Ask HN: The habit adopted in 2016 that had the greatest impact on your health? - <AUTHOR> Apart from exercise, what other habits have had a big impact on your health?
For me, standing desk was a noticeable improvement from sitting desk for health and avoiding procastination.  But it is not doable when your energy is low ( tired or sick) and if I had particularly mentally demanding job on hand.
I have much better weight loss when pairing exercise with standing desks <comment><USER2> I have made a consistent effort to be honest. Being honest about my feelings, thoughts and situations to everyone in my life; friends, family, and complete strangers. It's been incredibly benificial to my relationships and emotional well being, and I've been shocked at the level of compassion, motivation and honesty I've recieved in return, including deepening of relationships and emotional connection with friends/family/coworkers/acquaintances I've known for decades, and people I've just met. My fears and pessimistic worries about exposing vulnerabilities through brutal honesty have been overwhelmingly met with love, compssion, understanding, support and opportunity. This including the opportunity to offer the same to people whom I would have otherwise been blind to their similar struggles, thoughts and situations. <\--- I typed this and almost diddn't post it because (insert misanthropic adjective here)

<comment><USER3> Have you had bad experiences and if so, how did you cope with them?

This is something people nowadays should do more, including me. I am going to make this my goal for the new year. I always fear how people will react/think about me when I tell them my feelings/thoughts. This has caused my to lie about a lot of things(mostly small ones), which becomes a habit in time. It mostly comes from insecurity about yourself and low selfworth and not being able to stand up for yourself. As such, I think these traits will greatly improve if you are honest.

<comment><USER2> Yes, certainly, but the bad ones are few and far between. Also honesty makes it easier to identify and limit the emotionally toxic relationships. Coping becomes much easier with the increased network of people to share with.

"As such, I think these traits will greatly improve if you are honest." \- This has been my experience!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Potato hacking. I normally follow the "potatoes by day" variant. The process is simple: steam/boil at least a couple pounds of potatoes, then let them cool in the fridge overnight. The next day, you can only eat potatoes (no condiments whatsoever!) until dinnertime, at which point you can eat a normal dinner. Coffee, tea and water are fine during the day as long as they don't have added sugar/cream/etc. Don't forget to cook more potatoes if you're running low! They keep for at least a few days in the fridge.

In my experience the hack is a great way to liberate yourself from false hunger signals and feeling like you "must" eat certain foods. If you're hungry, the potatoes taste good. If you're not, they don't. Resetting all these habits helped me shift the remainder of my diet towards better food choices, to the point where I actively seek out fresh veggies & fruit and dislike packaged or meat-heavy meals.

The hack is not for people that have issues with nightshades or starches of course. potatohack.com has the most comprehensive info on the subject, but it is discussed on other blogs as well.

<comment><USER5> Interesting... I tend not to eat just potatoes (I'm diabetic), but wonder if it would work with my typical "mash" (cauliflower, celeriac, parsnip, potato, butter, cream, salt, pepper) it isn't just potato, but may be able to get a similar effect if I cut the butter, cream, salt and pepper down.

Will definitely look into it.

<comment><USER4> Yes, there are cautions for people that are diabetic or pre-diabetic. I suspect that you can't do the strict "hack" but there could be useful ideas in there, e.g., related discussions on resistant starch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did about 8k on the bike and got back on a rowing machine, but somehow ended the year still overweight. So in terms of health my year will hopefully be 2017, I will get on a LCHF diet. Because I have Hashimoto's thyroiditis, I did a little experiment 5 months ago, I stayed gluten free for 3 months (because I read somewhere that gluten could be the culprit) and my digestion and overall being improved. So I need to get back on diet and also cut out all the sugars. The biggest impact on my health has been impulsive overeating of candy. I even got a little worried about possible diabetes and bought a glucose meter, had an elevated blood sugar only two times in the morning, from 10 day tests. So I might not have diabetes...yet. But if I keep this up, I'm on a good path. I look unfit now, I weigh 110kg, I almost came to 100kg this year, but now I bounced back, especially in December, go figure why :P But I am not out of shape in terms of performance, I did a lot of weight lifting this year also, I can squat 150kg and deadlift 210kg with np, I did some really heavy climbs on my bike with 400 avg watts for 30 mins, so I am a lot better than average overweight guy. 12 years of rowing in the past, also helps. I just need to figure out why I constantly crave for short term satisfactions.

<comment><USER7> Was in the same boat. I cut out sugar (except for a banana in a protein shake each day) and made sure that I get enough protein. After a few weeks the sugar cravings stopped and I also lost a bunch of water weight. I also seem to have a smaller appetite, and when I eat I stop when I feel satisfied, which never seemed to happen before, instead I would stop when my stomach felt uncomfortably full because I never felt satisfied. I'm really happy with the changes, and it is making it easier to stick with my lifting program because I feel like I am making progress again.

<comment><USER6> Well done. I hope I can do the same. Do you think I can ease off sugar in small steps, like substituting candy with sweetened tea (agave syrup) ? I also heard that lemon juice helps when you get a sugar craving.

<comment><USER4> I personally eased off sugar in iterations, by making short "pushes" where I cut out ALL added sugars and answered any cravings with fruit like bananas, apples or grapes. Each iteration wouldn't last forever, but every time I "cheated" it was with a little less sugar than before. And every time I tried again I lasted a little longer before cheating.

Something that really helped me was getting angry at the companies producing all these foods with added sugar. Seriously, look at the labels, it is EVERYWHERE (at least in the USA). I resolved to not buy these products--why give your money to these companies that can't make a product taste good without resorting to cheap tricks? Why am I paying them to hurt me? I do still buy dark chocolate for dessert a few times a week--I am not opposed to dessert, but that's the only place I think sugar should be.

Ultimately I think everyone has a unique approach (mentally and physically) that works for them, and it's probably an ensemble of smaller strategies accumulated over time that create success in the end. Be willing to experiment (safely), accept temporary failures, learn what works and then repeat all over again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> 1\. Mindful meditation [free]

John Kabat-Zinn [0] masters the link between science and meditation and has published very valuable books (including guided/audio meditation exercises) [1]. There are a couple of scientific studies which prove effectiveness [2] [3].

2\. LSD [$5-10/dose + $25/multi-use test kit]

Benefits (mid- and long-term) are similar to those of meditation. In addition, you may be able to access your spiritual dimension, which increases quality of life even further (it is less immediate with meditation). It however requires one to literally read/understand/know everything about the substance before applying it (minimum literature: "The psychedelic explorer's guide" by Fadiman). Also, order a test kit and test before you ingest. Certain "edge cases"/people should not try it.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat- Zinn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Kabat-Zinn)

[1] [https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4180277/Mindful_Way_Through...](https://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4180277/Mindful_Way_Through_Depression_- _Guided_Meditation_Practices)

[2] [http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks- to...](http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better- brain/)

[3] [http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214697/meditation-brain- neuros...](http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9214697/meditation-brain-neuroscience)

<comment><USER9> > In addition, you may be able to access your spiritual dimension

Spiritual dimension is just vague new age rhetoric. I don't want to be fear mongering but you may end up with a psychosis as well. Recommending random strangers to use recreational psychedelic drugs under the guise of getting "similar mid- and long-term effects to those of meditation" is flat out irresponsible.

For those who _are_ interested in using psychedelic drugs. First of all, never use a full dose the first time you use it. Second, get a sitter aka babysitter. That means someone who does not use any drugs (that means nothing in the sense that the sitter(s) need to stay awake during your drugs usage, and worst case the sitter(s) should still be able to drive you to the hospital if its needed). Consider to inform your doctor and discuss with them the alternatives.

Instead of LSD and other psychedelic drugs I want to offer an alternative. If you want something akin to mindful meditation: do it more, or follow a 10 day Vipassana course.

> Certain "edge cases"/people should not try it.

This disclaimer is too vague. Some people don't know they are, or are young and will do it anyway because young people's brains (age < 25) are not yet fully grown up.

If you're into mindful meditation and want to take it much further, follow a 10 day Vipassana course instead. You will get guidance from the people there, and if you really get over the edge during your 10 day course (you're likely to experience difficult times regardless), you'll at least not be under the influence of drugs and will be surrounded by specialists who are sober. Also, a mindfulness instructor (such a course might be worth paying for) has followed a 10 day Vipassana course as its part of the requirement to become one.

Finally, I can highly recommend yoga _together_ with meditation. (Without any spiritual BS, as that is unnecessary/distracting and excludes those with different religions including atheism. A good yoga or mindfulness instructor will include everyone, and avoid using such rhetoric.)

TL;DR do mindfulness, yoga, Vipassana don't do psychedelic drugs.

<comment><USER8> As I said:

 _It however requires one to literally read /understand/know everything about the substance before applying it_

If you follow this, you will know if you belong to the category of people who should not use the substance to discover more of what we perceive as reality. It seems obvious to me that a comment on HN will never be able to fully cover the subject.

I agree however 100% with your suggestion to add yoga.

<comment><USER9> >> It however requires one to literally read/understand/know everything about the substance before applying it

> If you follow this, you will know if you belong to the category of people > who should not use the substance to discover more of what we perceive as > reality. It seems obvious to me that a comment on HN will never be able to > fully cover the subject.

Yes, I saw that disclaimer as well. Do you want me to address it? Your usage of "literally read/understand/know everything about the substance" fits CYA due to being extensively broad. Nobody in the world ever read/understand/know everything about any subject. Even those who maintain Erowid, studied psychology in university, or Albert Hofmann for that matter know everything about LSD. Those who know very little are arrogant about their knowledge whereas those who do know a lot are modest and acknowledge there's so much they do not know.

