like nonsense to outsiders.

Both of those seem like poor premises to me but I can't disprove either of them.

I'm still proud to say I'm short the S&P because at the end of the day all you can do is look at the cards dealt and make your best call but I'm much more willing to believe that I go bust on that bet than I would have 10 years ago.

<comment><USER2> >Or what if these central bankers are geniuses manipulating the quantum mechanics of our economy in a way that will just always seem like nonsense to outsiders.

If you think deeper into it, you will see that the U.S. economy does not exist in a closed loop. For instance, most of the physical goods we use gets produced in China. The profits from producing them flow back, since purchasing real estate in the politically stable "West" is much more reasonable than holding your capital in China where you can get killed over it. A similar process happens to the Saudi oil money and the VC market. Although it might look like the central bankers have found a wonderful way to make money from thin air and make everyone happy, I think we are actually just slowly selling off strategic assets to the external buyers and spending the proceeds to buy trinkets.

<comment><USER3> In America the ownership of real estate is not an absolute right. Your property can be taken by eminent domain, by failure to pay fines, or more commonly it can be taken due to failure to pay property and/or income taxes.

If they ever need to get the foreign owners out they will set a tax on foreign owned real estate for an amount makes the investment not worthwhile.

<comment><USER2> Except the economy is getting more and more dependent on that external money. Good luck banning foreign owners if 20% of your state GDP is real estate deals (real numbers for British Columbia; they also tried foreign buyer tax, although the Chinese figured out some loopholes). Good luck banning foreign investments if millions of local jobs exist solely to make the companies look like better investments, and millions more are tied to advertising, accounting, cloud and other services provided to VC-backed companies.

You can't stop the slowly accumulating long-term effects without a considerable mid-term depression, and no politician will go for it because the majority of voters is very short-sighted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Central bank rate setting is basically an adjustable rate mortgage for > states and their entire economic systems.

The debt markets are complex but at a high level, this is an absurd analogy. The debt the author is worried about are largely based upon fixed interest rates for the life of the debt. As such, one can write down on a piece of paper the obligations borrowers have, and they will not change over time due to the structure of the debt.

If one is going to write an article about predictions based upon the interest rate markets, one needs to do better than "wow, look at all this debt, surely it will not be possible for parties to meet their expected obligations!" If we were in a _high_ rate environment, would one argue there is _less_ default risk? It doesn't make sense.

If you're going to make a prediction, make a prediction. Don't just say "countries will default" if you can't explain what chain of causality gets you there. High debt loads with low rates do not cause defaults: other events do, ones that are hard or impossible to predict. So the analysis contains zero real predictions or information, other than claiming that somehow an unexpected crisis will be made worse by the debt. It seems equally likely as not that debt will exacerbate whatever the next crisis is, it seems _extremely_ unlikely that it will be the root cause.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Well of course we shouldn't have funded state entitlement programs with > trillions in low-interest debt and ensured our governments and, by > extension, our societies were addicted to low interest rate revolving credit > facilities writ large.

The author doesn't mention the single largest source of increase in federal debt the last few years: the military and tax cuts for the wealthy.

<comment><USER6> Are you talking just discretionary budget only? Mandatory budget of the federal government has been growing as much more than discretionary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The author provides no proof that asset prices are the result of inflation or that the 100k salary for a restaurant manager is. The latter is normally used as an example of how tight labor market right now not inflation.

I'm not surprised they don't show any statistics as the lack of inflation in the past decade has been quite a surprise to economists.

</comment><comment><USER8> A large undiscussed issue here is that low (and negative) interest rates have hidden the risks of wage stagnation on consumer demand. That obviously has economic consequences, but it could get to socisl unrest pretty fast.

Your dad could afford to buy a Toyota Corolla and a new mid-line TV in 1980. You can afford to finance one with low interest rates in 2019. But your son won't be able to afford those things with spiked interest rates and more restrictive lending paradigms.

A tangible example is carmakers offering 0% loans at 5-6-7-8 year terms. Even though fewer customers can afford the price in cash, or with a more conservatively priced 10%-APR 4-year loan, sales numbers remain high.

If the day of reckoning comes, and interest rates return to historically normal levels, or dramatic 1980s levels, it's going to break that illusion. Will consumers be angry when they realize they can't even have the quality of life they've grown accustomed to?

<comment><USER9> >> Your dad could afford to buy a Toyota Corolla and a new mid-line TV in 1980. You can afford to finance one with low interest rates in 2019. But your son won't be able to afford those things with spiked interest rates and more restrictive lending paradigms.

This is a misrepresentation of the real statistics around wage stagnation. Real wages (adjusted for inflation and/or purchasing power) hasn't changed much for the lower and middle classes in the USA for the past few decades. So, the average American can afford to purchase exactly what they could a couple decades ago.

Source: [https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most- us...](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-workers- real-wages-have-barely-budged-for-decades/)

<comment><USER10> > So, the average American can afford to purchase exactly what they could a > couple decades ago.

Sure, if you ignore the cost of health insurance and medical bills. Also if you ignore the cost of higher education.

<comment><USER9> No, the price index used incorporates both healthcare and education costs.

Source: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_consumption_expendi...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_consumption_expenditures_price_index#Comparison_to_CPI)

<comment><USER10> Those numbers don't pass the sniff test. According to that, the adjusted cost of education has gone down!?!?! That clearly ignores college, or is just factually incorrect. I also don't believe that the cost of medical treatment has gone down, although admittedly I don't have numbers to support that assertion.

<comment><USER11> Price and medical care should be approached as though there's a giant sign that says "Here there be dragons." There are a lot of weird incentives to have multiple prices for the same medical good. For uncompensated care the incentive is to have the price be as high as possible within the bounds of sanity. The prices that insurance companies pay on the other hand tend to be much lower while those same insurance companies have an incentive for a high price for those without insurance i.e. the higher the un-insured pay for procedures the more the insurance company is saving its customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's hard to argue with what the author describes as a hunch, but his threshold for "end of the world" is pretty low.

I was working in an adjacent milieu at the time, and I wasn't happy when S&P tanked, but really, no one cares about unemployed bankers, unless you're in the position of the author and you know them personally. Even then, it's not the end of the world.

Moreover the world isn't turned upside down when a Taco Bell manager makes $100K. And ordinary people experience an absence of money at the ATM on a regular basis when it runs out of _their_ money the day before payday.

Negative interest rates are uncharted territory, but the anecdotes supplied as background information aren't that persuasive.

</comment><comment><USER13> Negative interest rates basically mean: "We accept your money to store it safely, for a small fee".

Didn't banks do just that at the times when gold was the world currency? That continued for quite some centuries, e.g. during the explosive growth of the industrial revolution.

