Slowly Poisoned by Energy Drinks - <AUTHOR> http://yiddish.ninja/the-hidden-cost-of-energy-drinks-they-poisoned-me/ <comment><USER2> Ah... Fuck. I feel like this is the signal I've been waiting for all these years :(

Since 2006 (in uni), when I was first introduced to energy drinks, I've been more or less addicted to them ever since. I even go so far as to regulate my consumption of them in cycles to get the most I can out of it: [https://www.rdegges.com/2011/my-use-and-abuse-of- caffeine/](https://www.rdegges.com/2011/my-use-and-abuse-of-caffeine/)

I never really liked the taste of coffee much (without loads of cream and sugar/splenda), so energy drinks were a happy medium because they taste really good, they come in lots of 0 sugar / calorie varieties (which is great when you're trying to stay in shape), and give you a LOT of caffeine per serving which makes me feel super high: happy, productive, focused.

Since 2006, I've probably had roughly 2 energy drinks per day (and over the last few years: maybe 4).

So... This really sucks.

I always "felt" like they were bad for me, but never really did any research as I knew it would most likely make me stop drinking them.

It's surprisingly easy to convince yourself not to look into something so you can continue justifying your actions. But now, I suppose, the fun is up.

It's really time I start being more careful with myself :(

<comment><USER3> Be careful while you wean yourself off your addiction. Drink plenty of water and take a few naps when the headaches come. You'll be fine after a day or two.

If you want to be awake during the day, then get at least seven hours of sleep a night, preferably eight. If you really need caffeine some days, have one or two cups of coffee or black tea, no sugar added. But don't have caffeine every day or you'll regain that addiction. If your work schedule doesn't allow this, then accept that you are shortening your life and decreasing your quality of life for the sake of your work.

It's your life, make your decisions accordingly.

<comment><USER4> The evidence against coffee is inconclusive.

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply coffee was harmful. I was warning against a recurring chemical addiction to caffeine, which, speaking from experience, is very real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did anyone think for a second that those things _aren 't_ bad for you?

Washing down multiple cans of it per day and coupled with an unhealthy lifestyle is a guarantee to have trouble down the line.

I'm astonished that the author seemed to expect a different outcome.

<comment><USER6> I was _really_ bad for this at one time. Back in 2014 I was doing crazy shit like routinely working 14 hours a day or more, and in the evenings I would prop myself up by having a triple shot latte, followed by a Red Bull, and maybe a box or two of chocolate covered espresso beans. And I was doing this 5 or 6 days a week, for weeks on end. Not getting enough sleep, not watching my diet, not exercising, etc.

You can probably guess where this story leads... yep, onto the back of an ambulance, having a heart attack. :-(

Now anytime someone has a heart attack, there are probably a lot of factors involved. I can't sit here and say that energy drinks in particular _caused_ mine. But in retrospect, the overall lifestyle I was living was _not_ healthy and I paid for it.

So, long story short... don't be like me.

<comment><USER7> I'm going to forward your comment to a friend of mine who is very much on the same track. Thanks for posting this.

<comment><USER6> The good news is, I lived, and the doctors tell me I should be fine as long as I commit to a healthy lifestyle going forward. So I got back into bicycle riding big time again, both road biking and mountain biking, and a typical meal for me now is something like I had for lunch today: a big plate of salad which was nothing but lettuce, salt, pepper, olive oil and a small amount of honey-ginger dressing.

I eat a lot of lettuce lately.. it's nice because it has few calories and takes up space in your stomach so it curbs my urge to snack all the time, which was a problem in the past.

Of course that's not all I eat, before somebody posts worrying that I'm going too far in the other direction. I still eat a lot of the same stuff I always did, but in moderation, and a lot more veggies now than in the past. And I mostly quit eating candy, chips, and other real low-value junk food.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The cached version is here: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVkhl9b...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVkhl9bp0QgJ:yiddish.ninja/the- hidden-cost-of-energy-drinks-they-poisoned-me/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment><comment><USER9> The issue appears to be the 2000% DV of B6. This isn't the first I've heard of this (e.g. with supplements). Most energy drinks don't have this in them. Be careful with vitamins and minerals. More isn't always better.

<comment><USER10> I used to occasionally drink Spike Shooter which contains 25,000% of B12. Supposedly you can't OD on B12 without a predisposed genetic condition. Still, I have no regrets moving away from energy drinks, I found my desire for them was simply a symptom of a bigger problem like not getting enough sleep.

<comment><USER11> While it's generally true that water-soluble vitamins are hard to overdose on, it's still true that you at the very least have an abnormally high (and possibly toxic) level of the compound in your bloodstream until your kidneys can excrete it. In the case of B6, it apparently takes years of overdose before the sensorimotor neuropathy becomes apparent: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B6#Toxicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B6#Toxicity)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> tl;dr: "5 hour energy", as well as Costco's generic version thereof, contain a megadose of vitamin B6 which is not safe for daily consumption.

The lesson you should take from this is that, when taking a combination drug like an energy drink, you have to go through ingredient by ingredient checking the dosages and reading the corresponding wikipedia pages. I do consume energy drinks, but I used that procedure to reject the brand that's reported causing a problem here.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's almost like making a habit of consuming something with addictive properties is a bad idea.

Yeah, they're good for helping finish a late-night essay or helping sustain your programming train of thought... but they're not designed to be used often. Too much of anything will more often than not kill you.

</comment><comment><USER14> Over 12 years old: drink only water, tea, coffee, beer, and single malt whiskey. Period.

<comment><USER11> Honestly, Ethanol is straight up toxic and we probably shouldn't drink it. We just grandfathered it in because our ancestors were getting drunk off fermenting fruit way before the genus Homo even existed.

<comment><USER15> I dunno. I don't think there would have been civilization had there not been beer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was involved in the nootropics community for years, doing Gwen.net style double blinded assessments on various compounds. The biggest thing I've learned (aside from the fact that almost all nootropics are ineffective or only marginally effective, the marginally effective being the most popular: nicotine, caffeine, modafinil and amphetamines) is, if you're using performance enhancing drugs, you have to be honest with yourself about this and be really nerdy about it. Proprietary blends and energy drinks are just bad news. I would recommend taking caffeine pills instead of energy drinks. You can easily optimize your dose and you know what your taking. You can also get a years supply of caffeine for like 20 bucks in pill form. Being honest with yourself about the fact that you don't so much like the taste of coffee as the highly-addictive drug in it can save you a decent amount of money.

There's no evidence that any of the other compounds in energy drinks beside caffeine do anything for alertness, and caffeine is a very safe drug.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually did a MindCamp session on making your own energy drinks 6+ years ago. The live demo/taster was a double-shot mocha with 150 mg of powdered caffeine (in solution), a bottle of shelf-stable chocolate milk (because I was at a conf), and a tablespoon of Torani Kahlua-flavored syrup.

<comment><USER17> Dude! I remember that! You had more than the LD50 of caffeine for the entire conference in the canister.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I used to be an energy drink addict. I drank two Rockstar a day for several years. I stopped cold turkey and my skin and health in general improved. I also swore off drinking anything in an aluminum can because of the BPA lining. Larger energy drinks have the largest detectable amounts of BPA in them.[1]

These days I drink bulletproof coffee that I make at home and keep in a stainless steel mug. It takes a bit of getting used to, but drinking butter + mct oil+ coffee without sweeteeners is a pretty good way to start the day, IMHO. I feel much healthier because of it and love that it's compatible with the ketogenic diet, which I have lost about 20 lbs doing.

[1][http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2009/03/health-canada-finds- bp...](http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2009/03/health-canada-finds-bpa-most- soft-drinks-energy-drinks-top-list)

<comment><USER19> Same here, but Monster was my poison of choice. I lost 50 lbs with keto and haven't looked back. Everything just got better.

I think bulletproof coffee is a bit overrated though. I tried it and couldn't get into it, and that's with very good quality coffee. A bit of heavy cream is nice sometimes though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr

Continued consumption of energy drinks like 5 Hour Energy / Costco Energy Shot / RockStar Pure Zero gave him the 2000% of the US recommended daily B6 of 2mg. Main effect: numbness in half of the body, a known side effect of B6 overdosing.

<comment><USER21> Just the Costco Energy Shot was 2000% of the US RDA. His total consumption was 2600% if I'm reading his post right.

Interestingly, 46mg per day is still well below the value that's generally considered the safe upper limit: 100mg [1]. Presumably he also got some B6 from food, but probably not more than 1-2 mg.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16320662](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16320662)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I live by my grandpa motto, everything is poison, vary them and your diet to avoid be poisoned to fast by one single source.

</comment><comment><USER23> Thank goodness that coffee is something I actually like. I stick to no more than 4 cups a day, 5 cups if I'm feeling lucky. And by a cup, I mean an 8 oz cup (a 20oz to me is 2.5 cups of coffee).

When I was in college I was admitted to the ER for arrythmia. The condition was exacerbated by excess caffeine. I went from a pot of coffee a day to 3 cups a day for years, this included exercise and meditation. I refuse to touch energy drinks; while it gives me a shot of energy, prolonged use has consequences like my visit to the ER due to excessive coffee intake. I'd rather focus on getting the correct amount of sleep and taking regular breaks to recoup my energy rather than relying on coffee to feel awake.

</comment><comment><USER24> I will never understand people who take drugs for working. Drugs are supposed to be for fun!

</comment><comment><USER25> For B6, 46mg by 10am isn't very much. Most B6 supplements come in 100mg capsules.

