"Mindless Eating," or how to send an entire life of research into question - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/the-peer-reviewed-saga-of-mindless-eating-mindless-research-is-bad-too/ <comment><USER2> Tragically, I bet this is all too common. Wansink's mistake was blogging about it.

This emblematic of a larger problem with how science is practiced: the obsessive focus on p-value thresholds leads to irrational practices like trawling data for interesting "findings."

But on a certain level Wansink was right: a data set is not completely worthless if it showed a null result. So we need to start thinking about how to communicate the value of data even when the null is not rejected.

One way to do this is to encourage widespread sharing of data sets regardless of the outcome of the experiment. Maybe for a given study the data did not show a definitive result - but does the data point to potential future paths of study? Maybe another researcher could get ideas for new experiments.

<comment><USER3> > a data set is not completely worthless if it showed a null result.

Why is a null result worthless? I don't understand. It goes against my common sense that paying more for food doesn't make you eat more. The fact that this is not the case is valuable knowledge to me. I understand that it's not as glamorous as "paying more makes you eat less!", but it's still valuable knowledge that should be published.

<comment><USER4> Null results are "worthless" only in the sense that they're harder, if not impossible, to publish, and do less for your career.

As a former neuroscientist, I had a unicorn data set of intracranial EEG data, and we'd spent so much time collecting it, that we were determined to find _something_. I left grad school before we found anything of interest. I believe my former prof eventually published _something_ on it, but I analyzed the shit out of it, even knowing I was fishing, because so much time would have been lost to not use it.

Fishing like this was one of the reasons I left. The pursuit of knowledge and the pursuit of your career don't align often enough.

To me, what's unusual is not that Wansink pushed to keep analyzing the data, but that he was called out for it. _Everyone_ seemed to be doing it when I was in academia.

<comment><USER5> I feel the same way about current practice research, but find that industry standards are even more abysmal in terms of fishing. What field are you in now that you find an acceptable level of rigor?

<comment><USER4> Hah, well, I returned to software dev, so I'm not too worried about research rigor these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is something that irritates me to the point of irrationality.

Why so many people spend so much time and resources on $name diets, questionable research, news about how 'xyz' is good for you while 'abc' is bad, exercises to eliminate calories in 30 days, exercises to remove localized fat etc? All of this is shown to be evidently bullshit for decades for the minimally rational observer.

Meanwhile the knowledge of what works is blatantly obvious: the energy expenditure must be higher than the intake. Having a healthy diet and exercise regimen along that is highly desirable but not strictly necessary, stating this just because understanding the core concept is more important than sheepishly believing the latest fad. Also that this is a process that takes a lot of time and is not a one-off procedure but a process of learning life- changing habits.

I'd like to remark that this is not easy at all! In fact is really hard due to the inherent biological and societal tricks that play on our minds. But if people are already suffering psychologically and financially with this, why don't just try the basics?

I understand how this is incentivized by an industry that extracts money from desperate people trying very hard to feel accepted by what society indicates as an acceptable and desirable appearance. The irony is that the failure of their latest hope is what makes them unable to understand that the problem is much simpler (not easy), and only try again on a more desperate attempt with the latest extreme measure.

At least if people would be honest enough to blame themselves for their bad habits (lack of a healthy diet and exercise regimen) they could start the process of accepting what they are as a result of their choices, and finally notice that they have some agency on this.

I am not talking here about existent mental and biological disorders of course and would not downplay their role.

Sorry for the rant, the only way I can rationalize that this exists is that there are people that deny the existence of climate change.

<comment><USER7> > _Meanwhile the knowledge of what works is blatantly obvious: the energy > expenditure must be higher than the intake._

This is like saying about the poor, "What works is blatantly obvious: Poor people just need to increase income or reduce expenditures. Boom! Poverty solved."

The secret is that _this isn 't the problem_. The actual problem that fat people must solve is not _what_ to do, but _how_ to do it, both in the short- and long-term.

> _Having a healthy diet and exercise regimen along that is highly desirable > but not strictly necessary..._

1,000 calories of cupcake are 1,000 calories of chicken breast are, in theory, the same amount of energy. In practice, diet and exercise considerations are integral aspects of the actual problem that fat people must solve.

Example: For some, exercise is actually counter-productive and causes more hunger. For others, exercise is a crucial part of success.

Example: For some, calorie restriction can be done with no particular attention paid to the balance of carbs, proteins, and fats. For others, a low- carb diet means lower hunger/higher satiation for longer and is a must for success.

<comment><USER6> > The secret is that this isn't the problem. The actual problem that fat > people must solve is not what to do, but how to do it, both in the short- > and long-term.

You're right, it just gets to my nerves as this is a source of huge suffering to most people and there's an industry specialized to prey on this.

<comment><USER7> Couldn't agree more!

<comment><USER6> I just want to point out that this is not restricted to 'fat' people, but a great majority of people who feel a huge pressure to adhere to a physical appearance standard without the proper education of how to get there and maintain it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> PSA I always post into weight threads: Every legitimate long term study of non surgical weight loss shows that it doesn't happen for the vast, vast majority of people.

1) ["In controlled settings, participants who remain in weight loss programs usually lose approximately 10% of their weight. However, one third to two thirds of the weight is regained within 1 year, and almost all is regained within 5 years. "]([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1580453))

2) Giant meta study of long term weight loss: ["Five years after completing structured weight-loss programs, the average individual maintained a weight loss of >3% of initial body weight."]([http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full](http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/74/5/579.full))

3) Less Scientific: [Weight Watcher's Failure - "about two out of a thousand Weight Watchers participants who reached goal weight stayed there for more than five years."]([https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight- watchers/](https://fatfu.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/weight-watchers/))

4) [The reason why it's impossible seems to be that although calories in < calories out works, the body of a fat person makes it extremely difficult psychologically to eat less.]([http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker- pope-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/magazine/tara-parker-pope-fat- trap.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)) This is borne out by the above data.

5) [The only thing that does seem to work in the long term is gastric surgery.]([http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1421028/))

Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not even one.

<comment><USER9> > Moreover, you won't find any reputable study on the web where the average > person lost 10%+ of their body weight and kept it off for five years. Not > even one.

Of course there is: [http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/published%20research.htm](http://www.nwcr.ws/Research/published%20research.htm).

Here's a good question: other than the fact that these people lost weight, what is identifiably unusual about them?

<comment><USER10> Was going to link to the National Weight Control Registry, thanks! I'll just add that all those studies in GP seem to prove is that A) weight loss _programs_ (especially fad diets) don't work and B) it is a psychological issue. There are plenty of people on MFP, /r/loseit or just counting calories themselves that have successfully kept off weight for years. I'm one of them.

