Ensuring a Level Playing Field for Rideshare - <AUTHOR> https://blog.lyft.com/posts/2019/1/30/ensuring-a-level-playing-field-for-rideshare <comment><USER2> The "gig economy" bites back. For those wondering, here is a breakdown of the TLC's implementations[1]. Without a doubt, Lyft is bemoaning "Minimum Driver Pay" where "Each app company will have its own rate, which will be set by TLC and adjusted periodically, and those with lower utilization rates will have to pay their drivers more per trip than companies with higher utilization rates."

While it's true that higher-utilization apps (like Uber) will have to pay their drivers less, this puts drivers in a position of power and Lyft in a position of higher driver demand. I think this is a good thing both for drivers and consumers. _Drivers_ get to arbitrage working for either Uber or Lyft -- depending on the utilization/pay scale -- while being protected financially by the TLC's policies.

Lyft can cry wolf all it wants, but it's not as "small a player" as it makes itself out to be. By the way, this also protects new players in the space. These rules only apply to businesses doing, on average, 10,000 dispatches a day.

[1] [https://www.chauffeurdriven.com/news-features/in-this- issue/...](https://www.chauffeurdriven.com/news-features/in-this- issue/2049-new-rules-and-regulations-taking-effect-in-nyc.html)

<comment><USER3> As a former driver I have to say lyfts logic is accurate. Also, why should a company with less dispatches be subjected to different rules from those that don't?? That's extremely anti-driver.

<comment><USER4> The general logic is that larger players have more economies of scale so making regs apply to all makes it _even harder_ on the small guys.

<comment><AUTHOR> Except in this case it's the reverse. The larger players, which have it far easier in terms of utilization rate, are _rewarded more_ than smaller players working their tails off to reach better, but not best, utilization.

So it's even worse than applying a single rate to all and tacitly advatanging larger players. It's actively basing that advantage on largeness.

<comment><USER5> Are you saying the law advantages providers with over 10k/day and hurts providers with under 10k/day? I don't understand how that could be. The law doesn't apply to providers with under 10k/day, so they should have freedom to do whatever they find optimal.

<comment><AUTHOR> The utilization formula part of the law advantages each operator individually according to that operator's numeric utilization score.

Imagine if utilization was like a credit rating and the TLC wants laws that ensure good credit ratings among operators. So they incentivize reaching a good credit rating.

One option could be to say, hey if you get a credit rating about 700, that is good for the people, so you get a tax break or something.

Instead they are saying, hey if the size of your business already makes it easier for you to build a high credit rating, then you get _even more_ tax breaks than others do, giving you even more advantage over them.

This is not about the 10k/day part at all, only about how if Uber's position as current market leader leads Uber to already lead on raw utilization rate, then the new law automatically rewards Uber with a labor price break _more than_ the price break Lyft would get, and more still than Via or Juno.

<comment><USER5> dnautics and TylerE were talking about the 10k/day boundary. If your reply isn't about the 10k/day boundary, then I think you misunderstood them.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I understood them. Despite my commentnot being directly about the 10k/day part of the issue, my reply is directly relevant to the parent comments. Perhaps you misunderstood my first comment?

<comment><USER5> TylerE was only talking about the 10k/day boundary. Why did you reply to TylerE if you wanted to talk about something else? You should have replied to someone else. As-is, the thread just became really confusing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "Why did you reply to TylerE if you wanted to talk about something else?"

Because my comment was related to that. Not all related things had to be squarely about the 10k/day item. My reply, which was very related to the parent comments, just wasn't about the 10k/day part.

It's not necessary for a reply to focus on or discuss precisely the 10k/day item in order to be related and merit being a reply in this subthread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Examples of this back and forth that have benefited drivers include Lyft's > pioneering in-app tipping and instant payments for drivers, features Uber > has since copied.

In—app tipping is the worst thing that ever happened to ride share services.

<comment><USER7> If you have ever tried to work as a ride share driver, you would quickly discover that without tips it wouldn't be nearly as viable a source of income.

Honestly, I don't mind not getting tipped by the old man or single mother going home with a few bags from the grocery store, I know they're broke. On the other hand, I appreciate it when the businesswoman headed to the airport gives me a bigger tip than I expected, I know she can afford it.

Would I rather make a flat extra $7 an hour? Yeah, probably overall. But allowing tipping (in an environment where it's been a tradition for generations) costs the company nothing and results in more income for underpaid drivers. If it's that or simply make less money, well, it may not be the perfect shining ideal of How Things Should Be Done, but I'll take it.

<comment><USER6> > If you have ever tried to work as a ride share driver, you would quickly > discover that without tips it wouldn't be nearly as viable a source of > income.

That's why having tipping be part of the app is so ass backwards. The pricing shown to the customer is what the customer agreed to pay. Some fraction of that goes to the driver and that amount should be enough to be a viable source of income. Banking on an expected X% bonus that's not listed in the price presented to the customer for the system to be able to operate is disingenuous.

> Honestly, I don't mind not getting tipped by the old man or single mother > going home with a few bags from the grocery store, I know they're broke. On > the other hand, I appreciate it when the businesswoman headed to the airport > gives me a bigger tip than I expected, I know she can afford it.

And if she doesn't tip do you feel sleighted?

> Would I rather make a flat extra $7 an hour? Yeah, probably overall. But > allowing tipping (in an environment where it's been a tradition for > generations) costs the company nothing and results in more income for > underpaid drivers. If it's that or simply make less money, well, it may not > be the perfect shining ideal of How Things Should Be Done, but I'll take it.

Tipping for drivers has always been possible, in cash, outside of the world of the app. Having it total external prevents "expected tip" shenanigans for min wage calculations like goes on in the food service industry. That also has the advantage of being off the books for the drivers (let's be honest, none of them are claiming taxes on a fiver given in cash by a passenger).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Stop calling it "rideshare". The driver is a not "talking a ride" and "sharing" it with you. They are a paid driver. This is a taxi service — not a carpooling service.

<comment><USER9> Aren't you sharing the ride with other passengers?

<comment><USER10> How many Uber rides have other random passengers in it?

<comment><USER11> Uber pool is pretty popular

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone explain the argument here - isn't the point of the minimum wage that a company has to ensure the employees (drivers, contractors, whatever) make at least the minimum wage. I realize Lyft doesn't like it - it costs them money - but what's their argument that they shouldn't have to pay their drivers a living wage?

Something something higher Utilization Uber? I read it twice but it's still a little muddy to me. Are they arguing that since Uber drivers have higher utilization, Uber has to pay less minimum wage padding - so they get an advantage? Isn't that fair? Or is this more complex than I'm hoping?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a much more complex issue than you are reading into it.

Lyft here is not opposing a plan to ensure drivers make a minimum wage nor opposing a plan to incentivize companies to increase their utilization rate, which is a measure of how much _productive_ traffic they add to the city instead of unproductive traffic.

On the first issue, Lyft is saying that the specific implementation of a minimum wage policy is going to hurt drivers by lessening ride demand overall. Their reasoning is that the policy mandates the wagechange must apply individually to every single ride, rather than applying in aggregate to each driver over longer time spans like a week.

If Lyft can compete through price changes on a ride by ride basis, yet still ensure that at an aggregate level the driver meets or exceeds the wage requirement, this gives Lyft more levers they can pull to keep prices lower for customers and/or strategically decide which types of traffic patterns ought to be paying higher prices that subsidize the wage requirement.

The current policy disallows this type of "smart pricing" and instead insists that all rides must raise in price, which is likely to lead to decreased demand overall, especially for short rides that are less problematic in terms of return-trip utilization risks.

This issue had little to do with Uber except maybe that Uber had greater capitalization to ride out more losses while this law kills off competitors. But Uber drivers could be just as negatively affected as any other drivers from the specific way that a wage requirement is being carried out.

The other issue is very different, it is about rewards given to companies based on the company's demonstrated utilization rate, which is in part a function of the amount of ride liquidity that company has, which is basically a proxy for market share.

Lyft is asking, hey, if the goal here is to reduce unproductive traffic in line with some studies on traffic congestion, etc., then why is there an individually-calculated reward on a company by company basis that is partly calculated using a proxy for market share? How does that solve the city congestion problem?

For example, let's say that the city did some research and knows that if companies operate with utilization rate of 60% or higher, this is "good," and they want companies to have a financial incentive to reach that.

One way would be to offer a price break, freedom to pay drivers less than the new minimum wage requirement, as a reward for hitting the utilization mark.

Instead of that, the law is choosing a formula not based on something like that 60% number from studies or other factors. Instead, it is saying, hey so Uber had a utilization rate of 45% (pretty bad for the city, way less than 60%), but their 45% number (partly due to their market share) is better than say Lyft's utilization at 40% or something.

In that case, Uber would get _more price break_ than Lyft, because 45% is higher than 40%, despite neither one hitting the mark necessary at 60%.

