NASA Wants to Send Nuclear Rockets to the Moon and Mars - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/nasa-wants-to-send-nuclear-rockets-to-the-moon-and-mars/ <comment><USER2> what happens at the end of such a trip, when the propellant is exhausted, and can no longer evaporatively cool the core?

it has to contain enough propellant to come back to Earth orbit to refuel the propellant coolant?

even if the core is throttled to its lowest levels, it will still produce heat in the vacuum of space? or will radiative cooling balance the remaining production of heat?

<comment><USER3> You do what you would on a terrestrial reactor, and shut down the reactor e.g. by using control rods, or pulling out fuel rods to shut down the chain reaction. These wouldn't be simple radiothermal devices, but proper actively managed reactor cores.

Having said that you absolutely would need active cooling even in a 'shut down' state, probably by circulating a cooling fluid to radiator fins. You might use the same fluid as the propellant or might not. In the former case sure, you wouldn't be able to use all of it as propellant.

<comment><USER4> Absolutely not, in space you have the option of jettisoning the core, carrying coolant for a controlled shut down is a waste of weight. You might even go as far as having 4 disposable cores, one for each acceleration stage.

<comment><USER5> Not sure why this is being downvoted jettison the core would likely be the go- to solution you can put into a stable orbit or even set on course with the sun and let it burn off...

There is no much need for a complex control mechanism in fact keeping those core as orbital modules on mars would likely allow you to skip many of the complications of having a complex control system to prevent a run away effect and modulate power output no one really cares if the core would go critical even at low orbit on Mars as there is so much radiation there from natural sources anyhow.

If the core goes critical mid way then either have a fallback core or just jettison it and wait for a rescue mission.

The vessels would likely have enough supplies for such occasions and as far as risk to the crew goes nuclear propulsion in space is much less dangerous than chemical propellants that can actually explode.

With a nuclear core you can safely vent hydrogen and xenon to space not worrying that much about radiation or long term contamination the cores can be more or less exposed with large fin stacks for radiative cooling.

<comment><USER6> "set on course with the sun and let it burn off" \- [https://laughingsquid.com/why-it-is-more-difficult-to- crash-...](https://laughingsquid.com/why-it-is-more-difficult-to-crash-into- the-sun-than-leave-the-solar-system/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > which will almost certainly be used on any crewed mission to Mars.

This is interesting. I hadn't seen anything about NASA plans to get humans to Mars requiring nuclear-thermal propulsion. Does NASA even currently have a serious plan for Mars missions with the whole Artemis thing going on?

<comment><USER8> They branded Artemis as part of a larger "Moon to Mars" plan, with logo and all. [https://www.nasa.gov/moontomars/](https://www.nasa.gov/moontomars/)

<comment><USER7> Interesting. I'm kinda down on Artemis overall, as it seems like the whole thing is getting bogged down in political maneuvering, as usual.

NASA keeps saying it's more than boots on the ground, but all the plans they announce seem to be boots on the ground or overly complicated paths to the surface meant to please contractors.

This gem of a line from this week's Orbital Index kinda sums up why I'm preparing for disappointment:

>"Meanwhile, contractors ( _cough_ Boeing? _cough_ ) are pushing for the Gateway plan to be nixed in favor of… The Exploration Upper Stage, a large interplanetary upper stage (launched on SLS Block 1B) in development by (wait for it) Boeing."

Boeing and the SLS have taken _forever_ already, and the version that _may_ launch soonish isn't even the "real" SLS.

<comment><USER8> I'm skeptical of any human exploration plans NASA has beyond 2-4 years or so. Anything more and the next President winds up nixing it to put their own stamp on things.

My money's on a commercial program like they one they've been doing for ISS resupply.

<comment><USER7> > My money's on a commercial program like they one they've been doing for ISS > resupply.

Fully agree. If I had to bet right now, I would guess that SpaceX will get humans to the moon before NASA does. They're moving so quickly on Starship and seem extremely determined to prove their new rocket.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> How big is the added risk of toxic waste? I'm not sure how much waste is produced in relation to propulsion energy given but it must be quite small? And I imagine that during travel in space you could just dump that waste out into space considering the vastness of it all.

<comment><USER10> Whenever you're splitting Uranium atoms the results will tend to be radioactive. The results will build up in the fuel over time and eventually make the reactor stop working. Conventional reactors breed a bit of plutonium too as U238 captures neutrons but most aerospace reactors want to be as light as possible and so use highly enriched Uranium. So after your trip the engine will be quite radioactive but, as you point out, there's a lot of space and outside Earth's atmosphere and Van Allen belts it's moderately radioactive anyways.

Thankfully nuclear reactors aren't particularly radioactive until you turn them on, which is a big improvement on the radiothermal generators, RTGs, that we sometimes use in probes headed for the outer solar system where solar panels don't work. It's during launch, before this part gets turned on, that you have a risk of crashing and losing the reactor somewhere on Earth.

<comment><USER11> I'm increasingly of the opinion that nuclear for space should be mined and built in space. Just launch the infrastructure needed to bootstrap the process.

<comment><USER12> Um, uh, um, uh...where to start?

"Mined" from where? How?

<comment><USER11> The moon? Asteroids? Or even just ship up unrefined ore such that a catastrophic failure can't threaten the population.

<comment><USER13> Neither of the first two are options... at all realistically, nither uranium nor thorium exist in anything below a large planetary size body in any quantity: [https://www.quora.com/Do-uranium-and-thorium-exist-in- signif...](https://www.quora.com/Do-uranium-and-thorium-exist-in-significant- quantities-in-our-solar-systems-asteroid-belt)

And shipping up unrefined ore is also a bit of a ludicrous idea for mass reasons and the rocket equation alone. You do realize you can isolate a nuclear reactor core from explosions on rockets right? What catastrophic failures are you attempting to design your solution of avoiding a nuclear reactor around?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> How does one convert nuclear heat energy into directional energy for propulsion purposes?

<comment><USER15> Take a look at this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Links dead.

Edit: available through outline [https://outline.com/nbpE5n](https://outline.com/nbpE5n)

</comment><comment><USER17> so things got really serious and we need to get out there as fast as we can

</comment><comment><USER18> Anyone else just get a JSON 404 page from this link?

        {
            statusCode: 404,
            error: "Not Found",
            message: "Not Found"
        }

<comment><USER19> I tried it just now and was able to see the article. On another note, why do they include the HTTP status code in the JSON body? Isn't it already present in the status line of the HTTP response?

<comment><USER20> People using funky software stacks don't always have access to the status line information, so some APIs include the status in json.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For the first time, period. Doesn't look like we had one 60 years ago...

<comment><USER8> We did: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA)

Tested successfully (on the ground) in the 60s.

Real pity about its cancellation, too. It was considered for the "Grand Tour" that the Voyager probes wound up doing; they could've sent nearly 30x the spacecraft mass with NERVA rockets.

</comment></comment><comment> bra-ket this is great! check out project Orion [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_\(nuclear_propulsion\))

<comment><USER22> It's much more likely to look like NERVA than Orion.

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

These types of engines have already been run: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDNX65d-FBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDNX65d-FBY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm disappointed.

I expected a project-Orion-type interstellar solution. Not a measly "twice as fast as conventional" water kettle.

Also, no word about what they will acually use. Because classic uranium is a quite limited resource actually. It has been said to run out even before fossil fuels.

Also, why not a _fusion_ rocket? Given that we know how to make fusion bombs. Because until we find a massive amount of anti-matter, this will be the next best thing for a loong time. The only limiting factor would be a human body's ability to withstand G forces.

<comment><USER24> > Because until we find a massive amount of anti-matter

I honestly hope this never occurs, or we never are able to contain/store such a mass for any real length of time.

Because if we can do it, it will be used for a weapon.

Seriously - I can't even imagine what - for instance - one kilogram of anti- matter coming in contact with regular matter - the amount of energy that would be released...it staggers the imagination. Today's fusion weapons release only a fraction of their potential energy; anti-matter conversion would be 100% (roughly):

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

"Using the convention that 1 kiloton TNT equivalent = 4.184×1012 joules (or one trillion calories of energy), one gram of antimatter reacting with one gram of ordinary matter results in 42.96 kilotons-equivalent of energy (though there is considerable "loss" by production of neutrinos)."

So...one kilo of anti-matter would be equivalent to 42 megatons - which is close to yield of the Tsar Bomba:

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

...but in a much more compact package. 50 kg of antimatter - which would be feasible for current launch systems, and comparable in size to current warheads:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W80_(nuclear_warhead)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W80_\(nuclear_warhead\))

Well - that's a 2 GT weapon...while I'm sure such a thing has been considered as to it's effects...I honestly don't know what that would be. Best guess might be that one such warhead could easily take out a good portion of say, the west coast (of the United States)?

Ultimately - we are not ready in any manner - socially, morally, politically - as a species to wield that kind of power responsibly. Honestly, even nuclear weapons fall into that assessment, despite recent history - I'm honestly not sure how we have gotten this far without a major nuclear war occurring.

