Twice as High Diet-Induced Thermogenesis After Breakfast vs. Dinner - <AUTHOR> https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/105/3/dgz311/5740411?redirectedFrom=fulltext <comment><USER2> I don't mean to be negative but this is another useless nutrition paper. It shows effects we already know about, and it doesn't show them in more convincing ways than previous studies, and it then it misinterprets the relevance of these results for a headline.

You can't get anything useful if you focus the entire window on the post prandial. The body is complex and caloric balancing is not a simple thing. Studies that focus on appropriate (24 hrs+) periods of time never measure any difference. Not only that their own study showed that:

> Low-calorie breakfast increased feelings of hunger (P < .001), specifically > appetite for sweets (P = .007), in the course of the day.

So for many people who don't eat a large breakfast your compliance is going to be impacted. Anyone familiar with nutritional science will tell you that compliance is a much bigger deal than eeking out tiny theoretical shifts in calories by shifting meal times, which even if you could prove were real would absolutely not be worth it if it broke your overall compliance.

Outside of that, this isn't a novel finding. We already have small pilot studies showing this stuff that have the same problems. Repeated science is often underrated, but these results are uncontroversial, they are just over interpreted and old.

> Extensive breakfasting should therefore be preferred over large dinner meals > to prevent obesity and high blood glucose peaks even under conditions of a > hypocaloric diet.

Like, sorry, no that's absolutely not a fair conclusion of these results. It's just not.

<comment><USER3> > I don't mean to be negative but this is another useless nutrition paper. It > shows effects we already know about

So I'm going to put you in the "nay" camp regarding the importance of reproducibility[0] in science? Kind of funny that half the time nutritional science gets criticized because it isn't reproduced/reproducible enough and the other half because it is "useless" to reproduce the same findings. Cannot win.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility#Reproducible_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility#Reproducible_research)

<comment><USER2> Did you read my entire comment? Feel like I addressed this here:

> We already have small pilot studies showing this stuff that have the same > problems. Repeated science is often underrated, but these results are > uncontroversial, they are just over interpreted and old.

In general I am strongly in favor of reproducing science, this study doesn't really test anything helpful for either outcome though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Aligns with many recent studies on better insulin sensitivity in the AM, and showing how early meals help sync internal circadian clocks (there is one central and many peripheral).

"Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper."

P.S.: If you practice time-restricted eating (intermittent fasting), it's better to skip dinner than to skip breakfast.

<comment><USER5> > better insulin sensitivity in the AM

I think it's more accurate to say "After a fast" .

Next study needs to shift these windows by 6 hours. I suspect it will show nothing to do with circadian rhythm and everything to do with fasting/non- fasted eating.

<comment><USER6> I don't think After a Fast" is accurate in the context. 'In the AM" is referring to the Dawn Phenomenon[0], isn't it?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_phenomenon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_phenomenon)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Study group consisted of 16 people. Anecdotal results at best, sorry.

<comment><USER8> Study group consisted of 16 _men_ and 0 _women_.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely right!

Also "normal-weighted" is a pretty bad standard, cause that "criteria" is easily flawed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In Germany there is an old saying that goes "Eat breakfast like an emperor, lunch like a king, and dinner like a beggar." Isn't that roughly what the paper concluded?

</comment><comment><USER10> There is a video here by an M.D. who sells nothing but books on nutrition and donates the profits to charity; the page includes links to all the papers he cites [https://nutritionfacts.org/video/chronobiology-how- circadian...](https://nutritionfacts.org/video/chronobiology-how-circadian- rhythms-can-control-your-health-and-weight/)

</comment><comment><USER11> So now intermittent fasting is stupid? or we should reverse the fasting period to evenings instead of mornings?

<comment><USER12> Intermittent fasting has never been about specific times of eating. There are a number of versions, eat two days, fast for one, eat in the day, fast in the evening etc, but the idea is in the name, not the times. This research is interesting insight but it doesn't conflict with the core principle behind intermittent fasting in any way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any layman's explanation of health implications?

<comment><USER14> I'm not a doctor but if I'm reading it correctly they did a study with 16 normal weight males and found that when eating in the morning their blood glucose and insulin concentrations[1] were lower after breakfast compared to dinner regardless of calorie consumption.

So eat more in the morning and less at night.

[1][https://www.endocrineweb.com/conditions/diabetes/normal- regu...](https://www.endocrineweb.com/conditions/diabetes/normal-regulation- blood-glucose)

<comment><USER15> This is a problem. No study should be male only. It creates a gender bias in scientific evidence: There are metabolic difference between males and females.

<comment><USER16> It's not a problem, it's just incomplete. From what I've seen, most studies (especially with animals) start out with only male participants, to eliminate the effect of menstruation and the related hormones, which we've seen can be very potent.

This makes it easier on the researchers trying to conduct a preliminary study. The limitations of the study just mean we can't necessarily generalize the results to both men and women, people of different weights, (nor, I suspect, people of various races,) or even, given the sample size, all men of normal weight.

But first we see if we can detect an effect in "normal weight" males, and then we have doubts about its applicability in other populations we test those populations. This of course isn't the most thorough way of experimentation, but it's the biggest bang for your buck when your resources and/or available subject pool are limited.

<comment><USER17> > to eliminate the effect of menstruation and the related hormones, which > we've seen can be very potent.

Interesting, never considered this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why are nutrition and social studies considered science?

They chart out a few numbers for very few people; have no understanding or analysis of the underling biological or biochemical processes. The later of which is hard, grungy and boring science - but that's really the important high order bit.

This is hack territory. It's the easiest science with very low bar, but at some point we have stop this madness.

</comment><comment><USER19> So.. Don't psych yourself out if you have a high body temperature after breakfast?</comment>


Deno: A secure TypeScript runtime on V8 - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/denoland/deno/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> I love JavaScript but I like TypeScript better. This project needs more love.

Would be incredible to see async events magically distribute across CPUs - kind of like how goroutines work.

EDIT: Though I am having trouble getting it to work with expressjs and the intellisense is not there

</comment><comment><USER3> Deno this Deno that, there are more frameworks than libraries these days.

<comment><AUTHOR> Deno is a platform similar to Node.js not a library or framework.</comment></comment>


1MB+ of HTTP overhead due to TowerData cookies - <AUTHOR> http://bigqueri.es/t/1mb-of-http-overhead-due-to-towerdata-cookies/479 <comment><USER2> I assume this would be another problem solved by disabling 3rd-party cookies?

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-third-party- coo...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-third-party-cookies)

<comment><USER3> This would be the only problem it solves, then, since blocking 3rd party cookies does almost nothing to stop tracking.

<comment><USER4> Why is that?

<comment><USER3> Take a look at the results on [http://www.areweprivateyet.com/](http://www.areweprivateyet.com/)

The methodology is described here: [https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2011/09/tracking- trackers...](https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2011/09/tracking-trackers- self-help-tools)

Even the DNT header, which is widely recognized as a failure since it relies on the perpetrators to regulate themselves, protects you better against tracking than blocking third-party cookies. It's just too easy to track people by other means, and the companies that aren't already doing it will certainly start if a meaningful number of people suddenly block third-party cookies.

The only pragmatic and effective way to avoid being tracked today is to use something like uBlock (more efficient ABP + noscript) with the third-party script and frame blocking features enabled (whitelisting third-party scripts/frames only on those sites that break something you want to see at the cost of possibly being tracked by something the block lists don't catch.)

<comment><USER5> Thank you for good links. What is also somewhat scary is font enumeration. It is somewhat uncommon to find two computer with the exactly same set of installed fonts. I have noticed that especially on Windows platform many applications bundle their own fonts, and the resulting sets are very good for fingerprinting systems.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Some interesting research is being done on this: [https://github.com/ghostwords/chameleon](https://github.com/ghostwords/chameleon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not all fingerprinting is for consumer unfriendly purposes. It can be used for security to make sure client accounts are being accessed by known machines, or it can be used to monitor license sharing (for paid subscription services).

Oracle, and others have paid services that do this for the security conscious.