Worse yet, because Uber's ability to engineer 45% utilization is largely just because Uber happens to have a larger volume of ride inventory, the reward had nothing to do with proactive policy on Uber's part, but is instead literally codify the idea of "the rich get richer."

Many alternatives make more sense in terms of helping the city and preserving fair competition, for example:

\- basing price breaks on city-wide utilization target levels that apply to everyone.

\- basing price breaks on the amount utilization increases over time, so that the people making the biggest improvements get the biggest rewards.

<comment><USER10> This sounds overly complex. I don't see why regulation would need to worry about utilization, pricing structure, etc. Of course inefficient use of roads/vehicles is bad for a city - but even low utilization is probably better than private drivers? And low utilization is also bad for any company so why have any need to regulate based on it, all companies still want the highest utilization possible?

I guess what I'm asking is: why doesn't a regulation Just say "drivers should all have decent working hours (enough working hours, shifts not too long or short etc) and they should be paid at least the minimum wage for each of those hours _regardless of whether they are driving or not_.".

<comment><AUTHOR> It's quite complicated. For example, in economic studies of taxi services there's a well-known "round trip" problem with rides that go from an urban center to a relatively less dense outerlying area. Around NYC this might be a ride from the financial district out to a far out region of Queens or something.

Once you drop off the rider, you're less likely to immediately pick up a new rider in that random outlying area, so there's some "return trip" extra cost built for everybody, in terms of paying the driver to get back to a place with a lot of passengers, the driver spending time to get there, and society bearing a zero utilization period for the driver to get back.

As a result, this typically makes prices for these rides go up to reflect all these built-in costs. And naturally this reaches some equilibrium that reflects what people in the outlying area are really willing to pay for the convenience, and somewhat weighted by the natural demand for rides there.

But one criticism of Uber has been using investor capital to artificially reduce those costs down to levels totally unsustainable in terms of the actual demand and built-in costs. Essentially taking a loss to artificially over- service those areas, leading to huge increase of zero-utilization return trips and huge losses to cab companies that don't have investor cash injections to artificially suppress the real prices in an attempt to win monopoly market share like Uber is trying to do.

This is just one issue, and there are many more involving ride supply, driver pay, smart pricing, business pricing, etc.

All these things combine to create a really complicated situation for the TLC to genuinely ensure that drivers are paid fairly and companies like Uber don't just use investor cash injections to skyrocket unproductive "rides in waiting" floating around to artificially make rides more available for market capture.

As a result, very simple policies that do not dig into operating details are unlikely to succeed at all and would be easily gamed, especially for larger operators.

<comment><USER10> > one criticism of Uber has been using investor capital to artificially reduce > those costs down to levels totally unsustainable in terms of the actual > demand and built-in costs. Essentially taking a loss to artificially over- > service those areas

This would seem at first glance to either be a case of predatory pricing, or it is not?

I still don't see the why regulators shouldn't separate the issue of minimum wage from the other issues (competition etc). Even if the regulation means killing Uber's competitors, isn't it the right decision to impose a minimum wage? Is there a similar debate about e.g what a minimum wage does to small vs large actors in retail?

If Uber uses a dominating market position unfairly or uses predatory pricing with investor money that should be addressed, but if Uber needs to "pad" their drivers wages $2 per hour and Lyft needs to pad $4 to reach minimum level due to Uber being able to use its size to get higher utilization, then that seems like competition as it should work?

I appreciate your attempt to explain why and how this is complicated - and I apologize for being thick here.

<comment><AUTHOR> > "if Uber needs to "pad" their drivers wages $2 per hour and Lyft needs to > pad $4 to reach minimum level due to Uber being able to use its size to get > higher utilization, then that seems like competition as it should work?"

The problem is that Uber's higher utilization is an arbitrary metric, and if we're picking arbitrary metrics, why would we pick one that intrinsically entrenches the current market leader?

Just because Uber's utilization might be higher than Lyft's, that doesn't mean either one of them is operating with a satisfactory utilization or an unsatisfactory one. What if Uber operated at 99% utilization, and Lyft at 95%. At that point, offering any financial incentive based on ranked utilization would be a huge waste of taxpayer money.

Meanwhile, if Uber and Lyft are at 15% and 10% utilization, it's equally a waste to reward because those are such bad numbers that society is enduring major congestion costs.

Here's an analogy. Suppose in the US that the government decided sports teams are a morally bad influence on society due to executive and athlete behavior.

As a result, they will reduce your team's roster size unless you donate money to charity.

Suppose they were to "unlock" one new roster spot for every $1 million of charity donation. That seems possibly fair. Teams can each decide if it's worth it, and it's a flat fee affordable even by the least financially well- backed teams.

But instead suppose they tallied up all the donatioms to charity and ranked each team. The top team gets all roster spots, the next team gets most of them, and so on down to the teams that did not donate, which get no roster spots unlocked.

What's the problem with the second model? It seems like a nice auction sort of way to do it, and that's fair right?

Well one problem is that the whole point was to raise money for charity to offset ethical problems, and the auction method does not necessarily cause much donation to happen, only enough to be the winner, say. The winning team might have only donated $500k total, but they are still rewarded like they did something awesome. Society loses out.

The second problem is that it intrinsically favors teams with more money. They can buy the roster spots just based on their size, regardless of whether it is addressing the underlying ethical problem. For big teams it's just a cost of doing business and the players can keep on doing cocaine in the hotel room, who cares. But for the small teams, even if they want to reform the underlying problem, they may not be able to afford to unlock roster spots, which reinforces that they won't make as much money from winnings, which keeps them unable to buy future roster spots, and so on.

The utilization reward policy is like this in many ways. It doesn't reward based on absolute levels of utilization or improvement of utilization... it intrinsically rewards based on your _ranked_ utilization, which just reinforces the market share of existing operators.

<comment><USER10> That utilization is an arbitrary metric is exactly my point! Why use _any_ metric in a minimum wage regulation? The regulation should be "drivers should make a decent wage, that is they should get enough hours and enough pay for each hour". That's it.

How the different market actors are affected (whether it strengthens the incumbent) and how it affects congestion etc shouldn't even be a concern! Road congestion is one thing. Competition is a separate thing. Minimum wages is a third thing. I don't see any reason why regulation needs to consider any 2 at the same time. Predatory pricing is (often) illegal, congestion should mean raising congestion fees, min wages should be simple. Am I oversimplifying it?

If a $15 min wage was imposed in other parts of the market such as retail, who would care if WalMart was unfairly benefiting from it and would there be suggestions that regulation should be using a more complex metric so smaller retailers would be allowed to dodge the min wage requirement somewhat?

<comment><AUTHOR> > "If a $15 min wage was imposed in other parts of the market such as retail, > who would care if WalMart was unfairly benefiting from it and would there be > suggestions that regulation should be using a more complex metric so smaller > retailers would be allowed to dodge the min wage requirement somewhat?"

Yes! In fact, in NYC there is already a huge backlash against the minimum wage increase stating that it unfairly hurts small businesses (who are forced to fire people and/or cut benefits since they cannot meet basic operating revenue requirements if they keep the same amount of staff and also have to pay them the higher wage).

Many proposals have been suggested that there should be offsetting tax breaks given to small businesses because the minimum wage unfairly hurts them more than larger chains.

A theme I see in all of your replies is something like "just do X" where X is enforcing a minimum wage or incentivizing rideshare utilization.

But it is way, way more complicated than that. If you "just raise the minimum wage" it can actually turn out to hurt workers overall, if the resulting price increases passed on to consumers cause demand to drop, or if businesses have to fire some workers and require overtime from a smaller staff, etc.

It's the same with rideshare policies and many other things. If you "just do X" without understanding the economic ripple effects of X, you might end up hurting the very people that X was supposed to help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't trust Uber, period. The idea of Uber gaining a monopoly on "rideshare" services in NYC makes me damn near sick.</comment>


Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://andrewkelley.me/post/jamulator.html <comment><USER2> All that work, and then he hits the expected killer problem - self modifying code. Getting past that without an interpreter is going to be tough. Not impossible, because the self modifying code isn't that dynamic in the places he found it. It's not like it's reading external input and compiling it. There are a limited number of cases to be handled.

It's amusing seeing this in a machine which gets its code from a ROM.

<comment><USER3> Which is one of the reasons I hope WebAssembly becomes the de-facto standard for binary code distribution: It preserves more structure of the original program and allows less of the lowest level shenanigans (it provides a clear and protected control flow, has a small instruction set, no dynamic code generation, and no instruction misalignment / dual-alignment).

<comment><USER4> Wait, WASM disallows all dynamic code gen? That sounds really disappointing. How do JITs work on WASM?