It is also not how drug usage should work. If you get drugs prescribed from your MD you need to follow his directions as well as the directions from the drugs. You're basically under his supervision and guidance, he's partly responsible for your well being. The best you have as recreational user is your own knowledge (while your psyche is impacted by the drugs), and hopefully a knowledgeable, emotionally stable sitter.

Please, don't recommend psychedelic drugs (or even drugs) to random strangers [1]. You may think they are intelligent and responsible, but many just aren't. Recommend it only to those people you know very well, and follow the advice I told you about not using full dose first time as well as sitter. The options of more mindfulness, yoga, and Vipassana 10 day course are much less dangerous. (Even those can be dangerous though which is why I follow yoga via an experienced yoga instructor who is finishing their physiology study, instead of following online free YouTube videos.)

[1] And especially not while using a good introduction, with sources, about the benefits of mindfulness & meditation while not providing any for psychedelic drug usage while suggesting it as the next step of mindfulness & meditation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A few things:

I started eating 2 hard boiled eggs (aka arse fruit) each morning. I now don't have a hunger craving at 10am like I used to have and can easily work through to lunch time and have a moderate lunch.

I joined a choir and it helps take my mind off the 9 hours of coding I do every day. It also gives me an outlet for my limited artistic side.

You say besides exercise, but I have to add that I started boxing. We have clubs that specialise in white-collar boxing, which has a lower barrier to entry than normal amateur boxing. I'm not good, but the club is inviting of all levels of talent and it's the best exercise I've ever done. Had my first public fight in March 2016, which was a big psychological hurdle. Nailed it.

<comment><USER8> > I started boxing

The hits you receive cause brain cells to die. Your brain being your most valuable asset, generally speaking, but even more so for intellectual work such as programming, you may want to switch to a no-contact martial art (such as kung-fu).

<comment><USER11> "no-contact _martial_ art" is a bit of an oxymoron. If you plan to use your martial art to improve at _fighting_ (vs general fitness) there is no way around free sparring. Every school of Kung Fu _that teaches fighting_ includes sparring.

If you don't want to get better at fighting, might as well learn ballet, or go running.

Your point about head concussion from extensive boxing practice is a good one.

<comment><USER12> And still, there are martial arts that do not exclusively specialize in having your head battered with heavy gloves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I stopped running and started working more. My health has never been worse. I regurlarly deal with back problems and I have gained a lot of weight. Used to be thin, now I am somewhat chubby. I want to start running again.

<comment><USER14> Good luck with your startup.

<comment><USER15> Having lived in San Francisco for the past couple years, something about this simple exchange gives me a eerie twinge of intellectual sickness.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've changed my eating habits and started following ketogenic diet(keto)[0] 18 days ago, and I already had great results so far.

I wasn't terribly overweight, but always on the thin line between obesity and overweight.

At the beginning: 184cm/6" height, 104 kg/229 lbs weight, 30.7 BMI

Now: 95 kg/209 lbs, 28,1 BMI.

Although I only lost 9 kg/20 lbs, I started wearing my XL t-shirts again down from XXL, and all my jeans are too loose already.

The best part of keto is it's not just a diet for weight loss, but a balanced lifestyle diet that I can follow for the rest of my life, that I never feel hungry while doing so.

[0]: [https://reddit.com/r/keto](https://reddit.com/r/keto)

</comment><comment><USER17> No real habits to report, but for anyone interested in sit to stand desks, I found a site that sells them for relatively cheap. I can't personally vouch for the quality of these desks, but as far as I can tell, they are the same sort of thing that office furniture companies sell, only 300-400 bucks instead of 1000-1500. Not necessarily high quality, but functional enough.

You do have to assemble it yourself, but anyone with a cordless drill and a bit of sense should be able to manage. There are a couple things that can go wrong, but they are easy to avoid and/or fix. The desk surfaces that come with these are probably a crappy laminate, like sub MDF quality fiberboard. That means that you have to be careful when screwing the legs into the surface, because if your drill's torque/clutch setting is too high, the screw will just spin and blow out the hole instead of fastening tightly. This is easy to avoid though, just set the drill to one of the lowest torque settings, say 1-3, and work your way up if the screw doesn't go in all the way. Also, there are usually plenty of holes on the legs, so if you blow 1 or 2 out, it's not the end of the world.

The only other thing to look out for is bad leg motors and/or bad control boxes, which are surprisingly common. No worries though, these things are easy to troubleshoot, and I'm sure the company will get you a replacement in no time if anything is DOA, as it's pretty common.

Anyways, my point is, if you don't mind spending around 4 hours of your time to read a manual and put one of these things together, you can save a substantial amount of money.

Also, if you don't want a crappy surface, you can just order the legs and add your own surface, although make sure to check that the legs can support the weight.

woops, here's the link [https://www.autonomous.ai/smartdesk-sit-to-stand- height-adju...](https://www.autonomous.ai/smartdesk-sit-to-stand-height- adjustable-standing-desk)

also, if you're really a cheapskate, you could probably find all this shit on alibaba or something, and save even more money.

<comment><USER18> Ikea sells electrical standing desks too, available around the world: Bekant, ~$500ish

[http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S19022530/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S19022530/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Been LCHF Diet for 18 months. Last 2 to 3 months used guided meditation/self hypnosis to control hunger and eating. Lost about 47 lbs in those 18 months. Last 3 lost 15.

Exercise some and that makes me feel better as well.

This past year I have taken to napping 3 of 5 days at work 5 to 20 minutes. I have my own office and I nap during lunch break. Most naps are about 11 minutes long. I always time them. Napping helps my productivity immensely in the afternoon. I can be coding, architecting etc. within 10 minutes after the nap. Oh, I usually drink one coffee or white tea before I nap.

<comment><AUTHOR> Is it possible to provide the link to the guided meditation? It sounds intriguing

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Started to get serious about sleeping regular, sufficient hours, coupled with situational changes that made this more tenable. It's night and day. I feel like a completely different person.

</comment><comment><USER21> Paying more attention to various natural cycles of mine. Started using a calendar more regularly. Started using mindmapping more regularly. Gradually shifted towards an 8-day cycle for the gym as I found a lot of success with longer rest time in weight training. Experimented with removing coffee for a two week period(somewhat useful). Made attempts to develop habits around cleaning and practice in the first half of the year and am going to reassert those in the coming year as more of a "everyday ritual" that I use to warm up to project work instead of turning on news or social media. Started using fl.ux again after a long break caused by an OS change and laziness, to the benefit of my eyes and ability to be sleepy.

I'm most excited about controlling my time and information better. That gets my stress down, which in turn does so much for my health.

</comment><comment><USER22> My back and shoulders have been hurting more and more (I'm only 27!) and it took me way too long to accept that slouching over my laptop was causing it.

Putting my laptop on a pile of books and using an external keyboard and mouse made a HUGE difference and my posture has improved significantly after just a couple of months.

I recently bought a Roost laptop stand which is great for travel and looks like spy gear but it is a bit pricey and a stack of books does the job too.

<comment><USER23> I had the same problem. In addition to regular exercise, try doing these stretches for once or twice a day: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdNS95hpL-o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdNS95hpL-o) (they are fun too! Perhaps get a group together at your office to stretch together once a day)

These exercises work to move your body back toward perfect posture, undoing the damage caused by sitting, typing, etc.

I stopped using these in November due to travel. My back and shoulder pain returned. It took about 7 days of consistent stretching for the pain to go away again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Started counting daily calorie intake.

I use an app called "Lose it!" To track my daily calorie intake and have paired it with Google Fit where I track my weight every day.

It has been way harder to eat excessively, as I'm constantly aware that I'm accounting all I eat. So mostly it just makes me aware about what I'm eating.

Results: Constant 0.5kg weight loss in every week.

A bit aside from the subject, but I also have changed to use paper money instead of cards.

I have a weekly budget that I get from the ATM every Monday. This raises awareness of the money I spend, since I can see my current budget every time I open my wallet. It has helped me to save significant amount of money.

</comment><comment><USER25> I stopped eating refined sugar (as far as possible) and I quit Twitter. Both made me feel better and less dependent on external stimulation. Positive side- effect: Increased self-confidence about being in control of things that before seemed to be in control of me.

In regards to sugar, I know limiting my sugar intake will remain a healthy habit forever. In terms of Twitter, I see it more as a temporary experiment. At least for the moment.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not for me, but for a lot of friends, Pokemon Go made a huge health impact, just from the increased walking around... One friend in particular started going to more parks, etc just to walk their trails and get more game play. Kind of wild.

For me, It wasn't really a year I pushed myself as much as I could/should. This coming year, planning on going lower carbs again, but also limiting my calories a bit more than the last time. A few years ago, I lost 80# by going low carb, but wound up in the hospital for ketoacidosis. Will have to keep a closer watch on my blood sugar and insulin levels. I've been within 15# of that weight since, but it's been hard.

One funny thing (kind of in response to the potato hack post), is that since that year, I really don't care for potatoes by themselves as much (straight mash, or fries), I'll have a little, but a year without added starchy foods of any kind (bread, rice, potato, corn) really changes what you like. I do seem to do better on red meat (even leaner varieties like bison) than I do with poultry.

So, ready for round 2.

</comment><comment><USER26> No more drinking. Used to waste a lot of time, money and calories. Haven't been hung over for exactly one year now :))

</comment><comment><USER27> Waking up before 7 AM every day - I seem to have a lot more energy throughout the day and I sleep better at night.

</comment><comment><USER28> I adopted daily meditation exercises and read a lot about stoic philosophy. My mental state is better than ever and I'm sleeping better because of it.

