Why do we value gold? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25255957 <comment><USER3> > _So what does this process of elemental elimination tell us about what makes > a good currency?_ First off, it doesn't have to have any intrinsic value. A > currency only has value because we, as a society, decide that it does. As > we've seen, it also needs to be stable, portable and non-toxic. And it needs > to be fairly rare - you might be surprised just how little gold there is in > the world.

>The demand for gold can vary wildly - and with a fixed supply, that can lead to equally wild swings in its price. Most recently for example, the price has gone from $260 per troy ounce in 2001, to peak at $1,921.15 in September 2011, before falling back to $1,230 currently. That is hardly the behaviour of a stable store of value.

Basically describes what are and are not the problems with Bitcoin.

<comment><USER4> _> A currency only has value because we, as a society, decide that it does._

For some reason, many people believe that this is true. I believe that it is not.

Technically, yes, if people all decide the currency has value, then it will have value. But this is a ridiculous argument! How much is this currency supposed to be worth? According to this argument, any number is potentially valid! This means that there is absolutely nothing that should hold the value of the currency fixed, and with a few "no free lunch" arguments (anyone can claim any random thing has value and try to trade with it), we see that things with no intrinsic value should NOT have value.

So why does the US Dollar have value? It's just paper (cotton), right? Not true! If the exchange rate of the dollar decreases, you'll see the Federal Reserve will start trading some of its goodies from Fort Knox (gold, etc.) for US Dollars, in order to maintain the dollar's exchange rate/value.

So in reality, the US Dollar is _backed_ by holdings that have intrinsic value.

EDIT: As pointed out, I should mention that another important backing of the USD is taxation.

Also, what I said about the Federal Reserve isn't technically true. What's important is that they have a mission to moderate the rate of inflation of the USD (i.e., maintain its value), and their asset holdings are critical in allowing them to do this.

<comment><USER5> There is no gold in Ft Knox, right? Our currency hasn't been back in 40 years.

Currency has a value because the goods we trade it for have value. Inertia?

<comment><USER6> Money is money because people believe it is money.

Right now, you can turn in a $20 for food and booze and whatever. I'll believe that's money. And if people don't have a reason to stop believing, it'll continue to be money.

<comment><USER7> The whole "money has value because people believe in it" thing isn't exactly correct. Money has value because somewhere along the line, someone accepted US dollars for something valueable to them. If you're hungry, you value food. When you produce food and allow someone to pay you in US dollars, you've injected value in to the US dollar. The dollars you hold are an abstract representation of the value you provided that you can then exchange for something else of value in the future. The US dollar is a means of accounting.

The term "has value" is used loosely when it comes to currency. It's true that the currency itself is valueless outside the context of trade, but most modern economic theory is predicated on the axiom that this is OK.

Think of it in math terms. Arabic numerals are a means of specifying quantity.

* * * * *

How many asterisks are there? There are 5. The numeral 5 describes the quantity. The number 5 is not literally five asterisks. It only describes the quantity. The same is true of modern currency. $3.50 is not literally a gallon of milk, it merely represents the economic quantity of milk. If I agree to sell you milk for dollars, I'm adding value to the dollar.

When viewed in this way, something else becomes clear. One of the basic values of currency is trust, not "intrinsic value" (which is a euphemism for intrinsic utility). When I add value to the dollar by exchaning valuable goods or services for dollars, I trust that everyone will play by the rules. Specifically, I'm trusting that the value of my trade will be preserved over the term that I hold the dollars.

<comment><USER8> ...that's what "believing in it" means.

<comment><USER7> Belief and trust are completely different things.

<comment><USER5> I guess I'm not clear on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Chemically, it is uninteresting - it barely reacts with any other element."

What a bad start, this is chemically very interesting... :)

The whole article comes across this way to me, it starts from a bad hypothesis and then continues to make baseless assumptions until it reaches its desired conclusion. :/

It explains a load of reasons exactly why gold has value, then claims that this is not intrinsic?

Interesting read though... I do enjoy that we have abandoned gold and silver standards, although knowing this does make me wonder why our leaders are so terrible at managing the economy. We made it easy for ourselves, and now we have politicians selling us the idea that its complicated to fix...

<comment><USER10> Gold's market price is completely disconnected from its simple "intrinsic" value. How much gold would you buy if you were never allowed to sell or trade it? Maybe a pair of earrings? If you own more gold then the amount you answered, you effectively believe that gold is worth more then its "intrinsic" value (for example, you could believe it has value as a medium of exchange or a store of value).

<comment><USER9> maybe i just don't know what i'm talking about, but i feel there is a disconnect, but its not clean - its because of the intrinsic value that it is such a 'tradeable' thing.

the prices of many things are driven by supply and demand, and i'm not going to disagree with that, but the article gives far too much weight to that side of it imo and poisons me against it with sloppy wording.

without the intrinsic value there would be no demand...

its not like, e.g. bank notes, EPNS or copper coins, whose value is almost entirely due to trading and very nearly completely disconnected from their intrinsic value. even then they inherit some of their value from their durability and utility in that arena...

tbh, i've only ever bought gold for cosmetic reasons... i know very well that gold contacts and radiators are generally a sales gimmick rather than beneficial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Most recently for example, the price has gone from $260 per troy ounce in 2001, to peak at $1,921.15 in September 2011, before falling back to $1,230 currently. That is hardly the behaviour of a stable store of value."

There are many who believe gold is somewhat of a proxy to the probability that at some point there will be complete lack of faith in fiat currencies (combined with the belief that it will be an acceptable substitute in such an eventuality). If that is the case, the price volatility of gold has in fact a lot to say about the viability of fiat currencies as a stable store of value.

<comment><USER12> Correction: The price volatility of gold has a lot to say about _contemporary belief_ in the stability of fiat currencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In evolutionary biology and anthropology " _Everything is the way it is because it got that way_ ".)

Gold was cross-culturally "evolved" (due to ancient trade and customs) to be recognized as a precious metal suitable for garments, wealth storage and, consequently, payments for no other reasons but being good enough.

</comment><comment><USER14> Currently I'm studying accountancy, so the concept of monetary value has suddenly become important to me. I had pondered it in the past, but not to a great extent.

 _A currency only has value because we, as a society, decide that it does. As we 've seen, it also needs to be stable, portable and non-toxic._ The second sentence contradicts the first. Portability is very important to the effectiveness of a currency, especially in times past when our modern communication methods did not exist. Currency represents an agreement as well as a quantitative value. The ten pound note currently in my wallet is a liability that the Bank of England owes to me when demanded. This is far more convenient than having to call up the Bank of England and demand a portion of their liability every time I go and buy a pack of ciggies (another viable currency, if you are presently incarcerated).

 _A similar argument applies to another whole class of elements, the radioactive ones: you don 't want your cash to give you cancer._ Regarding Uranium 238, this has a very long half life (roughly the same as the age of the Earth) and it is an alpha-emitter. Radioactive effects of alpha-emitters are usually only toxic if ingested or inhaled, whereas a strong beta-emitter can burn your skin in sufficient amounts. The chemical toxicity of Uranium is a far more serious issue. If the potential radio-currency is highly radioactive, it would lose its value very quickly. Of the four main decay series, three result in lead.

<comment><USER15> _The ten pound note currently in my wallet is a liability that the Bank of England owes to me when demanded_

It is? How can you make that demand, and what will they give you in return?

<comment><USER14> I'm reading that very same ten pound note. On the side which bears the image of Queen Elizabeth II, it says:

      Bank of England
      I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of TEN Pounds

Regarding what is returned...

Whatever I buy with the ten pounds is what I get in return from the seller. When I pass the ten pound note over, the Bank of England now has liability towards the seller, not myself.

<comment><USER8> But if you give the note to the Bank of England, what will they give you? Gold! How much?

Most likely, the only thing you can get from the Bank of England is a TEN Pound credit on your next tax bill.

<comment><USER14> _But if you give the note to the Bank of England, what will they give you? Gold! How much?_

Who says that you would?

<comment><USER8> Oops, that was supposed to be a question mark, not an exclamation point!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like to think that Bitcoins are much more similar to gold than dollars, and yet everyone makes comparisons with modern currencies.

<comment><USER17> Sure, because people don't buy and sell things with gold, they buy and sell things with modern currencies. They do so because well-established legal frameworks ensure future demand for the currency to pay taxes and meet debt obligations, and also keep the supply in line with demand.

Sure, Bitcoins are similar to gold in being relatively, rare, but so are tulip bulbs. What matters isn't the restriction in the supply, but the sustainability of the demand.

Gold sustained its demand over millenia not just because it was rare, but because people _needed_ gold to meet future tax and debt-repayment obligations, or to purchase things from foreign lands. The number of people _needing_ to receive BTC-denominated income in future, on the other hand, is negligible; virtually anyone [considering] providing real goods or services in BTC can cease to transact in BTC at any point they have doubts about its future value or liquidity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Nixon made his decision for the simple reason that the US was running out of > the necessary gold to back all the dollars it had printed.

That's the whole problem right there. The ~~counterfeiting~~ quantitive easing is simply too attractive to the congresscritters to allow a little honesty to get in the way.

<comment><USER12> Economics is not a morality play, and connecting money to gold has nothing whatsoever to do with honesty.

Look, the most important point of money is to facilitate economic exchange. Yes, rentiers want to store their savings somehow, but there's a reason that the word rentier has negative connotations.

