Juicero Plans to Lower Prices and Cut 25% of Staff - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2017/07/14/juicero-layoffs-lower-prices/ <comment><USER2> In case anyone missed the Juicero teardown in April, here it is:

[https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so- expensi...](https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so- expensive-6add74594e50)

> One Giant Misstep

> The vast majority of the complexity of the Press is driven by one simple > problem inherent in the machine's design: the massive force required to > press the packs across the entire surface at once. The machine must apply > equal pressure to ~64 square inches of surface area at once, meaning the > drivetrain must be able to apply thousands of pounds of force to squish all > that produce.

> On the contrary, when a human hand squeezes the same pack, we naturally use > a very different technique [fingers create large amounts of pressure over > much smaller surface area]

> I have to believe the engineers that built this product looked at other ways > of pressing the juice, but if the primary mechanism could apply force in a > more focused way it could easily save hundreds of dollars off the shelf > price of the product.

That blog post is high art.

<comment><USER3> AvE also did a teardown. It's 40 minutes long, and evidently I watched the whole thing according to YouTube. [https://youtu.be/_Cp- BGQfpHQ](https://youtu.be/_Cp-BGQfpHQ)

<comment><USER4> I just can't stand this guys mannerisms, and constantly goofing of words. Every single word, is some kooky variant. I respect that he's clearly an intelligent guy, and knows what he's talking about. It's just like listening to your annoying uncle, trying to constantly make a stupid joke.

<comment><USER5> His Canadian dialect contributes a lot of this, dontya know? Skookum choocher's a thing up there.

<comment><USER4> I understand that, I work with Canadians in every one of their provinces daily. They definitely do not talk as backwoods as this guy. His shtick is just to be obnoxious, and it's distracting from the otherwise great tear downs he does.

<comment><USER5> I'm quite the opposite; the shtick is addictive, and actually seems to help me retain the info. I remember points he makes and moments in his videos better because of the off-the-wall comments. I even end up talking a bit the same way after I binge on his videos.

<comment><USER6> My wife gave me a strange look when I told her something was "good enough for the girls I go out with".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >The company was founded by Doug Evans, who has said his plan was to do for juicing what Steve Jobs did for computers. Dunn's letter noted that Evans was stepping back from daily operations but would remain a board member.

Probably because he realized that trying to be the Steve Jobs of juicing wasn't going to be as fruitful (heh) as initially thought, but still wants to be a part of any potential exit.

<comment><USER8> He wanted to be Apple. Turns out, he's Keurig.

<comment><USER9> The plan was always to be Keurig while telling people they were Apple. It didn't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think a lot of the commentary on Juicero misses the real skeleton in the closet.

The product was designed to specifically to justify the business model of the DRM pulp packets and thus MRR for the purpose of revenue and growth. Everything about it looks like they designed the packets and juice pulp DRM features first, then backfilled the rest of the mechanical design to support the REAL features (keeping people buying your fruit packages) and not the FAKE features (juicing?).

Many people talk about the ring roller/ toothpaste squeezer method being easier. Of course! But how do you do DRM with that? It's trickier. How do you scan the barcode and also keep your customers from using off brand K-Cups, I'm sorry I mean, fruit pulp packets.

It's obvious for $800 they could have designed an amazing conventional juicer, which actually would be a better product. But how do you get monthly recurring revenue out of that and thus justification for raising millions in venture capitalist money?

Juicero is a great example of dark hardware design and a cautionary tail about the hubris of the "if you build it" risk management strategy.

<comment><USER11> Why would drm be harder with a roller? If it's in the housing most people aren't going to open it and override even a simple drm mechanism

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So I got on Linkedin and checked out some of the profiles of people working there. Some of them have MBAs from MIT Sloan and Harvard. Not saying I'm not susceptible to this, but group think / drinking your own Kool-Aid is something to be careful about as we engineers hop and skip through the startup minefield.

<comment><USER13> They got paid a steady paycheck. They produced the product the founder wanted. I wouldn't hold it against the engineers and developers.

We can rag on the guy who engineered the juice pressing bit, but it very much looks like a junior guy right out of school who didn't have an adult in the room telling him that his $800 first effort was beautiful but needed to be redesigned to be under $50 in parts. Everybody needs that experience to understand how stuff works in the real world.

<comment><USER14> Exactly. If you've worked in any startup, I'd imagine you've had the same experience, I sure have.

When the founder wants something that doesn't make sense, you try to reason about it, you try to get other voices helping in a chorus that something doesn't work, but when the founder is the one with the money, the vision, and the ego, it can be impossible to move them off their idea regardless of the merits.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. He who has the gold makes the rules. I've seen this more times than I care to admit. It could be the silliest product in the world, with fatal flaws you can easily point to, doomed to failure, but he's the boss and you're not, and he doesn't want to hear "reasons". So, you go off and build it, keeping your resume up-to-date and ready...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ya know, for $400, they probably could have built a product that's a vertical micro-farm that plants, grows, and harvests the fruits for you, chucks them into a press, and juices it. Then it can turn that leftover pulp into compost and replant the seeds.

That would actually be really cool and useful!

<comment><USER17> I would buy that That's a dream

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Lower prices? While the article doesn't mention any specifics, juice that retails for $7 per serving and juice that retails for $5 per serving is still addressing the exact same market.

The cost structure of a subscription-based, home-delivered, fresh, semi- prepared food product is not going to, even at scale, be close to price- competitive with a juicer from Bed Bath & Beyond and some fresh fruit from Whole Foods. Juicero will, by its nature, always be a premium product situated well beyond any home juicing options.

<comment><USER19> well worse, on the idea where many companies are trying to be environmentally sensitive its clear these guys weren't even considering that aspect. this is even worse than a Keurig simply because the waste is far greater and packaging is as bad if not worse because they have to carry all the liquid with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Freshly pressed juice is sold at a pretty high markup and little stands and shops seem to make a hefty margin. They charge like $10 for 12oz. of freshly pressed fruit and veggies. So, there's a ton of upside in selling packets and I can see how they made believers out of early investors.

But wow did they go about it wrong, charging $699 for a machine that does a worse job than your bare hands!? Was there not one investor who did a technical due diligence? I'm so surprised.

<comment><USER21> Investors put close to thirty million into a wireless charging company in four rounds completely disregarding it's impossible to create what they want according to the law of physics.

<comment><USER22> Source? I could use a laugh right now

<comment><USER23> uBeam ultrasonic charging is physically impossible

<comment><USER24> ...at a useful enough wattage to replace existing charging systems, while be small and convenient enough to attach to a cell phone.

The actual technology works...just not well enough, and scaling it to be an order of magnitude more useful is probably physically impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder if there's a correlation between over-funded companies, and over- engineered products?

<comment><USER13> IMHO, the juicer wasn't over-engineered, it was under designed. Whomever designed it wasn't given or didn't pay attention to cost constraints and didn't think hard enough about how to solve the problem in the most efficient manner.

A well designed machine would probably be more like a roller on a worm drive mounted on some stamped sheet metal. It would look totally chintzy but get the job done and cost a fraction of what the Juicero cost. It would still be a stupid product that would probably fail, but at least the hardware wouldn't cost an arm and a leg.

<comment><USER14> It could be that by doing a roller system, it wouldn't be able to be sold at a premium and generate the funding they have.

Some of this all works together, would they have been here with a workable, reasonable product? Probably not, they would have been just an appliance.

But with a completely unreasonable product, they get to flaunt it's ridiculous merits as value. You could even imagine marketing around the full press having some bs nutritional value versus not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, it's been an incredible journey. Blowing through millions of VC money, to create the ultimate in over engineered nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER26> What they should have done is something like this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CYA8HsM_Mg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CYA8HsM_Mg)

Instead they ended up with a costly dud.

</comment><comment><USER27> to be honest, the Nest smart thermostat seems to me just like this juicero thing.

I don't own one, but I heard from early buyers that thing is expensively useless.

but somehow it receives less laugh and the company is still operating.

but of course, the nest company has an ambition in smart homes and iot also, not just making thermostats.

</comment><comment><USER28> Compared with SeeFood app, I wonder which one of them is more useful.

<comment><USER29> No one has claimed Juicero is _useless_ , just that the value-proposition is a very hard sell when a $0 substitute can get similar results.

<comment><USER30> Really, I'm getting older, but my teeth still work okay. I can still chew my fruits and vegetables without having a machine do it for me. Is this something that people are having difficulty with these days?