<comment><USER5> They don't now. The spec will almost certainly allow some form of dynamic code generation/loading in the future

[http://webassembly.org/docs/future-features/#platform- indepe...](http://webassembly.org/docs/future-features/#platform-independent- just-in-time-jit-compilation)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> NES cartridges also could have their own hardware too. Don't like the NES sound card? You could ship your own inside of the cartridge. I think notoriously castlevania 3 shipped some custom hardware in their cartridge. Some of the cartridges for the famicom came with an fm synth chip.

<comment><USER7> I believe this was even more common on the SNES. The most well-known example is the Super FX chip, which was used in Star Fox and Yoshi's Island among others, but there were actually a ton of these things: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wonderful, detailed deep-dive into static compilation and emulation with an approachable start. Good job.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting read, shame about the dynamic code problems.

I wonder whether something like this might be better attempted in rpython which will build a JIT compiler for you.

[http://rpython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/](http://rpython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/)

</comment><comment><USER10> _This means that they test some condition, and then either transfer control flow to the next instruction, or to a different label. This means that we can mark the possible branch address and the next address as instructions._

I hope all of these NES ROMs were coded well. Seems like you could do something like...

      if False:
          jump_to_data_address

... then he'd be interpreting data as code.

<comment><USER11> This actually happens surprisingly often in 6502 code, because unconditional branches always take three bytes, unlike conditional jumps which take two bytes. So if the value of some condition flags are known to be constant (e.g. ORing with a nonzero constant always clears the zero flag) it saves a byte to use an always-true conditional jump in place of an unconditional jump.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Aside, it's surprising to me that there isn't a (maintained) Java/JVM implementation on top of LLVM...

<comment><USER13> Reflection is hard to support with ahead of time compilation, yet java code often makes heavily use of it for (de-)serialization.

<comment><USER14> _" Reflection is hard to support with ahead of time compilation"_

Not true at all. There's nothing in reflection and serialization[1] that is hard to implement with an AOT compiler.

The real problem with AOT-compilation in Java is that there are many optimisations, like devirtualization, that can only be done (or done much more easily/effectively) at runtime.

You can get some of this back with whole-program/closed-world optimisation, but in reality that's highly impractical for Java. Many Java programs are very large and people want the ability to update them quickly and easily, often without even restarting let alone recompiling.

An LLVM-based Java runtime could use a hybrid AOT/JIT model, however. Recompiling parts of the program as needed at runtime based on profiler data, you'd get the fast startup of AOT combined with the high performance of JIT.

Don't get any crazy ideas about beating Hotspot's performance, though.

[1] one exception is classes/methods that are defined at runtime using dynamically generated bytecode. But that's pretty rare.

<comment><USER15> Still there are plenty of commercial options to AOT compile Java, and OpenJDK is getting its free variant with Java 9 for Linux x64, with Windows and OS X already supported on the Java 10 development branch.

Oracle Labs is also pushing forward their research of meta-circular JVM, which makes use of AOT compilation. Although it restricts it to a "native Java" subset.

[http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/metropolis/Metropolis- Prop...](http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~jrose/metropolis/Metropolis- Proposal.html)

<comment><USER16> OpenJDK's AOT compiler, when you also allow it to include the JIT and still recompile hotspots, is about 5% slower than just using the JIT. The only reasons to use it are startup times, ease of distribution (no JVM to ship, sort of), and for use in places that don't allow JITs (iOS).

<comment><USER15> OpenJDK's AOT is also on its early days.

Have you ever profiled Excelsior JET, Aonix, Jamaica, IBM Websphere Real Time for example?

Their products are almost as old as Java, so I imagine they are worth their price.

<comment><USER16> I believe those products prohibit doing public benchmarking so even if I had I couldn't tell you the results. :)

<comment><USER15> However if they were really bad, they would have already disbanded the teams, because companies would just use the gratis JDK with pure JIT.

Regarding OpenJDK, according to the Java Languages Summit talk, the Java 10 dev branch already has better optimizations than version 9.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a similar project idea for ages. Instead of LLVM it would static recompile into C macros or C++ inline function calls for each opcode. Then it would compile the output and run the game.

Emulation is just plain fun.

<comment><USER18> [http://mp2.dk/blog/blog/2014/04/14/practical-and-portable- bi...](http://mp2.dk/blog/blog/2014/04/14/practical-and-portable-binary- recompilation/)

<comment><USER17> The compiler tends to treat static variables very differently from locals. I was holding out for efficient local functions which can be forced inlined to keep the emulated registers as actual system registers. Sadly std::function doesn't play well with force inline on all platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> lol, it just came to me that clang is an abbreviation for C language. I always imagined it to be the sound metal makes when you slam it together, because bare metal programming etc.

<comment><USER20> Though for what it's worth, the official pronunciation is the klang metal sound:

[http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2008-July/015629.ht...](http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm- dev/2008-July/015629.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Dupe: submitted 1560 days ago - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838326](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5838326)

<comment><USER22> Please note that duplicate submission are _not discouraged_ on HN in general, especially not after such a long time.

However, thanks for sharing the link to the previous discussion!

<comment><USER23> Although clicking the |past| link takes you to this page: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Statically%20Recompiling%20NES...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Statically%20Recompiling%20NES%20Games%20into%20Native%20Executables%20with%20LLVM%20and%20Go&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This should have a 2013 added to the tittle.</comment>


2018 was more of a dumpster fire for online hate and harassment - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/2018-really-was-more-of-a-dumpster-fire-for-online-hate-and-harassment-adl-study-finds/ <comment><USER2> 2018 does seem to be the year when hatred for men (or perhaps especially white men) was completely normalized.

In any case, the only winning move is to not play.

<comment><USER3> I find it mostly resentment. And maybe it was always there, just now being expressed openly.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Where Foodies Eat – The most popular spots among Instagram foodies - <AUTHOR> https://wherefoodieseat.co <comment><USER2> I love it. How did you put this together :D

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this manually curated? How are restaurants selected?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's semi-automatic. I manually curate a list of foodies (instagram accounts). The places on the map are the most used instagram locations (restaurants) among those foodies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's possible that wherefoodiesDONTeat could be what more of humanity wants

<comment><AUTHOR> lol ^_^</comment></comment>


How I negotiated a $300,000 job offer in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> https://blog.usejournal.com/how-i-negotiated-a-software-engineer-offer-in-silicon-valley-f11590f5c656 <comment><USER2> It's not exactly clear what the actual offer was. From the end:

 _The final offer I signed was ~$300,000 in total yearly compensation (over four years, including a variable annual bonus, and amortizing the signing /relo package)._

<comment><USER3> Recruiter: I heard back and got approval for a new offer and I wanted to see what you thought. We'd like to offer you a {salary + annual bonus} of $180,000. In addition to that, we would like to offer $400,000 in RSUs that vest over four years. Lastly, I was able to get approval for a $90,000 {signing bonus + relocation expenses} package. That would put your four-year compensation package at around $1,210,000, or an annual compensation package of around $300,000. What do you think?

Author: Yeah, I'll sign that.

And that was that.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What happens to a long-running script when my computer sleeps? - <AUTHOR> I have a command line script running throughout the day monitoring plane ticket prices, and sometimes I forget it's running and put my Mac to sleep at the end of the day. When I wake it up, the script continues on as if nothing happened, but sometimes time stamps are a little funky. What actually happens when I put my Mac to sleep? Does the OS pause all running processes? What part of the OS handles unpausing the processes when awoken without corrupting their state? <comment><USER2> When your machine sleeps, it sleeps. Only a few processes remain running, like wake-on-LAN or BT etc.

Normal task scheduling handles waking things up.</comment>


Hi, I'd Like to Add Myself to the New Yorker (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://frankchimero.com/blog/2016/new-yorker/ <comment><USER2> > Many online publications have quotas for their writers, sometimes up to 10 > posts per day. What does this mean? There is very little time for original > writing, so staff spend most of their day rewriting the interesting posts > they find elsewhere. No rewrite is ever complete, though. Small elements of > language stay intact, and they can act as tracer cells which track the > lineage of content.

This chrome extension highlights lines of "churnalism" which result from the copy-and-paste journalism writers have to use to hit these quotas:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/churnalism/igpjomm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/churnalism/igpjommbbpdncpcnjkombboimdclgdhm?hl=en- GB&utm_source=chrome-ntp-launcher)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fvADRst_YM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fvADRst_YM)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, it seems the service the extension used has been retired.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Creativity is the art of putting two things together that didn't obviously go together.

This was an excellent example of such.

<comment><USER5> That's such an insightful comment that I gotta ask: can I add you to my professional network on LinkedIn?

<comment><USER6> Here's my standard response (so much so, that I have a keyboard expansion for it - 'lkno'):

"Hi YOURNAME. Thanks for the connection request but I usually have a policy of only connecting with people I know, have worked with or otherwise have a pre- existing relationship. If we have met and I don't remember it please accept my apologies. If you have a particular reason for wanting to connect, such as a role or opportunity, I am happy to hear what that might be. Otherwise, please feel free to follow me on LinkedIn if you think my comments may be of interest. All the best. Regards."

