Founder of Liberty Reserve Pleads Guilty to Laundering More Than $250M - <AUTHOR> http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/founder-liberty-reserve-pleads-guilty-laundering-more-250-million-through-his-digital <comment><USER2> Liberty Reserve's main line of business was operating a shared ledger trusted by multiple companies which would exchange cash for ledger entries and ledger entries for cash, earning a fee each time. Think like Western Union except minus all the pesky regulated bits.

LR was a direct reaction to what had befallen e-gold, which was in fundamentally the same business except it did all of the cashing first-party (early in life, at any rate). e-gold was shut down for being a money laundering operation, principally because it was a money laundering operation.

LR was also a money laundering operation. It observed various issues e-gold had had, such as being physically located in the US (though theoretically registered in a country friendly to money laundering), and intentionally fixed these bugs with the intent of being the most robust money laundering operation it could be.

This ended up not working out, which is why the vacuum that urgently desires a money laundering operation has replicated the same hub-and-spokes model with the hub being a cryptocurrency (presently Bitcoin) and the spokes being exchanges and LocalBitcoins sellers. The onramps/offramps to Bitcoin are exposed to a variety of ways to curtail their operations but the central trusted DB required for them to cooperate is not controlled by anyone who can be conveniently extradited. People in the Bitcoin community refer to this obliquely as either "censorship resistance" or "resistance to policy attacks."

If you're interested in the history of this, Paypal and e-gold were approximately contemporaries, and one of the reasons Paypal succeeded and e-gold did not was that Paypal conspicuously courted respectability, so that even if Paypal was also doing hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and illicit transactions it would be unlikely to indict them as a criminal enterprise because they were a proper company whose lawyers wore suits and whose VCs were quite respectable. Bitcoin collectively cottoned onto the wisdom of having its fronts benefit from the same factor as opposed to being, well, insufficiently socially insulated from legal process. (I can accurately summarize who makes Bitcoin exchanges but it would read like a parody.)

<comment><USER3> Bitcoin and other online exchange / transaction systems (e-gold, LR, etc) represent a small fraction of global money laundering, a small enough fraction to be laughable and irrelevant.

<comment><USER4> One would assume there were more than $250M in bitcoins circulating, which seems to be the threshold for prosecution here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Perhaps if Liberty Reserve had only aimed higher:

HSBC Judge Approves $1.9B Drug-Money Laundering Accord [1]

 _" U.S. District Judge John Gleeson in Brooklyn, New York, signed off yesterday on a deferred-prosecution agreement"_

HSBC money-laundering procedures 'have flaws too bad to be revealed' [2]

 _" HSBC's procedures to prevent money laundering, sanction-breaking and criminal activity still have deficiencies so serious that to publicly disclose them would risk serious crime, the US Department of Justice has said."_

[1] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc- judge...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-02/hsbc-judge- approves-1-9b-drug-money-laundering-accord)

[2] [http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/05/hsbc- money-l...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/05/hsbc-money- laundering-procedures-flaws-too-bad-to-be-revealed)

</comment><comment><USER6> Money Laundering is Financial Thoughtcrime: [http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/money-laundering- is-...](http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/money-laundering-is-financial- thoughtcrime-1058902-1.html)

. . . By Former Chief Foreign Exchange Dealer; Director of Credit Card Interchange @ Visa & Founding Director of the Bitcoin Foundation . . .

<comment><USER7> It also falls under "victimless crime" definition.

<comment><USER8> Where is that definition?

<comment><USER6> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victimless_crime)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Their biggest issue (besides being a centralized service thus easy targeting) was not encrypting internal communications and allowing comments to accompany transfers which were typically "For 200 dumps of CCs" or something similarly illegal. They tried to avoid KYC regulations by just providing the internal ledger, you had to go through 3rd party exchangers in order to buy in or cash out of the system and these parties were supposed to do KYC.

Pecunix and C-gold are other centralized, closed book-entry systems still around though Pecunix changing to a voucher system.

<comment><USER10> Well, lots of drugs are sold for cash. Cash is issued by the Fed. Can it be sued for facilitating drug crime?

<comment><USER11> The feds also actively try to combat drug sales. LR made little to no efforts to do so.

I agree with what you're saying but I disagree with your example.

<comment><USER12> I think op meant the Federal Reserve, who are not involved in the War on Drugs.

<comment><USER13> Federal Reserve does not issue cash, that is the job of the Treasury Department.

<comment><USER6> Issuance and printing are distinct operations. Federal Reserve Notes are in fact issued by the Federal Reserve, and printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which is a part of the Treasury[1].

[1] [http://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/8320/how-and- wh...](http://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/8320/how-and-when- is-m0-money-created)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why is it illegal to operate money transfer? Why founders are responsible for the crimes committed by its users? Are they guilty because the business was "unlicensed" or did they specifically promoted crime in some way?

<comment><USER14> You can't operate MSB these days without complying with regulations regardless of where you operate from.

Laws for MSB's anywhere require them to comply with legislation based on where their costumers are originated.

When you move money from your US account to your friends in the UK through say PayPal; PayPal has to comply with the regulations in both the US and the UK.

Amongst those things the MSB also needs to ensure that they do their due diligence to ensure that they do not provide a service to launder money or facilitate other illegal activities this often includes running background and credit checks on the costumers, providing notifications of transfers to the authorities, checking their costumer base against a list of known criminal organizations and suspect individuals, and in general even required to report any set of transactions which fit a certain pattern.

LR (just like say Megaupload with it's "reversed" payment model) was designed to circumvent all of this intentionally while there might be some legitimate use for it it's primary use was to transfer funds and exchange currency in an unregulated manner which makes it attractive to only a certain type of individuals which seek that intentionally, anyone else would not want to use it using an unlicensed MSB is a sure way of getting your funds frozen and putting you under investigation.

I don't even understand how people can support them, even if they did not do so intentionally they've put their entire costumer base under a microscope if people used this service thinking it was a legitimate MSB they were defrauded. Money laundering and tax evasion is tricky, many laws in many countries are often structured in such manner that the accused has to prove that those funds were acquired legitimately and that all taxes were paid as due. Even if LB did this out of sheer stupidity (which obviously they didn't) they deserve to get their asses handed out to them just for putting every person who ever used them at risk of going to jail or getting in debt due to financial irregularities.

<comment><USER15> I agree. You have to look at the intent of the business. LR's primary use was illicit, whether they explicitely advertised themselves as such or not, they were still out of regulation and obviously not innocent.

Also it's customer, not costumer.

<comment><USER16> Strong accusations.

<comment><USER17> No longer accusations when they've been convicted in the court of law to the exact claims made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is serious stuff, and I want to mention to anybody on HN who is thinking about running a business like this given the rise in cryptocurrency related platforms, please consult a lawyer before you embark on your quest.

These are serious laws and it doesn't cost much to find out if you're in or outside of MSB regulations.

<comment><USER9> Some additional advice for anybody doing so regardless of where they live or the market they service:

\- Contract a legitimate 3rd party ID verification service like bitstamp does. You get API access where the entire verification process can be automated on your end, and it's out of your hands, so you have some kind of legal protection offloading the KYC risk to that party.

\- Encrypt all internal employee messages, regardless if they are totally innocent looking a prosecutor will find some way to twist the emails and chats into a crime. Have a written data deletion policy for internal messaging so they are not saved forever, as deleting them to satisfy a business operations policy will prevent possible future obstruction or evidence tampering nonsense charges.

\- Avoid any and all political ideology, don't call your service DownWithTheFedCoin. Notice how the prosecutors made a point about Liberty Reserve's name.

\- If you create an asset pegged to a currency don't use USD.

Finally have clear, concise instructions to resolve disputes, and some kind of phone number escalation procedure for users to actually talk to somebody. Better yet have a disinterested 3rd party to help moderate customer disputes in a totally transparent way instead of merely freezing accounts and ignoring their emails. As soon as somebody has their funds seized or delayed they run to regulators and lawyers to complain which in turn spawns government attention on your little cryptocurrency related service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> For anyone who doesn't know about Liberty Reserve, here's a good back story: [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/05/bank- of-...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/05/bank-of-the- underworld/389555/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Read: "refused to cooperate with government ops".

Thank goodness they didn't find Satoshi yet.

</comment><comment><USER7> Feel free to look at their indictment. The crime is providing too much anonymity and not centralizing enough. See "The criminal design of Liberty Reserve", starting from point 14.

[http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao- sdny/legacy/...](http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/usao- sdny/legacy/2015/03/25/Liberty%20Reserve%2C%20et%20al.%20Indictment%20-%20Redacted_0.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER16> Compliance with tyranny is treason.

<comment><USER4> the reason why your comment is greyed out directly correlates with why I left the country back in Bush II.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Isn't every non-US country, and every bank in those countries, operating an "unlicensed money-transmitting service" as far as the US government is concerned? I'm a little curious about where the lines are drawn.

<comment><USER21> No, see 31 US 5330 and related code sections.

<comment><USER20> I don't get it: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5330](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5330) doesn't seem to mention anything relevant.

I also don't understand the downvotes. I'm asking a serious question because I'm curious - if this company was operated by a Russian citizen living in Moscow (or by an Albanian citizen in Albania, or a Swiss citizen in Switzerland, or even let's say by the North Korean government) - what would have happened here?</comment></comment></comment>


Crysis on Switch Crashes If Console Username Contains Special Characters - <AUTHOR> https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2020/07/watch_out_your_username_can_make_crysis_unplayable_on_switch <comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised programmers are still creating software that breaks if people have special characters in their names/personal details, but apparently they are, and somehow this sort of issue made it into a console game.

