GitHub has completed its acquisition of NPM - <AUTHOR> https://github.blog/2020-04-15-npm-has-joined-github/ <comment><USER2> For those who were having deja vu, this is a notification that GitHub completed its acquisition of NPM.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, and here is the accompanying HN discussion when they first announced their intent

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22594549](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22594549)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is a good thing. When they were independent, NPM was a disaster area. The company spent 100% of its time chasing down social issues and insanity in the community and never figured out how to make money, or at least, it took them FOREVER to figure that out.

Years ago, they introduced "orgs" which they sat there and explained to me with slides and pictures and concepts and business bullshit for an hour. I did not understand a thing they'd said. Finally, they were like "We're selling private namespace in the npm registry for blessed packages for groups or businesses." I understood that. If they'd just said that up front....

They had some great people, some very smart folks like CJ, but they completely biffed every business decision they ever made, and when you'd go in and talk to the leadership, they were always acting as if they had some sort of PTSD from the community. I mean, people were putting spam packages in NPM just to get SEO on some outside webpage through the default NPM package webpages. People were squatting and stealing package names. Leftpad... the community management here is nightmarishly hard, and I was never convinced they'd ever make money on it. MS doesn't NEED to make money on it. They can just pump in cash and have a brilliant tool for reaching UX developers around the world, regardless of whether they use Windows or not.

I feel like the GitHub group at Microsoft is now some sort of orphanage for mistreated developer tool startups. GitHub had similar management issues: they refused to build enterprise features at all for years unless they were useful to regular GitHub.com. And there were other people issues at the top for years. Chris seemed more interested in working with the Obama administration on digital learning initiatives than with running GitHub, for example.

<comment><USER5> > I mean, people were putting spam packages in NPM just to get SEO on some > outside webpage through the default NPM package webpages. People were > squatting and stealing package names. Leftpad... the community management > here is nightmarishly hard

It's not NPM's fault (well, other than wrt. the leftpad thing), it's all about the "community". The Javascript open source community is a dumpster fire.

<comment><USER6> Oh please... I've solved more customer needs and business value from this "dumpster fire" than I have with other "real languages" I've worked with in my career. Give it some credit.

<comment><USER7> What does your productivity in js have to do with js having a terrible community?

<comment><USER8> Their productivity is directly related the to vast ecosystem of packages available. Those packages were written and maintained by the community. They are rebutting the assertion that this community is bad. It can't be that bad if they're helping millions of developers solve real problems around the world.

<comment><USER7> People can be ptsd inducingly toxic and still deliver quality code. These things aren't related

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Someone asked "Would this have made sense for a company like GitLab if they didn't have the corporate backing of something like MS?" and deleted their comment while I was writing the answer below:

Being the canonical registry for a language (Rubygems) or technology (DockerHub) tends to be a huge expense.

The main expenses are cloud costs (bandwidth and storage) and security (defense and curation).

I've not seen examples of organizations turning this into a great business by itself. For example Rubygems is sponsored by RubyCentral [http://rubycentral.org/](http://rubycentral.org/) who organize the annual RubyConf and RailsConf software conferences.

Please note that running a non-canonical registry is a good business. JFrog does well with Artifactory [https://jfrog.com/artifactory/](https://jfrog.com/artifactory/) and we have the GitLab Package Registry [https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/) that includes a dependency proxy and we're working on a dependency firewall.

<comment><USER10> It's a mystery how DockerHub remains free. The network and storage costs must be massive. Docker also sold it's enterprise business, so I am not sure who is paying for all this.

<comment><USER11> If you're running a package registry, you'd be painfully unaware of your own requirements if you're using a host/cloud that you need to pay for the amount of bandwidth.

Hosting a package registry on AWS for example, unless you figure out a way of seriously reducing the amount of traffic (which seems to be against working towards making a popular registry), is suicidal because of the bandwidth costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I never quite got a warm-fuzzy feeling from npm -- the tool, the service, the company. This announcement does nothing to help, from my perspective. Is my dependency on this or that JavaScript library something that really needs to be owned by a for-profit company?