In case someone out there is serious about losing weight and not making excuses, here's how you calculate your actual TDEE: [https://www.reddit.com/r/leangains/comments/2rv09z/this_is_h...](https://www.reddit.com/r/leangains/comments/2rv09z/this_is_how_you_calculate_your_tdee/)

<comment><USER11> Many times I'll read a story of someone who lost weight and kept it off. And then they detail their pre weight-loss diet and I think, well of course you were overweight. You were inactive and had a terrible diet (sugary drinks, processed foods, etc). You started getting some exercise and learned a few things about nutrition and the weight fell off.

But then there are others who seem to do everything right and are over weight in spite of that.

For example. I was never overweight as a kid and relatively active. In college and for the start of my career, I stopped being active and my diet was awful (e.g. I thought a large Jamba Juice smoothie and a carrot cake was a healthy breakfast choice). My weight ballooned up to almost 190 lbs (20+ lbs overweight), my blood pressure went up, I started having rosacea.

I started running and fixed my diet. Quickly my weight dropped down to 150 and I've kept it in the 140-150 range for over a decade. The other health issues cleared up as well. But it wasn't hard work for me. Being thin is my natural state if you will, and I had to do everything wrong to stay overweight.

My wife meanwhile continues to struggle with her weight. She's successfully lost weight through extremely diligent calorie counting, but after a year or so she starts to put it back on. I have never counted calories. Our diets are similar (in kind, not quantity of course, she eats much less than me). She is active, but not quite as active as me. So similar diet and life styles, but my weight stays off and hers does not.

Hereditarily, no one in my family is over weight. There is obesity on both sides of her heredity.

And I see this playing out in our kids. My son has an athletic build and will probably never have weight issues. My daughter takes after her mom and it will take a life time of diligence for her to remain at a healthy weight.

It seems that some people are optimized for famine, and some for feast. :-(

Obviously there are a lot of factors involved in the growing obesity crises. But I feel for people who struggle with their weight despite doing all the right things, I really do.

<comment><USER12> The food tastes too damn good! I've only been overweight because of binging and poor eating. I've never eaten in a normal, healthy way, and gained weight.

Calories are such that if you screw up once per week (birthday party, company event, family dinner) that could mean you gain weight if you eat regularly the rest of the days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 'Why did peer review not catch this? "Because peer review doesn't do this," Heathers told Ars. The point of peer review has always been for fellow scientists to judge whether a paper is of reasonable quality; reviewers aren't expected to perform an independent analysis of the data. ...In fact, without open data—something that's historically been hit-or-miss—it would be impossible for peer reviewers to validate any numbers.'

It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that the peer review process should include a statistician or someone who can review the statistics.

<comment><USER14> > In fact, without open data ... it would be impossible for peer reviewers to > validate any numbers

Even this is not sufficient -- the fact is that this is a methodological statistical error, not a mathematical statistical error.

The mistake is thinking that a dataset alone can yield data supporting a hypothesis derived from that dataset, rather than deriving a testable hypothesis from an existing dataset, and then gathering new data to validate.

I would say the only way that you could publish results derived from an existing data source is if you also published all the null results you got along the way when examining the data set; but this is not really a feasible thing to print in a publication; either the list would be very long and thus it would be clear that some sort of p-hacking was involved, or the list would be short and accidental or intentional omission would be suspected.

This dramatically reduces the amount of useful results that can be squeezed from a dataset, which is unfortunate, as many of them are hard to gather in the first place. It might be necessary to protect these datasets better -- to restrict access conditional on specifying the hypothesis being tested with the requirement that all results, including null results, be recorded, even if only in summary form if the results are not interesting enough to be accepted for publication or to be worth the effort of composing into a quality research paper.

<comment><USER15> > _Even this is not sufficient -- the fact is that this is a methodological > statistical error, not a mathematical statistical error._

That said, Wansink's papers had plenty of mathematical statistical errors that were evident without access to the original data, as documented in the mentioned "Statistical Heartburn" preprint: [https://peerj.com/preprints/2748.pdf](https://peerj.com/preprints/2748.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Very much so -- I had only read the first part of the article when I wrote this reply, having read the whole thing now (and the linked pizza paper) I'm more than a little horrified at what can, in the most optimistic case, be described as extreme carelessness.

I have a pre-existing bias against papers relating to nutrition science, and this looks worse even than I expect. I would love to see a treatment that looks at especially noteworthy research in the area that passes a rigorous methodological review, much less has been replicated with any reliability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If the academic world let scientists publish their validation of the null hypothesis, then they wouldn't go out of their way to "deep dive" into data to look for other hypothesis to prove!

</comment><comment><USER17> Feel like we really approach the whole dieting process incorrectly. People eat to fulfill a need. They are either hungry and eat to no longer feel hungry or they eat because it produces positive feelings (whether this is to negate negative feelings or just to enhance your already good mood).

Hunger is your body signalling your brain that you need nutrients. If you eat foods that cover all your nutrient requirements for a low number of calories and your body is taking up these nutrients properly, then you should have no problems. Thus it makes sense to inform people which foods they need to be eating as well as educate people on which disorders can cause poor nutrient uptake.

If you suffer from stress and you eat high calorie foods to feel better, changing your diet is likely going to exacerbate your stress, not make you feel better. I feel this is the case for many who are overweight.. stress management strategies should be the first priority as you won't be able to handle changing your diet for the long term until you get your stress under control.

<comment><USER18> This doesn't even begin to get into the effects different macronutrients have on you. It's a complicated subject that has reached religion-like levels of zealotry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article makes Wansink seem negligent and/or incompetent. Also, the embedded "CBS This Morning" video is cringeworthy. It appears that the recommendations in his book amount to "study normal weight people; do what they do." Isn't that fraught with survivorship bias? Do the recommendations in his book control for people that have the same habits but still end up overweight?

Anecdote: my household is a family of four. Myself and my wife, and our two teenage kids, daughter and son. Since we live together, the answers to the 10 questions on [http://www.slimbydesign.com/get- scored/](http://www.slimbydesign.com/get-scored/) are the same for the household. My son and I are normal weight. My wife and daughter are overweight. Conclusion: weight has very little to do with the design of your kitchen. Caveat: this conclusion has not been peer reviewed and is not scientifically sound.

<comment><USER10> > Isn't that fraught with survivorship bias?

It is, but it's not a completely invalid starting point. Even better is to study people who were once fat, but lost weight and keep it off. This is what the National Weight Control Registry does. It's similar to studies that have tried to pin down why marriages fail. Most studies focus on what went _wrong_ in failed marriages, but some of the most helpful suggestions have come from what people who stay married do.