Programmers, always remember that old XKCD comic when it comes to things like this!

[https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)</comment>


Now Hiring: Not You - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/now-hiring-not-you <comment><USER2> The reality I've learned from hiring a lot of people over the years is that recruiting is just not an objective process, no matter how much candidates and employers want it to be. I've often thought it's a bit analogous to dating. If you've ever had a close friend try to set you up with someone, you've definitely experienced it. Your friend will tell you how this other person meets all your criteria and you will be perfect for each other! You get all excited and then you meet the person and it's just a big letdown. Objectively you should be ready to tie the knot next week. But subjectively it's just not right for reasons you can't even always explain.

I've learned that if I'm not excited about getting a candidate an offer letter ASAP, it's likely they're not a good fit. If I have to talk myself into someone and make a list of pro's and con's, they're usually a bad fit.

<comment><USER3> I think you're right about what hiring typically is, but you transition to accepting it as correct too easily. The evidence for interviewing suggests that IQ testing, work product testing, and structured interviewing are the most effective techniques for identifying high performers. While of course nothing is truly 100% objective, those are certainly more objective than relying on excitement or gut feeling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I had a recruiter from Intel contact me recently, for a job that I seemingly had all the qualifications for. After a brief phone exchange she told me I was a great candidate and that I was what they were looking for. If the hiring manager agreed, I would be invited for a formal interview. Two weeks later I got an email saying I was not selected, the hiring manager did not agree, for reasons that will forever remain a mystery to me.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for sharing your story. Happened to me several times too. Once I received a rejection letter with 200 other candidates in CC list. We had a good conversation with each others.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would LOVE to know what the other people in the conversation had to say! I'm entertaining myself mightily by imagining it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Good but old stuff. E.g.:

"If Carpenters Were Hired Like Programmers"

[http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...](http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7819413](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7819413)

The first problem is having people doing the interviewing who don't know much of anything about the work.

The second problem is from organizations so dysfunctional with everyone so irrational and afraid of nonsense criticism that they spend most of their effort covering their asses.

A third problem is an economy that is far too slow with far too many people looking for jobs.

A fourth problem is just a generally sick organization.

In a sense, these problems are good news because they give an example of an industry where even a sick-o company can still survive and even hold job interviews.

Sure, you don't want to work for such a sick organization, but, if you can, maybe you should get into that industry as a competitor!

More generally, when you see an organization that sick, and the OP was a joke but not very far from the truth, the _flip side_ may be an opportunity!

<comment><USER7> Wow, is it really so hard? I mean, is it even possible to be a decent programmer and not find work in the US? Isn't the unemployment rate for software developer like 2% ?

<comment><USER6> I'm semi-retired now, but 20+ years ago I was caught in a big internal political fight in IBM's Watson lab. Some long time managers were demoted out of management. A lot of people left. I was walked out the door.

My work was in expert systems. I was doing a lot of programming and won an award for some crucial programming work I did -- writing the code all night one night -- saving _rule subroutines_ in our AI language. I published peer- reviewed papers in expert systems, applied math, and mathematical statistics.

I was and long had been good at programming and computer science, several operating systems, languages, many algorithms, lots of applied math software, etc. I'd taught computer science in ugrad school at Georgetown and in grad school at Ohio State University.

I sent 1000 resumes and got essentially nothing. My location was 70 miles north of Wall Street, and I was willing to move anywhere.

In wildly strong contrast, early in my career in software and applied math within 100 miles of the Washington Monument, once a sent a few resume copies and soon in two weeks I went on seven interviews and got five offers, all with nice raises. Soon I was making in annual salary six times what a new, high end Camaro cost.

IMHO, the idea that there is a lot of demand for people in computing, software, algorithms, etc. is just hype and hog wash.

But I'm still good at applied math and associated software so am doing a startup. I have to please my users and, thus, my advertisers, but no way do I have to please an HR assistant, an HR phone screen person, an HR interviewer, or a hiring manager.

I've typed in 100,000 lines of typing with 24,000 programming language statements (lots of internal documentation), nearly all in Visual Basic .NET with ADO.NET and ASP.NET. There is a redundantly reliable and scalable software and server farm architecture with a Web server, a Web session state server (instead of Redis, I wrote my own, just TCP/IP sockets, single threaded, using the TCP/IP queue as the queue of arriving work, object instance de/serialization, and two instances of a standard .NET collection class -- simple, fast, small, works great), two specialized _compute servers_ with my original applied math. It all appears to run as intended. For production I don't like the log file approach I took based on what Microsoft has, so I intend to take my session state server, rip out the collection classes, put in a write to a file, and, presto, get a log server. The servers all communicate with just simple TCP/IP sockets.

I identified the problem, designed the Web site, designed the architecture, designed, wrote, debugged, timed, and documented the code, and got it all to appear to work. Alpha test in progress now.

I'm a native born US citizen, have held security clearances at least as high as Secret, have never been arrested, have never been charged with any crime except for minor traffic violations, am in excellent health (now for my age), but have to say that for the past 30 years I've been absolutely, positively, totally unemployable for anything having to do with computing.

A shortage of people in computing? What a really bad joke.

<comment><USER7> Well, 20 years ago the landscape was completely different, I can believe the job market changes, and maybe in 20 years I'll find it hard for me to get a job. But currently, the landscape has never been better in my opinion.

Are you saying even today you're unemployable? How can that be? Unless you left some information about your credential out, like being incredibly annoying or some personality trait that would clearly reveal itself on the interview.

I mean, I believe you 100% if you say that you've tried to apply for work today, and couldn't get any offer after hundred of interviews, and that you're a pleasant person, and the whole thing is bad luck and that there are in fact less jobs then you hear, but I'd want to know more details. How can a pleasant person with your experience not find work in the current market? Is it agism?

<comment><USER6> > Are you saying even today you're unemployable?

Likely. Maybe Wal-Mart would hire me to stock shelves. In computing, essentially unemployable and have been since 1994. Long time.

Ah, along the way, I heard of a guy and several of his buddies who had, from a sudden change in some banking laws, found a hot resource allocation problem and, supposedly, some eager high end customers -- big banks. They had formulated the problem as a large 0-1 integer linear programming problem but gave up on using a linear programming package. So, they tried simulated annealing. They ran for days, quit when tired, took the best solution they'd found, and called it done without much information about how far they were from optimality. They mailed me their 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. I looked at it, thought I saw a path forward with some non-linear duality theory (in some senses, amazing stuff), did some derivations, the told them that I'd have a little in a few days and all of it in about two weeks. I did. I typed in Fortran code so that for some of the work I could call the IBM Optimization Subroutine Library for linear programming, callable from a certain Watcom Fortran compiler I had. My code ran right away. On their test problem 40,000 constraints and 600,000 variables, all 0-1, on a slow computer I got a feasible solution the duality said was within 0.025% of optimality in 905 seconds. I wrote them back with the good news but never heard from them again. There was something about they were just going on vacation. Uh, the guy who had done the simulated annealing work wasn't thrilled that I might work on the problem. They had paid me nothing, so I wrote letters to the candidate banks and heard back nothing.

There was another, similar case: The problem was the old one of which pharmaceutical salesmen should go to which physicians and leave what samples. Surprisingly I found a network integer linear programming formulation -- there get integer programming for free. I was writing the code in portable Fortran, since that seemed to be the effective approach, when a guy in the company who had an old heuristic wanted to get rid of me, and did.

Agism is a lot of it.

IMHO, broadly a CIO wants a lot of worker bees age 20 - 35 and manager bees older. As worker bees approach age 35, a tiny fraction are promoted into management and the rest fired. No way do they want to hire worker bees over 40; certainly not at 45, never but never at 50. The above is broad but IMHO roughly the situation.

Really, a guy 20 would be better off starting a grass mowing service, with one lawn mower, grow the business to several mowers, trucks, and crews, expand into landscape architecture and commercial clients, and by age 35 own a nice business he could keep running as long as his health held out and pass the business down to his children. Just grass mowing.

Or, a guy in computing at age 30 should think seriously about being founder of a startup. No, call that age 25 -- heck, call it age 20.

I'm no longer looking for a salaried job in computing and, instead, am concentrating on my startup.

I was pleasant enough a person early in my a career when I could get a better job anytime in two weeks. Now my skills with people are much better.

IMHO, being a worker bee in computing is a long walk on a short pier. The field might be a _profession_ like law, medicine, or some fields of engineering, but is not. So, there's next to nothing in professional certification, government licensing, professional peer review, legal liability, etc. From all I've seen, nursing works out better -- can continue to be a worker bee level nurse as long as can do the work. School teaching is better once get something like tenure.

I don't know how to solve the problem except just to leave it and, as in my case, do a startup. I can still do computing -- my startup software with 24,000 programming language statements in 100,000 lines of typing seem to work as intended, and I did it all from the first glimmer of an idea to the current alpha test. But that cuts no ice with any employer.

Ah, yes, now there is _data science_ : Gee, I have experience and an applied math Ph.D. from one of the world's best research universities that makes nearly all of current _data science_ look like baby talk. But, that cuts no ice, either.