Sadly, though, I know that my conjecture (in which I am not alone, I hope) will not do anything to stop the research - right now, though, the cost to produce anti-matter (let alone contain it) is so high as to make even a small mass cost an exorbitant amount of money. I sincerely hope there isn't any breakthrough on that front.

I honestly think we, as a species, are not ready for it (that isn't to say none of us are - but those who would be responsible with such "stuff" are likely very few - I know I am not one of them).

<comment><USER23> Well, if we found it, it would already be contained unless accessed by definition.

Also, magnetic fields could definitely contain it, as is already done.

We can already make anti-matter, as it't essentially the process of making matter bounce off, using a photon, in such a way that it reverts its time direction. Or, in classical view: Turn a photon into a particle/antiparticle pair. The problem is, of course, that it first takes those shitloads of energy, that it would release later.

And to actually _find_ anti-matter in nature, you would most likely have to turn into anti-matter yourself, travel back in time, and somehow survive the big bang without touching anything, to come out the hypothetized other side where time is reversed and anti-matter expanded to. Or try to get inside a black hole, and revert your direction of motion (as time and space are reversed in there). Both not yet technically available, to say the least. ;)</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Quadiq – A Simple, Relaxing, Strategy Game - <AUTHOR> I'm making this post before I go to bed. I'll check comments tomorrow if there are any to check! I just wanted to show off a simple game I built somewhat inspired by Hexiq and similar games. It's called Quadiq. You can play it at the link below. Let me know what you think! What does it need? How can it be better?<p>http://quadiq.binarycocoa.com/ <comment><USER2> A few thoughts:

-I would've liked to be able to undo a turn, willing to even give a significant amount of earned points for it

-After some time playing, it got really boring since you really just get the hang of it and don't need to think anymore. I mean that's really the point of the game is to relax right? I'm not saying to make it harder, but maybe you can think of some things to make it more engaging. Maybe more points for certain patterns like completing blocks in a certain color order. Basically it got really boring doing the same thing and getting the same rate of points. There is no sense of exponential gain for becoming better and more efficient at the game. But that may be the goal after all, to be relaxing.

EDIT:

Additionally, this game is simple enough to have keyboard navigation. Move with arrows, wasd, or hjkl and space as the action button. For fast typists like me, I would've found that to be very pleasurable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I created a number of issues in our git repo this morning and the ability to reverse a move was included! I like that idea. I also added an issue for keyboard controls!

I'm currently thinking of some ideas to make things more engaging but I do also want to keep a fine balance of excitement and relaxation (or maybe ill think of it like a loop to bring players back to relaxation after a 'plot twist' of sorts). I think different types of shapes is a good idea. A friend of mine suggested a 4x4, for example, that gives you 400 points. I've thought of other shapes but I want to make sure the algorithm is as efficient as possible, because that's part of the goal for me, learning better search algos and what not.

I'm also trying to figure out ways to make it more aesthetically pleasing as well as figuring out sound effects. I also like the idea of having some sort of integrated YouTube or Spotify player (kind of like how rocket league has a Spotify widget in the main menu).

I appreciate your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Great game! It definitely needs a way to go 1 step back.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've added that to my list of things to add!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice job. Keep at it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I most certainly will. I'll be adding a number of things soon.</comment></comment>


Heroku Pricing Changes - <AUTHOR> http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2010/1/21/pricing_changes_part_i/ <comment><USER2> _You, our customers, have given us great feedback that in some places our pricing isn't aligned with the value we provide, and in other places our pricing is just confusing._

That sounds familiar.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577622>

There is a user-visible _application_ to determine pricing which has, by my count, 52 separate items I have to pay attention to figure out how much you charge me.

How's about replacing it with this:

Cool Japanese Name for Hobbyist: $25

Cool Japanese Name for Small Business: $100

Cool Japanese Name for Enterprise: $1,000

Cool Japanese Name For Customize Your Own Plan: Click here for disgustingly complicated form.

The best part is you _don't have to change anything about pricing_. Just assume you know what people want (which should be easy since you have thousands of customers and can look at what customers at particular sizes actually need), put that into the plans, and you're done. If folks want to shave $2 off their costs by playing Spreadsheet Samurai they still can.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm still not sure what market Heroku is addressing. It's great for free apps, but as soon as you start to have to pay money, it doesn't seem competitive compared to other options... Am I missing a trick here? Are paid Heroku accounts actually the best thing ever?

<comment><USER4> Maybe I can provide some insight, I'm a current paying Heroku customer, our monthly bill's in the hundreds/mo and I think it's a great value. I've been a user of Engine Yard Cloud in the past as well (same app). I like EY Cloud just fine, it's a great product, but Heroku's got a moderately more awesome experience, and I like their architecture and the granularity of their billing better.

To put it in simple terms, if you want a host with deep Rails knowledge that will manage systems administration for you, Heroku and Engine Yard Cloud are great offerings.

I actually have a reasonable amount of experience provisioning bare metal and virtual servers from the ground up and I still opted to go with Heroku and pay the premium for convenience. I just don't have the time to deal with hosting issues, my company can afford it, and I'd rather spend all my time developing. Additionally, compared to managed hosting from a company like Rackspace both options are much better. The Rackspace techs I spoke with, that would've been on my team didn't have much Rails specific knowledge, so I didn't see how they'd be able to offload as much work as a Rails specific host.

The Heroku workflow beats every other develop/deploy workflow I've ever seen. You could achieve the same stuff yourself, but it'd take a ton of work.

Want to send emails through sendgrid? 'heroku addons:add sendgrid', mailing just works, no reconfiguration.

Want pull your production db down to your dev machine? 'heroku db:pull'.

Want to deploy your app? 'git push heroku master'

Want to scale up the number of Dynos? heroku dynos 6 #Scale to 6 Dynos

Want to make a backup of your DB and Code, then download it? heroku bundles:capture heroku bundles:download

Want to reset your application to the state it was in when you snapshotted a bundle? heroku bundles:animate BUNDLENAME

Yeah, I could set up an approximation of this, but the fact is keeping stuff running is a chore that I'd rather not have, and my homegrown solution would have more warts and be funkier to use.

Additionally, their stack is pretty awesome, and you only pay for code that gets executed in the dynos, that means that rake tasks, cron jobs, and stuff cached by varnish is effectively free. This is important because it means those infrequently run CPU intensive tasks don't cause short losses of responsiveness.

Lastly, I've spoken at length with some people on the Heroku team, and I know them by blog posts they write. They're damn smart developers, and I definitely trust them to run Heroku right.

<comment><USER5> Great answers to the questions I've been wondering about. I might have to give Heroku a try.

How's the database performance?

<comment><USER4> It's been reliably fast, our DB response times are typically between 3 and 4 ms, though at the moment our DB is overpowered as we haven't yet transitioned our truly DB intensive stuff onto it quite yet (we're on a Fugu, which is a High CPU Medium, and the dataset we're using easily fits in memory).

That being said, working on Postgres has been noticably faster and more pleasant than MySQL. Complex queries in MySQL didn't benchmark as well as they did in Postgres.

As far as the shared plans go, we use a cheap shared (koi) DB for our staging stuff, it's been snappy enough, even when re-syncing it with our production DB which obviously puts on a massive write load, but I couldn't really extrapolate much from that, and I have no idea how variable the performance winds up being with multi-tenancy on the DB.

BTW, one of the joys of heroku really is db:push and pull. I can easily do:

heroku db:pull #Pull production database onto local machine heroku db:push --app mystagingapp #Push the local DB onto the staging heroku db

Just be sure to do this with a script, the last you ever want to do is push your dev DB to the production site.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, db:pull sounds pretty excellent - setting up a proper dev db mirror is more pain than it's worth, usually.

Thanks again for the overview.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seems like they're focusing on monetizing the compute performance and making the database stuff essentially free.

I'd be interested to learn more about the business strategy behind this change. It's an interesting direction.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article's pretty old (~a month). I don't know that it was posted here, but I'd guess it was.</comment>


Objective-C bridge for node.js - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/TooTallNate/NodObjC

<comment><USER2> People who find this interesting should look into Cycript, which is used by all of us iOS hackers (but also works on Mac OS X and even Linux and FreeBSD through GNUStep).

</comment><comment><USER3> Thinking about this makes me giddy. Attempting to use as soon as I wrap up my real work.</comment>


One Tiny German Town, Seven Big Michelin Stars (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/magazine/one-tiny-german-town-seven-big-michelin-stars.html?pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> There is also Bray, Berkshire: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bray,_Berkshire#Restaurants](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bray,_Berkshire#Restaurants)

</comment><comment><USER3> This link is broken for me. It gives me a "too many redirects" error when visiting it.

