Pentagon Releases Marine General Held at Guantanamo - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-releases-marine-general-lawyer-ordered-to-confinement-for-disobeying-orders-1509750250 <comment><USER2> This is a major topic of discussion among my colleagues (I am a Marine judge advocate).

Some good background reading in a blog post by a fellow Marine: [http://www.caaflog.com/2017/11/02/the-non-contempt- contempt-...](http://www.caaflog.com/2017/11/02/the-non-contempt-contempt- proceedings-at-guantanamo/)

The gist is that "contempt of court" in the Gitmo commissions is narrower than it is in most other courts, and this was likely outside the power of Col Spath. Additionally, the subject the judge was discussing (BGen Baker's dismissal of several defense counsel) was removed from the judge's purview recently, so he shouldn't even have been issuing orders in the first place.

I have the utmost respect for BGen Baker, and hope his conviction is swiftly overturned.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious how, in this context, a Colonel is giving orders to a Brigadier General.

<comment><USER2> Rock, paper, billet description. Col Spath was the sitting military judge over the tribunal, and BGen Baker is the chief defense counsel.

<comment><USER4> Would the judge still be at risk for 'disrespecting a superior officer' no matter what the billet?

<comment><USER2> In this case, no. When the senior officer is of a different service, they are considered "superior" only if actually in the chain of command.

In general, this can be a source of tension. But ultimately, billet trumps rank. If the gate guard tells the Colonel that he can't come through the gate, the Colonel would do well to obey.

<comment><USER5> > If the gate guard tells the Colonel that he can't come through the gate, the > Colonel would do well to obey.

Does this include the US President, commander-in-chief, hypothetically?

<comment><USER6> Hypothetically, the US president could just make some calls that would eventually reach to the gate guard's superior and allow him through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "Brig. Gen John Baker, the chief defense counsel for the military commission system at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had been sentenced to 21 days' detention and a $1,000 fine by a military judge angry that he allowed civilian defense attorneys to resign from a case. They withdrew after apparently discovering the government had been monitoring their communications, including legally privileged exchanges with their client.

...

Those classified rulings 'placed us in the untenable position of having to advise our client that we could not visit him, but could not tell him why we could not visit him,' one of the civilian attorneys, Richard Kammen, said in an October statement announcing that the Nashiri defense team had disbanded because it couldn't guarantee its client confidentiality.

Defense lawyers consulted a legal ethics expert at Hofstra University, Ellen Yaroshefsky, who concluded they couldn't continue to participate in the case, given their inability to assure their client their discussions would be private. Gen. Baker concurred with that finding and dismissed the attorneys.

...

At an Oct. 31 hearing, Col. Spath ordered Gen. Baker to take the witness stand and to rescind his decision releasing the civilian attorneys. When Gen. Baker refused, Col. Spath found him in contempt and sentenced him to 21 days' confinement in quarters and a $1,000 fine. Gen. Baker was required to telephone the military judge's office every two hours to verify he remained in quarters, except for eight hours sleeping time." [1]

More on the Obama administration's surveillance of the defense counsel [2].

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-releases-marine- genera...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/pentagon-releases-marine-general- lawyer-ordered-to-confinement-for-disobeying-orders-1509750250)

[2] [http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation- world/world/americas/...](http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation- world/world/americas/guantanamo/article44541324.html)

<comment><USER7> That is truly disturbing.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it is. However, it's also reassuring that the system has corrected itself. While we might desire a system that never makes a mistake, it's comprised of fallible humans, and as harsh as it is, we know that sometimes there _will_ be errors. What we can do is try to make a system resilient enough that it can minimize and correct those errors.

<comment><AUTHOR> > _it 's also reassuring that the system has corrected itself._

Extrajudicial courts were created. Client-attorney interactions were willfully disrespected. A Brig. Gen allowed for the dismissal of the disrespected attorneys. A military judge threw a fit. The last ill has been partially corrected; we're a long way from due process, fair trials or justice.

<comment><USER8> Indeed. There's still a lot to be corrected, and the system as a whole wasn't perfect to begin with. But it's also last bit, which has been corrected, is the context of the submission. It's of course important to step back and assess the system as a whole: it's also important to recognize when smaller parts are working, if nothing else to remind ourselves that the system as a whole is worth saving.

<comment><USER9> Is it not, this:

"Extrajudicial courts were created." (I would add, created at will and could be created again in the future).

and this: "the system as a whole is worth saving"

a little incompatible?

I mean, what is the point of the system, if you can create a parallel one whenever you feel the existing one is not convenient?

<comment><AUTHOR> > _what is the point of the system, if you can create a parallel one whenever > you feel the existing one is not convenient?_

This is hyperbole. Nobody can create a military tribunal "whenever they want". Specific circumstances led to Gitmo's creation, circumstances not easily replicable domestically. American courts are still, by and large, impartial, independent and fair.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a photo of the Colonel-

[http://www.gazettenet.com/Gitmo-case-off- rails-13508136](http://www.gazettenet.com/Gitmo-case-off-rails-13508136)

The prisoner, Al-Nashiri, was arrested in 2002 and held in CIA black sites for years. In 2004, he was sentenced to death (in absentia) in Yemen for the USS Cole bombing.

Instead, the CIA interrogated him and tortured him for years. Now he's charged in a case where if he wins he remains in prison indefinitely.

If this guy really was a terrorist why didn't the CIA send him back to Yemen to be put to death legally?

According to this article, a CIA official disputed his guilt saying: "He was an idiot. He couldn't read or comprehend a comic book."

I wonder what the truth is and how they could be ambiguous on his guilt. I think the CIA is generally good but I often wonder how it'd work if Elon Musk type principles drove government agencies. All organizations seem poisoned by processes and plagued by mental models designed by lawyers with relativistic principles.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/the-h...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the- hidden-history-of-the-cias-prison-in- poland/2014/01/23/b77f6ea2-7c6f-11e3-95c6-0a7aa80874bc_story.html?utm_term=.b279dc66b477)

<comment><USER11> > _Instead, the CIA interrogated him and tortured him for years._

> _I think the CIA is generally good [...]_

You're either having strange moral values or suffering from cognitive dissonance ;-)

(I don't mean to attack you, it just jumped at me while reading your comment)

<comment><USER9> "You're either having strange moral values or suffering from cognitive dissonance"

And, I would add, missing some reading in the modern history of South-America.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald provides by far the best news coverage of Guantanamo, the trials there, and of this ongoing story. Without her, it seems like much of the activity there would 'die in darkness'. Thank you Carol! (It's hard to find a good link to her coverage in general, but that one looks pretty good.)

[http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation- world/world/americas/...](http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation- world/world/americas/guantanamo/)

Just Security, which has leading professors and experts in the field covering national security and international law, provides the best analysis:

[https://www.justsecurity.org/46578/gitmo-mess- continues/](https://www.justsecurity.org/46578/gitmo-mess-continues/)

</comment><comment><USER13> The UCMJ is a completely parallel legal code and has some messed up elements.

<comment><USER2> Well, no. The UCMJ isn't "parallel" any more than the IRC is "parallel." They are both part of the U.S. Code. Just like "IRC" is shorthand for "26 U.S.C.", "Art X, UCMJ" is shorthand for "10 U.S.C. § 800+X"

That also has nothing to do with this case, seeing as how this is a tribunal under the Military Commissions Act, not a court-martial convened under the UCMJ.

UCMJ: Chapter 47 of Title 10: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/subtitle-A/part-I...](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/subtitle-A/part- II/chapter-47)

Military Commissions: Chapter 47A of Title 10: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/subtitle-A/part-I...](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/subtitle-A/part- II/chapter-47A)

<comment><USER14> What are the avenues for appeal in the military courts? Does it end up in the SC?

<comment><USER2> Yes, for both courts-martial and commissions. I can only provide a good explanation of courts-martial, though, as I've never litigated in the commissions.

Congress set up the military courts to function kind of like a state jurisdiction, with its own trial courts, intermediate appellate courts, and overarching appellate court of last resort.

The trial courts are not standing courts, but are "convened" by commanders, and trial judiciary judges come to the convened court to preside (almost like how judges used to "ride circuit"). O-5 and O-6 commanders can usually only convene "special courts-martial" which have limits on the punishment they can mete out.

Each military department has its own intermediate appellate court called a "Court of Criminal Appeals" (CCA). There's the ACCA, the AFCCA, the CGCCA, and the NMCCA (Navy/Marine Corps). These are sitting courts but, like the trial judiciary, the judges are uniformed military members.

The court of last resort within the military justice system is the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (CAAF). They act like a "state Supreme Court" in a sense that they unify law within their jurisdiction, but you can still appeal their decisions to the U.S. Supreme Court. CAAF judges are civilians nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

A recent example of a case that was appealed to the Supreme Court (but the Supreme Court did not grant certiorari and hear the case) was US v. Sterling:

[http://www.caaflog.com/category/september-2015-term/united-s...](http://www.caaflog.com/category/september-2015-term/united- states-v-sterling/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone have a way to read this that doesn't require subscribing and is easily accomplished from mobile (no JS Kung Fu)?

<comment><USER16> Politico: [https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/03/john-baker- release...](https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/03/john-baker-released- guantanamo-dispute-244523)

<comment><USER17> I read both but think the WSJ article was written better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Non-Paywall archive [http://archive.is/ytv5S](http://archive.is/ytv5S)

</comment><comment><USER18> Cannot read. Subscription required.