A nice open source implementation can be found here:

[https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs](https://github.com/Valve/fingerprintjs)

</comment><comment><USER7> Would it make sense to just blackhole the rlcdn.com domain?

in hosts file: 127.0.0.1 rlcdn.com

Or is there a way for pfsense to filter that traffic maybe?

</comment><comment><USER8> Ghostery can help block this. (Not DoNotTrackMe; they sold out and put spyware in their add-on.)

<comment><USER9> Elaborate on the DoNotTrackMe part?

<comment><USER8> See "[http://www.areweprivateyet.com/"](http://www.areweprivateyet.com/")

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7234463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7234463)

Look at the source code for DoNotTrackMe. It sends detailed info on what pages you've visited back to Abine.

<comment><USER9> Link to the source code? (iirc, it isn't open source, but probably the extension code can still be examined)

The comment(by a competitor) says that DNTMe sends back data, but neither the comment nor the areweprivateyet.com website backs up that claim. The latter just says that DNTMe is not very effective at blocking.

Since you mention that they sold out, I hope to know if there's more history on the subject, if things changed in the extension, or with Abine, and when that happened.

<comment><USER8> Actually, it _is_ open source, because Abine copied GPL code into their add- on, making them subject to the GPL. They're using some of Moxie Marlinspike's code.

Download the DNTM add-on source. Do this with Chrome; Firefox will try to install it into the browser. Change the suffix from .xpi to .zip and unpack the file. Now you have the source.

Take a look at "components/common.js". ("Copyright (c) 2010 Moxie Marlinspike; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.") Towards the end of that file, there's additional code from Abine. To read it clearly, put it through a JavaScript beautifier.

Now take a look at the code around "parseIdentity", which involves creating a unique identity for the user and sending it to Abine via XMLHttpRequest. Notice the places where it builds up JSON items and sends them somewhere. Also look at "protocol.js", which implements the "Abine protocol". There's more, but that's all I have time for right now. I looked at a previous version in more detail, but this one has so much new stuff it's going to be hard to figure out what it's doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's why we need HTTPS everywhere.

I really hope letsencrypt.org takes off.

<comment><USER11> HTTPS is transport later security. It does not solve the problem of tracking.

<comment><USER10> HttpOnly, and, as far as I know, HTTP-only cookies can't be injected if you use HTTPS.

* HttpOnly restricts all access to document.cookie in IE7, Firefox 3, and Opera 9.5 (unsure about Safari)

* HttpOnly removes cookie information from the response headers in XMLHttpObject.getAllResponseHeaders() in IE7. It should do the same thing in Firefox, but it doesn't, because there's a bug.

* XMLHttpObjects may only be submitted to the domain they originated from, so there is no cross-domain posting of the cookies.</comment></comment></comment>


Amazon Inspector (Preview) - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/inspector/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if they're using OpenSCAP for this. It's an XML document that (at least) Red Hat and Microsoft publish which contains the lists of known good hashes for every file we publish, and also a set of rules for common vulnerabilities (things like "if a directory is public writable, flag an error" \-- but lots of them, and more complex). Also CVE data is published in a machine-readable format.

Here's the data that Red Hat publishes: [https://www.redhat.com/security/data/oval/](https://www.redhat.com/security/data/oval/)

I'll pimp my own experiments scanning offline guests using SCAP:

[https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/scanning-offline- guest...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/scanning-offline-guests-using- openscap-and-guestmount/#content)</comment>


Breaking Down the Chrome Web Store: An Exploratory Analysis of Extensions - <AUTHOR> https://extensionmonitor.com/blog/breaking-down-the-chrome-web-store-part-1 <comment><USER2> I've had RSS Feed Reader ([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed- reader/pn...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed- reader/pnjaodmkngahhkoihejjehlcdlnohgmp)) for soon to be 10 years on the Chrome Web Store. AMA

<comment><USER3> Did you every consider making money from it? If yes, how did it go?

<comment><USER2> We have a premium upgrade for users of our SaaS product, that's doing well. You can read about that business here: [https://www.indiehackers.com/product/feeder](https://www.indiehackers.com/product/feeder)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Some highlights:

\- 50% of the 188,640 extensions have less than 16 users/installs

\- 13 extensions have over 10m users/installs

<comment><USER4> Zipf Function / power law distributions.

Comparison: G+ Communities, by size (log-log scale):

[https://joindiaspora.com/people/d8210c0de509264f/photos/2830...](https://joindiaspora.com/people/d8210c0de509264f/photos/2830376)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> How do they collect this data? Do they have chrome store crawlers?

<comment><USER5> Yeah they must. I wrote one once too to power this: [https://extstats.appspot.com](https://extstats.appspot.com)

I wrote it to track our competitors (I used to work at HubSpot) but you can add any other extension in the drop down on the left.

<comment><AUTHOR> What happened to it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, how do you deal with duplicately named extensions?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: LIT Ave. – A social network with important key values - <AUTHOR> https://LITAve.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I'm Dave Kandarp of LIT Ave. ([https://LITAve.com](https://LITAve.com))

I'm building out a new kind of social network at LIT Ave. - a network that focuses heavily on being "social" and providing that connectedness of friends and family, which some other networks seem to be losing. In short, LIT Ave. is a location based messaging app for friends and people nearby.

But, there are also some really important key values I wanted to bake into my product:

1\. Network has to be appreciative of others - even if you don't know them! \- This has always been huge for me - if I'm able to appreciate someone, it's a big win, because it makes everyone involved feel great, which leads to creating value and positive environment! If I'm at a sandwich place, and even if I don't know who they are, but if they make a great sandwich, I should be able to appreciate them! A simple thumbs-up text-post at this location could help them when people nearby see that post.

2\. Bite-sized conversations with friends, family, your neighbors and people nearby. \- Comments are a great way to communicate, "Loving" the posts is great a way to show emotion, but what brings people closer? After feedback from early adopters and much thinking and experimenting, I decided to build something called video-responses - these are 10s video-clips you create on the posts to carry out small conversations.

3\. Be able to answer questions like where am I hanging out, what's new with me, and what am I up to? \- Going back to the sandwich place example, if I post something at that location, I want my friends to know it's a good place to check it out in case they're also in mood for a sandwich. :) Being able to share what I'm up to and what's new with me through not only photo and video, but also text (anonymous or non-anonymous) creates value - with LIT Ave., I wanted to build out a comprehensive app that focused on these key values!

Today, after a few months of work, LIT Ave. is available for download. It's a very new product, and much work still lies ahead as I continue to experiment and make the product better. LIT Ave. will continue to evolve - into something that will have even more value offered, not only by connectedness, but also at locations you create new posts.

I'd love for you to give it a try - I'd love to hear your feedback, ideas, and suggestions.

You can download iOS app at: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lit- ave/id1414091249?ls=1&mt...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lit- ave/id1414091249?ls=1&mt=8) and Android app at: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.litave.lit...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.litave.litave)

Thank you! Dave Kandarp.</comment>


Backtest Your Trading Strategy with Only 3 Lines of Python Using Fastquant - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/backtest-your-trading-strategy-with-only-3-lines-of-python-3859b4a4ab44?source=friends_link&sk=ec647b6bb43fe322013248fd1d473015 <comment><AUTHOR> In this blog post, I share how to use fastquant to backtest a simple SMAC strategy in only 3 lines of code.

fastquant is a wrapper for the backtrader package to make it a lot simpler to implement. My design for the backtest function is meant to be (almost) easy enough to be used by the excel practitioners in the finance industry.

For context, I'm a machine learning practitioner that focuses on NLP based investment research solutions, but I also spend my free time doing my own investing (with backtesting) and so this has been a passion project of mine. I'm very keen to get feedback on the package, especially from experienced quants here, so that the fastquant contributors and I can keep improving it to reach industry standard.</comment>


Why does this weekly newsletter suck? - <AUTHOR> http://twotoasters.com/ideas/2013/the-weekly-toast-mobile-trends-stats-and-news-issue-6/

<comment><USER2> When I open the page on my iPhone the page keeps reloading so I can't actually read any of it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any tips, comments?</comment>


Show HN: Voting Relationships in the US Senate - <AUTHOR> http://static.davidchouinard.com/congress/ <comment><USER2> There's probably some cool insights in here, but I'll need some help understanding it. For instance, what does an edge in the graph represent? What can I tell from the boldness of the line?