<comment><USER4> For me, the page redirects to a login form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also San Sebastián/Donostia: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Sebastián#Gastronomy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Sebastián#Gastronomy)

</comment><comment><USER6> Maybe three stars will be gone soon as Harald Wohlfahrt might through in the towel. [http://www.suedkurier.de/nachrichten/baden- wuerttemberg/Spit...](http://www.suedkurier.de/nachrichten/baden- wuerttemberg/Spitzenkoch-Harald-Wohlfahrt-zieht-sich-aus-Schwarzwaldstube- zurueck;art417930,9256137)

<comment><USER7> Wow. All the chefs that worked with him now have more than 70 Michelin stars together.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm from there :-) Just curious how this made the HN front page?

<comment><USER9> maybe coz of this:

>> In his last State of the Union address, President Obama said America should emulate Germany's knack for producing skilled workers — "high-school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges." He was referring specifically to fields like engineering and computer science, but he could just as easily have been talking about high-end cooking

<comment><USER10> Computer Science and Engineering are not the sort of technical degrees one gets from a community college. Certainly not out of high school either.

<comment><USER11> Its called "Fachinformatiker". Its basically a lower tiered version of the University CS degree. Its what is felt to be needed to be taken serious as an "IT-Person" in Germany. That said nobody ever asked me for that Piece of paper let after 15 years and 4 companys :P

there are 2 main tracks - one is hardware oriented the other more software oriented. In practice that means slightly more electronics or programming classes.

The stuff taught is certainly more practical than the stuff you learn at university but its geared toward 16 years olds. None in my class was that age. It was very surreal being treated as a kid again. And the mandatory ethics and German courses (as well as Sports class) were are real pita.

<comment><USER12> Quite informative, thank you. Can you explain the ethics issue? Or do you simply mean you or forced to take ethics courses?

<comment><USER13> IIRC they could mean two possible classes by using the term "Ethics":

* "Ethik-/Philosophieunterricht": basically you learn philosophy, ie. critical thinking, approaching problems/issues from different points of view, or

* "Ethikunterricht" as in learning ethical behaviour in the context of the profession you're striving to be in, which is most likely common sense crap that HAS to be taught so even "the last idiot" gets it or is at least on the record as having been taught this stuff so the school is not "liable" for potential ethics issues caused by the student.

I could very much be wrong about the latter point as I am enrolled in a similar, but more specialized "learning track" at a German "Fachhochschule" and not in a vocational school.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Airport Exposes Class Divisions in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/us/airport-project-reflects-a-changing-silicon-valley.html

<comment><USER2> SV transplant here. Grew up in suburban Chicago, now live in SF. Being surrounded by rich people all day is nice -- low crime, good water-cooler conversations with well-traveled, worldly, people, but there's a dark side: I'm having a harder and harder time relating to my family back in IL as time goes on.

In time, I imagine sociologists will study the affects of such insular communities on empathy, happiness, and many other dimensions of the human experience.

<comment><USER3> I live in Oakland and generally spend zero time here except either inside the condo or in a car driving to anywhere else.

I went to a local optometrist (who is surprisingly good); as far as I can tell, every patient who walked in was asking about Medi-Cal coverage or other government subsidy for the poor (which wasn't accepted, so they left). I'd far prefer to be around tech startup founders than the alternative, which is not "firefighters and teachers", but the poor and borderline homeless, it seems.

(I plan to move to Seattle or San Mateo County later this year; unclear if the benefits of Silicon Valley make up for the bogosity of California anymore.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't appreciate the way the article vilifies the airport and its expansion. Airports may be used by the super rich, but they are also used by middle class workers as well. I make under six figures but still co-own a private aircraft and enjoy flying recreationally.

Furthermore, the new FBO on the airport would not displace any current residents (the displaced resident in the article lives in a complex planned for conversion into a business center). Instead, the new FBO would offer entry level employment, such as aircraft fueler and receptionist work, exactly the kind of thing the non-tech residents of SV should be calling for.

</comment><comment><USER5> > "But I'm also going to try to talk to the guy at Facebook," she said in the > living room of her tidy two-room trailer, adding that she had read that the > company's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, had recently established a > political action committee for immigration reform. "He's trying to help > immigrants, and immigrants are here."

I'm not sure if she's being sarcastic. I'm pretty sure Zuckerberg doesn't care about the immigrants in her trailer park. He cares about increasing the pool of skilled technical works, which would bring his costs down.

</comment><comment><USER6> This type of thing is going on all over the country. If you play this out to its logical conclusion, none of the people that wealthy households depend on to maintain their lifestyles will be able to live near enough to the wealthy to provide those services. I guess someone better improve the Roomba and make a dish washing, laundry, and pool cleaning bot quickly.

<comment><USER7> I don't even know where you'd go in Chicago to pick up a private jet, and we're the third largest metro area in the country. Can you tell me more about the lifestyle support workers who can't afford to live near rich people here?

The fact is that SF and, to a lesser but still significant extent NYC, are hobbled in this respect by geography.

<comment><USER6> [http://www.chicagotraveler.com/attractions/palwaukee- airport...](http://www.chicagotraveler.com/attractions/palwaukee-airport.html)

Next flight leaves...whenever you want it to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wouldn't describe most people who work at Facebook and Google as being upper class. They may earn above average when you look at all workers, but I think upper class is old money, privately education with independent wealth and social power. I don't think that describes most geeks.

Edit: I think in the US a Senator would be upper class, some random Google employee is probably middle-middle at best.

<comment><USER9> If you are dependent on a paycheck from an employer to pay your bills (either as a regular employee or a contractor), and your annual pay isn't enough that you could, in principle, invest the surplus above the median income over your expected career and be able to live indefinitely at near-median income off the proceeds of that investment as passive recipient (IOW, if you work for a living and aren't something like a top-rank pro athlete or someone with similar pay), its probably safe to say that you are at best upper-middle class.

The upper class are the people that live comfortably off of capital (or have the resources where they could do so, in principle, even if instead they choose to consume their seed corn and _don't_.) They are the people that, if they have jobs, have no need to have fear of losing them, not because its easy to find another one (as might be the case for many elite workers), but because they don't really need the first one.

<comment><USER10> There was a post last month where the comments went into how the wealthy don't consider themselves "upper class". One fellow said he had $8M in investments but did not feel "upper class" due to lack of influence/respect.

Completely oblivious to the fact that he could cash out the investments, never work again and still be in the top 20% income bracket.

Here is how to become middle class. Go to school, get good grades, get a job.

Here is how to become "upper class". Get a pile of money. Stop working. Start accumulating influence and respect.

The $8M dollar working man is like a grad student who never leaves school. He keeps accumulating little bits of paper that say how awesome he is, but are worthless in the larger game. He never moves onto the next step.

Oh, and if you can't figure out how to gain influence/respect, get out of the Valley. You are a medium-sized fish in a giant pond. Find a smaller pond. Throw a dart at a US map, move to that town. Buy every piece of land that goes up for sale. Get involved in local politics, the Zoning Board will probably have the best results. Hire people and build your dream.

<comment><USER11> By the traditional definitions, you have the lower class (proletariat), middle class (bourgeoisie), and upper class (aristocracy). People who work for someone else--in exchange for a wage meted out by that someone else--are _lower_ class, no matter how high-up they are in their particular organization. Business _owners_ (though this includes freelancers) form the middle class. People who have enough power to control _the rules by which capital is allocated in the economy_ (and thereby basically have unlimited wealth, in a sense) are upper class. This used to be royalty, and those who could afford to spend all day bowing and scraping to them; in the modern day, it's congress, and the leaders of the industries who can afford to lobby them.

Interestingly, this class structure has been "rediscovered" in modern-day discourse, in the form of the MacLeod corporate hierarchy. It's harder to recognize within the context of a single corporation, but when you analyze, say, all of Silicon Valley in those terms (<http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/tag/vcistan/>), the class-structure leaps right out.

<comment><USER9> > By the traditional definitions, you have the lower class (proletariat), > middle class (bourgeoisie), and upper class (aristocracy). People who work > for someone else--in exchange for a wage meted out by that someone else--are > lower class, no matter how high-up they are in their particular > organization.

The "traditional" scheme I'm most familiar with has the proletariat, the petit bourgeosie, and the haute borgeoisie; that is, the post-aristocratic system used in 19th century discussions of capitalist society. The petit bourgeosie includes both what would, in modern terms, be elite and white collar workers (technical experts, managers, etc.) and small business owners (who may technically be 'capitalist', but are nevertheless are dependent largely on their own labor for support even if it is not wage labor), while the haute bourgeousie are the major capitalists.

Both the proletariat (lower class) and much of the petit bourgeosie (middle class) work at wage labor, and the proletariat and the whole of the petit bourgeosie are dependent on their ability to _find a market for their labor_ for their living. The haute bourgeosie corresponds very closely to how you describe the aristocracy, but the distinction between the proletariat and the petit bourgeosie is not at the point where your description draws the line between the proletariat and the bourgeosie; business ownership isn't the _sine qua non_ of the middle class.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nope. Next question.

<comment><USER8> The cheeky mods have changed the title, so your comment no longer makes any sense.