> My son and I are normal weight. My wife and daughter are overweight.

Do your wife and daughter eat the same portions as you and your son? It's a common complaint of women, who are on average shorter than men and therefore need fewer calories, that they can't eat as much as their significant others.

<comment><USER11> > Do your wife and daughter eat the same portions as you and your son

No. I expand on that a bit here - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14196631)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The Last Psychiatrist talked about this sometimes. The problem is not just that the original studies need to be rescinded, or discredited going forward. The problem is what do you do about everything that cited them, that took the knowledge in the faulty papers and used it as a foundation for more knowledge? The faulty ideas in the paper have permeated out to researchers and (sometimes) the broader culture generally, what do you do about that?

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/the_problem_with_scie...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/the_problem_with_science_is_sc.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> I think what's needed is a strategy for making actual data analysis an easier and more visible component of the peer-review and publishing process. Submissions are typically sent to three people for review, and the decision to accept or reject is made based on the feedback or criticism given. If the reviewers are busy, overworked professors, they may not have the time to really perform a deep dive into the data and conduct an independent analysis. Furthermore, it's likely these submissions don't include enough data for a proper statistical review.

This is the 21st century, where most if not all reputable journals have an online presence and submission portal. It would be great if authors had to upload their anonymized data sets in a common format (.csv?) that can easily be imported into statistical analysis packages (ex: Minitab, read into R, etc). Journals provide analysis and test recommendations, reviewers run the tests, upload their independent analysis results as part of the review process. The idea here is to produce something like an auditable paper trail.

There has to be some sort of solution for this problem, especially in 2017. Hiding behind shitty (or worse, deceitful) data analysis shouldn't be possible.

</comment><comment><USER21> _" Trawling through data, running lots of statistical tests, and looking only for significant results is bound to turn up some false positives."_

That's most of the field of macroeconomics. It's all data analysis, not controlled experimentation.

<comment><USER22> I was just about to ask, isn't that how data science works?

<comment><USER23> Proper data science (for example, bayesian analysis done right) takes that into account, and would generally not score random finds as remarkable.

But doing that is hard, so most people don't even try ...

yes, practically, that's how modern data science works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > Many scientists receive only cursory training in statistics,

This seems to be true (at least I have many younger colleagues who are woefully ill informed about even basic stats.) but it's very strange.

Most of what I learned of statistics, including tests for significance and regression, I learned in senior high school at the age of 17.

Learning not to search of correlations like this is pretty much equivalent to ensuring that you do not over fit your data set which is surely such conventional wisdom that no one getting a scientific education in the last sixty or seventy years should have missed it.

I'm aware that there is a lot of highly sophisticated statistical analysis that I don't know about but things like p value are not among them.

</comment><comment><USER25> Inside universities, it does not seem realistic that this will lower people's opinions on the value of social science statistical research, or in the related fields of psychology (esp. management/organisational psychology), or even all of the humanities.

That opinion is already "reject it all".

Even when it comes to medicine that opinion is strongly represented. A few people even ascribe the placebo effect to massive and widespread statistical error.</comment>


Never Eat Alone Again: Grubwithus (YC W11) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sfweekly.com/foodie/2011/07/never_eat_alone_again_grubwith.php

<comment><USER2> These are the kind of ideas that I say to myself, "I wish I thought of that."

Simple idea, simple execution, easy to understand, markets itself... It's great. Can't wait to try it out!</comment>


User Study of Tracking Protection in Firefox Nightly - moz-ur https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2015/07/user-study-of-tracking-protection-in-firefox-nightly/

<comment><AUTHOR> I found that this from the article rather telling:

"A feature for more than a privacy-centric niche. We sometimes think that privacy protection tools are valuable to only a small portion of privacy- centric users (3-8% depending on the study) or general users at specific moments (for example, using the private browsing window). It is noteworthy how many of the participants found value in tracking protection."

I constantly hear from friends (especially Chrome users) that no one cares about tracking on the internet. I think it is uplifting to hear that many of the participants found value in tracking protection.

<comment> moz-ur Yes, it was interesting from our perspective also. For some participants, the use of the tracking protection feature brought attention to tracking. Further, at least two of the participants described how they researched tracking as a result of using the tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Maybe this came up already, but how does the tracking protection work? Does it use a blacklist like uBlock, or a whitelist like Privacy Badger?

<comment><USER3> The page links to [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Polaris#Tracking_protection](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Polaris#Tracking_protection) "The current blocklist is powered by Disconnect."</comment></comment>


Covid 19 Censorship on Medium - <AUTHOR> Aaron Ginn has written a thoughtful, well-researched piece on the spread of Covid 19:
https://medium.com/six-four-six-nine/evidence-over-hysteria-covid-19-1b767def5894
But as of 12:30 pm US central time / 5:30 pm UTC, Medium is returning a "410 This post is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules."
You can still read an earlier version of the post on Internet Archive, without pictures, unfortunately: https://web.archive.org/web/20200321144004/https://medium.com/six-four-six-nine/evidence-over-hysteria-covid-19-1b767def5894
Yet another reason to dump Medium as a blogging platform... <comment><USER2> this epidemiologist shared a long tweet thread deconstructing his post and the medium post has been suspended

[https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360](https://twitter.com/CT_Bergstrom/status/1241522140559503360)

</comment><comment><USER3> I notice it. Somebody posted on social media and I was reading it last night. I was reading through the comments (most of them were criticizing the content) When I refreshed the page, I got the 410 error.

The article had some inaccurate info but also some new sources of data that I was not aware of.

I think was an interesting reading.

I wonder what Medium Rules it was in violation.

<comment><USER4> [https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360045484653](https://help.medium.com/hc/en- us/articles/360045484653)</comment></comment>


Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future - k-mcgrady https://medium.com/editors-picks/892b57499e77 <comment><AUTHOR> > _Dukes believes, though he has no evidence, that the bacteria in his gut > became drug-resistant because he ate meat from animals raised with routine > antibiotic use. That would not be difficult: most meat in the United States > is grown that way. To varying degrees depending on their size and age, > cattle, pigs, and chickens — and, in other countries, fish and shrimp — > receive regular doses to speed their growth, increase their weight, and > protect them from disease. Out of all the antibiotics sold in the United > States each year, 80 percent by weight are used in agriculture, primarily to > fatten animals and protect them from the conditions in which they are > raised._

I really don't like to generalise in this way, but this sort of stuff makes me, as a European, pretty angry at the general laissez-faire attitude of the United States towards such things.