<comment><USER4> It's actually worse than you think. If you look at what is inside those Juicero packets, it's basically just "chewed" up fruit pulp. That's why you can squeeze it with your hands so effectively. If it was actually a masticating machine, it might be useful. But this is literally a $700 device, that squeezes juice out of a bag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> the company is any way a sham to begin with/ I don't think it is solving a real problem anyway</comment>


Watching Amazon's Future in a Fashion Show - <AUTHOR> https://notboring.substack.com/p/jeff-bezos-fashion-flex <comment><AUTHOR> Amazon's new show, Making the Cut, is just another fashion show. But it's also a big Jeff Bezos flex, and a glimpse into the future of its content-to- commerce efforts. One day, Amazon will create shows built to sell every product category.</comment>


Ask HN: What does the future of programming look like? - <AUTHOR> There have been big paradigm shifts in computing before. What changes do you think are on the horizon? How do you <i>want</i> the future of computing to work? <comment><AUTHOR> It looks to me like webassembly, and a standard multi-language bytecode VM, is going to cause some big changes.

The cost of inter-process-communication is going to become significantly cheaper for webassembly-interpreted languages. I expect to see libraries that share remote _objects_ instead of just remote function calls. Sort of like python's rpyc.

I'd like it if instead of writing a web service you simply exposed specially written python/javascript/whatever objects over the web, where they could be imported by your GUI or used as an API by someone else.

</comment><comment><USER2> Babel. The tower, not the compiler.

Also, with Moore's law being over, special-purpose architectures may multiply as rapidly as programming languages have.</comment>


See How Much Time You Are Wasting With RescueTime - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/see-how-much-tme-you-are-wasting-with-rescuetime?partner=techmeme

<comment><USER2> Ironically I read the headline as:

"See how much time you are wasting by using RescueTime"

(Note: Nothing against RescueTime... just thought it was ironic.)

<comment><USER3> I have to say, RescueTime is so awesome that I find myself looking at it more than I should. I probably should spend more time working and less time checking my RescueTime stats. =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Been using it for a couple weeks. I'd hate to show my boss the reports it has generated ;) Very useful. Interesting data and some good visualization.

<comment><USER5> "I'd hate to show my boss the reports it has generated" -- Me too, but what if that's a good idea that happens to clash with our established workplace myths? I was thinking about the "measurement software" item on pg's list of things they want to fund, and I think that anything that would enable measurement would cause total chaos in any workplace I've been a part of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use Linux at work, and I wish there were a Linux version that I could try out. Sadly, I imagine @webwright & co. would be insane to waste any time writing a desktop client for such a small market. Are there alternatives for Linux?

<comment><USER7> I use this one <https://launchpad.net/rescuetime-linux-uploader>

<comment><USER6> Thanks!!! I didn't know that existed!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Like most people, I'm a person with deadlines. RescueTime does a good job at letting me confirm (or deny) how I think I'm spending my time. In other words, RescueTime lets me know when I'm lying to myself.

</comment><comment><USER9> great interview, tony!</comment>


The Robinhood High-Frequency Trading Scandal: The Plot Thickens - <AUTHOR> https://seekingalpha.com/article/4212397-robinhood-high-frequency-trading-scandal-plot-thickens <comment><USER2> I don't buy the author's argument that "everyone is doing it" doesn't hold water. The author mentions Interactive Brokers and Vanguard, the first being a HFT haven and the second being a non-profit.

When Robinhood first came out, I suspected they were skimming on the bid-ask spread, and that appears to essentially be the case, just through a third party.

Running trades isn't free, so I don't think it would surprise anyone that they found another way to make money. And it just so happens that it's pretty much the same thing most other brokerages do.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't really see anything nefarious going on.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish I was as skeptical about free products as I am about expensive products. Looks like Robinhood is just another tech company. Create a free product, store the data, wait for users to get locked in and later devise a scammy way to monetize it. Silicon valley why you no live up to your catchy slogans? ლ(ಠ益ಠლ)

</comment><comment><USER4> My opinion on HFTs with Robinhood It honestly doesn't matter. Every brokerage has some kind of deal with HFTs. Retail investors already have many disadvantages compared to institutions and this small "disadvantages" won't outweigh the benefit of free commissions.

I have seen many articles across other social platforms chastising Robinhood with its dealings with HFTs. I realized that there's no free lunch man. we need to realize that fast markets aren't our enemy.</comment>


Pysctp gets gentoo support thanks to zx2c4 - <AUTHOR> http://www.p1sec.com/corp/research/tools/pysctp/ Emerge goodness is now available for SCTP support for Python on Gentoo. Unofficial Debian and Ubuntu packages (PPA) available too. <comment><USER2> Video of emerge available.</comment>


IHollogram for iPhone - illusion of a 3d hologram jumping off the screen (vid) - <AUTHOR> http://www.davidoreilly.com/blog/2008/08/ihologram/ <comment><USER2> _"The software uses the ipod's built-in gyroscope to calculate rotation on the y-axis, so we can look around the environment around by turning the device, there are also controls for manual rotation with a slider on the left hand side of the screen."_

Cool, but the iPhone doesn't have a gyroscope, only an accelerometer. How does it detect rotations that are perpendicular to gravity?

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe the table is on a small incline (i.e. it's not perfectly horizontal). If you think about it, it's pretty hard to find a table that's perfectly leveled anyway. I have no idea how sensitive the accelerometer truly is so it could be a hoax (but probably it is not).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeah, I call hoax... Physics-wise this doesn't make sense

<http://tinyurl.com/yqh6zq>

TUAW confirms that, if you set the iPhone on a tabletop, the iPhone returns 3 values:

\- X: rotation around the short axis

\- Y: rotation around the long axis

\- Z: whether phone is face up or face down

I don't think this is possible... unless that table was actually at a 45 degree angle or something?

<comment><USER4> If the table is on enough of a slope for the iPhone to detect rotation (yaw) it would work... But maybe I'm just hoping it does because the idea of headtracking for 3d is so fun (check out <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/> for a similar experiment with the Wii if anyone missed it)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> seems like the image would lag behind the rotation of the iphone a bit.</comment>


From Ruby's Grape to Martini in Go for Building Web API Server - <AUTHOR> http://stevenyue.com/2014/02/10/from-rubys-grape-to-martini-in-go-for-building-web-api-server/

<comment><USER2> hmm...why rack is so slow?

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont know..</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What HTML to PDF Angular (typescript) solution are available? - <AUTHOR> Hello everyone, I'm been looking for a fully frontend solution to take our generated html to PDF. I've come across jsPDF with html2canvas to sidestep the limitation of jsPDF fromHTML method that does not take CSS into consideration, but have come blank.
Has anyone out there been able to find a fully frontend solution to html-to-pdf generation that includes CSS styles? <comment><USER2> Wkhtmltopdf

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that there are many backend solutions to this such as using a headless browser to generate the page and create a PDF, and Wkhtmltopdf, but I'm looking for a way to circumvent this with a full frontend solution.</comment></comment>


Coroutines and Fibers: Why and When - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@markpapadakis/coroutines-and-fibers-why-and-when-5798f08464fd <comment><USER2> Coroutines are also fantastic for scripting Game AI:

      local player = nil
      while(player == nil) do
        yeild(0)
        player = LookForPlayer(...)
      end

      while(WalkTowardsPlayer(player)) do
        yeild(0)
      end

      while(!PlayerDead(player)) do
        MeleePlayer(player)
        yield(0)
      end

Makes state management super-simple and is something you can easily teach to designers as well. This is partly why you see Lua show up in so many game engines.

<comment><USER3> FSM may be a better fit for this specific application, though.

<comment><USER2> For something engineered, sure.

However if you're working with designers who don't have a lot of formal education it's much easier to convey the concept of a function that "pauses" where yield() happens.

Also quite a bit of gameplay code ends up as throw-away so being able to quickly put behaviors together is a plus.

<comment><USER3> You're saying a tree of FSM states is more difficult to convey than linearized coroutine code, with emphasis on informal programmers/designers?

You may want to take a look at visual FSM solutions, which do what you specify and more, easily.

You're not even wrong.

[https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/animati...](https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/beginner/animation/animator- scripting), for an example in an Animation program

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I generally prefer coroutines myself but this article doesn't cover some points well.