<comment><AUTHOR> The original title was: Is there room for a middle class in Silicon Valley?

I think it's an important question, and if the answer is "no" what can we do about it? It was this line of the article that resonated with me: "We are becoming a community where our teachers, our police, our firefighters, our nurses, they can't live with us. They have to come in from other places. Healthy communities have all these people living together."

It seems terribly unhealthy to exclude the folks who provide vital and valuable services to a community from living in it.

<comment><USER13> Use sacbee to look up how much police officers make in the area. Hint, a hell of a lot more then I do as a programmer with 10+ years of experience. Hell, that campus police officer that pepper sprayed those kids at Berkeley makes 6 figures.

<comment><USER14> Back when SFPD was short staffed there used to be a billboard advertising $91,000 starting salary for new recruits.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Original Kickstarter Website Mockups - k-mcgrady http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/happy-3rd-birthday-kickstarter

<comment><AUTHOR> It is always interesting to see how where the big hitters of the web came from and what their roots were. Looks like the team behind Kick Starter had a pretty solid vision considering they stuck to it for so long until the final release. Respect.

</comment><comment><USER2> All I can say is I'm so glad they didn't drop the 'e'</comment>


Deploying v0.11 Phoenix application to Heroku – My first ever blog post - <AUTHOR> http://www.simonbambey.com/phoenix/2015/04/16/deploying-v-0-11-0-phoenix-application-to-heroku/

<comment><USER2> Nice blog post, it was concise and to the point!

Saw this tweet[1] yesterday

"DHH just admitted he stole ideas from #elixir and @elixirphoenix to create ActionCable @railsconf"

Seems like elixirphoenix is on a right path! This tempted me to look into elixir and phoenix.

My Question: How do you think phoenix can save _time_ for a web developer or a team of web developer?

Most of the time, I hear people talking about how fast their language or framework is. I think at the end of the day, all that matters is a tool that saves time (of frustration and redundancy) without any side effects. And you just wrote about one of the pain points -- deployment.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/kblake/status/590523627965059073](https://twitter.com/kblake/status/590523627965059073)

<comment><USER3> My ElixirConfEU talk should help answer these questions once it goes live in a few weeks. To answer them now, we have generators, like Rails, for scaffolding resources, except we split them into html and json. So you can do `mix phoenix.gen.html ...` to bootstrap a model, migrations, forms, templates, controller, etc, but you can also do `mix phoenix.gen.json ...` and it will do the same but bootstrap the controller and view for a JSON endpoint. We also ship with live-reloading in development, so you save your Elixir templates, css, js, etc, and the browser reloads/recompiles without a refresh. Outside of those things, our Channels layer that Rails is borrowing from makes it trivial for realtime clients. You don't have to worry about the transport layer (WebSocket/Longpolling/etc) and the client takes care of automatic reconnects. Once 1.1 ships, we also will support replaying missed messages b/w disconnects, which can be time consuming/tricky to get right on your own. Beyond what Phoenix offers, Elixir and OTP provide a distributed platform out of the box. So automatic failover, service distribution, clustering, are all baked in, which should be considered when evaluating X vs Y. Hope that helps!

<comment><USER4> Does it have any mod for Authentication? Such as OAuth ?

It doesn't seem to have OAuth, so I'm just curious.

<comment><USER2> I've not used phoenix yet, but looks like it has.

[https://github.com/h4cc/awesome- elixir#authentication](https://github.com/h4cc/awesome-elixir#authentication)

(Also see framework components of that page)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


To motivate people, talk about the context of the work to be done - <AUTHOR> https://www.sametab.com/blog/employee-engagement <comment><USER3> "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders.

Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

\- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

<comment><USER4> This is great if you have something worth yearning for.

"Teach them to crave fast data insight from the their analytics software for marketing campaigns" lacks the same sense of romance or moral imperative.

I'll acknowledge that's a bit tongue in cheek and not being charitable to the underlying point as it applies to day to day work, but I also think that this snark often applies to the "missions" that some/many Silicon Valley startups proclaim for enterprisey, salesey products, because I think those missions are a form of self-delusion about how much good you're really doing for society, as opposed to just making money because there's value to be captured.

<comment><USER5> A good leader can put a twist on that - "Let's improve the accuracy of ad targeting so small businesses can reduce their spend but attract customers and grow" or "Let's connect the world. Let's help unite lost friends."

<comment><USER4> Oh, absolutely, and being a former tech worker in the advertising industry, I'm intimately familiar with that line of thinking. When you're trying to inspire the workers, it works (I used it), but now I hate it for the dishonesty of the framing. That's also why it'll take very unique circumstances for me to ever go back to that industry.

<comment><USER6> >"Teach them to crave fast data insight from the their analytics software for marketing campaigns" lacks the same sense of romance or moral imperative."

I'm not sure what your specific role in the industry was. However while it may not have the same sense of romance or moral imperative as something else, it can still help rally great teams around causes. I've found people, particularly teams of data-driven marketers, can get quite excited when seeing a business grow directly because of insights they distilled from data. It's the feeling of making a tangible impact.

<comment><USER4> I won't discuss my specific role in order to keep what shred of my anonymity might be left.

My response was mostly aimed at statements like one of 8ytecoder's examples: _" Let's improve the accuracy of ad targeting so small businesses can reduce their spend but attract customers and grow"_. This is because the focus on small businesses is often a foil, and reality is much more morally ambiguous.

Actual small businesses are at the far end of the long tail. Very few companies primarily serve small businesses or primarily make their money from small businesses. In practice, in order of how much money is spent, the list goes: (1) large brands, (2) local/state franchises and political campaigns, (3) small businesses.

Most companies (Google/Facebook, for example) might coincidentally serve small businesses, but the real infrastructure and engineering investments are for the other two groups.

Small businesses tend to be the least sophisticated of the campaigns, because they honestly don't need much sophistication. Their numbers are too low to bring in real data science anyway, so it's more about being savvy at community presence. However, when you get to franchises and politics, the sophistication really kicks in.

Also, some of those small/medium businesses were for things like predatory lending companies. That realization made me stop and think for a moment about what "small business" actually meant.

Point being that I've seen and used (earnestly, at the time) small businesses as a sort moral foil while actually aspiring to develop technology for the other groups. And you believe it because you're paid to believe it.

<comment><USER6> In general I agree with everything you're stating wrt accuracy of the statement. In context of motivation though, people are all different. And in this case I think there's a type of person who is internally motivated by seeing the results of their decisions and hard work.

In that context, trying to make it about the businesses you are serving (external validation) may not be as interesting to that person as making it about them finding the key to the optimization settings that unlocked growth for the team and business that is credited to them. Helping them celebrate via recognition or whatever else drives that individual can let them get more out of the win than they otherwise would have, and become more engaged in their role.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cynical take: this is all great until it becomes clear to people that the context is actually "one of the executives wants a promotion". Or increasingly common: "profits matter more than any of our purported 'values'".

It gets hard to motivate people when they know they're working on things that are detrimental to the public in some way, or that only exist to make other people look good. Trying to fluff the context in these cases tends to just make people even less motivated because they're not stupid.

<comment><USER8> I'd take all of those things as positives.

If the work provides no value and the workers discover it, and stop working on it, the world is better off.

If the work provides negative value (to society) and the workers discover it, and stop working on it, the world is better off.

People should work on things which provide value to themselves, their community, and the world at large. They shouldn't be working on things that actively destroy those. And if the only reason they're working on them is because of a lack of awareness of their impact, then let them learn.

<comment><USER9> "People should work on things which provide value to themselves, their community, and the world at large. They shouldn't be working on things that actively destroy those."

Unfortunately, lots of folks are working on things whose sole value truly is to put food on the table at home. I think there are few janitors that enjoy cleaning toilets, especially if they work for places where the workers or the public smear feces on the walls. Few folks get motivated to clean portable toilets or to work for minimum wage at a fast food place. Few folks are truly motivated to work retail.

And it doesn't matter that some of these give some small benefit to the community nor that things like fast food is a mixed thing (fast food both provides a benefit and destroys the community) or that lots of laborious jobs tend to destroy one's body - and it only takes one injury or heart attack to make one out of work.

It isn't because they lack awareness of their impact or anything, but more that folks need to survive. Not everyone can get a job with your description for a wide variety of reasons. Besides, at the end of the day society still needs folks to shower old folks in homes and to clean portable toilets, no matter how much they don't fit in your description.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This isn't bad advice, or wrong, just recognize that it's not universal. Motivations vary from person to person, team to team, company to company.

If you want to know how to motivate a person, start by asking them. Maybe they will be self aware enough to identify what it is, maybe not. If they don't know what motivates them, ask them to take some time over the next week to reflect on a time where they were motivated at their job, and you can discuss it further in your next one on one. Then, take that scenario and start to deconstruct it. What was it about this time that was different than other situations? How long did that motivation last? Who were they working with at that time, and how much did the people play a role in keeping you motivated? How much do factors like stress and salary impact motivation for them?

