I Got Milk.com - <AUTHOR> http://milk.com/value/ <comment><USER2> Good for him.

milk.com was registered back in July 94, same month amazon was created. I suspect that many people have attempted to get control over it via naferious means in the past, however I also get the feeling the value of domain names has decreased since the early 00s -- how many normal people still type in domain names, rather than typing in "milk" and clicking the first result.

</comment><comment><USER3> Way to really milk ownership of the domain.

<comment><USER4> At first I thought this was a Reddit-style pun response, but then I read the linked page. I read it to mean "Yea, I really want to sell it, but it's going to be costly. Otherwise I'm happy to sit on it until a satisfactory offer comes around." Of course, there's nothing wrong with that at all.

The page states that research has been done, and there is a perceived value that as of yet hasn't been offered. The domain owner is clearly uninterested in haggling - give the right offer, or no deal.

<comment><USER5> FWIW I don't think he actually ever intends to or expects to sell.

<comment><USER6> I have a couple of friends who own various single word or three letter domain names. They universally say that companies attempting to buy their domains tend offer seriously not life changing amounts of money and often resort to threats when rejected.

Consider what if Land o Lakes owned milk.com and you demanded they sell it to you for $5k? Bwhahaahahaha!

<comment><USER4> > not life changing amounts of money

I don't know how high the offers can go these days. But then again, we're not exactly in the dot-com bubble anymore. In 2001 I bet it could have attracted life changing amounts.

<comment><USER6> The most a friend of mine got offered for a four letter com domain during the dot com years was $5k. He said he would have sold it for $15k.

I checked he still has it.

<comment><USER7> Business.com was sold for $7.5 million at height of the dot com boom. Have you ever visited that site? Neither have I.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business.com](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business.com)

<comment><USER6> Yeah sometimes people spend inane amounts of money for things. If someone was willing to pay $7.5 million for milk.com it'd be theirs. But no ones offered even 0.1% of that. So the market says milk.com really isn't worth very much. And the owner of milk.com and my other two friends that own single word domains are using them for their personal websites not squatting on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Check Dan's responses to emails he received over the years. Hilarious!

[http://milk.com/experiments/](http://milk.com/experiments/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Did anyone ever come up with a workable method of preventing this kind of rent seeking that plagues domain names?

The best scalable and impartial methods that I've seen mentioned were high renewal prices and limits on the number of domains one could own, but I get the feeling neither one would work when there is even a remote chance of extracting >$10M in the end.

Given the current system it's hard to blame him either — I don't know whether I would find the altruism to let such a domain expire.

<comment><USER5> What "rent" is he seeking?

<comment><USER9> "In public choice theory, as well as in economics, rent-seeking means seeking to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent- seeking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking)

<comment><USER5> I didn't ask for a definition.

In what way does that apply to milk.com? Is the owner seeking to get wealthy from it? And if so, is he also somehow failing to create sufficient wealth in the process?

What should he be doing differently right now to not fall on the wrong side of the line?

<comment><USER9> He (like most domain squatters) is blocking milk.com from being used for a practical purpose (from what I can tell), hoping to get $10M+ for no other reason than being the first to register it. He is definitely not creating any wealth in the process.

<comment><USER5> My read on his "value" page is that he doesn't actually want to sell. Assuming he just wants to keep using the domain for his personal site and have the same email address he's had since 1994, would that make it okay for him? Would that still somehow be immoral rent-seeking? What makes those uses of the domain "impractical?" Who is he morally obligated to give or sell the domain to, and if it is to be sold what is a fair value that wouldn't make it "rent-seeking?"

<comment><USER9> Yes, those are good questions.

<comment><USER5> Pretty sure the main answer is that he's not actually engaging in rent-seeking in any pejorative sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Domain name registration related shenanigans is so weird to me.

Lately I've been getting mail from various folks notifying me that the `.com` equivalent of one of my `.net` domains is going to be available. It's weird to me that it would be worth doing, but I'm assuming they're making money out of it.

</comment><comment><USER11> This gets posted every few months. Every time I wonder how it's not been taken away for squatting. I wonder if (or rather how often) he's had to go to court.

Nissan.com has been the target of a few attacks if I recall correctly and is arguably less valuable and much more defensible (since the person who owns it is actually called Nissan).

<comment><USER5> In what way is this site "squatting?" I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure you can't get a trademark on simple English words like "milk."

<comment><USER12> what about Apple then?

<comment><USER5> Apple doesn't in fact have a blanket trademark on the word "apple."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why is this being up voted ?

<comment><USER14> It might be unrelated but this page was mentioned in a fairly highly upvoted comment on a recent top story here. Dan Bornstein is also a relatively well known engineer.</comment></comment>


Is Meebo what's wrong with Web2.0? - <AUTHOR> http://www.uncov.com/2007/4/11/meebo-is-what-s-wrong-with-web-2-0 <comment><USER2> People say this about every software innovation when it first appears. It's too heavy. It uses too much CPU. It's bloated.

There's always a subset of computer-savvy people who don't think it's hard to install software, configure machines, use text-only interfaces, monitor their CPU and Memory usage closely... but often they forget that they aren't the majority.

</comment><comment><USER3> obviously many people either don't care or don't even realize (and thus don't care) the app takes up more memory. sure, there are opportunity costs to everything. people who use meebo or like-minded apps reap more benefits from the convenience than from the memory tradeoff. until someone comes up with something better, I don't see what the complaint is.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think it's an interesting position for the author to take. I didn't expect this article to be about the amount of memory that meebo takes up. Although I have noticed that it can get pretty sluggish.

</comment><comment><USER4> ajax apps like meebo/gmail/netvibes etc do take up a lot of memory, but the convenience makes them worthwhile alone.

<comment><USER2> More importantly, one of two things will happen as they become more common: either computers will just come with more memory, or browsers will become optimized for these particular tasks. The market rules, not the limits of the machine.</comment></comment>


White House predicts all truck, taxi, and delivery drivers will be wiped out - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/868716/the-white-house-predicts-nearly-all-truck-taxi-and-delivery-driver-jobs-will-be-automated/ <comment><USER2> Technical innovation moves and concentrates the savings to the top of the chain.

Technical innovation is a capital expenditure that pays off large returns in the long term.

Technical innovation permanently removes/drastically minimizes OpEx for those willing to put up with significant capital expenditure (in building the Technology in the first place): but once done, those jobs are gone.

It made mining, telephone, retail, manufacturing etc companies drastically minimize their dependence on human labor. These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly to the bottomline.

Next up is transportation.

Most governments dont want to be bothered with transportation and run it inefficiently.

New companies are capitalizing on this to establish future oligopolies: [https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the- growing-...](https://www.quora.com/What-controls-help-ensure-the-growing-ride- share-companies-dont-eventually-hold-us-ransom-after-public-private- transportation-has-eroded-away)

Sure, there will be human intervention required for edge cases but it will be humans augmenting technology, not technology augmenting humans in transportation.

Electric (and autonomous) vehicles are going to be the next PC era that is going to change the world for decades and build the new billionaires.

<comment> dao- > These are salaries that will never ever need to be paid that goes directly > to the bottomline.

This is only true for the first innovators. Competition means that these 'saleries' will just disappear rather than going directly to the bottomline. Exchange value (~ the price) shrinks as you replace human labour, as Karl Marx would already have told you. ;)

And that's not even a bad thing. It's good that people don't have to waste their lives in mines etc. The crucial question is how we as a society deal with this.

<comment><USER3> Well if you dont generate value in society, what will society do with you?

Or any system for that matter?

I may not personally support such a view, but from a purely functional stand point, you are about as much value as you earn and can therefore afford.

<comment><USER4> Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed for more and more automation?

Your value is that you're human being. Let the machines be enslaved to producing goods and services for the humans.

<comment><USER5> > Isn't that an old fashioned way of thinking about people in societies headed > for more and more automation?

That's the capitalist way of thinking about people. Old fashioned or not, it dominates the lives of most people on the planet, and the value of most lives can be summed to a precise monetary amount - that being the value of the labor extracted from them by society over their lifetime, as determined by the market.

We should be considering what to do about the likelihood that most people made redundant by automation will simply be left valueless to society. No one seems to actually be _trying_ to use automation to build a utopia and free everyone from the struggles of work. Rather, automation is allowing the elite to reap the benefits of labor without the burden of supporting society through compensating human beings for work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This may not be unprecedented, and hence may not be worse overall than other historical changes in employment. Yes, eventually all delivery driving of people and things will be able to be replaced by machines. But it doesn't exist today to do it safely and reliably in all cases.

Imagine if the technology did exist today to do safely and reliably in all cases. It would still take a huge capital investment and turnover of equipment to replace or refit all the human driven vehicles. It would be hard to do in a decade. So imagine it takes another five to ten years to drive the cost down and work out the kinks with weather and construction and so on and ten years to do the actual replacing. Keep in mind the existing equipment and labor will get cheaper as it starts to get replaced, slowing the transition. It seems it like the whole transition could take twenty years.

So in twenty years a major job category is going to get wiped out. Like lamplighters, stable hands, textile workers etc. The US has had twenty year periods where 10% of the population has quit farming ([https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf](https://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/table-4.pdf)).

This will be a big change, but it may not be a worse change than some that have happened in the past.

<comment><USER7> I still don't think driverless tech is even there yet. What Uber is doing in San Francisco is a little scary. I'm waiting for the first fatality.