@DavidChoinard can you give us a key?

<comment><AUTHOR> The thickness of edges represents the number of times the pair of senators voted the same in the Senate (only edges above a threshold are shown).

The two tightly coiled clusters shows just how weak the relationships are between the two parties.

The closer the nodes are to the center, the more bipartisan those Senators are. In the current Congress, Sens. Murkowski and Collins really stand out as by far the most bipartisan senators and important linchpins in bridging the gap between both parties. (this bar graph of partisanship shows that: [http://i.imgur.com/gYCMaxo.png](http://i.imgur.com/gYCMaxo.png))

Also, it's clear that in the current Senate, partisanship is a lot more pronounced among Democrats, likely because they hold the majority in the Senate. (ie. they have a lot less incentive to compromise)

While there were ups and downs, it's clear that there's a general trend of the Senate becoming a lot more divided over the last 25 years. Comparing 1989 to today is striking — opinions were a lot more intertwined back then (this static image really emphasize it: [http://i.imgur.com/4kDokyz.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/4kDokyz.jpg)).

<comment><USER3> The last url looks like some kind of political mitosis. There's probably a joke here related to the genome of government being split into two identical halves…

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1) How are abstentions counted? Does a senator that abstains more get pushed out towards the edge for having less connections in general?

2) Is this correct: If a party member votes 100% along the party line, then they will be towards the center of the blob. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting WITH bipartisan consensus (e.g. voting for hugely consensus PATRIOT act) then that person is gets put in the center. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting AGAINST bipartisan consensus (e.g. voting against hugely consensus PATRIOT act) then they would be on the edge far from the center.

</comment><comment><USER5> Interesting analysis, David. I actually got strikingly similar results looking at voting matrices and using SVD to turn them into two dimensions: [http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/how-divided-is-the- senate/](http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/how-divided-is-the-senate/) and [http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/the-danger-and-power-of- visuali...](http://vikparuchuri.com/blog/the-danger-and-power-of- visualizations/) . I assume you did something similar.

Either way, it's surprisingly easy to get access to this data, and fun to analyze. I have the scraping code on github (described in my blog) for anyone who is interested.

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice work David. For anyone interested in this type of analysis, Harvard has a new Data Science course this semester that had this node relationship analysis as a HW using the same data sources. You can check out the course site at: cs109.org

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually a student in the course and my interest in this was spun out of the last homework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ok, so while I wish I had the time to create a cool web app to analyze political data, I def think it would required not to overload the user's CPU. I launched the site and immediately my MAC slowed down to crawl. I checked top and it at at 100%+

I do not recommend you clicking on any of the dots.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can someone make a glass app that covers a politicians face with the logos of their largest interests? That would make politics bearable for me.

<comment><USER9> Their suits could have logos on them, sort of like boxers' robes.

<comment><USER10> People have made the "NASCAR jumpsuit covered with logos from donators" suggestion/joke for _years_. There was even a White House Petition for it: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/white-house- petitio...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/white-house-petition- logos_n_2912087.html)

<comment><USER11> Yes, it's getting kind of old and is unworthy of this discussion.

<comment><USER10> Just because it's an old idea doesn't mean it's not a good one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you like this, you may also be interested in Simon Jackman's ideal-point estimates for both the Senate and House:

[http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentSenate/x1.pdf](http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentSenate/x1.pdf) [http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentHouse/x2.pdf](http://jackman.stanford.edu/ideal/currentHouse/x2.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER13> Really cool! In addition to the comments others are making, I would recommend making the intensity of the base blue and red colors match. The democrats look more intense than the republicans just because of the color choice when given how interlocked they are, I assume the average blues are probably about the same as the average red. (Also a legend would help.)

Awesome work!

</comment><comment><USER14> I think it's fascinating watching how the parties have split up more over the years.

<comment><USER15> It looks like the Democrats are coming together on their votes, and Republicans differences are widening. It does make sense, as the fiscal conservatives and social conservatives really are different breeds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This would be even cooler if it was somehow combined with the data from opensecrets.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you're into that kind of things, here is a similar project I did last year: [http://friggeri.net/research/senate/](http://friggeri.net/research/senate/)

</comment><comment><USER17> For those interested, I believe the underlying data is from DW-NOMINATE ([http://voteview.com/dwnomin.htm](http://voteview.com/dwnomin.htm)).

<comment><AUTHOR> The data is actually from GovTrack.us, which I suspect is also where DW- NOMINATE gets it. My script for querying GovTrack is on Github: [https://github.com/DavidChouinard/congressviz](https://github.com/DavidChouinard/congressviz)

<comment><USER17> Very cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It would be helpful to see an animation to clarify this, but it's interesting to quantify how increasingly polarized this has become, starting in the early '90s.

<comment><USER19> +1 If the author could get data from 1980-2013, and make it into a 60 second animation, it would be really interesting to see.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've definitely considered that, but it's computationally difficult to make it in the browser. This animated gif is as close as it comes: [http://i.minus.com/ibi7p66VbETpnU.gif](http://i.minus.com/ibi7p66VbETpnU.gif)

<comment><USER20> This is illuminating, also would be if you could add _years_ to each slide that would be even more fascinating. Great work and thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This algoritm pragmatically computes how far left/right a senater's polical views are by placing them in the corresponding place on the page

<comment><USER4> I am not sure this is correct.

1) How are abstentions counted? Does a senator that abstains more get pushed out towards the edge for having less connections in general?

2) If a party member votes 100% along the party line, then they will be towards the center of the blob. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting WITH bipartisan consensus then that person is gets put in the center. If a party member is less partisan in the fashion of voting AGAINST bipartisan consensus then they would be on the edge far from the center.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is data for pre-90s years available? I am really curious to see the 60-70-80s progression.

<comment><AUTHOR> My data source (GovTrack) only has vote count, but not roll calls, before the 101th Congress. It might be possible to get data before that, but I suspect it's quite hard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> A legend/key would be nice.

<comment><USER19> I am assuming that the more clustered the circles are, the more like minded the party is? Each line represents a vote. So, a thick line between 2 congressman represents more general agreement, and thinner line means they agree only on a few things. Also, the position of the circles to the left or the right represents the extent of their political leaning, based on their votes.

Above are just informed guesses. A key really would be nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is absolutely fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER24> what's the story on Miller (D-GA) 2003-2004?

<comment><USER25> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Miller#Senate](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zell_Miller#Senate)</comment></comment>


Why We Live 40 Years Longer Today Than We Did in 1880 - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/die-another-day/309541/

<comment><USER2> Infant mortality plays a huge role. It has dropped significantly in the past century.[1]

"It is true that life expectancy in the Middle Ages and earlier was low; however, one should not infer that people usually died around the age of 30. In fact, the low life expectancy is an average very strongly influenced by high infant mortality, and the life expectancy of people who lived to adulthood was much higher. A 21-year-old man in medieval England, for example, could by one estimate expect to live to the age of 64" [2]

[1] [http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_infantmortality_pub...](http://www.hrsa.gov/healthit/images/mchb_infantmortality_pub.pdf) [PDF]

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions)</comment>


Accounting for Clouds: Stop Saying CapEx Vs. OpEx - <AUTHOR> http://gevaperry.typepad.com/main/2009/01/accounting-for-clouds-stop-saying-capex-vs-opex.html <comment><USER2> He lost me much earlier:

 _In other words, let's say you're buying a server from Dell for $5,800 dollars and you expect to use that server for 3 years. You also have to pay a 10% annual maintenance fee on that server, so the total cost over three years is $7,540._

So a running server costs a measly 48 dollars per month in maintance?

This may be true when you're operating on amazon scales (when you _are_ amazon) but for the average website-owner power, cooling, rackspace and _hardware failures_!! normally amount to a tiny bit more than that.

And once you take human<->machine facetime into the equation (by sending your admins over or by hiring remote hands) amazon begins to look not too shabby anymore.