Motivation is also fluid. What motivates someone at 25 is different than at 35. At 25 I craved recognition for having potential. At 35 I crave autonomy. Some fundamental components haven't changed, but the overall story has.

So, when in doubt, and even when not in doubt, start by asking.

<comment><USER11> Personally I find being asked to engage in introspection like "reflect on a time when you were motivated at your job" pretty demotivating. I'm terrible at it, and it's a huge timesink with negative associations to things like interviews and having to write up annual performance review text.

<comment><USER10> All the more to my point. You'd have a pretty crisp answer if I asked you in a 1:1, what motivates you. No need for the introspection.

But, you can't expect your manager or anyone to know that about you unless you're willing to share it. A good manager will understand this is demotivating and work within those boundaries. But, unfortunately managers aren't clairvoyant, so we do need to hear it from you :)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, no, I wouldn't. I might at best have a vague idea of what might be motivating. Like I said, I don't do introspection -- I could tell you if I'm happy or not happy at work, but if the answer's not happy that doesn't mean I know why.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The subtext of every article like this is "How to motivate people (without paying them more or giving them equity)."

In many, perhaps most, situations, people are working to build things they don't own. That is the context. Any other spin on the context is just manipulation.

This stuff might work on some people, but, as a regular employee, I'm most motivated by frankness from my bosses. Nothing turns me off faster than platitudes about the purpose of our work or why I should be motivated by it.

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty motivated by context / explanantion of purpose. If I'm just given platitudes, that doesn't count. I want to know why we're _really_ doing this (so agree on frankness), and if I don't like the answer, I probably won't be sticking around for long.

To a point, this is more important to me than pay or equity.

<comment><USER14> So, the boss is only a 100x-millionaire and really wants to own his own island before he's 30. Let's knuckle down and do it!

Realism, surely isn't motivating in a capitalist society, you're working to make someone else richer in most jobs, someone else who is already rich.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I think about people I've managed or observed, along with the way that clients or managers have treated me, I see a fallacy where differing expectations or needs are substituted for motivation. For example, I recently walked away from a project where the client kept restating the priority and the work context, both of which were well understood. The problem was that the project needed a legit budget and team - it wasn't a question of motivation, but reality on the ground. Likewise when I think about people I've managed who on the surface seemed unmotivated, the real problems were more subtle - <USER2> guy was clearly depressed but also didn't have the skills for the job. Another was going through a bad divorce and really needed a lot more money for the legal war chest. Still another was tired of so much work travel and really wanted to be in a different career. I'm sure there are people who legitimately lack intrinsic motivation, but more often than not my experience has been is doesn't have anything to do with not understanding the context of the work (though I'm sure that was itself be demoralizing).

</comment><comment><USER16> I find ownership to be motivating. Good leaders inspire me to own results, but also empower me to own the "how". When I do not own the method of obtaining success, I do not feel like I truly am responsible for success. The truth is, with more complex work, good leaders realize they're at the mercy of those that do the work, because of the complexity only the people actually doing the work have complete understanding of the system. Therefore, the best card to play is to be very clear about the desired outcome, including the whole strategy and context behind it, and hope the team owns it all.

<comment><USER17> It's funny how carefully you're stepping around financially rewarding people who do the work. It's like you know your status does not allow you to own the money generated, so you're settling for owning the results, the process, the method, the responsibility, the all. You are weak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Boeing tried this a lot back when I worked there. Our managers would talk about how their airplanes enabled people to trade with people across the globe, and brought people together.

It's hard to see the high-level talk as anything but just talk when the systems you have to deal with on a daily basis are a tire fire. Initech tried to talk a good game, too.

I suppose some people are motivated that way, but I care most about my daily process. If the process makes me miserable, no amount of "context" will motivate me.

<comment><USER14> I guess the question is "if we make zero profit, and have to reduce management level wages to achieve greater fuel efficiency in [our part of] global trade, then we're going to do that then, right?".

The answer is going to be "well of course the shareholders deserve profits", or something similar?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Best way to motivate people? Trust them.

Trust is _extremely_ rare in the modern work place. From grueling interview loops designed to weed out "fakers" to open offices, to micro managers, to always on Slackers...

A little bit of trust goes a long way. Find good people and don't treat them like they're out to rip you off and their motivation will flow.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

\--Antoine de Saint Exupery

</comment><comment><USER21> I have always found that as an employee, I can play an active role in this. Ask questions, do research, find out how your work relates to the bigger picture. This (and yes, sometimes combined with some mild self-deception) can go a long way towards staying motivated. It does sometimes bring up the question whether I shouldn't be asking those questions for myself and work for myself though ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> Maybe I'm an outlier (being a wannabe intellectual), but I feel like for me I honestly don't care too much about the grander scope of stuff as much as the actual individual problems I want to solve.

I like solving problems with concurrency and networking stuff, and typically don't pay much attention to how it affects the rest of the organization. I have some ethical issues with marketing, and worked on the adtech team of a company for two years for this reason.

I suspect this drives virtually any employer who I work with crazy, since they typically try and motivate me by telling me all of the cool stuff my work is going to do.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've encountered this being used as a crutch for poor employee performance on a software project focused on replacing a legacy application.

An employee with little programming experience used his supposed lack of context as an excuse for poor work and disinterest despite having been given an overview of (1) what the legacy software does and why, (2) the broader project goals, and (3) the immediate project goal (i.e., replacing the existing software). The employee similarly hid behind their lack of technical understanding, asking questions to "learn" but ignoring the answers.

</comment><comment><USER24> It's funny. I've never really gotten on with working at large companies. Fundamentally I think this is why.

Most large companies do not have a context for work done.

If they do, risk and reward is detached from it entirely.

The rest of the company forms a huge buffer such that you can do really well, or really badly, and it normally won't matter that much.

If there are levels of management that are "too important" for me to speak to, I'm out.

</comment><comment><USER25> I interned for a major defense contractor on a top secret contract. I did not have a security clearance, nor did several of my coworkers, and we had no idea what it was we were doing, at all. My job consisted of "Do this task" with absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. I hated that job passionately and definitely agree with the author that contextualizing your work matters.

</comment><comment><USER26> More fundamental than context, stop telling me your sole purpose is to make money. That's a one-way ticket to turning me off of any attempt to ever increasing my engagement as an employee.

Your business exists to solve a problem, which then makes money. Otherwise, I expect your business to be in finance or the government's treasury--then your #1 is "to make money".

<comment><USER14> It's oft repeated on HN that companies have a duty to make money for their shareholders as that's why they exist, to make money.

Not true of all companies, but certainly true of many AFAICT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In my opinion, every great work needs its justifying myth. If you don't have that, you won't have the confidence to pursue it further.

That doesn't mean that the myth is necessarily a good, ethical or healthy one. A lot of myths are of the form of "worthy sacrifice." Others are of the "defending oneself" sort, or the "ascent to greatness". The myth is made to fit the times and the task.

Organizations, and teams in those organizations, often take on their myths without consciously thinking about it. But it's absolutely critical to have them there to set the tone and allow everyone to proceed on the same page.

</comment><comment><USER28> This doesn't paint the entire picture.

One way to motivate people is to make sure they understand the 'why' behind the work.

A step in making them understand the 'why' is talking about the broader context (which the article is about).

</comment><comment><USER29> Auftragstaktik - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission- type_tactics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics)

</comment><comment><USER30> Reminds me of the military concept of "commander's intent". By knowing the broader purpose of a mission, subordinates are able to take initiatives if and when necessary.

<comment><USER14> Surely you have the same problems in war as in capitalism: that if the commander's intent is to have you all die in order to make an overall gain elsewhere then it may well not help to know their intent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sometimes the product/context isn't very meaningful. Sometimes the company's end goal is negative. E.g: Facebook. Their employees are probably more motivated if they suppress the fact that the context/goal is to suck as much information as possible from their users to target ads at them.

</comment><comment><USER32> In my experience, one reason this doesn't happen is because it's a lot easier for middle managers to carve out tasks and assign them then it is to corral and coordinate a bunch of enthusiastic people trying to help. It's easier for them to take credit for the work done in the end as well.

</comment><comment><USER33> Looks like they're mostly talking about Task Identity from Hackman and Oldham's Job Characteristics Theory

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_characteristic_theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Job_characteristic_theory)

</comment><comment><USER34> This reminds me of the people who are/were working on building weapons, they are/were not aware of the context of their work, for example they were building small pieces of large weapons but not knowing the full plan.

</comment><comment><USER35> I really need this article! I tried to start a startup with friends multiple times already, but the end result always was they cancelled. I think I overwhelmed them listing all the things needed to do in order to succeed.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've had two jobs for more or less public sector entities, and they were conspicuously more interested in new employees understanding the complete organization and its purpose.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is spot on. Unfortunately in my (long) experience often the aspiring motivators do not understand the context, leaving it to the underlings to attempt to reverse engineer it.