Autonomous vehicles will also not solve the transportation problem. A hundred automated trucks still doesn't come anywhere near the efficiency of three freight engines pulling the same load. Even if every car was autonomous on the Interstate, you might get rid of gridlock but you'd still have a lot of people moving very slowly; well under the theoretical maximum capacity for single lane transport.

I wrote a post describing this:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not- sol...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the- transportation-problem/)

<comment><USER8> > I still don't think driverless tech is even there yet. What Uber is doing in > San Francisco is a little scary. I'm waiting for the first fatality.

But we're well past the first fatality in a human-driven Uber.

<comment><USER9> Who would you jail when an AI runs over a pedestrian?

<comment><USER8> Fatal accidents often don't result in someone being jailed (fatal accidents that involve something like DUI do, and if there is an analogous human choice to deliberately cripple the self-deiving system of a vehicle that results in a fatality, the person linked to that act would likely be just as jailable as a DUI driver.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Amazon Go will be worse. There are a lot more retail workers than drivers. The technology is closer to fruition: Amazon has a working autonomous store, but we are still a long way from fully autonomous vehicles.

The hardware requirements for any store that wants to adopt Amazon's tech are minimal: some cameras, an entry gate and possibly some pressure pads under the shelves.

Even if Amazon doesn't license out their tech -- and they would be foolish not to -- you can be sure that Google and Microsoft are working on their own versions. The market is staggeringly big.

<comment><USER11> I think it would be hard to argue that we are a long way from fully autonomous vehicles, since millions of miles have already been driven by autonomous vehicles. What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine tuning.

<comment><USER12> > What remains is mostly regulatory hurdles, psychological hurdles, and fine > tuning.

I think this is too optimistic. Self-driving cars only work because they are in the minority. Can you imagine a city full of current state-of-the-art self driving cars and it not turning into a traffic chaos?

In particular, I think that self-driving cars cannot work fully autonomously without communicating with other cars or the road infrastructure. And I am not aware of any effort to create a cross-vendor car-to-car communication protocol.

There are trivial cases where pure autonomous following of traffic rules will lead to deadlock (or other issues). Take these two simple examples: 1) 4 cars arrive at the same time in a four-way intersection without signals or yields 2) on a three lane road, two cars from the outer lanes try to switch to the middle lane at the same time.

These are by no means difficult problems (I'm sure there are more difficult cases too), but they _must_ be solved and so far they're not being worked on.

<comment><USER13> Add to that, car to human-driven-car, and car to human (police officer, traffic coordinator) communication.

Sometimes the communication needs to be complex (I.e. Verbal). I've had a few instances when I've had to negotiate to unblock a traffic deadlock, mostly when a two way lane is constricted to one vehicle only due to parked cars, or a HGV which is too big to drive past. In London this happens quite frequently.

I really cannot think how an autonomous car, with no human inside, could handle these scenarios.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Barring major infrastructure and cultural changes, or general purpose ambulatory robots, delivery trucks will still need humans on board to handle the delivery (and pickup) part. No self-driving car is delivering to the seventh floor, and I'm certainly not operating the lift gate myself for LTL pallet deliveries.

That's a pretty fair part of the commercial fleet, though vehicles with self- mobile cargo (taxis) or dedicated handlers on each end (long haul) are quite amenable to automation.

<comment><USER15> So last-mile service is becoming last-yard service. That's a good way to think of it because these will be subsistence jobs, or slightly below. Employees will no longer need a commercial license, or even a clean driving record.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a fascinating (if strongly worded) article on Recode that touches on this:

[http://www.recode.net/2016/12/19/13600538/silicon-valley- gro...](http://www.recode.net/2016/12/19/13600538/silicon-valley-grow-up- donald-trump-election)

In short: Silicon Valley is going to drive a _lot_ of job losses in the not too distant future. There's a very real danger that will blow back as mass unemployment drives people to extremes, unless people start thinking very seriously about what this new world is going to look like, and how the vast majority of the country will earn a living.

<comment><USER7> I really hate the idea that everyone needs to work. I get paid a lot as a software engineer to write stuff. Over the years, I've just seen so much money poured into tech that makes people buy more tech or that does nothing but license intellectual property.

I quit my job for 11 months in 2015 and flew around the world; backpacking off my savings:

[http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/](http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/)

It was the happiest time of my life. I'm planning on getting some funding sources for next time (Pateron, grants for OSS projects, etc.) and see if I can make it longer next time. I'd rather just make enough, making content and tech that I like and find useful, supported by peers, than working the the current tech world.

Reynolds envisioned a world like this in his book Army of Davids. I think he painted an overly rosy outlook and neglected to realize how difficult it is to start small businesses or how little time people have after their day jobs to work on things. (You can kinda glaze over those things when you're a UT professor).

<comment><USER17> I'm visualizing a future world where a million more homeless people are truck- hopping rather than train-hopping. You summon a delivery robo-truck by stealing all the goods off a shop shelf. It's a bit like calling for a sand worm in Dune.

Can't afford Uber? Just hang onto the roof of one.

<comment><USER18> That idea came up in conversation among some friends just a couple of days ago! As soon as we have reliable robo-taxis, we're going to have teenagers (and drunk adults) reinventing "train surfing".

<comment><USER17> It's the latest in hipster travel modes. Riding a penny farthing is too tame.... Unless you're skitching off the bumper of a robo-Uber.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a long enough timeframe, most of our jobs will become obsolete; the question is how long? As a programmer I am not worried, as AI isn't really smart enough to interpret the crap I am asked to build.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This could have a chilling effect, especially for folks in the midwest who tend to rely on trucking for their livelihood[1].

[1] [http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...](http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map- the-most-common-job-in-every-state)

<comment><USER20> Yes, this will be a big problem to confront, but it should be noted that the NPR story is very misleading: [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck- driver-isnt-the-mo...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/no-truck-driver-isnt- the-most-common-job-in-your-state-2015-02-12)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I see a lot of speculation about how this is going to play out when the robots take our jobs so hey, why not join in right? Holiday week and all.

We know what people have done in the past when this sort of thing has happened - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite)

> The Luddites were a group of English textile workers and self-employed > weavers in the 19th century that used the destruction of machinery as a form > of protest.

I think that once the robots take enough jobs such that the anti-automation movement reaches a critical mass (and it won't take 100% of the jobs to do that, prob not even 50%) then we'll start seeing these sorts of things happen.

Sabotage of driverless cars will be trivial to carry out and very expensive to deal with... some forms may not have adequate protection under criminal law yet, which will require cooperation with legislators and law enforcement to address (good luck with that Uber).

I'm thinking things like finding and intentionally exploiting environmental cues that driverless cars use to make decisions (releasing plastic bags into intersections?) or else using directed radio interference to prevent them from communicating with homebase to know where to go next.

Some of these may be protected already by FCC or EPA or state-level equivalents, but will enforcement be up to the task? Is the FCC prepared to monitor and enforce local signal interference for corporations? Is a $500 littering fine enough to dissuade individuals and groups from continuing in "civil disobedience"?

My core point is that if anyone thinks people are going to take this lying down then they don't know human beings. Everyone is only 3 missed meals away from doing "whatever it takes" and that's even less if it's your kid(s) that are missing the meals.

If nothing is in place when the layoffs come then it'll take no time for former workers to organize and take matters into their own hands... within that election cycle the organization will be co-opted by some other ideology which conflates their anger at losing their job to automation with race, class, political affiliation, etc.

/speculation

</comment><comment><USER22> Another question is: who will be getting their money?

And then: is that fair?

In the long run, shouldn't technological progress benefit us all equally?

<comment><USER23> My answer is... no? Why would that be the case? Those people don't necesarrily have any right to that money. They /arguably/ have a right to a job/food/housing, but that is a whole other discussion.

Stopping technological progress because its unfair feels absurd.

<comment><USER24> Continuing technical progress just for the sake of progress and at the expense of human life and dignity feels absurd.

<comment><USER25> And if we go by soared's answer, it's all for the sake of a diminishingly smaller number of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I feel this short (but worthwhile) video explains the problem best. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

<comment><USER27> I recommend also watching Mark Blyth's brief overview[1] of how this problem has already affected the political landscape over the last several decades. Significant changes need to be made immediately to handle the changes technology is forcing on the economy.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI#t=792](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWMmBG3Z4DI#t=792)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> At the extreme, a drastic decline in incomes, through unemployment or wage reduction, would eliminate the need for trucks altogether, because there would be no money to drive demand for goods.

</comment><comment><USER29> I've worked for a medical laboratory as a courier for eleven years. I don't think all of these jobs will be completely wiped out, for several reasons hit on by people in this thread. Many of the things I do on a daily basis can be automated, (I know because I've been able to automate parts of my job), but other parts will prove to be such a high bar, it will be twenty years before they will be cost effective and/or the technology is created. I worry more about low cost, easy to use scanning technologies displacing my job more than I do automated vehicles, at least in the near term. Retraining those of us who want it really wouldn't be as daunting a task as it sounds. I've been able to listen to thousands of hours of audio while I drive, both audio books and university classes, and I encourage my coworkers to do the same. Most of us understand that this line of work will be disrupted at some point. Places like Uber will lead the front of the change. Business like where I am at, where I handle hazardous materials, and places like ups, which have unions blocking automation, will take quite a bit longer in switching over to autonomous vehicles.

</comment><comment><USER30> >> What those new jobs for truck or delivery drivers might be is "not currently foreseeable."

I wonder if the same thing has been said about other professions that have been more or less wiped out in the past? I would guess the answer is "yes"

And then the next logical question is "So what did all those people end up doing?" Maybe that's how we being to answer the question of what all the truck, taxi and delivery drivers can be doing when those jobs are gone?