Facilitating economic exchange requires that the amount of money correlates with the size of the economy. Fiat currency can do that (thanks to bank loans, which can shrink and expand based on endogenous demand from the economy), and gold-based currency cannot do that. It's really as simple as that.

<comment><USER19> With respect, may I ask what the reason actually is, that the word rentier has negative connotations?

<comment><USER12> Being a rentier means having income without working. Traditionally, this was because you inherited wealth, e.g. in the form of land.

Most people's sense of distributive justice has some aspects of desert theory, i.e. people tend to believe the economic distribution should align with what people deserve, where the latter is typically defined via what their contribution to the economy is.

From that perspective, rentiers have undeserved income, hence the negative connotations.

<comment><USER19> I appreciate your helpful reply. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> An interesting, mildly related tidbit is that certain types of seashells were used as currency in large parts of the world until about 150 years ago. [0] Probably occupying a similar sweet-spot: rare but not too rare and robust. An additional feature (or bug) would have been the inherent quantization.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_money)

</comment><comment><USER21> NPR 's Planet Money did a good episode (<20 minutes) on this topic: [http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/07/131363098/the- tues...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/07/131363098/the-tuesday- podcast-why-gold)

</comment><comment><USER22> The argument for why a medium of exchange (a currency) needs to be transportable and relatively nondestructible goes all the way back to Aristotle, in the West. (Similar arguments about silver surely must have appeared in Chinese culture, long ago.) I'm sorry not to follow my usual practice of providing references here, but I guess I think it is drop-dead obvious that not all features that give something value necessarily make that thing a convenient medium of exchange for trade.

The particular argument in the article kindly submitted here (well worth a read, even if you have read all the comments here) takes a good look at the properties of gold as contrasted with other chemical elements, and points out what features gold (and silver) have that most other elements do not share.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting article. The article claims that gold has no intrinsic value. I may be wrong, but I can't think of any entity that has intrinsic value, or, "value in and of itself." On the other hand, I can think of countless things that have value in relation to other things, such as, a loaf of bread and a hungry man.

Could it be that gold makes a good currency, and a good currency makes trading easier, and people value the ability to trade with one another, and therefore, gold has value?

</comment><comment><USER23> I value gold because you value gold.

</comment><comment><USER5> I imagine some day we will have 'currency' backed in real things - <USER2> maybe, or Petahertz. Something fungible you could use and trade.

<comment><USER24> Joules (or kWH). An energy backed currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If I'm too off-topic feel free to ignore this question. Isn't it more valuable to have knowledge and energy sources ?

<comment><USER26> Yes, but they don't operate well as exchange mediums.

<comment><USER27> How so ? Gold isn't just a currency/exchange medium, it's a valuable material on its own in many ways. Neither bitcoins nor dollars are, they're not commodities turned currencies, they were always meant to be currencies and nothing else.

<comment><USER25> By own material value do you mean for electronics, and thus for us now ? But what about centuries ago ?

Someone suggested me that gold doesn't rust and that stability was interesting as a long time token. But I don't find any usage beside the social status gem.

<comment><USER27> It works particularly well as a social status gem, because it's at the same time malleable (ie. easy to work with), shiny-looking, and not easily corroded. It's relatively easy to authenticate (compared to a bitcoin for example), and seriously hard to fake (unlike, say, a dollar).

Anyway the point wasn't the merits of gold over currencies, just pointing out the fact that it has a real status as a useful commodity, in a way that purpose-built currency doesn't. That means, among other things, that demand for jwelery in India for example, or changes in electronics manufacturing processes are bound to affect its price.

That makes it quite different from other currencies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The real history. A Play By Brandon Wirtz:

Nearly 20,000 years ago a man said said, "we have to stop trading seashells, they are to plentiful, people just go get more of them, and they break"

"Fine what do you propose we use?"

"Have you seen this shiny yellow stuff? You can form it with heat and it stays shiny forever."

"That Gold stuff? yeah It is pretty. I like Pretty things. But there isn't that much of it, and it is hard to find."

"Yes, that way we can control how much of it there is, so it will have value. No one will be able to just wander down to the ocean and pick up more. And we'll make different sizes of it so that we know how much each is worth"

This is why we use Gold. Because it was the first metal we could work with, it is scarce enough, and requires enough skill that only certain people (usually a government) can issue coins of it. You can still trade the raw stuff, but to fewer people and with out the trust of the minter you get a lower price for it.

</comment><comment><USER29> >Aluminium is ... just too flimsy for coinage.

Nonsense. The Japanese one yen coin is aluminum, and it holds up just fine.

</comment><comment><USER30> We began valuing gold because it's shiny, doesn't degrade over time, and it's rare.

We still value gold because we always have.</comment>


Cloudflare Image Resizing: Simplifying Optimal Image Delivery - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-cloudflare-image-resizing-simplifying-optimal-image-delivery/ <comment><USER2> A missing piece of (valuable) documentation would be handling cache scenarios for how you'd mutate a response based on user-agent or accept headers - say, changing file format.

I personally do client hints polyfilling via workers (dpi matters for things like "fit" even if you use srcset) and transpose images off-workers (github.com/h2non/imaginary). Will do testing and see how they match up in terms of quality.</comment>


Validating User Input for your Web and Mobile Apps on the Server Side - <AUTHOR> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/item/197-the-customizable-backend-as-a-service-step-one-input-validation

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Hugely useful to enable Flexibility and customization of business logic for Backend as a Service platforms. But how do I get my own business logic on the service?</comment>


Mapping the U.S. By Property Value Instead of Land Area - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/07/mapping-the-us-by-property-value-instead-of-land-area/397841/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this just the same as population density? I think there's an XKCD about this ...

[https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

<comment><USER3> Not quite fair. Usually the xkcd syndrome is caused by plotting density of something that is intrinsic to people e.g. red hair. You end up with a heatmap of population.

Here, land prices may be higher because more people are there bidding up the prices. But its not a direct property of the individuals. So the heatmap effect is indirect.

Maybe not big point, but there it is.

<comment><USER4> This map is measuring the land value within a county. Land values are dependent on population density. It's not surprising that Manhattan has such a high value when you consider how many folks are crammed into the island.

If you create a map that was land value divided by population density it would be much more interesting.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. This is making Dallas County look expensive, when in fact it is one of the most affordable major metro areas in the US.

The "elite Texas counties" the article refers to are really a figment of data representation. Sure, those counties have neighborhoods or small towns that are stupid expensive, but they are the exception. All of them are highly populous, though; all five dark red counties (Dallas, Tarrant, Harris, Travis, Bexar) are in the top-20 most populous counties in the US.

<comment><USER3> That doesn't jibe with the map data - land prices in that county are anything but affordable, regardless of how many people live there, right?

<comment><USER6> The map shows total land price in the county. It doesn't measure anything like affordability of land (which would be measured by something like price / unit area of land) or residential affordability (which would be measured by something like price / unit area of home.)

<comment><USER3> Got it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The demand to live in these places is soaring, but the desire among > incumbents to accommodate newcomers is low

Sums up why we ended up in Bend, Oregon rather than Boulder, Colorado. In the latter, there is a small but significant group of people whose idea is that the area needs fewer jobs, not smarter housing.

Edit: [http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs- be...](http://journal.dedasys.com/2015/06/18/boulder-colorado-vs-bend-oregon/) \- more about our choice, for the curious.

<comment><USER8> But if Boulder looked more like Denver (or Bend like Portland), you might not have made that choice, right? I'm guessing that you wanted those spots because they were semi-rural mountain cities with low population density.

So even if you did move to Boulder, you'd probably oppose the construction of more high-density housing, right?

<comment><USER9> There are smart ways to do high-density housing while preserving the character of cities like Boulder. The rail line from Denver to Boulder is going to help a lot of people justify not having cars in Boulder, and traffic congestion is probably the most harmful effect of squeezing lots of people into a small space. There are lots of places east of downtown/CU that you could build clusters of high-density, 4-5 story, mixed-use residential that wouldn't obstruct mountain views for the most powerful (i.e. richest) homeowners in Boulder. It would look ugly if you did something like the Denver Tech Center where 15-25 story buildings are placed on a ridge on the plains with no trees, but you could conceal quite a bit with the right placement of native trees around smaller 4-5 story buildings.

<comment><USER10> Isn't the rail line from Denver to Boulder supposed to be completed in something like 2044?

IOW, never?

<comment><USER11> Probably farther out since they'd have to reimburse Goldman Sachs for lost profits on 36 if they built the train.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recommend following Kim-Mai Cutler's Twitter if you want to find interesting articles/takes on SF's housing crisis.

[https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler](https://twitter.com/kimmaicutler)

I especially liked this Vox piece on what actually happens in the process of trying to build more housing in SF:

[http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8782235/san-francisco- housing-c...](http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8782235/san-francisco-housing- crisis?utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter)

</comment><comment><USER13> How can the random large splotches be translated into usefulness or meaning? The gif seems to imply that the areas are resized based on their value, that is SUPER not helpful. And the bucket $40b - $1tr?! Almost everything falls in that bucket! I don't think this map is of great value.

<comment><USER14> I thought that bucket was large too, but then I realized it is only used for color, not size. So size of county is a more granular measure for housing measure, if that's what you're looking for.