</comment><comment><USER38> It's funny, and sad, to see this on the front page at the same time as the story about Google cancelling TGIF.

</comment><comment><USER39> This works great when you are developing the polio vaccine. But in the wrong hands this is just an illegitimate tool of power. Plenty of people joined companies like Facebook because they were made to believe that they were truly changing the world for the better... the ability to fool people like that is just corporate demagoguery.

</comment><comment><USER40> we can't conflate nor confuse the interrogatives (who for what for when for where for why for how) ...

things being talked about are merely distinct, and certainly not interchangeable either / ors .

</comment><comment><USER41> Leaders inspire, managers motivate.

<comment><USER42> I would argue: leaders lead and managers manage.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: THC, CBD and a Request for Comments - <AUTHOR> I had never touched THC/CBD until a month ago. Then, I bought (legally! from a licensed pharmacy) some THC capsules and some CBD capsules. I took a THC capsule around 4pm and waited to feel its effects ("around two hours after ingestion"). Sure enough, 1h50min after I started to feel different - but it wasn't AT ALL what I was expecting: the sensations were 100% physical and extremely unpleasant. I had very specific paresthesias, that I could only describe as icy-cold(!) electric discharges through my arms, forearms and ring fingers, behind my knees and, the strangest of them all, inside my stomach. There was nothing even resembling euphoria (or anxiety), just physical sensations. At one point I got up (I was lying on the couch, watching something on TV) and went to the bathroom, because I was feeling nauseous and I was afraid I was going to throw up. I felt dizzy and I had trouble with my equilibrium. I didn't throw up and I returned on the couch and closed my eyes, trying to fall asleep. It didn't happen and I had to soldier on through three more hours of very unpleasant, exclusively physical sensations. Honestly, it felt like I was terminally ill and I was about to expire (again: I knew it was not going to happen, I wasn't anxious or anything, just enduring a maximal physical discomfort).
The next day I tried to find similar experience on the web. I wasn't able to. Hence, my puzzlement: what DID happen to me? was it me? was it the substance I put into my organism (contaminated?).
Anyone have a similar experience?
PS CBD was an ever bigger letdown: I'm a lifelong migraine sufferer and I was hoping I could use CBD instead of medication (multiple studies confirmed its usefulness). To my dismay, CBD induced migraines in yours truly! (took it three times, three migraines ensued like clockwork, 12 hours after ingestion).
Your comments are much appreciated! <comment><USER3> There are many different strains, with different potency, which have differing terpenes, which may or may not change how it affects your body.

 _Your absolute best bet is to talk to a doctor experienced in prescribing medical marijuana - and work with them._ When using medicinally, marijuana is similar to other prescriptions in the sense that you need to find the "correct" dosage and mixture that works for your body and your issues. This also includes experimenting with different forms of delivery (vape, food, oils, sprays, capsules, etc.) My dear mother spent close to a year visiting with her doctor to narrow down a strain, dosage, and delivery method to help cope with her RLS.

Anecdotally speaking, I have not had the experiences you described. In my non- medical opinion, it sounds like you may have taking too strong of a dosage, and may have had a predominately body-high focused strain. In general, Sativa's are more head-focused while Indica's are more body-focused. This is not set in stone, however; there are Indica's with a strong head-high and Sativa's with a strong body-buzz. And with cross-breeding and all of the resulting strains, it's not nearly as useful to think in purely Sativa vs. Indica anymore. But, the general rule may help you narrow down to a more palatable strain if you choose to keep experimenting.

Combining your two experiences (weird high, and CBD induced migraines), it may be that you, unfortunately, do not react well to marijuana.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Combining your two experiences (weird high, and CBD > induced migraines), it > may be that you, > unfortunately, do not react well to marijuana.

That's what I thought. Oh, well. I really wanted to be able to use CBD (especially in the future, for future ailments that afflict us all as we get older - arthritis, muscle strain, etc. Plus migraine, of course (I have excellent control over it with Ibuprofen, but I was quite excited at the possibility of using a natural product).

<comment><USER3> I would sincerely urge you to continue to experiment, as much as you are willing to, with at least few different combinations before completely writing off marijuana as a potential medical aid.

Specifically, I would try a different method of delivery and different potencies. If you aren't inclined to smoking or vaping, perhaps an under-the- tongue spray.

Depending on the concentration you have tried, I would try lowering the concentration of CBD and perhaps choosing something with a very small (1 - 5%) concentration of THC.

Obviously if you are not comfortable with experimenting for fear of another episode like you described, then don't experiment. A very large part of _any drug_ is being in a mental state where you are comfortable using it. I don't have concrete numbers, but I would posit that the majority of bad trips are due to mental state of the user (comfort level, environment, preconceptions, etc.), not the drugs themselves.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I would sincerely urge you to continue to experiment

I am willing to continue to experiment, and I will. It took me two weeks to try half a THC capsule again: I wanted to (from a purely scientific approach, I was looking for reproducibility), but the physical memory of that horrible episode made me delay it until I amassed the necessary courage. The second try was slightly better: the paresthesias were identical, but the scary, painful, my-body-is-shutting-down sensation was no longer there. Neither was anything pleasant, unfortunately. I also felt unwell (but nothing more) for 4-6 hours after the paresthesias disappeared. Please understand: I was VERY comfortable experimenting with it and very excited - from a scientific point of view, as I was documenting each and every little symptom that I was exhibiting. I also am one of those fortunate individuals who have zero psychiatric afflictions - <USER2> don't suffer from depression, anxiety, mood swings, nothing - so there was nothing to decompensate, to be exacerbated by THC.

I probably need to experiment with a different strain. Unfortunately, this means switching pharmacies, as my current one has a very limited offer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It is notorious that first time pot users often don't get high.

Oral THC takes a long time to hit which makes controlling the dose a lot harder. People get more reliable results using pot the old fashioned way, e.g. Smoking it or gaping it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was aware of the impossibility to control the dose when you ingest a capsule so I wouldn't have been surprised to experiences some side-effect, a hangover, just like when you drink too much and the euphoria is replaced by unpleasant physical symptoms. What puzzled me was the fact that I went straight into unpleasant physical symptoms, with zero euphoria (or anxiety, or any other mental alteration).</comment></comment>


How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2020/08/20/how-to-learn-everything-the-masterclass-diaries/ <comment><USER2> I've personally found that a necessary prerequisite to listening to an expert talking about something (at least for myself) is to read some books on it. It's boring, and it sucks, and it takes forever, but that repetition of just jamming things in your head and then going over them over and over again is a necessary prerequisite to being able to really 'get' what someone is saying at a master level.

For example, I wouldn't pay to see Gordon Ramsay teaching something without first working through Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and The Food Lab. And by the time I've worked through the books, I know if I'm actually interested in the subject, or if it's just something that I've convinced myself is interesting based on seeing someone doing it on YouTube.

That's just my own philosophy on it. You gotta chop the mesquite before you can smoke the ribs.

<comment><USER3> This is why the original concept of master class --- a master giving class to musicians/artists --- are only opened to the brightest high-level students. It's sort of pointless to hire the top talent in the field and let them coach complete newbies.

I think whether the prerequisite is specifically to read books depends on the field. In fact, the first thing to do, in my opinion, is to ask someone already in the field what's the best way to get a taste of this activity. But the general message, "chop the mesquite before you can smoke the ribs", I agree very much on.

<comment><USER4> On the other hand, my university was in the habit of using the best professors to teach the intro / first year courses. Because those are the courses where you tend to lose the most of your students.

<comment><USER5> They used the professors best at teaching. There are probably other professors better at doing research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Compare to [https://masterwiki.how](https://masterwiki.how)

> MasterClass is an exclusive online education platform that costs $180 > annually to learn (relatively ordinary skills) from A-list celebrities. > masterWiki is the direct adaptation of MasterClass' video courses translated > into wikiHow-style how-to guides, made available at no cost to you.

<comment><USER7> The posted article is a fun and interesting read about the author's relationship to themself and their family as impacted by their viewing of various classes.

I struggle to find a relevant comparison here, other than that both the article and your link (of a parody / theft of another company's intellectual property) are related to MasterClass.

<comment><USER8> It actually serves as a nice contrast in some ways. Compare the article's description of the experience of going through the classes with the takeaways from a sample of the wiki entries.

The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft, not the explicit instructions they might give.

<comment><USER9> > The real benefit of having true experts teach something is all the tacit > knowledge you get from hearing how they think about and approach their craft

I think that's part of it, but only a part.

The real value of teaching lies in tight feedback loops.

Learning, as a neurological process, is entirely predicated on feedback loops. Our brains observe some system, make a prediction as to how that system will iterate, and then adjust their prediction mechanism based on the observed outcome.

Maybe to give an example, I learned to dance (Lindy Hop) by working with coaches. My nephew learned to dance by watching things like Masterclass.

He has spent much more time on watching videos than I have in working with coaches, and has been interested in dancing for far longer, but I am the better dancer. By a wide margin.