</comment><comment><USER3> You guys seem to think that I was making an argument against using the Amazon service and in favor of buying servers. That was not what I'm saying in that post. I was making an argument that moving expenses from upfront costs to ongoing expenses is not _necessarily_ a good thing. It may or may not be. You're also assuming start-ups or small companies as customers. I'm also thinking of larger enterprises.

Many of the issues raised in your comments are addressed in the blog post itself and in the comment thread.

</comment><comment><USER4> Um, I'm sure he's right about the terminology, but his conclusions are whack. There certainly is a benefit to moving from capex to opex if your customers have frozen capex, which is something we're seeing happening right now.

A previous employer, during the "nuclear winter" of Internet service providers in 2001-2002, built a whole sales strategy around making an appliance-based(!) shrink-wrap product work as OpEx.

</comment><comment><USER5> The author seems to be thinking that people making the distinction between capex and opex aren't making the assumptions of lower utilization, agility, etc. that are mentioned at the end of the post. On top of this, when I use this terminology, it comes with the understanding that opex is better because moving costs to opex means breakeven for the customer is much easier to achieve. Clouds = on-demand = only pay for what you need = customer makes revenue directly on costs, rather than not.</comment>


Peter Thiel on the Global Economy, Technology, Artificial Intelligence [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_3r49XXRw4 <comment><USER2> This video is oddly pessimistic, but to me, Thiel is overlooking where the greatest advances are yet to come.

The advances in computers are advances in processing power and connectivity. Every industry uses both of these elements to succeed. Now that computers are reaching a sort of peak development, there is going to be a dispensing of the capabilities that computers offer into other industries.

Its hard for me to put it into words, but I think that computers are simply a stepping stone for real achievements to come.

The car has basically reached peak performance years ago, but we aren't disappointed in the fact that there was a lot of focus improving the car and a giant vehicle industry for many many years. Instead we moved on to building things that can use a car, such as the highway system. Or the mail delivery system, or the thousands of industries that completely rely on highways or mail.

In the same way with computers, we are now going to see industries and technologies appear that rely on having computers that have reached this advanced level of processing power we have today. Once this mighty computer is passed on to the common man, innovation begins to move in different paths again. Like a tree.

I dont know, this may have delved into a bit of a rant but that video made me extremely optimistic :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thiel would agree with your main statements.

He's said before that he's not particularly worried about advancements in computers continuing to unfold and the potential for the Net to become ever more like a planet wide nervous system with many more use cases coming into existence.

His complaint is that if progress does not occur in fields outside of computation there will be stagnation. No amount of computational intelligence can mine asteroids or convert the Sahara to arable land without doing something with the material world.

You can have rapid improvements in specific technologies in the midst of a general decline or a stagnation. For example; surely there a great deal of improvement in weapons systems during the middle ages. The stirrup, the crossbow, the gun, the cannon. Most of the advantages of those technologies didn't really help the average person's situation.

This is not a hypothetical. While there was enormous increases in computational power in the past three - four decades median wages have not budged. People were able to consume more primarily due to debt.

We ought to question whether computers will be enough to raise living standards in the developed world in the short to medium term (his main contention I think).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> OK, the big theme here is "innovation has slowed down, but this is being masked by all the activity around computers". So let's take a look at that.

Way too many smart people are tied up doing rather banal things with computers, or in finance. That's capitalism in action.

What isn't being worked on? Thiel is bothered by lack of progress in medicine. Medicine is now working on really hard problems, most of which are consequences of aging. Short of redesigning the human genome to eliminate aging, which may happen, those problems will remain hard.

There hasn't been much visible progress in aircraft in a while. Boeing is still building the 737, which first flew in 1967. Aircraft are lighter, quieter, more fuel efficient and safer than they were back then. But not cheaper.

The biggest societal problem is that we have less and less of a role for a big part of the population. The average IQ is only 100, remember.

<comment><USER4> > The average IQ is only 100

You do realize that's a tautology, right? There's no reason productivity couldn't be increased, and one potential method would be to boost human intelligence.

<comment><USER5> I believe the point is we (HN readers) are mostly exposed to smarter than average folks in our daily lives. Our idea of an "average" person probably is smarter than the true average person. And we would do well to remember that, for example, 42% of Americans believe ghosts are real.

<comment><USER6> you may be tooting your own horn there. its a trap to believe you and/or your community is "above average" in intelligence. the community on hacker news is more enculturated than most for a few things.

1\. working with computers

2\. selling technology

3\. thinking about business in the medium term

4\. calling ourselves very smart with little backing evidence for that claim

and besides that stuff I am not particularly impressed by the level of intelligence displayed here (including my own)

<comment><USER7> It's not a trap, HN definitely has a higher IQ than the general population. FWIW I have some data on IQs from a similar online community, showing the cumulative distribution of IQ compared to the general population: [http://www.leijuvakaupunki.fi/images/box/lw_ssc_iq_cdf.png](http://www.leijuvakaupunki.fi/images/box/lw_ssc_iq_cdf.png)

HN is highly correlated with technical professions and especially programmers. Those things happen to be highly correlated with and selective of IQ.

<comment><USER6> post I responded to said "smarter than average" which is not the same thing as IQ and conflating the two of those is also a trap.

<comment><USER7> IQ is the best measure of intelligence we have, and correlates strongly with real world outcomes like income and academic success.

<comment><USER6> I don't think we're even talking about the same thing anymore. Nor do I think we could possibly have a productive conversation on this topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He reiterates many of the things he 's been saying for a while and written in his book. It's worth reiterating them, probably because things have not changed.

He makes a distinction of computers as the "one field that has progres", but, is it really true that IT is not stuck in a rut as well? What are the new paradigms developed recently? Computer vision, machine learning were established in the 80s , despite only becoming commonplace nowadays. There is little progress in theory since then. Engineers obsess over the rediscovery of functional languages, a relic of the 50s.

Commercial success should not be taken as an indicator of real progress.

<comment><USER9> I agree that there doesn't seem to be much advancement over the 80s (I'm trying to learn emacs for Clojure right now). I don't agree that commercial success is not an indicator of real progress.

For example, LISPs did not run well on 80s computers. The Japanese, amongst others, had to create special computers to control their trains. Rules based programming performed poorly too. May other such paradigms and tools fall into this category.

For the most part the old, neat tools of now have the hardware necessary for them to be useful. The JVM provides great performance for Clojure. Over the last 30 years, multi-threaded concepts coalesced too. Now they're built into mainstream languages. Provided people stop trying to solve already solved problems like task management, we could possibly be on the verge of productivity improvements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> THIEL: "one other way of interpreting the AI boom is that on the surface, it is about extreme optimism about the potentialities of computer technology, and the beneath the surface, it is simultaneously, perhaps, a great deal of pessimism around the possibilities in other technologies that will be developed by humans, and deep pessimism about the possibility of what humans can do."

This is what I think about whenever I hear folks scaremongering about the "singularity". In my opinion these beliefs reflect a kind of spiritual emptiness; a yearning for answers that only God can fulfill.

<comment><USER11> What I find funny is people who think that metaphysics is _real_ , even at the mild level of mathematical Platonism, but think that it can only ever be figured out from our armchairs, that there's no way I could build a machine to do it for me.

On the other hand, I find it pretty _easily_ believable that we can receive compounding returns from advances in ML/AI. After all, pretty much as soon as we invent new techniques in computational statistics, the go-to fields needing to apply them are the other computational sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting talk. I'd love for him to write a history of capitalism type book. "The History of Innovation and Globalization". Start it off with the x-axis=globalization and y-axis=innovation model and go from say 18th century to now. I always enjoy history of economics books. I like the mainstream books but really enjoyed the perspective and research that went into "An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought". I am not aware of any good history type books from a more pragmatic business oriented point of view. Thiel has some interesting insights and perspectives.

Unfortunately that book probably wouldn't be a good use of his time but come on Peter, I know you want to write it :)

<comment><USER13> Zero to One actually has some good material in this vein.

<comment><USER14> The book does, and is well worth the reading time. I have Zero to One as an audio book and I am on my second way through it.