I've got my startup. My wife died in 1992 from stresses from her Ph.D., and I'm about to get a kitty cat!

I'm fine, but I looked hard for jobs from about 1992, for years -- a huge waste -- and now just want to do my startup. So, the startup will be just a Web site, and the users need know nothing about me. If there are a lot of happy users, then there will be a lot of happy advertisers, and I will do well financially. That's what I'm doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not sure what this is but I love it.

However, while I do sometimes feel this way, the article went on for a little while. I was sort of expecting an explanation or a twist at the end. Oh well, still good.

<comment><USER9> I'm assuming it's satire referring to those required job postings that are intended to single out a specific H1-B candidate but need to be posted anyways to satisfy the "we looked for an American and couldn't find one" requirement. They typically have very specific requirements that match the exact skillset of the intended hire to ensure that any American applying will be lacking in some required "qualification," even if it's "only has experience with software w.x.y and we require w.x.z."

Note: I'm not saying all or even most H1-Bs are hired this way, just that the scummy companies that abuse the program tend to post these kinds of job ads.

<comment><USER10> I agree that those who participate in a process like this shouldn't circumvent its rules -- that just makes the whole problem much more difficult to manage. However, I think you could just as easily argue that the process itself is scummy for requiring the job posting when a well-qualified candidate has already been identified.

Why is a candidate's country of citizenship the test for whether a role must be posted publicly before it can be filled? Wouldn't it be best for both the economy and the company if this rule were followed (without circumvention) for 100% of job openings? If your answer to that is "no," then why require it in any circumstance?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A lot of real people feel this way while looking for jobs. I did for a while.

<comment><USER12> Generally because employers, either through lack of effort or deliberate attempt to shield feelings, are never clear with people about why they weren't hired after an interview.

"You flubbed the algorithm question. We're looking for someone with a stronger CS background."

Done. Clean and ultimately more kind.

... Unless a large number of candidates actually are getting rejected for sexist / racist / ageist reasons masked behind culture fit concerns, and the company obviously doesn't want to admit to that?

<comment><USER13> > You flubbed the algorithm question. We're looking for someone with a > stronger CS background.

When Triplebyte wanted me to go through their experimental interview, part of what I was asked was to "talk about" hash tables and, later, red-black trees. That seemed vague, but, prompted for what they were looking for, I covered the following:

\- Hash tables are the generalization of arrays to non-integer indices. They have the access characteristics of arrays. They store data in a backing array.

\- When two keys collide, the hash table can store them in a linked list (the "buckets" approach).

\- If you don't like that, you can do quadratic probing, in which you repeatedly square an offset from the true hash value for that key, until you find a space in the backing array that is not currently full.

\- Quadratic probing has the disadvantage that when you delete an entry from the table, you have to leave a placeholder in the backing array saying "there used to be something here!"

\- If you generate an index into the backing array which is greater than its size, you would usually deal with that by taking the index modulus the size of the backing array.

\- If the backing array gets too full, you would allocate a new backing array of double the size and rehash everything into the new backing array. You double the size so that amortized insert time stays constant.

\- Amortized time complexity refers to the average amount of time taken for a set of completed operations.

\- Red-black trees are a type of self-balancing binary tree with the property that all paths root to leaf are within a factor of two in terms of length. I can't say much more about them and wouldn't be able to write one off the top of my head.

The feedback they gave me was that, if I wanted to continue working with them, my highest priority should be to improve my knowledge of hash tables and red- black trees.

And sure, there's plenty of room for improvement in terms of red-black trees. But I am mystified as to what else they wanted for hash tables.

<comment><USER14> Here are a few questions that are not explicitly answered in your post.

How is the index into the array determined?

What are the best and worst cases for algorithmic complexity of a hash table?

Disclaimer:

I don't conduct interviews at my employer. If I did, I wouldn't ask about hash tables. I was asked to talk about hash tables in a Microsoft interview years ago and my accepted answer was much less detailed than yours.

Edited to add an adjective.

<comment><USER13> > How is the index into the array determined?

Odd question. Theoretically, that choice is unique to the individual hash table, not a property of hash tables in general. I believe languages with default hash table implementations often use the machine address of the key, although obviously that won't work for keys that are compared by value, like integers and strings. I know there has been research into how to hash strings well, and I wouldn't be surprised if such research is still happening today.

> What are the best and worst cases for algorithmic complexity of a hash > table?

What's a realistic worst case? A bucket-style table using linked list buckets will perform, at worst, as a linked list, except that if you add too much the backing store will be resized and everything will be rehashed. It would be quite a challenge to provide a large number of keys that all collided with each other for multiple sizes of backing array, assuming the hash function was decent. If you limit yourself to a small number of keys, the fact that you're seeing "worst-case" performance probably doesn't really matter.

<comment><USER14> I'll try being explicit with my first question.

What is a hash function?

Edited to omit needless words.

<comment><USER15> Isn't that a bit of strange question to ask if you wanted someone to explain hash tables? If I brought in a candidate to interview for hash tables, I would probably expect them to already have a base covering hash functions.

Otherwise, if you go down this rabbit hole, how deep does your knowledge about the basics have to be? Do you need to know every possible hash function? Their tradeoffs? Their probability distributions? The uses for each? Implementation details?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've had recruiters call me up and say that my rèsumè looked perfect and they were looking for someone just like me, but five years younger -- and did I know anyone who was looking who fit that bill.

What I never figured out is how could someone have my exact skill set and knowledge and yet be five years younger -- they started hacking about with computers in 1982 when they were just ten years old?

<comment><USER17> In this context, '5 years younger' probably means something like '~five figures fewer'.

<comment><USER18> I used to work in a digital agency for a few years, they often used to refer to this "mythical" awesome junior; i,e, a very smart and super talented kid just out of uni to stupid to understand his salary expectations.

It's usually all about money, not age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When this happens I can't help but jump to the conclusion, perhaps erroneously, that it was something personal about me. Especially when you apply for a job that you are a perfect fit for, but never hear another word from the company. Was it my name? My gender? It's so elusive.

</comment><comment><USER20> Rude awakening -- you rarely get honest feedback about rejection.

Consider breakups. The Seinfeld classic "It's not you, it's me" is hilarious because it touches this truism.

Move on.

<comment><USER21> It's true but it's also an opportunity. Somebody is going to capitalize on this in one of those a recruiting as a service businesses and they are going to get outsized candidate flow because of how hungry people are for some actionable rejection feedback.

<comment><USER20> Uber-for-breakups YC 2018.

<comment><USER21> good one!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As somebody who's currently job searching, I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way

I've even made it to a final interview where they flew me across the country, only to tell me that there's no funding for the position

I wish I could work as a hiring manager for a year just to see all the crazy stuff I've experienced from the other end

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey, I didn't know they wrote an article about me! Fun. /s

</comment><comment><USER24> I feel like hiring is so much like gamble. Lot of time, the hiring manager clearly express I should get an offer or a request for next interview the next days. Only to have radio silent and rejected letter 1-2 week later even me follow up with them.

It seems like hiring requires a lot of decisions from multiple people. And they want to be safe, so all have to give a yes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Huh. I guess I'm the only one who saw this as a thinly-veiled reference to how female/minority candidates feel when they're turned down for jobs. Not saying it's right or wrong for anyone to feel that way, or even whether the satire was effective/funny, but that's how I interpreted it.

</comment><comment><USER26> _" • Being self-motivated, high-energy, and someone else."_

</comment><comment><USER27> If you're not sure what this piece is about and suspect the joke is on you, welcome to The New Yorker's brand of humor. I feel this way about most of their cartoons as well.

</comment><comment><USER28> Is NewYorker trying to be The Onion now?

That's my only takeaway from this.</comment>


Contribution of cannabis use to variation in the incidence of psychotic disorder - <AUTHOR> https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(19)30048-3/fulltext <comment><AUTHOR> I've seen discussion about this all over Twitter and thought it would be interesting to share regarding if the experiment is more correlatory than causal or vice-versa.</comment>


Are Eggs Bad for Your Heart Health? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/well/eat/eggs-cholesterol-heart-health.html <comment><USER2> Avoid eggs and eat hydrogenated vegetable oils + cheerios for good health

~said no healthy person ever

<comment><USER3> It really drives me nuts that we have all of these innovative and brilliant solutions for treating a number of supposedly preventable diseases, yet the field of nutrition can't even agree on how we can avoid delaying onset or preventing some of these diseases in the first place. The only thing we know for sure is don't smoke cigarettes.</comment></comment>


Apple Looking To Slice Up Cable 99 Cents At A Time - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/24/apple-cable/ <comment><USER2> This sounds wonderful, but I think it's unrealistic to expect this model to go mainstream. The pricing logic here completely ignores the costs involved. It's like saying that some people are sick of paying $20k for their cars and predicting that Apple is going to design a better car (tangent: wouldn't that be nice?) and sell it for just $1k. Sounds great, but it's just not possible.

Contrary to popular belief, not _all_ of that $150 you give to Comcast each month (ouch) goes to buying yachts for Comcast's CEO. Some of it goes to building and maintaining a network. Some of it even goes to pay for the production of those movies and television shows you're watching. The costs of producing entertainment and running large-scale networks is probably not going to drop by 90% any time soon.

The more likely scenario is this:

Comcast: May I help you?

Me: Yes, I'd like to cancel my $150/month TV+internet package and just get an internet-only package because I can get all the content I want over the internet now much more affordably.