I usually give them 4-5 days to respond. 9 times out of 10, they don't respond and I 'Ignore' the connection request. Of the remaining 10% that respond, there's probably a 50/50 split between 'No problem. I'll just follow you' (to which my response is 'Thanks for understanding') and 'Hey! Here's a great offer!' (to which I invariably respond with 'Thanks but I'm not interested at this time').

Very rarely, I will get an angry response from someone as if I've actively impaired their career. I don't bother responding to them. Even more rarely, the response is actually of interest and a conversation will ensue (and it may even result in a new connection).

That last extremely rare occurrence is the reason I don't just blanket ignore connection requests. Having been on Linked in since 2008, working as an individual contractor for most of the years since, and using variations on the above approach for most of that time, I've amassed over 1000 connections of which maybe 25% are recruiters.

<comment><USER7> I add them when looking for new oppotunities and report as spam when not. Don't want to work with unlucky recruiters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It works because almost half the new yorker cartoons involve one cartoon entity meeting or stumbling across another.

</comment><comment><USER9> Unfortunately, the author perpetuates the myth that those Linkedin requests are coming from individuals. In fact most of them are auto-generated (and address spoofed) by Linkedin from email addresses collected possibly many years ago and without the knowledge of the purported sender.

<comment><USER10> Is there any evidence to back this claim?

So LinkedIn uses "dark patterns" to trick users into contact list import and sending invitations, this is well-known.

But are they really sending e-mails in someone's name without their consent? Or do they just make it very hard to understand what you're consenting to?

I don't want to defend LinkedIn, I'd just like to understand the extent of their unethical behavior.

<comment><USER11> I think you also understand already that if you're not properly informed, you're not really consenting. This is like putting super small text in a contract and then saying "but you signed it!". On some level most people feel that this isn't a genuine dealing and that it isn't fair. Let's not muddy those waters by arguing about whether or not US law thinks it's OK to take advantage of people in this way (the only reason I mention this at all is that these discussions usually devolve into that and it's incredibly tiresome).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just looked at the most recent 12 on [https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons)

This barely works on maybe two of the twelve so I'm gonna call BS on all of this.

<comment><USER13> These cartoons aren't part of the caption contest. The caption only works on "caption contest" cartoons.</comment></comment>


TextDrive shuts down - <AUTHOR> http://discuss.textdrive.com/ <comment><USER2> Such a shame. I don't know about their latest iteration, but TextDrive used to be one of the few hosting companies that hosted Rails applications. Back in the Rails 0.10 days when many other hosting companies didn't even know what Rails was.

For a while they were the official Rails hosting company and helped many of the first Rails developers get their first sites up and running. It's a real shame to see them shutdown.

<comment><USER3> What was an added bonus is in those days rails core members were providing rails support on TextDrive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's sad to see that happen to a company, but where can we find information about what they did exactly, and where it went wrong?

<comment><USER5> I collected quite a few events that have happened in the last few months that lead to today: [http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to- tex...](http://billturner.github.io/2014/02/28/whats-happened-to-textdrive/)

<comment><USER6> That doesn't really seem to paint Joyent in a very favorable light.

IMHO, it wasn't a good idea for TextDrive to sell lifetime subscriptions, but if Joyent knew that when they purchased TextDrive, they should have continued to honor them.

<comment><USER7> TextDrive and Joyent were founded by the same people. Joyent continued to sell "lifetime" plans after it consumed TextDrive.

Here's a screenshot ( [http://cl.ly/UFhp](http://cl.ly/UFhp) ) from one of their lifetime offers. Of note: "How long will it last? As long as we exist." At that point, early 2006, TextDrive was a Joyent company. Joyent still exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I paid for LIFETIME hosting. The biggest reason I have not adopted NodeJS is I will never again trust Joyent and especially Dean Allen.

<comment><USER3> As I recall your account was cancelled by Joyent for abusing the support staff and you were offered a refund at that time of your account.</comment></comment>


Crate – scalable, shared nothing, masterless distributed SQL database with JOINS - <AUTHOR> https://crate.io/overview <comment><AUTHOR> This has been posted here on HN before, but the primary discussion about the DB seems to be 880 days old. It seems that at that time Crate didn't have support for JOINs.

So I was interested in the opinion of the HN members on the present state of the DB.

Have any of you used this? What kind of experience did you have with it?</comment>


Is cdnjs.com ready for use? - <AUTHOR>

There was a post about www.cdnjs.com 5 months ago http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132553.<p>There were some DNS problems at that time and thus most people were concerned about reliability. Now that it is powered by cloudflare.com, do you think that the timing is right to let global javascript hosting to cdnjs.com? <comment><USER2> Using a CDN that you don't control to host your javascript is a bad idea. Don't do it. Not only is it adding another dependency, you are cross-site scripting yourself and probably adding latency to your site due to the added cost of another domain to open http connections to.

CloudFront is cheap, and you can throw all your static files on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Alex, The DNS issue to which you are referring was only with our website. The CDN was unaffected, and is completely insulated from the website.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, I misread the comments.

I think that cdnjs is really a great idea and I use it for my new projects. To Google becoming a javascript CDN is far from there core business, I think a distinct entity is much better suited to become the global javascript host.</comment></comment>


How a Minnesota programmer figured out that a NYT photo was altered - <AUTHOR> http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/archive/2009/07/fakery_in_the_times.shtml

<comment><USER2> This story is particularly juicy because in the Metafilter thread in question (you can read it at [http://www.metafilter.com/83061/Ruins-of-the-Second- Gilded-A...](http://www.metafilter.com/83061/Ruins-of-the-Second-Gilded-Age)) the commenters pointed out a lot more work by this same photographer (Edgar Martins) which is apparently doctored in the same fashion. The funny thing is that Martins makes a public point of claiming that he doesn't do any "digital manipulation" on his pictures, which appears to be a total joke.

Here are some more of his images which he claimed to have shot naturally that appear photoshopped to be symmetrical:

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/30/magazine/05gi...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/30/magazine/05gilded.3.jpg)

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/30/magazine/05gi...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/30/magazine/05gilded.8.jpg) (orange fence in front)

<http://www.jmakes.com/spfo/dimpresent1.gif>

[http://www.artnet.com/Artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=0E9A...](http://www.artnet.com/Artists/LotDetailPage.aspx?lot_id=0E9A0A625C8CDC2EC7B27EB47F90FFD1) (plants are mirrored)

[http://www.saatchi- gallery.co.uk/images/thumbnail1.php/d4d7a...](http://www.saatchi- gallery.co.uk/images/thumbnail1.php/d4d7a4363323013004970.jpg)

<comment><USER3> "The funny thing is that Martins makes a public point of claiming that he doesn't do any "digital manipulation" on his pictures [...]"

Is that for real? I'm almost certain that [http://www.capricehorn.com/images/wwwArtworks/LATEST_2-(F2C7...](http://www.capricehorn.com/images/wwwArtworks/LATEST_2-\(F2C754E0-573C-1004-BA11-871068250123\).jpg) and [http://www.capricehorn.com/images/wwwArtworks/The_Accidental...](http://www.capricehorn.com/images/wwwArtworks/The_Accidental_Theorist_3_\(07\)-\(5EE6BC56-53E0-1004-9023-871068250123\).jpg) use the same mirror technique, albeit with foreground elements added (again digitally).

However, he doesn't appear to claim not to use post-production digital manipulation AT ALL, no mention at eg [http://www.saatchi- gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/...](http://www.saatchi- gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/a/26.html) of that. There is a quote about this here, <http://themorningnews.org/archives/galleries/topologies/> :

"This is especially evident in "The Accidental Theorist" series. Most people assume that these image are manipulated. Or perhaps even staged. In reality, there is no post-production work, no darkroom or computer manipulation."

But it's clearly referring (here) to just the Accidental Theorist show. That said the above 2 examples _are_ from that show and do appear to be 'shopped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps in the photographer's house you can climb a flight of stairs five steps only to find another flight of stairs that lead you back down. He likes to exercise, but only just.

<comment><USER5> He seems to also like the build beams that connect to form a triangle that in no way assist the ceiling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I find it quite amazing that the photographer even bothered to 'shop the photo. It seems to me as irrationality on his or his editors' part.

In this case, I don't think the doctoring of the photo affects the substance of the article. However, that said, this is certainly an ethical lapse that should be soundly rejected by the New York Times' readership.

<comment><USER7> I'm confused as to why the photo was altered in the first place - even without the shop job it was quite striking in its symmetry.

<comment><USER8> From what I understand, you aren't seeing the truly original photo in either of those examples. You are seeing the published versions, and the 'mirrored' version. They are attempting to prove that the published version was also mirrored by looking at the comparison of the 2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of the time the NYTimes swiped a collage illustration I made on my blog and ran it without attribution:

[http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2005/04/nytimes-republishes-my- ar...](http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2005/04/nytimes-republishes-my-artwork- without.html)

It took two emails of gradually-increasing emotional load -- I added the 'plagiarism' label to the second -- to get them to run a correction.