'Fair scheduling' \- nobody writes single threaded programs that process requests sequentially. It's either a thread-per-request system vs. a coroutine-per-request system. Threads are generally going to be more fair at scheduling since they are preemptive. Most coroutines are cooperative (Python, Lua) - so a long running coroutine (stuck doing some CPU cycle) will block all other inflight requests and cause latency variance. Some systems are preemptive (Erlang) so they don't suffer from the variance.

The benefit of coroutines is you can have a very large number of coroutines, probably orders of magnitude more than the number of threads - so coroutine- per-request models will scale much more than threads-per-request. The article is spot on about the context switching cost - it's so much cheaper to switch between coroutines.

You can also use multiple request per threads and use async IO, but that's the same as using coroutines with a much worse programming model.

<comment><USER5> Yes, fibers/coroutines are good for socket I/O because sockets could be made non-blocking, therefore a fiber could yield on EWOULDBLOCK error from a socket. For file I/O there is no non-blocking I/O option, so the whole OS- thread might block on it along with all the fibers that it owns. Therefore any operation that is not socket I/O and goes beyond CPU and RAM should be delegated from fibers to a good old worker thread pool. The fiber should yield after submitting a request to the pool, and on the request completion the worker thread should notify the fiber scheduler to resume the original fiber.

<comment><USER6> Well, there's no POSIX async file I/O, but there's libaio for Linux's aio syscalls (io_submit and co.), which works. (MySQL/InnoDB uses it for example.)

<comment><USER5> Upon return from a non-blocking I/O call the request is either failed or succeeded. Upon return from an async I/O call the request might additionally be in progress thus the fiber is required to wait for its completion. This case has little practical difference from a thread pool. Except with a thread pool it is the worker thread that notifies the fiber scheduler on I/O completion. With async I/O it is the kernel that notifies the application and then the application (from a signal handler or from an auxiliary thread) should propagate the notification to the fiber scheduler.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> i'm using java fibers ([https://github.com/kilim/kilim](https://github.com/kilim/kilim)) for a database

for anyone interested in using fibers inside a java webapp, i just wrote up a quick survey of async java servlet performance: [http://blog.nqzero.com/2016/01/asynchronous-java- webserver-h...](http://blog.nqzero.com/2016/01/asynchronous-java-webserver- hello-world.html)

(based TechEmpower plaintext benchmark, but limited to java async)

the model is that you use async in the server, and then bridge to a fiber implementation and then complete the async response when the fiber completes. for handling high latency low cpu processing on the server, this technique allows handling a huge number of connections

<comment><USER8> What do you think of Quasar fiber[1]?

[1] [http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/#fibers](http://docs.paralleluniverse.co/quasar/#fibers)

<comment><USER7> i assume that it's comparable to kilim, but have limited experience

Comsat (one of the servers in my benchmark i linked) is written by the same people and uses Quasar. so eg Comsat Jetty is an async jetty servlet with a bridge to a Quasar fiber-based handler. the performance in my simplistic test wasn't great (async jetty was 50% faster than comsat jetty) - i don't know if that's representative

however, it's very easy to work with and mimics the Jetty API, which is really nice. [https://github.com/nqzero/jempower/blob/master/comsat/src/ma...](https://github.com/nqzero/jempower/blob/master/comsat/src/main/java/ComsatJetty.java)

for my database i was initially worried about the LGPL license for Quasar, but the guys assured me that it's not viral in this usage and i think they're correct

pron (one of the developers) is active posting on HN and has written some very good/knowledgeable stuff about java, so i suspect that Quasar is technically solid. i do plan on doing an integration with my database at some point and i'll write up my results and post them on HN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Coroutines seem to be a very popular topic. And again my shameless plug, I did exactly the thing described in this article in my project: [https://github.com/ademakov/MainMemory](https://github.com/ademakov/MainMemory)

</comment><comment><USER9> One caveat with coroutines and fibers is that all the code that runs on them must be fully aware that they are running on said coroutines and fibers.

<comment><USER7> at least in java (i'm using [https://github.com/kilim/kilim](https://github.com/kilim/kilim), but quasar appears to be similar), only methods that yield need to be aware

<comment><USER4> Same for Lua.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> For Python: (might help someone) [http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/](http://www.dabeaz.com/coroutines/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand how resumable functions can be used to build stack-full coroutines, like in Go language, can anyone give an example or some links?

<comment><USER12> Go has an interesting history surrounding its stacks. Originally the stack was a doubly linked-list (segmented stack), but it changed into a more vector-like format (contiguous stacks) in 1.3. Here's a pretty good write-up:

[http://agis.io/2014/03/25/contiguous-stacks-in- go.html](http://agis.io/2014/03/25/contiguous-stacks-in-go.html)</comment></comment>


No Pascal, not a SNOBOL's chance. Go Forth! - <AUTHOR> http://hackaday.com/2015/11/03/no-pascal-not-a-snobols-chance-go-forth/ <comment><USER2> I made my first programming steps with Turbo Pascal and later with Delphi (which was very common here in Germany as a student language, versions 6/7, before the .NET stuff where used for ages, and possibly still are in some schools). Really surprising that there aren't many GUI building tools of equal speed to Delphi around right now.

Of course I've heard of Forth, but I can't remember seeing SNOBOL before.

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice article, but:

Again, could you _please_ not change the titles of submissions?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, thanks. I've changed the title.

<comment><USER2> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Internet firms react fast to avert implosion - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/18/BU8V13JUSM.DTL <comment><USER2> This is not a fast reaction, it's the correction of a situation that shouldn't have existed in the first place. Searchme is cutting excesses. If your big plan is to cut in gym memberships and massages, then you're in trouble. The people they are firing are probably support staff, not hackers.</comment>


Interview with Raffi Krikorian on Twitter's Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/articles/twitter-infrastructure

<comment><USER2> I you like this, then you'll also enjoy this presentation: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling-operations- facebo...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling-operations-facebook).

<comment><USER3> To add to that: [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling- instagram](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/scaling-instagram)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Flagged - title is editorialized. Correct title is "Interview with Raffi Krikorian on Twitter's Infrastructure". Edit: This has been fixed now. Thanks.

This actually seems like a disguised recruitment piece, until the last answer where it plainly is. There are little to no actual technical details about their SOA implementation other than handwaving about splitting their monolithic app into services and the benefits it brings. I guess it's just meant to entice developers with stories of the awesome solutions they will get to maintain as a cog in Twitter.

<comment><USER5> you appear as a little angry about the whole thing...

<comment><USER4> Spent time reading it only to find it to be a recruitment fluff piece devoid of any useful information at all. Angry at myself for even bothering to finish it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Raffi spoke at LAWebSpeed as well. Video here: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk07iaYQE1U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk07iaYQE1U)

</comment><comment><USER7> While server's is under maintenance, read a cached version [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.inf...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:www.infoq.com/articles/twitter- infrastructure)

</comment><comment><USER8> Original Castle in the Sky/architecture blog post: [https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second- record-a...](https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and- how)

</comment><comment><USER9> This guy starts too many sentences with "so", just like me.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have always thought twitter TPS were high, until i heard China WeiBo was doing those TPS constantly and had a highest TPS record 10x more then twitter..

</comment><comment><USER11> [deleted]

I decided this comment wasn't constructive.

<comment><USER12> 34k tweets per second * follower fanout. Trading platforms don't deliver curated individual timelines of single trades you are interested in.</comment></comment>


Show HN: An easy way to convert time - <AUTHOR> https://epoch.sh/ <comment><USER2> I can see that this might be useful for interactive human use, but I'm not sure of the benefit of the API. Most popular programming languages have a library to do this already without relying on a network service.

Unix command line with GNU date:

date --iso-8601=seconds

date --iso-8601=seconds -u # UTC

date --iso-8601=seconds -d @1234567890 # specified time stamp

date -d 2017-06-29T12:28:57-07:00 +%s # other direction

Python: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2150739/iso-time- iso-860...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2150739/iso-time-iso-8601-in- python)

Using a network API for this kind of conversion function that's already built into programming languages reminds me of the left-pad controversy. You don't need to outsource basic programming tasks to third-party libraries, and you also don't need to outsource them to third-party network services.

<comment><USER3> I don't think of it as an API to integrate into your service, but more of an easy to remember thing like [http://http.cat/503](http://http.cat/503) [http://http.cat/404](http://http.cat/404) etc.