Or do those jobs just get phased out as people leave them? Like people who quit for whatever reason are just not replaced by other people, they get replaced with the bots (or whatever we call the things that are replacing people here).

[Added thought] Maybe the answer is found in how secretaries were replaced? They were recently the most popular jobs in many states, and now are not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of these folks will be phased out but likely might never find work again. Things are different this time. There are multiple regions in the United States and the world solely focused on disrupting entire industries by automating them.

In the past, the speed of automation was slower giving time for people to adapt. Going forward, things will be swift and I am not sure what these people will do.

<comment><USER31> I think that is precisely why the White House is weighing in on this. Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems to be the only branch of the US legislature that is willing to look at the real issues that will cause much pain for US citizens in the future (instead of bickering about religion, climate change denial etc.)

<comment><USER25> Just a nit, President Obama heads the Executive branch of the US Federal government, with the other two branches being the Judicial branch (Supreme Court of the USA), and the Legislative branch (Congress).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If only AI could wipe out the advertisement industry first ...

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm guessing with the rise of automated jobs there will be a huge rise in electrical and mechanical engineers.

After all, someone has to take care of those machines, no?

<comment><USER33> I don't think so - the machines will serviced by machines. It's easier to design machines that can be easily maintained by machines than to design machines that can replace humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> The report also comes out against UBI.</comment>


Like chat roulette but with 8 random people at once and less wieners - <AUTHOR> http://videochat.io A pretty cool chatroulette clone testing some new technologies like Adobe Stratus and Node.js. <comment><USER2> "Login with your facebook account"

Yeah. That's not going to happen.

<comment><USER3> Seriously, what kind of consequences are you afraid of when logging in with your Facebook account?

Have you looked at the Facebook API? I've produced a website where you can either create a "normal" account by supplying your email address, or you can use Facebook Connect.

What I know about our users with "normal" accounts: their name and their email address.

What I know about our users with Facebook connect accounts: their name. No email and no means by which to contact them. And if I wanted to do anything else, like post on their wall, I'd have to ask them explicit permission first.

<comment><USER4> I believe he's referring to privacy concerns.

<comment><USER3> Right, and I'm wondering which ones.

My view of the Facebook API is that it _isn't_ exactly a gold mine of personal information. I'm wondering what part of it is it that freaks people out.

<comment><USER5> You are sorely mistaken. With the Facebook API, you're granted CIA level information on any person that allows you (most). I should know, I've been using the api for games and other apps since its inception. As for privacy, I'm convinced people can afford to give some up, in exchange for more civility, if that's what they want. If not, they can continue to enjoy the Smörgåsbord over at CR.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to just take your word for it, but for the sake of the discussion, would you please expand a bit on what "CIA level" information you can retrieve using the Facebook API?

To begin with, what can you find out about a person after they've logged in with Facebook Connect, _without_ explicitly asking for additional permissions?

<comment><USER5> To start with: <http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/User_(FQL)>

If that isn't everything you need, you could use that information as foreign keys to other databases in other places, to easily fill in the blanks, if you wished to dampen the shade of your hat. As far as "CIA level", I'll admit that was sensationalist just for the sake of writing, but it is damn scary nonetheless.

<comment><USER3> Right. But, if you are sensitive to privacy issues (which seems sound), you're not likely to have an exhaustively filled out Facebook profile either way.

So, if you have a sparingly filled out Facebook profile, what is the risk involved using Facebook Connect?

That API list kind of looks like a CIA-like dossier of information, I agree, but that's worth nothing if the values are mostly: "", drivel, some inside joke, or whatever.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fell at the first hurdle.

I don't have a facebook account. I am allergic to facebook and can't have an account on medical grounds (I get a rash and a great deal of irritation).

Sort out the login and I'll take a look.

<comment><USER7> "Allergic to Facebook". I like that. Maybe I should start telling people that instead of my standard explanation ( [http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relation...](http://everything2.com/title/Facebook+destroys+real+relationships) ). Have you had success with it? What I typically get as a response when I show them the above link is either tl;dr or "You're just using it wrong!" which I'm not, I'm not using it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Like chat roulette but with 8 random people at once and less wieners

"fewer". "less" here means ... something else.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is this website using Adobe Stratus like Chatroulete? I'm curious about this functionality since it seems to be non-commercial use only unless you pay Adobe a bunch of cash.

</comment><comment><USER10> need to host this script on a viral application on facebook(200,000+ MAU)? I can also help on this project. If you are interested in 20,000+ Daily Active Userbase please email me chenosaurus.. email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER11> Not going to login with my FB account..

</comment><comment><USER12> did it with a dummy facebook. what the heck tho? no other videos.. just me... beautiful beautiful me...</comment>


Why some job adverts put women off applying - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44399028 <comment><USER3> _She says Textio taught her company to avoid terms such as "coding ninja" \- a common phrase in Silicon Valley job ads._

This would also put me off applying for the role. It makes the company sound immature and anyone who calls themselves a coding ninja may not have great self assesment skills.

<comment><USER4> Saying it was "common" is simply a lie. I would love to see her stats because I've been working in tech for a while now and I've never seen the term "coding ninja" in a job ad.

I've seen ludicrous demands like more experience in a tech than the tech has been out.

Like "must haves : " \- 5 years experience in visual studio 2017 and sql server 2017. Non negotiable.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it's a lie, I think it's just an old example. Just as the media loves using "epic fail" in a "How do you do, fellow kids?" kind of way, it's easy to assume something is still happening because it was big the last time you checked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> r-a-w I would like to see the scientific evidence of this unconscious bias they are referring to. Im also skeptical of the claims that gender diversity alone will boost revenue 41%. That is a extremely bold claim.

<comment><USER6> I keep reading that tech is not very female-inclusive, and I keep wondering where these people are looking. Maybe San Francisco is different than any of the places I've worked in the past 25 years? I've been all over: deep south, midwest, north texas - I don't know if the gender ratio was 50/50 since I never did a headcount, but I sure remember an awful lot of women in technical roles everywhere I've ever worked. Maybe they're not counting Indian women?

<comment><USER7> Technical roles yes. How many are developers? I'm not dismissing QA, but QA I've found is so much more female than male that in a group of developers, the female will be asked are they QA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a UK license payer and general supporter of the BBC, these thinly-veiled advertising pieces (in this case for "Textio") always leave a bad taste in my mouth. Latching on to a worthy cause like feminism just makes it worse.

</comment><comment><USER9> Replacing uncounscious bias, with conscious bias based on words that take into account both the employer and the canditate prejudices towards some words is a crazy tricky line of thought. To me it seems there's a problem, let's add an aditional layer of complexity to make it more intentional and less visible. The end result is that adverts get even more filled with prejudice.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, that's what always makes me uncomfortable about diversity efforts. Diversity? Sure, that sounds good. How you propose to get there? Ummm... not so sure about that. If you go back to the origin of the term "white privilege" as coined by Peggy McIntosh (in 1989, mind you, not 1972), you'll find that she defends to concept with such dubious claims as "being able to find music that represents your group" is a concrete example of "white privilege". Almost all of her examples are essentially unverifiable - yet, the solution (to white or male privilege) is always to replace intangible, nebulous advantages with very specific, concrete disadvantages.

<comment><USER7> You start working at diversity by recruiting from places like historically black colleges for minorities and women only colleges for women(?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> actually if they look closely enough they'll find out companies really want to hire clever workaholics who have modest salary requirements, never ask for raise or promotion and are easily taken advantage of. That's the perfect employee.

The only way around this is to create more demand for labour. Make employers compete more, break down monopolies, remove protections, moats, tax entrenched rent seeking.

</comment><comment><USER11> _A job description that uses the phrase "We're looking for someone to manage a team" may seem innocuous enough.

But research has shown that the word "manage" encourages more men than women to apply for the role.

Changing the word to "develop" would make it more female-friendly, says Kieran Snyder_

So all you have to do to attract more women to a job is to lie about what the job entails? Maybe jobs for managers put off women because they don't want to be managers.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's somehow funny to me that they refer to Textio's CEO as "Mr Snyder", when she at least according to the company's Team page[1] seems to self-identify as female. Amazing what a one-letter typo can do.

[1]: [https://textio.com/team/](https://textio.com/team/)

</comment><comment><USER13> "ads with lengthy bullet points detailing the role's responsibilities will face a drop-off in women applying for the job"

Maybe women just don't like too much responsibility or hard work? Maybe for that matter, no one does? Have they even checked what effect their proposed changes have on male applicants? For example "coding ninja" would surely also be off putting to many men.

<comment><USER14> Wasn't there a study concluding that women tend to under-estimate their skills and men the opposite? If we assume that to be true, a long list of responsibilities is more likely to put off women because they don't think they can cover everything (or enough of it).

<comment><USER13> There are all sorts of feminist studies. I bet most of them will be found to be flawed and unsubstantiated - like many of sociology studies have been found in recent times.

In any case, I don't think there is a law of nature or a biological force that makes women underestimate their skills. Plenty of women don't underestimate their skills.

<comment> vertex-four Nobody suggested there's a force of nature or biology behind women underestimating their skills, only you - have you considered that many women may be socialised to do so?

It's not like the job application/interview/etc dance is perfectly neutral towards every characteristic and background a person might have all the time as it is - words used, interview styles, and so on and so forth are never neutral.

