HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.05724v1 <comment><USER2> Interesting research. We won't know how impressive it is until the kinds of people that break Tor give it a thorough analysis. Otherwise, it might be a scheme that simply _de-anonymizes_ users faster than the competition. I'll add that combining anonymity and performance seems to be one of the hardest security problems to get right with so much left to learn. So, I don't trust anything that does that, including Tor.

Asynchronous, non-real-time schemes that look like vanilla web traffic are the best. Especially using covert channels. However, my method is to do face-to- face with possible and otherwise use burner PC's, LiveCD's, and random Wifi hotspots. Tor or proxies optionally as extra layer of difficulty depending on what I'm doing.

<comment><USER3> >I'll add that combining anonymity and performance seems to be one of the hardest security problems to get right with so much left to learn.

A certain penalty in both available bandwidth and latency seems unavoidable in any distributed onion anonymization system, but one _practical_ issue may actually be something that I think doesn't get brought up nearly often enough in this context: a plain and simple lack of _raw_ bandwidth. In other words, more practical anonymity would be yet another emergent benefit/application of near universal FTTH gigabit+ class connections. While some applications can use as much bandwidth and as low latency as it's possible to provide, many popular, commonly used ones on the present Internet instead have a value beyond which there are few further benefits. One of the hungrier applicatinos for example is streaming video, but once someone is stably hitting ~50-100 Mbps they're already at what a full quality Blu-ray would offer, even without H.265, and with H.265 even 4K is going to look pretty great.

So if a given anonymity network had an overall overhead of 90%, or even 95%, well that's certainly significant. But at the same time if someone has 1 Gbps to throw at it, then even 5-10% remaining would still result in more _effective_ bandwidth available then large percentages of the population have raw right now, and more importantly enough for most of the current popular web applications. It would also have additional implications for the health and participation rates of the anonymity network, particular given that fiber links are symmetrical. These networks in general needs significant donations of bandwidth on the part of users to work effectively. When many, if not most users don't have that much available period then that can be tough: for somebody stuck on a 6/1 ADSL link giving up even a few hundred kbps could be painful. Whereas with an abundance, many if not most users would never even notice having 500+ Mbps serving as relay capacity at all times. This would further improve the overall value of the network, encouraging further use, and creating a virtuous circle.

Doing more with less is certainly very important, but no one should lose sight of how much in computer science has come from just plain having more. Anonymity networks would be best if they weren't "anonymity networks" per se, but rather simply "the network", as in what most people could use to accomplish anything on the Internet they'd want to. Ubiquitous encryption has been aided by better coding, but the most significant boost has come from having an abundance of computing resources, to the point where the overhead of encryption simply is irrelevant to the vast majority of users vs the benefits to security. An abundance of (symmetrical) bandwidth could enable a similar leap forward in anonymity online. It's another reason why we should really be pushing hard for major last mile information infrastructure improvements, and it's so unfortunate that the USA in particular has grossly underinvested and allowed companies to set the agenda there (unlike with electricity, phones and roads, which received major national pushes to the ultimate benefit of the whole country).

<comment><USER4> > One of the hungrier applicatinos for example is streaming video, but once > someone is stably hitting ~50-100 Mbps they're already at what a full > quality Blu-ray would offer, even without H.265, and with H.265 even 4K is > going to look pretty great.

When more bandwidth gets deployed someone will roll out more bandwidth- consuming video.

near and mid term: 4k, 3D, 10bit, 4:4:4, 60fps, lossless sound

long term: 120fps, 8k, light field 3D

<comment><USER2> And that's not opinion: that's a fact of life in tech that repeats endlessly. Induced demand, Jevons paradox, Parkinson's law... the principle shows up endlessly.

Now, what effect it would have on a 1Gbit anonymity network is anyone's guess. All the streaming and web apps on my network don't really impact its normal performance because they're much slower than it. So, this concern might not affect what the other commenter proposes in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If those figures (93Gb/s) are right and represents a real-world scenario, and not a lab test, then it's really impressive.

The following quote from the article highlights the difference between HORNET and Tor:

"Unlike onion routing protocols that use global re-routing through overlay networks (e.g., Tor [23] and I2P [47]), HORNET uses short paths created by the underlying network architecture to reduce la- tency, and is therefore bound by the network's physical intercon- nection and ISP relationships. This is an unavoidable constraint for onion routing protocols built into the network layer [29, 42]."

<comment><USER6> So does that mean that traffic on HORNET is viewable by one's ISP? (Sorry if this is a noob question)

<comment><USER7> They would see that you were communicating (because by necessity, all your stuff passes through them) but not who to, because they couldn't strip off the next layer of the onion. Much like Tor.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, Julian.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Its interesting that TOR takes a circuit based approach and these guys use a packet based approach... its the same thing that happened in telecom over a decade ago. (its analogous, anyway)

</comment><comment><USER9> One thing I suspect widespread use of onion routing will need are compatible anonymous reputation systems. I'd _really_ like to see work in this area.

I'm aware of two proposed systems, both largely academic: FAUST and Fair Anonymity:

[https://gnunet.org/node/1704](https://gnunet.org/node/1704)

[http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4707v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.4707v1.pdf)

One idea is that older (and still trustworthy) tokens become reliable and more valuable, encouraging parties to 1) keep their tokens for a long time and 2) behave themselves. As I recall, both operate with the concept of a token server. In the case of FAUST, tokens are requested unblinded (that is, from a non-Tor IP), but are anonymous and cannot be associated with the requestor after the fact.

If there's other or more recent work, I'd really like to hear about them.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm going to have to look at this closely. My first thought here is that it seems impossible to get high performance without leaking at least some form of sub-channel signaling about communications, but I don't yet understand the real "trick" behind HORNET.

</comment><comment><USER11> What stands in the way of deployment of this for general usage? Invention, disclosure, coding or what?

</comment><comment><USER12> Url changed from [https://www.dailydot.com/politics/hornet-tor-anonymity- netwo...](https://www.dailydot.com/politics/hornet-tor-anonymity-network), which summarizes it and embeds it, yet doesn't link to it.</comment>


Our Brave New World of 4K Displays - <AUTHOR> http://blog.codinghorror.com/our-brave-new-world-of-4k-displays/ <comment><USER3> I wish the author commented on whether or not he can view text comfortably at 1:1 scaling. 27" seems pretty small for that resolution, probably borderline.

As soon as you start playing with scaling you begin to lose the real estate of the monitor. Sure, things will look smooth but I wouldn't want to drop $700 on a 4k monitor only to have to scale it. At 200% scaling you end up with identical real estate as a 1080p monitor.

In case anyone is wondering, Googling shows that this monitor is also SST which is a good thing. It means on the inside there's only 1 actual panel instead of 2 panels stitched together. A lot of 4k monitors still run MST (the worse alternative to SST).

<comment><USER4> I have a BDM4065UC [1] which is a 4k 40" display, and I scale things up almost all the time. With the same number of pixels in less area, I don't see how you could avoid doing so.

I don't scale things as far as 200%, so I get more screen real estate, but if you aren't willing to scale at all, you might be disappointed after upgrading to 4k.

[1] [http://www.philips.co.uk/c-p/BDM4065UC_00/brilliance-led- bac...](http://www.philips.co.uk/c-p/BDM4065UC_00/brilliance-led-backlit-lcd- display)

<comment><USER5> I use the same with no scaling. I just wish I had a lower desk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If we keep improving the DPI, then just having ever more beefy graphics card isn't going to scale. People tend to forget that graphics cards are really focussed on rendering 3D games, and the vast majority of our daily computer use does not involve that at all. Rendering 2D path graphics is much, _much_ more common.

We need hardware accelerated path rendering we want to render text at those high resolutions fast efficiently. Thankfully, there have been people working on this for a while now, like Mark Kilgard at NVIDIA:

[http://www.slideshare.net/Mark_Kilgard/gtc-2014-nvidia- path-...](http://www.slideshare.net/Mark_Kilgard/gtc-2014-nvidia-path- rendering)

It's covered by patents though, so I'm not sure how open this particular solution is.

<comment><USER7> Since when is desktop 2D graphics rendering a performance an issue ?

I understand the mobile story - they need to conserve energy + work on low end devices - but I doubt you're driving those 4k screens with ARM/Atom CPUs, low end integrated graphics chips and 2GB ram - once you have those giant screens you can fit a desktop machine somewhere as well and those aren't lacking the horsepower to draw 2D graphics.

<comment><USER6> That 8K near the end of that post is _four_ times as many pixels to render as 4K. It's a surface area, it scales quadratically.

On top of that, the more pixels you have, the more a high frame rate matters to make animations look smooth. Sure, that might mostly just be scrolling on a webpage, but people care about this stuff. It's also physically less tiring for the eyes.

(Don't forget that, mobile includes laptops too - I'd like a high-res screen on my next laptop without the battery draining like crazy)

<comment><USER8> Yes, doubling the screen on one side raises the pixel count by 4x... but right now 3D graphics cards have at least a couple of orders of magnitude more graphics power than they need to drive a conventional 2D display, and 3 or 4 isn't out of the question, frankly. It really isn't a problem in 2D. Compared to any modern 3D game it's still a walk in the park for them. They've been overprovisioned for 2D work for a long time now. Even non-3D cards were getting pretty powerful before it just wasn't worth shipping 2D-only cards anymore, really, and that was a long time ago, and graphics cards have gotten scarily more powerful since then.