<comment><USER4> How does this exist ? I like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does not handle leap seconds:

[https://api.epoch.sh/2016-12-31T23:59:60Z](https://api.epoch.sh/2016-12-31T23:59:60Z)

Edge case, but 2016-12-31T23:59:60Z is a valid UTC time.

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't even know that was possible...

<comment><USER6> Welcome to the rabbit hole that is date/time handling.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup. Probably just step lightly out of that one. Already have too many irons in the fire

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using epochconverter.com for several years. Thank you for the effort. I like to break things. So, don't worry about this. But, it will not process 10413795600?

<comment><USER8> It looks like the max value is 9999999999.

"unix": 9999999999, "utc": "2286-11-20T17:46:39Z"

edit: No, I was very wrong. Adding another 9 seems to work. However, moving up one to 10000000000 does not.

edit2: Okay I wasn't wrong. It just was changed by the OP very quickly. Which I guess makes this entire post wrong now. But let the record reflect for a very brief period in my life I was correct.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, good catch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Fun, but I found this part interesting:

        ⏵ http https://api.epoch.sh/
        HTTP/1.1 200 OK
        ...
        Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2017 21:06:20 GMT
        ...

        {
            "utc": "2017-06-29T21:06:19Z"
        }

One second off. ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> It's not clear how it detects which type you've passed, but this is pretty unexpected:

[https://api.epoch.sh/-100](https://api.epoch.sh/-100)

`{"local":"0099-12-31T16:00:00-08:00","unix":-59011459200,"utc":"0100-01-01T00:00:00Z"}`

This too:

[https://api.epoch.sh/8675309](https://api.epoch.sh/8675309)

`{"local":"8675-11-04T16:00:00-08:00","unix":211615977600,"utc":"8675-11-05T00:00:00Z"}`

<comment><AUTHOR> This should be fixed now. As others pointed out, had some bad validation

<comment><USER10> Why is `-100` invalid?

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, I have no idea why I even checked for < 0 since it's seconds backwards since epoch. Just a mental snag I guess

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It would also be useful to provide a way to convert the other way around (from a date to epoch).

I actually built a similar tool a while ago: [http://timeconv.io/](http://timeconv.io/) that's similar to yours :) The goal is to provide a set of useful time/date utilities.

<comment><AUTHOR> It does

[https://epoch.sh/2017-06-29T20:57:08Z](https://epoch.sh/2017-06-29T20:57:08Z)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Neat site. How does it know my local time?

<comment><USER12> Getting of your browser?

<comment><USER3> Yes - but how? I looked at the HTTP headers I was sending and none of them contained the time zone.

<comment><USER13> Open your console and type `new Date()`. In JS every date is local time by default

<comment><USER3> Sure, but there is no JS on the page, and curling [https://api.epoch.sh](https://api.epoch.sh) gives the same result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> @Prefinem Do you plan to release the site source code?

I like it, a cool and useful project for sure.

<comment><AUTHOR> I could. It's just a simple Lambda function.

I will try and do so tomorrow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Doesn't seem to like any Unix timestamps less than 10 characters long?

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Silly me</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Open-source PDF Viewer for my Website? - <AUTHOR>

If you know a really good one, please take a second to drop a name here. <comment><USER2> I know it's not OSS, but scribd.com is a really useful service. They have a decently powerful API that lets you upload the doc and let them handle hosting, rendering, metadata, etc.

I'm not sure if this will work for you, but sites like drop.io seem to use it pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google docs viewer has worked well for me: <https://docs.google.com/viewer>

Example here: [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/embeddable- google-d...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/09/embeddable-google- document-viewer.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> I built this for a project I'm working on. <http://github.com/Benmills/pdfize>

It's a jquery plugin that uses the google pdf viewer. Here is a demo: <http://files.bmdev.org/pdfize.html>

</comment><comment><USER5> I can't think of any OSS, but Vuzit makes a pretty good one that you can add and embed in your website without having to host your files with them <http://vuzit.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't know if I would call it really good, but pdf2swf might be a start.

<http://www.swftools.org/>

</comment><comment><USER7> Not sure if this is an option for you, but you could run OpenOffice in headless mode and script it to convert pdf files to html.

</comment><comment><USER8> if you are into the java ee scene you can look into icepdf by the icefaces people. I've never personally used it but is is OSS now so it might work out for you.

<http://www.icepdf.org/></comment>


Journalists and Technologists Should Collaborate to Build More Trustworthy Media - <AUTHOR> http://www.openpolitics.com/articles/the-webs-original-design-1965-would-have-exposed-fake-news-better.html <comment><AUTHOR> 1) What do you think of the Neotext expanding citation system featured in the article?

2) What do you think of the Al Gore and Sarah Palin Fake News examples?

3) What do you think of the idea of modifying the browser to support contextual quotations without requiring the user to leave the source page?

4) What do you think about the idea of modifying video systems like Youtube to provide greater context to video clips?</comment>


XD2Sketch – How I built a profitable tool with one landing page - <AUTHOR> https://www.frenl.com/project/xd2sketch <comment><USER2> This is not a valid Show HN. Please read the rules: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh I'm sorry I should have read the rules more thoroughly... Will it be ok to repost it in a few days in the correct category (not in Show HN)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Most of my projects never made it to a release!

I wish I could relate less to that statement.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm surprised it costs so much per file ($14). What happens if the conversion is lousy? I wonder what percentage of purchasers request refunds because the output isn't useful to them.

<comment><USER5> It usually only makes sense for bigger files where the whole UI of an app or a website is done. Since the pricing isnt fair for smaller files, I'll release a pricing based on artboards in the next few weeks. Stay tuned. As per the refunds, there's a 100% refund policy. If you're not happy you'll get your money back. So far the feedback has been good and very few refund request have been made.</comment></comment>


Why WeWork.com uses a static generator - <AUTHOR> https://engineering.wework.com/engineering/2015/12/08/why-wework-com-uses-a-static-generator-and-why-you-should-too/ <comment><USER2> I'm still struggling to get on board with this. It seems to just favor speed above all else. I found the linked article at [http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static- websit...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/modern-static-website- generators-next-big-thing/) to be a bit more helpful in pitching the case, but even so it seems like just pulling the complexity of dynamic sites into the build stage of the static ones all because writing efficient DB queries is "hard". For a companies front page, I can see the benefit of generating content once instead of for every client, but what happens when you need to present information beyond the generic? What happens when you need to show a user's order history? Let them change their password? Allow them to see the distance of that run?

I feel old and crotchety, but I just find it a bit strange that as we get more and more obsessed with data, this emerges; something that seems less that optimal for dealing with it. They make the comparison themselves, but it seems like reverting from "Web Applications" back to "Web Sites" and just filling it with API calls to actual Web Apps.

<comment><USER3> The "right" way to do this (edit: this is essentially assumed by the article, so I'm not contradicting it) is to build static sites and use JavaScript to pull in any dynamic information. You run data services that output JSON, then the JS on the page calls those data services and renders the views.

This still allows you to reap the benefits of static content (namely CDN distribution / caching) while still maintaining some dynamic content.

But basically, you do it this way to avoid pulling data that isn't user- specific from the database. It's far more efficient to build a header + page + footer once at build time than to have every client have to do that on access -- even if you have 100+ variations of your site that need to be compiled and updated on any change in the shared content. Storage and compute resource are trivially cheap if they don't scale exponentially with number of users.

Yeah, it's more work for your developers, but it saves your DBAs a LOT of work by reducing the volume of data served from the database. And at the end of the day, it's full-stack effort that counts -- I'd rather have my developers spend 2x the time to build a system than have my DBAs fighting fires because the site went down. With a static site, you can set it to read-only mode if the traffic gets to be too much, and the static content will be handled by the CDN (which can almost certainly handle any load).

<comment><USER4> Using JS to present data moves the work of generating the display of that data from the build process, as with "pure" static site generation, or from server- side code, as with a standard CMS, to the client, where it is most likely to fail in unpredictable ways due to variances in browser JS or CSS engines, network performance, browser extensions, etc, etc.

But given that the concept of progressive enhancement seems to have been completely lost on the latest generation of web developers, who cares, right?

<comment><USER3> Well, the key here is that any non-JSON data you pull from a URL should be static. That means it can be cached, and the client should only be pulling a small amount of data that varies based on their account.

I wouldn't write an interactive web application this way, but for sites that are mostly content the approach works fine. You still have to test on multiple browsers, and you still have to write code that handles the differences in browsers/engines/etc. But your servers are doing less work, and the content reaches the customer faster. It's still up to you to optimize your JS (though I guarantee most tracking cookies are taxing JS far more than rendering a few divs will).