Comcast: OK, no problem. Our internet-only packages run $145/month.

I still think this is a huge improvement, mind you. Having everything on demand is much better than worrying about TV networks' schedules. And those who watch less can now pay less (i.e. those who watch more can pay more...). I just don't see everyone's bill going from $1,500 a year to $100 a year, like the article suggests.

<comment><USER3> The pricing models are ridiculous. I cut the cable cord over a year ago, cancelled my $150 a month plan, and now enjoy $30 a month Internet only with $10 a month streaming Hulu plus, $9 a month streaming Netflix, and save a ton of money every year.

The cable business model is dead. I'm sorry, but it does not cost $billions to produce these TV shows. I only watch about 3 TV shows regularly and spend maybe 2.5 hours a week doing that, so I'm not going to pay more than a few bucks a month. Also, I'm sorry, but if I pay for content, I am not going to let you get paid to show me unskippable ads. Not going to do it. The market has spoken. Technology is catching up to the cable companies and they are going to be relegated to bandwidth provider status.

<comment><USER4> How/where did you get $30/month internet? As soon as I ditched the TV part of the package from Comcast (and lost the BS 'bundle' discount), internet-only service went up to $60/month.

<comment><USER5> I (very happily) pay about 40 euros/month for unlimited internet (fiber nonetheless) plus free VOIP to Europe and the USA/Canada (and relatively cheap rates elsewhere). I believe I could get VOD as well plus TV but I have no interest in the latter and get my video from iTunes rentals.

Poor Americans are so isolated in their MSM cocoon they have no idea how they are ripped off! One would think that since they spend 40+ hours a week or whatever it is watching telly they would at least understand the true costs (i.e. how much they are being exploited).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It looks as though Apple TV is going to do what the Roku Player has been doing for well over a year now.

I got my Roku box for $99 (it's even cheaper now), and at the time it only did SD streaming from Netflix, but they have done several software updates since then, and it not only does HD from Netflix (and works beautifully), but it also streams from Amazon's VoD service, which is where I get most of my content when I can't get it through Netflix.

They've also added "channels" which allows any streaming video provider to hook into their API and stream to the Roku box, including the handling of paid subscriptions. Every day it seems like there's more. You can even get live baseball games and UFC fights.

I dropped my cable after the Roku. And to the above poster that said internet would barely be cheaper without TV, I have ATT U-verse, and it's $65 a month for internet-only 24mbps, but if you want an inexpensive option, I believe it goes all the way down to something like $25 a month.

I used to use torrents for some TV, but now that it's so easy to just stream stuff from Netflix, Amazon, etc, and watch it on my TV the same way I'd watch something on a Tivo, it's just not worth the hassle anymore.

The cable company's days are numbered here if they don't adapt to this new business model. I could never imagine paying $100+ a month for TV ever again.

</comment><comment><USER7> I still think the pay-per-episode model just isn't going to work in the US. We just watch too much TV. If you're an average American who sits down and watches 4-5 hours of TV a day that's going to be at least $150 per month in rentals. That's just for one individual too. A household of people watching different shows at a 99 cent per show fee could rack up a $500/month bill pretty quickly. Rental prices would have to be much closer to 5-10 cents per episode to be economical for most people to replace cable/satellite.

<comment><USER8> >that's going to be at least $150 per month in __rentals. __

That's the kicker right there. At $1/episode they're practically charging the cost of buying a DVD, except for all you're getting is streaming or crippled DRM'd 640x480 video - really just a rental.

$15/season ain't happening, and the formats they're offering aren't a reasonable value proposition for the buyers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As I was preparing for the new Mad Men season, I noticed that AMC was selling old Mad Men episodes for 99¢. At that price, it's about as cheap as renting the DVDs, and I thought Finally a network is coming to its senses.

That was short lived, however. They jacked up the prices when the new season started.

At 99¢ per episode or, say, $20 for a season I would jump right in and probably cancel my cable.

</comment><comment><USER10> I stopped using my iPod and went to a zune because I was tired of getting 99c to death. It was the best move, I would rather just pay my music "tax" and have access to all the music I want. Currently, there is about $1000 dollars of music on the device, when I had my iPod I never spent more than $100 dollars a year.

I am one of the few that actually want to pay for the things I like, as it will ensure that more of those things will be available.

<comment><USER5> out of (genuine) interest what happens to the $1000 of music if (gasp!) you ever decide to move to a non-zune device? Can you export it in an open format to move to the new one?

<comment><USER10> I'm sure they don't travel with me, but at $13 a month it is worth it. they will still cost $1000 and I have only to pay $140 (year). So if I need to move and want all the music which I won't not at $1000. I would have paid a 14% premium. the subtract all the music that I am either done with or didn't really like, I am sure that I will come out a head.

Hey, maybe that is a good business model, get a two month subscription service where you can access all the music and train the system to understand what you like so you can pay as little as possible for DRM free music. Best of both world.

Or we can all just enjoy Justin Beiber and the Youtube way of picking music.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I doubt this will do much - people have found out that you can download whatever tv show you want online, why should they pay for it on iTunes?

It might have a very, very small chance of working in the US, but outside its borders it faces an even bigger problem: most tv shows that can be seen here are several seasons behind, how can Apple compete with that handicap against free downloads for anything other than the "I am too scared of computers to even go near them crowd?"

<comment><USER12> "I doubt this will do much - people have found out that you can download whatever tv show you want online, why should they pay for it on iTunes?"

Simplicity. No need to deal with format issues, or un-seeded torrents, or corrupt files, or varying quality.

<comment><USER13> Are you sure? I never have any of the problems you state.

<comment><USER14> I have had those problems. If someone only watches a few shows, this could be a good deal. Also, I could never see my dad using bittorrent. It would be way too complicated for him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> $1/show/2days?

No thanks. It'd mean I'd end up paying $0. Quite frankly, no show is worth $1 for a single watch. Except maybe Nova (and PBS is OTA). If their non-prime- time dropped to $0.10, possibly all the way up to $0.10, then I might go through upwards of $50-$100 per year.

Which is $50-$100 more than they're getting from me now. You'd think they'd be interested in a market they've previously had totally untapped, but they don't seem to be.

<comment><USER16> If tapping the Groxx market would require them to lose money in a larger market, they aren't going to do it. Econ 101.

<comment><USER15> Or so the theory goes, if adhered to the current hypothetical parameters which seem to be making the media industries perform very slow seppuku. If people were _happier_ with what they watched, wouldn't it stand to reason they'd watch _more_? Doesn't Econ 101 also cover why demand is good for your income?

Not that I think you're wrong :) I'm definitely in the minority in this. But I _do_ doubt these sentiments / desires / tendencies are in the minority.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, this is in a way Apple's entry into the home console wars with iPod Touches, iPhones and iPads as controllers.

</comment><comment><USER18> Seriously, when am I going to be able to pick and choose what channels I want to subscribe to?

<comment><USER19> As soon as people, when faced with a choice between Everything and Nothing, start choosing Nothing.

<comment><USER18> I chose Nothing, and currently only get HD over the air with an antenna.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Apparently pay is the new free.</comment>


Building interface previews with React - <AUTHOR> http://www.callumhart.com/blog/building-interface-previews-with-react

<comment><USER2> Great post Callum!</comment>


IPads being confiscated in China after trademark loss to Proview - <AUTHOR> http://www.slashgear.com/ipad-confiscated-in-china-after-apple-trademark-legal-loss-13213171/

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if the Chinese authorities will go after Foxconn ? (probably not)</comment>


How Apple is sucking the profit out of the mobile phone market - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/07/30/how-apple-is-sucking-the-profit-out-of-the-mobile-phone-market/?utm_source=pulsenews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fortunebrainstormtech+%28Fortune+Brainstorm+Tech%29&utm_content=Twitter <comment><USER2> Apple purposefully chose to operate in an adversarial relationship with the telcos. They got concessions on app revenue streams (before apps existed), stopped iPhones from being peddled by fly by night phone resellers, and stressed out the phone companies networks.

An out of the box iPhone contains no carrier-branded crap. Period.

Apple is pushing the Apple user experience without the price premium. Everyone else is selling a commodity with minimal desirability. The Droids/BlackBerries/WebOS devices look and feel like knockoffs.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's with the financially illiterate assumption that profit is a zero-sum game? It's not. I'm sure that chart would look very different (and more meaningful) if it wasn't mashed into percentages.

Even if you used this faulty logic, the chart to me says "Apple stealing Nokia's share of profits", not the entire phone market. Were Nokia and Apple placed together in the chart, this would be clearer.

</comment><comment><USER4> Another problem with market share percentages without having totals.

If the market has grown 200% (in dollars) and apple is taking 50% of those dollars, than the competitors are also growing, although not at the rate of apple.

Somebody with better math skills than I probably was able to work out the actual numbers without much thought.

You'd think an article from a financial brand would do better than this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very strange title; it implies that Apple is actively making it difficult for other companies to make a profit. Of course, what's really happening is that (a) Motorola, Nokia and Samsung in particular have big shares of the declining dumb phone market, and (b) Samsung in particular makes lots of zero-margin ultra-cheap (<100euro unsubsidised) Android and Bada smartphones for the prepaid market.

</comment><comment><USER6> That is the most bizarre article I have ever read.

If Apple is taking a huge amount of profit off a relatively small percentage of the market, that would actually imply the opposite of what the article says, there is still the potential for large profits in the industry.