 _The FNB noted that although several reports show sensory neuropathy occurring at doses lower than 500 mg /day, studies in patients treated with vitamin B6 (average dose of 200 mg/day) for up to 5 years found no evidence of this effect. Based on limitations in the data on potential harms from long- term use, the FNB halved the dose used in these studies to establish a UL of 100 mg/day for adults._

[https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminB6-HealthProfession...](https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminB6-HealthProfessional/)

</comment><comment><USER26> If anybody needed an article or a news report to realize that an energy drink is far from "healthy" then I pity them.

Just take a quick glance at the ingredient list: Sugar. Caffeine. High- fructose corn syrup.

This is the case with most off the shelf beverages and processed foods. Remember: The majority of manufacturers do not care about your well-being or health. Toxic ingredients are so abundant, that eating "healthy" in the 21st century is a massive under-taking. Green tea might be a better and somewhat healthier substitute to any energy drink addicts that are reading this.

<comment><USER27> _Just take a quick glance at the ingredient list: Sugar. Caffeine. High- fructose corn syrup._

If they are not in the US and they took a sugarfree version, they'd only see caffeine, and that wasn't what caused the problem here, so that's not great advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> TLDR OP overdosed on B6.

Sometimes I drink the Runa energy drinks and I can verify they have no supplemental B6. I can also verify they taste really bizarre and many people cannot stomach them. Ironically the only thing making the taste of "regular energy drinks" drinkable is weird artificial flavorings and tons of syrupy carbs. Its not as weird tasting as some liquors, someone who can stomach a shot of scotch will probably be fine with a Runa. They taste like strong green tea mixed with a paint store, if that makes any sense.

I was mystified by the claims of poisoning because the dose where people start getting sick according to the medical data I found is about 5000% of the RDA. Only two documented cases in the whole world have resulted in problems at or below 5000% of the RDA. OP is something of a medical miracle to have been the third person on the planet to get symptoms below 5000%. I suppose somebody has to be the unlucky one. More than 50000% of RDA, about 10 times higher, is generally medically recognized as being unsafe for people in general. The ED/LD ratio for B6 is pretty safe compared to aspirin or tylenol or alcohol for that matter.

From wikipedia "For vitamin B6 labeling purposes 100% of the Daily Value is 2.0 mg."

The guy blames his rockstar drink, his 5 hour energy shot, and his supplements equally, but I checked online and the rockstar he's blaming is only 100% of the RDA (which is none the less a bit high) but the "Kirkland energy shot" is marked as 40 mg of B6 which is about 2000% of his RDA! That is a WTF product right there.

[http://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-content/kirkland- en...](http://www.caffeineinformer.com/caffeine-content/kirkland-energy-shot)

Doing some math his unnamed OTC vitamin supplement is providing 4 mg or 200% of the RDA. Which is also unreasonably high, although not dangerously so.

I would say the title is very misleading as many (most?) energy drinks don't have near toxic levels of B6. One very specific generic copy of a brand does have a level that sickens people at a rate of 0.5 parts per billion but its still only about a tenth of what most medical professionals think would sicken most people.

</comment><comment><USER29> What is funny is that energy drinks can be zero calories - no energy!

</comment><comment><USER30> I still consume energy drinks, right now I am drinking a rip it sugar free zero carb/calorie energy drink with 120% vitamin C, 100% vitamin B6 and 170% vitamin B12. Sure I can probably skip this and slug through the day, but I find it's a good balance for me, other than this all I drink is water and I only have a single serving a day.

<comment><USER31> Check your can. You sure you are only having one serving?

<comment><USER30> Yes. 8 fl oz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yup. Guessed it was B vitamins before reading through the entire article. As always, too much of a good thing. Most energy drinks contain a ton of B12 and B6—and I've suspected for a long time is actually more responsible for the feeling of energy from these drinks than caffeine or taurine.

<comment><USER33> I doubt the B12 you see in most energy drinks are the more expensive/absorbable form (Methylcobalamin) and not the cheap and less absorbable (adenosylcobalamin), I could be wrong though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Well this strikes close to home. During grad school, I'd drink a red bull (or two) a day. Now, I've quit caffeine completely (save a tiny cup of coffee in the morning occasionally).

I hope the author has a quick and easy recovery.

</comment><comment><USER35> My solution to getting enough caffeine: a 50 cent 100 gramm bag of roasted robusta beans.

They also taste pretty nice, if you eat them singly. Much better than any coffee that can be brewed from such..

</comment><comment><USER36> Really?? It takes a trip to the hospital with paralysis before you notice that shit is poison? The heart palpitations and industrial aftertaste didn't give you any hints?

</comment><comment><USER37> Actually, you poisoned yourself. You payed _little to no_ attention to what you were consuming.

</comment><comment><USER38> Wait, are we supposed to be _surprised_ by this?

</comment><comment><USER39> Is there a mirror or tl;dr? Looks like it got taken down by traffic.

</comment><comment><USER40> Database error.... really

<comment><USER41> Really, that's what it said. Op seems to have resolved the problem. Here's the cached version if not. [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVkhl9b...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVkhl9bp0QgJ:yiddish.ninja/the- hidden-cost-of-energy-drinks-they-poisoned-me/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I find that those energy shots really help if you need to stay up for a party, etc. But taking them every day, that's nuts.

<comment><USER43> _But taking them every day, that 's nuts._

And yet, that's precisely what their manufacturers want you to do.

<comment><USER42> I'm sure they'd like us to do all sorts of crazy things. Doesn't mean we should.</comment></comment></comment>


HackerNews upvote button not working in Firefox 25 - <AUTHOR>

As stated in the title, the upvote button is not clickable in Firefox 25 <comment><USER2> Just tested, working. Wait, was this a trick to make us upvote your post? (Just kidding, there have been some css changes lately, do a hard refresh)

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you sure this isn't related to the new CSS they added yesterday (or Sunday)? To check, just hard refresh your browser. That worked on my FF24.

EDIT: I just upgraded to FF25 and it works fine. I think you just need to hard refresh your browser.</comment>


CONIKS – Bringing Key Transparency to End Users (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/1004.pdf <comment><USER2> Joseph Bonneau, one of the paper's authors, talked about this in the Stanford Computer (course EE380) during Autumn quarter.

The talk's abstract: [http://ee380.stanford.edu/Abstracts/161130.html](http://ee380.stanford.edu/Abstracts/161130.html)

A video: [http://ee380.stanford.edu/Abstracts/161130-video.html](http://ee380.stanford.edu/Abstracts/161130-video.html)

One thing I didn't understand, is that CONIKS is not something where clients can insert keys in an unrestricted manner: There is a gatekeeper (run by the service provider), who does some sort of testing/control before inserting a new key.

<comment><USER3> the video doesn't work for me. HN hug?

EDIT: I think it opens up as a pop up to here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca0BHUNoTF0&feature=youtu.be](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca0BHUNoTF0&feature=youtu.be)

EDIT2: CONIKS starts at around 40 minutes [https://youtu.be/Ca0BHUNoTF0?t=2379](https://youtu.be/Ca0BHUNoTF0?t=2379)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Google's Key Transparency project [1] is based on this.

[1] [https://security.googleblog.com/2017/01/security-through- tra...](https://security.googleblog.com/2017/01/security-through- transparency.html?m=1)

<comment><USER3> I came here to say that. Anyone knows how relevant is CONIKS now that Key Transparency is out?

Kind of like, how relevant is NTS now that Roughtime is out?</comment></comment>


A Tutorial on Support Vector Machines for Pattern Recognition (1998) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/67119/svmtutorial.pdf

<comment><USER2> Yep. Was assigned reading in my ML class this semester. Loved it.</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts on outsourcing mobile app development? - <AUTHOR>

Currently have a few ideas for mobile apps that I'd love to develop.
I have the choice between spending a long time learning the platforms meaning longer to market or I have the strong chance of funding to outsource the work and still pick it up as I'm working with the contractors.
I was just wondering if anyone has experience with outsourcing mobile app dev, what the avg. costs are and if it's worth it? <comment><USER2> try to make a small test with a little simple app. If the contractor delivers and it is great, go for the real deal.</comment>


Prioritiz'd - <AUTHOR> http://www.prioritizd.com/ <comment><USER2> Is there a way to log in/sign up besides OpenID? I don't have one, but wanted to use your site. I spent about half an hour trying to figure out which accounts of mine are OpenID enabled, and to get the url for my ID. I keep getting errors like "Open ID server can't be found", etc. so I imagine the urls that I'm putting in the sign up box are not the right ones. Then when I finally get signed up and logged in, later I try to log in with the same url and I get an error. Very frustrating.

Anyways, to summarize: Open ID seems to suck, and its very confusing (though to be completely honest I'm a little drunk which might have made this more difficult for me). I'd imagine most users would appreciate a simple, traditional login (I would have). Anyways, I really wanted to use your site, but after 30 min of failure I've given up. Good luck though.

Edit: For spelling/etc.

<comment><USER3> Any OpenID-enabled site should, until the transition to everyone having such an account is complete, have a "create an account" link that just redirects to <http://myopenid.com> or somesuch. Link, one-page form, check e-mail for verification link, get a URL (username) handed to you, put it in. Exactly the same workflow as a traditional registration.

<comment><USER4> Thanks to all for your comments. We built prioritiz'd for the Rails Rumble, and as you all mentioned, there is more we need to do with it, including links to OpenID providers, and providing an option for creating a traditional username/password. We are currently working on a single sign-on application for our entire suite of applications, that will cover that last part.

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions. Please leave any other feedback on our support site so we can continue to improve the app. Thanks.