</comment><comment><USER29> (Guided) meditation (using [https://www.headspace.com](https://www.headspace.com) )

</comment><comment><USER9> So without mentioning running, exercise, and yoga and discrediting the change of 2015 (using small brushes to clean between the teeth so I don't have to see the dental hygienist every year) my next step (after very recently having my last wisdom tooth finally extracted, and an infection under a molar cleaned) made in 2016 is to brush my teeth 2 times a day. Including in the morning, when I'm a stressed zombie. I've been bloody stubborn/lazy on this throughout my youth and it is finally time to treat my dental hygiene like an adult should.

</comment><comment><USER30> It sounds a given but walking one hour a day, every day, really makes wonder.

</comment><comment><USER31> I started dancing Zouk. Besides the fact that dancing is fun and good for your soul it greatly improved my posture.

<comment><USER32> Longtime WCS dancer here, recently tried Zouk for the first time. It's fun, I really like the flow of the dance!

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Adapting BulletJournaling.

I noticed that everything digital is starting to distract me if I'm not careful. Even if I just go to my mac go check OmniFocus, my brain automatically wanted me to do other things on my Mac at the same time, while I'm already using it. Same for my phone.

I discovered the BulletJournal as a fantastic planning tool. Instead of having note apps, calendar apps, todo list apps and so on, I just have my nice Leuchtturm1917 notebook and a pen with me. It's destressing me, allowing me to be more analog and man, I completely forgot how nice good paper can feel.

It also helps me a lot fighting perfection and OCD. Every pen stroke is permanent which makes me appreciate mistakes more. Instead of an error, every wrong line gives the notebook more personality.

Lastly I was so surprised what a engineer brain can do with simple dotted paper. It's so easy to create new modules and layouts to expand the system further to solve another specific problem. It made me became creative with inventing new spreads for planning my months, tracking my daily habits or just scribbling down all movies I still want to watch.

It's a perfect non-digital companion for a digital guy like me and I love it. Just sitting in a cafe without my Mac or phone and reviewing my paper based system started to become a regular ritual that works like therapy. I'm very excited to start 2017 with this little guy in my bag :)

</comment><comment><USER34> Measuring my weight everyday on an IoT weight scale. Really helped me lose close to 7kg over 7 month (by eating slightly less, and better food), something I never managed until now.

</comment><comment><USER35> Standing to work, walking to think, meditation just because...

</comment><comment><USER36> I started running every day. I try to do mindfulness meditation but frequently get stressed and forget.

The running has been amazing.

<comment><USER37> Same! I'm 8 weeks in and already feeling the benefits. I'm 39, 190 pounds and my goal is 170.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Listen to yourself more.

<comment><USER39> This, introspection is apowerful tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I got one of those kneeling chairs (technically borrowed from a coworker who wasn't using it) and it has been _excellent_. We got these new fancy chairs in our new office and mine was hurting my back even more than our old fancy chairs. Switching to this kneeling chair helped so much - no more back pain. It also has quite a few different seating positions you can adopt if you adjust frequently or are a "seat fidgeter".

Upon writing this up I realize this is not actually a habit but a different piece of equipment, it just came to mind in relation to the standing desk mentions.

</comment><comment><USER41> I had to stop surfing, so I started playing table tennis. Five times a week. This and playing Pokemon Go, i.e. walking a lot the extra mile.

</comment><comment><USER42> I quit drinking coffee and start drinking liquid guarana instead (Scitec Nutrition brand specifically). It's like legal cocaine. I'm using it for morning and early evening boost.

<comment><USER43> I replaced coffee and energy drinks with caffeine pills. Same (or better) results, no sugar. Question: do you think this guarana drink is more powerful than coffee? It's quite common to see guarana drinks (mostly soda) here in Brazil, but I don't see them as energy drinks.. To be honest, I feel as I'm lacking energy for everyday activities.. Do you or anyone know whether any of these scitec nutrition products (or whey protein, etc) could help regarding energy? Or it's just for building muscles?

<comment><USER42> Guarana energy drinks and (for example Scitec) pure liquid Guarana are two different things, that's the reason I mentioned some brand. You need to try pure guarana. For me it's like 5-coffees at one 40ml shot, few hours lasting effect and no shaking. But be careful, you can overdose pretty quickly (start with recommended dosage on package and gradually add few milliliters each day to find your optimal/maximal dosage).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> 30 push-ups and 8 pull ups every morning. I've built a noticeable amount of upper body muscle and lost about 1.5st weight over about a year.

</comment><comment><USER45> Started doing Ashtanga Yoga. Opened up my shoulders and chest which got rid of my constant tension headache after about 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER46> I started running for 30mins every day. I'm not overweight but I've lost a few pounds and I feel much more healthier.

</comment><comment><USER47> I stopped drinking sugary drinks (mostly coca cola) everyday and lately I just reward myself with a small can on special occasions/hitting milestones, etc.

I had huge cravings on the first 1-2 weeks but nowadays I don't feel the need to drink them at all.

Since then I lost quite some weight and my blood pressure got a lot better as well.

</comment><comment><USER48> I started doing Hijama (cups with complete toxic blood extraction idk if I described it well) every 3 months. They say it has allot of health benefits. The most amazing thing I experienced is sleep like a deer which I was not able to do and wake up with a clear head.

</comment><comment><USER49> Gym 6 days a week. Really starting to feel proud of the gains. More confident overall, and a clearer head.

</comment><comment><USER50> Diet. When I ate unhealthy food and or fast food a lot, I saw a loss in willpower to do things. I think proper diet has a lot to do with how my day goes. It defines my daily discipline.

</comment><comment><USER51> Practicing self-enquiry. The practice is essentially trying to rest in the sense "I am", or simply being aware of awareness itself, rather than the object of awareness. It has drastically reduced mind chatter and anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER52> Decided to refrain from caffeine, sugar, and alcohol. I've had an increase in energy, clearer thinking, more restful sleep, and feel better with more positive thoughts than before.

</comment><comment><USER53> 1\. not using my cellphone while in the bathroom and not actually sitting in the toilet unless i was almost ready to 'do business'.

2\. not eating anything past 8pm.

</comment><comment><USER54> Counting the ounces of water I drank every day reduced dehydration headaches significantly.

There are a slew of apps that offer water logging, but I like Fitbit's implementation.

</comment><comment><USER55> Ketogenic diet + Intermittent fasting (23:1)

\- Energy levels are stable

\- Never hungry

\- Need to sleep 1h less

\- Feel better (less inflammation)

\- Fewer migraines

\- Weight loss

</comment><comment><USER56> Writing in the morning.

</comment><comment><USER57> being more social and going back to gym

<comment><USER57> also eating vegetables a lot and reading HN :)</comment></comment>


A lesser mistake than null pointers - <AUTHOR> https://diolang.com/blog/1.html <comment><USER2> That rabbit hole leads you to have separate types for collections with 0, 1, 2, etc. elements.

You need collections with two elements, for example to ensure that

       items.dropFirst().min()

or

       items.sort().take(2)

are safe to call.

Because of that, I think having _min()_ return _Either(int,error)_ is the way to go for most languages ('researchy' languages can be an exception)

Enforcing _abs_ to work for all integers would be higher on my list. Are there any languages that have _INT_MAX == -INT_MIN_ and interpret 0x80…0 as 'Not a Number? That could be used as return value for _min() on empty sequence_ , too.

<comment><AUTHOR> > think having min() return Either(int,error) is the way to go for most > languages

What about languages that want to be efficient? It's much more efficient to use a int return value then to unwrap it. Efficiently is one of the main goals of this language (Efficiently, safety, syntax/readability)

<comment><USER2> Do you think enforcing that lists never are empty is more efficient?

If the language can prove the list is not empty, it can elide constructing that "Either" object and optimize away the caller's error path.

If it can't (and there will be lots of cases where it won't be able to, even though it theoretically could), what will it do? Return an incorrect value, abort the program, refuse to run the code, something else?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. It's done during compile time and trivial to do.

Changing the function signature is significantly harder. You'd either have to inline the function, evaluate the code, run optimizations to remove the Either wrapping or you can have a more specialize simple check and have two version of the function. One with the standard signature and one that doesn't use Either and modifies the function to not use it.

Having one function signature which you don't need to modify is significantly more simple than applying several optimizations to undo wrapping and not break anything

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had several people ask if I could write a document of where the language is going and the goals of it however it might be a large read. I think a series of post each containing one idea would be more digestible. This is the first issue.</comment>


Thoughts on Redis - <AUTHOR> http://blog.kennejima.com/post/1226487020/thoughts-on-redis

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry, this is complete and total gibberish.

* The CAP theorem is a logical proof of the impossibility of providing both consistency and availability on a network which can lose messages (or using machines which can fail). You can't implement it any more than you can implement general relativity. It's a description of reality.

* The CAP theorem is not a data model which competes with or intersects at all with relational algebras. Rather, a relational algebra is the logical model (allegedly) underlying RDBMSes which are systems which historically provide consistency at the expense of availability in the presence of faults (thus obeying the CAP theorem because they're real systems and not opium dreams).

* Scaling horizontally does not imply anything about fault-tolerance. It instead describes systems in which resources can be incrementally added to incrementally gain capacity. It's possible to build a horizontally-scalable system which is less reliable than a single-machine system; it's also possible to build fantastically fault-tolerant systems which are also horizontally-scalable (c.f. Dynamo). Doing the latter is considered "a good idea;" doing the former is considering "fucking daft."