<comment><USER14> Most banks charge a monthly service fee already anyway. So we're basically already under negative interest rates; it's just regressive ones that are a higher percentage the less money you have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A lot of what the author said is negated by the fact banks build into their loans that the rate can not drop below zero and that is before their spread (profit) is added to the rate. What is correct is the rate cannot continually go down further but it will actually make banks even more profitable because they essentially have built in floors to the loan at zero. Meanwhile the bank may borrow below zero. As for the effect on the overall economy, it does mean that actions taking interest rates negative will be mostly ineffective should they be used. However the fed has been slowly crawling back to a better balance sheet with QT and higher rates over the last few years and even though there have been 3 cuts in a row last year the fed is still better prepared than say 3 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER16> So if we accept the premise that's there's (as a minimum) a significant correction or (at worst) a major financial crisis coming... where/how would you invest to either ride it out without too much of a haircut, or even make some profit?

<comment><USER17> You can sell an interest rate futures. But be warned you if you had done that 10 years ago when everyone thought low interest rates weren't sustainable you would have lost a great deal of money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This entire article tries to use an abundance of idioms and truisms to hide that there is not a lot of substance here. And the little substance present is confused.

The article is all over the place. For instance, the author worries we're going to end up in a world with both a debt crisis AND hyperinflation. However, none of the current debt is inflation-adjusted, so how can companies be unable to pay off their debt when they have tripled their revenue(due to hyperinflation).

He completely misunderstands the quotes from Larry Summers and the CEO of Deutsche. He believes they support his case when they have the exact opposite worry. Imagine you live in a house with a heater but no thermostat. The furnace is failing, so even on a typical day, you crank the heater up to its max setting to keep warm. Larry Summers and the Deutsche CEO worry that now the heater is maxed on a typical day, we have no spare capacity for a cold front. The author is worried that since we maxed out the heater that we're going to overheat because he doesn't understand that there is an intermediate step between adjusting the heater and making the house warm.

> I leave it to folks with advanced degrees in mathematics to model and > quantify this hunch.

All you need to understand and dismiss his concerns is to have taken an intro to macro class at your local community college.

</comment><comment><USER18> Negative rates In Europe resulted from the Germans refusing to borrow more to stimulate their economy after the financial crisis and from the EU failing to find a political solution to deep structural issues that have constrained growth. It's those underlying problems that are the real problem.

</comment><comment><USER19> There is inflation all over the world. Housing is not counted, although it's the major cost for everybody at this point.

The only way to remain sane in this manipulated fiat environment is to calculate gold/housing, stock/gold and Bitcoin/stock market and similar asset ratios.

<comment><USER20> This is false. Housing is almost a third of the CPI.

<comment><USER21> I think for many people housing as a fraction of money spent is much higher than that. I have had periods where around 75% of my spend was rent.

<comment><USER17> Depends where you live. In San Francisco you might. But when I graduated college I moved to Houston and over the last 10 years I've never spent more than 10% of my income on rent. Sometimes spending as little as 6%. (When I graduated I made 40,000 and spent $300 a month sharing a 2 bed room in a nice neighborhood, a couple of blocks away from a bunch of nice museums.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Abstinence Method – Dutch farmers say no to antibiotics for livestock - <AUTHOR> http://modernfarmer.com/2014/06/abstinence-method/ <comment><USER2> As the article says, the routine use of hormones and antibiotics for livestock has been banned for almost a decade in Europe.

What scares me is that with the new trade deal currently being hammered out between the EU and the US, there is a lot of pressure to "harmonize" the regulations, meaning the US will demand their chlorine-rinsed chicken, and hormone/antibiotics filled beef be allowed in the european markets.

<comment><USER3> Use of anti-biotics for livestock has _not_ been banned in Europe, where exactly do you get this info from?

The article talks about the Dutch stopping the use of anti-biotics as _preventive_ measures, a practice where you feed animals antibiotics so that they cannot get sick in the first place. Once the animal is sick, they can still be treated with AB.

And to clear something up: Organic-labeled beef in the US is AB free, you can only label beef organic if no antibiotics were used full stop. Germany? Organic beef is allowed to have been treated with AB.

The world of food and animal safety is not as black and white as you might think. The FDA has instilled some pretty harsh rules that have not been adopted in the EU.

Same goes with cars btw, the rules on Diesel emissions are ways stricter in the US, etc. Different safety standards as well.

<comment><USER2> > Use of anti-biotics for livestock has not been banned in Europe, where > exactly do you get this info from?

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#E...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#European_Union)

(And by Europe I meant the EU) Sadly, not all countries seem to respect the ban.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I upvoted a different story from this site and somehow found myself reading this (no doubt an oopsy of mousing) and trying to figure out the tie-in to the title I _thought_ I was reading. :-P Having figured out my error, I think this is a far more fascinating piece about one country deciding to drastically reduce its use of antibiotics in meat production.

Excerpts:

 _There are points of tension. Disease-prevention dosing can be a hedge against sloppy practices: With the drugs no longer available, farmers have to pay close attention to hygiene, diet and stress. Not all are willing to do so._

And:

 _Oosterlaken also revels in the challenge of farming without the crutch of antibiotics, and proudly shows off the changes he has made on his farm. He is obsessive about biosecurity, requiring visitors to shower and shampoo, change into fresh clothes and underwear that he supplies and then don scrubbed boots color-keyed to different areas._

<comment><USER4> I think the most shocking point is _To this day, when members of Dutch farm families go into hospitals, they are put into isolation rooms until lab tests show they are clear of the germ._

That has got to change peoples mindsets and could easily end up happening in the US.

<comment><USER5> Actually, it is not entirely impossible that with the prevalence of MRSA bacteria in the US there will come a point when US visitors to Dutch hospitals will need to be quarantined as a precaution.

The resulting headlines would make a powerful agent for change indeed.

<comment><USER6> Any body admitted to a UK hospital is swabbed (nose and groin) for MRSA.

I would be interested to see what the ratios are split by where the person was recently living.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, I had no idea they were doing that:

[http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/MRSA/Pages/MRSAscreeningwhattoe...](http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/MRSA/Pages/MRSAscreeningwhattoexpect.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What an inspiring story. The dutch seem to be particularly good at quantifying externalities and negotiating change, which may be due to their 'Polder model' of governance.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model)

<comment><USER9> I just saw a documentary on German tv showimg mich the Same thing for Danish pig farmers so it is not an isolated example. It is a simple issue of incentives.

Even more impressive was that zero anti biotics use in pig farming practiced by a farmer who had his pigs in stables with free range access was only 40% more expensive. Just think about it. We endanger the most important scientific advancement in human health for cheaper bacon.