[http://getsatisfaction.com/atlanticdominionsolutions/product...](http://getsatisfaction.com/atlanticdominionsolutions/products/atlanticdominionsolutions_prioritiz_d)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Either support good old classic login/registration or give us a link to OpenID providers. I have NO idea what my OpenID url is, but I know I have one with Yahoo. Now I have to go look it up, so a link to it all would be nice. (Most sites offer you to click on the various OpenID vendors and it auto-fills in the "base" url for you)

Otherwise a nice site and I'm actually interested in trying your app, looks like a task management tool that might be done right

</comment><comment><USER6> Are todo list sites the new zip programs? The thing that everyone thinks they can rewrite better than the multitude of existing solutions?

</comment><comment><USER7> Typo in the "Our Philosophy" section. It should be 'make YOU work faster.'

</comment><comment><USER8> What do you add over these? [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=todo+list](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=todo+list)

Personally, I only write notes to myself when I stop working so I can get back into the problem faster when I resume. I think writing and managing todo lists is a form of procrastination.

<comment><USER9> actually it is interesting you say that... writing up a todo list is a good way of procrastinating, but I find that if i have a todo list (assume it was "magically" generated), it helps me get through work a lot faster... atleast so that it helps me not loose the context when switching between tasks...

to this end ive found the MyLyn plugins for eclipse very useful.. creating the todo list is not too hard or tricky.. (though i found the creator page a bit clunky), and it even saves the state of the editor (ie open files, current line in the said open files etc) and loads the state as is each time you switch between items on the todo list (or tasks as mylyn calls it)..

I am sure there are much better tools out there like those widgets on google desktop and all but that is just another app you have to install..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I looked through the site, great design!

</comment><comment><USER11> Good site, but what is different from Tada List by 37signals?

</comment><comment><USER12> i dont have openid?</comment>


Ask HN: Tools/infrastructure for running tests on multiple hosts simultaneously? - <AUTHOR> My workflow has me running tests, in an interactive and iterative way on up to 250 hosts at a time, with machines divided into one of a set of up to 6 roles (some may have multiple roles).  I currently use GNU Parallel or Python Fabric depending on what I need to do but this requires writing a bunch of custom code for every set of tests I run.  Is there anything else out there that could reduce the overhead of my approach? <comment><USER2> I have some background in automation, python, and shell scripting - but I cant tell your exact pain points (other than you want to reduce some work). Maybe you can use some python (or some other language) scripting for generating your scripts , but having detailed knowledge of your scenario would be helpful to answer this.</comment>


Occupy Central's polite protesters - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/10/occupy_central_s_polite_protesters_the_hong_kong_demonstrators_are_disciplined.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email <comment><AUTHOR> The total contrast with nearly every other protest of recent memory is so stark and telling.

These people have been planning this for probably years, they were just waiting for Beijing to openly say that the open elections wouldn't be open (which knowing China was inevitable) and then boom a handbook is "suddenly" published and widely distributed and there is a clear sense of self and "don't f*$& with my life" sentiment by all the protesters who are the most trained protesters in the world. If any of the protests happened like this one does movements would've won.</comment>


Voynich Manuscript Deciphered - <AUTHOR> https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02639904.2019.1599566 <comment><USER2> Hmm. Surprisingly little translated content. What about the stellar chorus surrounding the zodiacal figures?

No discussion of common arguments against MS408 being a nonstandard alphabet for a natlang. What about the words repeated verbatim three times or, with minor variations, more?

How did this make it past peer review?

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, a translation that isn't immediately insane!

On the other hand, the paper has some eccentricities that make me sceptical:

" _Figure 16 shows the letter 'o' which is a familiar Latin symbol. It simply imitates the shape of the mouth when the phonetic sound is made._ "

But then there's the author:

" _Gerard Cheshire_

" _Dr. Gerard Cheshire has recently completed his doctorate, expounding an adaptive theory for human belief systems, and is now a Research Associate with University of Bristol. The solution to the codex of MS408 was developed over a 2-week period in May 2017 after he came across the manuscript for the first time whilst conducting research for his PhD dissertation. Having deciphered the writing system, he subsequently realized the significance of the manuscript to Romance linguists and Mediaeval historians, and so decided to publish the information._ "

One thing about the Voynich: immediate translations at first sight are very common and haven't been right yet.

</comment><comment><USER4> dupe. other discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917166](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917166)

(and i recommend [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC- sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC- sW5dOlDxxu0EgdNn2pMaQ) )

</comment><comment><USER5> No it's not. Just another failed attempt.

</comment><comment><USER6> for the 8th time this year!</comment>


Python 3.4 supports only 100 regex groups - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.4/Lib/sre_compile.py#L577 <comment><USER2> I guess you meant Python _3.4_ because 3.5 has no limitation: [https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.5/Lib/sre_compile.p...](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.5/Lib/sre_compile.py)

<comment><USER3> yeah it took me a bit to figure it out but "lt" in the original post text is supposed to mean "less than" or "older than"..

<comment><USER4> I thought it said "Python it"

<comment><USER5> I was betting on a python lite implementation for embedded boards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some might say if you need 100+ regex groups you have other problems...

<comment><USER7> If you're using regular expressions for lexing anything moderately complex, e.g a wiki markup, you could easily find yourself needing 100+ groups, especially if you're generating the expressions from some kind of input grammar

<comment><USER8> If you are lexing there is a much better way than trying to munge together a giant regex manually:

[https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.4/Lib/re.py#L346](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.4/Lib/re.py#L346)

<comment><USER9> No, using a completely undocumented class that heavily relies on further undocumented parts of the standard library that might be implementation details of the regex implementation is much better.

<comment><USER8> It's been there for like 10 years, I think you'll be ok if you use it... If it goes away, you can just bring it back right?

<comment><USER9> It'll stay but it's still undocumented and the code heavily relies on things that are undocumented as well. This makes understanding it unnecessarily difficult and forces you to comment your own code quite extensively.

On the other hand you can easily generate a regular expression by doing a little bit of trivial string manipulation everyone is going to understand.

<comment><USER8> So take the 'undocumented' code, copy it, paste it into a file, put the license comment at the top, and move on with your life. String munging regexes together is going to be slower and error prone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> [https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/33455fe85760e0173ee...](https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/33455fe85760e0173eeecef52c76de4240e10663#diff-5812393a306237111d8f76f73783e386)

<comment><USER11> > raise error("groups number is too large")

Oh, I hate that kind of error message. Why couldn't it be something useful like

        raise error("groups number is too large "
                    "(you have used %d out of an "
                    "allowed %d)" % (self.groups, MAXGROUPS))

<comment><USER12> It has a todo. Possibly just s fast hack till you can come back and fix it... Then fast hack became release :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see someone type a regex with 100 capturing groups.

<comment><USER13> I'd like to see someone _debug_ a regex with 100 capturing groups.

<comment><USER3> Such expressions are likely to be generated. In fact, the Python issue refers to a lexer for javascript. Imagine your design is to have one capturing group for each different language keyword, and suddenly it doesn't seem so silly any longer. [https://bugs.python.org/issue22437](https://bugs.python.org/issue22437)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cpython, right? Not python the language,if I understand this correctly.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, like GHC supporting only up to 62-tuple. Very limiting.</comment>


Show HN: CodeceptJS – end to end testing framework for Node with synchronous API - <AUTHOR> http://codecept.io <comment><USER2> Awesome. Loving Codeception for PHP. Very nice to see it coming to node.

</comment><comment><USER3> Coll

</comment><comment><USER3> cool</comment>


The Burden of the Humanities - <AUTHOR> http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=452772 <comment><USER2> I hate the style of this writer. So many adjectives and for meaningless things. Why does a piece need to be kicky? Why do the goals of a manufacturing firm need to be animated?

A tiresome piece and not fit to be read on a Friday.</comment>


After firesale, now HP Touchpads get 6 free apps from HP - <AUTHOR> http://blog.palm.com/palm/2011/08/6-pack.html

<comment><USER2> It's strange. $99 firesale, new TouchPads in the hands of a bunch of nerds, show off some "good" (not not "great") apps by giving them away.

I kinda hope it's all marketing hype. But now I want decent, functioning apps for this thing.

I created a legit WebOS app for myself in about 30 minutes. The development of these apps are unbelievably quick since it's just HTML/CSS/JS.

Your entire dev environment is a text editor, a WebKit browser and the inspection pane - the same one built into Chrome/Safari/Whathaveyou.

It'd be a shame to see WebOS completely die off.

<comment><USER3> Did you create your app before or after you heard about HP killing the platform off?

If it was after, what made you not develop any apps when the platform was viable?

This would be a great postmortem question for the HP team - if they had such a compelling development platform, why didn't anyone want to make the effort before they killed the entire thing?

<comment><USER2> After.

The only reason I didn't create one before was because I didn't think the platform had enough users to make the ROI on learning how to program for WebOS worth it.

<comment><USER3> So now that you know how easy it is to learn to program for webos (html / css/ js) - would the # of users it takes to make the ROI be reduced by enough such that it's ok to sell to an extremely small market?

ie. Since it's so easy to develop for, you will spend very little time/effort/money to learn to develop vs the iphone (which involves apis, objective c, etc) or vs the android (which involves java, etc) - and so it's ok that the market is small, because you can sell less copies to recoup the investment outlay (which was smaller to begin with because of the ease of development).

Does that change the value proposition of the touchpad?

If it does, then this points to a marketing failure on HP's part - they had a perfectly fine product - just needed to get past the initial "knowledge gap" when no one knows anything about the product.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> To me, this smacks of Palm just continuing executing in spite of Corporate's (ie, Apotheker's) decisive move.

Good for Palm.