* Nothing about horizontally-scalable systems (or NoSQL or really anything the author mentions except for Redis) requires that the entire dataset be kept in memory. Systems like Riak (<http://riak.basho.com>) or Voldemort (<http://project-voldemort.com/>) use pluggable storage engines, some of which (e.g. InnoStore and BDB-JE) have excellent performance with 1:10 RAM-to-dataset ratios. By the author's own metric, the Holy Grail has not only been found but the damn things are multiplying.

* Neither epoll nor kqueue "scale indefinitely in terms of I/O concurrency." Nothing does. That's horseshit.

You're better off huffing glue than reading this thing. I don't even care what he has to say about Redis. He could have some incredible insights about it, but they'd be completely and totally negated by the incomprehension, misinformation, untruths, and general crazytalk which preceded it.

tl;dr: 15+ years of RDBMS experience gives you 0 clues about distributed computing; reading Time Cube (<http://www.timecube.com/>) is preferable to reading this drek.

</comment><comment><USER3> "First, scaling horizontally has little to do with the database engine itself - creating a transparent, consistent hash function is the easiest part."

That is just so incorrect that it's hard to take the rest of the post seriously.

What happens when you want to add a node to your cluster? What happens when a node goes down? What happens when you drop some packets between nodes? When one node has an unbalanced number of keys?

Then, answering each of these questions brings with it many more questions. For example, if the answer to "what happens when your node does down" is to replicate some data to another node, then how do you deal with inconsistencies between different replicas of the data? What happens if the node you try to replicate to goes down? What if the node you try to replicate to has a different idea of what that data should be?

If a database is to be truly horizontally scalable, it will have an answer for all of these questions. Which has a _lot_ to do with "the database engine itself."

<comment><USER4> Replication is for redundancy, not horizontal scalability. Unless you mean scaling reads, but replication won't scale your writes. For scaling writes you need sharding but not replication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "In the computer science terminology, an O(N) algorithm is considered "naive", and in the computer security terminology, it even has a name - "brute force""

WTF?

<comment><USER6> I was trying to figure out if he was suggesting that adding machines ought to deliver a superlinear performance boost, which would be quite a trick.

(Yes, there are sources of slight superlinear speedup in parallel scenarios, but nothing capable of beating n^2, never mind exponential growth.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Redis works great as long as the dataset fits in RAM. After that, the background saving process kicks in, and performance becomes an issue. This caused my company to move away from Redis to Mongo. It's foolish to assume that just because a product goes beyond storing key/value pairs that it's over engineered. It actually seems that no research was done outside of what Redis can do given the portion of the article talking about namespaces for keys not being inherent in NoSQL solutions. Check out Mongo's collections. That's exactly what they are.

<comment><USER8> > Redis works great as long as the dataset fits in RAM

This is by design, companies moving away from Redis because of this did not understood the deal at the beginning, and where looking for something else, so it was a good idea to move away.

Redis is mostly an in-memory database that happens to be disk-backed. With VM it is a different issue, and there are interesting VM uses, but the vast majority of Redis users are using the DB without VM, and as it is, as an in memory store, where the disk dump is used in order to reload the data on startup.

Because this is the Redis way, even developments are focused towards this direction: to use less memory for common data types, and scalable clustering in order to make it simple to use multiple instances.

I see this as a very simple to gasp thing. Just because this is the argument of the discussion instead I fail to see why Mongo should instead not be just considered as an SQL-family DB. It seems more or less a subset of SQL, but implemented with different tradeoffs. For sure they have some good motivations to avoid SQL, but what I mean is that _semantically_ it looks a relational database, while Redis has a completely different data model, so I can't see how the two systems really are a reciprocal drop in replacement and/or comparable solutions.

So I can see how MongoDB can be an alternative to MySQL when used to store a lot (much larger than memory) of row-alike data (call it documents or like you want).

And I can see how Redis can be used when you have memory fitting databases and need very high performances, and in general for all the needs of atomic data structures and complex server-side operations in this data structures. For instance storing or caching timelines, taking leader boards for a game via sorted sets, and a zillion other use cases that are currently running while we are talking.

I can't see instead how MongoDB can replace Redis or the other way around, if not for a very small subset of cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If the guy needs access counters without an ever-growing disk file, he dismissed MongoDB too fast. The ability to repeatedly alter fixed size data without growing the storage is something MongoDB has, and no other database engine that I know of. (Their design has its own serious disadvantages, but still, if that's the behaviour you need...)

<comment><USER10> Seems ironic that he dismisses MongoDB for being "over-featured," and then start listing problems with Redis that these extra features solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I posted my answer here as it is long: [http://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2010/10/challenge-web-scale- integ...](http://www.ceondo.com/ecte/2010/10/challenge-web-scale-integration- architecture-1-10)

To save you one click, the real problem about the web scale is the integration. This is the hard part, this is where things start to break, this is where on can have fun too.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wonderful post. Probably the best I have seen on comparing a traditional relational database and a nosql database. Also very well written.</comment>


Technologies for Non-Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://ambrevar.xyz/tech-non-programmers/index.html <comment><USER2> What? Is this actually serious? You want non-programmers to use git and emacs?! This is so out of touch with reality it's funny. Here's an actual list of equivalent things for _real_ non-programmers:

Version control: Dropbox

Filesystem: Who cares? This has zero relevance to a non-programmer.

Cryptography: SFTP with the friendly client of your choice for file transfers. SSH _in a GUI_ like iTerm 2 if you're getting advanced and need remote secure control

Text Editor: Sublime

OS: Mac

Shell: Get a cheat sheet for Terminal

Anonymous Browsing: Firefox + uBlock Origin + Privacy badger + maybe Ghostery

Private Communication: Signal

Programming: Python</comment>


Bonjour, Entrepreneurs – Only you can prevent French-Bashing - <AUTHOR> http://www.rudebaguette.com/2014/03/24/bonjour-entrepreneurs/ <comment><USER2> Or alternatively, you can simply ignore all this Euro-bashing (France is just the flavor of the month) under the heading "they do things differently, so they must be wrong".

Because we've been hearing this "the old continent with its big government and socialist laws is dying" crap for generations, and so far the only major fuck- ups have been in the ideologically driven attempts to be more like the US.

Just a thought: maybe there are multiple roads that lead to success, and we should distinguish between real practical concerns and ideological prejudices.

This goes both ways, because next up will be an article about how much better France (or any other Euro country) is in terms of working conditions for employees.

<comment><USER3> _Because we 've been hearing this "the old continent with its big government and socialist laws is dying" crap for generations, and so far the only major fuck-ups have been in the ideologically driven attempts to be more like the US._

The Greeks just called and asked if you could give them a loan.

I think you're right that there are multiple roads that lead to success, but not _all_ roads do. The economic policies of quite a few European nations over the past decade or two have been unsustainable, and as we have now confirmed the hard way, that means sooner or later things break spectacularly. There's not much point comparing working conditions between Europe and the US when one of these places has widespread unemployment and there is literally rioting on the streets, as was the case not very long ago.

As 'gadders observed, there have been other economic policy decisions in (parts of) Europe that had nothing to do with emulating the US, sounded positive, but turned out to be crazy too.

<comment><USER2> Most of Europe has been playing this game for _centuries_.

Almost everything people consider typically European, from food, culture to social-economic policies, has mostly been imported and adopted from countries and cultures outside of Europe.

It's this openness to change, this constant iteration instead of desperately holding on to the "one true way" (something typical not only for cultures that rise and fall, but also something that seems to be hindering the US when it comes to implementing necessary change) is the essence of the enduring wealth of Western-Europe.

There is no one European way, just constant evolution until a new successful road is found.

The riots in the streets and social unrest, which are nothing new or unusual in Europe, are a part of that process, not a sign of deterioration.

(And unemployment figures are hard to compare when what is considered employment in the US is considered exploitation of people below the poverty line in Europe...)

The economic policies of "a decade or two" are nothing. A blip. European countries can completely tilt social-economic policy within a generation because none of it is tied to their fundamental identities. You visit some European countries now you would find it hard to believe they were strictly communist less than a generation ago.

Whatever traditions European nations have, they go much deeper than the favorite social-economic policy du jour. It's something Americans seem to find very difficult to separate.

The US has tied it's identity to fundamental social-economic values and ideologies. For European nations, social-economic policy is a changeable as the weather.

<comment><USER3> There is certainly a lot of diversity in political and economic views in Europe, and by European standards the political and economic mainstream in the US are very narrow, with relatively little difference between the two big parties or the economics they promote.

I think you are overstating how fast things change in Europe and how much has been imported and adopted from outside. With the arrival of the EU and its subsequent expansion to bring many more countries into "Europe", the mix has changed, but if you look at "old Europe" the character and general philosophy of each nation hasn't really changed all that much for quite a long time. The Germans are still industrious: they believe in making stuff well and follow a somewhat capitalist philosophy. The UK and most of northern Europe have similar tendencies, though some of these places have drifted away from manufacturing and toward service sectors more than others in recent decades. In contrast, the French are heavily socialist, and southern Europe has similar tendencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> French here and I agree with the NYC article. Strict employment laws and extreme taxation as well as constant IRS harassment makes it a living hell for small and medium entrepreneurs here. Systematically labeling any critic as "French bashing" is not the way to solve these issues and yet it's the only thing I read from my fellow French anytime there's a critic of our system in the news. Not encouraging.

<comment><USER5> Same here. Remember that whenever you want to hire an engineer here, you'll pay him 70k€ and he'll get 35k€ ( then pay income tax on that). You can have JEI that would help you a bit, but that's a lot of paperwork ( most companies i know outsource paperwork for that matter).

That pretty much settle the discussion. I hire interns then pay them freelancing after that. Never would I dare hiring them.