<comment><USER13> "Being socialized" would be a force of nature. Anyway, they are not - <USER2> would do that, and why? The mostly female teachers? And somehow girls would still do better than boys in school, despite constantly being told they are bad? Actually the opposite is the case - studies have shown that boys tend to get worse grades than girls for the same level of performance. So wouldn't that be socialization of underestimating their skills for boys? (Of course those studies might also be flawed, like the feminist ones).

<comment> vertex-four Being socialised is not a force of nature, because that implies that it's non- changeable. It's a societal choice to prioritise certain things and deprioritise others, to raise our kids to believe certain things, to allow the use of marketing in ways that reinforce existing beliefs, and so on and so forth. I find it weird that you consider "women" to be a homogenous group who all want the same thing and agree on exactly the method of achieving it, btw, as implied by your suggestion that a female teacher would never do anything that might hurt a girl's sense of self worth.

I don't know why studies suggest that boys are often better at correctly estimating (or maybe overestimating?) their skill level, but there's lots of potential reasons aside from "biology" and "bad study". Perhaps boys are just told "fake it til you make it" more often, and do so. Perhaps girls focus more on grades than boys in school for whatever reason, and the grading system is just set up to demoralise people in general. There's a hundred thousand possible explanations - but they're irrelevant to the point being made that if this is happening, then in order to encourage people who already believe these things about themselves to apply for a job, thinking about how to change your job posting to fit people with those beliefs is a good idea.

<comment><USER13> Um, it is you who refers to women as a homogeneous group that underestimates their skills.

It is fine to try to attract more people to your job, if that is what you want. However, if the problem is "women underestimate their skills", perhaps it would be better to work on women having higher estimates of their skills, than on downscaling the demands of jobs.

Women are free to go to career counseling and learn to correctly estimate their skills. Like everybody else. Bookshops are full of books with career counseling, too. I bet you can even get free advice on the internet. If you want to, you can learn to succeed, even as a woman.

The whole discussion is moot. You are free to believe that women tend to underestimate their skills, and men tend to overestimate. It just happens to neatly align with feminist theory that men are worthless windbags, but if that is your world view, ok.

If you are looking for papers, you can find plenty that contradict your theory. For example today I saw another big study showing "Stereotype Threat" has no effect on girl's performance on Maths. So even if girls are told they are bad in Maths (which I doubt is happening on significant scale, but whatever), at the very least it doesn't affect their performance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ofcom (i.e., UK government-approved regulatory and competition authority for the broadcasting, telecommunications and postal industries of the United Kingdom) mandates that for the BBC: 50% of leadership roles to be held by women by 2020.

[http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/10/13/ofcom-sets-new- ground...](http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/10/13/ofcom-sets-new-ground-rules- bbc-50-leadership-roles-be-held-women-2020)

With an infinite supply of talent and availability this will work. But the world isn't quite like that. Lots of women don't aspire to work 80 hours a week at full capacity over and above other life choices. Moreover, will gender trump merit on occasion? Who can doubt it?

<comment><USER16> your implicit assumption is that many men do "aspire to work 80 hours a week at full capacity over and above other life choices". I think that's a big assumption.</comment></comment>


Thoughts and Concerns about Operation Onymous - <AUTHOR> https://blog.torproject.org/blog/thoughts-and-concerns-about-operation-onymous <comment><USER2> Based on the following it seems very unwise to expect Tor hidden services to be secure against any determined attaker; I'd expect attacks to be well-known (among attackers). It's also sad to learn how little help this critical FOSS project receives (and I haven't been helping them either).

> _it 's important to note that Tor currently doesn't have funding for > improving the security of hidden services._

and

> _In a way, it 's even surprising that hidden services have survived so far. > The attention they have received is minimal compared to their social value > and compared to the size and determination of their adversaries._

Which links to a 2013 article[1] which says,

> _Hidden Services are in a peculiar situation. While they see a loyal fan- > base, there are no dedicated Tor developers to take care of them._

[1] [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need- some-l...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-need-some-love)

EDIT: add a little clarity and 'add' succinctness

</comment><comment><USER3> If I were dissident in an oppressed country (sigh the way things are going we in the west arent that far behind authoritarian regimes such as China, Iran and Russia) i would be very very worried now as the same method could be used or "discovered" by entities who are more interested in suppressing dissent than this silly war on drugs waged by western countries.

<comment><USER4> If the regime is cranky enough, I think just using Tor would catch their interest.

(I'm assuming they would just have ISPs monitoring traffic or whatever)

<comment><USER5> Exactly, if Tor being insecure and therefore your traffic getting you in trouble is your primary worry that's actualy a first world problem. Even using Tor at all is easily sufficient for any truly authoritarian regime to come down hard on you regardless of what your traffic contains.

> we in the west arent that far behind authoritarian regimes such as China, > Iran and Russia

In terms of the surveilance capabilities of the state, you're probably right. But e.g. China censors perhaps hundreds of thousands of messages a day and blocks access to vast swathes of the web. It actively uses online surveilance to crack down on activists and civil society groups on a routine basis. I don't like governmental overreach in surveilance and I think their systematic weakening of civilian security and privacy are massively counter-productive. There are also too many cases of police abusein many wester countries. But that's not the same as running a systematic, actively authoritarian police state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "The task of hiding the location of low-latency web services is a very hard problem and we still don't know how to do it correctly"

Maybe it would be better to re-think the applications? Instead of traditional web apps that require low-latency connection to be usable, maybe build fat client web apps where the information is synched from the server to local datastore and accessed from there.

These apps could live in the tor-browser just like we have Chrome apps. Maybe the tor-browser could expose a special Javascript API that would prove high- latency, anonymity protecting message passing mechanism between client and servers.

</comment><comment><USER7> If they want to get a crowdsource campaign going, better to do it ASAP so they can cash in on the general public's feeling about the shutdown and arrests (and before everyone forgets). Similar to how the heartbleed bug caused a major donation drive to the ssl project shortly after it happened.

</comment><comment><USER8> Mixed feelings here. It seems fairly clear from the material released thus far that opsec failures have been a major enabling component in recent regulatory ingress. Therefore, this is a fairly poor article in that it encourages a chilling effect and general panic. However, it's also a good article in that it encourages people to focus on sponsoring or improving the security of hidden services as a Tor project design goal. It stops short of pointing out where to send money, though.

(Update: read [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579944](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579944) for informed-sounding, better take on tech background.)

</comment><comment><USER9> You'd think that people running hidden services that are commercial and illegal in nature might push some money to the TOR project for these purposes.</comment>


DCFL – A parallelized constraint solving library for Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://poincare.github.io/DCFL/

<comment><USER2> What does communication-free mean? No usage of network? There's a global state that is updated by the workers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Communication Free Learning is actually a recently proposed algorithm to resolve constraints. The research paper it originated from is here: [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3240.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.3240.pdf)

The "Communication Free" part of it means that we can update variables' values in parallel without having to communicate the updated variable values between the processes updating the variables.

<comment><USER3> Abstract [non pdf]

Decentralized Constraint Satisfaction by K. R. Duffy, C. Bordenave, D. J. Leith

[http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3240](http://arxiv.org/abs/1103.3240)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kind of a bizarre side question, would constraint solving be the right tool to use to "solve" things like the kittens/catnip game (a civclicker variant)? Like, at any given moment, given a goal and available resources, tell you the "best" way to allocate your resources.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting question. Although I am not deeply familiar with either of the games you mention, it seems that they are inherently time-based. There are also some random elements to CivClicker (e.g. traders that come through). Given these rules, I don't think a simple constraint solver would be sufficient to "solve" the game, but it might be a part of a more complicated solution.

However, there are lots of games that essentially only involve solving constraints. A simple example is Sudoku.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> FYI this page looks really bad on firefox with a narrow window. It gets jumbled around and the dark blue background on the left takes over the whole page.

</comment><comment><USER6> Given that type inference can be expressed in the form of constraints, could this be used to speed up type inference on huge programs?

<comment><AUTHOR> It could be, but the primary issue with the Communication Free Learning algorithm is the fact that it is very hard to tell when a given constraint set has no feasible solution by directly trying to solve it. That's because Communication Free Learning is a probabilistic algorithm that is meant to converge to a solution over time. But, if after say 10k iterations we still haven't found a solution, that could mean that there isn't one or that we just haven't stumbled on it yet.

However, it is possible to apply the algorithm in situations where we know that there is a solution, at least with a pretty high degree of confidence.</comment></comment>


Sequence: A High Performance Sequential Semantic Log Parser at 175,000 MPS - <AUTHOR> http://zhen.org/blog/sequence-high-performance-sequential-semantic-log--parser/

<comment><USER2> Another alternative to regular expression based message parsing that has native support within syslog-ng: patterndb ([http://www.balabit.com/network- security/syslog-ng/opensource...](http://www.balabit.com/network- security/syslog-ng/opensource-logging-system/features/pattern-db))

Very fast and a bit complex to setup, but well documented and well tooled. Mature. It could do with some more community love, tbh.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link. Do you have any info on the performance of this parser?

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry to say I do not. I've only very recently got a stable monitoring configuration in place with this as a key piece, parsing up messages and sending them to downstream programs.

I welcome the move away from regular expressions though - they are just not necessary in this particular domain. We'll see if PatternDB's coarse grained approach comes back to bite me.