</comment><comment><USER5> You have to put a credit card on file to use the promocodes. So, they've just made it much easier for users to impulsively buy other apps in the future, and they've shown people how to use the app store. Not a bad marketing plan!

Personally I planned on making zero webOS app purchases in anticipation of installing Android. But now that my CC is on file, I'll probably have Angry Birds on here by the end of the month. :p

<comment><USER6> Angry Birds is free ;P

<comment><USER5> Oh! Nice! I may be able to stick to my plan after all then! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A part of me thinks that this is whole thing is a marketing gimmick to create a bunch of touchpad fans.

<comment><USER8> Of course it is. The question is: Will it work?

<comment><USER7> They got me. The touchpad is pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Eligibility Requirements: US-based HP employees, HP reseller partners, HP customers and HP webOS developer partners are eligible to use these App Promo codes. Promo participants require a TouchPad with a current functioning user profile; with credit card purchasing enabled. The promo codes below will expire on August 31, 2011 at 11:59 PM. Promo codes are available for as long as inventories last."

The codes are invalid, it seems that, according to the last sentence, the inventory has run out. Why HP, why?

<comment><USER9> Because they just wanted you to enter your credit card information!

<comment><USER6> I already had mine entered >_>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> received message that promo codes were no longer valid because of exceeded usage.

sent from HP Touchpad

<comment><USER9> same - I was really excited about Sparkle and Big Boss. Apparently they've been dead since last night. They succeeded in getting me to put in my credit card info too!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> i am curious now how much share this firesale gives the touchpad got in q3 2011.

<comment><USER12> Quick guess: Best Buy had 270,000 unsold units. Assuming they have 10% of all the market, there would be now 2.7 million Touchpads out there.

All Pre 3 inventory in Europe will get sold the same way.

<comment><USER13> "HP's initial order from its Taiwanese contract manufacturer, Compal, was for between 500,000 and one million units." [http://allthingsd.com/20110822/how- much-did-hp-lose-on-the-t...](http://allthingsd.com/20110822/how-much-did-hp- lose-on-the-touchpad-heres-a-good-guess/)

<comment><USER12> So, best buy had more than 50% of the lot? That's surprising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, 6 apps!</comment>


Uncle Bob Martin's "Clojure - Up Close and Personal" - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/15046335

<comment><USER2> This video IMO is the best introduction to Clojure</comment>


OpenSUSE Considers Governance Options - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/788935/ <comment><USER2> This is just tangential, but related. I work as an engineer in the reseller (VAR) space.

SUSE (the spun out from MicroFocus commercial company) has been hiring lots of enterprise sales reps in US metros, and it seems like every enterprise account is under "review" (aka Audit) at this time.

For those who don't know, if you get Enterprise Linux from either SUSE or RedHat, it comes via a support subscription. You are "in compliance" only if ALL PRODUCTION NODES HAVE A SUBSCRIPTION. That doesn't mean your unicorn/tier 0/1 app servers...its anything that's not TEST/DEV/QA. If you are not in compliance, you can't get support.

I suspect this is a bit of a money grab under EQT...boost the top line...prior to spinning out to public markets. Curious what others have observed.

<comment><USER3> I imagine that will be a short lived boost, followed by aggressive customer plans to move off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with SUSE is that they always come last in phoronix linux distro benchmarks. They have no clear unique feature that would make anyone switch distro. This is from a consumer point of view, maybe enterprise finds value where I don't.

</comment><comment><USER5> How about moving it under the Linux Foundation instead?

<comment><USER6> > The potential for some form of organization to be run under the auspices of > the Linux Foundation is also among the options.

That's one of the potential outcomes discussed in the article...</comment></comment>


Show HN: Crowd-sourced mapping of the UK floods - <AUTHOR> http://ukflood.info

<comment><AUTHOR> It's worth noting, if you're visiting from the USA, you'll see a blank map. Simply click "Show All" and it'll show you a more representative view.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to build a new project using mircoservices? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on scoping out a new project that will use microservices. There have been various posts recently that have touched on this topic but I'd like to have real discussion on the pros and cons of the various technologies that exist to deal with building, orchestrating, developing, and deploying decoupled services in a mircoservice architecture.
We have been looking into Docker as that seems to have a lot of hype but there have been concerns there. We've also talked about using salt with a combination of vm's or native lxc or rkt (rocket).
There seems to be lots of material talking about what mircoservices are and how they should be architected on a high-level but not as much about the actual implementation.
The project includes a realtime content component as well as several persistent less dynamic services.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Starting with "microservices" is a mistake IMO. Start with a monolith because you'll get to market much faster in almost every case. When(if) you run into scale problems then consider breaking off pieces into separate services.

Why would you want to introduce network overhead and sockets into your system if you don't have to?

</comment><comment><USER3> Why will the new project use microservices? What features of the problem domain point toward that pattern? How will microservices' tendency toward stable/static API's improve maintainability? If the services are essentially commodities, can they just be outsourced?

</comment><comment><USER4> What concerns are you talking about in regards to Docker?</comment>


Prediction: Newspapers will go bankrupt in 2007, unless they corner web classifieds by 1998 - <AUTHOR> http://www.useit.com/alertbox/classifieds.html

<comment><USER2> He said "many newspapers." And he is not far off. Newspaper ad revenues peaked in 2000.

[http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2007/narrative_newspapers...](http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.org/2007/narrative_newspapers_economics.asp?cat=4&media=2)

The surprising thing to me is that they have any classified ad revenue left. This suggests there are still opportunities for startups to take more away from them.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point was how accurate the prediction has been, with craiglist becoming so popular since the article was written in 1997. Had Google seen classifieds as a 'search problem', they would have likely allowed users to submit things sooner. After all, aren't most social network sites classifieds (rentals, events, tickets, movies, belongings, personals)?

I agree that NewYorkTimes.com could have easily captured the market by 1998 if they offered users a free service to post all those things, and later the ability to contact each other in private, and later have user logins with a picture profile. But newspapers wanted to continue to sell paper ads and magazine ads, and classifieds and subscriptions. They didn't fathom that simply by doing this, tons of users would visit their site, upon which they could sell all sorts of new types of ads.

That's what some startups are doing now--trying to get as many repeat users as possible, not knowing exactly what their app will be like a year from now, but knowing that they will have an ecosystem of users, whether or not competitors think it's cool or not. If Disco clubs are stupid, but somebody opens one that fits 100,000 people who keep coming back, it doesn't matter if other businesses think the model is stupid or not. You have your own ecosystem. And, the users aren't at somebody else's site, at a certain tv channel, or another place of business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In 2000, Google changed the premise behind this prediction, that advertising generally doesn't work on the Web.

The bigger problem with his prediction is that newspaper companies rarely go bankrupt. They get acquired.

He was right on the money that newspapers had a small window to keep hold of classified advertising. They missed that window; craigslist and ebay took over.

Also, he was right that newspaper companies are generally hurting in 2007.

[http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/business...](http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/departments/business/index.jsp)</comment>


Ask HN: Where do you find a UX guy? - <AUTHOR>

So we are a small group of individuals(well three:) ) who are trying to hack up something and yes we think it is cool(well it's obvious isn't it!). The problem is all of us are back-end folks and we know nothing about UX and web-design. So question is how do we find somebody to help us? I'm weary about 99designs/crowdspring route as I don't think I can explain what I have in mind properly to somebody over few lines of text(or over phone). We need a UX wizard. Somebody who can sit with us, be a part of the team, understand, visualize and bring our idea to life by the way of a clean UI. How do I find some one like that? I know this might sound weird. All our lives, we have been in the back-end world and hence our connections to the UI domain is pretty non-existent. Our initial thoughts were that we could hack up something, but UI is an art and as much we'd like to be none of us are artists(well in a UX artsy way:P). Any hints? <comment><USER2> I'd recommend parsing places like dribbble.com & taking your chances by contacting a few people there that do work you're in tune with. There's also the other option of contacting entities/companies that have solid UI/UX and asking them whom their designers are.

Most would happily put you in touch with anyone they're working with. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm a UX guy. Can I help? Feel free to message me.

<comment><AUTHOR> please drop me your contact details at email@example.com</comment></comment>


So long rust, why I built ZZ - <AUTHOR> http://aep.github.io/from-rust-to-zz/ <comment><USER2> The author comes across as a know it all bigot with some personal grudge against Rust developers/community.

There are articles with good criticism of Rust. This is not one of them.

> My company devguard was - by numbers of deployments - the largest user of > rust

Numbers?

> is that we do stuff nobody can do.

> Sometimes rules have reasons, and sometimes you need to shut up and read the > scientific papers of people who do in fact know better.

</comment><comment><USER3> There seem to be a ballooning number of entrants to the space of C-level languages recently (which is a fantastic thing after two decades with little going on).

Zig and Odin are the two others that have appeared recently, at least of the ones I can immediately recollect (in addition to Rust, of course). I'll discount Jai as it's currently vaporware. Zig seems to be doing some really impressive stuff especially around target/libc management.

<comment><USER4> I would love to see a Zig vs. ZZ vs. Rust vs. Odin comparison sometime.

<comment><USER3> Well Rust and ZZ are both trying to prove safety, Rust does it via the borrow checker and ZZ does it by formal verification. I would be surprised if the ZZ approach would scale beyond trivial examples (you're going to end up with programs that it can't give a yes/no answer to, that's always the issue with formal), but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.

Zig and Odin are both trying to be a "better C", they don't try to prove safety (that's up to you) but they try to make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot (and may end up being simpler than Rust as a result).