<comment><USER4> > the content reaches the customer faster.

Does it? Is it really slower for your customers to download a server-generated page than for them to download a static page, (probably) download a JavaScript file embedded in the page, execute the JavaScript, then download and process server-generated JSON?

<comment><USER3> Considering they're likely also downloading JavaScript and executing it when using the server-generated page, yes. Let's not pretend it's possible to do everything on the server side. Just now instead of compiling the page in real time when it's accessed, we compile large parts of it long before the user requests it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Static websites are great of course, and the article outlines that nicely.

The problem that I've been facing personally is that most of the times, the people who are updating and maintaining content on marketing websites are not developers.

So having to use the command line for static site generators such as Jekyll or Middleman is just not a good experience. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE static site generators in general and I'm using both Middleman and Sculpin myself.

Other people has seen this problem too, and some user-friendly-ish static site generators have started to surface, but I want to chime in with a solution to that too since I believe that the best way to adopt static site generators is to use the tools that content creators and maintainers already love and are familiar with, e.g. WordPress which now has a whopping 25% marketshare[1].

I built SpudPress[2] with a friend. It is a hosted static site generator for WordPress. We automatically generate a static version of your WordPress site and host in on a super fast CDN. You don't have to worry about any of the edge cases of generating a static copy, we take care of all that automatically for you.

[1] [http://ma.tt/2015/11/seventy-five-to-go/](http://ma.tt/2015/11/seventy- five-to-go/) [2] [https://spudpress.com](https://spudpress.com)

<comment><USER6> Movable Type, one of the original blogging platforms, worked (and works) exactly like that, though it also supports dynamic publishing. For example, Jeff Atwood's blog has always been statically generated: [http://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-horror-movable-type- sinc...](http://blog.codinghorror.com/coding-horror-movable-type-since-2004/)

<comment><USER5> That's really cool! I like that. It's nice to see that a platform like Movable Type has had this feature right off the bat for such a long time.

The main reason that we decided to build SpudPress this way, is that you can more or less take your existing WordPress site and instantly make it static.

In contrary to Jeff's Movable Type blog we're taking full advantage of the static pages to host the entire site on a CDN + handle asset cache validation automatically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > One key requirement for us when evaluating different static site generators > was the ability to hit an API endpoint and dynamically generate static pages > based on the data returned.

...dynamically generate static pages?

<comment><USER8> Basically, this means you hit an API endpoint that returns an array of JSON objects, each of which is used to generate an HTML page.

Contentful offers this as a service, along with web frontends for updating the data for those APIs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I run my personal sites and a couple other on static site generators (mostly Jekyll) and it really works out well. The most complicated and interesting case is that of hackercouch.com, where we are running custom Jekyll plugins to even serve an API.

Another website, recently setup for the chennai floods by a friend uses a Google Spreadsheet as a database, but is served as a static site: [http://chennairains.org/](http://chennairains.org/).

Its far more easy to deploy a static site, they are portable and shifting hosts is far more easier. Your database considerations are slightly less relevant since it only affects deploy speeds, and not your site performance.

</comment><comment><USER10> Some serious questions:

1\. Why not just use fs.writeFile to create all the site info as json files as either a one off or a chron job, then run a gulp task to either use something like jade or else roll your own rendering to put the JSON in the right place on the page, then output the result as html to a public folder, set up an express static server and have a catch-all splat after it for 404s? What am I missing here?

2\. If your site is fairly static like WeWork's, why not just have it as a SPWA, set all the links to retrieve a JSON file from the static server and process them on the front end? You could even use history.pushState and checking window.url to make sure that history works and links would load the right thing.

3\. When someone logs in, are you doing a DB lookup then serving their dashboard page statically (somehow, for some reason...), or does this static build only apply to part of your page and not others?

4\. Could everything Roots does be replaced by one 6 line gulp task? Not trying to be mean, just wondering if its target userbase knows what gulp is.

<comment><USER11> For point 1 - that will give you way worse performance than WeWork's current setup, since all requests will have to go back to your origin where your express server is running in order to determine if it's a static request or a dynamic request.

With netlify this happens at the CDN PoP which makes a huge difference for a site with a global audience like WeWork.

<comment><USER10> Sure, but that's not an advantage unique to netlify, is it? I mean, one could run the express server on Amazon CloudFront and have the same situation and a more competitive pricing structure. Or is there something else they do that I'm missing?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like the engineers made this decision:

"If you consider the amount of information that changes on a daily, or even weekly basis on a site like wework.com, it is actually quite wasteful to have a server process each and every request that comes through."

A better solution for a marketing site is to use a CMS (doesn't really matter which - Wordpress, Rails, etc) and then use a CDN like Cloudflare to proxy static pages and speed things up. It's fast, efficient, and flexible.

The solution wework used optimizes for performance but reduces flexibility. I'd bet the marketing team at wework wishes that they didn't have to redeploy the entire site every time they wanted to change some text.

<comment><USER13> With some static site generators you don't have to redeploy the entire site. Just the changed files. You can rapidly update the site with no issues. I'm not sure if a CMS is really a good solution for a site that changes infrequently or when updates typically require developer interaction anyways.

<comment><USER14> > With some static site generators you don't have to redeploy the entire site. > Just the changed files.

My static site does this. I use make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Why I immediately click off of blog posts with titles containing 'and you should too' and you should too"

<comment><USER16> Judging posts based on titling patterns considered harmful

<comment><USER17> Premature generalization is the root of all evil</comment></comment></comment>


Why has no-one brought back a JuicyCampus clone? - <AUTHOR> http://juicycampus.blogspot.com/2009/02/juicy-shutdown.html

<comment><USER2> Because it's evil.

Initially when I heard of it, I thought it was a great idea. I thought it'd turn out like friends gossipping about friends. But friends gossipping isn't google-able. It also isn't that anonymous. When you gossip in person, or with your identity on the line(versus anonymous gossipping), it significantly restricts the damage potential.

Why would you want to create a tool that is primarily used to hurt random college students? Not a rhetorical question, I'd really like to know the views on the other side.

To me, it makes no sense from any of the key angles(doing something I can be proud of; making money).

<comment><USER3> _Because it's evil._

Which makes it all the more surprising that no one has brought it back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://collegeacb.com/> is big at Penn State.

<comment><USER5> Here at Wesleyan, too, where the kid that runs it, Peter Frank, attends. When Juicycampus shut down he paid them to redirect their traffic to collegeacb, but it seems the deal is off now.

However, running this sort of of site is really asking for trouble. Peter gets a lot of flak for providing this outlet for anonymous spittle between students, with some people even threatening lawsuits (for example, [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1942971,00....](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1942971,00.html)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am one of the (anonymous, though my phone number is unblocked) developers of <http://www.dirtyphonebook.com> and to me that's the closest thing to Juicy Campus. It's a better version, because it affects everybody.

The site wasn't my idea, but I came up with the toolbar and some of the cool existing features and some of the features we're working on implementing right now. We are working on implementing pictures and other cool location and search-based features very soon.

Even though the site is admittedly very sophomoric right now it's going to be one of the most useful resources for all types of personal information fairly soon. Think spokeo and wikipedia and facebook on steroids.

To those that suggest this concept is evil, DirtyPhoneBook site has exposed cheaters, abusive people that go after people with guns, child-support deadbeats, drug-dealers that sell to kids, and other scum too. There needs to be methods of punishing mean and evil people.

I was randomly punched in the face and beaten up in highschool. I've gotten fired from a job I loved before because somebody else screwed up and they had power to blame me. I think the DPB concept is incredibly underrated because it gives you a way to expose jerks with no way of tracing who said anything. The anonymity allows a lot to come out that otherwise wouldn't.

Free Speech should always triumph over censorship. For the good of society, <http://www.dirtyphonebook.com> is the first place that let's anybody tell the truth about anybody without any censorship.

We're working on some fabulous stuff that is going to entertain and amaze people. ;)

<comment><USER7> Punishing bad people is great at all, but with no accountability you're going to punish a lot of nonbad people too.

There's nothing stopping people that have your phone number from posting "He raped me" or "He beat me up" just because they don't like you or because they'll get your job when you get fired. And since it's usually really hard to prove that you have never ever done X, an innocent person basically has no better way to defend oneself than a guilty person.