</comment><comment><USER19> paywall. how to get around it?</comment>


Bottomless Burgers in Seattle — for $10 the dream is reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.bottomlessburgers.com

<comment><USER2> Unlimited Mickey-D's burgers? Flippin' gross, dude.</comment>


How to Get Out of Bed - <AUTHOR> http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/03/24/how-to-get-out-of-bed/ <comment><USER3> So many comments about how to wake up early... the article is about depression, right? The author makes a distinction between lazy-trouble- getting-out-of-bed (which is what all the comments here are discussing, and, of course, something most of us experience) and the much more serious problem she's struggling with.

<comment><USER4> These days people seem to read only a title and begin writing their comments about it.

<comment><USER5> The comment system on HN discourages discussion of the article, because threads cannot be collapsed and so there is only space for 2 or 3 top-level comments to get much attention.

The top comment is often a poor quality one, expressing some controversial view that gets replies, starving the lower top-level comments of upvotes, and cementing its place at the top.

It would be better to collapse replies to all top-level comments, and allow people to expand the replies to the comments they find interesting.

<comment><USER6> What about randomizing comment order for the first N minutes of a submission's life?

Although I do agree that built-in comment collapse functionality would be great; I'm using a Chrome extension right now.

<comment><USER7> I'm a fan of experimenting with voting systems, and as this never happens, i'm always disappointed. I think it would be great if the order of comments was always random and scores were never shown (I don't care what people think of other people's comments; how can an opinion have a score? the very idea is preposterous). It would encourage people reading more comments, and not being either fearful of losing points or posting comments just to get a higher score.

<comment><USER8> Worth noting, the score is intended to be an objective measure of correctness — well sourced, clear, and reasonable comments aught to add to the score, rudeness, questionable sourcing/factualness should not. Ideally.

<comment><USER9> The problem is, given the current strict comment ordering system & the fact that many (myself included) read comments top to bottom, a 15 in the top position for two hours may in fact be equal to a 3 that's farther below.

I hadn't thought about it when I started writing this, but I'd be curious what comment ordering results a points/time value function would produce. Although a fuzzy random ordering would still be needed to ensure that lower comments got enough viability. So maybe points/time/position-at-vote-time

PS: That said, collapsing comments to promote more equality between highly rated level 1 comments would be an excellent idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not advice, but some good news for those who struggle.

I always had problems getting up early. I hated it. It was a running joke amongst my friends, any time we had to take an early flight or set off early on a road trip, they had to drag me out of bed. And it wasn't laziness - <USER2> just felt awful, really sick, terrible, early in the morning. One day I met someone who told me she was exactly the same when she was younger, but that it gets easier. She was right.

Now, I can get up earlier than my friends. I'm more of a morning person. I don't know what happened, but it changed quite suddenly, maybe in the space of a few months, sometime in my early 30s. Nowadays I get up early and hit the gym most days, which a younger me would simply have believed impossible.

I don't know if this applies to everyone, but I can tell you that none of my friends over 30 have the same difficulty I did when I was younger, but plenty of those in their 20s do.

<comment><USER11> I used to be a night owl - used to sleep in past 12pm. I switched over time.

Full time work shifted the pattern mostly. Weekends I still got up later.

Children who wake at 7am sharp was the final step. 8am feels like a lie in after years of a daily ritual of 7am rise. No matter if I go to bed at 10pm or 2am, there isn't compromise in the morning.

I guess one way of doing it is to give yourself no choice. Without children, I imagine an alarm in another room, perhaps next to a phone or computer where you need to press a button or it'll bill you for each 15 mins late. Unfortunately, these are things you can turn off.

<comment><USER12> It reminds me of one of the more beautiful pieces of cyberware available in the Shadowrun RPG: The little device hooked into your meatware that sends a harmless electric shock to your brain at a prescribed time (or some other event), immediately bringing you from a sleep state to a wakeful state. The company that invents that would be worth a lot of money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Most people don't have a problem with getting out of bed, they have a problem of getting into it.

There is certainly some who have genuine medical problems and so who struggle. An order of magnitude just don't sleep enough though. Go to bed at 10 and it's easy to get up at 6, or whatever your actual sleep need is (it varies by individual and over time, right now mine is a hair under 8h I think).

<comment><USER14> Problem is I'm getting home from work 7-8pm. Housekeeping, food, then rest, and I need to let my mind decompress before going to bed. That takes me past midnight. The only people I've seen do this over decades are very type A and/or they finish every night with a few drinks of alcohol. I don't drink.

<comment><USER15> What does type A mean?

<comment><USER16> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_A_and_Type_B_personalit...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_A_and_Type_B_personality_theory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So... Does anybody have any actual advice for getting out of bed?

<comment><USER18> I'll give it a shot. I've been getting out of bed at 4-5 am for the past 5 months when I have no need to other than to accomplish more personal stuff.

1\. If you need to get up early for work, leave a good handle on it the night before. Like leave detailed notes on how to accomplish the next step or steps. Detailed enough that your first half hour to hour will be brainless peace and harmony.

2\. Leave an exciting reveal for the morning. Say you finished building a cool new feature. Don't try it out until you wake up. I like to leave a 3D image or animation rendering overnight.

3\. If possible change your schedule so that the early morning can just be full of fun stuff.

4\. Plan to lay in bed for about an hour before you fall asleep. Incentivize it with a bedtime-only iPad or a pile of good books for bedtime only.

5\. Lay out your clothes for the morning, the night before.

6\. Do not get out of bed cold unless you find that invigorating. I bought 5 long-sleeve cotton shirts and sleep in those and some comfy pants and short socks. If I get hot, I use fewer blankets. I also keep a coat ready to put on.

7\. Make breakfast or a cup of tea/water beforehand.

8\. Make a fun routine. I bought a nice radio for early morning use. It picks up stations far away and I listen to it while I work.

9\. Plan to take a nap later whenever needed. Schedule in the downtime.

10\. Lay out a plan for your entire tomorrow. I do a mind map on paper. With this done the evening before, there should be nothing left to avoid thinking about in the morning, making it easier to consider getting out of bed.

Edit: And yes, it will change your life and people will wonder how you do it. Also I consider this practice a great burnout-prevention tool if you can keep work out of it (or out of the rest of your day).

<comment><USER19> I'd like to emphasize the first point. For about six months, I woke up at 4am Monday of every other week to catch a plane to another city to start work at 9am till 6pm. I would not only get everything ready to pack in the morning, but I'd leave notes throughout the apartment listing what I needed to do before leaving, things like "take this or that item", "turn the power off", etc. I'd put the notes on door handles, to the toilet, main entry door and the only way I could forget something was if I had a stroke and couldn't read.

So as parent said, it was "brainless peace and harmony" all the way to the airport.

<comment><USER20> Just curious, what sort of work situation led to that arrangement?

<comment><USER19> It was a contract and I didn't want to move so it was agreed that I work one week remotely and one week onsite every fortnight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've always struggled with mornings. I've never had any problem working late, but I just always figured I was a night owl.

Maybe I still am, but this year I decided I needed to mix it up. I tried to get myself in bed before midnight, then up at 7 for the gym before work. The reason being the gym is much harder in the evening, as is work (if you have offers to go out, meetups, whatever). If I don't start until midday, it removes any options I get during the day for a lazy (/alcoholic) lunch, or for socialising in the evening, because I have to work or work out.

I was moderately successful at this, but I've had a breakthrough in the last 8 or 9 weeks by getting up at 5.50 for meditation and qigong at 6am, before leaving just after 7 for the gym. Not only has the meditation helped me immensely, but I'm feeling more _alive_ during the day. And I can leave work (or not!) in the evening with zero guilt about not having done enough, knowing I can do whatever I want with my evening (be that work, or play).

For me, and particularly when I was working for someone else, I got up because I set an alarm and _had_ to get up. If I didn't, I'd get fired (probably). I've found over the last few months the key (mentally) has been doing something for _me_. If you have to get up at 7am to work for someone else, getting up at 5am or 6am means you're not getting up for them, you're getting up for _you_. It's harder to resent getting up and getting moving because you're owning it - it's your choice.

Anyway. I may just be getting older... Just my 2c.

</comment><comment><USER22> The only thing that ever really helped me get up early was to ditch my alarm clock. I used to snooze for over an hour every morning. Once I got rid of my alarm clock I started getting out of bed the first time I woke up each morning.

I got up a little later than I used to set my alarm for, but much earlier than I actually got up with an alarm clock.

<comment><USER23> The no stress way:

When alarm goes off, I take 1/3 of a caffeine pill (66mg - Im pretty sensitive to caffeine). Then I turn my alarm off and let myself drift back to sleep.... 15 minutes later I'm up and starting the day.

On rare occasions that this doesn't get me up, I really needed the extra sleep.

<comment><USER24> This sounds like it might be worth a shot. Are you aware of the "coffee nap"?

<comment><USER23> Its the only way I wake up these days. I used to take a whole caffeine pill (200mg equivalent to one cup of coffee, but it was too much - I would crash in the afternoon and when I stopped taking it, I got headaches. The 1/3 dose hasn't been a problem though)

The coffee nap sounds like a great idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I used to be pretty bad at getting up, and fixed it (for me) by keeping the same (morning) schedule on weekdays and weekends. The rationale is that your body has a rhythm, and if you laze around on weekend mornings but get up at a different time on weekdays, it gets out of sync, and you have all sorts of sleep issues. So, pick a time, and get up at that time every day whether or not you feel rested; soon enough your schedule will adjust so that you feel tired enough to sleep 7 or 8 hours before that.