<comment><USER9> I am not a graphics card hardware expert, but I thought that the current tail end of the pipeline (shaders) basically was a massively parallel pixel handling engine. And that the hardware for that has been getting more and more generalized because of GPU compute.

Is it that inefficient to bend modern graphics card shaders to the task of rendering obscene numbers of pixels without the front end 3d geometry calculations?

<comment><USER7> Problem is GPUs are build for triangle rasterisation and that part is still baked in to hardware for performance. You can use hack stuff on top of the 3D pipeline to render vector graphics but you need to transform geometry and do triangulation which isn't really efficient and can't be done on the GPU efficiently. Coupled with overhead of talking to the GPU trough drivers and you end up being CPU bound and not a lot faster than the CPU rendering.

The equation changes when you increase screen resolution as the cost of setting up GPU to render is determined by geometry not by resolution and GPU rasterization is practically free compared to CPU which gets slower as you increase the resolution - so at the high enough resolution the driver overhead might matter less.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Correct me if I'm wrong, but Displayport 1.2 can only provide 4K@60Hz via MST, which is something like simulating two vertical displays as one? I've heard this approach causes problems with some apps/OSes. Why can't they just start making displays and graphic cards with Displayport 1.3?

<comment><USER11> Displayport 1.2 can handle 4k@60hz without MST.

MST is, to my understanding, a cost savings on the panel manufacturer side.

Driving a display over a line is a matter of bandwidth. An MST monitor and a single panel monitor both have the same number of pixels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I went for 4K recently, however, I went for real 4K, as in 4096 pixels across rather than a mere 3840. So that is resolution dialed up 'to 11'. I also went for 31" rather than anything larger as I didn't want to 'crane my neck' to see the top of the see of pixels.

For me it is actually important to see individual pixels, this I can do on my 4K mega-screen. For me 31" was the 'sweet spot', 27" or 24" would just not be practical.

I also stayed with the one screen, for me I get 4 'HD laptop screens' which is what I want, to have the equivalent of 12 - not sure I would be that productive with a gazillion of windows open.

What surprised me was how well different devices do. I plugged in my Chromebook on the HDMI input and it just worked. My Chromebook is lowest of the low, designed for an 8 year old, I am not even sure it has things like a CPU or memory, but it just works on 4K, very nicely.

Obviously I have a real PC with linux to drive the screen, I did need to create the 4096 modes as it would only do regular 3840 out the box.

One feature these monitors have is the ability to run more than one input with two inputs driving the screen side by side. So you can get your refresh rates even with lame hardware if you don't mind using two cables. (These can go to the same graphics card or two PC's).

If you are a developer where the bottleneck is the speed of your own brain (rather than the graphics card) then I highly recommend going 4K. Big is good but there is a limit to how big which is tied in to the vertical height - <USER2> don't want to be staring at the ceiling.

</comment><comment><USER13> With the number of Amazon affiliate links this post has, how come it doesn't get flagged as spam? Is it the authors celebrity?

<comment><USER14> > Is it the authors celebrity?

Kinda, yes. The author is Jeff Atwood, founder of StackOverflow (you probably don't need a link) and Discourse ([1], ruby-based modern open forum software). He's also a hardware "enthusiast", to say the least, such posts where he's all excited about his new shiny shiny thingie are not uncommon on his blog. As such (and because he's probably already full of $$$), I wouldn't say the affiliate money is his primary motivation to blog this, I think he writes a geek post _then_ puts Amazon affiliated links because he can, but maybe I'm naive.

[1] [http://www.discourse.org/](http://www.discourse.org/)

<comment><USER13> Say we're looking at $500 per sale @ 10% Amazon commish = $50 a sale for just the monitors/graphics cards he's pimping. But it's a 30 day cookie and many here have Amazon prime, so we'll call it $100.

Say the number 1 spot on HN gets him 10,000 views. 1% buy rate:

10,000 views * 0.01 buy rate * $100 commish per user = $10,000

Dudes expected to bank 10k from this single post.

Guess that explains why he doesn't write about USB sticks.

<comment><USER15> _But it 's a 30 day cookie and many here have Amazon prime, so we'll call it $100._

Last time I checked an Amazon cookie lasts about 24 hours. Also, honestly what is your problem with his Amazon affiliate ? It is not like you are forced to buy a monitor if you follow his link. I'm more interested in what he has to say than in actually buying a display now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you build a Gaming computer with NVIDIA cards isn't it basically equivalent to a inexpensive deep learning setup?

</comment><comment><USER17> 27 is an annoying size for coding with multi monitors IMO. In landscape mode you've got a lot of width but not enough height to fill your field of view. But turning it vertically gives you way too much height and you crick your neck.

The right height IMO is 22-24 in portrait or 30 inch 16:10 or 32 inch 16:9 or larger in landscape. If you're going to maximize your screen area, maximize in both directions.

<comment><USER18> This is why I totally prefer the Chromebook Pixel aspect ratio for coding. I wish you could get 3:2 240dpi+ 27-30" monitors. Being stuck using 16:9 for anything other than watching a movie or show sucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Im curious for more in depth detail about the differences between 1440p at native scale or 4k at 2x scale, does the loss of effective screen space not negate any gains in crispness? I've only recently upgraded from two 1080p screens to a single 2560x1440 screen and I'm finding the extra space incredibly useful. That being said I absolutely love the fine text on my retina macbook.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just don't see the point, I have a 2015 Retina Macbook Pro and a 1080p 24" Dell monitor and can hardly feel any difference. It might have to do with the scaling though.

I wish they stopped with the pixel race or at least made it easy for the user to opt-out. 1080p is still pretty great for any mid size laptop and maybe then I'd be able to run Mission Control at more than 5fps.

<comment><USER21> Stop with the pixel race? Seriously? Monitors have been stagnant for a decade. Look at how many laptop screens are stuck STILL at 1366X768. What pixel race are you talking about?

<comment><USER22> I think that manufacturers have been busy pushing small screen pixel density for tablets & phones. So there has been a race just not the forefront at the large display or laptop markets.

<comment><USER21> Agreed, however, the context wasn't tablets & phones.

<comment><USER22> It is not the context, but that context could help explain the lack of R&D at those segments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is there any fully featured software to handle chopping these up into 4 virtual monitors, or basically just highly efficient window management so one's not constantly fritzing around resizing things?

<comment><USER24> Divvy? [http://alternativeto.net/software/divvy/](http://alternativeto.net/software/divvy/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone have experience coding on 21:9 screens like the Acer XR341CK?

<comment><USER26> I have a 21:9 display, the LG 34UM95. Overall I like it, but I wish I had gotten the curved version (I think). It's so wide that I find the edges a little bit unusable for full-time stuff. It's nice to keep notes and things off to the sides.

I went this route because I didn't want a 3-monitor setup, and a 2-monitor has the bezels in your direct view, or one monitor off to the side. My current setup is the 34UM95, and a 24" Apple Cinema display (on a different machine) directly above the 21:9 display.

The curved version has come down a bit in price, I may try swapping to that.</comment></comment>


Regression of GERD symptoms using dietary supplementation - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/GERD/comments/adt6vh/regression_of_gastroesophageal_reflux_disease/ <comment><USER2> (2006 study, and surprisingly not placebo-controlled)</comment>


How to Write The Perfect Headline: The Top Words Used in Viral Headlines - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bufferapp.com/the-most-popular-words-in-most-viral-headlines

<comment><USER2> You Won't Believe these 7 habits of top headline writers!</comment>


Show HN: Grow your SaaS through partner and affiliate programs - <AUTHOR> http://www.partnersspot.com <comment><AUTHOR> I built this because I had a hard time launching an affiliate program for my last products.

If you are you planning to start an affiliate/partner program for your SaaS, please let me know, I'll try to help you.</comment>


Rouge: A pure-ruby code highlighter that is compatible with pygments - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/jneen/rouge <comment><USER2> Hopefully this will be the perfect replacement for Pygments in Jekyll..?</comment>


Hack of Democrats' Accounts Was Wider Than Believed - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/08/11/us/politics/democratic-party-russia-hack-cyberattack.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_dk_20160811&nl=dealbook&nl_art=10&nlid=65508833&ref=headline&te=1&referer= <comment><USER2> Seth Rich was not Russian. Or a Hacker.

But Carlos Slim has to protect "the narrative" and his millions invested in Clinton</comment>


Soros, the Open Society Foundations, and the Continued Political Hacks - <AUTHOR> https://www.riskbasedsecurity.com/2016/08/soros-the-open-society-foundations-and-the-continued-political-hacks/ <comment><USER2> There is alot at stake in blaming Russia for the breaches. This was broadcasted, without evidence? and readily accepted by the public.

For this reason it's essential that some security experts outside the standard government contractor "experts" validate or at least weigh the evidence implicating the Russian _state_ as the attackers.

\- Security contractors have financial interests in going along with the popular political line / pleasing the govt.

\- Groupthink

\- Russian actor involvement does not mean Russian state involvement

\- There's benefit in claiming, only a state actor could have done this, to defend one's security system that is in fact weak enough that several non- state actors _could have_ penetrated it

<comment><USER3> 1) Now we know Manafort potentially received a cash payment of more than $12 million. Which, I mean, seeing how good he is at running a campaign is clearly money based on competence!

2) Donald Trump's campaign's ONLY intervention in the entire GOP platform was to remove anti-Putin language from the platform re: Ukraine.