The concept that zero to one is much more valuable than one to ten helped me understand my own career better. I have always been a risk taker and even though some of my work projects over the last 30 years have failed, my bosses never seemed unhappy with me. I would usually really nail a few new ideas a year. This book helped me to understand why I seemed to get perks (like ocean view window offices at two consequative companies) that none of the other programmers got, even though they seemed to be much steadier workers than I was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "From 1982 to 2007, that 25 year period, NYC was the world center for globalization, moving money around to do things we already know how to do. Now from 2008 to Present the center is Silicon Valley. Moving money around to do things we don't yet know how to do."

</comment><comment><USER16> For those who would prefer just the audio it's also offered as a podcast on iTunes.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there a transcript anywhere? I much prefer reading over watching/listening

<comment><USER18> Youtube has an auto-generated transcript feature. In the video description, click More->Transcript.

Edit: actually don't use the YouTube transcripts, there's a human-curated transcript here [http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter- thi...](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-thiel-ii- transcript/)

<comment><USER3> That transcript system doesn't recognize sentence breaks.

Theil speaks in run-on sentences, so it's not entirely the transcription system's fault.

<comment><USER19> It also doesn't try to distinguish the speakers, which is weird. (It could just be "speaker #1", "speaker #2", etc.) I'd have thought it would be a lot easier to distinguish voices than to understand the English words they are saying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Peter mentions Robert Gordon and his theory that all the good innovation is done but the one I'm looking forward to is the coming revolution in brain research.

Wait until procrastination, anxiety, depression and fatigue can be turned off by a device behind your ear that controls your amygdala and instantly puts you in the zone.

See see how much productivity goes up when everyone has the energy and motivation of the Richard Bransons of the world.

</comment><comment><USER21> Well, I am working on hard science. Neuroevolutionary development algorithms for reinforcement learning. Online unsupervised learning.

I can't get funding.

He talks big but he doesn't invest in the research. He still wants some business plan dropped in front of him. It doesn't work that way until the hard science is done first.

<comment><USER22> He's a contrarian for the sake of being a contrarian. He never grew up beyond 16. It's not worth bothering about what he says or means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Innovation discussion at 20m38s

Transcript:

[http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter- thi...](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-thiel-ii- transcript/#innovation)

</comment><comment><USER20> His bit about wisdom of crowds won't please The DAO fans.

</comment><comment><USER24> One interpretation of this interview: _If Machiavelli had had a prince for a disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him to do would have been to write a book against Machiavellism. --Voltaire_

Another interpretation of this interview: P.T. for POTUS.

</comment><comment><USER25> Url changed from [http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/video/peter-thiel- ii...](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org/video/peter-thiel-ii/), which points to this.

<comment><USER26> I don't think this is a good URL change. It is not like [http://conversationswithbillkristol.org](http://conversationswithbillkristol.org) is a blog spam for "Conversations with Bill Kristol". And the original site has video divided into chapters which is useful.

<comment><USER25> It was a borderline call, but I'm guessing a URL with Bill Kristol in it would have had an evil-catnip effect. So, risk mitigation.

<comment><USER23> It definitely gave me pause when I hit the YT link.

Fair call.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


DOJ Seeks Jail Time for Music Sharing  - <AUTHOR> http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/03/doj-seeks-jail-time-music-sharing <comment><USER2> I'm also slightly curious who gave him the tracks. It sounds like he got them anonymously over the internet. It would have been somebody with deep connections to GnR. And I'm sure that the person did not just give tracks to Cogill.

And I'm really interested in whether his streams were actually the source of the files. Most private torrent sites are really particular about quality. I don't think a song normally streamed would normally meet those qualities.

Also, I'm sure the song was not streamed in a lossy format. So song data would have been lost. And while you can convert a lossy format to another format, it won't be as high quality as if it had been converted from a lossless format. And there are signs that an album has been transcoded. And most private sites also have problems with transcodes.

So if other, non-transcoded file versions were released on the internet, and the stream was a lossy format, I'd really have a hard time believing he was the only link.

<comment><USER3> "A quick search of popular bittorrent trackers reveals that a torrent of many of the tracks in question was available in March of 2007, a full 13 months before Cogill's supposed initial leak."

[http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3638184/Chinese_Democracy_-_...](http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3638184/Chinese_Democracy_- _Guns_and_Roses)</comment></comment>


Please, take the "Work" out of networking - <AUTHOR> http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/03/please_take_the_work_out_of_networking.php

<comment><AUTHOR> The original article is here: <http://www.cnbc.com/id/29917512>

But I sorta liked Megan McArdle's summary better.

</comment><comment><USER2> "neting"

Ok, so I couldn't resist. I will now bend over and take my downmod lashing like a man.</comment>


Critical Fans (or how Mixergy did the Impossible) - <AUTHOR> http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/critical-fans-mixergy/ <comment><USER2> On my entrepreneurial path there were several pivoting moments: 1. Kwawsaki's "The art of the start" 2. PG essays 3. Hacker News 4. Four steps to the Epiphany 5. Mixergy.

Simply put, Andrew is changing lives.

<comment><USER3> Amazingly, I also went 1, 2 and 3 (and have stayed here for two years without progressing my entrepreneurial path much at all).

Am now ordering a copy of _Four steps to the Epiphany_ ; it may be the missing link between having Mixergy and Andrew Warner bookmarked, and actually using them to change my life.

<comment><USER2> I'll tell you what helped me - I started doing _something_ as I was reading the Kawasaki's book. It is embarrassing to recall now, but had I not done that stupid stuff I would not have gotten in the habit of _doing_. As you _do_ things your successes will embolden you and you will have a larger pool of experience to draw from. You need to find something that you can do with limited commitment and demonstrable results, which will in turn embolden you to take on a slightly larger thing next time. I recommend a market that is quick with feedback (which excludes enterprise), and has monetization potential (which rules out large segments of consumers web plays). For example, find a small business with a small problem and solve their problem in a scalable way - you will feel a lot more brave after that especially if you make some sizable money along the way.

It's funny to realize that courage is the _only_ thing that stands between someone like you or me and their entrepreneurial success, yet I don't see a way to short-circuit that simple problem. It seems that working through it step by step is the surest path. Oh well, whatever works, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This post was great.

Equally as valid and interested as the Mixergy review was the dynamic described at play on Hacker News I never picked up on before: How even worthwhile, quality sites that we generally like will experience a backlash here if we feel, even subconsciously, that they are over-exposed on HN.

It may be that we come here specifically for special news or unique insights we don't get on other sites, and we feel disappointed when HN merely reflects "normal" content?

I've never written a backlash or cranky comment, but I do admit I've groaned when I've seen links from certain sites posted, when i've felt they were predictable. I'm trying to figure out why this response gets evoked. Especially when the main reason I come here is for _your_ awesome meta- commentary, not the post itself.

In any case, this post has made commit to being more patient when I see familiar content here.

<comment><USER5> The groan is because:

a) If you're familiar with them, you probably already know what to expect

b) If you don't like them, you don't want to see them

c) If you like them, you've already read it, and

d) If they've been on a lot recently, you can't use # of comments as a judge of quality - they might just be complaints about "Everything Seth Godin says is common sense" or "Jeff Atwood couldn't code his way out of a paper bag", and those are no fun to read.

<comment><USER4> In my case, it's probably mostly d). I don't think I hold HN responsible for bringing me links I've never seen before or must like. But I really do come here for great discussion and insights (like yours right here!), in the comments section.

I'm totally willing to see negative comments, but they really have to bring something to the party. The examples you gave are exactly the kind of thing that would bum me out after a visit here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Has the idea ever been tossed around for a personal blacklist? If you really just hate <http://some_tech_site.com/blog> , and can't bring yourself to ignore it, you would be able to add it to your blacklist under your profile settings, and then any links from that domain will not show up on the front page when signed in.

EDIT: Also, regex pattern matching on the title would be kinda nice too.