For anybody who needs some help with sleep, take a look at cognitive behavioral therapy (e.g. [http://shuti.me/](http://shuti.me/)), which is reportedly much more effective than ambien et al.

</comment><comment><USER26> My secret for getting out of bed is that over the years I have lived an worked such bat- __* crazy hours that morning has lost its meaning. Oh, and I don 't have a bed to get out of. I sleep on a hard floor with no blankets.

I sleep on the floor because it's more comfortable for me than a cushy mattress. I learned this from my migraines at an early age. If I'm in a bed when a migraine strikes I can't get into a position that makes me comfortable for enduring the pain. I always ended up on the floor. I think this is because the floor give me the solid support to allow me full control over the position of my body. Years later, I just decided to ditch the bed altogether as it seemed like a waste.

I have no blankets because I live in the tropics.

<comment><USER27> > morning has lost its meaning

This is a bad idea for most people. Inconsistent sleep times will lead to poorer quality of sleep in most (but not absolutely all) people.

<comment><USER28> Even poorer quality of everything. Some density in your sense of time seems like a very important trait in one's life.

<comment><USER26> Agree with the two replies here. It's not for everyone. Not for anyone. It's just something I felt like a had to do for a while to keep up with my workload ad it blew away my sense of categorizing time.

That said, I do feel that the sun is extremely important in the benefits that it gives you. So I do try not to spend plenty of time in the rays.

<comment><USER28> Sun interacts with your system a lot. But more generally I believe in rhythm as a source of economy. Whenever that makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've tried so many things, and most of the things I read here in the comments sounds like fairy tales (just do it, go to bed earlier, ..). I'll spare you the details (I should make a blog post about it), but here's what worked for me:

\- get a dawn simulation device (doesn't work on its own, but still helps waking up more gently) // the more powerful/lumen, the better

\- likewise for audio: volume going up slowly (I use AlarmDroid), for this, use a gentle non-continuous sound (knock knock, _pause_ , knock knock, _pause_ ) the idea is that a continuous sound is too much annoying, forces you to go turn it off asap and go back to sleep. You may use a more brutal sound for your real wake-up time (so, at the end of the dawn simulation), the idea is that you'll have a gentle alarm beforehand and hopefully fear the brutal alarm and just get into a habit of getting up before the brutal alarm.

\- best for the end: padlock your alarm in a solid case, and put the key in your mailbox the night before (hopefully not too close to your bedroom, in my case, I may meet neighbors, so it forces me to fully clothes on). A key-less alarm at the other side of the rooms does NOT work and you will just get up, shut it down and go back to sleep.

\- bonus : use a very bright light (at least 5000+ lumen) on a programmable plug for the end of the dawn simulation (or just get a really powerful dawn simulation one, not sure if that exists though)

edit: added bonus

edit2: everyone is different, I just wanted to add my part to the overall list of ideas, please check out all the other comments, different stuff works for different people! (the coffee one sounds interesting, I would have tried it if I was a coffee drinker)

edit3: This should be common sense, but please don't use this as a way to sleep less. I use this because even when I sleep a fair amount (9+ hours for multiple days, I still struggle to wake up).

<comment><USER30> The only thing that works for me: go to sleep early enough that I'll get my full eight hours of sleep. Leave some room for those times when I'm more exhausted than usual. This means falling asleep by 10pm to wake up by 6:30am on weekdays.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, please do try this also. Everyone is different. Personally, When I try just going to bed early, I just end up fully conscious for hours in my bed not falling asleep. (edit: and yes I tried with using f.lux, not using a computer screen, reading on a passive Kindle, just listening to music beforehand).

<comment><USER30> I have a couple of suggestions for your sleeplessness for those times when you try to fall asleep earlier:

Definitely, it helps to be tired enough to sleep. But to be tired enough, you need to wake up early.. kind of circular. A heavy workout earlier in the day often does the trick too. If you're trying to make it a habit, then doing it gradually is probably the way to go: fall asleep earlier by 15 minutes each day.

There are also times when there are just too many thoughts in your head that won't go away - it helps to close the eyes, roll them up, do one of two techniques:

1) Consciously don't hold onto any particular thought. This is a meditation technique. Oddly enough, I think we do this naturally when we're really tired and sleepy.

2) Take yourself back to an activity that required total presence of mind and body: for me it's sky diving. I'm just falling, adjusting... and pretty soon I'm asleep and dreaming. I guess this is more of a visualization technique.

Both of those work to take the mind off attention grabbing thoughts and moving you to a more relaxed state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > It's a beautiful passage, and a good introduction to the Stoic philosophy > that follows. For an emperor, too, it seems very sound counsel. But for > anyone under the pall of depression, it's some of the stupidest advice ever > written.

I disagree. If you read between the lines, much of his message is "just fucking move, do something, get out of your current state" and from my experience, that is very sound advice for when you find yourself in a rut. (For the trolls - obviously it's not the one and only way to handle down times, nor is it "that simple" for true sufferers of depression.)

</comment><comment><USER32> Marcus Aurelius is a funny guy. A caesar "teaching" people to be humble, stoic and productive ... but of course that sounds really thin coming from literally the richest guy of his time on the planet. Granted, he certainly was one of the better and more capable emperors of the Roman Empire (given the list of screwups, that's not as high praise as you might think), but way he found power and richess certainly had less to do with productivity, humbleness and stoic behavior, and rather more with his family's accomplishments. Also he is famous for his hobbies, whilst he was no disaster, he certainly was no Julius Caesar either.

On occasion that leaks through in his writings. For instance he is usually far more concerned with "explaining" a slave's fate than with doing anything about it. Why is anyone a slave because of Marcus Aurelius ? Well, it's their own fault. They are the slave of their emotions, they drink and dance and don't think of tomorrow (slaves in Rome, especially the more skilled ones were treated very well. It is muslims that gave a bad name to the term slavery (although some Roman provinces contributed as well). In the Roman Empire, around Rome itself, it was not that different from being an employee. Sure there were bad jobs, and allowing employers to trade employees was horrifyingly bad for the power relationship, but if you compare to poor-rich relationships elsewhere in the same time, Rome comes out far ahead).

Marcus Aurelius sounds about as fair and balanced as the American Enterprise Institute explaining why there are so many poor. It seems to boil down to not being entrepreneurial enough. Never mind the obvious fact that being an entrepreneur is only common in the top 0.1% (and there, only in name, I've yet to see examples of companies started by the 0.1% that really introduced a new product. Somebody who takes over part of a bank into an independant company is not an entrepreneur in my opinion). In the bottom 50% being an entrepreneur, an independent businessman is actually far more common than in the top-50%, mostly out of necessity. I doubt any explanation for this will be forthcoming from our libertarian think tanks.

But Marcus' opinion of others is similar : if they aren't successful, that must be their own doing. If you didn't own half the farms around Rome, apparently it was because you drink too much (never mind that the Roman rich, not the poor are absolutely famous for just how elaborate their debauchery became).

</comment><comment><USER33> I bought a few Phillips Hue Lightbulbs for my room which turn on at 4:00AM, right when I get out of bed. So far, any night I haven't been out past my usual bed-time, 9:00PM, I have had no trouble waking up and staying alert the rest of the day.

Unfortunately I'm on travel right now so this system isn't accessible to me. I am now frequently finding myself sleeping in until 5:00AM.

<comment><USER34> OK, I'll bite: why do you need to get up at 4am, and consider 5am sleeping in?

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've found it absolutely essential to spend some time outside in the middle of the day. I usually take a 1 hour walk outside around noon. If I don't do this, my circadian rhythm will get out of whack: I won't be tired in the evening, but I will be very tired in the morning. In other words it will be extremely difficult to get up from bed at a sensible time.

Also, I avoid sitting in front of a computer or TV within 3 hours of bedtime. If there is something that I absolutely need to do on my computer, I use glasses that block the blue part of the light (it's the blue part of the light the influences melatonin, which again regulates sleep).

<comment><USER36> What are these glasses called? Do you also know flux [0] / redshift [1] / twilight?

[0] [https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/)

[1] [http://jonls.dk/redshift/](http://jonls.dk/redshift/)

[2] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux)

<comment><USER37> This model is quite popular: [http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S1933X-Eyewear-SCT- Orange-Anti-Fo...](http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S1933X-Eyewear-SCT-Orange-Anti- Fog/dp/B000USRG90)

<comment><USER35> Those are the ones I have :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I have a dog that gets me up at 6 every morning, but that dog is also asleep again by 9 or 10, and doesn't get up again until 3 or 4 in the afternoon. While there's no way I can do that (even if I had the free time to do so) I do make a point to schedule an hour or two in the afternoon to rest if I need to. Knowing that I can rest for a bit if needed makes getting out of bed less of a burden. I realize that few jobs allow for that, but they absolutely should. I probably get more done before 9 than many people do before noon.

</comment><comment><USER12> I love how Marcus Aurelius' thoughts echo across thousands of years and enormous class stratification with the kinds of things that every single human can identify with. His is easily one of my favorite books of all time.

</comment><comment><USER39> Even if you're _not_ depressed there are several reasons to spend more time in bed.

(1) get more sleep, (2) develop the faculty of imagination, (3) meditate (it doesn't matter if you fall asleep; you're in bed after all).