3) Not only that, but just days before the RNC, Carter Paige, one of Trump's foreign policy advisers traveled to Russia and gave a speech attacking America's policies towards Russia, calling America's focus on democratization and fighting inequality "hypocritical."

4) The Intelligence community has confirmed that Russian Intelligence is responsible for the hacking of the DNC, which is an obvious attempt to harm Hillary Clinton's campaign.

5) Furthermore, Donald Trump called on Russia to release/hack any emails they could get their hands on.

6) Trump's campaign manager has ties to pro-Putin oligarchs who were propped up by the Kremlin. This isn't new information. As long ago as 2005, there were calls to McCain's people to try and do something about Manafort because he was working against American interests in the region.

7) Trump has praised Putin numerous times, calling him a far better leader than Obama.

8) Donald Trump has taken an anti-NATO stance.

<comment><USER4> Do you have a link to evidence in support of #4?

#5 was as expected, taken out of context. All Trump said was that if the Russian did hack Hillary's email, that they release the 'lost/deleted' ones, something FBI wants very much as well.

#7 that isn't very surprising considering Obama's policies are so far to the left of most Republicans and frankly so seldom make any sense.

#8 again, not surprisingly that this was taken out of context by someone. Trump correctly pointed out that NATO has serious issues that need some tough love if they're going to be resolved.

<comment><USER5> Can you provide a link with evidence it wasn't? Because every article I've seen cites Russia. Applying Occam's razor and asking "Who benefits?" along with everything about Trump's campaign manager, along with proposed policies re: anti-nato and pro-Russian regional invasions, it all leads to Trump being an unwitting or witting agent of Russia. Trump wants some of that oligarch money. Anyone who doesn't see that is being willfully ignorant.

What I love most is how Obama is hated because he's a Muslim agent (despite literally zero evidence), but here's an actual agent of the former-USSR trying to steal an election and these guys are after Hillarys email management. Selective paranoia apparently.

<comment><USER6> So just to be clear, you have zero evidence to back up your assertion.

<comment><USER7> It wasn't his assertion. The user who made the assertion posted evidence that you can respond to if you like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The question we have now is can it be done by enemies of freedom and still lead to more freedom?

There is the logic of polarisation, of fight - both sides use whatever comes their way to weaken the opposite. Russia wants to weaken the USA, so they expose the political dirt to destabilize, and that works in the short term - but I like to think that in the long term it removes the dirt and makes the free system stronger.

The same thing: [https://stopagitprop.com/2016/08/13/exposing-edward- snowden-...](https://stopagitprop.com/2016/08/13/exposing-edward-snowden-the- xxcommittees-john-schindler-offers-the-counterintelligence-perspective/) \- it escapes them that sometimes to reform and to make the system better in the long term you need to weaken it in the short term.

Update:

And yet the same thing with the ex-soviet spies (for example [https://www.google.pl/search?q=ex- soviet+spy+youtube](https://www.google.pl/search?q=ex-soviet+spy+youtube)) who defected to the west - all they see is the destabilisation caused by the western activists - they don't see how the whole value of the west is based on the improvements that happen because of the activism.

And this is not to say that there is no danger of destabilisation - it is a dangerous thing - as we have seen in the Near East recently. But we must face the danger with courage - because giving up the freedoms would make the western system the same as the other side. And it is probably not as dangerous as the dictatorship agents thinks it is. The dictatorships have a lot of internal tensions - if the dictator looses grip - it all goes boom - but in a democracy the tensions are released in small portions - by the activism.

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't paint the world in such stark colors. The only reason you would even consider these people "enemies" is because the respective governments having chosen to be on collision course.

Technicalities aside, these "revelations" should serve as a reminder that when it comes to politics (including every version of democracy), there is a shiny veneer of righteousness, and underneath is intricate machinery that serves the sole purpose of controlling and manipulating the population. Both the US and Russia are extremely good at this in their own ways. The Cold War presented plenty of opportunities to refine the craft.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cyber war is much preferable to real war. Letting Putin throw the secrets of his enemies into the light to influence an election is probably going to stoke a retaliatory response but another generation of humans will grow up without total war upon them.

Mutually assured destruction is a hell of a deterrent.

<comment><USER11> A full on cyber war would be devastating if well orchestrated. Fortunately for us, it's all been piecemeal so far.

Full on cyber war to me looks like a erased economy by zeroing every asset and liability in the banks and funds, with pre-corrupted backups. It looks like bricked firmware on every router, industrial process controller, police/fire radio system, public utilities, even vehicles. It would be like an EMP hit. With nobody getting paid, no emergency services or utilities, public unrest would do all the work.

If they do it right, it's like Einstein's quote about world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones.

<comment><USER12> Why zero assets, and not fudge the numbers for your benefit?

Why brick routers and SCADA systems, and not spread malware or cause damage?

Why shut down the police/fire radio system, and not air false calls?

Chaos and misinformation is more useful than simply shutting it all down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [https://www.wikileaks.org/clinton- emails/Clinton_Email_Septe...](https://www.wikileaks.org/clinton- emails/Clinton_Email_September_Release/C05778285.pdf)

I'm sure he's just a concerned citizen.

</comment><comment><USER14> -Re: attribution

You'd think with the number of high profile cyber-sec wonks on here beating the It Was Russia™ drum, I wonder what they would think of Binney's statements, and technicalities he points out absent from such hollow saber rattling?

Then again, if what took place in the shadows is coming to light is true and can be cross verified, then you'd think that would ultimately be valuable to the public…

</comment><comment><USER15> We, the people of Eastern Europe, already know this geopolitical Satan intimately!

<comment> saiya-jin yeah, he is well known a __hole, that 's for sure. don't look for any altruism/good intentions in his actions, rather ice cold calculation on how to make profit on it in longer term, regardless of consequences

<comment><USER16> It requires quite a leap to disregard all his public statements and activities, the range of pro-democracy organisations that he has provided financial support for, his advocacy of democracy and the concept of the open society in general, his long-term advocacy for Karl Popper as a major voice in political philosophy and all the other things that point towards a genuine, coherent and consistent belief in the essential qualities a society needs to preserve peace and a functioning civil society.

Most of the anti-Soros conspiracies I have heard have been obviously either ideologically driven or transparent pieces of realpolitik. On balance I'd still bet on the man being motivated by altruism even if you conclude he is wrong-headed in the his beliefs or methods.

<comment> james-watson So riddle me this, if there are no borders demarcating countries, what exactly is the definition of a country?

The open borders zealots like Soros never seem to have a clear answer to this.

<comment><USER16> I'm not sure I believe in radically open borders. I'm certainly not saying I agree with Soros on everything. I'm simply saying that people who believe he has sinister intentions are staking out a fairly extreme position.

It comes back to a tendency that I feel more and more is the most pernicious influence of all in the public sphere - the inability of people to believe that those on the other side of a debate are reasonable, rational, intelligent people who are doing their best to solve difficult problems. We (and I include myself here) have a deep-rooted impulse to characterise the other side as either charlatans, crooks or imbeciles.

Taking someone seriously who has reached different conclusions to oneself or has a different worldview triggers such cognitive dissonance that we'd prefer to ascribe to them either nefarious motives or else some kind of mental deficiency.

<comment> james-watson This isn't a morality issue. Soros is a very clever, rational, and self serving individual. This is currently the model citizen, as we are all supposed to rationally optimize our own individual utility within the free market.

Soros is a financial speculator, so he literally makes money off chaos. He made his billions by betting against the Bank of England. Everything he is doing to destabilize Europe and the West makes perfect sense from his point of view. He is simply rationally maximizing his own utility given the tools at his disposal. This isn't immoral, its rationally amoral.

Soros is the perfect counterexample to libertarian fantasies of rational self- interest-run societies. Because it becomes very clear very quickly that one person's self interest is another person's dystopian nightmare.

Childish good and evil narratives don't apply here. It is just a very clear case of good intentions causing immense harm. When there is profit to be made off chaos, you are economically incentivizing it, and will receive more of it.

<comment><USER16> Again - you're making quite a leap here.

All his public statements are about promoting stability, democracy and the open society. If your hypothesis is that wants to promote chaos to help him profit from speculation there is no way to do that without also ascribing to him direct intentionality on the matter. He can't 'unconsciously' be creating chaos and 'accidentally' profiting. The cause-and-effect feedback look is too tortuous for this to be a rational explanation for his actions.

So pick your position. He's either a duplicitous puppet-master with no sincere motivation aside from increasing his own wealth - or he is a sincere believer in freedom and democracy - even if he is deluded or incorrect about the long- term effects of his actions.

Note that the second position allows you to believe he still wants to increase his personal wealth - it allows for the possibility that he is a hypocrite to a greater or lesser degree. But there is clear blue water between that and many of the Soros-theories that sound to me like barking mad wingnut fodder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Nothing in this data leads me to believe Soros does anything more than he states he does. There doesn't seem to be any hidden agenda or any evil master- plan.

<comment><USER18> The fact the agenda isn't hidden does not make it less evil.

I remind you that Soros (through his Open Society Foundations) supports illegal immigration and people smuggling into the EU: [http://news.sky.com/story/sky-finds-handbook-for-eu-bound- mi...](http://news.sky.com/story/sky-finds-handbook-for-eu-bound- migrants-10346437)

His organizations and owned media regularly attack every politician or activist who is against uncontrolled immigration, all over the Europe.