<comment><USER6> > you'll pay him 70k€ and he'll get 35k€

That's true (although it's a pretty junior salary). However, thanks to the stuff funded by the €35k he didn't receive directly:

* he has no student loan;

* his kids' school is free or very cheap;

* he has top-level health insurance, and he knows there's a 0% chance he'll ever lose it; he hasn't got a clue what "preexisting condition" might even mean;

* he lives in a place safe enough that there's no sense in paying to live in a gated community; he probably doesn't know what a "gated community" is actually;

* he's got decent unemployment insurance (even if his qualifications are his best employment insurance, it still allows him to get bank loans more easily);

* his retirement is funded;

* his wife will be able to take years off to raise his babies under financially interesting conditions (legally he can, too, but culturally he usually won't want to).

* he gets massive tax breaks if he employs a nanny, a maid, etc.

So all-in-all, I'm not sure you're better off with $100K in the US than with €35K in France.

<comment><USER7> Let me give you an example of why this is a weak argument, and bear in mind that I say this as someone that has lived and worked in France for the last ten years.

I'm going on 40. I'm not married, and I won't be having kids. From your list of benefits:

* although I also didn't have a student loan, it wasn't thanks to French taxes.

* I don't / won't have kids so their subsidised schooling does nothing for me individually

* health insurance. I'm still young enough that I don't have any major health problems, although of course, insurance is also protecting me from accidents and what not, so I am getting some benefit from this. Concretely though, I haven't as yet got much more than a few courses of antibiotics paid by the government in 10 years.

* safe enough? Pretty much the only reason you don't have gated communities in France is because all of the places that rich people live in have been there for hundreds of years. If they could figure out a way of doing it, the 16th arrondisment of Paris would totally gate itself off.

* unemployment - yeah, I'll give you this one. I'm almost tempted to try and get myself fired, just so that I can spend three years funded by the taxpayer to start my own business. (not really, but that idea certainly removes any fear I have of getting fired).

* retirement - no reasonable person believes that people of my age or younger will get much of a retirement pension. If you're not taking steps to guarantee your own retirement at this point, your going to get a bad surprise at the end of your career.

* I'm not having kids, so parental leave gets me nothing

* massive tax breaks for nannies etc? well, in the sense that you can more or less claim their salary off your salary for tax purposes, I suppose that's true, provided you're actually making enough money to be able to take someone on in the first place (I personally have a housecleaner, but my flat is so small that she only works for 3 hours a week - at her hourly rate, that works out to a tax saving for me of around 1000E a year. Not exactly massive).

As always with government subsidies, they are just not as flexible as giving people the money and letting them decide for themselves how they are going to spend it. My salary is suppressed to pay for a whole lot of benefits that I personally will never see. There is a case to be made to limiting government subsidies to oly those activities that the government can do cheaper than anyone else (maintaining roads, fire department, police department).

So why am I still in France if the deal is so raw? Well, personal reasons, and I'm also enough of a lefty that I do see value in providing good education, public transport and health services to everybody, so I don't resent those taxes. But I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would decide otherwise if they had the choice.

<comment><USER8> I might be biased, but I think we have the most beautiful motto in the world:

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

No need to translate I think - except perhaps for the last word, which must be understood as "solidarity", not just "brotherhood".

My situation is quite similar to yours. I dislike to depend on others, I'm selfish in my own way, but I dislike it when people are struggling because they don't have enough money to live. Just because they were born less lucky than I, or because something terrible happened to them, or because they made mistakes. I would find it hard to enjoy what I earned in the middle of a shanty town.

So I don't moan and complain too much when I have to pay my taxes. I'm not short of money anyway.

> But I'm willing to bet that a lot of people would decide otherwise if they > had the choice

You would lose that bet. For the last 30 years at least people have elected either socialists or moderate right wing representatives. Even N. Sarkozy would be considered a lefty in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I overall agree, except for one important caveat: one of the main incentives for high-tech investment in France is the "crédit d'impôt recherche", "tax break for research". It's very effective, as it pays ~ 50% of salaries + charges for employees performing R&D duty.

But the fiscal services systematically target those who take this tax break, and it's pretty random whether they'll cancel it retroactively, up to 3 years after you received it. For startups, which often spend most of their money on R&D salaries, such a recall is often fatal. And qualifying for it makes or breaks many business plans. So it adds a considerable risk to an activity that's more than risky enough, in a country that already suffers from risk averseness.

Unfortunately, the department of taxes & finances a.k.a. "Bercy" is where the best graduates from ÉNA [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_nationale_d%27admini...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_nationale_d%27administration)] go, and ÉNA is also the alma mater of most French politicians: finance civil administrators often control politicians more than the other way around, so the latter don't seem capable to control the formers' destructive power.

<comment><USER9> True, but even without Credit Impot Recherche, the salary of a French engineer is so much lower than in Silicon Valley, it's mind boggling. Labor is cheap in France.

Now, if only the locals would get the culture of optimism that pervades Silicon Valley, they'd be going somewhere. There was a story on HN just the other day from a high-frequency trader moving to Silicon Valley. Lesson #1: everyone collaborates and is helpful. Not making fun of you and telling you that you are going to fail.

<comment><USER10> Would the relevant salary comparison not be between France and the USA, instead of France vs Silicon Valley?

<comment><USER11> Depends. France has the same sort of salary diversity as the USA. Paris vs. Bordeaux are almost two completely different worlds so while you have good engineers in Bordeaux, their price tag is probably about 3 times cheaper than their Paris equivalent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> French entrepreneur here.

It's called "communication channel overflow": When I used normal channels like talking to my "deputee for French people living abroad", I got rejected based on the tone. I feel like other channels would be the same: We don't get heard, never, unless we strike or do mass demonstrations.

So I overflow my criticism to HN. When they have enough negative feedback, a report will land on Hollande's desk and they'll decide what to fix.

That said, I still think the "autoentrepreneur" status in France is unbeatable to start a business.

Edit: reworded.

<comment><USER13> > But I still think the "autoentrepreneur" status in France is unbeatable to > start a business.

TO start a business a single owner, yes, but once it grows, you need to leave, basically, or face tax-death.

<comment><USER12> Right, I once calculated the tax and social payments (incl. retirement, health care and tax agent) for a 75k€ business without employee, and it was ~53k€.

You can't get rich in France. We hate rich people anyway, you'd be subjected to all kinds of verbal violence.

<comment><USER14> For comparison I just calculated the same for Germany and Poland (1 person business, income tax, "gewerbe" tax for Germany, health care, no tax agent, no retirement for Germany):

In Germany on 75,000 EUR profits you have to pay ~30,400 EUR and get to keep ~44,600 EUR. Total taxation rate at this level is ~40.5%. At 1,000,000 EUR profits you get taxed ~49.5% and have to pay ~494,000 EUR taxes.

If you moved a few hundred km to the east to Poland which has an opt-in 19% flat tax rate you would pay only ~15,000 EUR on 75,000 EUR profits and ~192,000 EUR on 1,000,000 EUR profits.

So France seems to be "worse" than Germany tax-wise. Something I wouldn't have expected.

<comment><USER13> You should check out Belgium for fun :) If I remember correctly it's a little worse than France, or about the same...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ugh, seeing this quote from the article - "strict employment laws don't kick in until you have 50 employees: that's how many WhatsApp had when it was acquired for $19 BIllion." \- is everything going to be measured by WhatsApp now? This week on HN I've seen WhatsApp used for valuations on car companies, the duration from $0 to a $1B+ sale, the price of a user, and now this, using them for...I'm not even entirely sure. Is he saying that a French startup can easily be a $19B company while still being exempt from the employment laws? Is that incredible wishful thinking on his part? It'd be like a Silicon Valley startup saying "we don't worry about Obamacare costs at all, we'll have a $10B valuation before we hit 50 employees".

<comment><USER8> > is everything going to be measured by WhatsApp now?

Since when are we responsible for other's misuse of an example or metaphor?

Whatsapp was less than 50 employees when it was bought, restrictive french laws kick in when you reach 50 employees. This means that does those constrains actually don't affect you when your business is taking off. It looks like a valid remark to me.

> Is he saying that a French startup can easily be a $19B company while still > being exempt from the employment laws?

It looks like it. Whatsapp wasn't making $19B, it was sold $19B.

Besides, when you reach 50 employees I don't think you can be considered a startup anymore.

The interesting question with regard to this french bashing is: why do You even care? Are they threatening You in some way?

<comment><USER16> "Whatsapp was less than 50 employees when it was bought, restrictive french laws kick in when you reach 50 employees. This means that does those constrains actually don't affect you when your business is taking off. It looks like a valid remark to me."

No, all it means is that those constraints wouldn't have affected WhatsApp when their business is taking off. To extrapolate it beyond WhatsApp you have to assume that WhatsApp was somehow representative, when it was clearly a gigantic outlier.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just had a conversation with a friend this week who spends a couple of months a year in London. She told me that I wouldn't believe how amped up the startup scene is there. After reading the NYT article now I understand why.

The French supporters of Francois Hollande can put all the spin they want on it. But when the fifth largest city in your country is London then you've got a problem.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pet peeve: It's _moot_ point, not mute point :)

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/moot_point)

<comment><USER19> As moot point original meant the opposite of what people use it for today, it would be better to use "mute point" and return "moot point" to its original meaning

<comment><USER20> Do you have a source on that? I mean I saw a cracked article claim that but it was severely misrepresenting the various uses of moot and I could not find _any_ references to 'mute point' being a real phrase.