And that is not due to natural talent -- if anything, I would say that I am less coordinated than he is.

The advantage I have is -- partially! -- due to my instructors sharing a bunch of tacit knowledge. The structure of music, why jazz is polyrhythmic and how you can use syncopated steps to move between rhythms and melodies, etc.

But most of it comes from my instructors watching me flail about, and giving me immediate feedback on how to be less dangerous to my follow (the person dancing with me). And then watching me apply that feedback, correcting me again, and repeating that loop until I get it right -- which means than I then know what "right" feels like.

Online learning -- especially through watching videos -- completely lacks that realtime feedback.

It's possible to do! But most of the online course offerings that I have seen, don't. They are little more than recorded lectures and multiple-choice quizzes.

Moreover, now that I have a solid foundation -- built by working with coaches, and understanding the "why" behind the techniques -- I _can_ leverage dance videos to pick up new moves, because I know what to look for an how to apply it.

<comment><USER10> I think you bring up very valid points.

The overall takeaway shouldn't be to have personal instructors in order to learn things effectively and well. I think that will always be the case. The constraint there is mostly with accessibility and availability

What you intend to learn, and whether a self-learned/video watching approach can be effective depends entirely on how to close the feedback loop, and make it accurate. For couples dancing, it's very hard to know when you're doing things right (how is it supposed to feel? What is the correct tension for proper leading? Etc). So, it makes it almost crucial to have some (semi)direct guidance in order to make the practice sessions effective.

However there are many other areas in which it is easier to close this loop, as well as more correctly assess the result. This will of course never be as good as having an expert's guidance, but the cost/benefit in terms of time spent / skill gained is more amenable that it is for dancing.

I'd say (I might be wrong) that this applies somewhat to art, technical skills like math and programming, and other knowledge based domains.

Fields requiring physical accuracy and dexterity is a bit harder. Like music instruments or dancing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A really lovely read. I appreciate how naturally she frames her own growth in the face of professional and personal setbacks against different masterclass courses.

I love seeing this kind of writing on Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER12> Learning anything for me always follows this sort of structure (I'm sure someone will tell me there's some well known name for this because it seems so "self obvious").

Step0: Select the simplest achievable task in the domain of the new thing you are trying to learn.

Step1: Gather all the stuff you think you will be needing to accomplish the task (tools, materials, software, instructions, time!, etc).

Step2: Hit a road-block. It can be the lack of an indispensable tool or a lack of knowledge of a particular detail.

Step3: Fix the blocker (fill the knowledge gap about the new detail, buy/borrow the missing tool). If multiple roadblocks: Solve the one that seems most fundamental first; If stuck at blocker: seek help from others, sleep on it, give up (some things are too hard with your present knowledge).

Step4: If task still not completed GOTO Step3; If task completed: Select a new more advanced task and GOTO Step2.

<comment><USER13> My way of learning is the opposite. I pick a task that is incredibly cool and motivating and surely way out of my skill set. Then I try to find examples by true masters of things that turned out similar. Then I try to imitate what I can from them. In the end, my result is very so-so in comparison with the masters, but I still feel happy about having learned many useful things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> '...By this point, I have realized that there are two kinds of teachers. Some focus on transmitting their skills. They seem to be saying to the student: "this is how to do what I do." Others offer themselves as models to be imitated: "this is how I became who I am."'

This part struck me. For topics like computer science (or any science) we need more of the former, for anything related to the subjective experiences of creativity or even life, we need more of the latter. Even then, "this is how I became who I am," can only get you so far, because you need to learn to become who you are and not someone else.

<comment><USER15> I spent a couple years as a programming teacher, and really struggled to find the right balance there.

As an example, about 9 months in I had a student ask how they should approach a problem. I'd say "What are all the ways you can think of to do it?" and together we'd brainstorm a few viable approaches. "So which one should I do?". What do I say to that? Do I tell them which approach _I_ think is best? I was originally self taught, and I got good in part thanks to those moments. When you pick something yourself but you aren't sure if its the right choice, .. well, thats when learning happens. Next time you choose differently and over years explore the space. But at the same time, getting advice can really help a novice improve.

Despite being pushed I didn't answer the student about which approach I recommended, and I still wonder if it was the right choice. I'd like to think that my teaching approach resulted in my students spending more time gazing into the belly of the beast. But maybe I just didn't give them much as much instruction as they needed. I can't tell.

<comment><USER16> From someone versed in teaching, here's my unsolicited analysis of your teaching:

On the spectrum from direct instruction (I tell you/show you what to do) to inquiry (I set up a situation for you to use some of your prior knowledge to learn something new) it sounds like you leaned towards inquiry here.

You experienced the power of this yourself when you were younger so it's no surprise it informed how you chose to help/not help.

You used a mix of collaborative and cognitive questioning to both engage the learner in the problem and help them think through it. \</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

Next I'd like to ask you some questions to help you think through two important teaching concepts: 1) Productive struggle 2) Feedback

Was the student at a complete loss with what to do? Given time to take a break, maybe even sleep, and revisit the problem, do you think they still would have been at a loss?

If no, then give them time and space to think through it on their own or use cognitive questioning as you did to help them think through it.

This gets us to the concept of productive struggle. It is just as the name sounds. This concept has well researched benefits for learners.

If the student had no idea what to do and you suspect would merely get frustrated then that's struggling and its not productive. It's the kind of situation that leads to poor first order outcomes and has second order outcomes like making someone hate the thing you are trying to help them learn.

In that event it would be best to either help them through the problem with advice or find a different problem for them to work on that they have enough prior knowledge to productively struggle with.

Next up is feedback...

Did the student get any feedback after they made their choice? If it was programming could they run their code and see if it worked? Was it a binary right/wrong?

If it didn't work did the student have enough prior knowledge to work around any roadblocks they might encounter?

These questions take us back to the concept of productive struggle.

1) productive struggle is good 2) feedback or advice should be timely and based on what a learner needs to keep them from struggling unproductively

There are related ideas...some lessons you may have a focus and so you tell the student certain things that aren't the focus of the lesson instead of putting them in an inquiry situation. This is another skill needed for effective teaching: creating, selecting, and sequencing a curriculum.

Implied in all of this is the importance of knowing the content, how you want to teach, your learner's prior knowledge, and how they are reacting to the problem.

<comment><USER17> Love this breakdown. And to josephg's post:

When I was picking a dissertation topic I'd suggest things to my advisor and she'd say brightly, "Why don't you go do some research on that, come back in two weeks and tell me what you found?"

I'd go off to the library for a couple of weeks, do the reading, come back and say, "You know I think X is a terrible topic, the scholarship on it all seems to drag."

"Oh yes," she'd say, with a look that said this was the worst topic in the world.

"So why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?"

Then she'd get diplomatic. "You're young, maybe you see something that I don't!"

I realised though that it wasn't just that. Had she told me my idea about topic X was a loser, I'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity. I really had to figure out on my own how much the topic sucked. It had to come from my own discovery, not from her authority.

Anyway, I do this now and it drives my students nuts, because they want me to hand them a paper topic, ideally tell them what books to read, and send them off so they can execute the steps. Meanwhile, I want them to spend time in the messy, difficult process of working things out. I think my process probably results in more failure (at least as far as the grades are concerned), but the good work is so much better.

<comment><USER16> _I 'd have thought that my advisor was crushing my creativity and ingenuity_

Thanks for sharing this story.

I think a lot of about potential impacts like this on students/learners. My goals when teaching are to nurture agency, autonomy, and a positive disposition towards what is being learned in addition to a student learning the content or practices/skills.

People often misconstrue this as wanting to make learning "fun" for students. For me it begins with inversion, look at how to crush a student's spirit, agency, and disposition towards a topic. Don't do that.

Then find ways to put them in situations where they can struggle productively, be creative, show ingenuity, and see the fruits of doing so. Sometimes students aren't aware of their own ingenuity, creativity, or their own productive struggle so that gives me an opportunity to go meta with them and help them see it.

<comment><USER17> Yes, I love this! I try to convince my students to work on something they find interesting, even to take risks in doing so. My experience is that they tend to do better work when the topic reflects their own curiosity, obsessions.

Unfortunately the educational system I work in prioritizes conformity. I don't blame them for having a hard time taking a risk.

<comment><USER16> _Unfortunately the educational system I work in prioritizes conformity._

I feel that in my bones.

If you see this I'd be curious to hear more about your education experience. Drop me a line at heymijo.hn at google mail if you'd like to continue the discussion :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> _Now we put eggs in water with a tiny mechanical device that plays "Killing Me Softly" to let us know they are soft-boiled. You could say our standards have fallen._

For those of you who had to stop and shop at this point, here's what I found:

UK: [https://www.amazon.co.uk/BrainStream-Beep-Egg- Timer/dp/B001U...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/BrainStream-Beep-Egg- Timer/dp/B001U0O0F0)

US but unfortunately not featuring the Roberta Flack classic: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDE24G4/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDE24G4/)

<comment><USER19> I had one of those many years ago, but they're not very good. The sound is muffled a lot by the water and it's just not accurate all together. The Android app 'Egg Timer' gives much better results.