His goal apparently is to induce religious and racial tensions, destabilize Europe with them and finally break the EU (he already achieves that, see Brexit). And who benefits the most on European countries problems and EU dismantle?

Russia.

<comment><USER19> That someone supports a political agenda you disagree with does not make them nefarious and this kind of rhetoric really spoils the whole political process.

There are a lot of humanitarian reasons why someone might support migration to Europe from an active war zone, you know.

<comment><USER18> > migration to Europe from an active war zone

What slowly turns Europe into active war zone itself...

It's not about 'political agenda I disagree', it's about actions and their results.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, and it's totally okay to argue that there's too much uncontrolled migration to Europe. I think there probably is, even though I'm a strong supporter of more open borders in general. That's a big difference from accusing someone who disagrees with you of actively trying to destroy the eu.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Others have made the assertions that based on reading some of the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks that George Soros is attempting to influence Hillary Clinton."

"others have made assertions", wow that's some damning evidence! Such garbage on HN

</comment><comment><USER21> Kind of appropriate for the Open Society Foundations' info to be open to society to look at. I doubt it worries them much.

<comment><USER22> Yea, I saw "to have Obama leave office with a more transparent and clear targeted drone killing policy" (paraphrased) and I thought "hmm, I could get down with that.", and I'm confident the vast majority of open society supporters could as well.

We'll see if anything interesting comes out but it might just make Soros's supporters further assured he's on their side and attempting to do what he and his organization says they're attempting to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> there is government employee testimony proving the true hackers are unknown. It's easier to paint it as a known boogeyman. Have to keep advancing western geo-political agendas and must continue building up the military industrial complex.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can you even imagine the sorts of things Nixon could have gotten away with if he has simple been able to say in his era "I-It was an attempt by the Russians to defame me!"?

<comment><USER4> And there was a massive groundswell of support within the government to keep 'their team' from losing. Keep in mind the only reason Nixon is such a big deal is because Republicans were equally outraged, at least morally, at what Nixon did. I don't think that would happen today if Obama did something worse and I have my doubts about Republicans too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Regarding the presumed meddling of Russia, what is conveniently left unsaid, is that whoever made the leak possible should be awarded a US medal for Advancement of Democracy or something along those lines.</comment>


Vaccinated vs. Unvaccinated: Guess Who Is Sicker? - <AUTHOR> http://info.cmsri.org/the-driven-researcher-blog/vaccinated-vs.-unvaccinated-guess-who-is-sicker <comment><USER2> I read the study. It's a paragon of low-quality science.</comment>


Gab forced offline over apparent tie to Pittsburgh synagogue shooter - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/gab-forced-offline-over-apparent-tie-to-pittsburgh-synagogue-shooter/ <comment><USER2> The older I get, the less I appreciate "free speech". Community standards exist to protect the community.

We should not just assume absolute freedom of speech is an unalloyed good. What are the benefits, and what are the consequences? Because in this case, the consequences are pretty clear.

<comment><USER3> It scares the living shit out of me how many people in tech are actively fighting against free speech.

Censorship is evil. It is a power that _will_ be abused for political gains (as we're already seeing). That is pretty much a constant throughout human history. The internet itself was a platform for free speech. That's what made the internet of the 90s so great. Now look at it. A handful of mega corporations spying on everyone all day every day, and controlling what they're allowed to see and talk about.

It's all very 1984, and everyone seems asleep at the wheel.

<comment><USER2> There's a rather large gap between "Maybe we shouldn't let people plan genocide online" and 1984.

And we already accept limits on free speech. For example, can I publicly lie about someone as "free speech"? No, it's libel/slander.

<comment><USER4> There is not a gap. It is all just speech. When there are limits placed, then someone has to decide where they are, and therin lies the rub. It is only libel when you can show damages, only conspiracy when you make some action toward the goal, and only a threat when articulated. The laws exist and are clear.

<comment><USER2> Saying "There is not a gap" does not make the gap disappear. Applying limits to free speech is not absolute totalitarianism, unless the limits themselves are totalitarian.

For example, if criticizing the government is banned, that's totalitarian. If saying "All members of group x should be tortured to death" is banned but criticizing the government is not (unless the government is torturing group x to death), then it's not totalitarian.

<comment><USER5> Nobody was forced to visit or read Gab, just as nobody is forced to listen to what I say to a few friends in my living room.

Do you intend to control the latter as well, in the name of your "community"?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Northwestern Finds a New Solution to the Ticket Pricing Dilemma (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kevintrahan/2014/10/21/a-solution-to-the-flawed-way-college-football-teams-sell-tickets/ <comment><USER2> "The idea was that prices would start high, and they would fall in accordance with demand and the secondary market. Unlike dynamic pricing, where prices can rise and fall and customers are stuck with the price they pay, tickets under the "Purple Pricing" plan would only fall, and customers would be refunded to pay the lowest possible price. The concept is similar to a Dutch Auction."

Another element is the bidding price during the presale round. The bid you submitted will always be active. Once the price falls to your bidding price, you will be the first to buy it.

This ensures that those most willing to pay will always get access first. And it would ensure everyone pays the same price. Intuitively, this would discourage the secondary market from speculating the price. And if they only refund the original buyer, then this will further go to harm the secondary market.

<comment><USER3> This assumes static demand the entire time leading up to the event (concert, game, etc.) the ticket is for.

In reality, demand usually peaks sometime right before the event, so you're still going to have a secondary market taking advantage of the price differential.

<comment><USER2> Yes, the demand may peak at t=0 and since the price may only fall, there will still be a secondary market. However, their revenue will be much smaller. The minimum price for each ticket will be higher do to the falling mechanism. The discrepancy between what the secondary market will make is then smaller.

<comment><USER3> If demand peaks at t=0, the second market sellers are going to buy out the entire supply early where demand and price are the lowest, and then use economic hold up to inflate their prices even further. All you're doing with this system is guaranteeing that consumers who want to pay a lot of money _early on_ are guaranteed to do so.

Considering that this is an imperfect market and the second market sellers are more knowledgeable, average consumers are going to the ones paying out here, not the resellers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a nice variation on the Dutch auction!

I first learned about the Dutch Auction when Google used it during their IPO. Wall St hates it because one of the perks of being, or being connected to, an investment banker is that you get in on IPOs at a good price. With the Dutch Auction there is no initial IPO pop, and therefore investment bankers lose out on that profit opportunity.

Google uses another variation of this in Adwords. For each ad they do an internal auction, and the winning bidder pays the minimum needed to beat the second place bidder. According to game theory, the correct action for each bidder to do is to bid exactly what the ad is worth to them. Second guessing what other people bid is irrelevant.

<comment><USER5> If you care how much the other party pays, then you still have incentive to second guess their bid.

For example, in an auction fantasy football system, it is in your interest to make your opponents pay as much as possible for any bid they win. So if you believe they value a player more than you do, it could be in your interest to actually bid more than the value you place on the player in order to force them to pay their maximum bid.</comment></comment>


Anonymous infiltrates HGBary Security; tasked to infiltrate Anonymous by FBI - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/em14R.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> Warning: Torrent for leaked emails is 4.7 GB.</comment>


This Guy Wants to Save Robots from Abusive Humans - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-plan-to-protect-robots-from-human-cruelty

<comment><USER2> I thought it was the other way around [http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night- live/video/old-glory-insur...](http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night- live/video/old-glory-insurance/n10766)</comment>


Ask HN: Using R - <AUTHOR>

I think of myself as a burgeoning statistician first and a programmer a distance second. That might just be due to my first interests, and obviously data mining, data analysis and machine learning are truly both rather than one or the other.<p>In the stats community, R is widely used and I wanted to know if there were any R users on HN? If so, what exciting things are you doing or have you seen with the language? <comment><USER2> GGplot2, by H Wickham

<http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/>

and the bay Area user's group

<http://www.meetup.com/R-Users/calendar/10446894/>

<comment><USER2> in my google reader:

<http://blog.revolution-computing.com/>

<http://learnr.wordpress.com/>

<http://www.decisionstats.com/>

<http://anyall.org/blog/>

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--

<http://ask.metafilter.com/116762/Rrrrrgh>

[http://alittleknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/r-for- pedes...](http://alittleknowledge.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/r-for-pedestrians/)

and some portals:

<http://planetr.stderr.org/>

<http://info.smu.edu.sg/rsite/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using R for 4 years to analyse microarrays and to do nonlinear time series analysis on signals.

I'm using nonstandard methods based on my own code, third party command line programs and extensions I wrote in 'C'. I chose R over Matlab or Octave because it has a more powerful programming language and a nice time series datastructure.

Despite doing very little statistics for the last 2 years I'm still very happy with R. People I know who use Matlab tell me they only do it for the available libraries.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is a huge and growing R community. I am using randomForest (originally in Fortran) package as a classifier for my dataset.

</comment><comment><USER5> R is a great language. I have been using R for a while. However, I wonder if someone could make a free,nice,simple yet powerful user interface for R. For my fellow biologists who wants to do some data analysis,the learning curve of R is just too steep.

<comment><USER6> Rattle is a pretty nice front-end for R. Might be worth a look. <http://rattle.togaware.com/></comment></comment>


Simple explanation of UTF-8 - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description <comment><AUTHOR> I finally took the time to read how unicode code points are represented in UTF-8. Wish I did this before. It explains how you can represent 2^21 ~ 2.1 million code points in 4 bytes, what happened to the other (4*8-21=11) bits, and probably why the "char" type in Rust is 4 bytes instead of 1. Enjoy.</comment>


TBTK v2.0 – Second Quantization for C++ - <AUTHOR> http://www.second-quantization.com/ <comment><USER2> I wasn't sure what second quantization was so I lookep it up.