<comment><USER6> * Besides voting and commenting, there is a feature that allows you to verify yourself as the owner of a phone number on DPB if you want to make a verified rebuttal against a comment.

<comment><USER7> Sure, but if someone comments that I raped them, I'm going to post a verified rebuttal saying that it's an outright lie whether or not I actually raped them, which makes the rebuttal meaningless.

There's _tons_ of accusations people could make that are completely false yet almost impossible to actually disprove.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder what a mashup of twitter/4chan/foursquare would look like. In my large lectures, it's not uncommon for more than half of the students to have laptops open and on facebook. Imagine being able to have a real time discussion in a classroom/stadium/concert hall that's completely anonymous.

I got bored one weekend and created a rough working version using rails, but I scrapped it because I didn't want to maintain the site much less promote it.

What do you all think?

<comment><USER7> > _Imagine being able to have a real time discussion in a > classroom/stadium/concert hall that's completely anonymous._

Most programming conferences have some kind of "backchannel", such as BackNoise(.com), that is just what you describe. And the results are not always pretty: [http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/09/dont-blame-backnoise- atlan...](http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/09/dont-blame-backnoise-atlanta-new- media-conference.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> 1\. Colleges contain a bunch of kids with rich, litigious parents.

2\. Colleges are run by a bunch of administrators who cater to rich, litigious parents, and whose primary source of revenue is more of those parents in the coming years. They are thus rather sensitive about their brand.

3\. In anonymous forums, people pick on those they feel unable to pick on otherwise (due to social norms, fear of retribution, etc). Rich kids often fit these criteria.

4\. It's probably tough to find advertisers to want to have their content next to a bunch of hateful stuff.

</comment><comment><USER10> What was it? There's not enough info in the linked blogpost to figure it out.

<comment><USER11> Apparently, an uncensored gossip site for college campuses.

<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Juicy_Campus>

Though I was in college throughout most of the existence of Juicy Campus, I never heard of it, though it's possible my school wasn't in their list, or it just didn't gain traction there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've made something like that but specific to our school. It was sort of an automated "Gossip Girl" system that used Twilio to send texts of various tips. It relied on secrecy though, which was impossible to preserve in the end.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Unfortunately, even with great traffic and strong user loyalty, a business can't survive and grow without a steady stream of revenue to support it. In these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved. JuicyCampus' exponential growth outpaced our ability to muster the resources needed to survive this economic downturn, and as a result, we are closing down the site as of Feb. 5, 2009."

Sounds like they're in a Reddit-like dilemma...

Plus, they received a lot of flack for the stuff they had on there, so it's a headache waiting to happen</comment>


Show HN: I built a remote jobs board that you can filter by timezone ⏰ - <AUTHOR> http://www.remotecircle.com <comment><USER2> You expect people to give email address and share about the website on linkedn / twitter and facebook without even looking at the product once ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Love the timezones feature. Could the job title field work as a search field instead of auto-suggesting?

<comment><USER2> Account created 39 minutes ago, 36 minutes ago commented on this post about features not there on website ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not a Show HN. Just a signup page.</comment>


People who refuse to drink water, no matter what - <AUTHOR> https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/hydro-haters-people-who-dont-drink-water <comment><USER2> What kind of water are these people drinking? I don't understand how you could be dehydrated and hate the taste of water unless it's severely contaminated. A glass of water when you need it is the best damn thing ever.

I'm pretty used to crazy people existing, but this one just does not compute.

<comment><USER3> I mainly only drink water, but note that not everywhere in the world can you "drink" the water. My grandfather arrived at a US airforce base in Japan with his family in tow. This was in 1955 or so. They had a nice house on base. But the first time they turned on the kitchen sink, clear water came out... but also worms.

I spent most of my teenage years in several small towns along the Texas gulf coast. In most of these small towns, there was city supplied water, but it did not come from some water company that had ran thousands of miles of water mains. Instead every couple of blocks, there was a "water well" and a large 500-1000 gallon water/pressure tank which supplied water to a couple of blocks. I was told that since we were only a couple of miles from the beach that the wells were not that deep. I'd heard figures of "just 30ft", but not sure if that was true. Nonetheless, that was some nasty water. I still drank it though. Sometime in 1995 we got a brita water pitcher, it helped, but not much. Almost no one drank the stuff.

The worst case, I was visiting a friend that had moved into deep east Texas. The water was horrid. Almost impossible to drink. I took a shower that night, and it couldn't even rinse the soap off of me. My first day there, I mainly only drank beer. After going to bed late (still covered in soap), I woke up the next morning with a partial headache and a huge thirst from having no water the day before. I stumbled through the house to the kitchen sink. Found a large cup, filled it to the brim. Took a big gulp. The water was cool and quenching (or so I thought), but it was amiss. The taste, the thickness. I couldn't do it. I started gagging heavily. Nothing came up as my stomach was empty.. but still.. the water made a very thirsty man nearly puke. I took a step back and looked at my other options. There was still some cheap beer left, and there was a 2 liter bottle of diet pepsi on top of the fridge. I can't remember what my choice was, perhaps I just passed out...

<comment><USER4> > the first time they turned on the kitchen sink, clear water came out... but > also worms.

Whatever water tank/deposit they used had not been cleaned in ages. Surprising considering recruits are basically free workforce.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Water tastes like nothing. Why would I drink nothing? What's the point?"

The point is that water is fundamental to our survival. I just can't understand how someone who is presumably fairly intelligent could say something like this.

<comment><USER6> I can't understand how you can't understand this. How can someone of normal intelligence not understand that many things contain or are made out of water therefore the person saying that meant he/she doesn't drink pure water. He/she probably drinks juice. This is so obvious. How can a person of normal intelligence not be aware of this? Perhaps such a person is aware... he's just being human and like all humans sometimes does things that are harmless and slightly illogical.

<comment><USER5> Usually I'd be very sympathetic to this argument, but this person admits further down they drink far too little in general. I'm not perfect by a long shot, but I'd like to think I've got the fundamentals down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I feel like in the past this would anger me so much that people were wrong or being dumb. Now I just feel sorry for them. They're walking Darwin award nominees.

</comment><comment><USER8> The quest for more sugar in everything now bears fruit. If these people are not addicted, nobody is.

<comment><USER9> Exactly my thought after reading this - they don't hate the taste of water, they hate the taste of not-sugar.

<comment><USER10> That's way too simplistic (and judgmental). I'm not fond of plain water, but "hates the taste of not-sugar" doesn't explain why I'd find unsweetened tea or lemonade preferable. Yes, really. Heck, I'd find _salt_ water preferable in terms of taste, though it's a bad idea for other reasons. What theory do you have for why you're still a superior person?

<comment><USER9> I'm not a superior person at all, and I never meant to imply that. But you ought to know that unsweetened tea and unsweetened lemonade still has plenty of sodium (or in the case of actual lemon juice added, fructose sugars (which are not required to be listed on the labels)), which is also a flavor enhancer. My point is that it's not water that tastes bad, it's that some people get so used to salt and sugar in everything they eat that plain old water tastes gross.

> I'd find salt water preferable in terms of taste

I'm absolutely sure that's true for varying levels of salt, as shown by your preference for unsweetened tea.

Salt or sugar, they're both flavor enhancers, which was the point of my post.

Also, it's entirely possible that people who hate water live in places where a lot of minerals and iron are in the water, which is common (and a lot of people don't like that irony taste). Or, the reverse where people grew up in areas _with_ a particular mineral in the water which is no longer there. Personally, a nice ceramic filter on a Big Berkeley, put into the fridge for a day, ooooh man I'm gonna go hydrate currently.

Edit: I should have figured from your aggressive tone that a reply wasn't going to be productive, but after reading your bio - WOW. Feel free to let this thread die!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel like I could've easily been one of those people if I had been raised on the _tap_ water from my town, which was absolutely vile (We received a non- zero number of letters over the years from the county or federal government proudly proclaiming, "Good news! The water in your town is _no longer_ dangerously toxic!"). However, my father hated the town water so much that he paid for gallons of water to be delivered to our house from a cleaner source. A poorer family might not have been able to afford that luxury, and grown up thinking all water tasted like sewage.

I received a lot of ribbing from my friends during childhood for having a water-cooler in our house. But our water tasted _good_.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've never been able to get a real answer: does sparkling water hydrate you the same way flat water does? Also if there are "natural flavors" in the sparking water, how does that affect hydration. I personally don't mind drinking water, and always do during/after workouts, but prefer flavored sparking water if the option is available. Just wondering if drinking a few cups of that per day is the same as drinking a few cups of flat water per day.