</comment><comment><USER40> Actual advice for getting out of bed? Well, I presume it would be different for different people as most often it comes down to motivation, and different people need different motivation. However, you can take a look at [http://www.earlyrisershub.com/](http://www.earlyrisershub.com/) . I have tried to introduce different gamification techniques to try to motivate you to get out of bed. For example - competition, tracking progress and some small rewards. Also, any feedback is welcome. Thanks!

<comment><USER41> This is nice! I almost want to steal the idea and make an app out of it :p

<comment><USER40> Cheers! Go for it :) .

Btw, there are some benefits of it being a website. For example, you earn bonus points if you check from a non-mobile device - this implies that you are out of bed ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's helpful to have small practical tips on coping and how to be kind to yourself when you are too depressed or ill to get out of bed. Sometimes that self care is more useful than trying to go instantly from 0 to 60, sad to happy. Or, than what Marcus Aurelius is doing, beating himself up emotionally and feeling shame and guilt.

While I like Stoicism, I wish I could go back and time and give Marcus Aurelius a day off!

</comment><comment><USER43> I've never minded mornings. I mean if I woke up I can be out the door in 5 minutes and be ready for the day. At times it can be odd if I just get few hours of sleep, I can deal with a work day, but after that 6-10 hours I crash pretty hard.

</comment><comment><USER44> To get up well, you need to go to bed well. Going to sleep at roughly the same time every day is good. Physical activity also greatly increases the quality of the sleep.

</comment><comment><USER36> Reading this on Sunday morning/afternoon after a good night, I'm like: "yeah whatever, I'll just get my laptop and work from here!" ;)

</comment><comment><USER45> If you are going to diss Aurelius on his advice dispensing (calling the classics 'stupid'?), you had best have profoundly insightful alternative to propose. The author did not. I bin this in with 'more patricidal (elder disrespecting) rubbish' seeking to overthrow the tables of the greats who got us here and usurp it with presumably more salient and/or pertinent 'recent findings' or what have you. Such endeavors usually fail miserably.

<comment><USER34> The author does _not_ say the advice is stupid. She says that it is stupid for people suffering from depression, which she acknowledges is not likely the target audience of the original piece. (In fact, the target audience was Aurelius himself, since his Meditations were more of a personal journal than a work intended for public consumption.) This article is not in any way criticizing the writing of Marcus Aurelius; it is simply using it to point out an unhelpful mindset when dealing with depression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I just down an energy drink that's sitting by my alarm clock every morning. Not healthy maybe but oh well.

</comment><comment><USER47> Every time start having doubt creep in I think and act on one mantra.. Do the work.

It really is that simple.</comment>


Automakers Prepare for an America That's Over the Whole Car Thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/business/automakers-prepare-america-fewer-cars.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how low "cars per person" we will achieve through self-driving Uber/lyft services? Those type of services, if cheap enough, could replace the need for cars for little trips here and there.

But things like commutes are harder to replace. You have everyone trying to drive all at the same time during high traffic. Traffic will only increase as people can nap during commutes because people will commute from further and further away.

You'd have to have a lot of extra cars that only make 2-4 trips a day due to demand.

Plus a large amount of car lifetime is determined by mileage. Fleet maintenance will help, but after 150k miles on average, they'll need to be replaced. If these self driving car services are so cheap, we might increase the car mileage per person. Which means we'll burn through cars at a faster pace than person.

I'm not convinced that the end of personal ownership will be all that bad for car companies. I bet it hurts midmarket luxury the hardest since nobody will buy them.

<comment><USER3> Taxis are already self driving cars, and affordable for parts of the population. Those people buy cars regardless.

<comment><USER4> Cars are definitely more than a commuting device, they are cultural.

Also I think articles like this often forget that while it would be great to not need a car for the morning commute, people in suburbia still need to do many other things like shopping and fetching children etc.

Many of those tasks are just easier or more preferred to be done in personal transport. Sometimes you need to leave some shopping in the car while you go in to sit with the kids at an after school thing, before heading past a friends house to drop off their kids then finally heading home. A self driving fleet could probably still achieve that in multiple trips, but how many people want to deal with continuously pre-planning and concerting a half dozen small trips a day?

I strongly dislike suburbia and car culture does grind my gears in various ways, but I can't help but feel the car-in-an-app is solving the very specific problem of short once off trips, and solving that doesn't even come close to solving the nations transport issues.

<comment><USER5> I suspect that a lot of people who live in cities, don't own a car, don't use a car much, etc. don't really appreciate the degree to which people customize cars for their needs (roof racks for sporting equipment like canoes, car seats for kids, etc.) and use them for mobile storage. As an exurban person who does a lot of outdoors activities, it's hard for me to imagine not having a personal vehicle. The economics would really have to be compelling and it's hard to imagine they will be especially if the number of miles "driven" go up.

<comment><USER6> You will have carseat cars, cars with sports racks, larger minivans where you don't need the sports rack and so on. Uber today has a car seat option for example in NYC.

I could see cars that let you just move the stroller in and lock it in with standardized connection types in the wheels, no carseat ritual required, no waking up the baby. I can also see cargo delivery cars that you just drop your shit in and it delivers it securely to your house after you have gone shopping. Or even more likely, you just use an app for that and not even go to the store. Malls turn into showrooms.

All of that is for a self driving future.

What you do today is use something like car rentals when you want to go do outdoor activities. A friend of mine uses uber to go kiteboarding and rents a car with friends when he goes skiing.

<comment><USER7> There is probably a pretty well-defined density threshold where vehicle pooling makes sense, vs. personally owned vehicles.

In cities, pooled vehicles are a no-brainer. It's probably already faster to have an Uber come get you than it is to park a personally-owned car in the core parts of NYC, SF, or some other megacities. This is only going to get better, including specialty vehicles.

But as you get out into the suburbs and exurbs, it's more challenging to provide an acceptable level of service (max. 5 minutes from call to arrival, or some other pain threshold that causes people to just wish they had their own car). The economics also start to get harder: if I take an Uber (self- driving or otherwise) out to my house in the sticks, it's a lot less likely to get a return fare back into the city; that trip is a lot less profitable than circulation within an area. So it's doubly bad for a self-driving car company: you need a lot more cars/customer to provide the same service level, and you're spending a lot more time "deadheading" with empty vehicles, or charging extra to compensate.

That's not to say that self-driving vehicles won't significantly affect driving and commuting patterns, even in rural areas, but the displacement of personally-owned vehicles is going to be more challenging and may lag urban areas by a very long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This makes sense for big cities, but that vast territory in between, where Trump got the majority of his support, that territory where you see lots of trucks and SUVs, and people drive miles to Walmart or the grocery store or baseball practice - they're going to still want their own vehicle.

<comment><USER9> Need, not just want. For the residents of most of the surface area of America, you cannot survive without owning your own vehicle. Stores can be 10 to 50 to 100 miles away from your home, there are no buses or taxis or Uber, you can sometimes get a ride from a friend or neighbor but only if they're also planning to go to town, and if you each go to town together you're usually stuck there all day and then have to each wait long times for the other person to do what they need to do, because you're each shopping for the next 2 – 3 weeks before you go to town again.

<comment><USER10> Agreed, I have the feeling that most people think San Francisco or New York when they think "city"... the problem is that Phoenix exists (all 517 square miles). There are many, many medium sized (1 million ppl +) cities that are conglomerations of suburbs, with very little "urban" interface like Phoenix dotting the western portion of the US.

<comment><USER9> And there are plenty of people who do not and have no desire to live in a city at all, and that isn't going to change. Many people retire to rural areas, or live in smaller cities/towns. It's a deliberate lifestyle choice for many, and these people are perfectly happy to own a vehicle of their own and use it and it's not a problem that needs solving for them. So when urban technologists come in and say they're going to "solve" the problem of car ownership and turn it into a service, such people respond somewhere between mockery and outrage at the ignorance of such people thinking their ultra-urban environment is the only acceptable way of life.

<comment><USER11> Do you guys hang out in the makeup department and talk about your disineterest in lipstick? Why is every thread on this subject loaded with peanut gallery comments from people who aren't interested in autonomous cars. If you don't like them don't use them. They still stand to address the needs of 10s of millions of commuters in America, and far more worldwide. It's a huge addressable market.

<comment><USER12> I think it's not disinterest, but more of a reality check. While we all agree that self-driving cars will be a game changer, some of us think that it can be easily blown out of proportions.

"The needs of 10s of millions of commuters in America" could have been addressed with public transport years ago. The fact that they weren't should tell us that there's more to it than whether someone drives the car or not.

<comment><USER13> Basically this, combined with the fact that people who dislike public transit for cultural reasons (see also: hate the poor) point to SDC's as a panacea for all our transportation problems.

There was literally a post in one of these threads saying we should "screen" people so undesirables couldn't use public transit so it would be more attractive to yuppy scumbags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Carmakers have to adjust and prepare for a reality in which mobility is treated as a service and cars are losing their traditional function as a (middle class) status symbol.

I think that self-driving cars may actually increase traffic and our dependency on cars. Just think about it:

\- If you don't have to drive yourself but can instead use the time to sleep, watch a movie, study or shitpost on the Internet, a 1.5 hour commute to work isn't that bad anymore.

\- Since the labor cost for operating a self-driving car is probably really low (we'll still need mechanics for maintenance and such) and streets are heavily subsidized by the government, self-driving cars are cheap and could be a competitor to traditional public transport services.