<comment><USER10> > Just think about it. We endanger the most important scientific advancement > in human health for cheaper bacon.

Because that's what the consumer wants. Apparently. Supermarkets have been competing with each other on prices for ages, a well-known example is chicken fillet. The price has gone down to just E3 per kilo at one point, which caused a bit of a riot because those were the famous 'plofkip' (exploding chicken), or chickens that were forced to grow as large as possible in as little time as possible.

But there's the other side, too; farms like the one described in the opening post can thank their existence over an increase in demand for 'organic' meat, or meat that gets a label indicating it was grown in an animal-friendly fashion without use of antibiotics and growth hormone. Conscious consumers with a decent income will be more inclined to pay a premium for that kind of meat.

<comment><USER11> 'Organic' does not mean animal-friendly. It generally means without the use of synthetic chemicals (or without the use of any chemicals, depending on what farm you're at).

Either way, sorry for being overly pedantic, but too often when people see organic the automatically assume the animals are being treated better/more ethically than they would be at a regular, non-organic farm.

<comment><USER12> That not true in Europe at least, where organic certification includes animal welfare standards eg the UK see [http://www.soilassociation.org/animalwelfare](http://www.soilassociation.org/animalwelfare)

<comment><USER11> That's what I get for applying the US lens to Europe. . . .

But, the regulations are very similar. So, where your site states, "Lots of outdoor space and fresh air" "Encouragement of normal animal behaviour" I wonder if that is translated the same as the United States: "Provide access to the outdoors so that animals can exercise their natural behaviors" "Support animal health and welfare"

If it is, I really wonder if they're being applied the same, or if yours are as open for interpretation as ours. My experience with US organic farming is dairy and chicken. I work with farmers quite a bit through the extension office of my college employer. The organic farmers in my area practice (in my opinion) very loose organic practices.

For example, access to outdoors was available, but in an enclosed area (run for chickens, small pasture for cattle). This, by no means allowed the animals to "exercise their natural behaviors," and yet was within the legal definition of organic, and allowed them to sell their products to grocery stores and markets as 'certified organic'.

The health and welfare laws mentioned in the second portion apply to all farmers, regardless of organic certification or not.

Is the interpretation similar in Europe?

<comment><USER12> That's a very good question. I don't know what the worst case is here, only a few cases which are very good... Will try to find out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> In my experience living here, it's not only the farmers. Dutch doctors typically avoid prescribing general antibiotics (or advising anything stronger than paracetamol) to people.

<comment><USER14> My wife's cousin owns a dairy farm in Germany and only uses homeopathic medicines on the cows. When I stifled a chuckle, he indignantly pointed out that not only does it appear to work for his cows, it isn't as if the cows can understand him, nor know that they are being treated.

However much I have my doubts about homeopathy, his cows seemed healthy and weren't being pumped full of antibiotics; hence I saw it as a good thing.

<comment><USER15> Homeopathy "works" because most illnesses are self-limiting. For example, homeopathics appear to treat the common cold successfully, with the caveat that they take about a week or two to take effect.

<comment><USER16> My understanding is that for the common cold, that's how "real" medicine works too. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm from Belgium, and I didn't see this article anywhere in my newspapers :/ Keep up the good work HN :)

</comment><comment> bra-ket related: The global threat of antibiotic resistance [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7674550](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7674550)

</comment><comment><USER18> One of the things that stood out for me was the emphasis on transparency when comparing farms and vets together based on their use of antibiotics.

Without that transparency I think it would fail.

</comment><comment><USER19> The thing that jumps out at me from the article is the sheer size of 'the broiler farm that 160.000 chickens call home.'

If anything this article makes me feel ashamed for being Dutch.

<comment><USER20> It's not ideal, but if you look at how chickens are usually farmed, it's in the dark, in wire cages stacked on top of each other this is much better! Battery cages are completely unsanitary, the birds are covered in shit the whole time and can easily get injured, and much more stressful than this.

<comment><USER21> Yeah, these chickens are healthy, they might even be happy there. They could do a lot worse. If someone really doesn't like the idea of broiler farm chickens, they can pay a little extra for free range chickens. Or pay even more to buy them off a local farmer. Or just switch to something else entirely, there are plenty of alternatives available today.

<comment><USER22> how do you see that those chicken are healthy?

I ask honestly because my first thought at the picture was that, If anything, it shows that the chickens have bad plumage[0] and are mostly sitting down[1].

For [1] my guess is either the animals pick on each other too much, or they are actually chicks that have grown in size faster than they should. For [2] it may mean that they have weak bones/muscles (due to bad feeding, inflated growth and no movement) and that they are actually laying in their own filth.

It may still be better than cages, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In a potentially related story, BBC News reports a 300% increase in 10 years of younger prople being admitted with Crohn's Disease. Got it at 38 myself and, like others I suspect my exposure to large doses of antiobiotics may have contributed (For adult acne in my case - it's thought antibiotics deplete bacteria in the digestive tract which can lead to IBD following an infection, mine kicked off after food poisoning)

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/27810066](http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/27810066)

<comment><USER24> You could just as likely be looking at it backwards.

Could it just be a 300% increase due to 1000% increase in testing?

It's not really surprising; our brains are profoundly good at finding patterns, even when there are none.

<comment><USER23> It's quite possible IBD is just better diagnosed and patients are more aware of it yes. Myself I've been on Low Dose Naltrexone, more accurately, a low dose of Naltreone for 4 years and am asymptomatic, though I still have mildly active disease. The whole topic of OGF/Met-enkephalin is a fascinating one. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met- enkephalin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Met-enkephalin)

And I agree, yes, there are many factors that contribute to auto-immune disease development both genetic and environmental.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interesting article. The farmer that requires visitors to shampoo, probably has very few visitors.

<comment><USER26> It is about visiting the inner farm, so to speak. You can visit farms all you like, but once you come in close contact with animals, i.e., go into the animal barn, you're supposed to clean. The inner farms never had much visitors, especially in the industrial scale farming. Those who would visit anyway, vets, workers, maybe colleagues or students, will not have a problem with thorough cleaning, I suppose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Great idea until people start going hungry.

<comment><USER28> Apparently those measures have not had an negative effect on productivity in the Netherlands, so I do not see where you are coming from.

And you are also forgetting that this is done to prevent the spread of life- threatening diseases for which we do not have a working treatment yet and the emergence of new diseases of that kind.

Those are hard problems. Hunger in the first world is not (we already overproduce any kind of food) and even if meat would become scarce we could just use a fraction of the resources which are now used to raise livestock to feed ourselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Nice to read this.

Now.

There is no enough meat farmers in the Netherlands, to produce all the meat consumed _daily_ in the Netherlands.