EDIT: I see, you're saying the areas are hard to compare. Good point!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's kind of delightful watching NYC and SF in the gif inflate like gigantic pustules, cysts of real estate.

<comment><USER16> I'm the most surprised how LA blows up, I thought it was quite a bit cheaper there than in SF/NY.

<comment><USER4> LA county has almost 10M people living in it. SF has only 800K. If housing prices were equal, you'd expect LA to be 10 times the size (assuming an equal number of people per dwelling).

<comment><USER17> Yes, it's difficult to make a fair comparison across counties of such vastly different areas and populations. LA county includes far-off places like Palmdale which bring the average housing price way down. If you only looked at more central neighborhoods like Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, etc. you'd see distortion more akin to SF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The fact that people don't all prefer everywhere equally is a "troubling inequality"? Property value is just a reflection of demand vs. supply. People want to live in some areas of the country more than in others, but, since the area is limited, the increased desire drives prices up.

Is it really so shocking that more people would rather live in San Francisco than Alabama?

</comment><comment><USER19> >Folks who can't afford to live in those places don't get to take advantage of those labor markets. The demand to live in these places is soaring, but the desire among incumbents to accommodate newcomers is low. Hence NIMBYism, high housing costs, severe inequality—the whole shebang.

NYC has had a massive residential construction boom (see Williamsburg, downtown Brooklyn, Long Island City, &c). Almost all of the housing that goes up is luxury and seems to do very little to bring down the city's extreme housing costs. Maybe severe inequality is driven by factors other than just NIMBYism? The new condos seem to attract wealthy outsiders.

<comment><USER20> Also NYC real estate is a very safe place to park cash. So many properties simply sit empty.

<comment><USER21> I've always wanted a validation of this. Vancouver, Canada supposedly has the same problem.

I have yet to see anything beyond circumstantial evidence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> From the standpoint of at least one "user", I would have gotten a lot more value out of the animation if I could control it (e.g. with a slider). The pulsing back and forth makes it more difficult for me to pinpoint something of interest (e.g. a less expensive city like Detroit) and then track it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Going down into the rabbit hole, here is a JSON file [1] containing the county level data from the Economist. I think that this is the source of the data used by the author.

[1] [http://infographics.economist.com/2015/ASBTest/Land/js/count...](http://infographics.economist.com/2015/ASBTest/Land/js/countyData.js)

<comment><USER22> The original post from Metrocosm is here: [http://metrocosm.com/the-housing- value-of-every-county-in-th...](http://metrocosm.com/the-housing-value-of- every-county-in-the-u-s/). It provides a link to the source data from the Economist for the county-level data.

<comment><USER23> Where is the link on that site? I didn't see one, which is why I went digging for it and turned up the link above.

<comment><USER22> The metrocosm post links to this page on the Economist: [http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/04/daily-c...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/04/daily- chart-2), but unfortunately I am now hitting the paywall and don't have my subscription info handy :-/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The conclusions from the article seemed a bit rushed. NYC and the Bay Area are pretty different when it comes to NIMBY policies and commutes from low income areas to high income.

<comment><USER25> > NYC and the Bay Area are pretty different when it comes to NIMBY policies > and commutes from low income areas to high income.

How so? New York has plenty of NIMBY policies and commuters.

<comment><USER24> In NYC if you need a $1200 / mo 1BR apartment, sure Manhattan and north eastern Brooklyn aren't options but you still have places like Harlem, Queens, New Jersey, The Bronx, Staten Island all of which are under an hour commute from Manhattan (and with a rapid transit system that respects shift workers by running 24hrs a day).

NYC has also been adding high density (albeit market rate) housing stock by the tens of thousands each year since 2013 or so. NIMBY-ism in Bay Area communities tends to be opposed increased density of any sort, but for the most part in NYC it's focused more on the boundaries of low income housing areas.

East coast municipalities also have a lot more power to make mandates without the kind of broad community consensus that California cities have to abide by. So while residents can express opposition to a development plan and sometimes fight it in NYC, NIMBY advocates only carry weight when they're well equipped to battle city hall.

Basically my point is that it's kind of a stretch to draw a conclusion that the same patterns are applicable to both housing markets. The New York metro and the Bay Area metro are very different places with very different policies and political landscapes. New York's inflated housing market has more to do with legacy policies from the Bloomberg administration and real estate speculation than too few units and NIMBY attitudes, which are a much bigger problem in SF

<comment><USER25> I don't want to get drawn into a long debate on it, but I think it's clear that NYC has competitive commute times to the Bay Area. Some even think it's worse:

[http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/these-american-cities-have- the...](http://fortune.com/2015/05/20/these-american-cities-have-the-worst- commutes/)

As far as NIMBY goes... I guess I was taking that more broadly. There isn't objections against density qua density, but projects are blocked because they block views. And projects are blocked because of what they'd do to the neighborhood (think highways and housing projects, Forest Hills as a popular counterexample).

There also seems to be some empirical evidence that NYC is actually building housing _slower_ than SF.

[http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/08/new-york-citys-is- americas-s...](http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/08/new-york-citys-is-americas- slowest-building-growing-big-city.html)

<comment><USER24> Both of those articles are a good illustration of my point actually, sensational conclusions drawn from reports that don't take into account the dramatic differences between the cities being compared. In this case, NYC is so enormous that it's in another weight class where the benchmarks we're being presented are highly flawed in context.

For example, the commute time piece in Fortune isn't looking at metro area, only intra-city commute time. NYC having the longest average commute makes for an interesting data point and it's technically true, but it doesn't take into account the fact that the city of New York has an extremely large land area spread across several islands with a population that dwarfs most of the cities on that list. Considering how the data for NYC is influenced by situations like the non-trivial number of Staten Islanders who commute 1 to 2 hours a day to Manhattan (still intra-city) via ferry + subway, the 31.5 minute average commute time in SF doesn't look so good. Painting these pictures with the same brush is an effort in futility, the same standards just don't apply

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A well-known prior art of this idea -- and perhaps not even the first -- is Worldmapper at [http://www.worldmapper.org/](http://www.worldmapper.org/). "The world as you have never seen before" contains striking world maps with their areas proportional to measures like population (even the population in AD 1), income, aircraft flights, toy exports, nuclear weapons, languages, people killed by floods and 600 more.

</comment><comment><USER27> i kind of understand why people here frequently against high-density - the way it is done in US ends up with pretty unlivable space of towering boxes surrounded by concrete and asphalt (which is just obvious result of profit maximization while obeying height limits, etc.. While i think having a 200 stories tower surrounded by a park would be better than a bunch of 20-30 stories mid-towers sticking out of concrete/asphalt space)

<comment><USER28> I feel that sound is a big part of it too. European buildings tend to be a titch bit better about this, but American ones are downright terrible. I'd love to live in a apartment building for a long time, but the sound is what gets me. I can't play my sound as loud as I want, I can't stand other people ignoring that the walls are paper thin, I hear every toilet flush and chopping of carrots in the building. If you can find a way to really dampen the sound, then I feel a lot of people wouldn't mind the high density quite as much.

<comment><USER29> That doesn't have to be the case... I live in a large apartment building on a high floor, and I rarely hear my neighbors. Good walls and smart design go a long way. Granted, this is a fairly new building that is a bit expensive, but my point is that noise problems in high rise buildings aren't inherent to all large buildings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > "The stubborn unwillingness of incumbent homeowners in highly productive > places—namely San Francisco and New York City, which are barely visible on > the land-area map, but dominate the housing value map—is a huge drain on the > nation's economy." Are they trying to say that if people didn't have to > spend as much on housing then there would be greater GDP?

<comment><USER28> I think that if rents weren't such a drain, then yes, you could spend the money on other things and drive up GDP. SF currently has bad rents that are hurting the local economy. Money that just a few years ago was going to eating out, new cars, vacations, etc. is now going to a greedy landlord.

<comment><USER31> Monies spent on rent are already included in the GDP; they don't depress it.

<comment><USER32> I think he is alluding that high rent leads to wealth concentration. A lot of salaried people can invest a tiny bit in a much larger variety of interests than a few wealthy, or choose to work on something less profitable while still making rent. These investments by a lot of people will at some point lead to unexpected value creations that increase GDP. At least that is the tenet of a consumer and market economy.

<comment><USER28> Bingo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm guessing you generate these by fixing three points along the boundary and then find the conformal map with the prescribed scale ratio at each point. Cool tech. If only this was a useful way to present the information. Color contours work much better.

</comment><comment><USER34> Talk about big city distortion.

I can't help thinking this trend is at its zenith. Where economic growth is faltering, we're seeing de-urbanization, and I would be long the yellow areas and short the red, because if there is any upset to the JIT way our cities operate (London for example is said to have a mere 4 days worth food in stock), for reasons of climate change or political upheaval or some other reason (no more opportunity in overcrowded cities?), the rural areas on which we still enormously depend for food and water may suddenly revalue upwards.

<comment><USER35> Look outside the US. The US is not anywhere near as distorted as several asian countries and even mexico has a more extreme situation. Asia suggests it's not even close to it's zenith

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This appears to be housing value, not property value. So this is leaving off commercial property, which is probably usually proportionate to housing value, and agriculture land, which isn't.

</comment><comment><USER37> It would be interesting to see areas cross referenced by job creation and relative affordability over time. Perhaps there are counties whose plans did provide growth without economic isolation?

</comment><comment><USER38> I wonder how things will change once self driving cars become the norm.