I don't know much about Odin, but Zig has some very nice features to help embedded development:

      - All standard library containers allow you to provide your own allocator (there is no magical central allocator, ie. the dreaded 'malloc').
      - All errors must be handled, including running out of memory.
      - It's easy to just not use the standard library at all.
      - Cross-compiling is a breeze (eg. you can just build a Windows .exe on Linux as easily as building a Linux executable).
      - You can measure frame sizes so you know how large your stack needs to be (and thus guarantee your stack will never overflow).

Certainly I'd be interested in anyone's 'Zig vs Odin' if they've used both.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the comparison! Another one in the fray I forgot to mention is Nim. With all these new languages marketing themselves in roughly the same way albeit with slightly different vocabulary and with similar syntax, it's difficult to iron out what exactly the differences are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The ZZ language looks interesting, from a very quick skim. The blog post would have been a lot better if it swapped out the passive aggressive whining.

<comment><USER6> More substance on the benefits of zz in their particular case over Rust or Zig would have been appreciated.

<comment><USER7> > the benefits of zz in their particular case over Rust or Zig

don't ever use Zig

<comment><USER8> Ok, but why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a side note, I've had a few arguments with the author in the past, so I am not a neutral party here.

There's some stuff in this post that I feel like I should address. I'm not gonna go line by line, though I could, because this will be long enough. Just gonna cover the highlights:

> My company devguard was - by numbers of deployments - the largest user of > rust before we stopped using rust entirely.

I don't actually believe this is true. The link at the end has a slide that says "We shipped a quarter million devices with rust." This is certainly a big deployment, but if we just consider Firefox, Mozilla reports ~800,000 YAU, and about 250,000 MAU. I don't think this is a problem; I want people to have a good time with Rust, regardless of how big they are. But when summed up with all the other stuff, well... I only even mention this because it frames this article as "Rust's largest user is leaving."

> If you target anything else, you'll be fighting upstream

There is no fight here. These architectures require help to support. This is how open source generally works. If the author wanted to pitch in, we would have loved the help.

We'll get back to this later.

> If you have no responsibility, you can prioritize fun over results

We take our responsibilities very seriously. If Rust were about fun, we wouldn't put so much work into stability, or performance, or anything else. This section reads mostly like an insult, so I'm not really going to get into the rest.

> The recent ecosystem break with async has put the nail in the coffin for us, > because again they put the burden of actually making their poor design work > on the community, again hiding the true runtime cost (TLS) away from the > user while ignoring any prior work on the topic.

This has been a persistent issue with the author. He wrote his own coroutine + async io system. In the release announcement, (and on twitter) he made a number of factually incorrect statements about Rust and async/await. The largest of which that you could not use it on embedded, when that was a hard constraint on the design in the first place. TLS is not a true runtime cost, as I mentioned in a thread yesterday, async/await no longer uses TLS. This was always the plan; the initial implementation was shipped using TLS so that folks who didn't mind could get started using it. The author links to a blog post by Ferrous systems (another company using and selling a lot of Rust in the embedded space, incidentally) about how this was accomplished. It seems like this is saying that we forced other people to fix some sort of mistake. This is not the case; like any open source project, there was some work to be done, and someone did it. (I am not sure if this work was sponsored by Ferrous or not, I think it was.) I think this sort of ties back into the earlier bit about architectures; Rust is not a company, nor a foundation. We have no money. We cannot support everything internally. This is how open source works.

But even then... jschievink is on the teams. So this is the Rust team building the feature.

\</comment><comment>---

Anyway, I wish him well with ZZ. It sounds like it's a better arrangement for all parties involved.

<comment><USER10> > Mozilla reports ~800,000 YAU, and about 250,000 MAU

Missing digits?

<comment><USER9> Whoops, yep. Should be million, not thousand. [https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user- activity](https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity)

Sorry about that :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The blog post has been removed.

Archive.org link: [https://web.archive.org/web/20200331134855/http://aep.github...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200331134855/http://aep.github.io/from- rust-to-zz/)

<comment><USER12> Also [https://archive.md/QZPm4](https://archive.md/QZPm4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Contentless flame-bait, not worth reading.

</comment><comment><USER14> > Essentially ZZ is a tool built with a narrow commercial purpose, integrating > into existing ecosystems for economic efficiency. If that sounds boring, > it's because its in fact boring. Real work creating real value is usually > boring.

yes. well done for doing the right thing for your business.

</comment><comment><USER15> Link to ZZ itself is way down the article. Here it is for convenience:

[https://github.com/aep/zz](https://github.com/aep/zz)

<comment><USER16> ZZ looks genuinely interesting! I like that it compiles to C; this makes life much easier for embedded, say you're working with the ESP32 with it's obscure CPU there's no chance you'd use anything but the supplied C compiler. Could be an interesting option for systems/embedded programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems author took down their blog post.

> had to remove this again, because my random rants keep trending on > hackernews, and really don't have the time to write quality blog posts.

Would love it if he at-least left a non-emotional summary.

</comment><comment><USER18> i don't understand why he chose to build a new language? if rust sucks for embedded, why not spend you time helping improve it? if asm/C/C++ s so good, why not just continue to use his favorite language?

</comment><comment><USER7> The author might like ATS, it is an academic project with many of the same choices.</comment>


On Quora: What concepts are the new (digital) wonders of the world? - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-new-seven-digital-wonders-of-the-world

<comment><USER3> The link.

This is so fundamental that it's easy to forget but the hyperlink is truly the most fundamental component of the net.

The beauty of the link is how it tells us that all knowledge is interconnected and that we all are part of the same whole.

<comment><USER4> And lo, a religion was born.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Internet - the ability to publish anything, worldwide, instantly.

Google - the ability to search the whole of human knowledge (ok, a close approximation thereof) before you even finish typing the query.

Cellular data - the ability to access the above from nearly anywhere anytime (as I find this thread and publish this response from an iPad while a passenger in a car moving 80MPH, and it's no big deal).

</comment><comment><USER6>
      - The internet
      - E-Mail
      - <USER2>

<comment><USER7> Wikipedia, absolutely (that's also what I answered over there).

I think Wikipedia is often forgotten in discussions about the truly revolutionary companies of the last decade. Probably because they're non profit. But Wikipedia is one of the pinnacle examples of how the combination of technology and entrepreneurship can change the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I totally hate seeing Quora questions on ycombinator..

<comment><AUTHOR> I completely agree. The reason why i put it there instead of HN only is because i hope to reach a broader audience by that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The answers completely missed anything Minecraft.</comment>


Robin.io - <AUTHOR> https://robin.io/ <comment><USER2> If you are the launching or if it's a showcase then appending Show HN: to the title will be helpful.

Between this solution looks interesting. Is it only supported with GKE ?</comment>


Your content is distracting users from ads - <AUTHOR> http://fi.am/entry/your-content-is-distracting-your-users-from-the-ad/ cached version (thanks to deusexmachina): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache:http://fi.am/entry/your-content-is-distracting-your-users-from-the-ad/&cad=h <comment><USER2> Demand Media (and other ad-focused sites, but most remarkably their operation) understand this deep in their bones, which is why their content is to writing what chicken McNuggets are to chicken.

<comment><USER3> The replies to this comment seem to have missed one important point: You or I might not want to eat a Chicken McNugget, but millions do.

You and I might consider Demand Media-style content to be shit, but there's a market for it. We might want big, meaty content written with clever words and insightful conclusions, but the mass of the market wants little snackable boneless pieces that they don't have to work too hard to digest.

Demand Media understand this. They understand that the Internet is now predominantly used by people who read at an eighth-grade level, who don't know how to use browser tabs or ctrl-f, who will go straight for the back button if presented with big blocks of text. Demand Media seek to produce huge amounts of content that is _just_ good enough to be the most relevant content for any given long-tail search term. They do that better than anyone.

Google aren't fools, they aren't being gamed, Demand Media are just creating content that is the most relevant content for very specific search terms. It's not of great quality, but it's the best that's available. If you know how to form a search query then you can find better content most of the time, but most people have neither the ability nor the inclination. Cheap, convenient, omnipresent. It's the stuff empires are made of.

Like 99.99% of products in the world, it's not bad, it's just not for you. If you are strongly opposed to what other people consume, you have three proper grown-up options. Either take it up with them, satisfy that demand better, or ignore it. Railing against the people who fulfil that demand is going to get you nowhere.

<comment><USER4> On the one hand:

 _Demand Media seek to produce huge amounts of content that is just good enough to be the most relevant content for any given long-tail search term._

On the other hand:

 _If you know how to form a search query then you can find better content most of the time..._

Which is it, is Demand Media the most relevant content, or is there better content? If there's better content, then Google is failing users.

I'm pretty sure that there is better content corresponding to every single piece of information that a Demand writer has ever posted online.

<comment><USER5> Google is failing its users. Google is a machine, its does not have human intelligence. Google falls for simple SEO techniques, so that the first results for a query represent those site owners who best play the SEO game.

This is not a dig at Google, indeed its much better than it used to be, its just that its a machine with defined rules and will therefore fall foul of tricks (even if the tricks keep changing).

This is why Goole need to be scared of Facebook, as Facebook looks likely to be the first business to successfully implement a human recommendation level into search.

<comment><USER6> Didn't Yahoo start out with human recommendations?

<comment><USER7> > successfully

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nah, I uninstall crashy apps. And I, for one, never plan on buying anything they produce: how can you not notice _10 days_ of your application failing to work, and only notice because you checked ad revenue? Sorta implies where their focus is, neh?

edit: Maybe this is part of the reason. Ratings from the iStore for the application in question:

      *****: 0
      **** : 0
      ***  : 1
      **   : 5
      *    : 9

Several other applications have similarly-weighted ratings, reports of crashing, etc, though a couple are higher. Color me disinterested.