You may say "The US is allowed to govern itself as it wishes, no one's forcing you to live there" \- but with its heavy use of antibiotics in cattle-raising (banned in the EU - even though the US has tried to use its muscle to get the EU to un-ban it), the US is basically doing a fantastic job of fucking up antibiotics _for everyone_. So yes, I'm angry at the United States and its corrupt political system that means that there's almost zero chance that any of this will be fixed until it's far too late.

<comment><USER2> China is in fact by far the biggest problem regarding antibiotics.

So while you're busy being angry, don't forget to spread that anger around.

"Last month, the country's Ministry of Health revealed that on average each Chinese person consumes 138 g of antibiotics per year — 10 times the amount consumed per capita in the U.S. "

For those keeping track at home, that's about 41 times the total use of antibiotics in China compared to the US due to their population size.

[http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2103733,00...](http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2103733,00.html)

<comment><USER3> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism)

<comment><USER4> The above argument is not whataboutism. The statement "the US is basically doing a fantastic job of fucking up antibiotics for everyone" is false because no policy change in the US will significantly affect the rate at which resistant strains appear worldwide, US antibiotics consumption being less than 3% of China's. This refutes the original argument by bringing in additional information, whereas whataboutism is defined as changing the subject "without directly refuting or disproving the opponent's initial argument."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> when this was posted on metafilter last year someone posted a truly excellent comment: [https://www.metafilter.com/134210/Imagining-the-Post- Antibio...](https://www.metafilter.com/134210/Imagining-the-Post-Antibiotics- Future#5305117)

<comment><USER6> That was an extremely interesting comment. It would be helpful to mention that it's essentially an overview of bacteriophages, viruses which target bacteria. Describes their initial development, reasons why they aren't currently widely used, and links to more information about possible future development.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > who calls antibiotic resistance as serious a threat as terrorism

What an unbelievably stupid comparison. Terrorism is mass murder turned into the sort of spectacle that causes us to massively _overestimate_ a threat to our individual lives. If antibiotic resistance is that sort of threat, then it isn't much of a threat at all, and we can all go back to worrying about normal things such as dying from regular homicide, heart disease, crossing the road, and choking on food.

<comment><USER8> No it's not as serious as terrorism. Antibiotic resistance is MORE threatening then terrorism !

<comment><USER7> The stupidity of the comparison means that I have no idea what is meant by "threatening." In terms of individual lives, regular homicide is far more threatening than terrorism, as is choking on your next meal. Even ignoring the entwining of terrorism with politics, that already makes this a meaningless comparison.

And it's not necessary, because surely we've got plenty of analogous pandemics in the field of medicine which can orientate ourselves to any looming crisis. The AIDs virus in the West is still fresh in our memory, and a far more appropriate comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > economists for the National Pork Producers Council estimated that removing > antibiotics from hog raising would force farmers to spend $4.50 more per > pig, a cost that would be passed on to consumers

That is an unbelievable. A single pig produces over 100 pounds of meat, so we are risking catastrophe for a cost savings of less than 5 cents per pound of meat.

</comment><comment><USER10> This seems like the same sort of pointless hand-wringing that attends every technology at its peak. There are any number of works in progress that could replace antibiotics. None of them have yet because they are not economically competitive. As that changes - because they either realize their potential to be much, much more effective, or because the cost of working antibiotics rises - then antibiotics will fade in favor of the next technology in line.

This is what happens to every technology. Yet people seem to forget, despite the evidence all around them, that they live in a world that changes rapidly due to the fact that many, many individuals are working on new and better ways to do everything. Periods of seeming stasis to the outside observer - such as the long use of antibiotics, which is really actually a continual hectic development of new types of the single class of item - only occur because economic conditions favor them. As soon as economic conditions favor another technology, it is developed and deployed from its prototypes pretty rapidly.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it is pointless to consider the possibility that infinite progress is not inevitable. You may have faith that science and technology will always come through, but I don't. This blind faith that things will always get better is one reason why people deny climate change. I'm not saying we give up and admit defeat, but blind optimism is foolish. Keep working on solutions, but be prepared for failure scenarios.

<comment><USER12> > I don't think it is pointless to consider the possibility that infinite > progress is not inevitable.

It's an interesting thought but we don't even know what there is that we don't know, In the late 19th century many scientists thought we'd solved science (Kelvin among others said (in hindsight) hilarious things "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." and "Radio has no future" and he was the chair of the royal academy of sciences.

> You may have faith that science and technology will always come through, but > I don't.

I have more faith in human ingenuity than I have in anything else, human ingenuity exists _and_ works.

> This blind faith that things will always get better is one reason why people > deny climate change.

I have no idea about that one, the climate change deniers I've met have broadly been deniers based on religion or because it benefits them in some way directly.

> I'm not saying we give up and admit defeat, but blind optimism is foolish.

So is blind pessimism, people forget that by every measurable standard the human race is in a golden age (even including places like central Africa).

The one thing that has lifted large parts of the world out of a short nasty, disease ridden life is science (and technology but they go together).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone think it might just be an idea to change the amount of meat we produce? When people start dying at the age of twenty and thirty of bacterial infections that are totally curable today, and gonorrhoea becomes incurable, will we think our current insouciance rational? Will it be seen as a price worth paying in order to have cheap meat? A tremendous proportion of the antibiotics we use are abused as growth promoters for animals reared for meat or their products. They are used pro-actively on healthy animals outside of the EU. Even within the EU, they are used routinely in a way that is driving us towards a post-antibiotics future.

It is pretty sad to reflect that we are not able to prioritize our own health above an immediate desire to consume more meat more cheaply.

</comment><comment><USER14> This problem has been known for a long time, though it's taken a while for it to fully emerge.

I first encountered it reading Isaac Asimov's essay collection _Twentieth Century Discovery_ , which highlights a number of the most significant inventions of the 20th century as of its publication date, in 1969 (and no, I'm not _that_ old, I read it probably ~15 years later).

[http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Discovery-Isaac- Asim...](http://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Century-Discovery-Isaac- Asimov/dp/B0027WR3JU/)

The point being that natural selection is a very powerful force, and while antibiotics have proven useful, they've got very clear limits as well. And humans are an awfully large and well-connected biological niche to exploit at present.

</comment><comment><USER15> One of the bright spots is that it seems hard for bacteria to evolve more than one resistance, and that resistances don't confer an evolutionary benefit in the absence of the specific antibiotics.

There are modern techniques to avoid resistance issues. For example, as most diseases can be treated by more than one drug, switching them regularly in a hospital or practice.

There are other combinations of drugs which haven't been used a lot or not even been discovered yet. It would be nice for example to trick an infection into letting go of the resistance and then attacking it with the AB.