<comment><USER21> I think that mavhc is suggesting that 'mute point' should be a new thing, and 'moot point' should refer to a point that has been mooted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps related, but I've been seeing more and more French entrepreneurs setup shop here in Montréal in the last few years. There are similar problems in regards to the bureaucracy and red tape (and language laws, which can be a huge pain), but many I work with mention A) the state of the economy being better here B) the social climate and cultural similarities to France C) the proximity to the US and Silicon Valley, for funding.</comment>


The Bot Bubble: How click farms have inflated social media currency - <AUTHOR> http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121551/bot-bubble-click-farms-have-inflated-social-media-currency <comment><USER2> Url changed from [http://theweek.com/articles/560046/inside-counterfeit- facebo...](http://theweek.com/articles/560046/inside-counterfeit-facebook- farm), which is an excerpt of this.

</comment><comment><USER3> The pages which pay for fake likes are punishing themselves in the long run.

If a page has tons of followers but none of them ever interact with any of the pages posts, then the page will be de-ranked and the reach of each post will get lower and lower.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hence the feedback loop between Ad arbitrage/spammers and social networks will collaspe in on itself while sucking investors down the death spiral. Just a matter of time.</comment></comment>


CSS3 images rendering times and sizes - <AUTHOR> http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2011/pure-css3-images-hmm-maybe-later/

<comment><USER2> While I find some of the experiments at created icons with CSS _interesting_ I wish people would concentrate on testing and pushing SVG for vector images in web pages. SVG is small, fast and well-designed format for rendering static images.

To my taste, a benchmark test like this completely misses the point (even if it includes benchmarks for SVG rendering—which this one doesn't).

</comment><comment><USER3> It's interesting to see HTML+CSS3 slowly re-implementing SVG in an awkward way.

</comment><comment><USER4> All the major browser developers are adding hardware acceleration. Creating a suite of tasks to give them a target to shoot at would probably help to solve the performance issue in the next couple of revisions. They made short work of the JavaScript benchmarks and Acid2/Acid3 tests, for example.</comment>


Tools to Organize Digital Life - <AUTHOR> Looking for ways to organize digital data ranging from website passwords,website name, technical documents, pdf, notes. I have lot of good data but when time comes to use it ,  it is too much pain to retrieve it. I am looking for better systems techies uses to handle their data. I use trello , evernote , apple notes, google calendar etc... but still it is not working out efficiently. Please share thoughts on any good system working out for you. <comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts on this. This will help all of us.</comment>


American Express fails miserably at basic security - <AUTHOR> http://timetobleed.com/warning-american-express-fails-miserably-at-basic-security/ <comment><USER2> This sounds scarier than it really is. Why? Because credit card companies focus on identifying fraudulent transactions rather than verifying your id.

From Bruce Scheier's blog[1]:

"But once you understand that the problem is fraudulent transactions, you quickly realize that authenticating the transaction, not the person, is the way to proceed.

"Again, think about credit cards. Store clerks barely verify signatures when people use cards. People can use credit cards to buy things by mail, phone or Internet, where no one verifies the signature or even that you have possession of the card.

"Even worse, no credit card company mandates secure storage requirements for credit cards. They don't demand that cardholders secure their wallets in any particular way. Credit card companies simply don't worry about verifying the cardholder or putting requirements on what he does. They concentrate on verifying the transaction."

[1]:<http://www.schneier.com/essay-153.html>

<comment><USER3> Strong disagree. In reality, and especially for small-ish transactions, card companies are terrible at detecting fraud and customers are terrible at noticing it. Criminals can make second-order money off innocuous transactions through affiliate scams.

The only reason this isn't a big deal is that it remains incredibly easy for attackers to get CC#'s without capturing packets off the wire.

<comment><USER4> Don't know, obviously you know a lot more about this than me, but in my experience as a consumer, at least my bank (HSBC UK) has been pretty good at identifying fraudalent transactions on my account. They actually spot them before I do and call me right away.

<comment><USER5> My credit card companies are so good at identifying fraud they've caught 17 of my last 0 fraudulent transactions.

(OK, I sympathize: buying a thousand bucks of stuff in four transactions from central Japan at 2 in the morning is not exactly typical behavior for a Bank of America customer.)

<comment><USER6> btw, as a fellow B of A customer who has had to deal with their crappy fraud algorithm as recently as last week, apparently you can go into the branch and have the 'fraud protection' removed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's pretty terrible, but I'd say it's still more secure than most of the ways I transfer my credit card number. Twice I've needed a tow truck, and both times would you like to know how they charged my card? By picking up their radio and reading off all my info to the main office. All I'd need is a scanner to get dozens of valid credit card numbers a day.

<comment><USER8> I once gave my card to a waiter.

<comment><USER9> A waiter stealing credit card numbers has a good chance of being caught eventually. I assume the credit card companies do some basic data mining on their stolen card database, and if card numbers start getting stolen shortly after dining at a particular establishment then they'll track this down.

I googled "waiter stealing credit card numbers" and here's an example from today's news of some folks who got caught:

<http://www.wjla.com/news/stories/0510/739156.html>

On the other hand if you have a radio scanner and are picking up numbers going over the air from tow truck companies there's no traceable link between you and anything in the database.

<comment><USER10> No, but there'd be a link to tow-truck companies in your area, and perhaps their not-exactly-PCI-compliant handling of credit-card numbers would be exposed.

<comment><USER11> Who says it would be in your area though? You could travel the country and probably find hundreds of instances of this sort of thing happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Maybe. But their fraud detection is pretty good. I've seen some unauthorized charges before, and Amex has called me before I had any idea. I've also had unauthorized charges show up on a Citi card -- their customer support didn't care and refused to help me. I just paid the $60 (for some scam software, apparently) and canceled the card. So Citi may protect their numbers better, but Amex actually helps you when someone gets your number.

(I also had a Paypal debit card canceled for authorized charges. Needless to say, I just buy everything with the Amex. Good customer service, good interest rate, cash back.)

</comment><comment><USER13> American Express also limits password for their online banking functions to less than 8 purely alphanumeric characters (no spaces, no special characters). If this alone wasn't bad enough, this almost certainly means that somewhere deep in the bowels of AmEx's software stack there's an ancient system where the password field is in plain-text.

<comment><USER14> AMEX isn't the only one with arcane password restrictions. Most banks limit the characters to an alphanumeric subset of ASCII with a few characters like _, and -. It makes no sense.

If that wasn't bad enough, look at how services like Mint have to interface with these institutions? When will something like OAuth come into play at banks?

I'd love to charter a bank on the premise of superior online service.

<comment><USER15> I wonder about this, same for my bank. My theory is alphanumeric plus one, maybe two symbols means there is a lower probability of some sort of SQL injection. Perhaps a greater risk for exposing one account, but lower risk for exposing many.

It's the only explanation I can come up with.

<comment><USER16> It's a good explanation, but it can only be valid if they store passwords in plain text. No financial institution would do that, right?

<comment><USER17> I'd dare say that if a financial institution ever had a situation where an attacker could see any part of their database, they'd have far bigger problems to deal with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It wouldn't matter at all if the handler was https. If the form is delivered over HTTP, a man in the middle can make it go wherever they want.

</comment><comment><USER18> Just out of curiosity, what is the actual penalty to American Express for saying their page is secure while transmitting credit card numbers in plaintext?

<comment><USER19> If someone steals my card number, they're the ones on the hook.

Edit: mkull is probably right in the vast majority of cases

<comment><USER20> wrong.. if someone steals the card number, the merchant who accepts the fraudulent transaction is on the hook. Not AMEX

<comment><USER21> That sounds awful. Credit card fraud is mostly paid for by merchants??

<comment><USER22> The card issuer has two parties they can stick the charge to, one is the merchant, the other their customer.

The merchant is the easy way out, they're not going to cancel their connection with the card issuer because that's their bottom line. Sticking the charge to the customer is harder because the customer will cancel.

Follow the path of the least resistance: stick it to the merchant.

Now if they did the right thing, they'd fix their acceptance rules and a bunch of security issues and eat the remainder of the charges.

Fat chance of that happening any day soon.

<comment><USER9> This is actually sensible, since it shifts the responsibility for verifying the customer's identity onto the merchant, and lets merchants figure out exactly how much trouble they want to go to in order to do this. Some places will demand a photo ID to go along with your credit card transaction. On the other hand, some places like Starbucks don't even make you sign the receipt -- they figure the small number of coffees which get charged to stolen credit cards are well worth the ability to keep the line moving.

<comment><USER23> Per the merchant agreements, they _cannot_ deny you the sale if you don't want to show your ID. Also, the credit card companies no longer require signatures for purchases under $20 (possibly $25?) which is why Starbucks doesn't require you to sign any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> That's just an ad for 'homerun'.

Find insecurity in competitors service, make loud blog noises, drop payload.

<comment><USER24> Really, just an ad?

Amex's lack of security is no less interesting if it's discovered by a competitor. It's a pretty serious mistake by an organization you would expect to be more careful and knowledgeable about these things.

<comment><USER25> True, but read the comments. The organization reporting this is little better. ("Encrypted on the client" - which means they would be horribly exposed to man-in-the-middle attacks...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In the old mail order days my dad used to write the cc number on the order form, in plain text!

</comment><comment><USER27> The F-bombs really don't add anything to an otherwise decent write-up. Use some more creative vocabulary.

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry bro i write the way i talk. also: "shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits."

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "This page is secure"?

This comment is complementing American Express.

</comment><comment><USER29> I canceled Identity Protect service at AMX after it routinely lagged (sometimes months) in notifying me of credit changes to my fico or whatever. It is sad to see people pay $14/month for that service which, best case scenario, notifies you after somebody jacked your card and has long since moved away to a foreign country. Then I canceled my card too!