/ipad/i

/\d+ (Things|Reasons) You Need (.*)/

<comment><USER5> People usually recommend greasemonkey for that. I've never bothered because like I said in the article, the backlash lasts 2-3 weeks and then the bar for that writer is much higher for them to be submitted. For instance, by Valentine's day, Andrew will be lucky if he can get one interview a week on the front page.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my eBay/Google maps mashup inspired by HN  - <AUTHOR> http://thelocalbay.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea for this site came from a comment from yannis on my prior HN submission for townflier.com. Sadly eBay sent me a form letter rejection for the affiliate network but I like the way the site turned out so I'm launching it anyway to see if anyone else finds it useful.</comment>


Why Postgres - <AUTHOR> http://www.craigkerstiens.com/2012/04/30/why-postgres/ <comment><USER2> I love Postgres, and I usually get grumpy when forced to use Mysql, but ... rather than lots of fluffy features (most of the stuff listed here is not that compelling taken individually), _the_ thing for me about Postgres is that it's solid, reliable, and dependable. It behaves correctly. It has transactions. It has DDL transactions. It can, by and large, be counted on to get things right, rather than take shortcuts. It's a well-crafted tool that you can get a lot of mileage out of if you know what you're doing.

<comment><USER3> In other words, it is what you find yourself sorely wanting when you use MySQL for a non-trivial length of time.

<comment><USER2> Well, yeah, that or some inanimate object to vent my frustrations on by kicking it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting articles. I read part I and part II.

As a long-term mysql user who has dabbled with production Postgres machines I still don't see how Postgres really has any huge advantages that would cause me to want to run it for any new projects and deal with a new and possibly daunting learning curve. Postgres seems to do some things better perhaps, and in general seems to have more flexibility than MySQL. But it also seems to lack focus as a end-to-end db solution.

The clustering / replication complexity of Postgres is a huge issue for me, since scaling databases is not a trivial thing in the best of cases. With postgres, there seem to be 10+ different cluster / replication systems (both open-source and commercial?) and it's just a mess.

Giving people tons of options is great, but ease of use for developers and an amazing & simple out of box experience is so important. MySQL won the hearts and minds of developers this way... and now MongoDB is doing the same thing by improving on what MySQL what able to accomplish. The Postgres team should consider implementing something similar.

<comment><USER5> By choosing Pg over MySQL or Mongo, you are selecting a high-quality, stable product that is on a very slow and steady development trajectory with very few missteps along the way.

If you don't want to be surprised by the interesting and unexpected ways your database functions, choose Postgres.

<comment><USER6> > slow and steady development trajectory

Slow being the operative word. Sharding and JSON support should have been added as basic features years ago.

Now if you need either (very common) PostgreSQL is a non-starter.

<comment><USER7> Patently false.

Skype was supporting tens of millions of _concurrent_ active users on a sharded PostgreSQL setup _years_ ago (like, 2006-07 or so). Yes, the support wasn't native, and they had to write PgBouncer and PL/Proxy to enable that kind of scalability, but they Open Sourced both projects, and they're pretty widely used in many environments for exactly that purpose.

As far as JSON, the HStore extension has been available some time since 8.3, which was released in _2008_. Again, not native (though that's being addressed with 9.2, which should drop any time now), but not particularly difficult to use. A trivial web search shows people using JSON with HStore at least as far back as 2010, if not earlier.

<comment><USER6> Not false.

Skype added sharding support themselves. And it requires you to use stored procedures instead of SQL making it unusable for most users.

And I am talking about native JSON support as a first class citizen. Nobody is going to lock their entire data structure to a third party extension that may or may not disappear.

<comment><USER8> "And I am talking about native JSON support as a first class citizen."

Wait a week for 9.2, please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another cool feature: recursive queries using the WITH common table expressions.

Say you have a table fs <id, name, parent_id> representing a hierarchical filesystem, and you want to print the full path of each file, here's how you can do it in a single query:

      WITH RECURSIVE path(id, name, parent_id, path, parent) AS (
        SELECT id, name, parent_id, '/', NULL FROM fs WHERE id = 1 -- base case
        UNION
        SELECT fs.id, fs.name, fs.parent_id, parentpath.path ||
          CASE parentpath.path WHEN '/' THEN '' ELSE '/' END ||
          fs.name as path, parentpath.path as parent
          FROM fs INNER JOIN path AS parentpath ON fs.parent_id = parentpath.id
      ) SELECT id, name FROM path;

<comment><USER10> I don't know the details but won't that be quite inefficient? (it's not a construct I've seen before - never used Postgres in anger)

You're effectively working with a tree and there are much more relational friendly ways of doing that in SQL.

I know I'm just picking on this specific use but I can't help imagining that recursive querying will always be slow. Would love to hear how it's implemented if that's not the case.

<comment><USER9> All that WITH RECURSIVE does is allow a WITH query to refer to its own output. Beyond that there is no overhead.

Here is the query plan I got for my above query:

      QUERY PLAN
      CTE Scan on path  (cost=292.79..304.41 rows=581 width=104)
        CTE path
          ->  Recursive Union  (cost=0.00..292.79 rows=581 width=72)
              ->  Index Scan using fs_pkey on fs  (cost=0.00..8.27 rows=1 width=40)
                    Index Cond: (id = 1)
              ->  Hash Join  (cost=0.33..27.29 rows=58 width=72)
                    Hash Cond: (public.fs.parent_id = parentpath.id)
                    ->  Seq Scan on fs  (cost=0.00..21.60 rows=1160 width=40)
                    ->  Hash  (cost=0.20..0.20 rows=10 width=36)
                          ->  WorkTable Scan on path parentpath  (cost=0.00..0.20 rows=10 width=36)

<comment><USER10> But that could end up being quite deep couldn't it? Is it not like stacking up an unknown number of correlated queries? Could you even screw it up and have an infinite joining condition?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Could someone that's really familiar with Postgres give me the skinny on replication? I like Postgres a lot, but finally moved all of our data storage to MySQL because, according to the documentation I read just a couple months ago, Postgres couldn't really do multi-master replication.

This post, dated prior to the documentation I read before the switch, seems to suggest it would do it just fine as long as it was asynchronous. I'm not clear though on just how ugly its async replication might be ([http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/high- availability....](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/static/high- availability.html)).

I'd like to use dbmail to store mail in a database replicated across multiple servers (which would need fairly reliable replication), as well as syslog and other logging facilities to sql (where reliability isn't quite so big of a deal).

Is Postgres up to this now, or not?

<comment><USER12> You should use the "this page in other versions" mechanism at the top of the page you linked to so you can see more recent documentation: most of what PostgreSQL has with regards to replication is from versions more recent than 8.4 (the version you were reading).

[http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/high- availability....](http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/high- availability.html)

(I'm curious why you want to do replication for dbmail: it would seem like what you really need/want is partitioning; e-mail metadata, especially with effective indexes, requires a lot of write throughput, and synchronous replication is going to largely cause the same write load on all systems.)

<comment><USER11> Thanks, I hadn't even noticed that link at the top.

(To answer your other question: at the moment our mail load isn't severe enough to pose a problem for synchronous replication, and I'm just aiming for the ability to have multiple mail hosts share the same mail data with no single point of failure. As the mail load outgrows current infrastructure, I'll start partitioning -- although I haven't figured out how to do that just yet. I've considered a distributed file system, but hammer has only just recently started to look like it's up to the task.)

<comment><USER12> You can accomplish that with synchronous multi-slave replication with failover: as far as I can work out in my head right now, the result will be similar to the behavior you will get from a synchronous multi-master setup assuming you can work things out so the slave can be used for read-only queries.

<comment><USER11> I don't think I can do that without writing my own mail daemons for pop and imap, unfortunately, which I'd rather not do at this stage. All of the ones that I know of expect to be able to read/write metadata over the same connection to the same database or filesystem.

Failover setups aren't my favorite option. They seem to be easy to get wrong, and when you get them wrong, they only do wrong things at the exact moment that you most need them to be doing right things.

<comment><USER12> So, if you are doing synchronous multi-master you will also need to do explicit failover (in this case, not from server A to server B, but from server A/B to only server B): otherwise, a partition between the servers would be catastrophic to your data integrity (as there would be no way for the servers to know whether they should start accepting data that might be different from its buddy, as both think the other is offline).