\- There isn't a reason why kids, who now have to use a bike, a scooter or the bus until they are allowed to drive a car shouldn't be able to order a self- driving taxi; thus, they get used to being shuttled around all the time from a young age.

<comment> white-flame _> I think that self-driving cars may actually increase traffic and our dependency on cars._

Exactly. Remember how computers were supposed to give us paperless offices? They're automated paper-wasters and likely increased paper consumption in offices incredibly during the 90s and 00s. I've not been in corporatastic environments for a while, so I can't comment on the 10s.

<comment><USER15> I work in those offices, paper still exists, lots of it is printed, often though as an easy way to carry a document around for review.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This headline really overstates it. Anywhere outside of a major metropolitan center you are gonna be hard pressed to deal with day to day things like getting groceries without a car. The nearest grocery store to my house is about 5 miles. I can bike it but that really limits how much stuff I can get.

Similarly if you're a family with pets, particularly big dogs like mine, I can't take them anywhere without a car.

There is no public transportation of any kind that comes to my neighborhood.

So while yes, more and more people in cities may be abandoning cars because they have gotten more and more expensive over the last decade, there is no near future where America as a whole is able to live day to day without a car.

<comment><USER17> Exactly. I lived outside of the US for fours years and never needed a car. Even though I moved back to a city with public transport, and a single regularly rail line, it pales in comparison to the type of transport available is much of the developed world.

Self-driving cars are a terrible solution. They will ONLY solve the last-mile problem, but not the missing American infrastructure. Russia is larger, less dense and has better public rail infrastructure in terms of both commuter rail within cities and inter-city rail including high speed expansion. The US only has the California high speed system currently being constructed. Nothing else.

I've written about the self-driving car problem before:

[http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not- sol...](http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-solve-the- transportation-problem/)

<comment><USER18> Our entire system is kinda broken with how roads/parking are relative to size. So it's not an easy problem to fix overnight. With an our established and spread out infrastructure. But self driving cars will eventually lead to smaller pods or smaller vehicles. Potentially fewer lanes or even allowing non standard road shapes and straightaway and fewer parking lots. I think autonomous vehicles is a stepping stone to a better infrastructure and community

<comment><USER19> I think the actual problem is a political one. Too many industries need highways to get bigger and to have more Americans buy cars.

<comment><USER7> The problem is definitely political, but I don't think it's a corporate conspiracy. Americans just don't like paying taxes, and aren't willing to pay taxes at the rates that would make Euro-style public transportation (with a mix of buses, trams, commuter rail, intercity trains, etc.) viable. Even in the cities that have marginally-decent public transportation systems, they're chronically underfunded.

You could probably build a hell of a public transportation network if people were willing to pay what they currently spend on average on automobile-related expenses (or even a substantial fraction of it) towards a shared network, but people have been making that argument to the American public for the better part of a century now and it's not gained a lot of traction.

I'm not sure that self driving vehicles really change the underlying political calculus that makes Americans unwilling to pay for that sort of public infrastructure. But they could still be an improvement, in safety and resource consumption, vs the current status quo.

<comment><USER19> I agree and I don't think it's a conspiracy any more than I would any other powerful lobbying group. Autonomous vehicles, in my opinion, have the potential, if not high probability to make things worse. Instead of increasing population density in areas like the Great Lakes region, it'll make it easier to commute and build expensive, no poor people allowed, suburban enclaves filled with chain restaurants and a replica of an uptown or downtown where people can pretend they live in a city.

Even when State or local governments have funds available, they opt not to build out other options. I think the USDOT offered many billions to states like Ohio to build out rail connections, but they didn't want the funds. To add to that, the states and local governments know about things like induced demand, but they just keep building out these giant highways any way. They could have taken the funds and poured it into public transportation. There isn't much politics cost to it. Traffic is always bad, and people are going to be angry before, during and even after construction because it never solves the traffic problem.

It makes me so sad and drives me crazy that we're doing this to ourselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I know it is a pipe-dream, but it'd be nice if all the data these cars gathered got loaded into a central database. That way they all could improve faster and it would increase the ability for competition. I feel right now how we're doing it you'll get a certain brand that is definitely safer than another, which could easily cause a feedback loop.

<comment><USER7> If that's implemented by way of some sort of public agency which obtains, analyzes, and releases sanitized versions of the data collected by self- driving cars for the benefit of the public... then sure, that sounds like something we ought to do.

But I would probably not phrase that as asking for a "central database" as though it's being fed by the cars themselves. That sort of centralization is... architecturally suspect, for a lot of reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am not shure. As a european I see the cost of public transport only rising and at the same time I am giving up lots of flexibility. I see the option to buy a cheap self driving for arround 10'000$ as very appealing. Public transport is a tradeoff between cost, flexibility, time losing/saving and freedom. A self driving car can give lots of flexibility which public transport never can and will give. It's where I see the future of owning a self driving car. Also I do not see lots of chances for makers of self driving cars to differentiate between each other except the interour. About what else should I care?

</comment><comment><USER22> Americans may be over the car but our infrastructure doesn't really agree.

<comment><USER23> Did you read the article? Americans are over _owning_ a car, not mobility in general (the simple problem of when cars drive themselves you probably don't need one full time).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Decades ago when I was in Indiana, which liked and still likes cars, I knew some people from NYC, and they hated cars, any and all cars. Ever since then, NYC has had a lot hatred for cars. NYC just doesn't like cars. And, no surprise, now the NYT from NYC doesn't like cars.

I've lived in Tennessee, Indiana, Maryland, and upstate NYS, and all those places like cars, and those places have liked cars for all the decades NYC hated cars.

So, the OP is from the NYT in NYC and is about hating cars. So, from the decades of history, I'm not surprised or impressed.

E.g., I have a car in my garage. I own it 100%. It costs me $500 or so a year in auto insurance. Since I drive it about 5000 miles a year, there is nearly no cost for maintenance and the insurance costs me, what, about 10 cents a mile. The gasoline costs me about 17 cents a mile. So, all things considered, we're looking at ballpark 30 cents a mile.

And the NYT wants me to replace my car with what? No thanks.

Yes, it's easy for NYC and its NYT to believe that they have the right answers for everything for everyone on the two coasts and everywhere between. Alas, mostly NYC and the NYT are in an echo chamber and at odds with nearly everyone else in the US except for parts of a few of the largest cities and some of the West Coast.

Long ago I concluded that quite broadly NYC and the NYT are out of step with nearly all the rest of the US. So, the NYT doesn't like cars -- I didn't expect anything else and am not influenced at all.

Of course, there is the old screaming that humans are evil, sinners, that humans are doing terrible transgressions against kittens, puppies, flowers, the grass, the air, the water, the land, the oceans, the great natural order, etc. and that these transgressions are leading quickly to terrible retributions. Then, the claim goes that if we act quickly, we can achieve redemption. Of course, the redemption will require sacrifice. It's a trilogy -- transgression, retribution, redemption. And we can add on sacrifice. I'm not nearly the first person to think of such things! So, we hear from the NYT that cars show that humans are evil, sinful transgressors .... Gee, not nearly new.

I'm having a tough time finding what the NYT is good for. Apparently so are many others since, IIRC, now the NYT is planning to shrink its staff, vacate several floors of its main building, and lease the space to others. The NYT used to have some utility: It was printed on paper which was good for starting fires, wrapping dead fish heads, and in the outhouse out back.

Whatever side one was on in the election, everyone can see that the NYT was strongly on the side that lost. Since I put new batteries in my loser detector, it has been making loud noises in response to any mention of the NYT!

To me, the NYT fills a much needed gap in journalism and would be illuminating if ignited and still printed on paper. I continue to pay attention to the NYT occasionally, first, to remind myself of how much I miss good journalism and, second, to have details to argue that the NYT should just go out of business.

<comment><USER25> >"So, the OP is from the NYT in NYC and is about hating cars. So, from the decades of history, I'm not surprised or impressed."

Except the article is using Los Angeles as an example and the train picture and two of the women they spoke to in the article were Angelinos. This is is significant because Los Angeles has traditionally been an epicenter of "car culture."

Also since you seem to be implying an editorial bias against cars I will add that NYTimes has a regular automotive section of their paper, where they cover the industry and do new car reviews and quite decently at that. This article is from that automotive section.

[http://www.nytimes.com/pages/automobiles/index.html](http://www.nytimes.com/pages/automobiles/index.html)

<comment><USER24> Again, the OP NYT article saying that people will be buying fewer cars is because the NYT hates cars, cars not just in NYC but also cars in, in this case, LA. The NYT and much of NYC believe that cars and gasoline are sinful and evil.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> As much as I endorse concepts like Minimalism, Tiny Houses and Ride Sharing for reasons of practicality/economy, it should be abundantly obvious we're getting poorer.

It is not even subtle and a good portion of us are pretending it's about lifestyle choices.

<comment><USER27> Wages have been stagnant since the 1980s. The perceptible poorness, or rather lack of increasing prosperity is anything but subtle.

But the American 50-70s have only been possible due to an anomalous rise in oil consumption per capita. Energy = wealth.