I also kind of wonder what is the real value of a centralized repository versus just directly referencing git repos. I haven't used this gpk[0] project yet, but it looks like an interesting alternative, on paper.

[0]: [https://github.com/braydonf/gpk](https://github.com/braydonf/gpk)

<comment><USER13> Immutability and semver are the reasons

<comment><USER12> Can't we get all that directly from git repos and signed tags?

<comment><USER14> People can take down their git repos, or remove branches/commits/tags.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This brought up in my mind the thought that while Deno is still WIP (for example, packaging of Rust plugins is not yet resolved) and the ecosystem around it barely exists it was designed to have no dependency on 3rd party tools like npm and yarn.

<comment><USER16> It also provides none of the benefits of npm/yarn. In my understanding it's as if every package you used pinned all of their deps.

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't you just include a file by it's minor version like this:

      import * as E from 'https://firstname.lastname@example.com/lib/Either.js';

Whenever you `--reload` you'll get the latest 2.5.x release, no?

This should work out recursively for all the deps if they follow the same pattern, no?

<comment><USER17> This seems to be what is suggested as per [https://dev.to/pika/introducing- pika-cdn-deno-p8b](https://dev.to/pika/introducing-pika-cdn-deno-p8b) that was posted by somebody else.

<comment><USER16> I wasn't aware of the semver URL scheme, but it just brings more problems.

At this point they've just replaced `npm` with `pika` and expect people to think it's an improvement to not have a centralized file containing package dependencies and the last resolved versions of packages. Criticisms:

1\. Updating dependencies becomes much more of a diff (every file that uses it needs to be updated). The alternative solution to this is creating a single `packages.ts` file that imports all the external deps, and all your modules import from there. Which just `npm` with more steps.

2\. No lock file. I saw them present this at tsConf and I believe the original idea was that this wasn't needed because the URLs are the lock, but as you point out in practice people use URL's that aren't unique identifiers. This means no way to guarantee that all developers or even users of the project have the same dependency state. This will be a massive pain for debugging and maintaining packages. (Edit: see below, you can lock deps (unclear exactly how) - but only if you pay them!)

Looking at the Pika home page, they tell me I can build and release without a bundler.... so you're telling me that they expect people to put out production software that downloads it's dependencies at runtime and thus:

\- Is unstable because if they use the semver-URL scheme you mentioned and a patch version comes out that breaks the website, all users are instantly broken instead of the internal build being broken.

\- Is unstable because if a dependency/host goes offline, all users are broken instead of an internal build being broken (think leftpad but much worse as your users are instantly impacted, likely before you even know about it)

\- Is insecure because if a host is malicious, they can choose to supply different packages for a small subset of the requests, such as those coming from govt. requests against political targets, hosted build machines, etc. and nobody will have any way of knowing because there's no lock file/integrity hashes.

I further see on the Pika CDN page that they share packages _across websites_. This is seems to be a massive security flaw, as websites are able to modify these packages and now those modifications will apply to all websites using the package. It's prototype pollution-as a-feature!

Oh, and at the bottom of the page:

> Want to get more out of Pika CDN? The CDN will always be free, but you can > also access paid, production features like:

> Granular Semver Matching & Version Pinning

> ...

So base features that are the core of working with npm/yarn/any modern package manager are a paid feature in Pika.

I'll pass.

<comment><USER15> That's mostly unintended FUD (but still FUD) or problems that can be worked around:

<< \- Is unstable because if a dependency/host goes offline, all users are broken instead of an internal build being broken (think leftpad but much worse as your users are instantly impacted, likely before you even know about it) >>

So you don't recall Leftpad?

<< \- Is insecure because if a host is malicious, they can choose to supply different packages for a small subset of the requests, such as those coming from govt. requests against political targets, hosted build machines, etc. and nobody will have any way of knowing because there's no lock file/integrity hashes. >>

Are you kidding me?

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-spots-malicious- npm-...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-spots-malicious-npm-package- stealing-data-from-unix-systems/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Out of curiosity, what benefits does Microsoft/GitHub get from owning a package registry? I'd be fascinated to learn more about their long-term strategy here.