<comment><USER39> and something like hyper loop will be built

<comment><USER40> if you can live in Fresno and work in SF with a half hour commute, expect huge changes here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Awesome idea! If they could make it less ugly, I would prefer standardizing on this as a way to plot geographic data in certain cases.

Graphing by land area often means spending huge chunks of the map where nothing (relevant to a particular purpose) happens, and cramming all the interesting stuff into a few places on the coasts.

(Note all the hedges and caveats; I don't want to trivialize anyone's home here, but we definitely see this effect a lot.)

</comment><comment><USER42> While it looks extremely cool, is this really the best way to visualise this data?

Every method of visualisation has its strengths and pitfalls. One of the pitfalls of this method is that it always looks rather _dramatic_ , regardless of the data. Changing the shape of well-known things gives an uneasy feeling, regardless of what you map.

Only data that is perfectly equal will not result in arbitrary distortions. The amount of distortion, magnitude of the local scale factor, is (or should be) a parameter of the visualisation, just like the decision of using a fiery red-yellow colour gradient.

Linked source has a bit more info on what exactly they did. Which is simply substituting area for value in dollars. Only makes sense if the data somewhat follows a normal distribution. And I'm going to guess here, property value does not, at all. It's not even bounded. I'd have picked log value, because an exponential distribution for the value is a much more reasonable assumption.

In case of a visualisation like this, I might actually decide to do something that is generally frowned upon: change the "origin" of the data. That is, add some constant value to the scale factors, to smooth out the severity of the distortions a little. If I were mapping the log value that wouldn't be necessary since it'd be equivalent to scaling dollar values to $1000 or $1M, etc.

I'm trying to remember other examples where data was mapped to local scale in a non-shape preserving way.

The only thing I can come up with was a sort of homunculus visualisation (I forget if it was just a drawing or actually made into a 3d clay statuette). It scaled our body parts roughly proportional to the volume of our brain dedicated to it. So you'd get a giant head with huge bulging eyes, etc. It looked weird, funny, still somewhat human/cartoonish. It showed things as "this is MUCH bigger than that" or "huh I didn't realise my tongue was that important". It wasn't a very _clear_ visualisation, but I'm also hard pressed to come up with a better way to do it.

In other words, this type of visualisation helps to show the data in a mostly _qualitative_ way, not quantitative. And like the homunculus example, the data doesn't need to be super exact (we can't estimate relative area/volume of irregular shapes very well).

But it looks cool.

</comment><comment><USER43> This situation is exacerbated by government cost of living increases which take location into account. (i.e. New Yorkers get bigger raises)

It is also a consequence of the lack of a quality passenger rail system.

</comment><comment><USER44> I'd love to see this for Australia, so much of the population is in like 5 cities it would just look like one of those plastic ball molecule model things

</comment><comment><USER45> How does the transformation work? It must be something that keeps the same borders regardless of what numbers you put in.

<comment><USER46> It's up to the producer what properties of the original map are preserved. Wikipedia seems reasonable:

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

(Note especially the table of algorithms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Interesting.

BTW, there is a glitch in the animation. One city -- Lincoln, Nebraska, I think -- does not expand smoothly.

</comment><comment><USER48> Where would one find the source data for property value analysis like this?

<comment><USER46> It's discussed at one of the links:

[http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-property-values-in- perspe...](http://metrocosm.com/new-york-city-property-values-in-perspective/)

<comment><USER48> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> It'd be nice to see the values adjusted for household income.

</comment><comment><USER50> So the US mapped by property value looks like China.. :-)

</comment><comment><USER51> I don't think I've ever seen a worse Cartogram. At least they did an animation to make it easier to understand, but a regular map with simple choropleth would be a thousand times better.

<comment><USER34> I think the animation turns it from one of the worst visualizations I have ever seen to one of the best. Its point is ultra clear when you see tiny red dots become huge swathes of overvalued crimson. Texas is amazing. Look how even intra-state, cities crush rural (for now).

This is exhibit A on how animation can transform data visualization.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Supply and demand explain most of phenomenoms..

</comment><comment><USER30> Why should land values be homogenous?

<comment><USER53> General cultural belief in equality of both opportunity and outcome. Why should a real estate developer, and the whole horde of commissioned vampires that follow them, make 10x as much "over there" as "over here" when its the same product for the same people making mostly the same money at mostly the same jobs, just a different location?

Various standard of living effects, the $3M I'm not spending on similar housing in CA is improving my standard of living and retirement plans far beyond folks living there, after all its not like CA pays much more (maybe 30% tops, but the cost of living is like 2 times higher) or that stuff ordered from Amazon costs people in CA any less. Is it fair that I get a 90th percentile national salary but because I don't live in CA I get to experience a roughly 95th percentile lifestyle locally?

In post industrial world, once capital investments are worthless (capital as in giant factory, enormous milling machine, whatever its all scrap iron moved to China now) then the only worth is people, who can move around anywhere very quickly, yet they don't. This also impacts multi-site multi-office sized companies... the mantra for very small companies is everyone has to be at the same site in the same place in the same open office for 12 hours a day breathing each others coughs and sneezes because thats modern business, but how this interacts with multinationals is mysterious. I'll be honest, I have no idea how many offices my employer has, but I assure you its very large, I can't even be sure how many timezones... Work no longer requires physical plant investments, so where do / should people live if they no longer need to live in walking distance of the foundry or factory? If my boss lives and works at an office three states away, why do I need to drive 20 miles each day into an office to "work" "with" him? Its an aspect of economic belief that is in considerable turmoil where common beliefs when mashed up against observation create all kinds of strange cognitive dissonance.

<comment><USER54> >General cultural belief in equality of both opportunity and outcome. Why should a real estate developer, and the whole horde of commissioned vampires that follow them, make 10x as much "over there" as "over here" when its the same product for the same people making mostly the same money at mostly the same jobs, just a different location?

This might be a general subcultural belief. It's hardly generally accepted that equality of opportunity and outcome needs to be spread geographically spread out. In fact, I've never ever heard a serious case for it.

>Is it fair that I get a 90th percentile national salary but because I don't live in CA I get to experience a roughly 95th percentile lifestyle locally?

Fair in what sense? Without a definition of what you're considering to be fair, such questions are purely rhetorical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> s/value/price/g</comment>


Google Bug Bounty – The $5k Error Page - <AUTHOR> https://slashcrypto.org/2017/05/17/5k_Error_Page/ <comment><USER3> Nice catch. A long time ago the services on the backend were killed by a special URL. And someone found it, and it wasn't filtered by the front end. And of course someone tried to use it, but it never returns since it kills the service, but their client retried ... it was a lot of "what the heck is happening" going on until SRE figured it out and then they immediately patched the front end and the anomalies stopped. It is too bad the person who caused it didn't file for a bug bounty like this person did, they probably would have had something to show for their efforts besides "hey look at this funny thing you can do, oh wait it doesn't do it any more."

<comment><USER4> On Quora someone asked what the longest search query time was. I was able to craft a query that took multiple seconds to complete. It used wildcards and undocumented iteration allowing one to stuff thausands of queries into a single query. Turns out it is someone's job to measure result response times, and he/she came into the thread to kindly ask us to stop messing up their statistics.

<comment><USER5> It's hard to believe, but years ago, back when Google had what was called "stop words" (like 'the', that it ordinarily ignored) I was able to make Google perform a search that took over 30 seconds.

The reason stop words take such a long time is that millions of sites have words like "the" on them, so doing a join on all those simply takes a long time.

My method to find a long string consisting entirely of stop words, was to just download a project gutenberg of the complete works of shakespeare, and find the longest string consisting of just stop words in there, then search for it as a literal quote.

The longest one I found was: "From what it is to a".

Let me see how long Google takes to do it now :)

2.04 seconds! Nice :) - [http://i.imgur.com/IhPTpr6.png](http://i.imgur.com/IhPTpr6.png)

that took 30+ seconds 'back in the day'.

<comment><USER6> Is it really technically correct to say that Google was performing web-wide joins on data? Isn't it all about clever indexing?

<comment><USER5> There's nothing to index. How could it have found my Shakespeare quote via an index? It consisted entirely of words 'from what it is to a' but produced only the Shakespeare quote. I don't see how it could have indexed anything.... it must have done a join. (Which makes sense given the 30+ seconds I had to sit and wait before it returned its answer, while also reporting the time it took to produce it. What else could it have been doing?)

By the way I believe I wanted to know whether it would return the Shakespeare quote at all.

If you mean that it might have cached the results of the query, I doubt anyone else queried that exact phrase, other than me.

<comment><USER7> Google does index pages, in the database sense. An index in the database sense is nothing more than reorganizing data (or subsets of data) into structures optimized for searching and seeking, rather than full scans.

I'm guessing you're most familiar with btree indexes as present and default in many SQL solutions, which are good for quickly answering exact, greater/less matches. There are dozens of data structures useful for indexing, some of which are built to index full text documents. For an example, check out the gin and gist indexes in Postgres [1].

It's my understanding that database indexing and index compression was a primary differentiator Google excelled at from the beginning. They could beat others at fractions of the typical cost because they didn't need data centers to store and query huge quantities of documents.

Seriously, there's no way even Google could intersect the sets of all crawled web documents containing those individual words in 30 seconds, much less two seconds.