I'm happy to help as I can if you decide to use PatternDB - you can find me at l.skibinski at elifesciences dot org. I have some notes for getting started quickly I really should publish ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> As this appears to have been submitted by the author: the site is very difficult to read on an iPad. The font size toggles between small and large every few seconds. Easily reproduced in both Chrome and Safari.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting me know. I hadn't realized that. Will have to figure out why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the key differentiator between this and logstash? Obviously logstash has this beat on the number of patterns simply because it's been around for longer. If this is truly different (superior and/or faster) than logstash's grok parser, I wonder if this could be implemented as a sort of meta-parser in logstash, possibly useful in cases where someone would have instead resorted to building a grok definition.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't have any first hand experience, but it seems like grok [might not be that performant]([http://ghost.frodux.in/logstash-grok- speeds/](http://ghost.frodux.in/logstash-grok-speeds/))?

<comment><USER4> Sequence seems very fast. What format do you output to? Have you fed the resulting data into anything like a database?</comment></comment></comment>


Why Docker? What's all the hype about? - <AUTHOR> As a NodeJS developer who's a stranger to the DevOps world I've never really understood the hype around Docker.
In my quest for answers I read many articles explaining why containers are better than virtual machines, but I've rarely used a VM. Is Docker only beneficial for people who come from the VM world?
I wrote an article explaining the benefits of Docker using real-world scenarios that hit it home for me. No buzz words, clear language and with a spice of humor https://maximorlov.com/why-docker-whats-all-the-hype-about/ <comment><USER2> Containerization is nice because it literally becomes a "write once run anywhere" kind of deal. If it runs on docker, it will run on any* docker.

The true gain is from container orchestration, ie Kubernetes. Scaling becomes nearly trivial. Resiliency is handled like a charm. There are so many pros to containerization with orchestration that libraries full of books have been written about them.

<comment><USER3> So its like javaless java?</comment></comment>


Mother of three-year-old is first person convicted of FGM in UK - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/01/fgm-mother-of-three-year-old-first-person-convicted-in-uk <comment><USER2> Bizarre behavior all round.</comment>


Awesome Foundation gives no-strings cash to great ideas [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23469438 <comment><USER3> This is FANTASTIC! I am quite excited about the whole proposition. Wish it were there when I was in college...

So I quickly contacted several of my friends here in Delhi, India and got them many of them interested. Now we have: [http://awesomefoundation.in/](http://awesomefoundation.in/)

Anyone in India/Delhi, who is interested in joining this, hit me up at email@example.com

<comment><USER4> Are you related to the original Awesome Foundation, or have you just taken the same name?

<comment><USER3> Not related, but keen on becoming a chapter. Not sure if there are official requirements or it is organic such as BarCamp. (Hoping and assuming it is the latter)

<comment><USER5> Please do get in touch via the website. We're super flexible on chapters running themselves largely as they'd like (quite similar to Barcamp), but we'd like to officially have you in the loop to be able to provide you with resources and connections to the rest of us.

\- David Fisher (AF-trustee & co-founder)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To learn more about projects funded and the ideas behind the foundation have a look at their web site - community funding / support at its finest - [http://www.awesomefoundation.org/](http://www.awesomefoundation.org/)

</comment><comment><USER7> One of the events they funded was called Balloonacy: [https://www.facebook.com/events/277093279051184/](https://www.facebook.com/events/277093279051184/)

I helped solder like a bazillion motion sensor LEDs to a board to stick in all the balloons.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is great! How come I have not heard of this before? I have so many awesome side projects that would need a bit of help in order to pay for servers/continue development.

But seriously, I applied to the Knowledge chapter with [http://sciencegist.com](http://sciencegist.com). Fingers crossed :)

It's also quite inspiring to see the different kinds of projects being funded by this foundation. It helps with the feeling of being alone in the world of projects which "will help people, but can't make money".

</comment><comment><USER9> I was lucky enough to receive the Melbourne Grant a few months back. It allowed me to prototype a product I eventually tried to get up on crowd- funding. Sadly no luck there, but great initiative and meant I could at least give it a go and learn something.

<comment><USER10> What was it about? Why did you have no success?

<comment><USER9> * Here was my crowd-funding campaign: [http://www.pozible.com/project/11432](http://www.pozible.com/project/11432)

And here's a blog post I wrote about why I think it didn't work: [http://www.pigsdontfly.com/2013/05/7-things-i-learned- from-u...](http://www.pigsdontfly.com/2013/05/7-things-i-learned-from- unsuccessful.html)

<comment><USER10> Did you consider using alternative materials?

If you switched to 3D Printed materials, I think the costs would be much less and you could have funded it with the amount of money you already collected.

<comment><USER9> I used 3D printing during the prototyping stage, and even using a friend of a friend's printer it still worked out to be roughly $60 AUD a print.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've given 3 oral pitches to my local Awesome Foundation over the years and wasn't selected each time. Not sure if that says something about my ideas, pitch skills, or what, but it's a bit of a bummer. FYI: The ideas were a completely solar/bike-powered LAN party, an electronics recycling drive where you get to smash computers with sledgehammers, and a student conference where all the research posters are wheatpasted onto the walls of a graffiti-filled alleyway and presented with paint markers.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I just don't see the appeal of any of those ideas -- though clearly I am not your target interest group.

The smashing of computers as a recycling effort seems ridiculous to me in that computers are filled with tons of toxic materials.

I don't see how smashing them with hammers is good for anything...

<comment><USER11> Smashed computers can still be recycled, I had a partnership with a local e-waste recycling company. The idea was to give people incentive to recycle with a fun event. With regards to the toxic materials, it was my understanding that only monitors offered some risk. I could be wrong though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Another interesting method for crowd funding. While cool, I'm still hopeful that we'll soon have the crowd funding/crowd sourcing sites that tackle bigger problems.

A site that funds the next Mars Lunar Rover in an X-Prize manner, for instance. Another site that provides crowd-funded medical grants like the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Perhaps another to help fund some of Bill Gates' ambitious projects. He's got big ideas and even he's gonna need a little more cash. :-)

</comment><comment><USER14> Venture communism?

<comment><USER15> I'd say it's more like "venture anarchy" or "venture lololololol".

There's no central organization and each chapter is self-organizing. I was a trustee of the SF chapter for about two years. :)

<comment><USER10> This woman has balls, totally awesome, luv her idea to embetter ones surrounding just by empowering people to DO it. There's a lot Mill-/Billionaires can learn from her.

I LOVE LOVE LOVE the concept of self-organization! Writing a thesis+project on it :)

<comment><USER16> I know some Awesome trustees, and they're not millionaires or even close to it. Just regular Joes who think it's worth $100 a month to meet some interesting people and to be part of something cool.

$100 is not 'nothing', but plenty of people would spend that on other hobbies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This looks wonderful! I went ahead and applied for my Thread Hero project: [http://threadhero.com](http://threadhero.com)

<comment><USER18> seems interesting... but there's no detail info about how it works - <USER2> for charity side or shirt buyers side... you force me to have another sign up not knowing the details...

Edit: and after entering the e-mail already you ask to share!? I'm not going to share until I know more about it!

<comment><USER17> It's just a "coming soon" page right now. I'm currently talking with some organizations to figure out the details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> We have a chapter in London Ontario Canada, too! [http://awesomelondon.ca](http://awesomelondon.ca)</comment>


New Ocaml Cheat Sheets from OcamlPro - <AUTHOR> http://www.ocamlpro.com/code/2011-06-03-cheatsheets.html

<comment><USER2> submitted to <http://devcheatsheet.com> , thanks.</comment>


Powa Technologies: from UK tech darling to administration - <AUTHOR> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/db78778a-d727-11e5-829b-8564e7528e54.html <comment><USER2> Paywall</comment>


California passes strongest net neutrality law in the country - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/31/17805892/california-sb822-net-neutrality-law-vote <comment><USER2> I hope that the FCC leaves well out of this, unless the state law later morphs into something that restricts home servers or favors California based servers

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17886109](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17886109)

</comment><comment><USER4> >legal content

Does this mean the ISP gets to decide if something is legal?

<comment><USER5> ...there are other efforts that may require ISPs to decide if something is [il]legal...[Re:] MPAA, RIAA...

one example of many... [https://www.eff.org/tr/deeplinks/2017/04/another- lawsuit-tri...](https://www.eff.org/tr/deeplinks/2017/04/another-lawsuit- tries-force-isp-being-copyright-cop)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is great news. I hope California fights the ISPs hard in court. Surely, the ISPs are going to work up some plan to try and get around this.

<comment><USER5> verizon seems to be having a hard time understanding what an ISP should be doing...[California, British Columbia]

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjkmbn/verizon- fi...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjkmbn/verizon-firefighters- join-fight-restore-net-neutrality)</comment></comment>


Real Estate Deal That Could Change the Future of Everything - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/11/real-estate-deal-could-change-future-everything/3897/

<comment><USER2> IPO for a single real estate deal. Interesting.</comment>


Harvard engineering students devise BBQ smoker - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/05/05/harvard-class-cooks-ultimate-bbq-smoker/0O4fLQ0rbt9qMGsllPoTjK/story.html?p1=Article_Trending_Most_Viewed# <comment><USER2> I wonder if they used the "Texas Crutch," i.e., wrapped the brisket in foil after ~4 hours.

The upshot of the Texas Crutch technique is: after about 2 hours on the smoke, the internal temperature of a brisket will plateau for 6-8 hours before climbing toward its final temperature. According to experiments by Greg Blonder[0], this stall is caused by evaporative cooling: once the internal temperature reaches a point where the energy lost to evaporation balances the energy gained from the (low---225-250 Fahrenheit is the "right" temperature for a brisket) ambient temperature, the internal temp of the meat will stay put until sufficient water has evaporated.