I´ve been living and working there. I'm a meat lover. The Netherlands is the Hell for a person with the same tastes than me (many years of high quality meat and vegetables and cooking practices).

Meat in the Netherlands is of very bad quality and very high price (I will avoid more colloquial expressions of my basic english).

In those countries that dutch people call "monkeys" or "Moroccans" (this is, portugal, spain, italy and greece) the meat is much better in quality and price... but... we don't have the "autosuggestion" of "we are the best" than dutch people have (even with their street reality).

I don't trust news years ago, but I trust my experience.

The pseudo-nazi dutch people (the first place in the world where I did meet black-skin-nazis, gay-nazis, jew-nazis, etc), are very prone to believe, say and sell, that they are the best, this news are very well crafted for their mind, I don't want to live on a country with the meat quality and price of the Netherlands streets. I know the reality there.

I prefer to be a "Moroccan monkey discriminated european" for them, and take meat and tomatoes of the mountains of my not so auto-suggested, auto-inclined, people. And live with the bad reality (and crafted news) of my country.

Enjoy the meal, and sleep on ignorance and discriminatory abundance, and justify yourself your incoherent reality, dear dutch people.

<comment><USER30> This post is actually one of the most positive reviews of Dutch food I have ever seen =)

<comment><USER29> Well, it may seem positive, but here in the inferior south, that photos could destroy the day of many (sub)people.

We prefer animals and tomatoes not grow in those conditions shown in the photos (we get them, at the same prices, but grow with space and natural food).

I don't know why the article does not talk about the technologies used to modify vegetables and animals. I don't care if they don't get antibiotics, while they are transgenics, clones, or grow with irradiation and other technologies.

Also sorry and excuses to those offended downvoters, I can probe each word, I said them with care of not let me go, but I could go on, if somebody clarify the disagreement

<comment><USER30> Every foreigner who has ever seen a Dutch meal on his plate, dared to take a bite, and then seen the bill, knows exactly what you mean. Rants usually follow, though maybe not always with quite so many Nazi references :)

<comment><USER19> As a dutchy, the first thing my wife and I do as we cross any border, is go to have a decent meal. True story.

<comment><USER30> Imagine the shock, when one sinks their teeth into one of those beautiful, perfect looking, huge, shiny, spotless and bright red strawberries, and instead of the expected explosion of sweet, fruity flavor, the mouth fills with the tart, watery and astringent culinary assault familiar to the poor flavor deprived Dutch. How can a fruit so perfect in appearance be so offensive in taste that one would only feed it to a horse as a punishment for kicking a child.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the details of your CI/CD system? - <AUTHOR> I'd love to hear more about the CI/CD systems people have put in place at various companies. Would appreciate if people would share:
1) what solutions you're using
2) what security risks you've taken into account if using outside vendors
3) how to take into consideration VPCs and internal/external situations
4) what size company/number of developers you support with this.
Any other information would also be appreciated! <comment><USER2> 1) GitLab CI/CD does almost everything for us 2) Everything runs inside corporate network and all network traffic is monitored 3) One must get a permit from the company's security auditors 4) A major one</comment>


From coal to solar, India's energy landscape is almost too hard to keep up with - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/992611/from-coal-to-solar-indias-energy-landscape-is-almost-too-hard-to-keep-up-with/ <comment><AUTHOR> India and China are taking the lead in renewables. Trump and the republicans will be still stuck in oil and coal when the world leaves them behind. If the future is robotics and Ai is powered by electricity you have to invest in the future ie solar instead of protecting the past ie coal and oil.</comment>


Can't Afford a House? Don't Buy One - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-10-23/can-t-afford-a-house-don-t-buy-one <comment><USER2> And when you are retired and can't afford rent increases move to third world country and live on potatoes

Bloomberg..

Housing ownership is tied with a healthy middle class and healthy economy. If we banned predatory lending, you would know you couldn't afford it because no one would approve your 30-year fixed-rate loan!

<comment><USER3> Counter-example: Spain has a very high rate of home ownership and its economy isn't doing so well.

The truth is that we don't have enough data points to conclusively state that home ownership is tied with a healthy middle class and healthy economy.

A healthy middle class and healthy economic are more dependent on housing affordability regardless of whether or not that affordability involves renting or buying. If I were a government, I would optimize for how much people are spending on housing as a percentage of their income.

The number one source of income we should try to keep in check in society is income from economic rent in all its forms.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Realtime Hacker News RSS feeds (firehose, comments, search, and more) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/edavis/hnrss <comment><USER2> Does anyone know of a feed that has implemented a way to view top comments as part of the feed item summary/content?

Maybe with an image (SVG?) or an iframe?

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. I don't know of a feed that does this.

However, something like that should be relatively simple to build.

HN's API ([https://hn.algolia.com/api](https://hn.algolia.com/api)) can access all comments in a post. Should just be a matter of collecting all top-level comments, sorting by points, and sticking the top few into the RSS <description> element.

I'll consider adding this as an optional feature in hnrss. Would need to add caching, though, as each feed request would generate 20 separate API requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm using this reader for HN: [http://hckrnews.com/](http://hckrnews.com/) It isn't RSS but converts to a timeline - very convenient to use.</comment>


Dave McClure's Investment Thesis  - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/07/dave-mcclures-investment-thesis.html

<comment><USER2> > _We are not as interested in smaller revenue focused companies that aim to > be sold for $25mm to $50mm ... Even so, we will certainly end up with more > than a few companies that will sell in that range. That is a successful > outcome for us too if we can own 15-20% of the business and have less than > $5mm invested, which is the case for many of our companies._

At the high end, $5mm invested at 20% would mean a post-money valuation of $25 million. That's 1-2X. Or am I misunderstanding this?

Though, the multiplier doubles as the amount invested at 20% halves. Since most of their investments seem to be further away from $5 million, that could be what I'm overlooking.

<comment><USER3> i think what he's saying is it's an ok outcome if they can return capital (or slightly better)... likely for the purpose of reinvestment.

however that's not a target outcome, just a tolerable one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> USV and Dave are both invested in Twilio, anyone know which other companies they share?

<comment><USER3> at the moment i think that's the only one, altho we've also invested in competitors: \- USV in Indeed / me in Simply Hired \- USV in Wesabe / me in Mint

still i'm a big fan of a lot of companies in their portfolio. Fred, Brad, & Albert are some of the smartest investors around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is Dave the 1st investor to explicitly say and invest in pre-product/market fit companies? I though First Round Capital also did that but the sense that I get from reading FRC team blogs is that they are quite hot on investing only after customer acquisitions costs are lower than life time value I.e. After they have proven fit.

Is there anybody else other than angels?