I'm really dumbfounded that that article could make it on cnn.com.

</comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps the market will change to be more like the console market, where the hardware is sold at a loss in exchange for future revenue from other sources. I would look for phone manufacturers to start asking for a percentage of app sales.

<comment><USER8> Have you bought a phone lately? The telco pays for most of the phone in exchange for your agreement to use their service for two years.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but now phones generate other revenue than just the service contract. You don't think phone manufacturers would want some of that?

<comment><USER5> They want it, but they're not going to get it. In any case, for the time being, app store revenue is minimal compared to device revenue; last year the whole sector took under 2 billion dollars in sales globally, only a third (less sales taxes etc. in some cases) goes to the operator.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nearly 1,000 Paintings and Drawings by Vincent van Gogh Digitized and Put Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.openculture.com/2018/07/nearly-1000-paintings-drawings-vincent-van-gogh-now-digitized-put-online-view-download-collection.html <comment><USER2> Van Gogh has a special meaning for me, because it's the first time I was fascinated with a painting.

To put things into context: my mom is an art historian, and when I was a kid she'd regularly drag me to museums. I remember being bored out of my mind, with only the cool architecture of the museums themselves to mildly entertain me.

To this day I'm pretty uninterested in the classics

Years later, in my late 20s, I went to the National Gallery in London, and saw one of Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Cypresses" [1] there, and for the first time a classical painting struck me as beautiful. Maybe it's the pastels, maybe it was the texture of the gouache (which no digital picture reproduces, you'd need a detailed 3D model), I just stood there entranced by this painting.

I bought a (stupidly overpriced) print of it at the gift shop, and to this day it's still the only classical painting I can recognize a love for.

Sadly, that particular painting isn't part of this digitized collection, since the collection is from the Amsterdam Museum, not from London's National Gallery.

[1] [https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van- gog...](https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gogh-a- wheatfield-with-cypresses)

<comment><USER3> I never appreciated Van Gogh very much until I saw his large mesmerizing paintings in person at the museum in Amsterdam.

<comment><USER4> Me too! I was blown away by the 3d structure of the paint on the canvas. Completely changed my appreciation for the work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As nice as this is, it would have been even better if they'd used an understandable CC licence instead of the custom non-commercial sub-A4 one they've decided on. There are at least a couple of museums now that have licenced their entire digital artworks as CC0[1][2], and I've been talking to Munchmuseet in Oslo recently who are planning to licence their entire new digitised collection[3] as CC4 (free use with attribution).

It's important for me as I need PD (or CC0, which is functionally equivalent) to pick decent cover art for Standard Ebooks[4] works. As it is we usually spend hours hunting through pre-1923 art books on Hathi for the perfect piece, and CC0 collections make that much much easier.

[1] [https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/](https://metmuseum.org/art/collection/)

[2] [https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio](https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio)

[3] [http://munch.emuseum.com/](http://munch.emuseum.com/)

[4] [https://standardebooks.org/](https://standardebooks.org/)

<comment><USER6> I really don't understand your comment, and all subsequent responses along the same line. The digitized van Gogh paintings are perfect copies of the original public domain works. For the US, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. [1] makes it perfectly clear that the images are not protected by copyright, and there is similar law and legislation in Europe.

What do you mean with the ability of the museums to choose a license for the paintings, and what is the "sub-A4" license you refer to?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

<comment><USER5> I believe the problem lies in the wording of 'exact'. Without a direct comparison to the source material 'exact' could be challenged. There's also the problem of exact dating of a piece of art as being pre-1923. With a reproduction in a published book you have a publishing date in the colophon that logically must be the same year or later than the reproduction of the artwork inside. Without that you're relying on the artist's date of death or supporting material such as an original bill of sale to make the distinction.

Basically, the problem is that when you're releasing a derivative work with CC0 you need to be 100% sure that your original licensing is correct. We're probably being overly-cautious, but luckily the imprint style allows us to be.

(The A4 licence comes from their T&Cs PDF: "Images of the Van Gogh Museum collection up to and including A4 size in TIF format may be downloaded and distributed for non-commercial use".)

<comment><USER7> What if I download an "A4" and distribute an "A3" with exactly the same pixels?

<comment><USER5> No idea, and that's the problem: the licence is badly defined. Ideally they would have used one of the pre-existing CC licences that people already understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Woah. In an ML class I took last fall we got to design our own classification challenge problems that the entire class then competed on.

The one our group made used this exact dataset (the museum website)! We called it VANGOGHORNO haha. We basically pulled the images from the collection and mixed them with non-Van Gogh paintings. It was surprisingly a very learnable dataset, the top two teams got around 97% accuracy and many teams got to 90%. We resized the images and included paintings from vaguely similar styles like impressionism so we were surprised people did that well. I think the top team used some kind of transfer learning to identify entities in the paintings and learned from that.

<comment><USER9> Is there some downloadable archive file of all painting in the higher resolution or did you simply roll your own web scraper?

<comment><USER10> In case you're looking for supervised art datasets for machine learning, I made a little art-movement classifier you may be interested in.

Demo here: [https://bit.ly/2xClNHz](https://bit.ly/2xClNHz)

data and models are available for download.

You can also have a look at art500k which is essentially the same thing. [http://smedia.ust.hk/james/projects/deepart_ana.html](http://smedia.ust.hk/james/projects/deepart_ana.html)

Their dataset is also available for download.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Slightly off-topic, a big part of seeing a painting in real life is seeing the structure and layers of brush strokes. It's a long shot but does anyone know if any work has been done to create depth maps of paintings and possibly combine them with scans?

<comment><USER12> That would be a cool use case for VR headsets.

<comment><USER13> It would also be The End for physical museums. If the appearance of the painting (the "frontal" lightfield under optimal illumination) has been recorded and securely stored... the physical substance of the painting becomes something that is only maintained for sentimental reasons. It's a basic premise of science and engineering that, if you have the recipe, you don't need the artifact. See Walter Benjamin etc on the idea that the original has an "aura" that can't be cloned. Of course it is nonsense, but it foresees the condition of mind-scanning and conversion into digital selves. There's no way any one of us currently alive will exist, consciously, in an electronic system. There's no way to transfer consciousness from the biological to the electronic substrate, though one can dream (as Greg Egan has) of shifting a conscious brain from one system to another.

In brief, human consciousness and artistic judgement isn't going away, for a couple of centuries at least.

<comment><USER14> > There's no way to transfer consciousness from the biological to the > electronic substrate

Transferring? You are thinking small. What about expanding beyond your brain, so that it becomes a small part of a whole and by the time it starts failing it's just a peripheral input preprocessing device/local motion planner/unreliable redundant memory storage/small vote in global decision making and not you.

The possibility is still pretty far. Reliable biocompatible high throughput brain computer interfaces aren't there yet.

<comment><USER15> How about slowly replacing brain cells with synthetic ones while maintaining the consciousness in place?

<comment><USER14> Technical difficulties will be much greater. The brain is still a single point of failure. The "expansion" approach allows gradual increase of intelligence thru intermediate exocortex stage, boosting the progress, while studying which information processes/something else corresponds to conscious subjective experiences, paving the way for relocation of consciousness locus outside of the brain or resorting to other measures in a case of impossibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Script to download full sized images: [https://gist.github.com/RyanEager/a747215c259ffecb9beb1dfec0...](https://gist.github.com/RyanEager/a747215c259ffecb9beb1dfec00e9d00)

<comment><USER17> Please do not abuse these sort of services. Sure, downloading one-offs for legitimate personal use is fine (in my opinion) but please be reasonable and avoid discouraging them of publishing more stuff or even locking down the existing collections more down.

Sure I understand it's bit annoying that they do not provide the higher resolution as downloads, and that they don't have more liberal license. But it is still pretty nice service and reasonably well done imo. This could be the baby steps for more open collections, but egregious abuse probably will not help in getting them into right direction.

<comment><USER12> Someone could offer a torrent file or ipfs hash to the files so other people don't have to hug their bandwidth to death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder how they are colormanaging these? I sure hope only the web versions are (presumably) sRGB, and they have wide-gamut versions for other uses, especially for their prints. I imagine they do, they are professionals after- all, and the collection and digitization overall seems pretty well done.

</comment><comment><USER18> If anyone's interested, I made a set of apps that turns your macOS desktop into a rotating art gallery, given an existing directory of images. It's all done in a completely native way, so you don't have to worry about weird software interactions or future compatibility: [http://archagon.net/blog/2018/05/02/a-native-art-gallery- for...](http://archagon.net/blog/2018/05/02/a-native-art-gallery-for-your- mac/)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to throwing this batch in there. Hope somebody sticks them all in a torrent soon.

</comment><comment><USER19> This is quite an amazing collection, and great for archiving purposes.

But, (I can't help myself), I am conflicted about the digitization of museums/artists/artworks. Seeing a work of art, let alone one of the greats, is something that should be experienced in person. Reducing it to pixels for instant digestion is a sub-optimal way to experience it.

Granted, this is amazing to research and exposure, and for distribution to those who wouldn't normally be able to see it - but I fear that it takes something away from the art.

If you are involved in the contemporary art scene at all, you may have noticed that works are beginning to become 'instagram' friendly - from paintings that look good on the internet but are ultimately shallow, 'installations' that generate a lot of hype and look good on your Story (a la Infinity Mirrors [0]), to hordes of people taking selfies with the Mona Lisa instead of appreciating it [1].