Full classical: physical quantities are scalars (x, p), fields are classical fields (E, B)

Semiclassical (first quantization): physical quantities are now operators.

Full quantum (second quantization): all fields are now field operators.

from wikipedia, second quantization is a misnomer:

> The term "second quantization" is a misnomer that has persisted for > historical reasons. At the origin of quantum field theory, it was > incorrectly thought that the Dirac equation described a nrelativistic wave > function (hence the mistaken "Dirac sea" interpretation), rather than a > classical spinor field which, when quantized (like the scalar field), > yielded a fermionic quantum field (vs. a bosonic quantum field).

> One is not quantizing "again", as the term "second" might suggest; the field > that is being quantized is not a Schrödinger wave function that was produced > as the result of quantizing a particle, but is a classical field (such as > the electromagnetic field or Dirac spinor field) that was not previously > quantized. One is merely shifting from a semiclassical treatment of the > system to a fully quantum-mechanical one.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's correct. However, the formalism is widely known as second quantization within the physics community. It's therefore the terminology that is used in practice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There already were a few of these in C++, most notably the tensor contraction engine. Mine was written in mathematica.

[https://github.com/jparkhill/Symbolic-Many-Fermion- Codes](https://github.com/jparkhill/Symbolic-Many-Fermion-Codes)

I would love to see one in rust there'd be real advantages for asynchronous parallelism in some of the most sophisticated models.

<comment><USER2> > I would love to see one in rust there'd be real advantages for asynchronous > parallelism in some of the most sophisticated models.

Could you expand on this? it's my understanding that these engines already use lapack/blas for higher dimension numerical calculations, which are already parallelized.

<comment><USER3> Sure-- there's really two operations going on here. Finding the contractions needed for a properly indistinguishable quantum expectation value (there's a geometric number with the number of quantum particles ie: A_ij \cdot B_ji + A_ij \cdot B_ij \rightarrow C_ij for two particles), and then evaluating those tensor contractions in-silico. Exactly as in ML frameworks like PyTorch/TF, these contractions are executed as: unravel tensors ==> matrix multiply ==> Reravel. Sometimes there might be more than one contraction too, and more than two tensors. The order of raveling, factorization etc. completely controls the efficiency assuming you're always getting near peak in your matrix multiply with several orders of magnitude separating best/worst. Batching out the different factorizations, contractions etc. even just for the symbolic logic is a huge combinatoric problem.</comment></comment></comment>


Why I Don't Stress Over Competition Anymore - <AUTHOR> http://www.groovehq.com/blog/competition

<comment><USER2> Brett Martin from Sonar had a good piece about this: [https://medium.com/p/72c6f8bec7df](https://medium.com/p/72c6f8bec7df)

For me I also had that initial fear/disappointment when competitors launched but I realized over the past few years that my biggest competition was the better version of myself, executing on my same vision.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing! Great read :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like the circle of concern versus circle of control metaphor from the 7 Habits book. However, it must be applied with some subtlety. Being aware of your competition is not the same as stressing over your competition. As the author mentions, you must separate the portions of this knowledge that you can act on, and the ones you cannot. Nine times out of ten, it comes back to doing a better job at _your_ company. If your competition consistently does a better job than you, then you're likely to lose, but stressing over it won't change the outcome.</comment>


A Letter to College Students - <AUTHOR> http://themacro.com/articles/2016/02/letter-to-college-students/ <comment><USER3> tl;dr

      - Learn to code.
      - Meet people with real skills.
      - Have fun.
      - Take responsibility.
      - Be ready to hit the ground running.
      - Be your own career counselor.
      - It's okay to ignore your parents.
      - Be careful with student debt.

<comment><USER4> Thank you. Good points all.

</comment></comment><comment> whoa-duder Or you can start a company when your older too.

</comment><comment><USER5> What do you think about the value of grad school? It involves spending part of your 20s in school but allows you to have a bigger impact on the world through cutting edge technology. Any thoughts?

<comment><USER6> I don't think it has value - my former co-founder Kyle Vogt is building self driving cars and he didn't graduate from college. I just think you learn a lot faster in a startup environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hey there - would love to hear what you guys think about the post :) - <USER2>

<comment><USER7> I'm a 19 year old midwestern college student at an urban school who loved the article, especially the part about being social. My dad always said "it's not what you know, but who you know." Seeing the kinds of connections he made in college, his work, and his church pay off in astounding ways taught me a lot about that.

However I've always had trouble with meeting other people that like to code. Striking up a conversation with people in my CS classes usually ends up in a "don't bother me" sort of situation, and many people I do meet are less into coding and more into video games.

Finding a job in my school's understaffed IT department (help desk) has been a good start to the workforce, but is soul crushing. I'm never rewarded for anything that goes well, and people only remember the times I made customers angry. The job might give me some experience and a nice blip on my resume, but I feel it's setting me up for a soul-crushing sysadmin job at some major corporation around my city.

From the perspective of somebody not even two decades old hopefully you understand that without much social or business experience a lot of these actions are difficult, especially meeting people eager to collaborate on technical projects. You can look back on your life and wish you prepared yourself for your adult life better, but in the moment as a youth there's so much stimuli on campus and paths that I could choose that it really weighs down on me. Do I keep working hard at a boring IT job to make a comfortable, stable living as a sysadmin, settle down with a nice midwestern wife and some kids, and join a Protestant church? Do I work for the Peace Corps for a couple years in China to improve my Chinese language proficiency and risk having rusty tech skills? Do I try moving to some high-rent city with a lot of startups and risk crashing and burning? These are the questions that keep me up at night.

Thanks for reading my rambling slice of life, and thanks for writing this article. It got me thinking more about my future than I typically do on a Friday night in the dorms and helped me get some stuff out of my head. I'll be keeping a lot of these points in mind as ways to improve my chances for success.

<comment><USER8> Though it may not feel like it right now, you can do all of these things and more, you can do none of these things.... the truth is it actually doesn't matter what it is that you've done.

What is more important is the attitude you bring towards living! Though grunt work is soul crushing to the average person, it does pay the bills when you are just starting out.

Don't sweat the small stuff, don't let your mind think it is doomed to an unworkable situation. Conduct thought experiments often at work and in your spare time, and keep the friends you meet that are truly interesting people in consistent contact.

<comment><USER7> Thanks a lot for the great advice! I'm so glad I have the opportunity to learn so much from such kind people on this community.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Atomic gardening - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening

<comment><USER2> This was an interesting topic, but didn't provide much detail so I did a quick search and found this article that was pretty cool:

[http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/atomic-gardening- breedi...](http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/atomic-gardening-breeding- plants-with.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Everybody have their atoms replaced each few months, this is a mutation, a different natural process.

They are just increasing the probability of mutation with a mutagen and having new (and often uglier) flowers as result. The type of mutagen is not so relevant and gamma x-rays are not the only way to achieve this, some poisons are also used since many years (they play an important role in the first 'jurassic park' plot for instance).

Some mutations are aesthetic, other so-so and other are really unnecessary and ugly IMHO. If you have a tiny cristated opuntia near your PC you probably have an atomic garden yet. Of course any trace of the original radiation is first diluted and then cleaned before to reach the market by the propagation phase of these cacti and flowers. These are not radioactive plants.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like to bring this up whenever people start talking about not wanting GMO's.

If you are brushing your teeth with a toothpaste that contains peppermint oil you're ingesting a Atomically Modified Organism or HMO every day!

I prefer this article on the subject though.

[http://pruned.blogspot.com/2011/04/atomic- gardens.html](http://pruned.blogspot.com/2011/04/atomic-gardens.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://dilbert.com/strip/1989-08-29](http://dilbert.com/strip/1989-08-29)</comment>


How Much Traffic Does a Magazine or TV Mention Send Your Website? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.momentgarden.com/post/47117433601/how-much-traffic-does-a-magazine-or-tv-mention-send

<comment><USER4> What traffic from 60 Minutes looks like: [http://bjk5.com/post/30813320623/what-traffic- from-60-minute...](http://bjk5.com/post/30813320623/what-traffic- from-60-minutes-looks-like)

</comment><comment><USER5> Its not the traffic that they send, its the quality. TV, printed, and radio traffic are still very good. I once had a magazine mention and only had about 50-ish extra visitors. _But_ , that turned into doubling my sales for the next 2 months. Its not the traffic, but the conversions and sales.

<comment><USER6> This is true to a huge extent. The quality of the traffic matters so much more than the raw number of visitors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In 2008, a Consumer Reports Money Advisor TV segment that featured <http://www.PriceAdvance.com> was syndicated to news programs in 15 states right around the holidays. That led to 125k+ installs of our toolbar.

In October 2007, the Wall Street Journal mentioned Startup Schwag on the front page, below the fold. That yielded ~15 signups for the ~$20/mo service, though admittedly its appeal was a bit niche.

</comment><comment><USER8> One of my side projects[1] was shown for about 20 seconds on BBC News. Overall it drove maybe 10k visitors.

The traffic comes in huge waves. It jumps 500x in seconds and dies down almost as quickly. In my case there were aftershocks as the news piece was aired around the world.