It wasn't a giant deal -- a recreation of another blogger's (Niall Kennedy's) concept -- but to see that just like any blogger, the NYTimes may just carelessly clip things from the web was eye-opening.

</comment><comment><USER10> Uuhh, yeah. I don't think you'd need to be a programmer to that is altered. Also, I can tell from seeing a few shops in my time.

<comment><USER11> The pixels are a dead giveaway.</comment></comment>


Things Windows 7 does that Vista doesn't  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/pc/18-cool-things-windows-7-does-that-vista-doesn-t-628892

<comment><USER3> 17\. Native ISO Burner. I haven't used Windows in about 5 years, but it still amazes me that this was not baked in to Vista. My parents purchased a Vista desktop computer a couple months back. My dad called me on day 2 asking me how to burn a cd. He gave up on Vista after day 3. The awesome dual core Vista box sits and collects dust while he continues to use his XP (1 Ghz) computer where he has Roxio or some other crap already installed/setup.

<comment><USER4> imgburn - free burner software

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The only thing I see as genuinely innovative their is the "problem solver" taking screencaps for every mouse click then creating a webpage and allowing commentary to be added. Seems like a nice little utility app - I'd like to see that in ksnapshot.

The other things, MP3 preview, recently used lists (now with added marketing- ese), window placement, .. hardly revolutionary.

They added a seamless VM to ease upgrade from XP, nice one (but not really innovation, I can have my virtualbox run seamlessly (but prefer it windowed)).

Any reasons there to upgrade from Vista or XP? I didn't notice one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ha. In the first picture of the article, the Explorer "jumplist" shows a directory named "20 cool things windows 7 does th...". This article only lists 18. I guess the list was hard to fill?

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_removed_in_Windows_7>

</comment><comment><USER8> I dunno, since I switched to a tiled window manager, these types of "lists of cool features in ..." have become so anticlimactic for me.. most of those features just aren't that useful once you go get used to tiling.

<comment><USER9> I demand hardware acceleration for my xmonad!

<comment><USER10> You joke, but... my work laptop (Dell D630) has some low-end intel video card, and it can't even drive dual monitors. The redraw when I switch between workspaces -- which I do a lot, especially when on the built-in screen -- is painful :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yay native ISO burner! Also, the Windows Explorer built-in .zip file manager isn't freaking slow anymore (though 7-zip still puts it to shame with speed _and_ compression ratios).

<comment><USER5> Presumably they don't want to add bloat by allowing more than one compression type, sticking in a free tar.bz2 compression routine would break the bank too I expect.</thinlyveiledsarcasm>

<comment><USER8> Yep, because they care about bloat.

<comment><USER12> That's sort of the point of windows 7 isn't it? It's faster, smaller, and needs less resources.

<comment><USER11> But if they had a faster .zip compressor and/or a different format like 7-zip, it _would_ be faster and/or need less resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The article should really be called "18 things you never thought for the life of you would not be included in Vista that we will present as if they are groundbreaking features"

<comment><USER13> This is silly. I use OS X all day at work and can't WAIT to get home and work on my Win7 box where switching between applications, changing their size, and navigating within the window isn't a royal pain in the ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think we need an "X number of things every other popular operating system does that Windows doesn't" article. To start off:

      * Multiple users on the same machine at the same time
      * Software repositories
      * Useful software pre-installed (windows doesn't have IM, office tools, or photo editing software)
      * Advanced filesystems available

</comment><comment><USER15> The "Imagine Parallels on Mac OS X without the need to fish out money on an extra OS" comment regarding XP mode strikes me as a bit disingenuous. The more apt comparison I think would be Classic/OS 9 or PowerPC compatibility - <USER2> Apple did provide for free (Classic mode and Rosetta).</comment>


A search engine that removes the 1 million most popular web sites from its index - <AUTHOR> https://millionshort.com/ <comment><USER2> I'm still amazed at how bad Google search is for certain purposes (not that there's anything better), and it's largely due to content farms. I've installed Google's Personal Blocklist chrome extension which allows me to filter out specific domains (ask.com, ehow.com, answers.yahoo.com, wikihow.com, etc) and that does help some. It's interesting to me that google search used to have preferences allowing you to block domains but they removed it.

I actually find myself narrowing my searches by sites I know will have reliable information, like this one, reddit, certain forums based on the search topic, etc. I think there would be some real value in creating a search engine that was very selective about the sites it crawls. Honestly, crawling the comments from the best user-participation sites on the web (reddit, HN, SO, quora, etc.) would probably make for a very useful search engine.

<comment><USER3> Build a custom Google search engine and try it [https://www.google.com/cse/](https://www.google.com/cse/)

<comment><USER4> "More control, if you need it" \- Learn more link leads to a 404. Not really confident about this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's another similar idea, someone please do this: a search engine that excludes all "commercial" sites. "Commercial" means the site contains ads or accepts payments.

<comment><USER6> > "Commercial" means the site contains ads

Your idea started out good. Sometimes I want to research a product before I go looking for a merchant. Blocking all sites that contain ads? Just use adblock if you're that fanatical.

<comment><USER7> Presumably the idea is to define 'commercial' as a website with ads or accept payments, rather than removing sites with ads to increase viewing pleasure.

I think it's a good idea. It'd certainly help with the problem of blogspam etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _Imagine a search engine that simply removed the top 1 million most popular web sites from its index. What would you discover?_

A mix of affiliate-driven content sites, abandoned blogs & spam sites, based on some of the searches I did. The broader the category, the more likely I think you are to stumble on something relevant and helpful.

(Also, .gov sites don't seem to have been removed from the index. A search for "type 2 diabetes" still brings a number of results from NIH.gov, mimicking what Google serves up.)

<comment><USER9> I believe "removes the top 1 million most popular websites" means that they nix search results from the million most trafficked domains on the web as a whole rather than simply the top million results for a specific search. I doubt there are very many .gov domains that fall into that group.

<comment><USER8> NIH.gov is ranked #335 globally (185 in U.S.) according to Alexa.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you find this interesting, you can check the discussion when it was introduced here for the first time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3910304)

</comment><comment><USER11> Cool!

Tiny complaint: Its default option is "Don't remove any sites". Kind of misses the point imho...

Other complaint: If country is set to e.g. Switzerland, you see only .de and .ch domains in the results! Is there no "worldwide" setting?

<comment><USER12> that and my PC/browser is set to en-US but I am in Eastern Europe and my results are only for .ru (even though I'm not in Russia).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's cute as a novelty, but I tried actually using it just now, and giving me a CAPTCHA every few searches makes it _unusable_ as a daily driver.

Which is a shame because I really enjoyed searching with it.

</comment><comment><USER14> Rather than ranking on traffic, and getting rid of some really great results just because they are too popular, we ( [http://www.plexisearch.com](http://www.plexisearch.com) ) use indicators from Natural Language Processing to rank pages.

A How To should rank better for "Make a cake" than a sales page or a review page.

A Review should rank better for "Best SUV" than a Table Of Contents page.

Just because you are the Underdog doesn't mean you should win. You should have a fair fight, but a good result is a good result.

I hate much of the stuff in Wikipedia. But there are some pages that were amazingly well written.

I hate eHow, but there was a brief time when they had experts in the fields they were writing about writing really great content. Those posts should do well.

Later we may let you turn off Right or Left Leaning articles. We may expose the feature we have that returns only easy to read results, a feature designed for ESL, and Youth searches.

But we will never release a blanket no more top million sites.

<comment><USER15> OK, you can stop spamming now.

<comment><USER14> Yes, my site with no ads which demonstrates how rankings work and how page construction influences search is spam. Because losing money on every search you do for the benefit of informing people how search both works, and could work is such an awful endeavor. What was I thinking?

<comment><USER15> If that's the best way you have to promote your site, it must not be very useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As much as I agree with the sentiment behind this, I think the implementation is slightly misdirected.

Neither page popularity or query popularity are necessarily proportional to domain popularity (eg, *.github.com). Ruling out the most popular domains is therefore, I suspect, neither good or bad in terms of the quality of results it produces on the whole. Sometimes it will produce better results, sometimes it will produce worse, sometimes the same.

If a search engine/tool is going to add value, imho, the very difficult problem that it must solve is to improve the quality of results. Unless I'm missing something, I don't see that here (yet).

</comment><comment><USER17> Kind of surreal: doing a search with the first million results removed, finding a purple link at #9. =o

(I like big robots. I searched for "mech." #9 was a mech-based browser MMO I'd looked at briefly a couple weeks ago.)

<comment><USER18> It doesn't remove the top 1M results, it removes the top 1M most popular websites from the index.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We've been quietly working away on MillionShort - please stay tuned.