Maybe that's just the way things will progress in the Art world. But, imo, it is more important than ever to appreciate and continue creating the physical, tangible, beauty of art in an ever increasing digital world.

[0][http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kusama- mi...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-kusama-mirrors- broad-20171031-htmlstory.html)

[1][https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/arts/design/mona-lisa- ins...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/arts/design/mona-lisa-instagram- art.html)

<comment><USER20> I kind of disagree - many paintings are actually better experienced on print or online than in real life. Just take your example of Mona Lisa - you will get a better impression of the art from a good reproduction than from watching it behind glass surrounded by hordes of tourists at the Louvre. It is a relatively small painting and you can't even get close! Many classic paintings are awkwardly placed with bad lighting and so on. Some museums hang paintings in multiple rows, so you have to be a giraffe to enjoy half of them. Digitalization on the other hand is typically done under perfect light and viewing conditions.

In any case, for most ordinary people it is totally unrealistic to travel to museums all over the world to enjoy the real paintings.

<comment><USER19> Fair enough.

To be honest, I have issues with the Museum/Gallery institution as it exists, but that's another story altogether.

My bigger point, which maybe wasn't clear from my post, is that Art is one of the greatest ways to express humanity, and by digitizing and industrializing, we will lose some of that human aspect.

>>In any case, for most ordinary people it is totally unrealistic to travel to museums all over the world to enjoy the real paintings.

Agreed. And I don't think that we should idolize the great works as much as we do. I strongly encourage a more local appreciation for artists who are currently creating ;)

<comment><USER21> I have a similar viewpoint - in that personally I consider seeing original art locally, even though it isn't a Van Gogh or a Da Vinci or whatever, is worthwhile anyway. At the same time, digitisations or reproductions of "famous" works can still be rewarding.

Same with music, while recordings of Coltrane or Miles (or 50Cent or The Sex Pistols or Beyoncé, substitute whatever your musical tastes encompass) are great - it's still also great to go and see local live acs - who're potentially awful - but are often surprisingly enjoyable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I highly recommend the movie "Loving Vincent". It is a paint-animated film about part of Van Gogh's life.

<comment><USER23> I also recommend Van Gogh: Painted with Words, a BBC biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch who acts and narrates Van Gogh's letters.

If you like Doctor Who, there's an episode on Van Gogh with Bill Nighy that's sweet and sci-fi silly but they have an incredible scene where they animate one of Van Gogh's paintings. Sort of like the 360 degree VR animation of Starry Sky that is floating around Facebook.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Slightly off-topic, but does anyone here have experience buying reproduction prints of public domain works online? I've been meaning to get a print of a Pieter Claesz piece, but with so many different websites and options I've succumb to analysis paralysis. Any tips?

<comment><USER25> Only done it once, but I downloaded a HQ version of the picture I wanted and had it printed at a local printer. Was super high quality paper and good ink. Cost me about £7/$10 for a decent size, and I grabbed a frame off Amazon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some of his more famous paintings like Starry Night and Wheatfield with Cypresses aren't here. I guess I'll have to settle for Wheatfield with Crows! The sketches are fantastic tho - you have to scroll quite a ways to get to them but they are worth it.

<comment><USER27> There is a hi-res version of starry night, if you admire that painting here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_- _Starry_Night_-...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Van_Gogh_- _Starry_Night_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)

It is 30,000 × 23,756 pixels (file size: 205.1 MB) .

While incomparable to seeing it up close, a lot of brush details can be seen up close. If there was such as thing as a favorite jpg, for me this is it! :-)

<comment><USER28> It's spectacular on a 5k monitor! Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What I like about his artworks is the rough texture of his oil painting. I mean, these paintings are not just 2D pictures and their 3D aspects (e.g. texture and depth of the paint) tell much more. I hope digitization technology would be improved.

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't mind me, just sharing my favorite Van Gogh self portrait: [https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0016V1962](https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0016V1962)

The long, aligned strokes give the painting a feeling of motion and gravity, like bits of ferrous metal revealing a magnetic field. And the fact he put _green_ in his beard -- and pulled it off flawlessly -- never ceases to amaze me. It's almost psychedelic.

<comment><USER15> Do all these seem low contrast? I find it hard to believe that he painted down in value like this constantly. He'd have to mix every color with grey. It seems much more likely to be a weird photography setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Oh, but I long for visiting this and other museums in VR. Real soon now, I guess.

<comment><USER32> There have been several small attempts but no coherent joined up effort.

I really hope some galleries are digitising their collections via 3D scanning. Viewing something like a Van Gogh in VR without some real texture and depth is not convincing. Some of that paint is 5mm off the canvas. You can see that from a fair distance.

<comment><USER17> It is nice that these pictures now are pretty high resolution, so you can actually see quite a lot of the texture even if it is just 2d. Sure it is nothing compared to physical painting, but compared to your average low-res pictures it still feels like a significant step up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's a simple scraper to download the entire collection:

[https://github.com/Rendiere/vanScrape](https://github.com/Rendiere/vanScrape)

</comment><comment><USER34> Gentlemen, fire up your style transfer networks !

</comment><comment><USER35> I counted like 10

<comment><USER36> There are more than 10 on just the first page of search results, so I'm not sure how you're counting [https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/search/collection?q=&artist=...](https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/search/collection?q=&artist=Vincent%20van%20Gogh&pagesize=105)</comment></comment>


Why I took my Team to Costa Rica - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@latifnanji/why-i-took-my-team-to-costa-rica-for-a-month-816083ccd115#.bxsiw7jyj <comment><USER2> Sending the entire company to a distant location for a month only works if none of your employees have responsibilities outside of work. If you have children, or are caring for an elderly parent, or even if you have a significant other who you don't want to be away from for a month, it doesn't work out so well.

I like my co-workers, but I also like getting away from them at nights and on weekends. My co-workers are _not_ my family.</comment>


How to Make Lunr.js and Jekyll Work Together (with Gotchas) - <AUTHOR> http://rayhightower.com/blog/2016/01/04/how-to-make-lunrjs-jekyll-work-together/ <comment><AUTHOR> lunr.js delivers fast search results because the entire search process happens in the browser. There is no network delay because the network never gets touched during the search. If you run a Jekyll-based blog, this post will tell you how to make lunr.js work for you. Gotchas (and solutions) are shared within.</comment>


Apple malware affects mostly Chinese users - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29928751

<comment><USER2> A more informative technical explanation is given here: [http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=4140](http://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=4140)

TL;DR: Pirated OSX apps with components that listen for iphone usb connections, which then gathers some metadata from the phone, and if the phone is jailbroken, it also grabs actual data (imessages etc) by uploading an ios backdoor component that hooks onto the commonly installed mobilesubstrate jailbreak helper.

Also, for non-jailbroken iphones, it uses an enterprise adhoc distribution certificate to install additional ios apps which apparently has been backdoored - article doesn't specify which apps, but apparently there's a risk that one could replace well-known apps like facebook by using the same bundle- id as the legit ones. I guess the user will be prompted on first run to accept the enterprise cert.

All in all it doesn't appear to exploit any vulnerabilities, just using existing features for what they are worth.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is this the first time there's been a credible attack against non-jailbroken phones?

<comment><USER2> Doubtful, and ios7 (and 8) tightened up on pairing probably because of the scare of leaking data when charging with an untrusted USB peer. But maybe one of the first high-profile, mass-distributed ones?

Also, don't forget that jailbreaking _itself_ by definition proves the possibility of attacking a non-jailbroken device via USB (or sometimes, even via the web in mobile safari). The fact that you get a visible Cydia app icon and optionally an SSH daemon with a known root password just means this time the attacker (hopefully, _you_ ) was benevolent.

<comment><USER3> > Doubtful, and ios7 (and 8) tightened up on pairing

They could still do more. It would be nice to be able to see a editable list of trusted devices. At the moment, on first connection, a "do you trust this computer?" prompt comes up. If you select "trust", to my knowledge there's no way to then revoke that trust. Additionally, there's no "don't ask me again" button, so if you do use your device with an un-trusted computer you have to be careful to never accidentally click the "trust" button every single time you plug it in (e.g. if you want to charge but don't want to sync).

<comment><USER4> You can revoke _all_ pairing trusts (on ios8, at least) with:

      Settings > General > Reset > Reset Location & Privacy

AFAIK there is no UI for individual pairing management, but I think the full reset is completely safe/non-destructive otherwise -- just re-pair on the machines you do trust, and everything continues as usual without data loss or huge resync, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> the Chinese government denied the claims and was backed by state-owned internet provider China Telecom, which said the accusation was "untrue and unfounded".

I cant quite put my finger on it, but an isp chiming in and saying it wasnt the government just strikes me as weird.

</comment><comment><USER6> What about slightly Chinese users? Are they immune to the malware?</comment>


Hello Heroku World - Autobenching Heroku - <AUTHOR> http://blog.evanweaver.com/2012/02/29/hello-heroku-world/

<comment><USER2> Interesting post with impressively confusing graphing. Two splines for per color, but stroked differently, with nothing two indicate which of the two y-axes the particular stroke of a color belongs to. The legend shows only color, but stroking an empty box, for some reason.

<comment><USER3> I had to read it 5 times to understand the meaning...