<comment><USER16> > One of the bright spots is that it seems hard for bacteria to evolve more > than one resistance

Not sure where you got that impression. There are bacteria out there that are basically resistant to every antibiotic we have. The article even gave an example of a case where someone died because of this.

> There are modern techniques to avoid resistance issues.

Yes, true, and it is right that we should implement these techniques. However, until the whole world plays along there are going to be problems. If sub- clinical or too frequent doses of antibiotics are given somewhere in the world, then antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria will develop, and can be transmitted across borders.

<comment><USER15> Yes there are multiply resistant strains. But due to chance and evolution, they are spreading slowly.

This is still a dangerous issue... just not as bad as if the multiply resistant bugs sprang up all over the place like single-resistant ones do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "removing antibiotics from hog raising would force farmers to spend $4.50 more per pig, a cost that would be passed on to consumers."

one of those cases where savings of $4.50 a month cause extinction of human race.

<comment><USER18> Eating a pig month would be quite an achievement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really really hope that the threat of antibiotic resistance is like the one for terrorism. Almost negligible. But I really doubt it. Seems like a greater serious one ...

</comment><comment><USER20> Antibiotics are done, and they've been failing increasingly for at least two decades even though nobody cared to report it then. The speed of our transition to the "post-antibiotics era" is certainly our fault, but the phenomenon itself was always inevitable. Biology is an arms race, and it will always be one. In fact, biology overall is one of the worst substrates imaginable for hosting conscious entities, and that means this and many other problems may never be permanently solved.

However, it's not all hopeless. There are a lot of bacterial infections that will continue to be treatable with antibiotics for some time to come. So it's not like we'll lose all of our capabilities at the same rate. It just means that gradually the number of strains that are panresistant will increase.

To see what complete powerlessness over an infectious agent looks like you don't have to look further than viral infections today. The reality is we still can't do very much to treat them, so over time we'll just add significant bacterial adversaries to this list of diseases for which there is nothing else but symptomatic treatment available.

This will all change, because medicine has to change. In the future, it won't be enough to hit an unspecific infection with an unspecific antibiotic. It will be necessary to analyze individual infections and their interactions with individual patients in detail - and then very specific biochemical treatments will have to be tailored on a case-by-case basis.

The recent rise of monoclonal antibody drugs is a bridge to that future. We're still not knowledgeable enough, and we're still using these treatments with all the finesse of a 3-year old hammering huge lego toys together, but we'll get there eventually. We have to, it's the only hope against a lot of other diseases as well, including cancer.

In the mean time, there is a lot of research that needs to be done. We're also missing the actual technologies, both diagnostic and generative machines, but the most important obstacle to overcome will probably be the culture of medicine. This culture will change only when there is enough pressure for it to change. The FDA will have to change when its primary role becomes denying treatment to people who are going to die instead of keeping the population safe. Medical professionals will change when it becomes a big factor that they lack the scientific background to effectively devise and apply advanced treatments. But first, all of these disasters will probably have to actually happen, and we're already seeing the first signs of that trend.

So, there is definitely a path forward - it's not an inevitable descent into the dark ages. It's just that due to inertia and time spent waiting for basic scientific advances, there will be a period with less protection overall. Drugs may become available to plug some of these gaps, like insect-derived antibiotics, which will eventually fail too but will buy some additional time.

</comment><comment><USER21> Reading this scares the crap out of me. Unless there are incentives to drug companies (and those who research other antibiotic tech) we could go extinct before anyone creates a solution. Yet drug companies perversely invest billions on drugs that cost $1000 a month and help solve relatively minor ailments.

</comment><comment><USER22> I don't understand this bit: ". . . resistant bugs have grown more numerous and by sharing DNA with each other, have become even tougher to treat . . . "

How are different microorganisms sharing DNA with each other? Am I misunderstanding completely?

<comment><USER23> You are reading correctly. Lots here:

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

In short, one thing that happens is that they exchange small fragments of DNA (called plasmids). Those fragments can contain the information necessary for the resistance.

<comment><USER22> Mind? Blown. I had no idea that happened — it sounds almost Lamarckian.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vim-guru I guess there's already a movie in the making of how this all turns out.

<comment><USER24> The recent PBS Frontline documentary on the topic was excellent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I will be interested to see how sexual mores develop this century. I think the "sexual revolution" will turn out to have been a flash in the pan. Resistant clap and syphilis are a growing occurrence. I expect the old order of arresting people for promiscuity to return and the new idea of privacy in the bedroom to die.</comment>


The Camera you have with you - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2012/07/01/the-camera-you-have-with-you

<comment><USER2> Argh. Now I need the 40mm pancake lens. I normally shoot the most with my 50mm 1.4 on my T2i but it's pretty big to pack in my bag, especially with the lens hood to absorb bumps and grabby kids.</comment>


Rackspace is down - <AUTHOR>

The entire Rackspace Dallas datacenter is offline, as is https://my.rackspace.com<p>The internal comms system in Rackspace is also down - I just spoke to somebody in UK support who says they're aware of an issue but currently dont' have any further information. He could not even look up my account details because of the outage. Sounds serious :( <comment><USER2> My cloud server in Dallas is working fine, so not everything is down.</comment>


Ask Google to choose your next domain - <AUTHOR> http://rvmenu.com/ask-google#.Uulj3Z5gnPE.hackernews <comment><USER3> I spent a lot of money on Google in the RV industry (to the tune of $500,000/month for a certain fortune 500 company) & there are a lot of issues with this post:

First up, his stats across the board aren't even close. His impressions vary by a factor of 4 for the different ads. From that alone, I bet he forgot to turn of the "optimize my ads" setting from Google and switch on "rotate evenly".

The "optimize my ads" feature sounds like a good thing to leave checked, but like most things is designed to make Google more money. That setting basically allows Google to start optimizing whichever ad gets out in front first - <USER2> doesn't let you figure out which one is actually superior. So the data is tainted from the start.

Also,

> The .co domains have a performance penalty versus their .com brethren but > the differences should be proportional.

Where do you get this from? In PPC I haven't seen any studies on this at all. I could understand .com leakage on .co domains for people typing it in directly out of habit, but Google doesn't penalize ads based on their TLD.

Not to take away from the strategy (it's a great idea & this is exactly how Tim Ferriss picked the name for his Four Hour Work Week back in 2007[1]), but there's a lot of flaws with this specific example.

[1] [http://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google- adw.html](http://boingboing.net/2010/10/25/howto-use-google-adw.html)

<comment><USER4> Completely offtopic, but I can't resist:

What's it like being in a position to choose how $500k per month is spent? Wow. That's equivalent to about forty engineers' salaries per year.