Really identity thievery is an issue b/c of the banks + loan companies. They're perfectly willing to roll accounts with very little scrutiny and I don't understand why there are not class action lawsuits etc. to nail the lender not the jacked identity. Search on the "credit freeze" if you want the real solution.

</comment><comment><USER30> Why would you even need the entire credit card number to sign up for a service likes this? That's what boggles my mind the most. Amex really only need enough data to identify one of their cardholderes in such a way that noone can sign up for someone else.

Name + billing address + four last digits should be enough? Or eight last. Or four last + CVC. Asking for everything that's required for a purchase is beyond dumb. To me, it's like giving out your password while talking to customer representatives, that's also something you don't do.

</comment><comment><USER31> Reading the discussion about credit cards number security reminded me of this, that is worse than having some money stolen:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129797>

</comment><comment><USER32> Unfortunately, most of today's "security" with regards to credit cards are merely there to deter the easy grabs. Any determined person could easily get anyone's details through a number of means.

<comment><USER33> Sure, but why not grab low hanging fruit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I would be inclined to take this more seriously if there wasn't an enormous distorted AMEX logo at the top of the post.

<comment><AUTHOR> i don't do graphics bro sorry

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Eye Opener..it's hard to believe but then you have proved it. Merchants need to take this up with banks.

</comment><comment><USER36> The issue is as old as the internet itself - do not use your primary card. Open a special one for electronic use only with separate account instead.</comment>


Github, please don't tell me you'll charge my nonexistant credit card - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/MDLJU

<comment><USER2> So... did you contact Github about this or are you just being a dick and pointing it out here redit style.

</comment><comment><USER3> I got this email as well, replied asking about it, and promptly got a response apologizing and explaining it was a bug in their mailing code. Life goes on.</comment>


My crazy boss sold everything, bought a boat, and is sailing for an entire year - <AUTHOR> http://sailingondine.com/2010/12/11/skippers-summary-of-events/ <comment><USER2> I've lived on a boat in the Copenhagen harbour for the last four years.

I bought it in Holland, and knew absolutely nothing about boats when I started out. My thought was that the only regrets you have when you get old are all the things you _didn't_ do. Besides I'm enough of a businessman that I'd be able to sell it without a loss if it didn't work out. So I gave it try.

Four years later I'm still here and wouldn't want to live any other way. The boat is paid for so my only expenses are $200 a month in harbour rent and roughly another $200 a month on repairs. Internet isn't a problem since 3G is everywhere now - I can surf hacker news while at anchor somewhere off the coast of Sweden.

The upsides are pretty obvious: A gret free lifestyle, beautiful views, ducks right outside your window and the ability to go anywhere you want (within limits...)

The downsides are that it's cold in the winter, you don't have a lot of space, and you need to become a bit of a handyman. I've bought powertools I didn't know existed five years ago.

But overall it can only be recommended. Oh, and drop me a line if you're ever in Copenhagen I'll take you for a trip through the harbour, it's beautiful just before the sun sets.

<comment><USER3> That's amazing! I have a client who runs an acting studio (also an actor himself) and he lives on his boat for most of the year, docked at harbour- front right in Downtown, Toronto.

He tells me the harbour rental is one of best kept secrets. He only pays $100/mnth (a 1bdr studio in the area would go for $2100/mth) and lives in a beautiful yacht, with a master room and guest space, just minutes away from the downtown core and all the essentials. It's the kind of free-spirited lifestyle i'd like to live in the near future.

My question is, how do you deal with icy water? don't you have to pull out the boat when ice starts to form? In Toronto you could pretty much skate out on the lake in winter.

<comment><USER2> If your boat is in good shape and you're in a harbour it's not a problem. If you're not protected from the open sea by a bulwark of some kind the ice might drift towards land powered by wind and put a lot of pressure on a boat or whatever else is in the way. This will only happen if you're moored somewhere you shouldn't be though.

Basically what happens is that your boat just gets stuck in the ice and moves with the ebb and flow of the water.

The only problem you have is that you can't go anywhere until the ice breaks up. Last winter I got stuck in the ice somewhere in the Copenhagen harbour a few miles from my homeport and ended up staying there for almost three months. Here's a picture: [http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=oa2m2b&s=7](http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=oa2m2b&s=7)

<comment><USER4> Well, you have a steel boat. Leaving GRP boat to ice might not be as good an idea, although we had one here one winter and it still seems to sail fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am doing something similar. I am selling everything I have (not much stuff though, I am frugal) and moving to SE asia (where I was born). This is the first time I will be there in a long time (15 years) so not sure what to expect.

I made the decision in 30 minutes. Bought the ticket, committed myself, sold most of my stuff, said good bye to most people I know. The plan is to visit 50 countries in the next 5 years. Leaving on Jan 3rd.

I am too content with my life. Sometimes you need a kick in the butt to get out of your comfort zone. The world is too big and not enough time.

<comment><USER6> FYI, 5 years is not enough time to do 50 countries. It took me 10 years of traveling 6-9 months a year to break 50, and I'd say more than half of them are places I don't think I spent enough time in.

I'd recommend taking that half of the plan out, and just shorten it to "travel for 5 years or so". Chances are you'll find at least one country that traps you for an entire year. Probably best not to set yourself up to feel bad about it.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, I've "done" seven countries in two weeks. (In Europe, of course.) It's easy to get into a travelling pace where one night is enough to feel like you've seen a city... unless it's a _really_ big city like Rome or Paris in which case you need two.

<comment><USER8> I'm living in Europe and just have been to the USA for the first time. LA, SF, Vegas - 4 days each plus 6 days NYC (start and end point). I'm not sure you can do even the typical tourist stuff in one day where you don't have to think about where you go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been living in a motorhome and travelling full-time since January, so I've been on the road for close to a year. I'd originally planned to do this for a year, maybe 18 months, but now that I'm a year into it, I don't see any reason to stop. I'm going to Mexico, and Central and South America next fall and plan to spend all the cold months way down south. When I've done all the driving on the American continent I want to do, I plan to buy a sailboat and keep travelling (buying or renting a van or motorhome when I get to various countries I want to spend some time in).

I highly recommend it. All of it, or any part of it.

Selling and giving away all my accumulated crap was liberating beyond what I could have ever imagined. Getting out of the rut of daily life in one place and going to see lots of new places breeds a zen-like state of peace over the minutiae of everyday life (I guess your comfort zone just expands to be really wide). Living smaller means you can focus on the things that really matter. Cost of living can be as high or low as you want it to; I'm currently parked in an RV park that is home to formerly homeless people who've been placed in RVs by a charity organization, as well as retired couples living in $250,000 rigs, and everything in between.

Living on a sailboat is pretty much the same idea, with a few additional logistical challenges, if you need to keep working (I've been running Virtualmin from the road, and I just had to solve the Internet and power problem; on a boat, the Internet problem is much more expensive to solve). It seems to attract the same sorts of people, and I've met a lot of RVers who have lived on boats in the past, or live on boats some of the time.

<comment><USER10> How are you planning on getting a motorhome across the Darien Gap?

<comment><USER11> A good question. It's pretty tough for 4 wheeled vehicles to get across the Darien gap between Panama and South America. Driving is absolutely not an option - the track has been done I think twice by motorcycles, but that's it. Plenty of guerrillas in the midst of the jungle along with those horrific jungle conditions. There simply is no easy answer, and plenty of horror stories about boats used to transport drugs using a vehicle as a bit of cover. I've taken a motorcycle across the gap - the normal way, which means flying the bike from Panama to Quito or Bogota.

<comment><USER10> I've heard of flying or boating a bike around, but never anything as big as an RV. I imagine any option is going to be really expensive, though I suppose anything is possible.

<comment><USER9> Boat would be the only option for a rig as big as mine, and "really expensive" is a relative term. The cost of living full-time in a motorhome is highly variable and often has a very different shape than living a more stable life. When I'm doing very long trips, I probably spend more on gas in a month than most people spend on rent and food (I spent about $2000/month on gas during my Alaska trip, totalling about $5k for the whole journey). Spending $1000-$2000 for a ferry or ship to take my motorhome across wouldn't be what I would consider a show-stopping expense, and it's my understanding that that's the ballpark for this particular trip. It's just another thing to budget for. Moving, in a traditional fashion, to South America would probably cost even more, so from that perspective it's a bargain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is something that I dream about doing.

Unfortunately, buying a boat is expensive, and I have no knowledge of sailing.

So I've found something that is the same concept, but might work even better: bicycle touring. A world class touring bike (a Surly Long Haul Trucker) can be had for $1200. Much cheaper than a sailboat. A good tent can be had for ~$300.

I've made a deal with myself that I have 2011 to either get back into school, get an interesting, fulfilling job, or have founded a site that is producing enough money for me to work on it fulltime. If I don't accomplish this, I'm selling everything, loading the dog into a trailer, and riding across the country.

<comment><USER13> "Much cheaper than a sailboat."

You'd be surprised. Where I'm currently at (Montreal) there's a lot of 40-year old ~21 foot sailboats going for $3-4k. Me and a buddy planned to buy something this summer, but he spent his share of the money on travel. I was too lazy to learn to sail and don't like carpentry and other crap that goes into maintaining a boat, so I decided not to get a boat by myself.

Even when you factor in repairs, harbor fees and the possibility of having to write the boat off after 1-2 years because it's spending all its time in the water (most of the boats we looked at were dry docked for most of their existence), it's still cheaper than rent.

About touring bikes, it really doesn't matter what you tour on. I've known people who've toured on Wal-Mart bikes (not a good idea), 70s 5-speed bikes, track bikes (also not a good idea), double-stack welded tallbikes, etc. There was even a guy riding a BMX _backwards_ across the USA for charity.