[1] [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/textsearch- in...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/textsearch-indexes.html)

<comment><USER5> >Seriously, there's no way even Google could intersect the sets of all crawled web documents containing those individual words in 30 seconds, much less two seconds.

I believe you're mistaken. What I've heard is that for every word, Google has a list of every web site that contains that word - they've flipped the database. So, I believe, if you search for (without quotes) neanderthal violet narwhal obsequious tandem then -- and I just did this query, which took 0.56 seconds, but decided to remove some of the words, so it can get it me results. When I did plus signs, making my query +neanderthal +violet +narwhal +obsequious +tandem it said it worked 0.7 seconds to determine that in all of the entirety of the Internet, there is not a single document that has those 5 words on it.

How do you think it determines in 700 ms that all of the sites it has indexed on all of the Internet does not contain those 5 words anywhere on it?

The answer is that it has a rather short list of sites that contain the word narwhal, which it then intersects with the somewhat larger list of sites that contain obsequious and so on. 700 seconds is plenty fast when you take that approach.

so, this explains why joining stop words (which consist of billions of pages, each) takes so _very_ long.

using stop words it is easy to make queries that take one or two seconds each.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I found a bug in wickr where I can re-read "deleted" messages. I submitted it, answered their teams questions about reproducing it. A couple of weeks later, they said they can't fix it and didn't pay me :(

I got all my wickr contacts to switch to signal, which is much less buggy...

<comment><USER9> That bug is extremely common, and the source is always the use of soft-deletes in the database. When you view the _list of items_ (ex: inbox), the database query includes a "WHERE deleted = false" to exclude rows which have been soft- deleted. When viewing a _single item_ (ex: message) the URL contains a unique identifier, whether an auto-increment integer, UID, etc. The query used to load one item is "WHERE id = :id" instead of the correct "WHERE id = :id AND deleted = false".

Managing soft-deletes on a database table requires an attention to detail, with _every single query_ ever touching that table, that many developers lack the discipline to handle. Discipline aside, it's difficult for every developer on a team to remember which tables use soft-delete, and when checking that flag is or is not necessary. Finally, ORM abstractions often automate soft- delete in such a way that makes it exhausting for developers to validate every query. I've seen this bug over and over again at every company I've worked for. Happens so often it's impossible to keep count.

<comment><USER10> > Managing soft-deletes on a database table requires an attention to detail.

> Discipline aside, it's difficult for every developer on a team to remember > which tables use soft-delete, and when checking that flag is or is not > necessary.

That's the case where instead of "try harder not to make mistakes", you design a system so it is not possible to make them. One way would be to rename original table `raw_messages` and `create view messages as select * from raw_messages where not deleted`.

<comment><USER11> One of the problems with ORMs is that because it lets people forget about the annoying details of their databases, it also makes the forget the useful details of their databases.

<comment><USER9> Damn you! I wrote a bloody _essay_ in a reply[1] to explain, in superfluous detail, what you summarized in one sentence. Anyone with basic knowledge of the topic would know what you mean. I need to figure out this magic people like you possess. I'm tired of rambling, when nobody will read it. Thank you for the incentive to improve.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14374031)

<comment><USER11> That's the kindest spontaneous compliment I've received in a while. Thank you. But: while the pithy comment might farm more imaginary internet points, the essay may actually teach a lesson to the person who doesn't yet get it.

As for writing: it's not magic, but for me it's not consciously applied processes either. If I had to guess how my earlier comment came about, I'd suggest something like this as a generative process:

1\. Find two effects with a common cause (provided upthread). 2\. State each effect, sharing words and rhythm to bring out contrast. 3\. Omit needless words. (Thanks, Strunk/White!)

HTH.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _10 /02/2017 – Google already fixed the issue but forgot to tell me … I > contacted them asking for an update_

> _19 /02/2017 – Got a response, they implemented a short-term fix and forgot > to sent my report to the VRP panel …_

I hope Google forgetting to follow up on bug bounties and needing to be reminded isn't a common occurrence.

<comment><USER13> Having worked on a large bounty program myself, and having at least one thing blow up because I dropped the ball on a response, I'll just say that the front-end aspect of it can be extremely chaotic. This guy seems like he's pretty polite and patient, which you generally try to reward with a rapid response and high touch, but sometimes you can get overwhelmed with a burst of reports, distracted by problematic reporters and bogged down by working the bug through the pipeline.

There are systems and processes to help with all of this of course, but at the end of the day it's still a pretty tricky job to get perfect all the time.

<comment><USER14> What's the general signal to noise ratio for bug reports?

<comment><USER15> About 10:1 noise:signal.

This comes from a variety of experiences: I used to manage a bug bounty for a mid-size company on Bugcrowd; in 2014 I surveyed people managing a bunch of programs across different sizes; I've participated in bug bounty programs for companies of different sizes.

The more you offer for rewards and the more recognizable your company name, the more you will be spammed by people submitting reports like (I kid you not): "You have the OPTIONS method allowed on your site this is really serious." The last time I looked at the numbers, Google had over 80,000 bug bounty reports per year, with about 10% of them being valid and maybe another order of magnitude being high severity (I'm fuzzy on the last bit). It's probably over 100,000 per year at this point. It's not uncommon for recognizable but smaller companies to receive one or more per day.

I'm aware of full-time security engineers at Facebook and Google who do almost nothing but respond to bug bounty reports. It's a lot like resumes - <USER2> who have essentially no qualifications, experience or (most importantly) a real vulnerability finding will nevertheless spam boilerplate bug reports to as many companies as they can. Take a look at the list of exclusions on a given program - you'll see that many of them explicitly call out common invalid findings that are so ridiculous it's kafkaesque.

HackerOne and Bugcrowd provide a lot of technical sophistication to prime companies for success, but there is an organizational component that is very difficult. If your program is very active, it requires dedication to tune it so you're not flushing engineer-hours away responding to nonsense. This is not to say they're bad - quite the opposite, I think they're fantastic. But I generally recommend smaller companies set up a vulnerability disclosure program through a solid third party, and do so without a monetary reward until they can commit to dealing with a reasonable deluge of reports.

<comment><USER16> My favorite bug bounty report so far read, in its entirety, "try it ASAP".

<comment><USER17> I've received reports for things like "source code disclosure" where they link to our jQuery.

<comment><USER18> LOL - I'd like to report that I was able to download the entire source code of your website by right-clicking and selecting "View Page Source..."

<comment><USER16> If only that were true... modern web pages frequently have basically nothing of any value in the page source; it's all dynamically loaded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So I was thinking recently... with Google (amongst others, of course) themselves pushing towards AI applications, it seems to me that many of these less-advanced* bounty hunts might perhaps be able to be automated with a fuzzer+scraper+AI based approach. The fact that bug bounties are still being awarded does suggest that this is not that trivial, however, but might still be fun to explore nonetheless. I.e. can one train an agent that goes off and tries this sort of things autonomously? Might be fun to translate the HTTP intrusion domain into a deep learning architecture.

Similar things are being applied on the "defensive" side of things already anyway (i.e. Iranian, Turkish, Chinese firewall systems using machine learning to identify and block new patterns), so why not apply this on the offensive side.

*: Not to demean the author in any way; I understand that putting the time in to explore these things is easier said than done in hindsight.

<comment><USER20> I'm similarly surprised we haven't heard of a AI augmented fuzzer that's been unleashed on random domains to just "try shit out." Seems like a good way to find weird little bugs. Then again, the scope of the "problem" is so massive, and the "rewards" (shit to flag as "yea check this out more") so vague, I don't even know how you'd begin.

<comment><USER21> If the good people don't do it soon, the bad people will...

<comment><USER22> Or the curious one. Just make a point&click version of such vulnerability scanner and post in on Reddit; you'll have half of the Internet scanned in no time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I discovered the same error/bug a few weeks ago when a co-worker linked "this weird page" to me, I just looked around and thought it's pretty cool too see that part of Google and didn't thought too much of it, closed the tab and went back to my Terminal. :)

<comment><USER24> I am a bit jealous :).

I also did a subdomain search on google a few weeks ago. I stumbled upon a lot of login sites.

A subdomain search leaded to 95 subdomains under corp.google.com.

There is some strange javascript in those pages, there is a function called riskMi.

I don't want to get sucked into it, I'm also closing the tab and going back to my terminal :).

<comment><USER25> How did you subdomain search? Was it a brute force / dict search?

<comment><USER26> Shameless self-plug: You can use Fierce! A DNS reconnaissance tool - [https://github.com/mschwager/fierce](https://github.com/mschwager/fierce)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> In at least two other companies I've worked at we also use query params to enable debug information on live production sites. At one of those companies the only requirement was that you be on a corporate ip address but it actually still works if you're on our guest wifi.

</comment><comment><USER4> Good catch! Also studied Google's 404 pages. Seems like they have unified all but a few of them. One of them I found was vulnerable to old utf-7 injection (specified customizable page title before character encoding) and another was vulnerable to XSS. Got a bounty for the XSS one, the utf-7 one targeted too old browsers, out of scope for the program (I do wonder how many IE6 users Google sees).

<comment> joatmon-snoo It's a very low percentage, somewhere in the low single digits (if not an even lower order of magnitude). Still high enough for it to be worth paying engineers to maintain the backwards compatibility :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Offtopic: What's with the hyper narrow width on this page? Looks like this on a 1440p monitor (ubuntu, chrome) [http://i.imgur.com/m9YWcNj.png](http://i.imgur.com/m9YWcNj.png)

<comment><USER28> I prefer narrow columns for reading personally. Snap the article window to the side and scale it down for maximum enjoyment.