[1] <http://asterank.com>

<comment><USER9> I like this, i spent a good 30 min playing in it at work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The closest my company has come to mainstream fame was in the Wall Street Journal. It was a half page article on page 2 - not about us but more the data from our system (a specialist kind of weather data for energy-data analysis).

I don't think it drove more than about 100 extra visitors - truly a drop in the ocean. As a kind of direct marketing I think it was pretty much useless as the readership is so broad whilst our business is so specialist (no use in exposure unless it's to the right audience).

But we can now mention the WSJ piece as a kind of credibility signal. And for that it is great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point about the value of the social validation from high-profile media coverage! That's usually more important than the minimal traffic it drives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Magazines are definitely surprising in their longevity. I still get people signing up for my service from a small mention in a magazine in 2009.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was definitely our biggest surprise: we expected an early spike and quick tapering, just like we were accustomed to from web traffic.

It's hard for us to know how much residual traffic we still get from Better Homes & Gardens, since there's no referrer to track people coming from magazines.

<comment><USER11> Yep, same here, I only know because people occasionally say "I saw an article in Woman's Day" when they send a support email.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Some of my wife's projects have been featured on Cable TV shows and in large national magazines (Food and Wine, Brides magazine, Martha Stewart).

The amount of traffic she got from these was minuscule in comparison to popular online sources (Design Sponge).

The magazines in particular do tend to get put online and feed a small amount of views over time.

<comment><USER6> From the experience I've had, I tend to think that all things being equal, a mention on a popular blog in your market will drive higher quality traffic than a television mention.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> My company has been mentioned multiple times on major TV and Radio, the most recent being a couple of appearances on two different BBC shows, with millions of people watching. The clicks through to our site were only a handful - <USER2> the hundreds, or less.

</comment><comment><USER14> press for us (and we've gotten quite a bit) has mostly been useful in getting over the 'never heard of you' hurdle which i think is absolutely huge for just about any business conversation. the power of name recognition is astounding. we're a small app - we count our users in thousands units not millions - <USER3> our userbase is highly engaged, using our app every time they go to work and our most valuable user segment (bar staff) generally doesn't care about the press and certainly not tech press. mainstream press is mostly a fleeting adrenaline rush and ego stroke for us, it's primary value is street cred.

</comment><comment><USER15> My blog has been mentioned once (in 2004) on a german national news show (RTL Aktuell).

I got ~500 uniques more that day. I guess in 2004 german TV audience wasn't too much into internet ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> We often deploy promo sites to handle TV traffic.

For top cable shows (top 5 in weekly cable ratings), a rule of thumb we've found works for planning is 100 thousand uniques per _second_ of time the domain or URL is shown or spoken, during and following the ad. If the brand is the domain, that counts too.

So 15 seconds of clear call to action exposure can drive 1.5 million uniques. Numbers are lower without a call to action.

</comment><comment><USER17> Relatively little. Yes, there are visible spikes if a site is mentioned on TV, but it's nothing compared to what a decent size mailing can do, or getting attention from a major website.

Even when I used to work for a major TV station and we did very strong promotion in and around well viewed prime time shows the spikes in traffic were nothing shocking.

Of course this says nothing about the long term effects.

<comment><USER18> Mailing, you mean postal or email?

<comment><USER17> Email.

And be careful with email mailings, especially during office hours. Apparently most people have nothing else to do but check their mail every minute and click on every link in it. Huge traffic spikes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't think people appreciate how big the biggest magazine subscriptions are (3-7 million) and that people do tend to actually read them.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is really interesting, but you have to remember to THINK ABOUT YOUR AUDIENCE

In this case it worked relatively well, because (probably) there is a segment of the public of the site that is more on TV than on internet, so they saw the mention on TV and then went to the PC

I doubt you can get this kind of result from a TV mention (or ad) of HN ;)

</comment><comment><USER21> if I remember this podcast [http://techzinglive.com/page/1285/225-tz- interview-gabriel-w...](http://techzinglive.com/page/1285/225-tz-interview- gabriel-weinberg-the-duckduckgo-step-function) correctly (duck duck go founder), an nbc morning mention gained him something close to zero users.

</comment><comment><USER22> I bet the easy-to-remember and apt name helped combat the product's "lack of SEO friendly links". Conversion from someone hearing of a product once in offline media, even if they're a perfect demographic fit, seems impressive.

</comment><comment><USER23> HN will send more traffic than your mentions in magazines.

</comment><comment><USER24> really, the lack of a link (AKA THE FACT THAT IT HAPPENED OFFLINE) limited the long term seo value of the mention... Count me among the shocked.</comment>


Ask HN:  Please help a virgin blogger. - <AUTHOR> After repeated requests, I finally started a blog, but I have no idea what I'm doing.  For me, commenting here at hn comes naturally but blogging doesn't.  I'm so busy I don't have time, so I did the next best thing; I am "recycling" my old Hacker News comments.  It only takes about 5 minutes each morning.
I don't have the most important thing I advise my customers: a goal.  I'm not looking to drive traffic, make money, or get business.  I do want to paint a picture of myself and my work and provide whatever value I can.  I have included a link to my blog both here on my profile and as the last line of every email I send.
http://ShleppingData.com
After a few months, I'm wondering if I should continue.  Is this a waste of time, or does it provide value and can it lead to something else?
1. No one has ever commented, so I just turned comments off.  Does this make sense or just seem lame?  Maybe they don't comment because it's recycled material.
2. Posterous allows up to 100 entries per screen, so I just set mine at the max.  It's only text and almost everyone should have broadband by now, so it loads fast.  Why would anyone set this lower?
3. Posterous allows tags, presumably to group similar posts, but I can't find any facility for an index or Table of Contents.  So I just tag every post with it's own title.  Again, does this make sense or does it just seem lame?
4. I named my blog "Shlepping Data", because the simplest explanation of what I do is "Shlepp Ones and Zeroes from Point A to Point B".  (Of course there are a lot of details and I'm spending a lifetime mastering them.)  I wanted to leave a touch of lightheartedness along with all the technical talk.  Cool or lame?
5. Any other suggestions from seasoned bloggers are greatly appreciated.  What else could provide value without investing too much time? <comment><USER3> 1\. This is lame. When the traffic/readers start coming, they will comment/want to comment.

2\. To keep the window to have a scroll bar the size of a chickpea

3\. I don't know Posterous enough. Usually, you read Post A tagged with tag A', click on A' and you can read more posts tagged with A'

4\. It's ok. Cool, even

5\. Even with broadband, it took a while to open the blog. Cut down the number of entries. If you want someone to know who you are, you need to get visits, somehow. If you offer interesting content but noone reads it, you have failed!

Once you realise that, the rest does not require that much time. For example, if you use to read other people's blogs, just drop a comment in interesting posts, with a link back to your latest post (your comment - greetings - <USER2> you are and a link to your latest post, labeled as such). This way, you spread the word of what you talk about without requiring any more time than starting a conversation in some topic that did interest you. Maybe you even had a post (HN comment) related to the post you read, fine, link to it, saying so.

Your blog looks too disorganized. Untagged posts make for "non index stuff". If I want to read more about your ideas on startups I have no real way to do that. You could also add some 'personal' information in your posterous profile: who you are and what you do are fundamental.

Cheers,

Ruben Latest at my blog: 4 Reasons Why Pacman Is a Metaphor for Blogging ([http://www.mostlymaths.net/2010/09/4-reasons-why-pacman- is-m...](http://www.mostlymaths.net/2010/09/4-reasons-why-pacman-is-metaphor- for.html))

Just as a sample ;)

<comment><USER4> Good points all. You need to show respect for your audience by ensuring that a visit to your blog is a pleasant one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I always tend to think that in the blogging world there are those that are journalists and those that are diary writers. The diary writers only ever succeed if they're writing about things you'd read in Penthouse Forum circa 1978.

Try not to involve yourself or your feelings too much. Offer less opinion and more substance and things based on the concrete. Use the words "I" and "You" less and consider it more of a group activity -- even though people may have not shown up yet.

Instead of lines like "Do not allow anyone to read your code out of context.", you need to put the parts together and make the reader actually understand how you got to the thought process without being demanding. Instead consider something like "From practical experience I find that often, reading code out of context can obscure the meaning, context, blah." Zed is the only person who is allowed to be this opinionated, and only because he is charming at the same time.

If you want people to read, they have to feel engaged and part of the conversation. This is key.

Find your 10 favorite blogs, or ones of people you closely identify yourself as being close to professionally speaking, and do your best to gauge the voice of the ones that are extremely readable. Find your likes and dislikes, about a particular blogger or series of posts and gauge other media sources by the same methods.

I find my best writing comes after a lot of reading, pause to think, a mental break then coming back to the subject. Give it a try.

<comment><USER5> And WOW, this just hit me after posting. Your question to HN is by far and large more blog worthy than most of the things on your blog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the main issue is the content. Not that it's bad (it isn't), but it's recycled. It's out of context, doesn't feel you are communicating to me when I read it (and you're not, since you wrote it replying to someone else). Why would I go there instead of skimming your comments page?

The concept is not bad, though, but I think it would work better if comments served as inspiration for a post. What advice/opinion were you trying to convey through it. If it helps, I tend to structure my writing in motivation/introduction, content, then conclusion. Topic tends to flow better.

For specifics:

1\. Keep them on. First, do you have any readers for there to be comments? I never heard about your blog before. Second, write something asking for experiences, feedback, opinions. Give them a hook to write something back to you. If this askhn was posted in your blog there definitely would be replies.