I have a bunch of friends that swear by the LHT, but I like to tour on late 80s-early 90s rigid-fork steel mountain bikes (all the rigid-fork mountain bikes made today are suspension-corrected, which makes them useless for just about anything). On mountain bikes the rear rack sits lower and handling gets smoother as the rear is loaded, which isn't always the case with road-type frames. This means you can go with rear panniers only, which is great because front panniers really mess up handling. As a plus 26" wheels and tires can be found almost anywhere, and are usually stronger than 700s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I spent a couple months living on a sailboat off the coast of Colombia and Panama last winter. I was crewing for somebody, but it was easy to see that it wouldn't take a lot of investment to get up and running on your own.

Worth knowing, from a developer perspective, is that Colombia has really good 3G coverage. Unlimited mobile internet access will run you on the order of $20/month, and it's available pretty much everywhere. Including anywhere you're likely to set up shop on your boat.

The San Blas off the coast of Panama are where you really want to be, but unfortunately the internet access isn't so great. You can get online in a lot of unlikely places (there are islands with literally nothing except coconut trees and a solar-powered cell mast), but it will cost you.

Head to Cartagena and ask around at Club Nautico. Chances are you'll find somebody who knows somebody who has a boat to sell.

<comment><USER14> Good to know about Colombian 3G coverage. I'm actually going to Medellin soon. Will probably stay for a while. If any hackers are in that area would be great to connect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I had a friend who, tried to, do something similar. Unfortunately he knew almost nothing about boats and bought a boat that ended up costing him almost as much as he paid for it in repairs, sank once, and that he eventually sold for a tiny fraction of what he paid for it a couple of years later having only been able to spent a few hours at sea.

So I guess my point is, if you're going to do something like that, make sure you buy a really good boat.

<comment><USER16> As a life long sailor, I've seen too many stories like this one. Luckily your friend didn't die in the process, but too many people who think it would be very romantic to get on a sailboat and go round the world don't realize what they are getting into and do.

Just yesterday two men sank off of Nantucket on their homebuilt sailboat and the Coast Guard had to rescue them by helicopter. Luckily they were still close enough to shore to be reached. I don't know what they were thinking, but one of their most egregiously bad moves was bringing 1 survival suit for 2 people. And that is just the most recent story I've seen (like I said, it was yesterday).

<comment><USER17> as a new sailor, traveling with kids. it would probably be much better to use a regular monohull sailboat instead of a catamaran.

would cost more, but

<comment><USER4> There are some great cats like Gunboats or Chris White's Atlantics, but they cost a lot. Can't really compare catamaran's comfort to monohull, since effectively you have 2.5-3 times the living space in a cat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One of my favorite CV's is that of Physics Professor Lyman Page, who researches experimental cosmology at Princeton. (I worked in his lab for a couple of summers. He earned his world-renowned reputation for working on the WMAP satellite and the ACT experiment.) In between interning for the Bartol Research Foundation at the South Pole (1978-80) and getting his PhD (1983-89), he has this entry:

> Self employed February 1980 - September 1983

> Rebuilt a 37' wooden ketch and sailed about the Caribbean and East Coast of > the United States. To support myself and my boat, I worked as a painter, > carpenter, rigger, and cabinet maker in various ports of call. In the nine > months before graduate school, I was based in Boston.

</comment><comment><USER19> Cruising is a great lifestyle and can be done for less than $2000 per month.

There are plenty of people doing it on less than $1000 or $1500 for a family of four on sailboats from 30 to 35 feet.

More HN readers should consider living on a sailboat full time - it's fiscal mobility, grid independence, great stories, social without commitments and great views all in one.

Downside: Don't underestimate the work on a sailboat and you need to address maintenance issues right away - so be prepared to spend $xxx or $xxxx at random points in time.

<comment><USER16> It is almost _always_ better to pay more for a better boat upfront than get a cheaper boat and fix it up along the way.

Cosmetic stuff is fine, but on a 30' boat, if you are fixing structure or engines, it is going to get expensive quick. And if the laminate itself is wet, you are probably headed for a dumpster.

Get a good mechanical survey and a good structural survey on any boat over $10k.

I agree with your views on sailing, I've been crusing for a long time, and it honestly is one of the best things I do. Though I leave the computer, tv, at home. I find disconnecting completely for two weeks to be far better than taking my work life out on a boat for a year.

<comment><USER20> good advice. Most insurance policies will require a survey as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is awesome - I have a 30' sailboat that I don't spend nearly enough time on. I would love to cut free for a while this like this guy! It sure would take a lot of courage.

Oh yes, and boats _do_ require quite a bit of maintenance. I do most of mine myself and actually enjoy it usually, but it's not always on my schedule (although I try to be proactive, that helps).

One last thing: as a geek I really love fiddling with the boat systems. Having only two car-type batteries is not a lot, so I've been doing little things like replacing lights with LEDs (every boater should consider that IMHO for 1/8th draw and better longevity), changing how the charging system works, getting some solar going (in progress), etc. It's off the grid living!

<comment><USER16> Just don't get one of the mini windmills that a lot of cruisers are getting. They are so freaking loud they destroy your peace and quiet (and for those around you). Solar panels are far better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My girlfriends parents sold all their possessions and their house when she was 10 years old and bought a sailboat. They sailed for a year, starting at the Chesapeake Bay and ending up in the Bahamas, then reversing the route and eventually finishing in Newfoundland. This was a pinnacle experience for her whole family, but for a 10 year old it was absolutely transformative.

Nothing else could duplicate the quantity and quality of learning and growing she did during that year, and to this day she still uses her experiences as a touchstone. Can not recommend undertaking an adventure like this enough.

</comment><comment><USER23> I have a very flexible employer who allows me to work from home. So last summer I decided to bike across the US and work while I went. After buying the bike and camping gear my only expenses were internet and food. There's nothing quite like pitching a tent off the side of the road after a long day of cycling and pulling out your laptop to get some work done. However, sometimes after putting in 70+ miles in a day there is not much motivation left to get any work done.

</comment><comment><USER24> We sold everything bought a sailboat and have been up and down the east cost of the US and the Bahamas for 4 years now. My children are 11 years old.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's a beautiful boat. Is he still your boss? Always interested in hearing how people continue to earn money while sailing.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's gorgeous, I went with him on a small trip around the NYC harbor the night before he left.

And nope, we are no longer working together! He and I left our company around the same time. We were acquired but it wasn't the exit either of us wanted. So he decided to go sailing and I joined an awesome new startup :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There is at least one HN'er living on a sailboat (hey there Max T.), it sounds like your boss is going to be having an interesting year. It's going to be even harder to stop doing that a year from now, that sort of freedom is quite addictive.

If anything it reads like he's still running a company, albeit a smaller one :)

</comment><comment><USER27> To anyone who is thinking about doing this, I highly recommend it.

When I was younger, my family sold most of what we owned, rented out our house, and moved onto our sailboat. We sailed from Seattle to San Diego, then down the West Coast of Mexico, and up into the Sea of Cortez. We were only planning on being gone one year, but since it was such an amazing experience, we decided to extend our trip for a second year.

On the second year, we sailed from the Sea of Cortez farther down Mexico, then down to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, through the Panama Canal, over to Colombia, up to Honduras, Belize, Mexico again, then Florida. This second year was certainly more rushed since we visited so many countries, but we need to get back stateside for me to finish school and go to college.

Many people believe it is unsafe and expensive to do such an extended trip. But if you are friendly to the local people and accept their culture, they are often welcoming and friendly. Never once were we approached by pirates (although the Mexican navy did stop us 100+ miles off the coast before leaving Mexico to enter El Sal, boarded our boat with AK47s and searched for drugs. Obvi nothing was there and they left). In fact, many welcomed us because we helping to boost their economy, and would improve their image as a "tourist" town.

As for expenses, living on a boat is extremely cheap if you are mechanically inclined. Granted, the boat is a big investment, but other than that there aren't too many expenses. We used solar panels for electricity, a mini- desalinazation machine for drinking water, and often fished off the side, catching fresh tuna. The only expenses were diesel fuel and food (which is cheap in 3rd world countries!). Occasionally we docked, but that was also cheap (we stayed at a high-end resort in MX, including 3 pools and a personal zoo with tigers, and we paid $20/ day). Also, since our home was being rented, that provided some monthly income with no work.

The one danger, and it is very serious, is when people have a lack of offshore sailing and boat handling experience. When (not if) you encounter bad weather you've gotta know how to properly manage the boat, be it at anchor or in the middle of the ocean. I've seen boats slam into rocks during storms in port, and heard captain's calling for help because they're boat is sinking far from shore. However, with some training near shore and a few trips to sea with experienced sailors, most anyone can learn what is necessary to take on an extended sailing voyage.

Also, for all you who need a constant internet connection, rig up an amplified wireless router. We bought an industrial antenna, mounted it halfway up the mast, and rigged up a signal amplifier. In our home harbor, this lead to an increase from 3 wifi networks to over 35 wifi networks! Usually had about a dozen free networks from local businesses.

When we returned home to Seattle, we simply moved back into our original home, met up with old friends, and had some great tales to tell.

</comment><comment><USER28> For a similar adventure, check out bumfuzzle.com and go back to the very beginning of their blog.

</comment><comment><USER29> Your very sane boss knows what he loves, and decided to go get it.

Been there, done that.It was awesome. It wasn't a boat though.

</comment><comment><USER30> He is smart; not crazy!!

</comment><comment><USER31> he is not crazy , he is sane</comment>