EDIT: I visited your website and am not sure what to think. [http://joelrunyon.com/](http://joelrunyon.com/) Is it true that those sorts of marketing tactics will convince people to entrust you with how to spend $500k/mo? (Personal branding is rather important. I was just a little surprised that those particular methods would be effective.)

<comment><USER5> Not the parent, but I managed and eventually helped lead the paid search group at one of the top search agencies. We had clients with 7 figure budgets all the way up to 9 figure budgets (or essentially unlimited as long as we were within certain parameters).

It's a bit scary and heart attack inducing if something goes majorly wrong (like going dark for a day because someone forgot to check the flight dates in the account after you took it over from the previous agency). But like the OP said, it just becomes numbers.

The cool thing is you not only get much better support and escalation paths at Google, but you can test things at a very large scale and get answers VERY quickly. And little things that might not make a huge difference on smaller accounts, suddenly equate to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars difference in total revenue. But again, all things are relative, so %'s might not change much.

<comment><USER3> Exactly - the fact that Google actually pays attention to you is a nice plus. If I had an issue with a campaign, I had a direct phone number for someone who could fix things.

That said, at that point, support had already started to go downhill & we found the "reps" usually knew very little / less than us about campaigns. Interestingly enough, we found that BING reps were much more helpful as they were eagerly trying to make up market share.

[EDIT]: You also get access to betas & other google "tests" they're running with adwords that most normal advertisers don't. Most of them are designed to make Google more money, but every once in a while they'd come up with some cool stuff that'd be really helpful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _The ads started on January 2 and took 6 days to hit 98% statistical confidence._

No! You have to pick the time first, wait that amount of time, and later analyze how much confidence you achieved. With random variations, you could have a run of any size of positive or negative results, and you could just wait until you get the result you want. Sorry but tons of people make this mistake with A/B tests.

<comment><USER7> Weird... I always thought that if you are running a split test in parallel (all at the same time), then you can figure out the number of samples needed to compare the branches with statistical confidence. I mean it makes sense to me. As the number of samples increases for each split test the distribution shifts from a binomial distribution to a gaussian distribution by the central limit theorem, and that happens around 1000 samples with a reasonable conversion rate. Then you're just comparing Gaussians, centered around the mean conversion value, with a width proportional to the number of samples. Taking the difference between two gaussians will give you the "chance to be different". Standard practice is to wait until one branch has a 95% chance to be better and then declare it the winner. This will test for false positives, which is usually what you are concerned about. False negatives don't matter that much when it comes to things like picking a name.

<comment><USER6> Here's a good explanation: [http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab- test.html](http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html)

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the link to the blog post. It raised an important point worthy of inspection. I ran some numbers and "peeking" after the first 1000 trials does change the outcome. The chance that the outcome will reverse from declaring branch A the winner with 95% confidence to declaring branch B the winner with 95% confidence is rather small, less than 10%. However, if you lower your requirements to 80% confidence then the chance of the winner swapping increases to over 50%! For reference, I used the Wilson approximation for binomial distributions. I'm sure the Wald approximation fares worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Protip: Google "buy domain name", look for ads from godaddy or other registrars. Can usually get domains for a buck instead of ten bucks.

<comment><USER9> I just turned off adblock on google to try your tip. Agh my eyes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 'RV Menu' is a RV recipe/food keyword, not a rental-related keyword.

<comment><USER11> My office mate said the same thing. :)

The numbers were crystal clear though: bounce rate was the same for all the domains indicating that users were getting what they expected after clicking through.

<comment><USER3> Depending on your keywords you targeted in the initial campaign, you may run into some issues scaling out your campaigns into phrase + BMM match keywords as "rv recipes" & rv menu creation seem to be something people are looking for quite a bit.

Also, conversion rate is a better overall metric than bounce rate (harder to test that from the start though).

[1] [http://imgur.com/85u1grB](http://imgur.com/85u1grB)

<comment><USER11> I agree that conversion rate is the best metric.

I'm going to restart the tests using three domains and let them run over an extended period so that I can see whether I am, in fact, getting users who're searching for meals vs rentals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is there no mention of Average Position of each ad? That impacts CTR wildly! I can't take this post seriously without seeing more data.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why wouldn't you get the domain with the most impressions and then work to improve the click-thru rate? (other than Joel's great point about Google controlling impressions)

<comment><USER3> Because you have no reason to assume that the one with the most impressions is the top performing ads.

Because of the way impression share is distributed (and because we don't know what ad rotation setting OP had on), the top impression ad might only have the most impressions because Google decided to show it more rather than it actually being superior on any actual performance metric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, were these ads actually appearing evening across the same sites or search results, and in the same locations? If rvmenu.com appeared more frequently in one location than the others, that would skew the entire results.

I'm not convinced with the data you posted. The sample is small, and there's a lot of unknowns in the testing parameters. I wouldn't advise anyone to take this approach when selecting a domain.

</comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps ... "rv menu" appears to perform well because those looking for food menus for when they are off in their RV are interested in just _looking_ at RVs? Did they mainly click the expensive ones? [That's what I'd do, like "ooh, fancy; I'd like one of those"]

Interest, indeed clicks, don't mean revenue will follow unless they were actual sales actions.

Now, it could also be that you can sell RV hire to people researching for an RV trip using "RV menu" ...</comment>


The Svbtle Promise - <AUTHOR> http://dcurt.is/svbtle-promise <comment><USER2> This feels a bit like a marketing gimmick, especially when you read the fine print. If forever means "till Svbtle becomes financially insolvent", that is no different from any other company that shuts down because they don't have money. The only thing that this promise promises is that if Svbtle gets acquired then as part of the purchase agreement the buyer will be required to keep Svbtle "alive". But what guarantees the buyer from selling again and not including that in that agreement and the new purchaser from shutting it down? And don't make a promise where your fine print says these policies are subject to change. That's not a promise that's a promise with your fingers crossed behind your back.

<comment><USER3> It's not a marketing gimmick--it's a promise. It's how I want my own blog to be treated.

We announced this publicly so that you now know: if you write on Svbtle, your content is vastly more likely to survive for a long time than if you used your own server (probably) or if you used another publishing startup.

<comment><USER2> Ok I understand your motivation, I really do. However announcing something publicly with fine print that says you can't be held liable for that announcement basically negates that announcement. Either you promise and stick to it (no fine print) or you announce something that catches someone's eye because they wish there was something out there that worked this way and you get them as a paying member but has a way for you to go back on your promise (thus making it a marketing gimmick).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nobody starts a company going "and if we fail, fuck the users." The problem is that maintaining service takes resources that cease to be available when you fail. This "Promise" does very little to allay those concerns.