</comment><comment><USER6> I love that Dave McClure was able to put together a $30 million dollar fund. I like the idea of investments being made pre product/market fit, with subsequent double down investments once the ideas gain traction.

</comment><comment><USER7> I like the fact that smaller investments go a great deal in funding tech startups, bootstrapping is more viable now. The iterative approach is also critical since most founders cant build the product in one shot

</comment><comment><USER8> I wander how Dave's pitch deck look like, when he was raising these $30 mil from institutional investors. I guess one single slide with the word "fuck" in 30pt font ;)</comment>


Show HN: Wit.ai Bot Engine - <AUTHOR> https://wit.ai/blog/2016/04/12/bot-engine <comment><AUTHOR> Wit.ai cofounder here. We would love to get the community's feedback for our new Bot Engine. It's still early beta. Thanks!</comment>


The We Company just laid off 3% of its staff - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90314580/wework-layoffs <comment><USER2> As a (very disgruntled customer), I am convinced this company will implode in the next few years.

They treat paying customers poorly, their facilities are nothing unique and they've overextended themselves on a lot of commercial leases in the same cities, right across the world.

They've survived so far off the back of cheap capital. If/when the tap is turned off and/or vacancies shoot up, they're going to find themselves in a bit of a hole.

I was never a willing customer in the first place (they acquired the office space we were originally working in) and I've put in my notice to vacate. I know a lot of the other tenants are feeling/doing the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3% is a good amount. Better than other tech companies that are having 15% or more cuts because they over hired.

<comment><USER4> An interesting argument I've had recently is if there is a downturn, would you buy stocks in the ipos that are over employed on the ipo or rightly employed? You look at Adyen for instance, and it doesn't seem like there would be many people to cut fat from versus some other companies that seem to have a ridiculous amount of employees for where revenue is at pre ipo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> So, We is less ... we?

Or should that be fewer?

Weird company names cause all sorts of problems, but this is a new one on me.

<comment><USER6> The "We Company" can be treated as compound noun based on "company", so it can be treated just as "company" is.</comment></comment>


What the Flix? Netflix 4K Streaming Requires Kaby Lake, Windows 10, Edge Browser - <AUTHOR> http://www.tomshardware.com/news/netflix-kaby-lake-cpu-4k,33070.html <comment><USER2> That's a nice list of things that I don't have and don't plan on getting!

Kaby Lake: I recently replaced my laptop, and I'm not looking to replace my desktop.

Windows 10/Edge: I've got a license and a backup image containing the install, but I don't intend to use it.

Premium account: Meh. It's just me and my wife, and we don't have anything over 1080p. No point.

This reminds me of the Vista-only release of Halo2, when Microsoft insisted that there were technical reasons that it couldn't be made to work on XP. Then someone overrode the OS version checks and it worked fine.</comment>


Porn Films Don't Get Copyright Protection in Germany, Court Rules - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/porn-films-dont-get-copyright-protection-in-germany-court-rules-130701/ <comment><USER2> > On that basis the District Court found that the works had never been > released in Germany and were therefore ineligible for protection under the > Copyright Act

Germany is a party to the Berne Convention, so I find that highly unlikely. German copyright law explicitly says that foreign nationals are accorded all the protections required by international treaties (see article 121, section 4 of their Copyright Act).

</comment><comment><USER3> Torrentfreak is such a terrible linkbait sensationalist piece of poop. This is one decision of one court for a specific tiny selection of films. It has absolutely no meaning in a broader sense.

They don't even link to the sources in that article.

Flag and or skip.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just one court and others have ruled differently in the past.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, that is kind of a bizarre ruling. Unpacking it from the current context of finding file sharers, on what grounds should a court get to decide that a production loses all copyright protection solely because of its content? It's not just the sex acts but the performers, I presume, that give value to a porn video (and of course, production value and story writing).

I suspect that some athletic broadcasts enjoy copyright protection by the league and yet it'd be strange to deny their copyright just because it's a bunch of guys kicking a ball around

<comment><USER6> I think we are still living in times where some parents would rather deliver a person in a society where the chances of being a porn performer are reduced, compared to the chances of being a sports performer.</comment></comment>


Scaling Rails to 125,000 Requests per Minute on Heroku - <AUTHOR> https://zeemee.engineering/scaling-rails-to-125-000-requests-per-minute-on-heroku-b4128a10a769 <comment><USER2> Wow $5000/mo for 2000rps, just for the application servers? That's absurd.

I think we're paying around $2000/mo for our app servers, a database which is over 2TB in size, and we ingest about 10 megabytes of text data per second, on top of a couple thousand requests per second to the user facing application.

I don't think we'll be turning to Heroku any time soon. Sorry if this seems like a pissing contest, just giving some basis for comparison.

<comment><USER3> This sounds like classic engineer(s) talk; totally ignoring the human cost of setup, maint and ongoing development which is usually handled by an (expensive) ops team. It's not $5k vs $2k, it's $5k vs $2k + ops time.

<comment><USER4> If you run Cloud Foundry (CF), you can get the Heroku experience on your own setup. It works on vSphere, OpenStack, AWS, Azure and GCP is getting there. More platforms are coming.

I work at Pivotal, we donate the majority of engineering to CF. We also dogfood it by running Pivotal Web Services (PWS)[0], which is a Heroku competitor.

One major difference: PWS (and CF) doesn't have fixed instance sizes. You can specify, to the megabyte, how much RAM you want your app to have. Other resources are dished out proportionally.

PWS has thousands of customers, thousands of VMs under management by BOSH, I'm not sure how many apps and services at this point. Last I checked, it's run by about 8-10 people in two shifts (SF and Beijing).

[0] [http://run.pivotal.io/](http://run.pivotal.io/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure how i feel about this. On one hand, squeezing that sort of performance out of Heroku is a notable achievement. Props. On the other hand... why Heroku at that scale? 10x F-Large servers is going to cost 5-10x the cost of a comparable E3 configuration and E3 root access gives you a great deal more "knobs" for customizing your performance outside of your code.

I get that many teams don't want the overhead of managing their own instances, but when you find yourself optimizing for a platform that is engineered around convenience instead of performance i think it may be time to make the switch.

<comment><USER6> One reason for them to scale to 10x F-Large on Heroku is that their app gets super-slammed (150x more than average traffic) around college application deadlines. So they can spend most their time on cheap Heroku and just temporarily scale to super expensive Heroku for a short time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> By way of contrast several years ago I benchmarked a real application hitting 1000 requests/s on a $20 per month Linode box. At this point there was no noticeable increase in response time. I could have probably gone much higher but that was enough for my needs so I stopped.