<comment><USER13> Per volume? Not quite, but not really measurably different. The CO2 dissolved in the solution has to take up some small amount of space. Otherwise it's basically identical; our bodies interact with enough CO2 in a day that you simply aren't making a dent.

"Natural flavors" are essentially adding sugar and a couple chemicals to the water. You can think of it as being effectively the same as drinking an equivalent amount of H2O and taking a tablet that contained all of the "natural flavors". No real difference in hydration, but taking in a bunch of sugar after a workout is generally frowned upon. Go get some protein instead.

<comment><USER12> "Natural flavors" is in seltzer water with 0 sugar. It is also advertised to have "no artificial sweeteners", which I realize might be bending the truth somehow, but I'm pretty sure food and drink companies can't outright lie about that stuff. From what I've gathered it doesn't affect insulin levels like the artificial sweeteners from diet soda does, but I also can't figure out what it actually _is_.

Side-note: sugar after a workout is the best time for sugar. You want to replenish muscle-glycogen as soon as possible and sugar is a fast track to that. Obviously you should opt for fruit over a Gatorade or sweets though.

<comment><USER14> Be aware though, they can advertise 0 calories as long as it rounds to 0, so a couple calories of sugar is "0 calorie natural flavor".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Would these people refuse to drink water 200 years ago? If not, they would most likely die. It's _almost as if_ there is some evolutionary element at work here...bad decisions take you out of the gene pool the rest of us are splashing around in. Unfortunately at this day in age, we find ways to keep these humans alive, and empower them to share their suicidal preferences via the internet.

<comment><USER16> I think 200 years ago people were mostly trying to stay away from water as much as possible not to get sick. They were drinking beers, meads and all kind of stuff that was somehow preprocessed. Still in a lot of places good water from tap is not reality.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. Cholera was a serious problem. in 1854, Dr John Snow, suspecting that contaminated water rather than "miasma" was the cause, mapped the cholera deaths in Soho, London: [https://www1.udel.edu/johnmack/frec682/cholera/](https://www1.udel.edu/johnmack/frec682/cholera/)

The closer to the Broad Street pump, the higher the death rate, with one exception: the nearby brewery. The workers at the brewery drank beer instead of water. (The water used to brew beer is boiled, killing the bacteria.)

Dr Snow had the handle removed from the pump, ending the epidemic. There's now a pub nearby called the John Snow (in what is now called Broadwick Street), and a kerbstone made of pink granite where the pump was.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought this might be a prank article but someone commented here that they don't like to drink water either. I had no idea.

Also: what's with the annoying gifs that don't add to the article but do move and distract you when reading? That's one reason I thought this was a prank article.

</comment><comment><USER19> I pretty much only drank soda until I was in my 30s and started to have problems with reflux and heart palpitations from caffeine. Now I have a cup of coffee in the morning and water the rest of the day. I can't even drink a full can of coke any more without feeling a little nauseous.

</comment><comment><USER20> Provided this article isn't a prank or parody...

Talk about first world problems.

Hong Kong flushes with sea water because of the lack of fresh water sources, and these people complain about it because either the lack of taste, or the metallic taste (from bad pipes?)

</comment><comment><USER21> I knew someone like this, they changed after passing multiple kidney stones.

<comment><USER22> Seems like a good startup opportunity. Break your bad habits by forcing a small bluetooth-enabled stone through your urethra.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> As long as the water-haters are mixing ice cubes, tea, juice etc. in their "waters" I think they'll be fine. I am going to assume this is a prank. Although, if more blogs and news channels and talk shows pick this up, I guarantee this will become a "thing" within 6 months. The internet is exhausting sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER24> I love to drink water from the tap as a kid. Then at some point I discovered carbonated bottled water and tap water started to taste bad for me. It never changed back. Even if I buy non-carbonated bottled water it tastes as bad as tap water. I can easily drink tap water after it's boiled (warm or even cool). Might be psychological.

<comment><USER25> Heating tap water will quickly drive off the chlorine.

<comment><USER26> Or running through a very simple and cheap carbon filter, which also takes out a lot of other off-flavors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Looking for clues that this is parody, here's a candidate ("Big Water"):

 _She's been carted off in an ambulance after fainting at the gym, after suffering a panic attack and after experiencing extreme exhaustion from a minor cold — but she says she still won't fall for Big Water's scare tactics. "Even if there are absolutely no other options [besides water], I usually just opt to not drink anything," she tells me._

Replace "drink water" with "minimize greenhouse gas emissions," "exercise," "eat less junk," etc.

Basically, the world is full of people determined to sabotage their own lives.

<comment><USER6> Big water is real though. It's the bottled water industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm a pretty non-picky eater, but I feel like I can usually empathize with other people's picky eating habits. Not drinking water however, is something that I just can't wrap my mind around.

</comment><comment><USER29> I was like this for a while until we got an RO unit with a water polisher. Tap water tastes like chlorinated algae and bottled water is just bottled tap water unless you get something expensive. Carbon filters like Brita don't really help that much with the taste. I ended up drinking mostly flavored water like crystal light and Mio.

RO water changed all that. It is delicious! Put a jug of RO water in the fridge and it's the best thing ever.

</comment><comment><USER30>
      All these people I could look up were American, which I don't think is a coincidence. There's been a lot said about Americans lack of food culture, and I think this is a symptom of that.
      Just as some people eat fast food every day, these people always opt for the unhealthier alternative when it comes to their drinks. A strong food culture and tradition would go a long way towards teaching people to enjoy foods which are actually good for their bodies.

</comment><comment> 0--__-_-__--0 This doesn't seem that weird.

From what I understand it's very rare to drink water in Chinese culture because it was historically necessary to boil it. You drink tea, booze and soup, but not water. If someone with first hand experience can chime in on this I'd appreciate it.

Same in historical Europe and America - alcoholic beverages were preferred over water for health reasons.

</comment><comment><USER31> Is it really that surprising that people who are raised on soda won't take up water once they reach adulthood? Imagine the same situation but with regular food. Would you switch to the healthier but totally tasteless and bland alternative? I doubt it -- I know I wouldn't. I would keep eating steaks and vegetables over a tasteless mush.

<comment><USER32> Arguable steak and vegetables are some of the healthiest food you can eat, if they are high quality...

<comment><USER31> So are milk and vegetables juice (to a degree). I'm sure you can convince those people to drop soda and energy drinks. It's the move to water that is probably a hard sell.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> After giving up diet soda I also hated drinking water because I found that, as backwards as it sounds, it gave me dry mouth and actually made me feel dehydrated. I drank it anyways but I discovered adding a tiny pinch of salt to it made those symptoms disappear and I don't mind drinking water any more.

</comment><comment><USER34> This is the first thing it reminded me of: ProZD's product review of drinking water. It's quite funny. [https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg](https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg)

</comment><comment><USER35> These people seem mental but when I grew up in Germany (born '66) nobody drank tap water. It was either sparkling water or some other kind of drink. Maybe it's changed now, not sure.

</comment><comment><USER6> I get it. It's like why eat bread when you can eat a sandwich? Water is still entering there bodies... I don't find this to be that incomprehensible as some people here do.

</comment><comment><USER36> These people -- do they hate water, or do they find it too boring?

</comment><comment><USER37> I briefly dated a woman like that. I met her in an Aikido class. (She was quite advanced in Judo.) Sometimes I really liked the way she smelled. Sometimes I really didn't.

</comment><comment><USER4> So may stories about tap water being undrinkable. Why not filter and/or boil it? You can make gallons of perfectly drinkable water easily.

<comment><USER10> A lot of the people you're talking to won't even throw a prepared meal in the oven instead of having one delivered. Boiling water is definitely not going to be on the to-do list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Reading this made me thirsty, no lie.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, I just downed my entire bottle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Had a colleague like this: coffee and stout only. Nothing else. Never drank water.

<comment><USER30> my dude

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Purity Of Essence

</comment><comment><USER42> My people. I can't stand drinking plain water. I need some kind of taste.