<comment><USER26> I see that. I don't see a lot of urgency in our societies either. Perhaps you have seen this:

[https://i.redditmedia.com/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2sV1yY46...](https://i.redditmedia.com/LkKBNe1NW51Wh-8nLSTRdQtTha2sV1yY46vhUWcu_6g.png)

I blame the television and the media, they have sunk the population into a hypnotic stupor.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Health insurance for remote teams in US? - <AUTHOR>

Anyone have a company with employees all in different states?  If so, I'd love to hear about possible health insurance solutions.  Do you subsidize individual plans for your employees, or is there some way to make it work with a multi-state group plan? <comment><USER2> As I understand it, insurance companies can't really offer plans that cross state boundaries. Best thing is probably just to buy individual plans for each employee. Or you can tell your employees to buy their own plan, and send you the bill (this is what I do; my employer is in Washington and I am in Pennsylvania). Either way is is a bit easier with Obamacare than it used to be.</comment>


The dark side of GraphQL: performance - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/benawad/status/1212392789637521410 <comment><USER2> The title is misleading. The post doesn't discover any dark sides of GraphQL. The post is about a potential performance problem with a library that implements the GraphQL spec. There might be a problem with the library itself. There might be a problem with the use of said library. The author states that it takes 19ms to fetch 20 recipes from a postgres database. This looks really suspicious. Why does it take so long to fetch 20 indexed rows? Maybe there's some general performance problem with the application?

<comment><USER3> You focus on and make assumptions it's indexed rows and that ~20ms average for a database call is "suspicious" but you're not concerned about the 400ms flamechart for graphql-js doing validation shown in the thread?

graphql-js is the reference implementation of GraphQL, so it's not any random library.

<comment><USER2> The graphql-js library focuses on correctness, not on performance. Facebook doesn't invoke it at runtime, only at built time. They use persistent queries only. If you want a high performance server runtime I wouldn't use Node.JS. Especially for a complicated task like validating and resolving a GraphQL query Node.JS is the wrong tool. It's too high level to tweak hot paths and optimize the garbage collector. So no, I don't think the flame graph is suspicious. In my language of choice (go) I could drill down memory and CPU consumption for each line of code to find the bottleneck. Maybe this is possible for Node.JS too, I don't know the tooling so well. I would suggest that if such tool exists a detailed flame graph of the Node.JS application might help understand the issue.

<comment><USER4> OP is using Apollo Server, which is by far the most common server implementation for GraphQL. It may well be there are issues specific to Apollo, but it's definitely worth getting to the bottom of based on how widely used Apollo is.

There is nothing in the posts that identifies NodeJS as the culprit, and based on the info I'd be very surprised if it was. It seems most likely that the type validation is what is taking so much time. But then again, strong types are one of the main benefits of GraphQL. If anything, I've found Node to be one of the easiest and most "natural" server languages for GraphQL, and I have implemented GraphQL servers in Node, Java and Python.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried elixir's absinthe?

<comment><USER6> I'm curious to find any performance comparisons between Elixir's Absinthe and Hasura, on a Phoenix app.

<comment><USER5> I would be extremely (but prepared to be) surprised if Phoenix + Hasura were faster in terms of latency than Phoenix + Absinthe, since one has to enter and exit two vms and the other doesn't, unless you're suggesting the frontend issue graphql results directly to the hasura backend, bypassing phoenix.

<comment><USER6> Two ways one could test - 1] REST client <-> Hasura <-> Phoenix 2] Phoenix- generated HTML <-> Hasura <-> Phoenix

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reading the thread, this isn't a "dark side of GraphQL" but a "dark side of not understanding how to debug/improve performance in my software dependency".

<comment><USER8> Ben Awad is pretty knowledgable in graphql. He is one of the most solid youtube tutorial guys on it.

<comment><USER7> I have no doubt. The unfortunate bit is that his tweet uses "GraphQL" to refer to a specific implementation (Apollo Server) of GraphQL rather than GraphQL itself.

<comment><USER9> It would be like posting "The dark side of SQL" for a slow MySQL query

<comment><USER10> But there are dark sides to using sql, often from the abstraction that sql provides.

Maybe the optimizer picks a poor plan and you can't figure out how to make it work better. Maybe the schema has redundancy you can't change or the indexes aren't suitable for that query. Maybe it's auto parameterizing constants and the query with the problem has a parameter causing different behavior than the original constant used in optimizing the query, or maybe your query with 1000 elements in an in list worked great in memsql or whatever but is slow unexpectedly in the database you ported your app to. There are downsides to everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure if this is mentioned in the thread, but one of the reason it takes so long for the requests to return is when GQL initializes the entire record in memory and then reduces it back to only the fields you wanted. This can be a big problem if you have a deeply nested data model, and potentially many results. The memory consumption can hit the roof. I find that the best approach in those cases is to create a one-off REST endpoint (or to create a field higher up the GQL hierarchy) and handroll the SQL query.

<comment><USER12> Things have matured quite a bit. With Apollo Server it's possible to fully understand which fields are being requested before creating and running, for example, and SQL query. Fetching only the requested data for a given query reduces in-memory footprint. Most people get the whole data object and then allow GQL to select the subset of fields the user asked for, but for cases where performance is a problem there is another solution.

<comment><USER11> I haven't used Apollo Server lately. But the way you describe it doesn't address the core issue, which is the initialization of the intermediate objects in-memory. So just to give an example, if I wanted to query for the projects of listings of my company, I can write it this way in GQL:

       me { company { listings { projects { id name } } } }

This will initialize: a User, a Company, Listings and Projects of all listings.

I can also write this in SQL using a couple of joins and return an array. The memory consumption is trivial in comparison to the original request.

<comment><USER13> You can implement your GraphQL server to do either of those, it's not inherent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I guess I still don't quite get most GraphQL designs or why a lot of people jump to implement it... I have always thought the big idea behind GraphQL is you already have endpoints (likely rest) which are cached/optimized? And then GraphQL becomes a layer over the top to map/reduce client requests for more optimized request/response cycles for clients (and I guess decouple some business logic)?

Which then makes me wonder why this is the "dark side" of GraphQL? Isn't this just not optimizing a query somehow or using a cache effectively? Is it really the nature of GraphQL that's causing this to be slow or just programmer error [1]?

I've used GraphQL in production services as an alternative to a rest endpoint (which I didn't care for) and I don't think sheer the nature of the validations ever caused that much slow down or rather, more plainly put that GraphQLs design would not necessarily cause such poor performance on such a small set of data.

/shrug I dunno, if this were me, I'd just assume I had written a bad query or validation somewhere. And to be fair to the author, they only made a post on twitter to reflect on their problem, not to say GQL has a dark side (at least from what I read in the thread).

[1] We all have made programmer errors, are likely making some "now," and will for sure make more in the future. No reason to feel bad about it, we're all human :) Mistakes are just a part of life no matter how "good" at things we are.

</comment><comment><USER15> From the thread.

'Slow response times for large documents'

[https://github.com/graphql/graphql- js/issues/723#issuecommen...](https://github.com/graphql/graphql- js/issues/723#issuecomment-379090872)

It seems that the graphql library is performing a lot of validation, and that's slowing things down. I expect validation to be a pure-compute task, and this is Javascript, so I suspect this is really a "working with large amounts of data in Javascript is slow" issue - but that's just at a glance.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sounds to me like an issue that comes with coupling of validation with serialization. A lot of these API frameworks combine the two, with a the goal of automating validation when receiving data from clients, but then also do that validation when serializing response data, which should already be validated if it's sitting in your database.

I've ran into similar issues with FastAPI and DRF when dealing with really large payloads.

</comment><comment><USER17> Quite strange, GQL server source code is literally just walking by fields and resolving promises, very simple and straightforward.

We had something like this in our backend, but this long times is usually meant that something wastes event loop and just blocks everything from execution.

It could be anything for example it could be async hooks that makes ~1000 times slower if you are using a lot of promises (since resolving fields often are just promises) since overhead is per promise. In general in latest nodejs you can do huge amount of promises and they have little to no overhead, but, again - something wrong with nodejs setup, some library populate event loop or something deeper in nodejs internals. It is not an issue with gql itself since if you have gql performance issues that means that your server is super slow in processing like anything. Our team was shocked by performance and it turns out that NodeJS is super fast and it is some libraries (like sequelize) that kills the performance, but gql is not one of them.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've seen similar issues in graphql-ruby. Even if I hardcode the data in my resolvers, it takes hundreds to thousands of ms to render a list with some moderate nesting.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've built fairly complex GQL backends using CPython + Graphene and never seen something like this - if we had slowness it was because we were yet to implement dataloader in some places.

</comment><comment><USER20> We faced similar issues at Zalando when trying to use Graphql at scale and to mitigate this we built [https://github.com/zalando-incubator/graphql- jit](https://github.com/zalando-incubator/graphql-jit). Try it for your usecase and let us know how it affects the performance

</comment><comment><USER21> Checkout Super Graph it's a GraphQL to SQL compiler and API service in GO. In production mode it uses prepared statments so no compiling hence very latency. [https://github.com/dosco/super-graph](https://github.com/dosco/super-graph)

</comment><comment><USER22> Forgive me if this sounds a bit "hindsight 20/20", but I feel like performance was always a lower consideration when it came to utilizing graphql. The win is in reducing overhead around providing new endpoints.

Like react, it eschews performance for the sake of enterprise level scaling. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, being both of these came from one of the largest dev organizations in the world.

<comment><USER23> > performance was always a lower consideration when it came to utilizing > graphql

That's strange, because I thought the main selling point was to consume only the data you need. The client specifies exactly which fields it wants. Then it doesn't over-fetch. To make things higher performance.

<comment><USER24> GraphQL the protocol/language was designed for performance, but (when I tried GraphQL, which was several years ago) the server-side implementations seem to have had much less of a focus on it.