My "secret" is to use a language that is not slow-as-mollasses. A decade ago Rails had a definite productivity advantage over the (mostly Java) web frameworks of the time. That hasn't been true for a while, and there are many performant alternatives. If you're culturally a Ruby or Python programmer you can go pick up Go, or Node, or Elixir and feel at home. If you live in JVM or FP land you've always had fast alternatives (in my case it was Scala).

You pay a one-time cost to learn new things but you reap the benefits forever.

<comment><USER8> > If you're culturally a Ruby or Python programmer you can go pick up Go / > Elixir

And then you're 10 years behind the curve when it comes to community support which is really the only thing that matters when it comes to being productive.

That's 10 years of less blog posts, tutorials and most importantly third party gems / packages that have been extracted from many years of real world use cases.

<comment><USER9> I think phoenix itself is proof that it can be a lot faster the second time around (I'm one of those heretics who believe it's a pretty clever react clone with an added layer of cool innovation).

The libraries seem to be filling out quite quickly – and libraries may be a long tail problem. The set of 10 to 15 requirements every project has is basically there.

<comment><USER10> > The set of 10 to 15 requirements every project has is basically there.

Even a lot of the really basic stuff like file uploading and image handling libraries aren't in a good state yet. For example, there's nothing that comes close to Carrierwave, Paperclip or Shrine and the Image Magick libraries are nowhere close to their equivalents in Ruby or Python.

<comment><USER8> Yep and this is the problem. Initial library support isn't close to enough.

It needs to be extracted from a real project and then carefully groomed and enhanced based on real problems.

Otherwise you're just sitting there trying to invent something with no use case. You can't invent a beautiful API or account for edge cases that you don't even know exist.

This is why Rails will be around and thriving for another 10 years. Until something so drastic comes along that it fully disrupts everything we know about web development, I will still reach for Rails.

Right now all of these alternative solutions in other languages aren't offering enough benefits to even think about switching.

P.S., I'm not even a Rails fanboy. I use other techs too and tried to get on the bandwagon with Node back in the early days and did the same thing with Go. It took a long time to realize how much of an utter waste of time it is to chase the new shiny thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm always very suspicious of metrics reported in req/minute to make numbers look bigger than they actually are.

Assuming linear load – which we all know is never the case – is 2,000 req/s on average, which is nothing to be shy about.

<comment><USER12> > Assuming linear load – which we all know is never the case

This is phrased in a confusing way. If we're talking about sustained burst periods of traffic, then you almost definitely expect a fairly smooth distribution of requests over the course of a minute. You would only really start to expect serious variance at the daily granularity (i.e. time of day).

<comment><USER13> Uniform is entirely the wrong thing to expect at a given time of day. Typically we model these as exponential, or poisson distributions:

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

<comment><USER12> "Sustained burst periods of traffic"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi everyone, OP here (Pete at ZeeMee).

Thanks for all the discussion around this! The point of the article wasn't "How to get the most performance per $" \- I would never recommend Ruby, Rails, or Heroku for that.

Rather, it was "If you're using Rails on Heroku, this is what it looks like to scale, and this is how far we could get it to go" For us, it's great! We can sit nearly idle (cheap), most of the year, and can crank it up to "expensive" a few days a year when needed.

If you need more/bigger/better scale than that for most of the year, then this article is still helpful because you know which technology to not use.

At ZeeMee we currently have about 2.5 people working on backend/rails stuff, and right now it makes more sense for us to work on features at this scale, rather than work on scaling itself. We were happy with how easy it was to crank up to this scale when we needed without really optimizing anything else.

Of course we'll switch off of Rails+Heroku when the (cost to swtich) < (cost to continue). Keep in mind that the cost to switch includes engineering costs, and opportunity costs (other things we could be working on).

Love the discussion, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> Per minute? The only reason why one would measure requests per minute is when the number of requests per second is ridiculously low.

And it is... Seriously, 2,000 requests per second is considered fast in the Rails community?

The JVM achieves several orders of magnitude that before the JIT even kicks in.

<comment><USER16> Wow are you seriously comparing mri with jvm that receivee billions of dollars and significant manpower investments and is fundamentally different from.mri?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, this is why if you want to serve more than 200rps on a dedicated box you pick something other than Ruby in 2016.

<comment><USER18> This is a t2.micro instance (regardless of the hostname) running Ruby:

[http://imgur.com/a/EGMt4](http://imgur.com/a/EGMt4)

<comment><USER19> Running what, a bare metal rack app returning an empty response and doing no real work? All requests are not made equal, which is why these RPS judgements are pretty silly unless we define the exact request.

There's the TechEmpower benchmarks for that though. And you can't deny Ruby is among the worst there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How to scale your Rails app to 2000 reqs/sec? TL;DR Spend $5k on dynos. :S

Rails and Heroku: two things that don't really seem like good value these days.

<comment><USER21> The counter argument is that developer time can cost a lot more than that. If Rails makes me faster, my company might save a lot of money. Obviously how much it makes me a faster developer versus how much performance I pay depends on the developer and the specific application.

<comment><USER20> I did Rails for 10 years. This is not even a trade-off anymore. You can write code in a productive language and have it be much less resource intensive out of the box, e.g. Elixir.

Your codebase is as good as your worst developer and it's quite easy to write faulty code in Ruby. The claims of any savings using Ruby are highly dubious in my experience of making lots of money being called in to unf*ck many a Ruby codebase as a contractor.

<comment><USER22> offcourse. every rails/ruby thread _must_ have an elixir reply. every time.

Sorry to bashing, but that is the reality

<comment><USER18> I'm surprised we don't see more "use jRuby" replies. Most of these discussions come from businesses "already using Rails". jRuby has immediate, major improvements to performance and many codebases "just work". In my case, I just had to mess with the Gemfile a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are some interesting points here on how Heroku internals can affect your app:

> An important outcome of these tests is that the slow-response situation is > outside of your control unless you're running single-tenant (performance) > dynos.

<comment><USER23> It's like almost every "cloud" works. This are just VMs with a lot of noise from your neighbors. That's why i always use bare metal. Control over whole CPU and cache lines can be game changer if you have cpu intensive applications.

<comment><USER24> Most AWS instances over a certain size have pinned cores and you'll see very little steal time unless something is up. That said, something might be up! I've seen it and the big players(netflix) monitor for this and re-prov accordingly.

<comment> jon-wood You may have pinned CPU cores, but there's still contention for other resources such as disk IO and network unless you've got dedicated interfaces for them as well, and that's just within your own instance - downstream you've got shared routers, and the various AWS services you're probably depending on as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There's a very important metric they have left out of their data on settings for each test run: WEB_CONCURRENCY. While this will be different per app it will make a big difference to the performance. They mention they had 67 processes on 10 p-large dynos, but why 67? Did they do some separate testing to prove that was optimal?