I do still see the appeal of the singing egg, though.

<comment><USER17> I didn't have space for this in the essay, but the mechanical egg also plays "The Final Countdown" when the eggs are supposed to be hard boiled.

It's honestly _not_ a great way to cook eggs, but don't underestimate the joy of hearing those opening notes in the morning...

<comment><USER13> By now, you have probably conditioned yourself to associate the sound with the pleasant experience of eating the food, not unlike Pavlov's dogs.

<comment><USER17> Other way around: the egg is so-so, but every time I hear the song I'm a teenager again (not that I'm that old, but that's when I was getting to know a lot of classic rock & similar), so it makes me feel young and full of potential.

Unlike... that egg.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at."

[https://m.xkcd.com/874/](https://m.xkcd.com/874/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Despite the au courant reference to the global pandemic, this seems _very_ familiar (particularly the bits about Wintour, Gladwell, & Ramsay), but I can't recall where I read it (sometime 5-10 years ago, maybe), and a cursory google search doesn't pull up anything.

Still, the deja vu was pretty darn strong. Perhaps the writer had a blog that has since been deleted, and she recycled an old post.

<comment><USER17> Hmmm... this has me wondering. I've been writing about teaching and learning for a while (my dissertation and book were on the topic in the early Middle Ages). MasterClass has only been around for five years though, and the Wintour course came online last year. It's possible there were review pieces out. I did do a bunch of searching on MasterClass last year, because I was tempted by it but found it a bit pricey and wanted to know if there was any substance to the courses. Most of what I found were _very_ brief reviews though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Play. That's how.

</comment><comment><USER23> This was beautiful! In fact, a note to all the YouTube productivity gurus who think they are giving us a master class on productivity or VCs on twitter who sell their (obvious but apparently profound) wisdom thinking they are doing a service to humanity. At least IMO things that are best learned in the form of a class are vocational stuff and hard sciences, anything other than that like a course on confidence, productivity, loving yourself, learning to learn etc should be f*cking banned into oblivion.

<comment><USER24> Or you could just, like, not watch/read those videos/posts/tweets if you don't like them?

Also, there's a lot more academic fields than the "hard" sciences and vocational stuff.

<comment><USER23> Cute!

How do you say you don't like a video/post/tweet without reading/watching those videos/posts/tweets?

Yes there's a lot more academic fields than the "hard" sciences and vocational stuff, add them to the list too. That was not a treatise on teachability/learnability of a subject.

I seriously didn't get your point, you thought of being sarcastic and bitter because I ranted about how I disliked VCs and Productivity gurus? Thanks, got your point, be well.</comment></comment></comment>


Introducing Dockbit: Turn your deployments into repeatable workflows - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dockbit.com/introducing-dockbit/ <comment><USER2> Aside from GitHub, what other version control systems do you support?

<comment><USER3> Hi, I am Tair, founder of Dockbit. At the moment we only support GitHub repositories, however GitLab and BitBucket are going to be added pretty soon. Please write us an email to email@example.com and we will notify once it's ready. Thank you!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for adding support for GitLab!</comment></comment></comment>


How Much Does It Cost to Build a Web Application? - <AUTHOR> https://djangostars.com/blog/how-much-it-costs-to-build-a-web-application/ <comment><USER2> useful article!</comment>


Using logistic regression to predict parking difficulty - <AUTHOR> https://research.googleblog.com/2017/02/using-machine-learning-to-predict.html <comment><USER2> I appreciate a good ol' logistic regression model. I know deep learning is hot shit right now, but this right here is probably the best way to solve most real world ML problems. Just good data, insightful features, and a simple classifier.

<comment><USER3> The dirty secret in ML is that logistic regression, SVM, and random forests often work better than deep learning on real problems.

<comment><USER4> For image classification, CNN's are still the way to go. But creating your own architecture and training your own novel model aren't necessary for most problems anymore it seems because of transfer learning.

<comment><USER5> I threw all of the above plus CNNs at MNIST problem and boosted decision trees outperformed CNNs.

Granted if I tuned both perfectly, CNNs probably would have outperformed but with defaults and a small amount of parameter search, boosting worked best.

<comment><USER4> That's pretty interesting, why are boosted decision trees so effective? I've heard the same meme applied to kaggle competitions (everything is just a way to shove data into xgboost, etc)

<comment><USER6> The grandparent post contains a hint of something I've already heard in lectures and from ML practicioners: boosting and random forests are more resilient to improper tuning (to put it another way, they are more universal and work well "out of the box").

Which, BTW, makes them more appealing to me personally. In many real-life cases extra few percent of accuracy matters very little, but ability to just apply something to a problem without much fuss matters _a lot_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You can't write a blog post on how to build a statistical model _without stating how good the model is_ in actuality, along with validating the other regression details such as independence of features, train/test split, etc. (I am coincidentally working on a blog post along a similar San Francisco dataset which specifically addresses these concerns, so it's on the mind)

Logistic regression in particular has many features which provide more information about feature importance _or lack thereof_ and many metric to confirm model quality, and it is disappointing to see this post only do a high-level overview. Yes, it may be a Google trade secret, but there has to be give-and-take.

<comment><USER8> > You can't write a blog post on how to build a statistical model without > stating how good the model is in actuality

> it is disappointing to see this post only do a high-level overview. Yes, it > may be a Google trade secret, but there has to be give-and-take.

Why exaclty? This is not an academic paper. People who get this feature to show up might be curious about how it works, and 99.9% of them won't understand anything about independence of features, train/test split, etc. Worse, they would find the article too boring and technical. Just knowing that it is powered by a ML algorithm (and not some human input) is enough. I'm not sure why there has to be a give-and-take.

The fact that they put links to wikipedia for what Logistic regression is should give a good idea of the intended audience of this blog post.

<comment><USER7> > Worse, they would find the article too boring and technical.

> The fact that they put links to wikipedia for what Logistic regression is > should give a good idea of the intended audience of this blog post.

The Wikipedia page on logistic regression is an order of magnitude more technical than this blog post.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > we were able to ... utilize anonymous aggregated information from users who > opt to share their location data

That should read, "from users who did not disable the on-by-default sharing of their location data"

<comment><USER10> Is it actually on by default ? Last time I reset my android phone, I had to agree to sharing my location history etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "When we started the training process, many of us thought that the "fingerprint" feature described above would be the "silver bullet" that would crack the problem for us. We were surprised to note that this wasn't the case at all — in fact, it was features based on the dispersion of parking locations that turned out to be one of the most powerful predictors of parking difficulty."

I assume dispersion of parking locations is the distance from parking location to destination? I would have liked to see more about what kinds of inputs they used and how they cleaned them up to account for the confounding factors they mention (public transit users, private parking.)

<comment><USER12> > I assume dispersion of parking locations is the distance from parking > location to destination?

I would guess its the density of parking locations in a given area, rather than distance to destination?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > in a pre-launch experiment, we saw a significant increase in clicks on the > transit travel mode button, indicating that users with additional knowledge > of parking difficulty were more likely to consider public transit rather > than driving.

This shows pretty clear that we shouldn't try to accommodate cars as much as possible when there already is good public transport at a certain location.

<comment><USER14> We should also remember that excessive accommodation of cars will often prevent the possibility of good mass transit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I was just retaking CS261 on Coursera alongside a friend (we're in week 3) and they were asking, "What good is this anyways?"

Related techniques and how to implement them are covered in the first 2 weeks. While a lot more is going on in this system, one could call the core of the system that does this estimation "simple" for the field.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am wondering how much of this gets to be real-time. Are they computing the difficulty of finding a spot based on Maps/Waze users' live data or using daily/weekly patterns on past data?

</comment><comment><USER17> If you go to Stein's you better walk or take public transport, though. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER18> Can we use an API to help test parking prediction by using it in our apps?</comment>


How Zappos delivers "WOW" in the mobile era - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hipmob.com/post/49186492059/how-zappos-delivers-wow-in-the-mobile-era

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here - we put this together with the Zappos team to set some examples for everyone going mobile. Here to answer any questions (or ping me at firstname.lastname@example.com)</comment>


Google to Yahoo Search search for mRSS goes to yahoo page - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80472?hl=en

<comment><USER2> It's the last paragraph: "Google supports mRSS, [...]"; mRSS is a link to [http://search.yahoo.com/mrss](http://search.yahoo.com/mrss) \-- it seems like it should do a search, but it 404s to the Yahoo homepage.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's probably like that because mRSS was developed by Yahoo + mRSS community [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_RSS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_RSS)</comment>


The real story behind the Twitter mouseover exploit - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2010/09/23/twitter-mouseover-exploit-hacker-matsta/

<comment><USER2> > The hack used well-known security flaws in JavaScript

[citation needed]</comment>