<comment><USER9> Hi Groxx,

I agree with your comment overall; however, I wanted to touch upon the following quote.

> how can you ... only notice [your app is failing] because you checked ad > revenue? Sorta implies where their focus is, neh?

In what business is revenue _not_ the primary focus? While I understand the importance of product quality and customer service, as well as the correlation between these factors and revenue, a company that's paying more attention to their app store reviews than their revenue is doing it wrong.

With that being said, the rest of your comment is perfectly valid but I do not feel that a business should be bashed because they watch their revenue closely.

<comment><USER8> My remark wasn't meant to imply that revenue is inherently bad. Simply that undue _focus_ on revenue often creates sub-par products. There are plenty of small software shops out there which _need_ revenue to exist, but create things _for people_ instead of _for profit_.

My gripe is that apparently checking ad revenue every other week is of greater importance than even checking that the software _works_. Improving people's lives by providing something useful is _clearly_ further down the importance list.

And some don't even need revenue - a la Linux / Rails / _many_ open source projects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is why there are many websites that split their 20 paragraph articles over 10 pages, the lower the actual content on a page the bigger the chance of a click on an ad, and the bigger the total ad inventory.

Conversely, if your content is too compelling _nobody_ will ever click on an ad.

<comment><USER9> I always assumed this was for usability purposes. In particular, the whole "most users won't scroll down to see 'below the fold'" rule.

<comment><USER11> Users do scroll. <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html>

From the article: Scrolling beats paging because it's easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page

<comment><USER9> I haven't seen this before, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A former employer (and this is one of the many reasons I don't work there any more) was well aware of this and took advantage of it all the time. Just to give one example, their 404 error was a page of ads...

</comment><comment><USER13> This concept works great for custom 500 and 404 pages. Put an Adsense for Search box and make money when you're not able to serve something else.

</comment><comment><USER14> It could also be that the user thought, since there was no content but the ad, that the app had switched to one of those "click the ad before seeing the story" type things and clicked the only thing available to get the working data.

Also, what kind of programmer doesn't have checks in data acquisition code to make sure it is valid and immediately alert someone when it is not?!?

</comment><comment><USER15> I think this phenomenon is mainly about UX and IxD. If there's only one route presented to the user .. many of the users are likely to choose the single route presented to them.

Perhaps this is a trite point, but I'd argue that it's a good example of how presentation of advertising should be included as a key part of any UX and IxD strategy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Those people will leave in anger. Why would they ever use his service again?

</comment><comment><USER17> Isn't that just the same as all the spammy grabbed domains? Get a good domain name, put ads on it. I've heard some people make good money with such sites.

</comment><comment><USER18> This reminds of a problem that many publishers have with Facebook's ad platform. Users are too engaged with the content to click on the ads.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's the click through ratio, but what about the click counts?

</comment><comment><USER20> Server error.

<comment><USER21> Server errors also distract from ads.

<comment><USER22> Unless your server-error page has ads on it.

Hmm...</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you test your service in Opera? - <AUTHOR>

Sometimes, things are really broken in Opera. Usually they're fine, but some sites seem to disregard it completely.
In terms of market share, Opera is almost infinitesimal, so it's difficult to feel entitled. But it still feels like something you would or should check out - eventually that is; it's not a main priority for a soon-to-launch company. <comment><USER2> We make sure our sites work and display perfectly in IE 7/8, Firefox 3+, Chrome, Safari. For IE6, Firefox 2 and Opera, we just make sure that all the information is accessible and that the main functions work and don't worry too much about how it looks.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_(web_browser)>

"The browser has seen more success in Europe, including about 47% market share in 2009 in Georgia, 43% in Ukraine, 36% in Russia, and 8-11% in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic.[106]"

</comment><comment><USER4> No.

</comment><comment><USER5> nope</comment>


E-cigarette makers wage war to lure China's 300M smokers - <AUTHOR> https://kr-asia.com/e-cigarette-makers-wage-war-to-lure-chinas-300-million-smokers <comment><AUTHOR> Two years ago, no one in China knew about Relx Technology. Today, it is a firm valued at USD 2.4 billion...</comment>


Why VCs sometimes push companies to burn too fast - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/why-vcs-sometimes-push-companies-to-burn-too-fast/ <comment><USER2> > The Worst Case:

> The company runs out of money.

Actually, the worst case is keeping a company going even though the fundamentals of the business are imprecise, hard-to-define or just plain wrong.

You end up wasting resources of all kinds for everyone involved. Investors, employees, and founders, to varying degrees, will squander time, energy, enthusiasm, money in pursuit of a mirage.

Money isn't everything, surprisingly, even in a round of funding. If you accept a huge sum of cash with a giant valuation attached, you must have reasonable certainty that you will at some point achieve that valuation without more raising. Mental gymnastics aside, I don't think most startups can guarantee outcomes, but they must be, at least, certain of their motives.

Are you raising because you're at the scaling stage? Or are you raising to buy yourself a little bit more time to hopefully, maybe, figure things out?

The latter reason is a poor reason to raise, and most of the time, only staves off the inevitable at the cost of unnecessary suffering and hardship.

<comment><USER3> "Investors, employees, and founders, to varying degrees, will squander time, energy, enthusiasm, money in pursuit of a mirage"

Most 'employees' will never see any significant upside in any of the startups they've worked at or will work with - so their compensation is their livelihood and not exactly a waste of time.

There is a lot of inefficiency at big companies as well, so it's arguable that most tech workers are 'wasting at least some of their time' in the big disorderly march to progress.

They are also gaining skills.

But I agree it's a pretty bad thing to do to raise money to 'figure things out'. I'd loathe to think of how many of those would actually get funded.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm a VC. I think a lot of this boils down to the asymmetric relationship between the upside and the downside.

If a company doesn't do well, the investor loses all/most of their investment. It doesn't matter how ambitiously or unambitiously the startup acted, the VC's losses are roughly fixed.

On the other hand, the difference between a company having a very good (e.g. 8x) vs. fantastic (e.g. 50x) outcome is _huge_. If increasing burn helps a company grow faster, acquire more market share, and improves the chances that the company will 50x instead of 8x, then that's worth a higher chance of failure to the VC because they have some diversification. It may or may not be worth it to the founders, who only work on one startup at a time.

So basically, if the two possible scenarios are the following..

1) 60% chance to 0x, 30% chance to 3x, 10% chance to 8x

2) 80% chance to 0x, 15% chance to 3x, 5% chance to 50x

.. then VCs strongly prefer the second scenario. There's a slightly higher chance of a loss, but the upside is much, much greater.

<comment><USER5> Given the expected values in your example, I don't think anyone would fault a VC (or any actor with a non-pathological marginal utility curve) for taking option 2. Now, what about the two bets:

1) 80% 1x, 20% 5x (EV: 1.8x)

2) 99% 0x, 1% 100x (EV: 1.0x)

How many VCs do you know who would take 1 over 2, even though it's the "obvious" money-winning bet?

I'd love your thoughts on why this is. My semi-cynical thesis is that VCs need home-run logos on the Portfolio page of their website to keep their spot at the dealflow table.

Let's break the VC world up into three types:

A - Brand-name VCs that funded yesterday's massive unicorns, and are regarded as clairvoyant masters of the universe

B - Unknown VCs with a half-decent return on their last fund, but didn't back anyone you've heard of

C - VCs that swung for the fences a few too many times and imploded

Founders want to work with "A" VCs (for both rational and irrational reasons), so the first names they call are the ones whose past big bets paid off. "B" VCs are much lower on the call list, and only get access to the deals that "A" VCs all passed on. "C" VCs are obviously not available to chat.

It is arguably rational for a VC to seek to become an "A" and end up as a "C", rather than to muddle along as a "B" until she's getting pitched every week by hair salon and gym owners with A Great App Idea and her LPs wonder what she's doing with their money.

<comment><USER4> Lots of great points in your comment.

First, I don't think any rational VC would take #2 over #1 in your example, but the caveats are: a) people aren't good at estimating small probabilities, so they might think that #2 should be 97%/3% instead of 99%/1%, and then #2 is "better". And b) They overestimate how much of a "sure thing" something is, so maybe what seems like 80%/20% in scenario #1 is really 50% 0x, 30% 1x, and 20% 5x. I can't remember the origin of the quote, but I've repeatedly heard that "trying to build a $100m company is not that much riskier than trying to build a $10b company, so you may as well shoot for $10b."

Also, generally VCs won't take bets where the EV is <3x or so. A good fund will have a net return of 3x+, and you can't get there by making a lot of 2x bets.

Furthermore, 99% 0x vs. 1% 100x is _very_ lopsided. Probably too lopsided for most investors with portfolios of 20-40 companies per fund. If someone made that bet for all 30 companies in their fund, the fund would be 0x almost 3/4 of the time. But if the bet was more like 95% 0x and 5% 100x, then that's kind of interesting. Making 30 investments like that would produce a terrible return 21% of the time (0 wins), a good return 34% of the time (1 win), and a terrific return the rest of the time (2+ wins).

That said, prestige is (unfortunately) a factor. So I could imagine someone making an investment with an EV of 4x that is likely to be a unicorn over an investment with an EV of 5x that is unlikely to be a unicorn.

The last thing I'll add is that A/B/C grades for investors are context- specific. An 'A' like Sequoia or Accel might be generally pretty great for everyone, and you won't go wrong taking money from those firms. But in certain areas, lesser-known funds might be very strong company-building partners. For example, there are specialty funds that are focused on SaaS companies or frontier tech, and if you operate in one of those spaces then those funds might be just as good as taking money from Sequoia.