<comment><USER29> You can make any site have a narrow column like that - the site should give those of us who prefer wider text a way to get that too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Such a refreshing story after countless of security researchers get threatened or sued when they report security vulnerabilities to the company that should have thanked them instead.

<comment><USER31> Haven't read one of those in years. Did one come by on HN recently?

<comment><USER32> This one comes to mind: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14166966](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14166966)

> Raneri questioned my motivation and I said that I want to give the vendor > ample time to resolve the issue and then I want to publish academically. He > was very threatened by this and made thinly veiled threats that the FBI or > other institutions would "protect him". Then he continued with statements > including "we want to hire you but you must sign this NDA first." He also > recommended that I only make disclosure through FINRA, SDI, NCTFA and other > private fraud threat sharing organizations for financial institutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I found a bug in Go which turned into this CVE

[https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2015-8618/](https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2015-8618/)

I applied for a bug bounty, but alas was turned down as Go isn't a Google service and it wasn't in scope for the Patch Reward Program.

I did get into the hall of fame though!

</comment><comment><USER34> Here's a link to the Google Security Rewards Program

[https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/programs- home/](https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/programs-home/)

</comment><comment><USER35> As a Xoogler who misses the debug stack, this was some fun nostalgia. Good catch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Can you tell what SFFE means? GFE is the Google Front End but I can't find much about SFFE.

<comment><USER36> Would be very interesting to know what SFFE means ;)

<comment><USER37> Static File Front-End?

<comment><USER38> The hostname is static.corp and the service is static-on-bigtable, so...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Am I the only person who had to enlarge the page to read the article? Nice catch though.

</comment><comment><USER40> thefacebook.com redirected to facebook.com/intern/vod up until last week.

</comment><comment><USER41> "forgot"

<comment><USER42> What do you think the motivation would be to intentionally "forget"? To save money? If that's the motivation why not pay the reporter $500 instead of $5000 for a small info leak. It's illogical that they would intentionally "forget" then pay such a high bounty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm surprised that anyone at the big Corp actually bothered to even reply to this guy reporting the bug much less actually give him a bounty!

<comment><USER44> Where is this resentment and skepticism coming from? The facts say otherwise. Google is known to be receptive to bounties and payout.

<comment><USER45> This story from yesterday has raised some resentment about google's support:

A startup's Firebase bill suddenly increased from $25 to $1750 per month [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14356409)

<comment> joatmon-snoo Their customer/enterprise support is notoriously sketchy, at least from the outside (a la HN) looking in.

That's not the same at all as their bug bounty program, which is generally one of the best out there.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Email Marketing During Post-Covid-19 Times. Underrated? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@s_82154/email-marketing-during-post-covid-19-times-underrated-c09a2cfbfab7 <comment><AUTHOR> There is more about business. Actually they still use email marketing campaigns as one of the elements talks with clients. TikTok also helps to communicate with this, and if we combine it we will get a new way for cooporation.

</comment><comment><USER2> Wait, I thought we were back to the "email is dead" part of the cycle now everyone's excited about TikTok.</comment>


Dad Took Sons to Syria to Show Them the Difference Between War and Video Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.ryot.org/man-took-sons-syria-see-real-war-end-obsession-violent-video-games/783645

<comment><USER2> I like... good for this dad. I have three kids and while I won't be traveling to Syria anytime soon, it's nice to see positive reinforcement of non-violence today.

Most parents simply turn their children loose with whatever device and hope for the best. Having worked for many years in IT security and knowing what's out there, any Internet-connected device the kids use must be used within the presence of an adult at all times. No mobile phones or connected devices in their bedrooms -- ever. When they leave home, they can have them, but until then, I err on the side of caution.</comment>


Ask HN: Are we need a new distributed file system - <AUTHOR>

i was have a project and this projects needs a reliable, fast, distributed file system for storing/accessing big files. (not posix compliant)
So i start to search for already invented wheels, and i found some solutions (HDFS, GlusterFS, ExtremeFS, etc.) but they have a problems like hard to configuration or hard to adding new node or getting slowing when you reach some node number even SPF and/or data loss.
And all file systems needs a effort for customisation using for web (they don't have  tunable replication count for file properties and hitting traffic)
finally i convinced my self, we need a new distributed file system which covered all these needs (specially using for web projects, no SPF, minumum configuration, tunable replication, etc.)
but right now i have doubt about it, are we really need a new DFS? <comment><USER2> There are definite holes in what can be done right now. Some projects give you all of the raw tools but none of the automatic management you need to keep something running. Others scale poorly in terms of human costs when it comes time to add new machines.

If you agree, then throw money at me and I'll build one for you. No, I'm not joking. Contact info is in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, i agree and if had $1000000, i should spend for that but i haven't.

<comment><USER2> That's a good sum. You don't have to pay me all at once.

<comment><AUTHOR> if someone do that properly i guess they will be rich.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Scientists Edge Closer To Lab Test For Chronic Fatigue Syndrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/07/31/540565526/scientists-edge-closer-to-elusive-lab-test-for-chronic-fatigue-syndrome <comment><USER2> I looked at the paper and the data is kind of strange. Looking at figure 2, there are a bunch of cytokines that have a nice linear progression with increasing levels corresponding to increasing severity of disease. This seems like solid evidence that more cytokine = bad.

But if you compare with the controls, mild cases of ME/CFS have _less_ than the control, moderate cases have the same as controls, and severe cases have more. This kind of torpedoes any simple explanation of what's going on. The authors discuss this in a kind of hand-wavy way that maybe ME/CFS causes some down-regulation to start with and then the increasing trend is on top of that.

So, I'm not sure what to make of this. It seems useless as a test at this point: "You have totally normal cytokine levels, indicating that you're either healthy or have moderate ME/CFS."

<comment><USER3> The thing that currently spazs me out is the Simpson Paradox (Yule–Simpson effect)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

In short, if your population has two (or more) diseases with similar enough symptoms that they are grouped together, statistical analysis can and does totally fail. And your experiment will produce garbage.

So what if Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is really caused by a couple of different things, but with converging symptomology. You have a real catch 22 situation. Can't identify the cause of the disease without a consistent experimental group. Can't select a consistent experimental group without a functional test.

<comment><USER2> That's a very good point. The paper suggests that "severity may be a key variable for subgrouping ME/CFS." So it's possible that there are three different ME/CFS diseases that can be distinguished by cytokine levels. Hopefully once these are separated, statistical analysis will succeed and medical progress would follow.

In the bigger picture, you have to wonder how many things that we currently categorize as one disease are really many different diseases. (Like how in the 1800s, people would die of "a fever" but we now know there are many different diseases causing fevers.) It's kind of a cliche now that cancer is not a single disease. I expect conditions such as autism and schizophrenia will fragment once the right tests are available. What else?

<comment><USER3> > how many things that we currently categorize as one disease are really many > different diseases.

Had a GI doctor tell me he thinks there are 'lots' of gastrointestinal syndromes that medicine has no way to identify. Also have read an epidemiologist years ago that wrote there are probably a lot more infectious diseases out there. Some of which may have serious long term complications.

<comment><USER4> Fortunately we have a tool to help on both fronts: metegenomic sequencing. It's only just starting to be used in clinical settings in a non-retrospective way, but many groups are interested in how the gut microbiome (or changes of) can impact the etiology of GI disease. Several pharma startups are looking at therapies for GI disease that rely on changing the gut microbiome, either directly via introduction of new flora (fecal transplant or introduction of tailored microbial cocktails), or via small molecules that can shape the taxonomic distribution. Microbial cultures introduced to the GI tract tend to either die off entirely, or become dominant. It's a bit of an unsolved puzzle why the trend isn't toward plurality. The microbial therapies for _C. diff_. are one example.

Beyond GI disease there's also indication that the gut microbiome has psychological impact, and metabolic impact. There's a lot we don't know.

Metagenomic sequencing can disentangle the various organisms present in a sample and report all of the taxa present, but the results are only as good/complete as the database used, and unknowns can be a significant slice of the pie.

When our group does deep-enough sequencing and _de novo_ viral genome assembly, we often have enough contigs beyond our organism of interest to assemble genomes for other viruses, and sometimes they are novel. Yes, there are more infectious diseases out there.

A Chinese team exploring the viruses of invertebrates found nearly 1,500 new viruses [1]. That one study expanded the list of known viruses by a significant number, we're talking double-digit percentage change. Many more viruses will be found, and some of them will be pathogenic.

In the (hopefully) near future it will be reasonable (if not yet cost effective) to use tools like high-throughput sequencing to look at everything in a sample, rather than ordering specific assays for individual pathogens. It's a long road until sequencing will be part of the standard of care, but we're in a golden age of biomedical exploration, enabled by sequencing and new molecular methods.

1\. [http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v540/n7634/full/nature2...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v540/n7634/full/nature20167.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If someone comes to you with a whole lot of pain and loss of function, ignoring it and thinking it's just in their head/they just need to toughen up and get over it because nothing showed up in thier blood reports is something that is almost ubiquitous in the medical field today. I have a connective tissue disorder that was ignored for years because nothing showed up in my blood report and I looked healthy. There is a reason why people are dysfunctional and in pain and once I got a diagnosis from a very highly respected geneticist, every doctor believes you and then they start helping. Otherwise, many just brush you off or worse, perform a surgery and when you keep coming back due to little change in symptoms you get brushed off so you find another doctor, in their minds they successfully treated you and the same cycle continues until you find a doctor who listens and then the treatment essentially starts.