In my experience it should be tested as an independent variable (to dyno number and type) to optimise performance.

I will however 100% echo that it is never worth scaling on shared tenancy dynos. In my experience the combination of noisy neighbours and random routing means you'll very likely end up with worse performance by adding shared tenancy dynos.

</comment><comment><USER26> I know I'm going to get flamed for this, but I nearly stopped reading at "per minute". Heroku is still nice, though, and I perfectly understand why people stick with it, but contrasting it with the choice of using Ruby is what made me read the article.

</comment><comment><USER27> My 2GB VPS can handle that ~2k rps easily at a tiny fraction of the cost.

<comment><USER28> 2k rps with rails?

With all of the talk about how slow ruby is, that sounds too intensive for a 2gb vps to handle, but I'm not a rails dev so I don't know.

<comment> jon-wood 2k rps alone is fairly meaningless without the context of what exactly is being done. I could build a Rails application that can serve a cached static template at 2k rps without breaking a sweat, but once you start hitting the database and doing some processing of that data it gets more difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Once you get to ~25 dynos the cost performance large dynos makes sense and you can run a lot of puma workers with the 14gb memory quota.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is great. The multi-tenant dyno issues certainly matches our experience - we would consistently get request timeouts when under load (even if scaled up) until we moved to the single-tenant dynos. With the random routing, if even one of your dynos has a busy neighbour you _will_ be timing out on some of your requests.

</comment><comment><USER31> Wow, that's like over 5,000,000,000 requests per month! Please use requests per second like everyone else.

<comment><USER32> Not really justifying the practice but I bet the OP wrote it in those terms because that's the default unit that New Relic uses.

Bothers me whenever I look at my New Relic dashboard but I haven't bothered to see if one can change to seconds rather than minutes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So, noisy neighbors mean that you can't get predictable performance from shared dynos; simple math indicates that even one lagging dyno out of 20 will kill your 95th percentile response times.

The trouble with the dedicated dynos is that you need at least two for high availability (to not miss requests on dyno crashes / restarts). That puts the minimum cost per service at $500/mo. Not necessarily an issue with monolithic apps, but quickly untenable with microservices.

<comment><USER34> I would imagine that Rails apps are generally more monolithic in nature.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Always wanted to ask how much hits does HN handle by the way?

Anyone have any idea about what DB HN runs on and what is the size of the schema?

<comment><USER36> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889575](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11889575)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> >POJA (plain old JSON API)

Oh, god.</comment>


The Aol Chat Room Monitor Revolt (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/the-aol-chat-room-monitor-revolt/ <comment><USER2> This is partly what is happening. Reading in out of the loop subreddit the trigger is Victoria but the problem is different. The one I see as one of the biggest problems is. The unpaid volunteers aren't given the tools necessary to handle moderation of subreddits by reddit corporate. The tools moderators use comes from third parties and volunteers. [0] As an outsider I have understand why they are angry, trying to create safe spaces by sweeping(and inconsistent) bans of subreddits but not giving the tools to moderators to keep their subreddits clean.

[0][https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...](https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure the reddit community (either moderators specifically, or redditors in general) are intelligent enough to know what tools they need.

I once tried to suggest a new tool, and was attacked there for 3 weeks after on subredditdrama for requesting such a tool.

My crime? Suggesting that moderators be able to ban everyone who (wrongly) upvotes an offtopic post. This would allow them to steer things back on topic, by punishing those who refuse to stay on topic.

<comment><USER4> _Suggesting that moderators be able to ban everyone who (wrongly) upvotes an offtopic post_

Reddit already has a problem with moderator abuse and nontransparency, and you want to give them the ability to ban people based on their votes? The literally only control that a user has over content?

I can see why you were "attacked". That is an _awful_ idea.

<comment><USER5> I don't know, in my experience, Reddit is much more rife with low-quality posting and bandwagoning than moderator abuse. It happens on rare occasions, but most accusations of moderator abuse I've seen have turned out to be nothing more than some first-world anarchists trying to stick it to the man and a bunch of other people bandwagoning on. Meanwhile, most subreddits with more than 10k posters are just awful because it's so hard for moderators to actually moderate the community (see, for example, all the true* subreddits that have sprung up just to create less popular versions of popular subs).

<comment><USER6> I read a few subreddits that might be considered outsiders. I get the impression that Reddit is slowly being subverted. Subverted by the sort of people that might have a strong voice on Tumblr and Twitter. Slowly censoring anything that's undesirable to their world view.

<comment><USER7> Being "subverted" by a different community would be the best possible outcome for reddit. It's a proud soapbox for white supremacists and misogynists to virulently spread hatred under the guise of "free speech". If this "community", seemingly comprised entirely of self-entitled white men in their 20s, were scattered to the winds tomorrow, the world would be a better place.

<comment><USER8> I don't disagree but there is a beautiful irony to posting that here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also - lets not forget that chat room monitors were willing to put up with the AOL TOS, hours and conditions for one good reason:

that sweet feeling of power to kick and ban other people (and likely to brag about it to their buddies).

<comment><USER10> _that sweet feeling of power to kick and ban other people (and likely to brag about it to their buddies)._

Yes: I wrote about that problem here: [http://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the- moderator-problem-how-...](http://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator- problem-how-reddit-and-related-news-sites-decline/) and there is some HN discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9217628](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9217628).

I don't really see a way around these problems: Paying people would be too expensive for sites like Reddit, and "volunteers" suffer from adverse selection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> >As described, Reddit is an interesting example where people voluntarily fill the same community leader role that Aol's volunteers did, although they do so with fewer restrictions and more agency. //

Presumably the current Reddit debacle is the stimulation for posting this now. The article mentions Buzzfeed and Youtube models too. Quite interesting.

<comment><USER12> I had to look up the current reddit debacle:

[http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/new...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/reddit-in-revolt-moderators-shut-down-popular-parts-of-the-website- in-solidarity-with-fired-friend-10363099.html)

I'm still not sure what's going on, though.

<comment><USER13> As far as I understand, reddit did introduce a new search function yesterday, which pissed off mods of several subreddits. [1] Additionally they fired(?) an employee who acted as a interface between the r/IAmA mods and the people who do amAs [2], who are usually not redditors. So the mods of r/IamA set there sub to private. That means that only invited users can see the sub. From there quite a few other mods did declare their frustration with reddits communication, their solidarity with either the IAmA mods or Victoria and various other grievances. And either set their subs to private or at least declared their solidarity. And by now half of reddit is private and the other half rages agains the admins. ( Reddits front page, that is the ~20 highest upvoted posts on the site, are uniformly against reddit.) For a bit more details see [3].