Finally, below is an interesting set of tweets from an LP who has been investing in VC funds for several decades. TLDR: it's basically impossible to build a great fund return on top of lots of small wins; you need a few huge wins instead.

[https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657287940456886272](https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657287940456886272)

[https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657288063329013760](https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657288063329013760)

[https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657288245105917952](https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657288245105917952)

[https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657288489331855360](https://twitter.com/HorsleyBridge/status/657288489331855360)

<comment><USER6> I wonder if this financial reality is really the way it has to be or if it's a natural consequence of competition in the VC industry getting out of control. When the intangible value-add a firm can provide is low, all they can really compete on is the financials and how favorable the terms are to the founders. This causes a spiral where the valuations go up (dragging up even the valuations of 'A' firm deals) but the dilution each round does not keep pace. Founders with unicorn ambitions benefit by growing faster and keeping more of the future fortune so they keep the inflation train going. Everyone else who wants to build a solid company or reward investors with a steadily growing stream of dividends and a good but not great ROI suffers from the pressure to grow faster than they or their business model are capable of handling. Of course there's a second pressure from the other direction as companies compete to acquire more nimble competitors in lieu of hiring slowly and risking internal R&D. Since M&A has become a more and more common exit strategy over the last few decades, there's more opportunity for those unicorn returns with less risk, further souring VCs' opinion of other deals.

In other industries like biotech it's not that rare to see early rounds where founders give up 40-50% of the company so even though investments are bigger and riskier, the financials work out to returns as good or better than tech in general. The pharmaceutical industry has outsourced large amounts of R&D risk to biotech investors for a long time though, so the risk is usually scientific and not product-market fit or sales/distribution. If you're working on a drug for a certain disease or condition, it's pretty easy to calculate how much you can make or how much you'd be worth to a pharmaceutical giant at various stages of risk (seed, animal studies, efficacy studies, clinical trials, post approval, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A more succinct, cynical take: anyone who sells money for equity is always going to be happy to see you need more money.

(The author dances around this, for understandable reasons.)

<comment><USER8> I understand the cynical take, but having worked with a lot of investors, I don't think it's the dominant reason. If at all possible, investors would rather own a smaller piece of something huge than an ever increasing share of something small.

This is actually something you can use when negotiating if someone tells you "I need 20%." Really, they need a big return on their invested dollars. The exact % is just a rule of thumb based on the overall returns they expect from their investments in the context of the entire portfolio.

<comment><USER9> So maybe the higher the ask%, the lower their faith in the company?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A much simpler and cleaner analysis: risk-return divergence.

Investors manage portfolios and fund returns are dominated by the home runs.

Therefore, investors generally want to maximize risk (and potential return), which is usually at odds with a founding team with most of their net worth tied up in the company.

<comment><USER11> Plenty of people on founding teams like home runs, too.

<comment><USER12> Well, of course they do. But what they "like" is a pretty trivial level of analysis.

Let's say you invest 5-10 years into a startup. Which would you rather have? A 30% chance at a $10M payday, or a 5% chance at a $100M payday? The answer is not "Well, I'll just repeat until the 5% chance materializes."

<comment><USER11> I'll take the 5%. Makes it easier to raise money. I've done this twice, so you can take my answer as actual and not theoretical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The zombie problem - same issue I brought up at [1]. Not successful enough to pay back investors, but they _won 't die._

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12981392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12981392)

<comment><USER14> I am surprised that VCs don't sell their zombies to specialized turn-around firms or to other investors looking for slower, but more steady growth.

<comment><USER15> Private Equity

<comment><USER16> This. I've advised on 30+ PE deals involving software companies this past year. Definitely worth looking into if you're a profitable mid market SaaS company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I actually gave this quite some thought after talking with a friend about the up-and-coming startup he was working for. Recently they just received a 20 mil series A funding and yeh...they're burning cash (mass hirings, searching for a new location, etc.).

The thing is, the CEO has started his own company twice and sold both (this was his third company) so we both assume he knows what he's doing.

In the scenario of the CEO, I feel like his plan is this, and only this:

"high risk, high reward"

"live fast, die young"

Are these the correct thoughts for a serial entrepreneur (who is also sorta like an investor)?

*edit, funding was actually for series A not B

<comment><USER18> Yeah, these are correct thoughts for a serial entrepreneur. With two, assumingly successful, exits he now likely has a net worth somewhere between 2-100M. He could live off his investments/net worth. If his next exit is not a very big one, he will not really gain much. i.e. If he exits for 10M, which could be good for the early employees, he has only made a small fractional increase in net worth, for presumably a ton of work -- he wasted his time. So of course he will want to take big risks. This is probably a big part of why VCs prefer serial entrepreneurs, besides other obvious benefits like experience, they are prepared to shoot for the stars which is how VCs get paid.

<comment><USER17> agreed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Author here - curious if you've seen this happen.

<comment><USER19> You have the dynamic mostly correct, but the motivations reside more at the partner level than the VC firm level. Individual partner IRRs are determined by the mark up they can report for the specific deals on which they have attribution.

When a VC pushes for a faster burn which then necessitates a new VC firm to fund the next round (perhaps prematurely relative to the founder's perspective), it's so that that individual VC can mark up their personal IRR.

Which may be relevant to their firm and the firm's fundraising plans to LPs. But could also be even more relevant if that partner is thinking about changing firms or starting his/her fund own. Individual IRR, based on deals with attribution, is the resume of a VC.

The effect of this is, junior partners push for this type of behavior more than senior partners that are already set with an impressive personal IRR.

<comment><USER8> Agree that much of this is partner dependent, but I've seen the dynamic play out happen with senior partners who have great track records and with younger partners out to prove themselves. In each case, I think the motivations differ slightly, but the same theme is at work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Main theme: The VCs again are not looking carefully at the plans of the company and, instead, are focused just on current _traction_ and maybe the growth rate of that traction. So, the VCs are looking at essentially just accounting measures. That's like betting on race cars without looking at the car engineering.

Problem: Using just traction and its rate of growth is a poor way to evaluate the real future of the company.

Here's some of how: That approach ignores (A) the size of the market and its growth rate, (B) the core technology and is it defensible or, instead, easy to duplicate or equal, (C) the status of would be competition, (D) the scalability of the technology, (E) the margins once have reached some significant scale, etc.

The VCs look like they would really like a drag race car that from a standing start just went 0-100 MPH in 2.5 seconds but 500 feet ahead is headed off a cliff, in another 1/2 second will have the rear tires explode, the supercharger belt fail, or already has the engine at 8000 RPM and in 1/2 second at 10,000 RPM the engine will explode.

Why Do VCs Do This: As the OP explains, the VCs have to report back to their LPs quite frequently, and the LPs are looking only for simplistic measures, e.g., from something close to traditional accounting, e.g., would ignore anything about the engineering of a race car.

Apparently the VCs and LPs would prefer a lemonade stand that opened just before July 4th and on July 5th can show good traction and fantastic rate of growth in traction.

For a safe, effective, cheap one pill that taken once can cure any cancer now in Phase III trials, the information technology VCs would say "No traction" and f'get about it.

So, the VCs want an early _pop_ easy to see and measure in simplistic terms. Okay, that can become a game. So, delay all reports of progress. When have accumulated some nice progress in traction, in January say that will have rapid growth starting in March and will have a report on April 1st. Do that, and have the April 1st report look really good on traction and its rate of growth. Then let the VCs report this fantastic _exploding success_ back to the LPs.

Information technology VCs just flatly refuse to evaluate projects based on the real internals and, instead, pay attention only to simplistic, visible, external measures. That's foolish.

Entrepreneurs beware: Reporting to a BoD of fools is no fun.

<comment><USER21> I agree with a lot of what you said but would biotech VCs evaluate IT any better? Biotech has really long expensive cycle times from discovery through trials. It's like correspondence chess vs bullet. Not the same, not similar.

On biotech, I had a sailing buddy, Cambridge PhD, and I could not understand the motivation of principle engineer level researchers in that field. Maybe it's a job job; I couldn't see any parallel.

<comment><USER22> Is that a viable path to becoming a biotech VC?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The only VC firm I know who doesn't put loads of pressure onto the foundry/exec to deploy capital is a16z, or at least the partners I know of and/or founders I know who have worked with them seem to have not felt that pressure. I always thought this was both annoying and pretty useful. On one hand, if you're building a sustainable business and you're in the growth stage, you're simply going to market, and so that can take as long as it takes (if the market is nascent, maybe you're waiting for it to mature etc), and that's nice. On the other hand, I've seen founders get so wrapped up in building the company they forget to build the business, or so wrapped up in building the business they forget to build the company, if you're under the gun of investing capital, you have to stay pretty focused on your real revenue. Forgetting to focusing on real revenue can be pretty easy when you're well funded and know you have big pro-ratas/names behind you who won't tank an investment. If you're in the MVP stage, founders who don't burn and burn quickly are probably doing it wrong, as an MVP may not be a business yet, and if it is, it's almost certainly not geared to operate at scale. IMO seed/mvp should burn consistently and quite quickly, growth stage should burn very planned and systematically.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can a lot of this be distilled into differing risk aversions between the investors and the founders?

Two major reasons here seem to be 1) VCs not wanting to sink time into a failing startup (force downside) and 2) markups in valuation are preferred by VCs (force upside).

But directionally these incentives are the same for founders. Founders probably want to work less if their startup is failing (per person*years they put in). Founders also prefer the case where they're valued a lot and worth a lot.