From what I understand: the more dyno you have, the less each dyno can do. Which is funny when you think about it, becuause your Heroku bill increases linearly with the number of dyno.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> if httperf is using select() with 65k odd sockets then that could be a bottleneck...

the "dumb" C impl can be faster too! it should probably fork() a few times so multiple accept()s can fight over the socket, which should probably be put into in non-blocking mode, and should also turn nagle off.

for even more points you can reduce the copying of the trivial response from userspace into the kernel using sendfile()/splice(), if you mlock() it into RAM first!

the printf likely reduces the throughput by a large amount too!

(I've spent far too much fiddling with various syscalls for synthetic benchmarks!)

<comment><USER5> Post says the driver was benched at 25k rps. But yeah that C implementation sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Python/Bottle dismal performance here is in line with Nicholas Piël's fingings regarding WSGIRef server:

 _Disqualified servers: (...) WSGIRef, I obtained a reply rate of 352 but it stopped reacting when we passed the 1900 RPS mark_

<http://nichol.as/benchmark-of-python-web-servers>

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting.

Didn't know Jetty was this bad. Or perhaps there are configuration options that influence this?

The author concludes that Tomcat collapses, but in the 4 and 7 dynos scenarios there doesn't seem to be that much difference between Tomcat and Finagle (which the author says did ok), but perhaps I'm reading the graphs wrong?

</comment><comment><USER8> Looking at the app he used for bottle, it only replies (dynamically) on /hello/:name .. the others (Sinatra, Node), are configured to reply on "/" as the route. Is that the reason he got such consistently bad results for bottle? Did he adjust the route used? Would like to see an actual equivalent "/" = "Hello World" app tested..

</comment><comment><USER9> Hm... I briefly glanced over the graphs, and the results don't make sense to me. Every single server he tested must do a C accept call at some point, plus some (a lot of) extra stuff. If those servers take less time then plain accept call, doesn't it just indicate that the benchmark is flawed? Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> AFAIK the issue is the way they listen() to the socket, as well as whether the accept is concurrent in some way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know of a good alternative to ab or httperf for load testing high- performance HTTP servers? With httperf I can't see to coax more than ~25,000 requests/sec out of my framework built on Jetty, but ab can easily do > 45,000 req/s. Both seem to be limited by the load generator, not the server.

<comment><USER11> There is siege, which looks ok (I haven't used it): <http://www.joedog.org/siege-home/></comment></comment>


I made a VR newsletter - <AUTHOR> I started this weekly newsletter for interesting articles about virtual, augmented and mixed reality. I'm going to be curating it with a couple of friends, so I'd love to know what you all think and if anyone has suggestions of what they would like to see.<p>I just published the first issue here: http://vamr.io/issues/1 <comment><USER2> Would love to see more from this! \- E</comment>


Breakthrough in solar efficiency by UNSW team - <AUTHOR> http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/breakthrough-in-solar-efficiency-by-unsw-team-ahead-of-its-time-20130505-2j117.html <comment><USER2> This article makes the prototypical solar energy mistake: thinking efficiency matters. It doesn't (unless you're working on satellites). There is no shortage of rooftop space. There is a shortage of dollars. The only thing that matters with solar is cost (in dollars) per installed watt (in watts). Efficiency plays a part in that; a more efficient cell for the same price is much better! But, a slightly more efficient cell for something much more expensive is not an advance at all.

This finding is technically neat, but I don't see how it is a breakthrough by any means. Admittedly, I only read TFA.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. Tom Murphy makes that point in his blog: "Don't be a PV Efficiency Snob": [http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/dont-be-a-pv- eff...](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/dont-be-a-pv-efficiency- snob/)

There's plenty of solar capacity on the planet to meet not only present electric generation demand, but the growth require for substituting much present fossil-fuel usage with electricity. Probably even bringing up per- capita energy allotments to a reasonable fraction of Western levels (1.5 - 2.5 kWh/day would make a huge difference for most people's lives).

The real challenges are cost -- building out solar capacity would require 8-9 doublings of existing capacity, at least. Financing this (or ramming through the construction regardless) is going to be the biggest challenge.

Storage though is the other bogeyman. There's very little pumped storage available. Grid batteries, likely emphasizing cost over size, weight, or efficiency, as there simply isn't enough of many common battery materials to meet requirements, thermal storage. Maybe hydrogen production, maybe electrically-powered synfuel production, flywheels.

There are a few reactor options, mostly still not commercially proven, which may help bridge the gap: TerraPower, LFTR, and other breeder designs. Relying strictly on conventional uranium fission reactors would burn through known reserves in a few decades -- 30-80 years.

<comment> Tuna-Fish > Relying strictly on conventional uranium fission reactors would burn through > known reserves in a few decades -- 30-80 years.

While strictly speaking true, this is completely irrelevant. "Known reserves" refers to the surveyed amount that is technically and economically feasible to extract at present market prices. The cost of uranium ore is a vanishingly small part of running a nuclear plant -- fuel costs are less than 10%, and the vast majority of that is enrichment and processing. Uranium market prices could go up by two orders of magnitude without endangering the industry, and at that point, we have milennia of known reserves (mostly in seawater).

<comment><USER3> No, it's not irrelevant. If you're going to claim that, at least have the intellectual honesty to point to models of probable reserves or advanced recovery methods.

I haven't looked extensively at the fission fuel issue, but that estimate is one that's fairly widely disseminated, including by the nuclear power industry. I see values from 5.4 - 6.3 megatons of uranium.

The problems are that:

1\. Existing scale of fission energy generation is a small fraction of a "total replacement" estimate.

2\. Even if there are extensive amounts of uranium, recoverability and net EROEI matter. Unless the extraction process is tremendously complex, nuclear chemistry _should_ tend to make this favorable, though it may still be expensive in terms of time, plant, technology, and/or other limiting inputs.

3\. This calls for betting the farm on unproven technolgies or reserves. We _do_ know that solar is sufficient for at least the next century or so. During which hopefully humanity can get its population back under control and to sustainable levels.

I'm aware of the concept of proven reserves. I'm also familiar with models of resource extraction and exhaustion such as Hubbert's work in oil, though not of the specifics as applicable to uranium. The IAEA's got some light reading on the topic: [http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/iaeabooks/1357/Methods-for- the...](http://www-pub.iaea.org/books/iaeabooks/1357/Methods-for-the- Estimation-of-Uranium-Ore-Reserves-An-Instruction-Manual)

And as mention, breeder designs change the maths a bit.

Sources / math:

<http://www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/3675/Energy%20Challenge.pdf.download>

[http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/2010/prn201009....](http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/2010/prn201009.html)

(And the math done here showing we'd exhaust those reserves building the first 5,000 of the 17,000 1GW plants required to meet present demand at a cost of $52 trillion: [http://terrydyke.com/2011/06/even-if-nuclear-power-were- safe...](http://terrydyke.com/2011/06/even-if-nuclear-power-were-safe-enough- peak-uranium/))

[http://terrydyke.com/2011/06/even-if-nuclear-power-were- safe...](http://terrydyke.com/2011/06/even-if-nuclear-power-were-safe-enough- peak-uranium/)

<comment> Tuna-Fish 1) True. Which is why we should be building more...

2) EROEI is fantastically, ridiculously good for everything nuclear-related. Even the worst uranium mining schemes beat everything else by a million times. And the costs are still minimal even with the more exotic extraction schemes. There have been trials of them, they have been successful.

3) Solar is incapable of being used as baseline generation. All intermittent capacity needs to be backed by something else. Right now, that's gas turbines. Fracking will make this feasible for ~30 years, beyond that we need something else.

The Hubbert's work in oil is not really applicable to Uranium, simply because there are effectively unlimited reserves of it at an economically acceptable price points and fantastic EROEI levels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Are we really falling for this again? How many times do we have to go through this.

Ignore all articles regarding solar breakthroughs unless:

1) they have a sticker price on their web site, for sale immediately 2) they don't need investments to get a business off the ground 3) they have links to all research and patents that capture what the breakthrough is all about.

<comment><USER5> I came here to post pretty much the same thing.

If you believed the commercial success of all the solar panel breakthroughs we have been hearing about, then by now every solar panel would be the size of a postage stamp, be generating 12 KW of power by moonlight and they would have been giving away a free solar panel with every six-pack of beer...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the end the only important figure in solar energy is Watt-hours generated / $invested over the lifetime of the panel.

The most efficient commercial solar cells available today are (as far as I know) the Maxeon line and their rated efficiency is 24%, so even that claim holds no water.

What I find a bit annoying is that any news item that contains the words 'breakthrough, solar, efficiency' will automatically get wide distribution.

You can probably find one such announcement per month and it usually amounts to nothing once the dust has settled.

<comment><USER7> > In the end the only important figure in solar energy is Watt-hours generated > / $invested over the lifetime of the panel.

Are there any meaningful differences in the toxic byproducts of manufacturing, transport, and/or disposal of the panels?

I might care about that, too, but I've heard very little about it.

<comment><USER6> All things being equal (same location of production and same environmental laws in effect) that should be factored into the price. If you compare say Chinese made panels with US made panels there will be a difference due to environmental issues being ignored but this will to some extent be off-set by import duties.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice if they gave some sort of citation or linked to some sort of scientific paper.