I end up drinking a LOT of iced tea, and G2 gatorade when I'm exercising.</comment>


MMS comes to Google Voice - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/06/google-voice-finally-supports-mms-on-att-sprint-and-nearly-100-other-carriers/

<comment><USER2> At last (not that I care personally), but it was one thing separating Google Voice from real numbers and now it's perfect, plus, it means Google Voice is not dead. I only wish they had a webhook API of some sort so that I can handle phone calls programmatically.</comment>


Facebook Bans Kodi Device Sales - <AUTHOR> https://www.cordcuttersnews.com/facebook-bans-the-sale-of-kodi-boxes-jailbroken-streaming-players/ <comment><USER2> "Kodi" is an open source media player. Nothing more or less.

The problem comes because people sell boxes preloaded with Kodi _and_ plugins that make one-click piracy possible.

Unfortunately the association that people make is now "Kodi = Piracy", which is very wrong.

<comment><USER3> And BitTorrent is a P2P file sharing program but it doesn't suddenly make the verb 'torrenting' mean anything other than piracy.

Kodi is a fantastic piece of software and it's a shame that their brand is being tarnished but c'est la vie when that's the biggest practical use case for your program. There's no sense for anyone other than the XBMC foundation to fight the river on this one.

What I would do if I was the project lead:

\- Pick a new name or go back to XBMC since it still has plenty of mindshare.

\- Implement a proper store for plug-ins and require signing for them to run a la Firefox.

\- Let users sideload plug-ins by running in 'unbranded mode' and aggressively litigate people using your trademark for unlocked devices.

\- Partner with manufacturers for an authorized device part of your store.

\- Work with content providers to add official apps to your store a la Chromecast.

<comment><USER4> Your recommendations more-or-less came to fruition as the company Plex.

<comment><USER5> I find the dichotomy quite interesting. Fundamentally, there aren't too many differences between the two, and yet Plex has no stigma associated with it. It's a pretty limited space to work in. Long term, I don't see how Plex's business model works. Since they don't control the media, they don't really control anything. There's only limited appetite for transcoding software.

<comment><USER3> In my view that's one of it's strengths, they make a good product that is best in class for the their niche. I'm happy they're trying to expand with features rather than some content bid. Plex doesn't have a stigma because you can't use it to actually pirate content.

I don't think Plex will ever be a huge company but you don't need to be in order to succeed.

<comment><USER5> >best in class for the their niche

I find plex to be quite buggy and opaque. It is tolerable for the few things that it does, but that's mostly because it's a niche, and there isn't that much competition in this space. I don't know how emby is doing these days.

>trying to expand with features

Their expansion efforts are also not that scalable, again because they can't control content. They recently added integration with tuner boxes and dvr, but that whole segment is on its way out. Not to mention, various other issues with the inability to handle DRM and other copyright restrictions that come with cable. They also tried some cloud drive integration, which again didn't pan out, because they don't control the storage. I think they've tried to bundle some news and podcasts, which is marginal at best. In this space, I just don't see how you can make money unless you are selling content, storage or compute. Plex sells none of these. At the end of the day, it's some glue software that probably calls ffmpeg to transcode.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Shouldn't the title be FB bans ... sales _on Facebook_? It's good to remember that FB <> Internet and FB <> world.

<comment><USER7> Isn't that implied. If it said Walmart bans sales of Kodi, is anyone going to think they are banning it worldwide.

<comment><USER6> One would hope so, but not as FB would have it. e.g. internet.org. Safer to keep a tight psychological bound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anybody think these clowns are actually going to be around in a decade? I can understand the business desire to censor political minorities to please the majority, but how does doing enforcement for the content cartels generate _any_ goodwill from their users?

It will be interesting to see what happens when their surveillance archives go off to the highest bidder (and are subsequently leaked).

<comment><USER9> "Content cartels?" You mean copyright owners? I'm not sure the majority is on your side. A lot of folks, including me, generate copyright-protected content and are happy to see anti-piracy measures enforced. Facebook has other issues, to be sure, but I don't have a problem with this.

<comment><USER8> Enjoy your bubble, while it lasts. It's [not] funny how every new "anti-piracy measure" seems more akin to precrime policing. This unrelenting insistence on invasive control is the heart of why copyright and the Internet cannot coexist.

<comment><USER10> I certainly think that many Hollywood companies are stuck in the stone age in many regards, but these devices are literally built for piracy (with the specific plug-ins, there are very legal uses of Kodi). You may have your own views on copyright, but I don't really see any rational argument for why someone should be able to profit off selling these devices.

Yes, the internet makes it easy to circumvent copyright, so then why don't people download this software themselves?

If you don't believe the `content cartels` deserve your money then why should someone random person installing free software?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> TIL that facebook has a marketplace.

<comment><USER12> This is brilliant marketing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> All the fuss about Kodi makes me think I should get a box. Is it worth it?

<comment><USER14> Kodi has one of the most arcane UIs I've used in years. Also, you need to find and set up plugins to get streaming going and this is a complicated process. The streams can be good but not worth all the hassle.

<comment><USER15> A younger more daring me set up SportsDevil back in the day (like a couple of years ago) so I could watch the Florida Gators play while living across the country. It was SUCH a pain to get a reliable stream. And even then, it was potato quality. With GoogleTV providing all the channels I need, and at a 35 dollar a month price, I can't see any reason why I'd go back to this route.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No "wiretapping devices"?

I wasn't aware that people sold stuff on Facebook. But Facebook apparently has a store now. Never noticed.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very odd. I can't imagine the rationale. "But you could watch pirated movies with it".... uh yeah, same for VLC, can I sell my Macbook on Facebook?

<comment><USER2> None of them have plain vanilla Kodi on them. If they did, Amazon wouldn't have a problem selling them - and probably no-one would buy them either.

They're all preloaded with insta-piracy plugins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Funny how they can easily and quietly manage banning Kodi yet stuggle publicly with removing blatent hate speech. Not saying they're equivalent, just that Facebook is perfectly capable of blocking things when they want to despite the free and open perception they try to create for the platform when they don't want to.

<comment><USER18> Their choice is strictly defined by the profit gain and loss calcs.</comment></comment>


Microsoft Issues New Strike to Chrome with This Stunning Browser Move - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2020/06/07/microsoft-issues-new-strike-to-chrome-with-this-stunning-browser-move/ <comment><USER2> Clickbait title.

> Among the new features, Edge has added a tool that will hide annoying > notification prompts when you browse the web. And the browser's appeal spans > both consumer and business users—Microsoft Edge 83 also comes with some > features such as Profile Switching that make things much easier for those > working from home during COVID-19.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is updating Edge through windows update a 'strike to chrome' or a 'stunning move'?

That is the dumbest title I have ever seen.</comment>


4 ways to administer Linux with a web interface - g-garron http://linuxaria.com/article/administer-linux-web-interface?lang=en

<comment><AUTHOR> I think CPanel/WebHostManager should have been included, whether you like or dislike it, it's by far the most popular web interface on hosted servers</comment>


Hailo says Uber blocked potential investors - <AUTHOR> http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29740296

<comment><USER2> Obviously... most VC firms don't invest in competitors because it would be a conflict of interest.

<comment><USER3> >He added: "In raising that massive [funding] round, any investor who wanted to even look at Uber's books to decide whether they wanted to make an investment had to sign an agreement which specifically named us, as well as Lyft, and restricting them from having any ability to even talk to us for at least a year.

I'm not very familiar with venture capitalism. This reads to me as if prospective investors wanted to gauge Uber's finances by looking at their books but were forced to sign the agreement first. Is this not the case?</comment></comment>


Why your academic code needs a software licence - <AUTHOR> https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2020/licence/ <comment><USER2> This article makes grand statements and that makes a glaring omission even more so: Releasing code and picking a license for it must involve your employer/University beforehand, they have a say and they have a legal department.

As for permissive v. copyleft licenses, you really need to think about the aim and the pros and cons. Again, lawyers will have good insight on this, it's not about "liking" one sort over the other.

<comment><AUTHOR> As I stated in the article: I am not a lawyer; my university gives us the freedom to provide code under a licence that we see fit. Of course, things change if they have a preference for a certain licence. Nevertheless, my point is also that any licence is better than no licence, right?

<comment><USER2> Well, it depends.

My point is that IMHO you should probably be more cautious and perhaps abstain from telling what type license is better and that they can just choose whatever they like.

There are good videos on the topic on Youtube (forgot which ones) by actual lawyers in the field that are more cautious than your article.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I see where you are coming from. I will update the article with a disclaimer!

(this is a little bit a case of 'YMMV' because some universities appear to give you a lot of leeway here, while others want a lawyer to be involved immediately)</comment></comment></comment></comment>