What's your plan to maintain those links and user data if you get acquired/shut down?

<comment><USER3> As I mentioned elsewhere, there are certain things that can be done to keep the service running for at least your lifetime--I'm working on a trust that will be created in the event of my death (or the company's death) that can keep the servers running for a very long time to come, even with no paying customers. We will make that public when it's finished.

<comment><USER5> I feel sorry for you whenever you post. I was an asshole about your forks post, (and I'm sorry for that, (EDIT: I should have apologised before now)), and people are kind of being assholes now.

I mean, here you're saying "I'm thinking of the users in case I FREAKING DIE" and even that isn't good enough for some people.

<comment><USER6> Are you kidding us? We all need to feel a bit better by criticizing everyone as long as they're actually doing something. Next time they'll think twice before making us feel bad for not really being able to be proactive and tackle even the smaller projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In addition to keeping the permanent URLs live, why not pledge to release the source code? Seems to me that this would be the easiest way for users to take control of both the data _and_ the platform, in the event the company becomes financially insolvent.

<comment><USER3> Good idea--we'll add that.

<comment><USER8> I'd also add to that - build in a simple way to export your data (maybe it already exists). That kind of trust and confidence in your product being so good that you give people the keys to leave at any time would remove any hesitation at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am a paying Svbtle user. I like the interface, and I like that platform.

I sent Svbtle some comments about their platform last year. I wanted links on the blogposts to use target="_blank", and a way to tweak which image gets shown when you share a post on social media. There was also a few issues with images you couldn't get back to thumbnail-mode after having click-zoomed in on it. I didn't hear back, but a "No we don't want to do that" or "We read the mail" would have been appreciated.

But I guess my priorities aren't aligned with Svbtle, which is sad. I care less about how long my posts live in their infrastructure (and beyond), and more about how my data is consumed and shared today.

<comment><USER10> If you want to customize tiny details like that, you should have made a blog yourself. It's really not that hard. For me the point of paying for a service like Svbtle is not having to care about these details and only on the content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks similar to Posthaven's pledge[1] to "last forever". There was a similar discussion on establishing a non-profit trust or foundation[2] to carry out this objective. What happened?

[1]: [https://posthaven.com/our_pledge](https://posthaven.com/our_pledge)

[2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230137](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230137)

<comment><USER12> I've literally written Posthaven into my estate plan to make sure there is funding for it, if that helps. There's pretty considerable paperwork involved in a nonprofit and it's been trickier than I had hoped to get it there.

<comment><USER11> Awesome!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> You know, there are a lot of blogging and micro-blogging sites popping up in the last 10 years (Wordpress, Blogger, Medium, Svbtle, Octopress, etc), but I can't help but feel that nobody cares what most people have to say. Twitter has devolved into this weird sort of micro-marketing medium, Medium and Svbtle have devolved into Wordpress, Facebook has devolved into Yahoo's old front page. Any given person's software blog is probably only used as knowledge- portfolios on resumes, and are almost always abandoned for _anything else_ more worthy of that person's time. The whole social aspect of blogs and micro- blogs seems completely useless compared to more transient services like snapchat or whatever. I just keep wondering when all these tons of mass- communication services are going to go the way of our old geocities pages.

<comment><USER14> I tend to agree, but with the following qualification: I don't really read any particular person's blog regularly, but I do end up reading a range of blog entries when they are linked from some sort of aggregator (HN, Twitter etc).

Additionally, as a software developer I often find myself on the blog entry of another developer who has blogged a solution to just the exact problem I am facing, which is extraordinarily helpful.

For those reasons I feel that these blogging sites should and will continue to exist in some shape or form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> There's a lot of hate in these comments, and I think a bit unnecessary.

The fineprint says of financial insolvency: "In the event that one of these extreme cases comes to fruition, the founder of Svbtle currently intends to take additional actions in order to continue honoring the above promises". Surely the meat behind Svbtle is the user accounts, the kudos, the database. That's expensive. If Svbtle were to shut down couldn't the owners just create a snapshot as a bunch of static files, wack it on a $10p/m VPS behind nginx and a free cloudflare plan? They could even release it for anyone to mirror.

The idea is noble and seems great. Stop jumping to conclusions, this guarantee is still better than any other shaky blogging startup without one.

</comment><comment><USER16> While I like both Svbtle and Medium, I'd still prefer to have the blog fully controlled by myself. I'm thinking about git(github pages)+jekyll because I don't want to pay for a server.

Having said that, Svbtle's kudos are a nice thing. Is there any simple, trusted upvote-as-a-service thing out there so that I can embed it in my blog and don't have to maintain a server+DB myself?

Everyone and their dog offers free advanced analytics, but I want a simple upvote button API :) Edit: nope, FB is not what I want.

<comment><USER17> Since you are using "git" & "Jekyll" I would say you are a technical person, so you should just do it.

A couple of days scripting, designing and configuring I managed to have a decent blog [1], without paying a dollar.

I'm using a combination of metalsmith, Amazon s3 & gulp.

1: [http://www.drinchev.com/blog](http://www.drinchev.com/blog)

<comment><USER18> Is your sidebar suppose to have a vertical and horizontal scroll bar on it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Man, this is such a breath of fresh air after seeing the startup scene in general treating user data as trash when the service folds. That's not your data; your users just let you hold it for them.

<comment><USER19> Note that not all user data (e.g settings, drafts, etc) is being saved; only the published content.

<comment><USER3> Actually, we do save all user data right now and don't plan to change that-- but it's hard to promise to keep that stuff forever.

<comment><USER19> That's not immediately clear from the verbiage (both places about the promise only mention "content you publish"), so that might be something worth adding.

<comment><USER20> He actually addressed that. He said its hard to promise to keep that stuff forever, implying that limiting the promise only to published content was an intentional decision in order to make it feasible to make the promise at all. Notice also that he did mention that they save that stuff right now, despite not promising. Better to promise to save what you can than to not save anything at all. I thought his response was quite adequate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What I read into this is that a lot of people have moved from Svbtle to medium.com so hence they are looking at giving reasons for people to stay.

Guess a complement to how successful medium.com is becoming.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is it legally binding in some way? Is there a funded trust set aside with a charter and instructions on how to handle caretaking services once svbtle itself has shut down? No? Well then these are just words, which will be meaningless when the shit hits the fan.

You can have all the best intentions in the world, when the walls close in and you need to think about your mortgage, paying the light bill, and keeping food in your stomach I can guarantee you that keeping someone else's blog running will be so far down the list of priorities it'll get trampled underfoot.