Once you start thinking in terms of multiple servers (whether it be based on replication or partitioning) you have to start thinking about these kinds of complex corner case issues, as you have moved from working with "a server" to "a distributed system", with all of the associated theoretical limits (such as CAP).

<comment><USER11> You're right, although the MySQL binary log used for replication handles this fairly gracefully for reasonable outage periods. Collisions are still possible after a resync, but it tries pretty hard to resolve them using timestamps on the transactions.

I'm working on some software to automatically manage outages, deploying new server instances, re-syncing databases, etc., but that's quite a few steps away from where we're at right now. For near-term purposes, anything that could do as good of a job at multi-master replication as MySQL can would be just fine.

<comment><USER12> I can then only wish you luck in your attempt to take an off-the-shelf system (dbmail) that was designed to be used with an ACID database and plop it on top of what is now an only eventually consistent data store without first rewriting it to tolerate those semantics ;P.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Original author here, after the original post there was so much great feedback that it was worthwhile to publish a part two - <http://craigkerstiens.com/2012/05/07/why-postgres-part-2/>

Additionally there will probably be a third post when Postgres 9.2 releases soon highlighting some of the great new features such as the JSON datatype.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'd add "business risk" into the discussion. Mysql has an interesting road ahead of it, and there are certain people that just won't put open-source Oracle in their critical path.

<comment><USER15> Fortunately, there are at least two drop-in replacements, if Oracle should drop the ball. Percona Server, and MariaDB. Both are based on the well-vetted core of MySQL, and both are continuing to make huge strides in the capabilities and stability of MySQL.

Of course, Oracle hasn't dropped the ball yet; 5.5 was a good, solid release from them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few week ago I discovered Postgres Schemas (worst named feature ever -- nothing to do with SQL schema definitions). Basically, schemas allow you to have multiple databases within a single database. So, you only need to manage (or host/pay for) a single database but each company can have their own schema which gives you complete separation of data across all the tables.

These, together with the Apartment gem for Rails, makes building isolated multi-tenant applications really easy. It also makes migrated to a true multi- database/multi-server/sharded setup much simpler.

<comment><USER17> If you were using Oracle or MS SQL you'd be quite familiar with what Postgres calls a schema.

The SQL standard as I understand it is very vague on how schemas should be implemented beyond the information schema.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't value the underlying database as much anymore since I have been working with Rails apps. The database is just an API. I want to write my code in such a way that I could unplug POSTgres and plug in SQL Server tomorrow without skipping a beat. Using AREL you should largely be able to do that.

<comment><USER19> 1\. No app of significant size will actually allow this. If you've ever tried to switch over a large data set with a high query volume you'll know that it never "just works".

2\. Just because there's an API behind it, doesn't mean that it doesn't matter which one you use. As a trivial example, Linux and OSX are both POSIX but it's hard to make an argument it doesn't matter which you use.

<comment><USER18> I bet after you switched your data over you wrote the conflicting SQL lines in a much more generic way.

<comment><USER19> No, the issue is not conflicting SQL. An ORM solves that problem extremely easily.

It's the fact that query planners and performance optimizations implemented by each database are different, and thus directly porting your current schema and queries doesn't work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is Oracle's ownership of MySQL becoming an issue? I realize it's open source but still it seems like things have become to deteriorate slightly. Is that causing any alarm?

<comment><USER21> Yes and no. Oddly enough, Oracle has owned the most important part of mysql (innodb) for years, so them buying the rest of it was almost a benefit to have it all under one roof. They then went on to put out a very good release (5.5) that didn't suffer from the "don't use it till its in the teens" birthing pains that most previous releases did.

The thing is, most of the improvements in that release were really the work of a bunch of companies that had given up getting their patches accepted upstream and were trading around and maintaining their own patchsets. "The Google patches", "The Facebook patches", and "The Percona patches", etc. Mysql/Oracle brought their long stagnant release up to where the rest of the community had already gotten.

The nice thing is that means its already been proven that if they go dark and just squat on a stale code base for years, its not actually going to hold anything back.

The two things they have done are raise prices, and stop providing source code for new unit tests. Neither is a good thing, but they're pretty trivial in the overall scheme of things.

<comment><USER22> That isn't entirely fair to the InnoDB/MySql developers at Oracle - from what I've heard there has in general been an increase in development activity within Oracle. Some of that is merging patches from downstream, but most of the work has been on other improvements.

Performance in 5.6, for example, has improved a lot even over patched versions - e.g. [https://www.facebook.com/notes/mysql-at-facebook/can- innodb-...](https://www.facebook.com/notes/mysql-at-facebook/can-innodb- do-100k-iops/10150907613720933)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> One thing I appreciate about using Django and its DRM is that it hardly matters what database I use.

If I'm writing SQL by hand I much prefer Postgres to MySQL since it is more standards conforming and has fewer random quirks. But given that Django generates the SQL for me, which database to use is largely a matter of ease of deployment, and on AWS that's MySQL (via RDS) so that's what I use.

</comment><comment><USER24> Here's a link to the previous discussion <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910743>

</comment><comment><USER25> To answer his question, yes virginia, we (people that use MySQL) use replication a lot. Especially at mid-grade levels of scaling where custom sharding and replication middleware hasn't necessitated itself yet but vertical scaling is out of the question.

I'd say the bigger issue with Postgres now is that middleware like <http://code.google.com/p/vitess/> for it hasn't been deployed in the large yet. Most Postgres scaling anecdotes I've heard were:

"Well we put 64 gb of ram in the server and installed a RAID array of SSDs and stopped writing dumb unindexed queries."

Well that's just dandy, but what if my indices don't even fit in the ram of a single machine?

<comment><USER5> > I'd say the bigger issue with Postgres now is that middleware like > <http://code.google.com/p/vitess/> for it hasn't been deployed in the large > yet.

That simply isn't true. Take a look at PgPool (<http://www.pgpool.net/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page>) - it provides many of the same core features as Vitess, goes beyond to provide replication and flexible sharding/partitioning and is a good number of years more mature than Vitess.

PL/Proxy is similar middleware (though implemented as stored procedures) developed by and used at Skype for massive Pg partitioning.

There are dozens more packages like this at Pgfoundry (<http://pgfoundry.org/>). What specifically do you feel is missing?

<comment><USER25> >What specifically do you feel is missing?

A very large deployment of it that has shaken out the bugs.

<comment><USER26> You get the feeling that Postgres needs some marketing. It's a great piece of software but if people can't easily find out if it's been used at massive scale they aren't going to trust it.

Like it or not most deployments of MySQL are probably because people can easily hear about it being used for massive databases. The decision isn't based on technical merits (or lack of).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why are doughnut boxes pink? - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pink-doughnut-boxes-20170525-htmlstory.html <comment><USER2> FTA, not really related to doughnuts: _" Susan Lim was 12 when her parents, three brothers and one sister fled the Khmer Rouge in 1979 for the U.S. The family was taken in by Ngoy, Lim's uncle, who lived in a five-bedroom house in La Habra. When Lim arrived at her uncle's house, it was the first time she had ever seen a refrigerator. "I thought it was a mansion," said Lim, 49. "We were so happy just to see food on the table every day and not having to worry anymore if they will come to kill us today or tomorrow.""_

A sobering anecdote to remember when most of us are having a First-World-Bad- Day.</comment>


The Fine Line – Ryan Lochte Swimming. (NYT Video-Supported Storytelling) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/05/sports/olympics-swimmer-ryan-lochte.html <comment><AUTHOR> I quite like how this approach to storytelling/demonstration has been put together.

Sure, they hijack the scrollwheel, and there isn't a lot of textual content on the page, but it is done very well in my opinion.

I thought it would be appreciated here (I have no connection with NYT or this story)

A++, would scroll again.</comment>


How Old Are Silicon Valley's Top Founders? Here's the Data - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/how-old-are-silicon-valleys-top-founders-heres-the-data/ <comment><USER2> Stolen from my buddy Abe. Poor journalism.

[http://abe.is/the-best-age-to-raise-money/](http://abe.is/the-best-age-to- raise-money/)

<comment> bjelkeman-again It looks very much like it. A shame if they did and didn't credit him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Seeing that data overlaid with number of people starting companies would be really valuable.