Glad to see CFS sufferers get some validation as they are ignored plenty of times, especially women sufferers.

Note: I would say 40% of my doctors (I've seen over 50) were not like this and about 20% were over the top amazing. Acccesible through phone or email anytime, personally call you after appointments and intermittently to check up, personally call other doctors to explain issues and follow up treatments, extra long appointments.

Basic message: if someone is in pain/unhealthy there is a reason. Rarely it is psychological but that doesn't mean they should not receive adequate treatment and that doesn't mean you place them in that category unless you rule out plenty of other possibilities

<comment><USER6> > Rarely it is psychological

"Medically unexplained physical symptoms (MUPS) are physical symptoms for which no relevant organic pathology can be found. MUPS are very common, comprising up to half of all consultations in primary care and up to one third of those in hospital outpatient clinics.1 Some studies indicate higher prevalence; a landmark study of medical outpatients in North America with new complaints of common symptoms such as chest pain, dyspnoea, dizziness, and headache, found that an organic cause was demonstrated in only 16% of cases.

...Although MUPS are a major clinical problem and widely regarded as being difficult to manage,4 sophisticated approaches to management or even recognition of the problem are unusual, especially in hospital medicine." [1]

I do realize that a case being marked as MUPS is not _proven_ to be psychosomatic (psychological). Yet if even a small amount of MUPS cases _are_ correctly diagnosed, there'd probably be enough of them to surpass the term "rare".

Yes, ideally we would run every possible test on any patient that walks in with a stomachache. But there are limits to our economy and to doctors' time. It's a complex problem.

[1] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2564157/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2564157/)

<comment><USER5> The ailments you describe though can certainly be debilitating but require no underlying diagnosis. Me and my mother have horrible migraines, no one knows why but it doesn't matter because I was prescribed a medicine, didn't work. I was prescribed a second one and it worked and it is frustrating and it sucks but quality of life is the same.

For all those ailments, we can treat stomach aches, dizziness, headaches. But when one day you're relatively healthy and 3 months later you can't walk then you NEED a diagnosis. Its like when you get stomach aches vs stomach aches plus throwing up for 99% of the food you eat or bleeding stools and frequent constipation then you get a diagnosis to figure out what is going on, usually a colonoscopy/MRI for IBS or UC.

For most things we don't need a proper diagnosis. A ligament tear grade 1,2,3 can be treated without any radiographs. Often similar conditions can be treated with the same exact splint or therapy. There is no need to further diagnose if quality of life can be the same with less than 6 months of treatment and medications.

But when you can't work or do normal daily life functions al of a sudden, you can't just give up and say too bad. Unfortunately if I had Medicaid that is exactly what would have happened. Doctor classifies it under a broad diagnosis requiring little tests and you're screwed for life. Since I had ppo from work, I went to a bunch of doctors until I got a clear obvious diagnosis. Now that I have a diagnosis I can improve.

Also, if problems aren't certain as they are chronic, widespread or hard to diagnose you see certain specialists who are trained to diagnose. You don't see a general physician

<comment><USER7> > Also, if problems aren't certain as they are chronic, widespread or hard to > diagnose you see certain specialists who are trained to diagnose. You don't > see a general physician

This is actually (imo) one of the largest failings in the UK's various health systems -- Diagnosticians as you have them in the US, do not exist. The entire system relies on GPs keeping up to date on various diseases and symptoms. This means that a lot of the time diseases that typically present with vague symptoms, like cancer, can go undiagnosed for years.

<comment><USER8> We have diagnosticians? This is my first time hearing of them so they must be pretty rare.

<comment><USER9> Would have been nice when one of my family members was in the hospital for 6 months. Maybe he was talking about Dr. House?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article is here: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1710519114.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/07/25/1710519114.full.pdf)

It's worth noting that their false discovery rate was not study-wide, but rather group-wide. As they state at the very end of the paper, " _FDR control was performed separately by group (e.g., severity level) to allow for group differences in the proportions of truly null hypotheses_ ". So, if you try to look at all significant P-values, after adjustment, you'll find that for that purpose, the P-value significance is going to be inflated.

<comment><USER11> It's also worth noting that there is no clear causal relationship. There is a strong and well-established association between depression and inflammatory biomarkers, but we have very little idea of whether depression increases the risk of inflammatory illness or vice-versa.

[http://www.mdedge.com/currentpsychiatry/article/76288/depres...](http://www.mdedge.com/currentpsychiatry/article/76288/depression/depression- and-inflammation-examining-link)

<comment><USER12> The research I'm familiar with (and teach) suggests you see associations prospectively in both directions, but no clear evidence of causality (although I've grown skeptical of causality as a concept).

This PNAS paper is nice to see, although as some are pointing out, there's a bit of p-hacking probably going on.

My sense is that certain research topics are kind of ground zero in this misled, outdated mind-body war. So you see people trying to demonstrate something along the lines of "see here, there's a biological basis to this, so patients aren't just inventing this," as if the psychosomatic conceptualization of the problem was ever just "inventing it," and as if people with psychogenic psychosomatic problems can't mimic the same things in their subjective reports (what happens when you do have this cytokine screen, and you still have people who look normal on that?)

As you're alluding to here, the problem is that even if you do find inflammation markers it's difficult to tell if this is due to stress in a broad sense, and how these markers relate to perceptions of stress across a broad range of individuals.

Just to take an example: how do these markers look in psychiatric patients who don't report CFS symptoms? I don't mean to suggest that these individuals have psychiatric problems, but it's unclear to me from this study what is going on with these inflammatory markers.

Let's say these cytokines do cause increased pain and fatigue experience. Do CFS patients have a stronger relationship between those inflammatory markers and experienced pain? If so, what does that mean?

The paper itself is more appropriate in tone than the NPR article, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER13> I am at the half of this long thread, comments are incredibly good and interesting --even for HN-- but yours seems to me outstanding. Thanks for taking the time to write it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are an awful lot of online discussion groups for various medical problems. It is not uncommon for members to share new research in hopes of better understanding their own condition. In some cases, they are pursuing alternative remedies because conventional treatment and proven science are failing them so badly. Getting solid information about what is likely actually happening in their own body can be empowering.

It isn't the sort of thing most policy makers or business makers want to hear. People in such positions tend to be incredibly controlling and actively against the idea of empowering patients to take better care of themselves through better understanding of their condition. But it is actually a low cost, effective way to get better quality of life in the face of coping with a chronic, likely incurable, condition.

Written in reply to this, which is now dead, so I cant post it there: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14896446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14896446)

</comment><comment><USER15> There seems to be a desire evident in the commentary on this topic to categorise CFS as either completely psychological, or completely physiological.

My own experience, having had the condition for much of the past 10 years, and having (after many years of frustration) found treatment methods that have enabled me to achieve almost full recovery, is that it is very much _both_ physiological and psychological, and that only by treating the mind and the body together can full recovery be achieved.

Whilst many people will want to read this study as evidence that CFS is fundamentally physiological in nature, it doesn't do anything to dismiss the role of psychology as a causal or perpetuating factor. It is equivalent to using a lab test indicating (for example) imbalances of serotonin as evidence of depression, without taking into account the many years of stress and trauma that may have led up to the issue manifesting as a physiological (and debilitating psychological) condition.

Whilst I have no doubt there is scope to develop treatments that can ease CFS sufferers' physiological symptoms, and I hope research findings like this can help to bring about these kinds of breakthroughs, I have no expectation that a comprehensive remedy for CFS can be found that doesn't include profound psychological healing as a key part of the treatment.

It also occurs to me that a major reason why this condition continues to evade explanation and treatment by mainstream medicine, is that the profession is unaccustomed to looking at things as both psychological and physiological in nature, and that it will take a change in mindset on this to pave the way to discovering effective treatments for CFS and other such "mysterious" conditions.

<comment><USER16> My experience, having fully recovered, is similar, and it fits with what we know about how the brain works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> As someone who has suffered from CFS I am so happy to see it becoming more recognized and understood. You see, the frustrating part of having an illness like this is it is not well known enough for people to really understand it, but it has major impacts on your life. I can't tell you how utterly angring it is to be sitting in front of my computer and I know that if I just finish this school paper that isn't anything that hard, I can go to that social event, but I just am so tired I can't do it.

<comment><USER18> As someone whose symptoms fits the bill, how did you get diagnosed and how did you get it under control?

<comment><USER19> Be careful, those symptoms are also for a lot of other things including depression and burnout which are far more common amongst programmers.

Do get diagnosed and get a second opinion, but it might or might not be CFS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I can only hope/wish for some advancement in CFS/ME.. Having a loved one who has it makes you see how hopeless many people have been for so long and how little the healthcare system has been able to help. Really hope to see change soon.

<comment><USER16> Yes, at the moment doctors aren't really much help. However there are various things you can do yourself as a CFS patient to improve things, and possibly recover.

I suffered from CFS myself and recovered about 17 years ago (with no relapses since), so it is possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some commentary on this study by experts:

[http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to- cytokin...](http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-cytokines- for-chronic-fatigue-syndrome/)

In summary:

\- it's quite overhyped.