<comment><USER19> Others have commented on why the acquisition makes strategic sense from a technological perspective, but I think it's also important to consider how it makes strategic sense from a psychological perspective. For a long time, devs loved bagging on Microsoft. I once saw some Microsoft guys demo something cool at a conference, and they had to basically apologize that they were from Microsoft, because dev sentiment toward the organization was so negative, even though they were doing cool stuff.

The acquisition of GitHub was absolutely intended to capture a tool/ecosystem that developers liked using and benefit from that positive sentiment. That's why Microsoft has been so cautious about branding GitHub as a Microsoft property out the gate. It's trying to ease devs into the idea that the company is something devs can like, and I wouldn't be surprised if this psychological strategy is at work with the npm acquisition, too.

<comment><USER20> > capture a tool/ecosystem that developers liked using and benefit from that > positive sentiment

So...appeal to devs, something something, money??

I really like how MS are improving our tools and embracing open source, I really do. But I've never quite understood how the return on investment in these things justify the cost. I just struggle to the an obv big picture here.

I.e. is it incorrect to think of the GH acquisition as mostly an azure marketing expense?

<comment><USER8> I have a limited understanding of this but I think the goal is to have a complete developer ecosystem. When most software was deployed to Windows desktops, they owned the developer environment - Visual Studio.

Now most software is written and deployed on the cloud, but not their cloud. But they could make the dev experience compelling and easy - write your code in VS Code, which automaticallgy integrates with Github. Github is mostly free until you're a large company so why not use it. Of course you need to run CI and Github makes that easy so go ahead and add a single file to configure that.

Now you have a build artifact ready to deploy on github. Would you like to click a single button and have that deployed to Azure? They'll also throw in monitoring if you do it. Azure bills is the pot of gold at the end of the developer experience rainbow.

But this is just speculation. I don't understand business very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Curious world we live in, where the infrastructure behind so many OSS projects can simply be _acquired_.

What's preventing the dream of decentralization from taking off? We have the technology.

<comment><USER22> Money prevents it. It takes money to host things and pay people to work on infrastructure. While people often volunteer to contribute to OSS products because they like or use them, not many are willing to write infrastructure that can handle this kind of traffic in their spare time. Even if you can find someone to donate the time, you'd still need to fund that infra in some way. Having an infra company (say, Google donates a bunch of GCP credits) to cover the hosting costs still puts the project at risk if the host company decides to stop funding.

<comment><USER23> Whatever happened to people hosting things in an old computer in their basement? That used to be a more popular thing back in the days before the cloud came about and before we had these stable broadband connections. Obviously an infra like npm couldn't deliver with such a setup but at scale, who knows

<comment><USER24> Was that ever really a thing though? When I dig through my memory (and READMEs on old hard drives) I see a lot of .edu addresses. Seems the good-old-days of the internet wasn't about hosting things on an old computer in your basement but rather hosting things on an old computer in your school's basement.

And around the time when home connectivity became good enough that people considered home hosting was also around the time Slashdot was created.

<comment><USER25> Many early dial-up ISPs offered static IPs for hosting FTP/HTTP/SMTP/MUDs etc.

<comment><USER26> Or you could host with the ISP

I had a members.aol.com/benibela site or something

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Question from a new JS developer: Should I be using NPM to manage my dependencies?

I have recently started getting into JS programming. I have thus far avoided NPM, because I've been trying to use CDNs for all my external dependencies.

My thinking is that it saves me bandwidth costs and potentially saves my user's bandwidth as well if they get a cache hit.

I get the downsides are that I don't control the CDN and they could go offline, but honestly I expect I am much more likely to go down from some mistake in my own deployment rather than a well known CDN being offline.

I am wondering if I am missing something though, because absolutely every JS package I read about suggests you use NPM (some also link a CDN, many don't). Should I be using NPM to manage my JS dependencies instead of using CDNs?

<comment><USER28> IIRC it turns out the cache hits from CDN'ed Javascript files ended up being fairly low and neglible, due to how many different versions there are of everything. Better just reduce the file size.

<comment><USER27> I feel like bootstrap and jquery stand a decent chance of being caches in a large enough portion of the user base.

And even ignoring my user's bandwidth, it would still save me significant bandwidth (depending on the size of my website).