</comment><comment><USER20> This isn't a big deal to me, but considering how most scrappy search engine competitors are taking the maximum privacy angle against Goog, how are you approaching search privacy?

</comment><comment><USER21> For a website who's shtick it is to remove the top 1M results from it's index the designer thinks having the default option remove nothing is a good idea apparently. Also, I don't think it actually works unless www.adamwest.com is not in the top one million results for "Adam West"

[https://millionshort.com/search.php?q=Adam+West&remove=1000k](https://millionshort.com/search.php?q=Adam+West&remove=1000k)

<comment><USER22> It removes the top 1M globally-ranked websites. So here it's removing wikipedia, imdb, etc, and leaving only more specialist sites.

www.adamwest.com isn't removed because it's ranked 3,400,000th or so, using alexa as a reference ([http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/adamwest.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/adamwest.com))

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> How are they determining which sites are the 1 million most popular sites? I hope it's not by some useless metric like Alexa Rank or something like that.

</comment><comment><USER24> How delightful. I just found the most scrumptious recipe for turkey cranberry flambé that I simply never would have found on google.

</comment><comment><USER25> Ok, I'm sold. My first search was useless, but I searched for "ES6 ready date" (scrapping 100k top sites), and got [https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es- discuss/2013-November/...](https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es- discuss/2013-November/034557.html).

</comment><comment><USER26> It's not only missing sites, but it ranks them very differently too. When I search for my own name on any other search engine, my own website comes up first or second. When I search here, it's buried way down at twenty-something. It would be nice to know how this data is being collected, collated, and sorted.

<comment><USER27> every web search site ranks results differently than every other one. There is no one 'standard' ranking or anything.

Some of them may rank them in ways more useful to more people of course. Getting ranking working well is pretty much the challenge in making a good web search site, and is how Google originally vaulted over it's competitors.

Asking to know "how the data is collected, collated, and sorted" is… asking for a lot. For one thing, it's pretty much 'trade secrets' \-- lots of people would really like to know the answer to those questions about Google, but it would probably take a multi-volume book to answer it completely, and Google generally prefers not to share the details, as they are what makes Google what it is (and would also make it easier for people trying to spam google results)

<comment><USER26> Yes, every site is different, but this one's _way_ different. When Google, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and others all agree about the relative ranking of two sites, a radically different result is likely to be evidence of a problem

Also, I'm not asking for every last detail. Even Google has shared the broad outline of their PageRank method. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect some explanation of the basic approaches involved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Used it for five minutes, and already found two great websites.

I don't know who's behind that search engine, but thank you!

<comment><USER29> can you say which? thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It doesn't work if all the results of the first pages belong to websites on the top x sites specified. Try to search for 'google' and remove the top 1M sites.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is a great idea. With the saturation the top 1 million websites have on regular search engines, I could see myself using this for more deepnet searches. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER32> I really like the idea... makes me feel of the good old time!

</comment><comment><USER33> Really? After removing the top million hits, the top results for 'bitcoin' are bitcoin.org and wikipedia?

<comment><USER34> Are you sure you've chosen the right option (besides the text field)? By default it's chosen "Don't remove any sites".

I ask because my two top results for 'bitcoin' are bitcoinbrasil.com.br and bitcoin-today.yoyafi.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Users of this search engine can actually stumble upon my personal website without knowing it's exact url...

</comment><comment><USER36> python.org isn't in the top million most popular! What's wrong with people :)

</comment><comment> adam-f Searching for millionshort on millionshort gives you... millionshort.com

</comment><comment><USER37> Apparently my personal web-site is in the web's top one million.

<comment><USER38> So is mine... but still stuck behind the kebab companies :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Word "google" is apparently not searchable at all.</comment>


Transformers 2.0: Deep interoperability between TensorFlow 2.0 and PyTorch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/huggingface/transformers <comment><USER2> Amazing how quickly Hugging Face's Transformers has become the most important library in NLP.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hugging Face makes the best NLP libraries out there. It is great!

</comment><comment><USER4> Bravo!

(I'm aware that HN guidelines discourage "me too" comments. In this case, I think we can make an exception.)</comment>


Twitter's Paper Millionaires May Want to Get Out ASAP - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2014/01/twitters-paper-millionaires-may-want-to-get-out/?cid=co16909414 <comment><USER2> The Writer of this article needs to perform some fact checking. There are nowhere near 1600 Millionaires in Twitter - closer to 600 to 700 is the number most common heard in their offices.

A lot of those are not at the end of their vesting periods either so "Getting Out" is a meaningless term, not feasible for the next 2-3 quarters.

The quality of Wired articles is really plumbing the depths these days.

<comment><USER3> TWTR's fluctuation so far has been $38.80 - $74.73.

Wouldn't you expect the fluctuation in millionaire numbers to follow that, and count of millionaires to be on the high side during the stock's ups?

At peak $74.73 price it only takes 13,382 shares to go over $1 mil, which for company with 555,200,000 shares outstanding is 0.002% grant, generous, but not an unheard-of amount.

<comment><USER4> By the same logic, Google's stock is at $1100 meaning anyone with 900 shares of Google is also a millionaire. Now I don't know about you, but I have some software engineer friends at Google and, first hand information from them, they are NOT millionaires. Typically, companies know how much they are worth (or will be worth post IPO) and distribute stock to employees accordingly. Exception is of course if you join the company in the early rounds of funding (when typically the valuation of the company is low so you have to compensate with more stocks).

Twitter almost doubled its headcount in the last year itself - I am not sure if they were paying 10s of thousands shares to newly joined employees especially when their last valuation (before IPO) valued Twitter at $10B or so.

<comment><USER3> Some people have been offered that, and others have not.

[http://www.quora.com/Salaries/I-was-offered-15000-RSUs-as- pa...](http://www.quora.com/Salaries/I-was-offered-15000-RSUs-as-part-of-my- Twitter-offer-a-year-ago-I-didnt-take-it-Does-that-mean-they-wouldve-been- worth-600-000-today-ignoring-tax)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think twitter is one of the most promising "social media" (are we still calling it that?) stocks out there. Where Facebook's main audience (teenagers) is jumping ship, I think Twitter has too many of celebrities and famous people "locked-in" to their platform for a comparable exodus to take place.

Added to that, media like Television have been integrating Twitter into their systems ( live tweeting, tweet voting etc. ).

Looks promising enough to me.

<comment><USER6> Twitter, just like Facebook, is grossly overpriced/overvalued. The number of users for both are impressive to say the least, but neither is making a profit that can justify the value of the companies. Both companies seem to have a business plan straight out of the dotcom era, that is: "let's slap some ads on and see if that works".

At this point I think we have seem what will be the downfall of Facebook, teenagers not thinking it's cool. As for Twitter, it might be a US vs. Europe thing, but I honestly don't know more that a handful of people using Twitter and all of them still have Facebook as well. Twitter is a broadcast platform nothing more. That works great if you want to follow celebrities, but if the celebrities are the reason for using Twitter for many, then Twitter is going to be much more vulnerable to an exodus that Facebook. Facebook users won't move to a new platform before all their friends have moved as well. With Twitter you just need to move the top celebrities and their followers will leave as quickly as they signed up.

In my mind Twitter has an impressive broadcast platform, but they aren't making the money to justify the value of the company and have no clear way to do so in the future. Someone is going to have to foot the bill at some point. No one is going to pay a subscription fee for neither Twitter, nor Facebook. That leaves ads or having companies and celebrities paying for their posts.

Twitter has a funny way of working like an little bubble. People on Twitter believe that everything revolves around Twitter, while the rest of the world are at most vaguely aware that it exists.

<comment><USER5> I considered this when I typed my little comment.

I would like to respond to your insightful comment about celeberties moving over to another platform.

I think this is just not going to happen very soon. I would like to compare a twitter account a lot more to a e-mail address. Celeberties and brands ( lets not forgot about brands ) have worked very hard (or waited rather long, at least) to get their millions of followers and their @username signature.

I think this is what causes a kind of lock-in: moving away would mean that your messages would get a lot less attention and having to wait a long time to be back at a million followers AND abandoning your @username, which many people have come to know you by.

Now I don't know anybody by their Facebook profile URL, while I know many celebrity @usernames, even though I don't use Twitter. Finding somebody on Facebook is the same as finding anybody on any profile site. You have to use the search, there is no added value. Twitter has a very strong weapon here with their @username offering.

Also, I don't think a new platform could offer enough extra's for them to take the step. Another platform would have to offer something so special that it justifies leaving a million followers behind. I don't see this happening because the strength of Twitter is its LACK of features. You type something and move on. You see how that cancels out any newcomer?

I'm from Europe, and I see a lot of people using Twitter. If I look at my Facebook stream, a lot of the status-updates are coming in through Twitter, or at least apps that post to multiple networks.