It's true that the _client_ doesn't over-fetch (and also doesn't need multiple round-trips), but at least when I tried the gql-js library it required the _server_ to over-fetch: it would ask for individual records, and then do the field plucking/record joining itself; there was no way to intercept the query along the way to find out which fields it needed so you could only fetch those.

I get the impression that the server libraries were designed to work with a document store or "fat" REST API that is only capable of taking a single ID and returning the entire record. In this situation it makes sense to have a separate middleware server to keep the big fetches and round-trips inside the datacenter and only give the client exactly what it needs, and needing a little more server power isn't a big deal. But, if you need to do something more sophisticated (even something as simple as only fetching certain fields from the datastore), they were no help whatsoever; when I was looking into it there wasn't even a way to parse the query into an AST and do the rest of the query planning yourself.

<comment><USER25> Echoing this, GraphQL is just a specification, and it is up to library authors how that spec is implemented.

I think there might be a disconnect or misunderstanding in the developer about this. GraphQL is sort of like the Flux pattern for MVVM architecture. It isn't so much a thing as an idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> without the actual code, this is as far as we can debug. can the author create a small reproducible repo instead?

</comment><comment><USER27> any chance to reproduce and post the HAR file? thanks

</comment><comment><USER28> Hmmmm... if anything the performance of a graphql query should generally outshine REST in nearly any category of performance. From the sound of things, the performance issue doesn't make any sense. He's using Dataloader, and he is certain it's not related to dataloader anyway. So maybe some dependency he's using is the wrong version.

<comment><USER29> Can you elaborate? I find it hard to believe that you can't build a REST API that's faster than GraphQL given all of the bells and whistles that GraphQL tacks on and that you could hand write the perfectly optimized REST endpoint. What am I missing?

<comment><USER30> REST can definitely be faster than GraphQL, because as you mentioned GraphQL is doing much more.

But as you start to re-use REST APIs across multiple pages/apps, you often end up:

\- over-fetching: you'll receive some data that you don't actually need, but that it's required by another page

\- over-querying: the data you are over-fetching might have required extra queries (or even worse calls to an external system)

\- cascading requests: if you are working with nested data you might have to call the server multiple times, often in a sequential manner

Also in my experience the performance of REST APIs tends to get worse over time, because as many developers work over the same APIs it's almost unavoidable to keep these APIs lean. Just before Christmas we had to spend some time figuring out why a fairly simple GraphQL request was taking almost 2 seconds. Turns out a developer had accidentally introduced an n+1 in the underlying REST API. The n+1 was on a field/relationship that we didn't need/use, but with REST you don't usually get to pick what you want to load so...

Solving these problems with REST is possible but not trivial, while GraphQL mostly solves them out of the box. So while REST could be faster than GraphQL, in my experience it usually ends up being slower.

<comment><USER31> I think this gets to the underlying criticisms. GraphQL is not the replacement for REST and by nature an improvement - it is an alternative to REST based on a certain set of pain points. If you're a large org with multiple consumers and your API development is silo'ed, then GraphQL may solve a set of problems you have that a small homogeneous team may not.

<comment><USER30> Correct, but it's worth noting that GraphQL has much more to offer than just request performance. I'd argue that performance improvements is the less interesting part of GraphQL.

The main selling points for me are:

\- speed of development: once you have a complete graph, you can add new pages/features at a fraction of the time, and often without touching the backend at all

\- type safety: you can generate typescript/flow types for your queries, giving you type safety from db to client (assuming your backend has types)

\- query co-location: you can have the query (or a fragment) inside or next the component that uses it. Need a new field in a specific component? Just update the fragment, any page that includes it will get it by automatically

and last but not least developer experience. Having worked for a few years using graphql + apollo + react + typescript (on both a personal and a reasonably famous large website) I can honestly say that it feels like living in the future. As a mostly backend developer, I have never enjoyed working in the frontend so much.

<comment><USER32> Well said. That's why my current team started using graphql. It actually had very little to do with performance or anything backend-related, and mostly because of the same reasons (FE speed of development, type checking, etc).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me) (2006) - <AUTHOR> http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me

<comment><USER2> With this being written in 2006, I'm really impressed with how on track Tesla has stayed. It gives me hope for the future of the company, and the results it will hopefully deliver.

I can't wait to see what Musk and Tesla do next.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ahh, the little-known trickle down theory…

An articulated and advocated instance, where it just might work.

</comment><comment><USER4> (2006)</comment>


Show HN: i built this Instagram web interface. What do you think? - <AUTHOR> http://quickagram.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I just made this webapp to explore some ideas and i would love to hear your impressions.</comment>


Zuckerberg says the public misunderstands his and Facebook's motivations - <AUTHOR> http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/05/26/zuckerberg-motivations/

<comment><USER2> >We believe that people own their information and not only should they have control over it

vs

>The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly." He adds: "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

[http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/05/26/zuckerberg- motivati...](http://social.venturebeat.com/2010/05/26/zuckerberg-motivations/)

These two opinions seem inconsistent.

>We believe that people ... should be able to take [their personal data] to other services.

How is FaceBook actually making this possible?

</comment><comment><USER3> It's his job to make his company's motivations understandable to users and to investors and to business partners.</comment>


How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team - <AUTHOR> http://www.growthsensei.com/blog/2013/2/5/how-to-build-kick-ass-growth-team <comment><USER2> LOTS OF CAPS!!!! I HIRED 4 PEOPLE WHO WERE TOP OF THEIR CLASS!

Seriously? This seems like him trying to retroactively explain why he has a good team. Even if his company and his team do their jobs excellently, that doesn't mean he can explain why, or even necessarily create a new team with the same level of success. Frankly, there are a lot of random factors in success.

More specifically, as other people have pointed out, the focus on academic credentials is ridiculous. I suppose if you create an insular team where everyone can pat each other on the back for having a 4.0 GPA, that's fine. But there are tons of good technical people without any credentials, or who didn't give a toss about school. Not only are you not willing to hire them, you've created a culture where even if you do find someone amazing without credentials, that person will be a second class citizen.

<comment><USER3> The point was to hire the very best you can, which I think is something everyone can agree with.

<comment><USER2> That's a useless platitude. The point of the article is to define what exactly "best" is. Everyone always wants to make the best choice, but they hardly know what that is. In this case, the author says "best" is top of class, a sentiment with which I vehemently disagree

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it - Why do people abuse the term 'hacker' so much? If it's so much hip being one, then, why not try to be a real hacker instead?? Why do people simply call themselves a 'growth hacker' when all they do is simply send a bunch of marketing emails to Techcrunches and Mashables and some PR agencies??

Similarly, it was the term entrepreneur before, for example, I have a huge list of dudes on my Facebook with titles like CEO, CTO for a <insert a dotcom domain with a wordpress blog with a free theme installed here>. Being an entrepreneur/hacker is one thing and abusing the terms is totally another!

<comment><AUTHOR> Neya - my growth team does more than just sending marketing emails. We are very data-driven and product strategy is also part of our team responsibility. We use machine-learning based classifier for many part of our company funnels

<comment><USER5> I don't know if it's just me or if I've had a long day, but I can't really understand posts of this kind anymore when they are effectively just buzz words/phrases strung loosely together.

<comment><USER6> That's the point, he is actively making it difficult for you to understand him. By dropping in words with complex backgrounds, he hopes you (you generally, not you in particular) do not have enough knowledge in those domains to understand how those terms do/do not fit together. This leaves you in a position of having to accept his point as there might be truth in what he is saying - you aren't knowledgeable enough to tell the difference between the correct and incorrect usage of the terms.

Generally, someone who understands the concepts will not use terms strung together like that unless forced. "machine-learning based classifier" with "company funnels" seems a bit suspect in this case, and probably needs a blog post to explain fully, not a simple one line rebuttal as above.

So yeah, it's not just you.

<comment><USER4> Very well explained, Ryan. Agreed!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You make some decent points, but your "Data Analytics" questions are pretty basic. Stats 101 level stuff. I mean, sure, you might want to open with one or two of these questions, just to test someone for bullshit. But if someone's applying to be a data scientist and can't tell you what a 95% CI means, or what Type 1 and Type 2 errors are, or describe the concept of expected value, their resumes probably shouldn't have passed your filter in the first place.

Second, I take issue with the "marketers are mathematical Neanderthals" line. This is a broad stereotype that does nobody any favors. As much as everyone likes to take swings at MBA types every so often, graduate-level marketers need to be highly proficient in statistics to be competent at their work. Few of them can code, I'm sure, so in as much as that's the case, they're probably not of tremendous value to an early-stage growth team. But a classical marketing training most certainly includes strategy, stats, data analytics, etc. It's not just advertising.

Now, if you're talking about "marketers" in the sense of Communications majors who've never so much as passed Calc B, I'd see your point. But those sorts of people fall into an entirely different category.

</comment><comment> brown9-2 So you want 23 year olds who graduated valedictorians of their universities, have PhDs, are accomplished quantum physicists, capable of answering complex computer science interview questions, familiar with statistics, _and_ can explain the causes of the subprime mortgage crisis?

Why set your bar so low?

<comment><USER8> That confused me as well (even though I do have a university medal) - then I realised that PHD = Passionate - Hungry - Driven, not Doctor of Philosophy :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I am sorry to put it this way in this forum, but the "bullshit" and "buzzwords" warning lights on my panel have just lit up.