This isn't rocket science, lots of human beings have figured out how to set up organizations and funds to continue doing work after they are long dead. Alfred Nobel died over a hundred years ago, for example. But it requires setting aside money _now_ to make that guarantee, not just some nice sounding words on the internet.

</comment><comment><USER23> You mention design customization in this post, and the Svbtle homepage claims "the best reading experience".

Have you considered offering a toggleable dark mode to readers? The glaring white background of every Svbtle post, combined with the large amounts of blank space, agitates my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER24> this skips the entire point - it says within their power. Servers cost money. How is it going to be "within their power" if they have no money?

<comment><USER3> I'm working on a trust that will be created in the event of my death (or the company's death) that can keep the servers running for a very long time to come, even with no paying customers. Will make that public when it's finished.

<comment><USER25> Perhaps it would have been better not to make the promise until you had the backing for it. I think that's what's causing most of the negative reactions here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Having just seen Mandrill's "free forever!" tier turn into a $240/year minimum spend, color me a bit skeptical.

<comment><USER27> Pardon my language, but fuck free. I don't want to rely on anything that's free. It's a perversion of market principles. I don't take any startup offering seriously that starts with free. Charge money and make the value proposition clear. Yes that means you can't compete with Amazon or the big boys on price. Differentiate with better service or find a better idea.

Free is for entertainment.

<comment><USER26> Fuck free, but fuck forever too. _Neither_ one is realistic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Why not just open source the code and make the data easy to import/export? My thought is that Svbtle is two things: 1) a website 2) a company/brand. This promise seems to be mostly about the website. As long as I can export the data, keep the domain name and use the same code/design/theme options then it doesn't matter to me if my Svtble branded blog is hosted on their website or $2.99/mo shared hosting. It'll look the same to my readers and function the same to me as a writer. I don't need a promise, just let me export/import everything or at least pay someone to do that for me.

What I think is more interesting is the question of what will happen to the brand and culture of Svbtle, and Posthaven as well. Would it even be the same company if it was run by the executor of the founder's will? And if so, then why not just hire an executor now? I've always been intrigued by the idea of Autonomous Corporations, and it seems like something kind of similar would be an interesting way to solve this problem. It really comes down to, can a brand and style be maintained into perpetuity without daily human effort and upkeep, or will it lose its haecceity over time? I guess we'll have to wait a long time to find out.

</comment><comment><USER29> I know it's usually frowned up to reply with media references here, but this is such a preposterous claim that I couldn't help but think of this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yaTCXcvTGY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yaTCXcvTGY)

</comment><comment><USER30> Any plans on using IPFS and Archive.org to accomplish this?

<comment><USER3> No, we want to do it ourselves.

Only in the case of something horribly catastrophic would we resort to using an external service like Archive.org--but unlike other startups, we would work very closely with them to archive all data. And perhaps even give them the domain name.

<comment><USER31> Does a feature such as making account content a git clonable repo in the background ? Then all changes and revisions are easily maintained where ever a user wants.

<comment><USER30> Thats essentially what IPFS is (content addressable by its hash).

[http://ipfs.io/](http://ipfs.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That is a bold promise that they will have to break at some point. Everything is ephemeral in this world, especially applications on internet.

There is one thing they could have done: commit an amount on money in an official bank account, or with a contract, etc... that will serve as the back up plan to keep the content online if only they were to shut down.

Keeping static text online is actually pretty cheap.

But then if you want your content down one day you would have to have some sort of dynamic back end, maybe even a support if a bug comes around, etc... Another problem.

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone wondering how this is going to end up should read the story of TextDrive's "lifetime hosting": [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextDrive)

</comment><comment><USER33> When I hear "forever," my ears perk up because... that's a long time.

Will my content be on Svbtle for, say, 200 years? I'm very curious about how you can honestly promise that.

</comment><comment><USER34> There's a lot of negativity and people poking holes in the promise in this thread. I'm glad that Svbtle is taking steps and thinking about the (really) long term. So kudos for that.</comment>


Ask HN: How many ways one can earn money online? - <AUTHOR> -> Freelancing - Finding freelance project from different website and completing them.<p>-> Video Blogging - Make video and uploading on youtube. (Earn per view) (ex: MKBHD who does video review of gadgets)<p>-> Blogging - Create blog and write article. Monetise content via ads and earn money. (ex: Amit agarwal who writes on Labnol.org)<p>-> Affiliate marketing - Promoting and selling other product and earning affiliate commission.<p>-> Virtual Assistant - Handling others personal work remotely.<p>-> Provide Service - Build your own website and provide some service. (ex: @Amit Agarwal from ctrlq.org who builds custom google scripts as service)<p>-> Build SAS Product - Build some product and charge monthly. (ex: buffer social posting app)<p>-> Sell your own Product - Make some product and sell online. (ex: sell themes via themeforest, etc) and Many More.<p>Few I know are listed above share any other if you know in comments I will add them to above list.<p>#EarnMoneyOnline <comment><USER2> Bug Bounty Program (HackerOne, BugCrowd)

Online Tutoring and Mentoring (CodeMentor)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are we restricted to _legal_ methods (and in which jurisdiction)?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can say mostly legal globally.

<comment><USER3> Microservice websites - Mechanical Turk and Fiverr

Crowdfunding - GoFundMe and Kickstarter

Live Streaming - Twitch, adult (if you're into that)

Online markets - stock/day trading, auctions

Cryptocurrency mining

Bing points - (shameless referral link -> [https://www.bing.com/explore/rewards?PUBL=REFERAFRIEND&CREA=...](https://www.bing.com/explore/rewards?PUBL=REFERAFRIEND&CREA=RAW&rrid=_f7ce9ea2-488b-743c-c868-9586e5cbb3f8) ) yes, I earn enough points every few weeks to redeem for Amazon gift cards.

AdSense - putting ads on your website. I earn ~400/yr on my different websites, which more than pays for the hosting and domain registration fees.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the quality C Programming Questions found in web? - <AUTHOR> I would like to know some good resources around the web, which contains question/puzzles related to c programming language. Preferably those links which contains comprehensive collections of such questions, or you found the most useful.
Links to articles, blogs, competitive programming sites, pdfs, videos or .txt files etc.
Basically those resources you found useful while preparing for your interviews, conducting interviews or tests related to C. <comment><USER2> you can refer [http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of- problems/](http://www.techiedelight.com/list-of-problems/)

some of them are in C++ but you can easily follow if you know C

<comment><USER2> PDF of all problems - [http://www.techiedelight.com/wp-content/uploads/Techie- Delig...](http://www.techiedelight.com/wp-content/uploads/Techie-Delight-List- of-Problems.pdf)</comment></comment>