Some call this cheating, but in my experimentation the "crutch" produces significantly tastier results because of the difference in juiciness. As additional evidence here, I'll note that _every_ BBQ place in Austin whose brisket is good to great---Franklin, La Barbecue, John Mueller Meat Co., and even Rudy's---wraps their briskets in foil. (Edited to add: I didn't mention Black's and Kreutz's because I'm not 100% sure that they do, but I vaguely recall that they do.)

One worry might be that the meat doesn't absorb as much smoke after the foil is applied, and this is indeed true. One can trade off additional time in the smoke for more evaporation. After about 4 hours, the meat isn't going to absorb much more flavor from the smoke, so that's a great time to wrap it.

In fact, at that point you may as well make your life easier by transferring the meat to an oven (ideally, a convection oven to avoid hot spots) and finishing it off. It may feel wrong, but in my experience the results are superb.

[0] [http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/stallbbq.html](http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/stallbbq.html)

<comment><USER3> As soon as the meat reaches ~130f, it's not going to absorb any more smoke.

<comment><USER2> Interesting. There seem to be conflicting opinions here. Referring again to Blonder[0], it seems that one can improve smoke absorption by mopping consistently. Personally, I'm usually pretty aggressive with the mopping, that is, every 45 minutes to 1 hour.

[0] [http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/srasmokeringmoist....](http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/srasmokeringmoist.html)

<comment><USER4> Lookin' ain't cookin' are the words I live by. (Brisket is very, very forgiving if you go low and slow and just focus on the internal meat temperature. Maintain 225-250F with the smoker, don't worry about short spikes, focus mostly on the target temperature.)

Turn once 50% into the cook (pounds * 1.5 hours), again at 75%. Spray apple juice.

I learned a ton from the Virtual Weber Bullet forums. From the perspective of food hacking, the HN crowd would really love it--lots of overlap with the approach, even a lot of good "hardware" mods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you've ever wondered what the real value of going to Harvard is, it's all in this sentence from the article:

> On a hike up Camelback Mountain in Arizona, he pitched the idea to > executives from Williams-Sonoma, who agreed to be the client for his class.

Just casually pitched an exec and got a brisket sponsor, no big deal...

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the article exaggerates the lack of accessibility in BBQ. There sure is a fair amount of BBQ-broscience but resources like AmazingRibs.com, Aaron Franklin's YouTube videos, and Virtual Weber Bullet all have great recipes, guides, and forums. The challenge is that BBQ is true regional American cuisine, with a lot of variation. This is similar to authentic Chinese or Indian food where there are significant differences among the regional flavors, techniques and ingredients. The cooking tools aren't overly dissimilar, or don't really need to be, as traditional pits are pretty impractical... but you have to know what flavors and textures you're looking for.

I own a Big Green Egg (ceramic Kamado-style oven) and a Weber Smokey Mountain (a vertical water smoker) and I have a hunch right away as to the improvement with this device.

The Egg is quite versatile in that you can do direct grilling along with indirect slow roasting, by use of a "plate setter". This is a large ceramic plate with legs that is very similar to what is used to fire plates in a kiln, though in this case it acts as a heat sink and shield between the meat and the fire.

The hourglass shape enables a better blockage of direct heat from the main cooking chamber. BGE plate setters have gaps on the sides that in the case of large briskets can burn the ends, leading to a form of traditional "burnt ends" unless you're diligent about dousing hotspots with a water gun and mopping/spritzing regularly.

This is partly why I prefer the Weber smokey mountain for brisket. That said, Kamados are very easy to use - dump your lump, light a couple paraffin cubes, and you're up in 20 minutes.

<comment><USER7> I agree, there's plenty of good online resources, and brisket especially is pretty straightforward. When I was learning, I absorbed Aaron Franklin's videos and was delighted with the results even as a beginner. By the time I mustered the willpower to actually wait in line and try some BBQ at Franklin's, I was pleased to find that I really wasn't too far off.

This line from the article was a little silly: "In the end, the secret was to precisely control the temperature both in the smoker and in the meat over the "low and slow" smoke."

When really the importance of heat control is pretty well known. Something I use and that may be of interest to HN is a heatermeter:

[https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter](https://github.com/CapnBry/HeaterMeter)

which uses a fan to maintain a set temperature automatically and has a web interface to monitor it remotely. The article mentioned the students had built something similar too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love kamados, but if one is really concerned with temperature control I don't see how one could beat a water bath for cooking with a separate smoking step.

Also, while interesting, that hyperboloid profile has significant disadvantages compared to the more traditional ovoid used by the BGE and clones: more difficult to manufacture, internal stresses, smaller cooking area, more weight, etc. Good engineering practice would need to account for those. I don't expect a news article to address any of this, but I would be interested to hear what was considered in class.

<comment><USER9> When Nathan Myhrvold visited Google and spoke, I asked him what he thought the "best" way to make BBQ ribs was (with a stretched definition for "BBQ"). He said: sous vide, arrest via dipping in liquid nitrogen, deep fry, then smoke.

<comment><USER8> I'm so conflicted with Myhrvold: I hate Intellectual Ventures and what they do with the passion of a thousand suns, but Modernist Cuisine is an incredible and seminal work of art and science.

The modernist methods for BBQ do consistently produce a great que, but throwing a butt on an egg slow and low tastes just about as good and takes a lot less work.

<comment><USER9> The other thing I asked him about was BBQ stall.

He had done some nice work providing evidence against the "it's just fat melting" theory (he prefers the idea there is water vapor around the meat, absorbing the heat). I suggested that one could wrap the butt in aluminum foil, which would eliminate the evaporation and cause much more of the low heat to stay within the body of the meat.

That would presumably affect the bark, which is why he suggested the deep fry, although I don't think that's really the same as a slow bark.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you don't want to build your own, the green egg is a really solid ceramic smoker/oven. expensive but the results are consistently good.

<comment><USER11> You can build a really cheap smoker out of a ceramic flower pot. I built one after I saw Alton Brown talking about it.

Mine is almost exactly like this one, except that I replaced the top pot with a ceramic lid. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAydLWYGoJA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAydLWYGoJA)

I've been thinking about building a PID controller for it (I already have the equipment from a project I did for an embedded systems lab in college), but I'm worried I'll end up eating way too much barbecue.

<comment><USER12> I've built a couple of smokers out of cardboard boxes and they were fantastic.

I got a large box (like refrigerator might come in), cut the bottom out and cut a door leaving one side for the hinge. I then used a pencil to poke some hole and ran dowels through the box horizontally to put the racks on. An electric hotplate and a cast iron skillet full of apple wood chips provides the smoke. I put it on the concrete and put the box over the top of it. I put a meat thermometer in the top of the box. Warning: the first time I did this, the concrete under the box was also smoked and I had a large black square on my patio. Cover the concrete with tinfoil to avoid this.

This method produces a lot of smoke and not much heat. I've done salmon and a couple of turkeys like this. I let them smoke for 4 or 5 hours, then finish them off in the oven. Rave reviews on the turkey at thanksgiving. The whole thing cost like $10 to make (I already had the hotplate).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have a related project that I've considered commercializing. I've built a temperature controller with an embedded linux board that serves a webpage and runs a python websocket server that updates the page. I've also got a daughterboard with a thermocouple amplifier and transistor to power a small fan that feeds the fire. The system logs and graphs temperature data. It's basically complete control from your phone.

[http://imgur.com/a/aGr0H](http://imgur.com/a/aGr0H)

<comment><USER4> This is awesome. The big issue for me when I've considered this is the operating conditions. You're hosting a linux board near a 250 degree source of heat that may be operating in ambient conditions that range from 35F and very rainy to 100F summer smoke.

<comment><USER13> The board doesn't have to be near the fire. Even the fan is separated. I 3d printed a fan mount that threads onto a pipe that runs into the firebox. The board' temperature range is 0-70C, so freezing temperatures would be a problem, but high temperatures. The rain would be an issue though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those in the Seattle area, Jacks in Sodo is where you can get your BBQ fix. Best brisket outside of Texas.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. Eat there frequently.

And you spent time in Terre Haute. My congratulations on your escape.

<comment><USER14> Hrm... your screen name makes me think that I might know you. Fellow Rose Grad?

<comment><USER15> No, but I did DJ at WMHD in the mid-80s. Hung out with Ron Dippold and Wayne McDaniel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> One thing that they don't talk about at all is meat quality. Whom you buy your brisket from can be much more important than optimizing every detail of the smoking process.

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if they really used mesquite as their wood or if that was some artistic license on the author's part. If so it would be an interesting choice. Mesquite burns hot, produces a lot of smoke and can very easily impart a harsh bitter flavor. It's a tough wood to get right.

<comment><USER18> Mesquite is the traditional wood for Texas-style beef brisket. Pork and chicken may not be able to stand up to the stronger flavor of mesquite, but beef does well with it.

Or at least that's what I've read. My smoking experience is very limited, but I've done a lot of reading.

<comment><USER6> Mesquite is best for grilling due to its flavor and strength. You can smoke with it, but you really need to like Mesquite.

Oak and/or Hickory is usually what I've seen and used. I also like Pecan. (smoking briskets for about 5 years)

<comment><USER19> Apple wood can make outstanding pork & lamb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I prefer the hot and fast cooking method (smoking temperature around 275). Ribs can be smoked in an hour and 10 minutes. I compete in KCBS sanctioned bbq events and do well using the hot and fast method. I've tried many smokers out over the years and now solely use vertical drum smokers (specifically Hunsaker Vortex Smokers) as they do well with the hot and fast method.