\- we already knew that TGF-B was elevated in patients.

\- as TGF-B wasn't increased after exercise, that puts into question how relevant it is as a biomarker, as symptoms tend to increase after exercise.

\- it doesn't give any indication as to whether the illness is organic or psychological, as both depression and lack of sleep cause inflammation.

</comment><comment><USER21> Does anyone have more information on this topic? I am never sure if this is snake oil market or not.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm not sure if it's me or the article, but something about reading it just made me really tired. More so than, say, Javascript fatigue. Which is interesting, because usually that's my limit.

</comment><comment><USER23> If you're feeling fatigued, try Calcium and Magnesium supplements. They're cheap and safe and you might simply have a lack of minerals that doesn't show up in blood tests. That's what it was for me anyway. From chronic fatigue to normal life - it feels like I took 15 years off. Calcium relieves muscle pains, Magnesium improves sleep and reduces stress. They can also have a laxative effect.

</comment><comment><USER24> Surprised no one has mentioned a Keto diet yet as a potential remedy for CFS. One of the biggest benefits of Keto is its anti-inflammatory effects.

A quick Google search brings up at least a few research papers showing that Ketogenic diets have been seen to suppress the expression of inflammatory cytokines.

<comment><USER25> Just saw your other carbs comment, I agree. I've seen first hand the great improvements with Keto, but it's a very difficult diet to get into with the subsidies carb-heavy foods receive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here is why CFS research is so difficult:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14896929](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14896929)

</comment><comment><USER26> _" Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to work? Medicine."_ \- Tim Minchin, _Storm_ , 2008.

Should you trust an authority? That is always a personal decision. I try not to, but I will listen to someone with credentials and give weight to their knowledge and experience. Online randoms describing an "alternative" are not challenging authority or bypassing it: no matter how they try to frame it, they are trying on the mantle of authority itself, but with no foundation.

Your assertion that "policy makers" are systematically withholding "solid information about your body" is paranoid nonsense.

If you want to go study the systems of your body, all the world's medical information is publicly available. There's a reason a medical degree takes seven years or more, however: the body of knowledge is vast and interconnected. It's not withheld, it's just a much greater challenge than many of us are willing to undertake.

Online forums may be a source of good advice and anecdotal suggestions, but they also give false hope to the desperate, and thereby open the window to perpetuating snake oil and quackery and delusional magical thinking. At their worst, this amounts to conducting uncontrolled medical experiments on other human beings who are only willing because they are desperate - and that's close to evil in my book.

<comment><USER15> > "Do you know what they call 'alternative medicine' that's been proved to > work? Medicine." \- Tim Minchin, Storm, 2008

I've been a big fan of Tim Minchin's, and thanks to living in one of the cities where he built much of his early fame, I've seen and enjoyed much of his work.

But I feel like a form of Godwin's Law should apply to this quote.

It's been done to death, it contributes nothing of value to the discussions in which it is cited, it minimises and trivialises the horrible predicament of people (like myself) who experience illnesses that mainstream medicine can't/won't recognise or treat, and serves only to promote a sense of smugness among people who think they have mainstream medical science on their side.

The point that people sharing this quote don't understand is this: For mainstream medical science to 'prove' something to work, it requires huge commercial and/or political incentives to do the research. If a pharmaceutical company or research institution can't reasonably expect a study to result in the development of a drug that can yield hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, it doesn't get done. That leads to a vast gap between what has been "proved to work" and what can actually work for people who take matters into their own hands, as I've done very successfully.

It's notable that all the comments here seeking to refute Mz's comment are doing so by exaggerating or outright misquoting what she said.

<comment><USER26> On the contrary, I shared this quote having full knowledge of the cost and complexity and political barriers, having both studied the industry academically and being personally close to medical practitioners engaged in the research and implementation of new treatments.

I think all suggestion of "alternative remedies" is dangerous, since it opens the door to those preying on desperation to sell false hope. I have an active dislike of the phrase, because it fails to capture just how harmful they can be, and how rarely they are actual remedies. "Unproven interventions" might be a better name.

More precisely, they also serve to mask those treatments deserving of more research that might actually have some potential, because such signal is lost in the torrential noise of snake oil and quackery.

I join your criticism of the externalities in the US market-led system that incentivise research into drugs of symptomatic relief rather than cures.

Nevertheless I believe that is a short-term systemic malfunction, and in any event is not a severe problem elsewhere where drug pricing is regulated. Large amounts of money and time are routinely allocated around the world for fundamental research into many difficult and poorly understood conditions. Pointing out that medicine can't treat everything is fine, because if it could we wouldn't need more research. But claiming the research doesn't get done, that's simply untrue.

<comment><USER15> _I think all suggestion of "alternative remedies" is dangerous, since it opens the door to those preying on desperation to sell false hope._

I'm with you on practitioners who charge thousands of dollars offering to cure terminal cancer with carrot juice and coffee enemas. But this is a very small segment of the industry, and from what I've seen, anyone who does that for any amount of time gets regulated or shamed out of business.

Most natural health practice is nothing of that sort. It's things like diet/nutrition, exercise, stress/trauma therapy; all things that have significant evidence of being beneficial.

All the treatments I've tried in my journey to get well fit into this category: low-risk treatments for non-life-threatening conditions, that just support the mind and body to heal and strengthen naturally over the long term. I've been doing it for nearly 10 years and in that time my life has utterly transformed.

Do you have any objection to this that doesn't rely on dismissing every health provider without a medical degree as a dangerous charlatan?

<comment><USER26> Nutrition. Exercise. Stress management. I think these are mainstream health practices.

There are practitioners with other qualifications. Although I've met physios with some peculiar ideas that subsequently turned out to be have a very high proportion of adverse effects (e.g. spinal adjustments).

My message is consistent, I hope: try what you will, but never pretend to expertise, and steer clear of recommending or suggesting anything to anyone, because at that moment one becomes a snake-oil peddler and are risking harm to someone else. Recognise that even medical practitioners are taught not to treat themselves or family because you cannot, _cannot_ be objective about it.

I do not express an opinion on your personal journey, except to say that despite not knowing you from Adam it's still gladdening to learn that you are feeling better.

<comment><USER14> _Nutrition. Exercise. Stress management. I think these are mainstream health practices._

If you have a very serious medical condition, like cancer, and you talk to a doctor about things like taking vitamins, most of them will pooh-pooh it as if any impact it has is merely a placebo effect. Using nutrition, exercise and stress management as part of your defense in the face of something that doctors don't really know how to treat gets dismissed and attacked and basically lumped in with snake oil. In fact, you are basically doing this yourself with your wild misquotes of people here in service of some agenda that has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to comprehend anything being said here, as best I can tell.

<comment><USER26> I am not surprised that you dislike that I have rebutted your remarks. Nevertheless, when I quote you, it is practically cut-and-paste.

Mz, I think your comments in particular in this thread have been worthy of such strongly worded reprimand because they could lead others to attempt self- treatment and to disregard medical advice.

The fact that you've done so by misrepresenting the character, motives, competence and behaviour of practitioners is something I take further umbrage at.

<comment><USER14> When you misquote me and then wildly twist my meaning, with zero intent whatsoever to actually have any respect for me or understand anything I am saying, yes, you very selectively cut and paste in order to try to make it say whatever meaning you are attempting to force upon my words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I am an MD, born in Russia, but did medical school here in the United States. All the same, people constantly ask about the Russian medicine, and so I was recently asked if we have fibromyalgia in Russia. My answer was that I don't know about fibromyalgia. But what I know is that half of the psychotropic drugs that people are prescribed in this country we only give to political prisoners in Russia.

<comment><USER28> How do you know this? Has the Russian government a public list of psychotropic drugs it uses on its political prisoners?

<comment><USER27> Right, Russian government publishes a list of psychotropic substances that are given to political prisoners. Jeez, people, it's a joke. The joke is a commentary about American proclivity to eat psychotropic meds like vitamins.

<comment><USER28> I was under the impression that you seriously thought you knew which drugs the Russian government uses on its prisoners and was making a tongue-in-cheek remark in response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> CFS is most likely "Candidasis". An overgrowth of candida bacteria/yeast in the gut.

This is very well known, and easily and cost effectively treatable.

Consistent overconsumption of processed sugars leads to candida overgrowth. The body addresses this naturally through inflamation. Prolonged inflamation yields depression symptoms, and a host of other things.

Google: candida

You can recover from this mostly in one night for $5 and fully in about 2 weeks for $30.

Ultimately these Stanford guys will try to design and patent an anti- inflammitory and it will cost you alot and not solve the problem. Address the source of inflammation.

Im surprised no one in this thread knows this and debate has wandered into little to no value.

If you are suffering from this, please please research candidasis or candida cleanse.

<comment><USER30> The trouble with this kind of comment is that I can find scores of people who say that CFS (and fibromyalgia) is most likely a misdiagnosed hypothyroidism, treatable with standard T3/T4. Lots of people say "it's obviously <this thing> treatable in <this cheap way>" for some value of <this thing>, and that makes them all less credible.</comment></comment>


A startup provides the best way ever to find your work buddies - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesshackers.com/2007/07/25/a-startup-provides-the-best-way-ever-to-find-your-work-buddies/

<comment><USER2> This is getting out of hand.

People are reaching into the web 2.0 hat, drawing out some features or another niche they can build a "social networking site" around.</comment>