[1] [https://pay.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3bvkf0/stop_throwing_...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3bvkf0/stop_throwing_beer_cans_on_my_lawn_while_im/)

[2] ask me Anything, basically the community interviews someone interesting.

[3] [https://pay.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...](https://pay.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/)

<comment><USER14> 1 is a long confusing extended metaphor, not an explanation of the search issue.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but it is the reaction of the search desaster by a guy who moderates almost 200 subs. So I included it as a primary source to show the frustration of the mods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I see a significant difference between AOL and Reddit. AOL selected the monitors and had the power to remove their privileges. That's what made them essentially employees. Reddit moderators are mostly self-regulated. Even in the large subs new moderators are chosen by other moderators and rarely is a moderator of a sub involuntarily removed, except if they have abandoned the sub or violated the terms of service. I can see how Reddit is not obligated to pay them because they volunteer by their own will and not at Reddit's discretion.

</comment><comment><USER16> Given the market cap of Facebook is $245 billion and it has 1.44 billion active users, then each user is $170 (170 == 245/1.44). If each user generates $1 for Facebook each quarter, that's $4/yr which is an annual return of 2.3% (2.3 == 4/170).

I'm not sure where I stand on calling users "sharecroppers". Seems a little unreasonable. But the economics of it are interesting and concerning.

<comment><USER17> With 1.44 billion monthly actives, and going with the per user averaging, it comes out to ~$2.45 per user per quarter (as of the most recent quarter; it's safe to assume that will continue to increase for now).

They're generating closer to $10 per year for Facebook. Your annual sales take jumps to 5.9%. A year from now that will probably be closer to 7%. PE ratios usually compress with time due to slowing growth. I would be comfortable predicting that Facebook will eventually get this calculation up to 15%+. Their PE ratio right now is 80, which is producing a massively warped calculation on the return %, as that PE compresses heavily over the next ten years, their return per user will skyrocket.

If their PE ratio were a more sane 40 right now, this number would already be at ~12%. Double their annual income to $6 billion and their sales to $30 billion over a few years, drop their PE to 35 ($210b market cap), boost their user base to 2 billion, and it jumps to 14%. A very plausible outcome four years out. This is all calculated off of sales of course, not income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> For those "out of the loop", this was probably posted in relation to this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9822580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9822580)

</comment><comment><USER19> What's the problem with letting the community work 'for free'? They are receiving benefits, even if non-monetary. Peer recognition, control, power...

If foobar.com's forums asks me to an un-paid moderator and I gladly comply, I have no right to decide 6 months down the road that I shouldn't have been doing that work for free and deserve payment for it.

<comment><USER20> Work laws are weird like that. There are certain things you can't consent to even if you really want to.

For example, you can't agree to work for less than minimum wage, you can't agree to work for free to get rid of a debt, you can't agree to have sex with someone in exchange for money.

These things apply even if you voluntarily sign a contract saying you consent.

<comment><USER21> It's all relative depending on your location any or all of those could be legal.

<comment><USER22> I think everyone understands that different places have different laws.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Great article. It was 1997 I believe and my dad and I sent each other a message over AOL instant messenger for the first time. It felt like magic to communicate that way. The phone was few feet away but this seemed futuristic and awe inspiring.

</comment><comment><USER24> Lets say, theoretically, that a similar ruling were found for some of the Reddit moderators. Wouldn't it be in Reddit's best interest to immediately terminate their employment and find a way to bring in more cost-effective moderators?

</comment><comment><USER25> Having trouble getting past the author's failure to distinguish between the web and the Internet... :-P

<comment><USER26> I understand that it is common for facebook users to think that facebook is the internet.

Many do not understand that email has anything to do with the internet.

I was in a psyciatric hospital when I pointed out to the staff that I needed to renew my domain names. They told me I could not do that so I asserted my right to manage my own fincial affairs, as is the law. the staff of that particular hospital know about that law so they will arrange for you to pay rent and the like.

But they regarded my talk of domain names, registrars and renewals as delusionals. Then I started screaming and crying "But I am a webmaster!" You are going to throw me out on the streets."

"We'll see."

This went on for a few days then "WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO MAKE IT HAPPEN!"

The next day one of the staff told me that a fellow patient suggested he put my name into Google.

He apologized, then said "Sometimes I forget why I work here."

Then he set me up on a staff computer so I could renew.

Lots of mental hospitals have wifi or desktops.

Others have no eay to contact the outside world at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Good point ;-)

</comment><comment><USER28> Kind of off topic, but the "Aol" branding has always grated on me. It's an acronym, AOL, not a word.

<comment><USER29> Originally, yes it was an acronym, then they officially changed it to a word in 2006. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL)

<comment><USER30> Yep, just like KFC is no longer "Kentucky Fried Chicken" \- it's just KFC.

<comment><USER31> "Yep, just like KFC is no longer "Kentucky Fried Chicken" \- it's just KFC."

The very first words at KFC.com are "Kentucky Fried Chicken"

Doing a text search on the home page says Kentucky shows up two more times.

<comment><USER32> From 1991 to 2006, it was just KFC. [http://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp](http://www.snopes.com/lost/kfc.asp)

<comment><USER33> NB: that Snopes page is part of its The Repository Of Lost Legends (TROLL) section, a cautionary lesson in false authority:

[http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp](http://www.snopes.com/lost/false.asp)

(And yes, I got sucked into the "Kentucky trademark" story too.)

While Kentucky Fried Chicken _did_ change its name, it wasn't for the reasons given in that account.

<comment><USER32> Thanks for that. I did already know firsthand that KFC had changed its name for a time. I found a source (Snopes) that confirmed it. Internally I was skeptical of the reasoning that was provided (since it conflicted with what I knew from more reliable sources), but the actual reasoning was tangential to my point</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


PayPal apologizes for blocking sales of photo book with "Iranian" in the title - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2013/07/17/paypal-apologizes-for-blocking-sales-of-photo-book-with-iranian-in-the-title/

<comment><AUTHOR> more on the story: [http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/07/paypal-and-the- word-...](http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/07/paypal-and-the-word- iranian.html)</comment>


Sage: Semi-automatic ground environment air defense system - <AUTHOR> https://www.ll.mit.edu/about/history/sage-semi-automatic-ground-environment-air-defense-system <comment><USER2> Nice piece about the SAGE site on Mt. Umunhum over Silicon Valley:

[http://www.mobileranger.com/blog/sentinel-of-silicon- valley-...](http://www.mobileranger.com/blog/sentinel-of-silicon-valley-the- radar-tower-at-mount-umunhum-is-saved/)

and a strong dissenting opinion ("the biggest taxpayer fraud in world history") about SAGE from a guy who was there:

[https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/sv/umunhum.html](https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/sv/umunhum.html)</comment>