</comment><comment><USER10> "So I have a team of 12 Growth Hackers / Data Scientists / Product Managers- Growth / Whatever the f __* you call it - I call them growth ninjas"

Is this satire?

<comment><USER3> I think if you called the team marketing you would struggle to hire people with the right skill sets into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The text is from a marketeer, and it shows. I hit buzzword bingo in a couple of paragraphs. They're not hackers, they're not ninjas. They are marketeers of the big data generation. Nothing new here, move along.

On a side note: average age of 23??? What's with this concept that people in their 40s, 50s or 60s can't be as/more driven than youngsters?

<comment><USER12> > average age of 23??? What's with this concept that people in their 40s, 50s > or 60s can't be as/more driven than youngsters?

Most of the time I have seen the "we only hire young, hungry people" statement, it translated to: we hire (on paper) qualified people who are still cheap and don't have enough experience to say no to the silliest requests we have. After hiring we just give them enoug work to have their first burn out with 30 and then we hire new people.

Most of the time someone in his 40s to 60s has more experience which means better connections to potential alternative employers and costs more money.

Please see this as a general statement, I don't know if this is the case with this company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I can appreciate the content of this article. I believe the author is correct about a number of things. I wonder though, if the author understands just how much his bizarre use of capitalization undermines his point.

If you are trying to apply accents to specific words, you'd be much better off with an underline or the even subtler italization. The random caps and questionable word choice throw me off. Why, for example, does the author refer to his engineers as ninjas and what does that have to do with their qualifications? I thought we were done hiring rock stars and samurai and that we could return to the days where professionalism was important.

In short, I appreciate the message, but despise the delivery. If you can afford to hire PHDs, ninjas and other such elite folks, you can afford to hire someone to edit your writing, and you should.

</comment><comment><USER14> It is interesting the focus on academic achievements.

Yet I think, that yes, it means they might be hardworking people, but does not guarantee much else.

Sometimes you find great people that are not even graduated, and I am not talking about "Bill Gates fake dropout", but people that never set a foot in college in first place.

Some people started their trade very early, sometimes in childhood, and when they reach 20, they are already masters of it.

Of course, these are rare, so if you want to risk less, hiring only the best of their classes is fine.

<comment><USER15> I don't agree with the logic behind it in this context.

a) Working hard in a commercial environment is something different from studying hard. Many successful academics are motivated by acquiring knowledge, but find it very hard to motivate themselves to produce stuff, especially marketable end-products.

b) Laziness is not a major obstacle for a good hacker. Since there is a limited amount of time per day one can truly focus, laziness can be a great aid in picking your battles and avoid wasting energy.

<comment><USER14> Interesting.

Yes, hard to argue with that.

What I would say is that a top class might at least know how it is to work hard...

Maybe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The brave new world where there are no jobs for PhDs so they have to work for the marketing spam department.

</comment><comment><USER17> After reading this article, it has become clear to me that I would never want to work for this guy.

</comment><comment><USER18> You lost me at buzzword strategy growth buzzword overhypedbuzzword hacker.

</comment><comment><USER19> You had me at Big Mac. Maybe.

It seems like such arbitrary conditions you set in order ...wait a minute, I just noticed the website is "growthsensei.com", that's like Guru level 88?

Aaand that's all my time for the day.

</comment><comment><USER20> Question for willix: How is growth hacking for freelancer.com different to good marketing for freelancer.com?

<comment><USER3> Growth is marketing- it's just done with a different set of people than you would do a decade or more ago. Instead of people with MBAs or marketing backgrounds you do it with computer scientists and statisticians, and you base your actions on science; lots of testing and data.

<comment><USER20> That is the point I need clarification on.

For a site like freelancer.com (large number of users, entirely online, lifetime value very important) testing and data work very well.

So since marketing is growth, isn't this the approach that would be used by a good marketing department?

Obviously a bad marketing department would do things differently, but a good one would find the activities that gave the steepest growth curve

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sharing what you look for in a growth hacker and what questions to ask is very useful as many people claim they are great at "growth hacking".

My biggest insight from this is that growth hackers need to be mathematical and not marketing gurus.

Great article! Keep em coming

</comment><comment><USER22> Yes, because acquiring one person with a PhD for your team is easy. Difficulty in adding 3 more is probably like finding the resistance of resistors in parallel...

</comment><comment><USER23> We have some growth hackers at our company lol. They're basically the slacker engineers that work on salesforce integrations all day long to help sales ppl.

</comment><comment><USER24> interestingly all the types of people you name- data scientists, quantum physicist, blah blah - are all the same types of people who crunched numbers for the big banks only a few years back until making moves into tech.

im totally for data crunching and analytics but there's a human side of the business that gets overlooked when a team is so heavily decked like this.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm really hoping this whole article is satire.</comment>


How to Run Pandoc in AWS Lambda - <AUTHOR> https://claudiajs.com/tutorials/pandoc-lambda.html <comment><USER2> By the way, FF reports this when accessing pandoc's site from the linked URL

        pandoc.org uses an invalid security certificate.
        The certificate is not trusted because it is self-signed.
        The certificate is not valid for the name pandoc.org.
        Error code: SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER

The problem is that the tutorial on claudiajs.com is linking pandoc as [https://pandoc.org/](https://pandoc.org/) but they are plain http site: Google links to them as [http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)

The author of the tutorial is too optimistic about the adoption of https :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> fixed :) (deploying to the CDN, so should take a bit to get globally updated)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tldr: tutorial on how to create a scalable document conversion service using Pandoc, AWS Lambda and S3. Also covering how to deploy third-party binaries with your Lambda function.</comment>


How to unit test Python Spark jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.nocountryforolddata.com/unit-testing-spark-jobs-in-python/ <comment><USER2> Is there a good book, or guide for this somewhere? Have been wondering for a while about how to best do this.</comment>


Google Robots vs. Humanity - <AUTHOR> http://benatlas.com/2010/03/google-robots-vs-humanity/ Is the Google page rank algorithm messing up our culture? <comment><USER2> This article seems poorly thought-out and borderline incoherent.

      Now Matt Cuts started to direct humans to the Google Spam
      report page, "help us maintain the quality of Google search
      results". If this is not an admission that a Google bot sees no
      difference between a splog and a blog than what is?

No, it looks pretty obviously like a way to train and tweak the pagerank algorithms. Why does it have to be something more than that?

       And it doesn't look like the usability of the search results will
       improve anytime soon, not after the massive amount of the social
       media clutter is now integrated into the pages

Why does the addition of new oneboxes conflict with result quality? These seem pretty orthogonal. (The author goes on to imply he thinks all oneboxes are spam, which just seems naive.)</comment>


Why don't more software applications look like clean desks? - <AUTHOR> http://n8.tumblr.com/post/73857484/why-dont-more-software-applications-look-like-clean

<comment><USER3> Yeah, esp in consumer apps (not so much in business and enterprise apps - <USER2> are destined to be cluttered), the uncluttered interface can bring in some real value. Years back when I kept looking at MySpace pages, I thought how can any sane person be on this interface? If it wasn't for clutter, MySpace would have been what Facebook is today.

</comment><comment><USER4> I thought this would mention probably the most famous application that does look minimalist - the google.com homepage.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, my bad. Great example and I forgot. Before I saw your comment I actually just posted this today:

[http://n8.tumblr.com/post/77817247/forgot-about-probably- the...](http://n8.tumblr.com/post/77817247/forgot-about-probably-the-most- popular-example-of-a)</comment></comment>


Free OS X Server Redemption Code - <AUTHOR> http://wad3g.github.io/blog/2013/10/27/os-x-server-redemption-code/

<comment><USER2> Worked, thanks. I was trying to find the thread for the essential OS X apps and found this instead.</comment>


You can use a VPN to battle ISP net neutrality abuse - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/you-can-use-a-vpn-to-battle-isp-net-neutrality-abuse/ <comment><USER2> This is totally overhyped.

The internet existed for quite a long time and most ISP's never did the things that were alleged in this article. There are some things that have been proven, sure, but they're not the norm and they're usually rare. The FTC and the market sorted the issues out pretty reasonably.

If you're worried about tracking, you need to stop using Google and Facebook, now. You should also stop using Chrome or anything with instant search enabled.

The other thing thats missing is that most privacy VPN providers are very sketchy and make a ton of unverifiable claims. You're not really better off using a Privacy VPN provider given the current technology.

Tor is marginally better but YMMV.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, as the article points out, the ISPs have done all these things inthe past and AT&T is already rigging up fast and slow lanes. Are VPN providers perfect? Oh heck, no. But, for now the best of them are an excellent option if you're worrying about your ISP looking over your shoulder.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and the existing agency (the FTC) and the public dealt with them. Worrying about fast and slow lanes is needless. NN is a solution in search of a problem, and more than likely an excuse to usher in an actual tax on the internet. Worrying about your megacorporation ISP vs your shady privacy VPN provider is not really a great tradeoff.</comment></comment></comment>


Developing with the Particle Photon - <AUTHOR> http://cmaher.github.io/posts/developing-with-the-particle-photon/

<comment><USER2> First link in the article is dead

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It was supposed to link to [https://www.particle.io/](https://www.particle.io/)

(how embarrassing)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> cool project, thanks for sharing!

It'd be interesting to see a wind speed sensor, temp sensor, or light sensor or something on the AC unit so you could know when it's on!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually where I want to take this, I'm thinking a wind speed sensor to recognize if it's on/off and a temperature sensor to turn it on/off automatically.</comment></comment>