I suspect that the average "cost" of starting a company in your 20s is much lower than later in life (smaller salary to give up, less chance of family etc).

The really interesting (relevant?) question would be chance of success over age.

<comment><USER4> Then of course you would want to see what is the percentage of startups that failed at any specific age. Maybe it is cheap to start a startup when you are 20, but you fail more than when you are older and know what in the world you are doing.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you know more when you are older. Knowledge comes with experience and if you never found a startup in your life, you won't have much more experience no matter what age. You become only more risk averse.

<comment><USER4> I was part of a startup when I was 20 and I knew _nothing_. I didn't understand business, I didn't understand money, I didn't understand value, and I barely knew how to develop software in a competent manor. When I was 20 it was still okay to sleep on a couch for months because I saved $80, I could barely comprehend how insignificant $80 is to a company. I was making something cool that I wanted and the fact that the company wanted it too was neat and frankly lucky. Given another ten years of just living your knowledge of how the world works will grow considerably. Maybe you do become a little more risk averse, but you definitely become a lot less stupid. When you are 20 you have a very hard time judging how good an idea is so one is as good as another. Given enough 20 year olds one is bound to be lucky :) When you are 30 you should be able to toss out many ideas most of which are just bad which is why I would expect them to fail less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really hate when people default to percentages to display data for incredibly small sample sizes. I know by the very nature of the data there is not that much individual information available but the sample size is 41 companies. Really?

</comment><comment><USER7> This data is worthless because it shows nothing about the _distribution_ of founder success. It gives no indication of expected value.

Better data would provide the average success of funded companies by the age of the founders. This would tell us whether or not younger or older founders are being under-funded.

The expected value of older founders could easily be higher if they have a lower variance but greater average success. Or it could be that younger founders are severely under-funded because the top-heaviness of the winners vastly outweighs the higher number of failures.

Who knows? The data in the article tells us nothing but how old people happen to be in this community.

<comment><USER8> It's probably not worthless. It just depends what question you're interested in answering.

Expected value is a good one, but personally I was just interested in knowing the ages of all the founders.

It's absolutely worthless for an investor who's trying to predict success, though. And since founders are investors of their own time, it's worthless to help you decide whether you should start a company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"...manually searching LinkedIn profiles for year graduated, we were able to generate a list of founders for 35 of the 41 start-ups, and to determine an approximate age for the majority of them."

I think there's a statistically significant variance in a graduation date versus a persons actual age. Lot's of people in my CS program were above the age of 25 but if all you're checking is the graduation year then according to this graph, we would all be put into the 20-24 bucket.

Granted, they acknowledge that their data is heavily biased given their small sample size and given the fact that it only charts successful startups.

</comment><comment><USER10> When they complain about having to get the data by hand, I assumed they were crawling through at least hundreds of profiles. Instead, it's just 35. If I had to guess, that's also a contributing reason as to why the first bar chart is in %, it masks how laughably small their sample is.

Just because those founders have companies that went on to $1billion+ doesn't make them disproportionately significant in a statistical sense. Although it feels like they try to imply that with "disproportionately influential dataset".

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a decent start. However, the data set is statistically insignificant. Only 52 founders? HBR can do much better than this.

<comment><USER12> Agree. I read the part where they "were limited by having to do manual research" on LinkedIn: essentially typing in the founders' names and hitting return. They did this 52 times. Get some grad students and put them to work. You'll have a couple thousand in no time.

I once emailed Reid Hoffman (a friend knows him) proposing to do an analysis of the life-cycle of an entrepreneur (age, what jobs they held before founding, repeat founder success, etc.) I never heard back from him; I'm sure he's got better things to do. But I wish LinkedIn would set up a data-mining department, like OKCupid's. They could do some really interesting stuff.

<comment><USER13> LI has a very large data mining department, they just don't publish what they are doing. Just look on LI for employees of LinkedIn that are data scientists; it's a substantial team. Source: I'm trying to hire data scientists and I am learning where they are...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Selecting companies that are valued at over $1B yet haven't IPO'd yet is a really narrow set and a moving target. Why not include companies that were venture-backed and have IPO'd? And/or companies that were acquired for over $1B?

For me the most interesting part of the underlying data is the number of Chinese companies.

</comment><comment><USER15> There are probably very few founders over 50. Given that there is at least one success in that bracket, I'll bet that founders over 50 have the best odds of any age group.

<comment><USER16> Not least because any entrepreneurs of that age are probably successful serial entrepreneurs. Otherwise, they wouldn't even be able to get any funding at that age.

<comment><USER17> I actually know several people that have gotten funding after age 50. Just one example, but the first startup I worked at had a CEO who was around 50 years old, and it was the best place I've ever worked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Data show surprisingly young founders in the billion dollars clubs but I'd be interested to see the breakdown of tech/business founders among the 20-24 yo founders

<comment><USER18> You mean the extremely bubbly my series A-F silicon valley VC valuation billion dollar club. Also known as the $100 million of which I own 5% as a founder reality club.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Did they make the source data available? It's only about 40 companies, right? Should be pretty easy to show us the details.

</comment><comment><USER20> And here are the reasons for that: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc- istan-6-th...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-the- isms-of-venture-funded-technology/)

Text search for 'chickenhawking' to get to the meat of it.</comment>


Less mentioned books programmers should read - <AUTHOR> http://jdefr.swippet.com/ I compiled a list of my favorite books I think most would enjoy reading. They are in my opinion highly beneficial for a programmer to read. <comment><USER2> Although some of these are good reads, I would not go so far as to say programmers should read them. More and more as the time from idea to launch gets shorter, the talent does not lie so much in the deep language knowledge but the ability to elaborate on ideas and to foster benefical conversations across disciplines.

Books like Switch and Made to Stick now go first on my "new coders should read this book" list, and I dont expect that trend to stop.

<comment><USER3> Not only that, but most of the books he recommends are simply too narrowly focused to be useful to software engineers in general. It's useful to understand most of these things at a conceptual level, but you don't need a book to do that - Wikipedia and some thinking will suffice.

I can't imagine, for example, why every developer needs to understand linking and loading at the binary level. In a modern language, those problems are solved for you, to the point that I'd consider switching platforms if they weren't.

I used the computer systems book when I took a computer architecture course in college, and although it did provide some interesting thought exercises, I can't say it's had any effect on my professional career. I certainly wouldn't recommend reading it on your own unless you're planning on working at a level below the OS (and if you are, you probably already know about this book).</comment></comment>


Harlan Ellison Sues Claiming Fox's 'In Time' Rips Off Sci-Fi Story - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/harlan-ellison-sues-claiming-foxs-235987

<comment><USER2> Harlan Ellison is kind of a dick. He may have a point about In Time, but he's a dick, nevertheless.

<comment><USER3> Still I endorse his efforts to prevent Justin Timberlake from starting an acting career.</comment></comment>


MH370 Pilot Flew a Suicide Route on His Home Simulator, Matching Final Flight - <AUTHOR> http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/07/mh370-pilot-flew-suicide-route-on-home-simulator.html?mid=twitter-share-di <comment><USER2> The confident assertion in the headline is contradicted by one of the later paragraphs:

 _" However, it's not entirely clear that the recovered flight-simulator data is conclusive. The differences between the simulated and actual flights are significant, most notably in the final direction in which they were heading. It's possible that their overall similarities are coincidental — that Zaharie didn't intend his simulator flight as a practice run but had merely decided to fly someplace unusual."_

<comment><USER3> Yeah it looks another sensational header, but public don't know any details. How many test flights did he performed on simulator?

If 100+ there will be always something close enough. On the map it looks like the final path is off by at least few hundreds kilometers off.

<comment><USER4> Seriously? Those two paths are off by a few hundred KMs, but are nevertheless very very similar.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, especially the beginning of the route, taken to avoid Malaysian airspace. Why would someone do that in the simulator? Also, having practically spent half of my free time flying around in FSX I can tell you, flying over any ocean is boring, it's not something you do for fun. You fly over the ocean to get somewhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>