</comment><comment><USER21> This one is also a temperature-controlled, natural fuel BBQ and smoker: [http://www.grilltender.com/](http://www.grilltender.com/)

</comment><comment><USER22> PID controller, fan, heater and SSR relay is all you need.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Berkeley engineering students respond with automated bong."

</comment><comment><USER24> Anyone hungry tonight? How about some delicious Boston-style BBQ? Harvard- style BBQ? Engineering student-style BBQ? Anyone?

Harvard is one of the world's great educational institutions, but perhaps it's spreading the branding a little thin to apply it to BBQ made by engineering students.

Now a BBQ smoker from Central TX A&M might be interesting.

<comment><USER25> What's the difference between Austin and Boston when it comes to cooking brisket? Given the ubiquity of information and the ease of travel, I wouldn't place such a premium on location. Some of the best BBQ I've ever had was in Brooklyn (and I didn't have to wait 2 hours for it).

<comment><USER26> Experience and standards? It's like asking what's the difference between NY Style pizza in NY and NY style pizza in LA. Do you think they are the same? It's also like saying that TexMex in MN is the same as in TX or CA.

Anybody can open up an BBQ place in Anytown, USA, and it could be passable or even pretty good, but it'll not beat a moderately good place in a town known for BBQ. It's mostly because the low quality places get run out of town to those with exceptional BBQ, and maybe even thrive in places where BBQ joins are scarce. Making really good BBQ is an art, and takes many years of experience and practice, maybe even mentoring under a master. Some guy smoking a brisket following a recipe online isn't going to come near even low quality BBQ restaraunts. Not without a lot of experience, trial and error, and by that point they aren't even following the recipe any longer.

<comment><USER27> Aaron Franklin just got the James Beard stamp of approval, winning Best Chef: Southwest for 2015. I expect there'll be Franklin-Style BBQ "Just Like Austin" places opening up around the country as a result.

[http://dining.blog.austin360.com/2015/05/04/aaron- franklin-w...](http://dining.blog.austin360.com/2015/05/04/aaron-franklin- wins-james-beard-award-for-best-chef-southwest/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Somehow I suspect this would have turned out better if they were UT or A&M students. Oh wait... can we just put brisket Texas students make using tin foil and a crock pot up against the brisket made by the Harvard kids? I'm pretty sure talent and experience will triumph over technology.</comment>


Now we know why Ritalin works - <AUTHOR> http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/rethinking-healthcare/now-we-know-why-ritalin-works/380/ <comment><USER2> "Why do stimulants like Ritalin turn ADHD kids normal but turn normal kids into hopped-up screaming meamies?"

The second half of this, that normal kids on Ritalin and Adderall will be overstimulated and unable to concentrate, is just plain false. Both have been shown to improve concentration in healthy controls (with the notable exceptions of people with anxiety, OCD, or other hyperglutamatergic problems, and especially not people with schizophrenia). That's why it's prescribed to pretty much everyone: because it works for pretty much everyone.

Some studies:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=R...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=7862911&dopt=abstractplus)

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18522689>

<comment><USER3> Really? Ritalin makes me calmer and helps me sleep a lot better. Does it do that for pretty much everyone?

<comment><USER4> I'm an Aderal person. If I want to work at 3 AM. I take some Aderal and I will have the ability to think and not fall asleep no matter how tired I get. So it(slightly different it) definitely does not do that to everyone.

On a side note: I have ADHD (and dyslexia but not really important) and Aderal can sometimes make me more active that before-Yes it depends on how much I take at one time, but still. I wouldn't say it calms me down. Meh

<comment><USER5> Same here - almost exact reaction. I remember as a kid that Ritalin used to calm me down but, as an adult, these are definitely stimulants to me today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> No matter how you look at it, Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta and similar drugs are amphetamines or amphetamine analogues. You can take them (at a threshold dose that is unique to your body), and you will feel more focused, concentrated and on top of things. Take too much of it (this includes people with "ADHD") and you will have manic symptoms.

Do the medications help people with problems concentrating, impulsiveness and attention (collectively known as ADD)? Yes. Are there healthier ways to change your brain? Most definitely. I'd like to see a kid who is on ADHD get prescribed an exercise/meditation/therapy routine and compare the results to someone treated with medication. I'm sure the results would surprise a lot of people. Our body is a feedback-oriented system. "Chemical Imbalances" in the brain are often remedied with lifestyle changes. This includes "diseases" such as depression, anxiety and adhd. The corporations that research these conditions are quick to jump to conclusions based on limited scientific information if it means they have a good chance of success. It's been scientifically proven that exercise and diet play an enormous role in helping you concentrate and pay attention. But you know what? Advertising exercise won't make Shire Pharmaceuticals any richer. It's way easier for parents to resort to a medication as well. Who has time to monitor their kids anymore? Advertisements would have you believe that it's your only choice. AND they make everything sound all scientific, when in reality they are picking and choosing data. It's really a sad situation, but I hope there are enough people out there who know about the alternatives. It sucks being so dependent on these stimulants that you can't focus without them - you are bound to used them for the rest of your life. And who even knows what the long term effects are? The results are just starting to come in...

<comment><USER7> Actually, the results won't "surprise" a lot of people. For most ADHD sufferers: Exercise and therapy are somewhat effective, medication is even more effective, and combining the two approaches is the most effective. Big surprise.

The results are not "just starting to come in", though that's a common claim for folks who aren't actually familiar with the field. Ritalin has been studied for over 70 years. People have been taking it for decades on end. The long term results are that people with ADHD lead better lives. How horrible.

<comment><USER6> No doubt, there are plenty of cases when medication is the right option. However, there are many more cases where it's not.

How we do psychology? We take a bunch of symptoms that seem to coincide with a group of individuals and we label it as a disorder : <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhd#DSM-IV_criteria>

The fact that these symptoms exist and cause problems for many individuals is of no question - that's why we have a "disorder" label associated with it. There is no dispute that medication is effective in treating these symptoms, either.

However, the claim that medication "even more effective" is flimsy, if not flat out wrong. The problem is that there are many more studies devoted to the "effects of ritalin on ADHD" than there are to the "effects of exercise and ADHD." Or meditation, or biofeedback, or eating 7 lbs of celery a day, or whatever. To make the claim that "drugs are more effective" is easier because studies of this nature are more prevalent - but it doesn't make it right. That would be a total confirmation bias.

A difficulty in comparing medication to other methods is that medication = instant gratification and instant results. You eat a pill. A half hour later, you are focused, less scattered and more attentive. In the similar way to how coffee wakes you up if you are tired. It's easy to make an experiment out of such results. Exercise, in contrast, isn't instant. Exercise increases levels of nor-epinephrine and dopamine... but not nearly as rapidly (or with as little work) as an amphetamine compound. Steady and healthy levels of serotonin (which is now being studied as another player in the ADHD game) don't begin to rise until weeks of daily exercising. It may be slower, but our bodies are capable of changing, and for quantities of any given chemical being pumped out to increase, you need to keep doing things that keep causing it to be released. You need to form habits that make your body more effective at producing it's own chemical cocktails. Take a basic course in human physiology or neuroscience if you don't believe how amazing and capable our bodies and brains are at adapting and improving.

Furthermore, a disorder label can easily be misconstrued by a young individual with ADHD. They might think to themselves, "Wow, finally, a word to describe all the problems I'm having. It's not my fault after all, I'm sick, and I need medicine." It sucks because instead of really trying to go beyond the condition by using their will, they may give up and go the route of altering their minds externally - just to keep up with their peers. Is that a bad thing? Well, I'll leave that up to the reader.

It is my personal opinion that that overcoming challenges of ADHD is not only possible through other, healthier methods (exercise, meditation and learning/coping strategies), but is more rewarding as well (speaking from personal experience).

However, no one can do this by themselves - and it sucks that some people do not have the support, and that schools don't have a 15 minute exercise break every 3 hours, and that they don't let you eat snacks in class, and that we are constantly exposed to electronic stimulation from a very young age, that some of us don't learn how to control our intake of these things. Television, video games and other forms of electronic stimulation have been proven to release dopamine (Jeez, what doesn't?). A person with ADHD can easily focus to a show on TV with quickly changing camera angles, loud sounds, constant dialogue and continuous novelty. We grew up with this. But, when we are in class, we fidget, and daydream and blurt things out because this stimulation is not present, so our bodies are attempting to mitigate the dopamine withdrawal through the constant production of activity, of both the mind and the body.

Finally, Ritalin hasn't been studied for 70 years. It's been about 40. It didn't start being used for ADHD until The late 60s, and wasn't in widespread use until the 90s - which is when the more serious studies began to come out.

There's much more to say, but I'm getting tired :)

Sources: [http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-03-26-adhd- treatmen...](http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-03-26-adhd- treatment_x.htm) [http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041220013546.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041220013546.htm) <http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/565830>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> its not really news that Ritalin and other Schedule II stimulants work by increasing the amount of Dopamine in the brain, though the article's point about there being structurally fewer dopamine receptors might be.

That being said, for those with moderate - severe adhd, those prescription stimulants are the difference between a functional happy lifestyle and one which isn't.

<comment> daniel-cussen _...Those prescription stimulants are the difference between a functional happy lifestyle and one which isn't._

As an ADD, I can attest to this. I would even go further: with Strattera, it feels like I have two minds that work simultaneously.

One is free to ponder on the workings of the universe and all things abstract therein.

The other that is like a nanny. It takes care of piddling shit like not getting hit by traffic, remembering why I went into a room, basic politeness, not pissing people off, the whereabouts of my possessions, and remembering if I have to be somewhere at a given time.