Also, I think that I should add that both you and me are commenting from own experience, neither of us is saying anything based on market research. So let's not keep doing this :)

<comment><USER6> I think you're right about the not abandoning @usernames, but new celebrities are showing up very year and they are not yet tied to any platform.

And yes, let's not keep doing this :-) Market research would be exciting to see though.

<comment><USER7> I think if you just look at the shear number of followers mainstream (i.e. CNN) and alt (Vice) news accounts have or the same for financial news accounts, it becomes pretty obvious that a huge number of Twitter users rely on it for REALLY important information. I don't look at customized Feedly or Flipboard type aggregators anymore, and why would I? The information I get from who I follow on Twitter is available sooner, is summarized and usually has the option to dive deeper. While we can see that celebrities have huge follower counts, because their accounts are often water down by third parties, it seems logical that people follow them as a way to just say they 'like' them and not as a source of important information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Am I the only one that can't read Wired articles on an iOS device (g4 iPod) anymore? Why the heck is this page constantly rerendering?

</comment><comment><USER9> You would want to do this at any company. If it tanks, you lose both your job and your nest egg. Diversification is the name of the game.

<comment><USER10> The issue of getting out is a pointless term for most of the employees right now. They won't be fully vested for at least 6mos to a year.

<comment><USER9> The lesson of the first dotcom bubble is that making money is easy, holding onto it is hard. I actually know a few ex-billionaires... That never saw actual dollars. Now they are working schmucks like anyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is the value of code that can cause revolutions, sway financial markets, and spread P2P information across the world instantly? How can any analyst know when there's no comp? Answer: they can't. I'd sell the hell out of $TWTR right now because the analysts are going to fill the news cycle with negetivity and the smart money is slobbering over short potential. Once it finds a bottom however, I'd double down on it and get ready to wake up daily to a green ticker.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why can't they just write some long term options and safe guard their value. Or may be they are already doing it and wired may just have ignored it.

<comment><USER12> You realize you would need a counter party for those, right? I'm not in finance, but maybe somebody who is can guesstimate the size of the long term options market for tech companies? I'd say it must be minuscule, how can you build a profitable strategy off something with that volatility without devolving into straight gambling?

<comment><USER13> 2016 options [https://www.google.com/finance/option_chain?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&ei...](https://www.google.com/finance/option_chain?q=NYSE%3ATWTR&ei=OIHRUpCeELHFwAPR1wE)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd like to thank Wired for the buy signal on Twitter. :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Isn't that the only way for dotcom wealth preservation?

</comment><comment><USER16> what exactly is a "paper millionaire?"

<comment><USER17> Someone whose stock property ("paper") can be valued as > $1M, i.e. If they sell their TWTR stocks now they will be 'actual' cash millionaires.

<comment><USER18> I think liquidity is a key distinction. Many of those Twitter employees are in a lockdown(?) period post IPO where they are not allowed to sell their shares (typically 6 months). Thus they don't have the option of becoming cash millionaires right now. (Many startup founders are this way post series A)

Compare this to a case where someone owns $1MM worth of Google shares, purchased on the open market. Even though they don't have cash, it's basically as if they own cash, since you can liquidate the shares right away.</comment></comment></comment>


Scandinavia Got Great by Educating the "Whole Person" - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/opinion/scandinavia-education.html <comment><USER2> A recent 'Pitchfork Economics' podcast explores today's Finnish economy (free college, 5 week vacations, universal health care, taxes no higher than the US ...) , by speaking to the author of _The Nordic Theory of Everything_. (Link includes transcript)

[http://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/re-imagining- capitalis...](http://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/re-imagining-capitalism- with-anu-partanen-and-trevor-corson/)

<comment><USER3> Taxes no higher than US? Are you kidding? Income tax rates are higher than the US. On top of that there is a 20%+ VAT on nearly everything you buy. (Not to mention a 4% to 5% 'transfer' tax on most anything you sell.) Not knocking Finland, but I'd bet the average income earner is paying nearly 45% in taxes.

It's been a while since I had any first-hand experience though. I doubt, though, that things have changed that much.

<comment><USER4> Spot on! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Finland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Finland) says:

> When including all direct and indirect taxes paid (personal income tax, > social security payments, VAT, etc.) by an employee with an average income > of €3,250 per month the total tax was estimated to be 44,5% in 2015

I wasn't able to find similar numbers for the US at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_States) . The US numbers would need to include payroll taxes and sales taxes. These numbers vary across the country.</comment></comment></comment>


Erlang's Mnesia no longer has 2GB storage limit - <AUTHOR> http://weblambdazero.blogspot.com/2008/09/sky-is-limit.html <comment><USER2> I think that Mnesia is one of the most compelling reasons to look at Erlang. Having a distributed, in memory database is really cool, and has the potential to solving a lot of scaling problems.

</comment><comment><USER3> Short version: they swap out the DETS back end for something called "Tokyo Cabinet".

Can anyone more knowledgeable about the details that that entails comment? How does it affect performance? "Distributability"? How solid is it?

</comment><comment><USER4> Halleluja!

Now things will really get cracking!</comment>


How they did it: GRU hackers vs. US elections - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/from-bitly-to-x-agent-how-gru-hackers-targeted-the-2016-presidential-election/ <comment><USER2> Interesting read about basic techniques coming together to enable a big project.

It must be an absurd amount of leg-work to put this information all together after-the-fact.</comment>


A big list of the things R can do - <AUTHOR> http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/07/a-big-list-of-the-things-r-can-do.html

<comment><USER2> This is rather a short list hiding open alternatives to Revo works; the better idea is to read CRAN task views <http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/>

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is. David Smith is a great blogger (and wrote the original ESS and a first draft of an Introduction to R), but he's somewhat hamstrung by the nature of his job. That being said, the Task views are not a friendly interface unless you're familiar with the material already (i.e. by having used psychometrics or something before).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> R has frequently been a source of inspiration for me. (I mention his briefly here: <http://mvz.so/articles/lend-a-hand-to-science.html>) It appears, to me, as an example of a tool that has done and continues to do its job, for the benefit of all mankind. This isn't to say it couldn't have been done better, but I'm consistently impressed by the wide-ranging use and love that R finds in so many fields, and by the breadth of people who use it, most of whom would never call themselves programmers. I can't figure out what exactly R got right, but I often think it has something to do with the fact that it was created by someone who called himself a statistician, not a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is off topic but why do tools built for large scale analytics or distributed processing have to be so slow at small scale / at the low end.

e.g. R, Erlang, Hadoop.

Feel free to ignore me but please don't downvote without comment :-)

<comment><USER6> Slightly OT, but I wouldn't say that R was "built for large scale analytics." You have to go through some serious hoops to work on anything in R that takes up more than 50% or so of available RAM. Revolution Analytics's R build is designed for it, and some standalone packages like bigmemory can make R work better with large data sets, but vanilla R is awful for the task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here is a big list of R links. Perhaps this gives a better idea of what R can do. [https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioconductor/2010-June/033791...](https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/bioconductor/2010-June/033791.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> R is a great language, with lots of features and applications without the incremental stuff added by Revo. Their 'Big Data' stuff isn't for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is great thanks - I've got a book on R that a friend found at their work and gave to me. Been meaning to dip into it for a while now.</comment>


Agromafia - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-agromafia-food-fraud/ <comment><USER2> > _We were curious about what we 'd find in a U.S. supermarket. So we shipped > three brands of Italian extra virgin we purchased in New York back to the > mother country._

> _They were included in a blind taste test by those experts in Rome. The > process is as tightly orchestrated as a Verdi opera. Blue glass hides the > oil 's color. Separate cubicles prevent cheating._

> _The panel would not say they were adulterated - but they agreed two brands > we purchased back home did not come within a sniff of extra virgin. They > described one as lampante -- the lowest quality olive oil. That brand > happens to be one of the best-selling in America._

Fascinating. I guess it's becoming really hard to find a bottle of genuine extra virgin olive oil. Odds are that the extra virgin olive oil from a supermarket is just some other oil with some chlorophyll added for coloring.

<comment><USER3> _I guess it 's becoming really hard to find a bottle of genuine extra virgin olive oil._

Buy Greek extra virgin. Guaranteed flavor and quality. Italians buy it to raise the quality of theirs. In Greece 80% of virgin oil production is extra virgin. In Italy it's less than 50%, while in Spain less than 20%.

Here's one for example: [http://www.amazon.com/Iliada-Extra-Virgin-Olive- Liter/dp/B00...](http://www.amazon.com/Iliada-Extra-Virgin-Olive- Liter/dp/B003TO9SJS/)

<comment><USER4> > In Greece 80% of virgin oil production is extra virgin. In Italy it's less > than 50%, while in Spain less than 20%.