2\. The main point that jumps out to me here is the "only text" part. It's a bit dull if you are trying to engage an audience. Design to convert surfers to subscribers. When I write I like to put headers and subheaders. Some graphs, images or screenshots. Liven it up.

3\. I don't know posterous, but I tend to like looking at categories to find similar posts.

4\. I like clever names.

5\. Write first for yourself, then for your audience. Writing is a great way to put your thoughts in order and realizing what you really know about that subject. You'll learn, and that's good in itself even if no one reads it. It seems to me that by recycling comments you're not gaining anything personaly and not getting motivated enough to make it better.

</comment><comment><USER4> I quick review of your "blog" makes it pretty clear that (as you yourself admit) you are just posting stuff. Why would anyone re-visit when they would have no idea if anything of interest to them will ever be posted?

I think you need to decide upon an audience and "talk" to them - they may not come but I think that is how all successful bloggers get started.

How about taking another look at the guy you met on your second working gig? You were impressed with what he was doing and felt inspired. I am certain there would be an audience for anyone writing for others aspiring to being just that guy. There is philosophy, technique and a way of looking at the world to be explored in detail aplenty. Links from HN will bring the traffic to reward your efforts.

<comment><USER3> Yours are also very good points. You don't need to talk to a particular audience... but keep in mind there is an audience. It may be just "you" or someone with your same tastes. Some day they will come (and hanging in HN brings a lot of traffic, interactions, good comments and all this, the community here loves part of what I write, but it is the part I may be more proud of).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think your posts have good content, the key issue here currently is delivery and audience.

Normally creating good content would be the first challenge, but you seem to have good content already. Perhaps you should look to change it to fit the blog audience / open it up further for discussion.

They key problem is that currently your audience is 0 (or very close to 0). It is unlikely that your audience will go from 0 to big numbers over night. So it is something you will have to work on and grow over time.

Firstly, think about what streams you can use to gain new audience members per post (submission to content aggregators / forums / guest posts on other blogs).

Then think about building a consistent schedule for releasing new content. Currently you are doing this daily, but I would suggest weekly (to spread the content further). Make this known to the audience so they know when to check back for new content.

Finally once you start having an audience, you'll want to keep it. Use platforms such as twitter and email lists to help inform that audience when new content is released so they keep coming back.

Slowly over time this should start making your blog a success.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd been reading your site for a few weeks before I realized they were recycled comments. I like the idea of culling the ones that read like little essays. I just assumed that was your goal.

Plus, having a blog on its own domain is easier than giving everyone a link to <http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=edw519>, which is awkward, and which includes the clutter of shorter comments, other people's comments, up/down arrows, etc.

1\. When I read, I'm interested in an author, not an author's readers. (But the links back to HN are good in case I want that.) As in the last paragraph of this article: <http://daringfireball.net/2010/06/whats_fair>

2+3. I prefer reading one post at a time, with a straightforward ToC. Tags are distracting. If I'm looking for a post on a certain topic, I use a search engine.

4\. Even if the title's lame at first, it can become cool if comes to stand for something good.

</comment><comment><USER9> To be honest, it seems like you just wrote a script that scrapes all your comments from hacker news and then posts them to your blog.

Unless you add something to your posts like images, and some context, I'm not going to be revisiting your blog. I'd just stay at the source (Hacker News) where I can find lots of great comments that are all presented in their context. The voting system does a great job of picking out the best.

I think you do have interesting things to write about, I just think you need to do more than copying and pasting your comments.

</comment><comment><USER10> Thanks for starting a blog.

As you correctly identified - you need a goal. And a thesis - a topic you can center your blog around. What can you offer that helps others? What are you an expert at?

1\. Thats fine.

2\. Not a good idea. A long scroll bar will overwhelm people and turn them off. Unless you want to follow the cult strategy: have barriers in place to retain fewer people but the most loyal people - you should limit the posts to 10 or 20.

3\. Tags = subtopics. People can click on a tag and read all the posts that share the same tag. So if you use the post title as the tag too - no 2 posts will share the same tag. And tags end up being meaningless on your blog.

4\. I didn't know what Shlepp means. Had to Google it. And Google says that Shlep is a word. Shlepp is not. Shlepp will also lead to a lot of spelling errors. Ideally, your blog name should be something simple, memorable, and something that people search for / identify with. If you can't come up with a good name for the blog, or have a lot of topics to talk about - then do what Seth Godin did. Start your blog with your own name.

5\. Keep a schedule of writing. Buddy up with someone. Because most bloggers don't last more than 3 months. Especially when they are not clear with their goals.

Spend as much time you do on writing on promoting the blog too. Without readers, writing is not much fun.

Make your posts easy on the eye. Use images. If thats not your thing, at least use subheads or strong tags. So that people don't tire their eyes out.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure you're going to get anywhere with blogging if you're only willing to expend minimal effort on it. It's like anything else.

Some bloggers say that everyone should blog, and exhort them to do so. The truth is not everyone needs to blog, just like not everyone needs to run marathons or excel at cooking.

I do find having a "best of" collection of your HN contributions valuable. But that's not blogging.

</comment><comment><USER12> Are you sure you don't have a goal? Even just improving yourself as a writer counts as a goal, and in that case you can't beat forcing yourself to blog once a day. Writing something publicly is sort of like launching your startup, the fact that it's out there where everyone can see it makes you work on quality.

As for specifics: 1\. Why? Eventually readership may increase. Comments are what makes blogging worth it, until you get enough users that the comment section turns to shit. 2\. Because a lot of people read on mobile devices over a 3g connection, not to mention it just looks much better. 3\. Lame. Use them as categories. Helps readers when they're looking through your archives 2 years from now. 4\. Perfectly fine. Name's essentially irrelevant, and campy humor isn't bad by any stretch. 5\. Blog a lot. Don't stop. I did it every day for about 4 years, sometimes twice. Didn't turn me into Dickens, but I now am comfortable at least. I attribute most of my success in life to the communication skills I gained from it.

</comment><comment><USER13> It sounds like you don't have a clear voice.

To find that you might want to try defining clear goals for your blog and limiting it to a certain topic area and then begin to write.

By reposting comments there's no overarching thread that pulls your blog together into a coherent narrative. A good blog does that.

It seems like you're able to write well and have the time to do it so go for it.

PS It might help to find a comment you liked and then re-write it into a blog post, IE explain to your audience the context and then your opinion/thoughts.

</comment><comment><USER14> 1\. I would leave them open for now. Unless you are being overwhelmed by the chore of dealing with comments, they provide a good way for your readers to offer feedback.

2\. Having 100 entries per screen seems like a bad idea to me. I would set it to 10, maybe 15 max. The issue isn't so much the load time, but the sheer intimidation that this much visible content provokes.

3\. Most blogging platforms don't have a "Table of Contents" by default. Just treat the tags as categories for the convenience of browsing users. For example, business, ruby, python, life-lessons.

4\. The title is fine.

5\. More value:

(a) Posting original content rather than comments from elsewhere. There are exceptions, but generally the comments require further context to be really understood.

(b) Occasionally writing more substantial posts. For myself, I find that an outline really helps pull these together. It also has the benefit of breaking the post up into subsections for easy reading.

(c) Use thematic images. Dosh Dosh is a master of this: <http://www.doshdosh.com/twitter-marketing-mass-follow-users/>

(d) Take a notebook with you everywhere. If you have an idea for a post, jot it down, perhaps with a quick outline so you don't lose the details. I often find that my best ideas come during a jog.

(e) Respond to other interesting blog posts. A good argument is a great way to create compelling content and grow a blog.

(f) Study both popular blogs, as well as blogs you admire, and figure out what makes them compelling to you and their audience. Then go forth and do likewise.

</comment><comment><USER15> Ever seen <http://iampaddy.com>? I like this site because: there are very few posts; all of them are quality; the design is engaging; it is very easy to follow the author on twitter; reading each article takes little time.

Looking at your blog then you have experiences, observations and advice to offer which could be valuable. Why not write one topic bi-weekly or monthly which focuses on a single theme, re-using your existing comments appropriately. Personally I found your posts light-hearted, interesting and engaging (with some refinement) but too random. As it stands, its not a blog but a collection of comments. I would get rid of all of it and start again. In answer to your questions:

1 - keep comments on. Why not? 2 - I prefer to see a list of articles rather than everything thrown at me in one page 3 - I think posterous will let you do what you want, having read other posterous blogs. Not sure how exactly 4 - I'm not sure all of the name works, although I like shlepp as a word. 5 - I'm not a seasoned blogger but like reading the occasional blog.

</comment><comment><USER16> If you don't have time to actually write blog posts, why are you attempting to write a blog?

</comment><comment><USER17> Many of the entries struck me as kind of odd, because I felt like I was jumping into an existing conversation but without the context. In fact, that is exactly what's going on here. Rather than just copy-and-paste your HN comments exactly as originally written, modifying the first few sentences or adding a whole new introductory paragraph to explain the question you are answering might make these posts flow better standalone.

Likewise, some other remarks made in a few posts really don't make sense in a blog entry existing outside of the context of the HN conversation. I would suggest reading your posts with an eye for, "does this flow well by itself?"

Tagging ought to be used to group similar posts, but I've not figured out how to get Posterous to do this either.

I had no idea this blog existed until, oh, about ten minutes ago. You might not have had any comments yet because it's still on the obscure side?