Sure, I could take no medication and try focussing more on the basic things I'm supposed to remember instead of being a space cadet, but I could never get myself to. It's just not sexy enough. I prefer to "have two minds."

<comment><USER9> You actually like Strattera? I went on that stuff for a month and it was the worst feeling ever. It felt like a gun pressed up against the back of my brain all the time, I pretty much wanted to die.

Ritalin and traditional stimulates on the other hand are always great but I build up a tolerance quickly. (Currently I just use various caffeine sources to concentrate.)

<comment><USER10> This is the interesting thing about ADD: Why do some drugs help some, but not others, for what appear to be a common set of symptoms?

<comment><USER7> For the same reason there are dozens of NSAIDS and pain killers. Humans are complex systems, and complex systems exhibit complex behaviors including differing reactions to similar inputs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I work out twice a day. It's the best way I've found to keep myself sane and productive. I've never taken any drugs but I'll sleep 10+ hours a day or get ridiculously jittery if I don't.

And I've also found that I am most productive if I have a coffee exactly at 6AM and 3PM.

I have spreadsheets to track my sleep and caffeine consumption with respect to productivity. Classic signs of ADHD.

<comment><USER12> Caffeine is a drug.

<comment><USER13> The good type of drug, the type you don't have to steal from your room-mates secret stash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "What they found was the ADHD people had fewer of these cells, meaning our brains are less capable of processing dopamine, the chemical 'attaboy,' than other people. _It's all gone into the Journal of the American Medical Association._ "

Those dopamine-thieving bastards.

</comment><comment><USER15> The real news here isn't so much "why Ritalin works," but that we now have a coherent theory of the pathophysiology of ADHD (fewer dopamine receptors in the brain). That the theory explains why Ritalin (and other meds) work is just a very nice consequence of the theory.

</comment><comment><USER16> Gotta love any article that tries to take on numerous very complex phenomena and package them together into a very simple sound bite.

<comment><USER9> I really enjoy how every single mental disorder has to do with not enough or too much dopamine.

<comment><USER17> To be fair, almost everything that happens in the brain has to do with dopamine one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Blankenhorn's comments after his post are just as good as the post itself.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think the real reason we have so much neuroticism in our culture is that we don't believe there is an accessible realm of objective, real value. We think that everything we find pleasure and meaning in is merely physical, thus doomed to elimination. However, we yearn for unchanging meaning, and can never find satisfaction in these transient distractions.

Seems that instead of focusing on things like therapy and medication, we should try to find an absolute source of meaning that actually satisfies us. Something like a more reason based approach to dealing with neuroticism, identifying the actual root and trying to find its solution, would be much more effective. But, I've never heard of such a thing. Instead, it's all about regulating ourselves and trying to become normal, though since no one is normal there doesn't seem to be such a thing.

<comment><USER20> Sounds good, suggestions as to an absolute source of meaning, that doesn't fly in the face of rationality?

<comment><USER19> Yes, free will and purposeful intelligence. Essentially, if all intelligence boils down to algorithms of one sort or another, then per the no free lunch theorem, all we can expect is randomness. All appearances of order and meaning are merely illusory.

However, I think I've empirically established we (or at least I) have free will and purposeful intelligence. Thus, at least I can access meaning.

<http://www.box.net/shared/u13u3agxqg></comment></comment></comment>


Space Startup Could Lace the Atmosphere with Toxic Mercury - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-19/this-space-startup-could-lace-the-atmosphere-with-toxic-mercury <comment><USER2> Looks like we'll never learn.

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


YouTube Gaming is LIVE - <AUTHOR> https://gaming.youtube.com/ <comment><USER2> Looks like if you try to load it and have third-party cookies disabled you just get redirected to a 404:

"404.

Lorem ipsum other castle, arrow to the knee set up us the bomb."

Luckily they have an amusing error page.</comment>


Study says people eat a lot at work – and it's not too healthy - <AUTHOR> https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2018/06/11/study-says-people-eat-lot-work-and-not-too-healthy/cRcHKubIo5uw17GgHQvlOK/story.html <comment><USER2> I've shared this experience at my workplace. There are freely available snacks and occasional catering from local vendors. I don't find it surprising that many take advantage of the offerings, especially of highly popular foods like pizza.

An improvement would require both the individual and the organization to make an effort to reduce overconsumption and promote healthier foods. Would it be useful to apply standards like the USDA does with school cafeterias? [0] Either way, recognizing the issue is an important first step.

[0] [https://www.fns.usda.gov/school-meals/nutrition-standards- sc...](https://www.fns.usda.gov/school-meals/nutrition-standards-school-meal)</comment>


Internet Archive Amasses all TV News since 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/business/media/internet-archive-amasses-all-tv-news-since-2009.html?hp

<comment><AUTHOR> It's indexed via the Close Captioning data, and, will go back, year by year, to 2002 (when closed captioning started). After that, we'll need some clever language recognition technologies to make this data searchable.

I did not know this about the news, but, "The act of copying all this news material is protected under a federal copyright agreement signed in 1976."

</comment><comment><USER2> Here's the original announcement from the Internet Archive:

[http://blog.archive.org/2012/09/17/launch-of-tv-news- search-...](http://blog.archive.org/2012/09/17/launch-of-tv-news-search- borrow-with-350000-broadcasts)

But it's not particularly convenient to get to the content:

"Use the index of searchable text and short, streamed clips to find programs to borrow on DVD-ROM or view at the Internet Archive's library in San Francisco."

</comment><comment><USER3> there is so much available at the archive, and i while i struggle with "findability" (which even with faceted browsing i'm not sure we have any better ideas out there) i'm still surprised when i meet even deeply technical types that don't know the entirety of its weath.. like the 9/11 archive <http://archive.org/details/911> computer chronicles (heheh) [http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Acomputerchr...](http://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Acomputerchronicles&sort=-publicdate) or my favorite is probably the polymorphics video from the ICBM guy's company <http://archive.org/details/AllAboutPolymorphics></comment>


Microsoft unleashes 20,000 lines of Linux code - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3403

<comment><USER2> The headline really doesn't hint at the nuances of this.

Microsoft released code to help Linux run in Microsoft's HyperV virtualization system. Linux would run, just slower, without these drivers.

Releasing these drivers is likely a crucial step in getting HyperV adopted outside of windows-only shops. Linux is a popular server OS. It is crucial that they appeal to a large demographic, as they are competing with other established virtualization vendors like VMWare.

<comment><USER3> And now we have the code! Woo!

There should be much rejoicing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's a cookbook!

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

</comment><comment><USER5> MSFT have certainly matured a lot in recent years. Windows 7 is looking good and now they are contributing to open source projects. I think we can thank Apple for forcing them to adapt.

<comment><USER6> I both agree and disagree with this comment.

To start with, Windows 7 is great but XP was pretty solid for its time too so I'm not sure that Win 7 signals anything other than the fact they've had a new hit.

However, there are segments within Microsoft that are working hard to get some momentum for what might otherwise become a stagnant behemoth of a software company. These cases are seeing Microsoft compromise old values in an effort to create something new (for instance this as you've said and ASP.NET MVC as another example).

Obviously it's all for profit but it's a good sign that it is still profitable to innovate, even in a company whose established popularity and size would typically mean that it stands to gain most from focusing on the "whole product" (e.g. support etc.) if we take Moore's chasm viewpoint.

Whether we have Apple to thank for this I'm unsure though. I guess the marketing efforts of Apple to make it cool have put a lot of pressure on Windows in the last few years. Whether the way to beat this marketing attempt by Apple is innovation is a deeper question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> According to this blog <http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=3433>, M$ did so because otherwise it would be in violation of the GPL.</comment>


MongooseIM version 1.6: Riak, DevOps and more - <AUTHOR> https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/mongooseim-1-6-riak-devops-love-and-so-much-more.html <comment><USER2> Non-Redirect Link: [https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/mongooseim-1-6-riak- de...](https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/mongooseim-1-6-riak-devops-love- and-so-much-more.html)

The original got captured by my filters.

I have some huge MongooseIM Nodes in production, unfortunatly RIAK is not an Option for us.

<comment><USER3> Which requirement that you have excludes Riak?

<comment><USER2> For authentication and vCards we're using a custom LDAP backend. And XEP-0313 Message Archive Management didn't exist when we had to implement a custom solution, especially on behalf of german archive law §146AO and §239HGB. We did put a lot individual developement in a solution I can't economically justify burying now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to Ejabberd and Prosody?

<comment><USER5> MongooseIM is a fork of Ejabberd. One feature I liked about it when I had a look at it (that was while ago) that it had websockets support which Ejabberd didn't have back then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Does anyone have experience with Riak vs Mnesia as a backend for the various Erlang XMPP servers?</comment>


Hyperloop: Next-gen Javascript to native code compiler - <AUTHOR> http://ceogeek.tumblr.com/post/64080615800/introducing-hyperloop

<comment><USER2> The naming of this could have a negative effect on it's discover-ability, given how popular the physical hyperloop concept (by Elon Musk) can be on HN.</comment>


Session Private Messenger (P2P Signal fork) - <AUTHOR> https://getsession.org/ <comment><USER2> Is this a truly decentralized version for Signal? Is such a thing even possible?

Super excited to see more focus on non-centralized applications with privacy in mind. Matrix is also working on a pure p2p mechanism too.

</comment><comment><USER3> So there's a blockchain and a cryptocurrency, and people hosting servers get cryptocurrency. I don't see who pays, and what makes the cryptocurrency valuable, though?</comment>