Just a note: After wikipedia in 2013, world production of virgin olive oil was 2.8 million tonnes. Spain produced 1.1 million tonnes, or 39% of world production in this year whereas in Greece the production of virgin olive oil was only 0.31 million tonnes. Therefore, please note that with your data both countries will produce almost the same amount of liters of extra virgin in fact.

If you find that in Spain less than 20% of the virgin olive oil is extra, this is a good thing, not bad. Means that if you read "extra virgin" in the tag is top quality. Only the best of the best can be tagged as extra virgin (More than 80% of the candidates are eliminated in the process). Of course, the controlled and 'low' production is also a marketing strategy to keeping prices of this premium product always high. Spain could produce much more bottles of extra virgin if they wanted to do so.

After wikipedia: Extra-virgin olive oil accounts normally for less than 10% of oil produced (extra-virgin + virgin + refined + pomace) so to find extra- virgin produced in California should be currently difficult, but the percentage is 80% in Greece, 65% in Italy and 50% in Spain and is not difficult to find in the european markets. Is just that is not cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My grandfather was a chemist at GSK, and at one stage in his career was responsible for sourcing raw ingredients for many of their products (toothpaste, soft drinks, etc).

One such ingredient was lemons. He used to travel regularly to Sicily where he would sit down with the local Mafia families and try to negotiate huge lemon juice contracts. They would trot out some juice and he would taste it and perform various chemical tests. His first time doing this he decided they had excellent juice and ordered all the juice they could produce that season, but when the full shipment arrived and he tested it in London he found it was fake lemon juice - water with citric acid and some other crap.

So he goes back to Sicily to sit down with these families again. This time he tells them: I have authority to spend more money on lemons than anyone else in the world. I'm also a better chemist than anyone you could possibly employ. I'm buying the same amount again, but this time I'm testing every tank before it boards the ship. We get the best you've got this time, and every time in future. If anything is off, we're never buying lemons in Sicily again.

He said he half expected to disappear that night, but instead the next day he got VIP treatment at the dock while he and his team tested every single tank of juice, and it was all perfect. For the rest of his career GSK got top quality lemon juice. After he died my grandmother received several letters from his contacts in Sicily, thanking him for being fair and honest.

The sad thing is that it's the locals who really get fucked over in these scenarios: they fear the Mafia and their livelihoods are totally under their control.

<comment><USER6> So GSK knowingly did business with the Sicilian Mafia? Fascinating.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This was a very interesting 60 Minutes piece last night, but also very frustrating. They tested three brands of EVOO sold in the US, and found two were complete fakes, but didn't tell viewers which ones not to buy. How does this provide any actionable information to the public? At least tell us what we should be looking out for.

<comment><USER8> They would get sued for libel, and they would lose because these taste tests are not valid evidence in US court.

I suspect the problem is somewhat overstated - to me it sounded like the tasters believed the olive oils were lower-grade, but without a rigorous definition of what that is it's hard to say how big the problem is.

Personally, I buy the lower-grade EVOO for sautéing. I'm going to be disappointed if it's really just olive oil with chlorophyll added, but at the same time I'm not looking for high-grade stuff when I buy a $10 bottle of oil. It would be a waste for what I'm doing with it.

<comment><USER9> In the US, isn't it up to the accuser to prove libel, not the defendant to prove that what they said was true?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The guy parroting in the article is really annoying.

In the other side, this is again a problem of uneducated consumers. People don't know currently what mean concepts like bread or milk. Seriously the real taste of milk is totally different to the watermilk/waterchalk that we drink currently. You buy cheap and by unknown brands, you'll have a cheap product.

I can't talk by Italy, but in Spain this is a serious market. If some brand would be tempted to sell fake olive oil mixed with other oils as pure virgin olive oil _directly to the final consumer_ [1] the competence, consumer's associations and the government would eat it raw in five minutes. Olive oil sold to consumers can not contain sunflower and of course _not_ the infamous canola oil. The idea to mixing rapeseed and olive oils and selling it as pure olive oil will be _outrageous_ in Spain.

We need to remember that in 1981 more than 20.000 spaniards where poisoned by scammers selling fake canola oil. Many died and other suffered permanent nervous damage for the rest of their lives. It was a really bitter lesson and the market is strongly regulated since then.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spain_rapeseed_oil_toxici...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spain_rapeseed_oil_toxicity)

[1] Everybody can expect to have sunflower oil, palm and also canola in their favourite brand of potato chips or cookies, but is advertised as vegetable oils. You can mix olive oil with other edible oils as long as you tell the consumer what is eating and we do not joke about it; Pepsico was fined in 2003 for fake advertising with a brand of 100% olive oil fried potato chips. Other company quickly unclosed that the real content of olive oil was the 2%, brought the brand to trial and won.

<comment><USER10> As Italian can confirm. Some of the tastes of my youth disappeared (strawberries are nothing like old locals one you could get) but people take food labelling very, very seriously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I used to get good olive oil when I lived in California. A little old guy would call me on the phone once a year, and ask if I needed more Olive Oil. I would always say Yes! and order a bottle or two. Then his granddaughter would get on the line and verify my address etc.

This guy owned the trees, pressed the olives and bottled it himself. It was the best stuff I ever tasted. He quit calling years ago; I miss him.

<comment><USER12> Anyone know of the best way to buy the best EVO (extra virgin olive oil)? reply

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Buy olive oil from California Olive Ranch. It's not great (I'm on the east coast, and the latest harvest I can find is from October, 2014), but it's most likely the real thing.

<comment><USER14> I do use their olive oil. I prefer it to anything else I've tried from a grocery store.

>It's not great

Well, what is a great brand, then?

<comment><USER13> I say "not great" because in grocery stores in my area, all of the California Olive Ranch bottles are over a year old. The longer the oil sits, the worse it becomes. Also, the bottles are sitting beneath fluorescent lights. It does help that the bottles are dark green, but completely opaque is better.

California Olive Ranch is a fine brand because, as far as I know, they can be trusted. That's the only reason why a brand even matters. They're members of the California Olive Council.

EDIT

If you're on west coast, I'd be curious to know the harvest date listed on your bottle.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For the most part, you should avoid Italian brands of olive oil (sold outside of Italy). They mix Greek, Spanish, Portuguese olive oil, then label it Italian for branding purposes, and the content is never virgin or extra virgin. The labelling is misleading on purpose. If you can find, go with either Greek or Portuguese. Much less adulterated olive oil.

</comment><comment><USER16> The relationship between quality and price of goods is, in most of cases, an hyperbolic function. Unless we are experts we can't really feel the quality difference between a $25 vs a $50 gallon of olive oil. The same for wine. Maybe most people can spot the difference between a €2 vs a €10 bottle (wine in my country is cheap..), but not between a €10 vs a €20 bottle.

<comment><USER17> Human sensing is very relative. Just two days ago I was in a museum about tricks of the senses [1]. At one station there were three sandpapers. One fine, one medium and one coarse. You had to first rub your hands on the outer ones simultaneously and then both on the one in the middle (the medium one) at the same time. Although it was one uniform sandpaper it felt different depending on the hand. I think with taste and smell it's very similar that smaller differences only really matter in direct comparison.

Even experts after training will have a hard time, there are some studies out there where sommeliers didn't notice they got white wine with red food colouring.

[1]: [http://turmdersinne.de/en/home](http://turmdersinne.de/en/home)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Olea Estates EVOO from Sparta, Greece is the real deal! USDA organic certified, hand picked olives, first-pressed and cold-pressed. Extremely low acidity and all of our testing is available online. It is my husband's family farm started in 1856. Check out our early harvest Olea Gold unfiltered, strong, peppery, finishing EVOO. The highest polyphenols are in this oil. Our kalamata and tsakistes olives are also delicious! www.oleaestates.com

</comment><comment><USER19> > We can call ourselves the FBI of food.

<comment><USER20> Then why are they investigating foreign products?

<comment><USER21> They aren't. This is the Italian police investigating Italian products.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There was an interesting story on NPR a while back about counterfeit honey from china.

[http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/08/honey- laundering/](http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2011/08/honey-laundering/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I did an olive oil tasting at a local shop dedicated to olive oil. Unlike the grocery store olive oil I've always had, their olive oil had a bit of a burning sensation in my throat. Lots of flavour; I buy my olive oil from them now.

</comment><comment><USER24> Olive oil is being produced in Georgia now:

[http://georgiaolivefarms.com/](http://georgiaolivefarms.com/)

I've gone through a couple bottles and was not disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER16> As rules of thumb (my grandparents used to have olive trees), I would use: pure olive oil is thicker and gets solid with the cold. The same for honey.

</comment><comment><USER12> Know of the best way to buy the best EVO (extra virgin olive oil)?

</comment><comment><USER25> Still, it's better than robbing, beating and killing people.

<comment><USER26> No, it's not "still better than robbing, beating and killing people", because those are the things you would need to do in order to integrate and control every stage of the agri-food value chain.</comment></comment>