</comment><comment><USER9> Even for a press release the TFA has woefully little real information. After digging around I did find this one article which has a little bit more on how this is supposed to work. [http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/technology/solar- discovery-...](http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/technology/solar-discovery- sets-new-record-low-grade-silicon)

</comment><comment><USER10>
      At present, the best commercial solar cells convert between
      17 per cent and 19 per cent of the sun's energy into
      electricity. UNSW's technique, patented this year, should
      produce efficiencies of between 21 per cent and 23 per cent.

<comment><USER11> While being able to use significantly cheaper silicon of poorer quality, was the breakthrough as far as I gathered.

<comment><USER12> A quick TLDR from the article:

        The breakthrough involves using hydrogen atoms to counter defects in
        silicon cells ... [so that] poor quality
        silicon can be made to perform like high quality wafers.

A 25% improvement to efficiency is a big deal. Getting that improvement with cheap silicon makes this a huge win.

But there's no reference to patents or to research demonstrating these claims, so I don't know what to think.

<comment><USER13> What's the cost of adding these hydrogen atoms though. Too bad they're not talking about that in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Actually, this time they seem to want to crank it out in three years:

 _Funding to help commercialise the technology will total about $15 million over three years, with the UNSW seeking support from the federal government's Australian Renewable Energy Agency for part of that sum._

Most of the time these articles are very vague about any real application.</comment>


How Sitting For Long Periods Affects Your Metabolism - <AUTHOR> https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/article-how-your-office-job-is-affecting-your-metabolism/ <comment><USER3> This report triggered several of my alarm bells, so I investigated further. I had a look at the quoted study.

"RESULTS: No differences between trials ( P > 0.05) were found in the overall plasma triglyceride, glucose, or insulin responses during the HFGTT. "

It takes some balls to dismiss a study based on one sentence in the abstract, but this is an admission of a common and fatal mistake, so I'm going to do exactly that.

They're claiming there is no difference between groups because they were unable to show that, if there was an inherent difference, the chance they'd see these results is at most 5%. There's an easy way to obtain such a result: small sample size. And, indeed, they only compared 2 groups of 5 people.

There is a proper way to show two groups are the same, and it's called "equivalence testing." It has the same kind of statistical requirements that normal testing does. What they did instead is totally statically invalid.

There's not a soft way to put it: this study proves nothing. Let it be an example in training your defenses against bad science.

<comment><USER4> Makes you wonder what they're selling.

Get a few sites to pick up a bogus scientific study article supporting a new product they're releasing is a thing.

<comment><USER5> Right? This feels like a foundational article used to build bullshit credentials somewhere else by planting bogus citations that no one will check because they are >1 level deep. Hell, people don't even check 1-level deep citations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Exercise should only be for cardiovascular health. If you have an unfavorable energy imbalance, i.e. you're gaining weight, then you need to eat less by extending your time between meals. It's as 'simple' as that. Not easy, but simple. The 'easiest' solution is to go through periods of intermittent fasting. Either skip breakfast+lunch most days, or take a few days off eating entirely. People need to stop dieting, and they need to start 'not eating'. Our society consumes too much food.

<comment><USER7> Depending on your present calorie consumption you can start reducing calories by really concentrating on the fats you're including in your everyday diet. I'm not saying fats are bad, but that there is double the calories per unit of fat versus carbs and protein. Start concentrating on replacing some of those fats with purer protein and high fiber foods. This way you've already reduced calories, but not how much you're eating. I started with getting out of the habit of always having whole milk on hand at home, for example. You'd be surprised by how much you can curb your appetite by just leaning a bit more on high fiber foods and protein.

I combined this with being more mindful of how much I exercised that day. _If I did exercise that day I don 't use it as an excuse to binge eat anything._

I also try to push breakfast out until around 10am (I wake up around 7am, and usually stop eating by 8pm the previous day). Not sure if that counts as fasting, but it works for me. I tried 16 hours of fasting (basically no eating until lunch) and I just ended up binge-eating the calories I saved by not eating. Your mileage may vary.

After getting to work I have about a quart of water, then a coffee. If I feel on the edge of "I need a snack" sometimes it can be enough to just have another pint of water in response to that feeling.

Last, I really tried to get an understanding for how many calories are in particular foods and how many calories I really need per day. Use a calorie calculator to get a feeling for how much you burn while doing certain exercises. Learn how many calories are in common items that you eat all the time. Find optimizations if they are particularly high in calories. Then, after you've learned a bit, stop stressing about the numbers, take your newfound knowledge and see how you do.

<comment><USER8> My opinion, from my own experience: Sure, that definitely works. But the choice of cutting fat is kind of arbitrary. You can do the same with sugar & carbs and get basically the same result w.r.t weight loss. I think this illuminates the real underlying issue with modern diets which is _not_ that we eat "too much of X", but rather "too much of everything, too frequently". Approaches like this work not because "fat is bad" or "carbs are bad", but because they provide a simple, concrete framework for diet choices that ends up reducing overall calorie consumption.

<comment><USER7> It's just way easier to rack up calories if the thing you're eating is higher in fats. Remember that fats have no fiber (neither does protein, but that's another conversation), so you won't 'feel' as full, which can easily lead to a much higher calorie ingestion rate that you're body won't be able to keep up with.

Another big thing is portion control! You hit on the nose with eating too much of everything. Something else I've done is making myself smaller plates, but also taking much smaller bites and taking a much longer time to finish the plate. I make it take as long as possible. That way by the end of the plate I have a more accurate sense of how hungry I still am or not.

It's tough to summarize all of points of my current regimen since I've pulled bits and pieces from lots of different sources and put some personal experience into the mix.

<comment><USER8> Heh... What's interesting is I personally feel the opposite. I can eat thousands of calories of carbs/sugar no problem, but I fill up on fat pretty quick. I did the keto diet for about 4 months and _almost_ never went over my daily calorie budget, basically without even trying that hard. Most days I had to remind myself to eat _more_ because I was way under.

I wonder if this is a case for emphasizing that "one size fits all" doesn't work in dieting, either. It seems likely that satiety for various food sources might vary based on biology and lifestyle too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am always conflicted when I see something in here linking to globe n mail, particularly when the article is basically utter garbage, without any amount of research involved in it whatsoever. While there may be truth in there, it is certainly not worthy of even scanning the piece.

</comment><comment><USER10> This kind of articles are just another excuse for paralysis by analysis and for people to stay fat.

Most of the time, your metabolism doesn't matter.

And it never matters if you train with high intensity and have a decent muscle mass.

</comment><comment><USER11> 13 hrs is a f __*ton of sitting even for an office job. Anyway I was just given a standing desk and I feel way better at 5PM.

</comment><comment><USER12> I wonder if intensity matters. What would the response be if instead of treadmill one lifted weights with high intensity.

<comment><USER10> It depends on the fitness level of the subjects. The more fit they are, the less low intensity exercise (treadmill) is effective.

More info here: [https://roguehealthandfitness.com/importance-exercise- intens...](https://roguehealthandfitness.com/importance-exercise- intensity/?print=print)

<comment> 52-6F-62 Also depends on how you use it.

If slow, long jogs aren't cutting it—hit the sprints. 20 seconds on (full out), 30 seconds off (medium-light pace), or some similar interval.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very confusing article. At first I thought it is trying to say that if you are sitting for long periods, exercise can be bad for you. What it's actually saying is that more you sit, less effective the exercise is.

<comment><USER14> Maybe this explains why exercise never makes me feel "better" just more tired.

<comment><USER15> Do you stick with it on a regular schedule?

No science here, but anecdotally if I've been slacking off on exercise and then restart, I feel pretty tired/terrible at first. After a few weeks of regular routine exercise though, it flips and I feel tired/terrible when I don't exercise and energized when I do exercise.

<comment><USER16> I have the same experience. My threshold seems to be about 8 days - <USER2> that I can resume exercise more or less ok after slacking (or being ill) for 8 days, but after 10 days it costs a lot more and I feel worse afterwards. Of course it is more like a ramp than a binary thing, but there's a "step" around the 9th day in the graph.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The study in question limited participants to 4,000 steps a day for four days. That's an absurdly low level of exercise to undertake.

<comment><USER18> Is it that absurd?

During the coldest months of winter I would wake up and eat breakfast (sitting), jump in the car (sitting), commute to the office (sitting).

Once at the office I sit for 8h.

Then car again (sitting). Back home I prepare food (standing!) and then eat it (sitting). I then spent the rest of the day either sitting on the couch or at the computer.

Weekends could get even worst if it was a snowstorm day. Wake up, eat, sit in front of Netflix and then back to sleep.

Now that spring is in the air my steps are raising back up.

<comment><USER19> You sit for 8 hours...straight? No. You also seem somewhat proud for not being active...why make your family go through the drawbacks earlier than necessary? Not to mention the future medical costs (not just money but time)

<comment><USER18> It's not about being proud, it's about showing how having such a behavior is not absurd. I don't walk around talking about my inactivity.

In my case, that's only two months a year. Someone else might be that inactive for the entire year.

Think older people, people with disabilities, physical or mental health issues, etc.

Sure, I don't sit for 8 hours a day while at the office but it's pretty close to it. I have a 30 minute lunch where I walk to the cafeteria and stand while waiting for the microwave. I also have a 15 minute break in the afternoon where I walk to the most comfortable spot of the building and back again.

When it's not -22ºF outdoor I squeeze some outdoor walking time in during those breaks.

I hate stationary cardio on machines and can't stand harsh cold weather. My exercise is done hiking up trails during spring, summer and fall.</comment></comment></comment></comment>