Magnitude-wise these motivations are very different between founders and investors. For founders, a failure means lost years of their lives -- forcing a downside is a lot more painful. Founders also celebrate the home-run as much as the VCs (in fact probably for the biggest home runs, the founders get out more than an individual VC right?).

This could create an asymmetry whereby founders are in no hurry if hurry could mean failure, and the model above is classical risk aversion. Conversely, VCs don't mind that much if your chance of failure goes up by a few percentage points.

Aaron also tacks on some new ingredients: VCs like to see markups for it's own sake (to solve the monitoring problem between LPs and VCs).

I have no doubt with his experience the mechanisms are absolutely correct, just wondering if the majority of the underlying generator of these symptoms is underlying risk aversion.

</comment><comment><USER25> VC's want your company to quickly "Blow up" one way or another.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder how much of this dynamic is caused by the 10 year fund life? Would VCs respond the same way if the LPs gave them 15 years? Would VCs change the sort of company they invest in?

<comment><USER11> In order to raise Fund N+1, a VC firm needs successful exits from Fund N. I had a startup whose exit timing was driven by our investors needing a successful exit so they could raise. A longer-lived fund would not have changed the timing.

<comment><USER26> Theoretically you could try to shift it so that fund N was based on the exits from fund N-2. That way you don't have to the cohort in N-1 to exit so fast.

The only difficulty would be the first couple funds where you'd have to push group 1 to exit so you could raise fund 2, then try to raise fund 3 on the exits of fund 1 plus the growth (but not exits) of fund 2.

<comment><USER11> The investors in question had raised many funds. I suspect their LPs were more interested in "what have you done for me lately" than anything about Fund N-2.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> > Conversely, companies that fail remove themselves as a time commitment for a > partner

If you look at the portfolio of a VC fund you'll see why. If they're in 45 companies, essentially all the return will come from 3-5 companies. The other 40 board seats are a hassle. Whether they return 0x or 2x, they're just not material to the success of the fund.

</comment><comment><USER28> Are there really no small ball (in the Moneyball sense) VCs?

It seems like there could even be a market for taking the ok but never great companies off the hands of boom/bust mentality funds at fairly good conditions.

<comment><USER29> Dave McClure laid out a model for playing Moneyball on startups – investing well before product/market fit, when other VCs didn't see value. Today, that's 500 Startups. [http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/07/moneyball-for- st...](http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2010/07/moneyball-for- startups.html)</comment></comment>


Proggy_fonts is dead? - <AUTHOR>

Just realized that http://www.proggyfonts.com/ is down. It's a shame since those fonts were imo the best pixel fonts ever made for programming. The website and the files are still accessible on Archive.org<p>RIP Proggy! <comment><USER2> That's odd, considering I downloaded a fresh set of Proggy just a few months ago.</comment>


Refresh Joins the LinkedIn Family - <AUTHOR> http://blog.refresh.io/post/115300546551/announcement <comment><AUTHOR> I have to say I am slightly nervous. I hope they don't butcher Refresh like they did Rapportive. That was one of the best Gmail plugins then LinkedIn striped out so many of the great features. However, I will say LinkedIn has done quite a good job recently with the Connect App on iPhone. Adding Refresh might just take that experience up a notch.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I look for a data science internship at age 30? - <AUTHOR> Long story short, I'm an applied statistician with four to five years of industry experience. Most of my work has been in the marketing vertical and has involved the use of SQL, R, and Python for model development and evaluation on medium sized data sets that required minimal cleaning.
After recently being let go from a big corporation that mischaracterized a role, I have begun applying for data scientist roles as I'm interested in taking my skill set in that direction. I've had a few interviews for data scientist roles over the past two weeks, but I've considered whether getting a data science internship would help add something to my resume. What do you think? Should I look for an internship at this stage in my career?
Thanks!
EDIT: I do not have a PhD. Background is an MA in social science discipline plus lots of late nights and weekends continuing to learn and develop my skills. <comment><USER2> Make some showy data visualizations with R or MatPlotLib. Publish them somewhere with a link you can share. Even better if you can handle a little webdev, make something like one of these and really knock their socks off: [http://d3js.org/](http://d3js.org/). Have a resume website or fleshed out LinkedIn account that you can share.

Sign up on Kaggle ([https://www.kaggle.com/](https://www.kaggle.com/)) and start participating in contests. Use this to refine your technique. If you do well in the contests, it will be noticed. Be awesome, tactfully, but publicly. Join their data science jobs mailing list and aggressively pursue leads. Make friends and participate in the community and forums.

You should also be attending events like ODSC ([http://odsc.com/](http://odsc.com/)). Talk to data science people in your area, make connections.

Get very, very friendly with the features in NumPy. Keep your skills sharp and continue to build them.

You should get paid for what you do. Take charge of your fate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't do an internship: you already have years of professional experience doing similar work.

In spite of what I call the so-called shortage for data scientists, getting a data science job is a pretty tough challenge. Read this post for a good description: [http://treycausey.com/data_science_interviews.html](http://treycausey.com/data_science_interviews.html)

Keep interviewing and applying for jobs. You will learn a lot about what exactly you want to do and eventually land on something.

If you are in or near one of the tech hubs in the US, I might recommend a data science bootcamp like those offered by Metis, or even an evening course like that offered by General Assembly. Such programs typically have connections with local industry and can help network.

</comment><comment><USER4> Keep looking for a full time job as a data scientist.

Keep learning and polishing your skills while on your hunt.

Also look for contract positions, short term projects with companies, also look at doing a few data projects on your that might be interesting to employers.

An internship isn't going to look as good as a full time gig or even short term paid engagements.

Good luck in 2016 leveling up.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most companies won't consider you for an internship if you're not a student. Age might be a factor but its not a big one. I am a 38 year old graduate student and I had no problem getting a paid internship for the summer. I'm not a data scientist, YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER6> A data science internship won't help as much as a data scientist job. That will probably take longer to find than two weeks but less time than finding and completing an internship.

Since you are making it to the interview stage and have knowledge of typical tools, my gut tells me that an internship won't improve your resume. Job hunting is hard.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you have a PhD check out

[http://insightdatascience.com/](http://insightdatascience.com/)

<comment><USER8> Do you even read bro ?

<comment><USER9> OP's clarification of a non-PhD was clearly labelled as an edit. "Do you even read, bro?"</comment></comment></comment>


Keylogger Found in Audio Driver of HP Laptops - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/keylogger-found-in-audio-driver-of-hp-laptops/? <comment><USER2> Main discussion here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14314795)

</comment><comment><USER3> I missed the 'main discussion' post so I'm glad to see this one. I purchased a HP laptop[1] a few months ago and sure enough the files mentioned in the article exist on my system. I followed the steps outlined and looking at the log file, I do not see any sensitive info, function keys are working and the log file didn't come back. I did get a prompt to run the HP recovery manager app but I declined.

[1] [https://www.costco.com/HP- ENVY-x360-13-y013cl-13t-Touchscree...](https://www.costco.com/HP- ENVY-x360-13-y013cl-13t-Touchscreen-2-in-1-Laptop---Intel-Core-i7--- QHD%2b-.product.100317294.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> My guess is that the the developer's main intention was for the driver to react keystrokes , rather than malice. But they definitely should've avoided writing all the keystrokes to a log file located under the user's home directory.</comment>


Flow Hive breaks $1M on first day - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/flow-hive-honey-on-tap-directly-from-your-beehive/x/8900185#

<comment><USER2> This is just a fad trying to promise easy honey from a spigot. A short read by real beekeeper blogs and you discover that 90% of the work of managing a beehive is the inspections you need to do every 2 weeks - not the honey extraction. Without inspecting for mites, diseased bees, missing queens (and understanding how to deal with this), etc, your hive will likely fail and you'll just have source all those bees again. Much cheaper (and humane) to just buy honey at a local farmers market.

Note that when doing inspections everyone suggests you'll need smoke + veil + etc as you have to remove the frames and look at them closely. Even the flow website recommends this (noticeably missing in the video, though)

So what does this really buy you? A great crowdfunding video.

<comment><USER3> Ignoring the inflated labor-saving claims for a moment, isn't it still valuable for home-scale (1-3 hives) as an alternative to buying a centrifuge? I could see having a super with Flow for directly jarring honey, and a couple regular supers for comb honey.

I agree that the marketing is badly done, but I'm trying to look past that and see real use cases. It would be great if they added a "What do I need to get started _in addition to Flow_?" shopping list in their FAQ.

If the claims of beeswax reuse by the bees are accurate, it might conserve the hive's metabolic budget. It seems plausible, but IANAA.

<comment><USER3> _Update:_ Whoof, they're $60/frame. Hard to justify the labor savings, especially with all the unknowns — crystallization, plastic leaching, longevity. An centrifuge can be had for <$300, and there are cheaper low-tech methods too.

I think I'll go with (even easier to harvest!) DIY mason jar beekeeping instead. The bees package your comb honey for you! You still need regular supers for winter stores. [http://makezine.com/craft/how-to-mason-jar- beehives/](http://makezine.com/craft/how-to-mason-jar-beehives/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone here comment on the veracity of this? Seems like a no-brainer based off of the video that even large-scale producers would want to go with this sort of hive.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is such a great feel-good story. Scrappy entrepreneurship generates a win-win for humans AND bees!

Not to take away from the larger problems facing the bee ecosystem, but I love that this project is getting attention. The careful, diligent application of technology _can_ solve serious problems. We just have to do the legwork.

</comment><comment><USER6> Related: [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/now-cleared-for- la...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/now-cleared-for-landing-at- airports-bees.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Makes me want to get a hive myself.

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks great!</comment>