</comment><comment><USER18> My suggestions:

\- There's nothing describing your site that explains to me why your theoretical perfect reader would be interested in what you have to say. Your description is a clever few words about programming in general, but that's not too helpful. Judging from the content I skimmed, something more like "a startup blog for data specialists from a guy who has been there" is more compelling. Think of a person, preferably a real person, who you are writing for, and phrase everything like he's the only one you care about.

\- You need to lock down your goal, but your goal can be to increase the visibility of your personal brand ("paint a picture of myself"). I don't think it can only be to help people, because if you just want to help people, a blog is a terrible place to do it; more people are on HN, so just comment here instead.

\- Comments are overrated. Who has the time to comment on an individuals blog? Wouldn't you rather they responded on their own blog and linked to you? Or sent you a personal note? I think comments are a weird way of having a one-to- one discussion, but publicly viewable. Unless you have dozens of commenters, and they talk to each other, in a well managed threaded discussion forum-style comment section, you're fine to turn them off.

\- Posterous is nice and all, but it immediately marks your blog as "personal thoughts from Joe Shmoe". That's fine if you're writing for your co-workers and your mom, or just to practice your writing. But if your goal is to build that personal brand, you need to show more personality than the default blogging template.

\- Tags, search, categories... these things only matter in so much as they make it easy to understand the things you talk about on your blog. If you haven't figured that out, you don't need to worry about tagging.

But here's my real thinking to share with you:

\- Blogging "without investing too much time" is worthless unless your goal is cathartic. Assuming you want readers, there is a dramatic J-shaped curve to blogging, where the X axis is attention and the Y axis is effort/time. You'll have a few people pay attention because it's new and they like you. Then they'll go away because you're boring. Then you'll slowly get better, and better, and somebody somewhere will pay attention, then somebody else... and in 2-years, you'll have a few hundred people who anonymously look forward to the things you have to say. Then in another year or two, assuming you continue to get better and learn more and be more valuable, you might just get a lot of attention.

Might.

</comment><comment><USER19> Blogging, much like commenting, is a form of communication. For that to work, it needs two parties: the one communicating, and the one being communicated to (more advanced viewpoint: blogging is a dialogue... but let's skip that bit for now).

Who are you writing for? Figure that out, and then the rest will make more sense. Everything you do on your blog you should do for that ideal (or concrete) reader. Your own desires should generally come a distant second. It's all about the readers.

Another tip: Just as making a product "for anyone" is a deadly mistake, making a blog "for anyone" is also fatal. If your blog isn't written for anyone in particular, it isn't interesting to anyone in particular.

</comment><comment><USER20> I've done the recycled comment thing once, and it worked pretty well. However, I did introduce it as such and restructured it into a standalone piece of writing for the benefit of the reader.

I haven't been able to figure out the difference between commented and uncommented blogs. There are some great blogs in each category. I think it's easier for people to comment when they see other comments (even for other posts). Otherwise, they assume it's not the thing to do on this blog and move on. At least that's my theory.

Not a Posterous user so can't say much about those features.

</comment><comment><USER21> Recycling comments is a sound strategy for Version 1.0. People clearly appreciate your thoughts. Activating comments will just require more of your time and make the project more painful.

Commenting in threads is like counterpunching, Blog posts don't have the context or constraining framework and can be harder to write. So long as you're getting something out of it, keep going because the writing doesn't disappoint and the motivation behind the blog is sustainable. 11points wasn't built in a day.

</comment><comment><USER22> I kind of have the same problem you do, adding a comment into a discussion feels natural to me, I can give a couple of points in the part of the discussion I feel most comfortable in and leave it at that.

With a blog I always feel like I want to do a well researched comprehensive piece spanning an entire issue. This is where I decide I don't have time to become the master of the area I'm thinking about and don't write it. It's that perfectionism that prevents me from really getting started.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey, don't sweat it man, I'm in the same boat with a lack of "apparent" readers, due to nearly zero comments.

Great name, that's fine! Just keep blogging, on a predictably regular basis (this is very important, because your readers want fresh, _original_ content), leave comments open, watch your logs to really see who's coming around, drop your URL here and there as you see fit, and wait.

The result may be that nothing changes, or you finally gain some traction and comments take off. If having readers matters to you, you also have to promo the thing, so people will actually become aware of it.

Here're a couple of issues. One, the amount of blogs I can read is practically doubling every month. It's insane, because it's never been easier for every single person alive to do it.

And two, you have to provide some kind of real value, however you do it, so that I'll read your blog and maybe comment on it, out of the 10-gazillion I have to choose from.

</comment><comment><USER24> You are an extremely valuable contributor to HN. Reposting your HN comments is great way to start blogging. I think you will eventually feel the urge to post original content once you see how rewarding blogging can be.

1-I would leave comments on. You never know when someone might have an extremely valuable tidbit to share.

2-up to you. 20 is as acceptable as 100.

3-Not lame

4-cool

</comment><comment><USER25> As you searched your old comments to find ones worth bloggifying, did you find any over riding themes? Anything that cried out for elaboration? Trigger related ideas you would like to explore?

Your comment history should give you a good window into who you are and what is important to you, and thus good topics to write about.

</comment><comment><USER26> Your page took 35 seconds to load here. (Here being the rural US where broadband is not available.)

</comment><comment><USER27> Clickable link: <http://ShleppingData.com>

</comment><comment><USER28> Quick a dirty suggestions from an experienced blogger:

\- Migrate to WordPress.org and/or get a nice looking theme + logo design

\- Add a photo to compliment each post

\- Add sub-headers and bold important thoughts

\- Start a Twitter profile to promote posts and additionally submit posts to Stumble, Mixx, Sphinn, HN, Digg, Facebook, etc.

\- Prominently feature email newsletter and RSS subscription options

\- Add a short biography of yourself below each post + create an About page and Contact page

\- Implement links to related posts to increase stickiness (Wibiya.com blog toolbar can help here as well)

\- Utilize your blog footer to feature additional content

<comment><USER29> No.

He wants his own personal blog, on par with his comments here at HN, but with some active readers.

Most of this tips will turn his blog into a neon whore house of a blog.

Just write good stuff, and let people comment. Make friends with people and share your writings with like-minded people.

<comment><USER28> I totally mis-read the second paragraph of his question. So yea... If you're NOT looking to gain business and drive traffic, then by all means don't listen to my advice. Sorry!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Don't write to get things off your chest, write to entertain the people you want reading your stuff. It's like a book - you write to entertain or educate others, not yourself.

</comment><comment><USER31> How about blogging about starting a blog and how you go about discovering your goal. Some artists have a vision in mind before they start, but I don't think this is a requirement. You chose a medium to play with, sometimes the lump of clay reveals its potential after some experimentation.

</comment><comment><USER32> Don't take this the wrong way but your blog confuzzles me. What are you talking about and what's going on?</comment>


Why Two Is The Magic Number? Slate on Creative Pairs - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2267342/entry/2267343/

<comment><USER2> Because human brain has two halves-left and right. Not a remotely sensible answer? No?Can there ever be one silver bullet?one answer to this question? I dont think so- And I think, anyone who says otherwise is lying to himself/herself.</comment>


Why the #$% Do We Swear? For Pain Relief - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-do-we-swear <comment><USER2> An actual, controlled study using the classic "cold-pressor" test (hand in icy water):

"When swearing, the 67 student volunteers reported less pain and on average endured about 40 seconds longer."

As to the "why"/mechanisms... just the authors' speculations at this point.</comment>


Nigerian startups now allowed to import up to $20k worth of goods per quarter - tefo-mohapi https://www.iafrikan.com/2017/04/21/central-bank-of-nigeria-increases-foreign-exchange-limit-for-small-medium-enterprises-now-allowed-purchases-of-up-to-20-000-per-quarter/ <comment><AUTHOR> This article isn't getting much press, but I had a ton of follow up questions as this is a space (nigeria + imports) I know very little about.

Does this mean Nigerian small businesses couldn't import goods prior? I would imagine this imposed severe problems? And as to what they are now needing to import, this seems to discuss Forex, but then more physical goods. Can anyone speak to where the major barriers have been historically, or in what goods systems for this sort of novel provisioning was most lacking?</comment>


Linode is serving confidential files over unauth'ed HTTP - <AUTHOR> https://www.linode.com/readme.txt

<comment><USER2> Last Updated: 2008

named readme.txt

...</comment>


Venture Capitalist Promises $1M to First Person to Reach 123rd Birthday - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhedgecock/2015/04/21/venture-capitalist-promises-1m-to-first-person-to-reach-123rd-birthday/

<comment><AUTHOR> The Supercentarian Awards site:

[http://supercentenarians.info/](http://supercentenarians.info/)

Interestingly, Jeanne Calment, the present validated record holder, is a statistical outlier. The cluster of oldest validated human ages lies around 116-117. Then there is Sarah Knauss at 119 and Jeanne Calment at 122.

People at that age are incredibly frail, balanced on the knife edge, with a stupendous mortality rate on a monthly basis, never mind yearly. It seems unlikely that any first generation rejuvenation treatments, based on the SENS model, probably, could be safely applied to people past the age of 110 - that's a much harder proposition than treating a 60- or 70-year old.

So I suspect Kaminskiy will get good publicity from this without the prospect of having to award a prize any time soon, since the life expectancy of people alive at 110+ is not going to be greatly influenced by meaningful progress in medical science over the next decade or so.</comment>