I guess eventually your site might grow such that your dependencies are not a significant portion of your total download size, but I am not currently there.

<comment><USER28> Do you 'feel like' or do you actually know? It's important to make decisions based on actual data. I haven't researched it in depth, but if these asset sizes matter to you, then it is worth researching.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> dang, Microsoft going around acquiring dev tools like its a monopoly game

<comment><USER30> Same feeling. Next ecmascript might be called Microscript. :)

<comment><USER31> It's called Typescript

<comment><USER32> It's called a joke

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I don't have a good feeling about this kind of centralization.

</comment><comment><USER34> "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!" — Steve Ballmer, 2000

<comment><USER35> Too bad he didn't act on it. He was just talking...

<comment><USER36> He didn't say _which_ developers though. Arguably, Office and enterprise developers have been served fairly well even during his tenure. As long as you colored between the lines, the experience was alright.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I hope this only goes as far as being able to sign up with and link a GitHub account to NPM. Any tighter integration seems like it would be in bad faith, in terms of allowing integration with other git services/non-GH package hosting.

<comment><USER38> On the contrary, I'd vasty prefer if a package repository required the source be hosted within the same account (even if just a mirror) that is offering the package, so that they can verify the authenticity/reproducibility of anything inside.

<comment><USER39> Isn't that kind of the point of the GitHub Package Registry?

<comment><USER38> Presumably a good reason to push NPM over to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> They just made Github teams free, so I imagine npm private repos is next?

<comment><USER41> I think they've indicated that the plan is to make NPM the ultimate public JS package registry and move paid plans to GitHub Packages.

See Nat's original words about the acquisition: [https://github.blog/2020-03-16-npm-is-joining- github/](https://github.blog/2020-03-16-npm-is-joining-github/)

GitHub Teams get 2GB of free private package storage (unlimated for public packages) [https://github.com/features/packages](https://github.com/features/packages)

He did mention that they were using their enterprise customers to subsidize the cost to allow them to offer Teams for free, so maybe if they get enough enterprise customers using GitHub Packages we might see unlimited free private packages for individuals/teams. I don't see a ton of value for GitHub/MS in that situation, but maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I like how Microsoft basically just acquired a whole slew of open source tools and no one seems to notice or care.

<comment><USER43> Why should anyone? Open source has always been about freedom. MS hasn't acquired the tools to my knowledge, they've acquired popular infrastructure built around tools. Anyone can still start GutBub based on the same `git` source tomorrow if they wanted.

To be sure a lot of this may be about talent as well. They may need to be liked in the community otherwise they have a hard time hiring top talent. They are buying a community since they probably couldn't build it themselves.

<comment><USER44> Because open source has always been defined in its very definition by its definition to the for-profit software industry, which Microsoft basically invented? Because in spite of having made a turn towards open source, Microsoft once treated it like a mortal enemy, akin to cancer? Because of how other large companies like Google have smothered open source projects?

I'm personally not worried about the acquisition (I think it's a net positive for the community), but there are plenty of reasons to discuss this interaction.

<comment><USER35> Even people change, why do you find weird that companies change? >Because in spite of having made a turn towards open source, Microsoft once treated it like a mortal enemy, akin to cancer?

MS was in the business of selling operating systems and desktop software. Not only they realized that open source doesn't threaten that territory (remember year of the Linux desktop?), but they've changed the revenue model and are making much more money now from selling services than by selling software.

>Because of how other large companies like Google have smothered open source projects?

Why should we judge what one company does based on what other company does?

I am sure no company does something for "good of humanity" but to earn money. What matters is if in the process of making money, they also do good things or bad things.

Microsoft has stopped doing bad things and started doing good things. I only hope more companies will follow.

<comment><USER44> Parent was saying "why discuss this at all?" and I'm saying here are some reasons! And you're doubling down while... having the discussion. Case closed. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd say the three biggest namespaces in dev are github, npm and docker hub - will Microsoft go 3 for 3?

Docker Hub feels a bit neglected - it could be aliased to docker.pkg.github.com and that'd be a huge improvement

<comment><USER45> Docker is definitely getting acquired in the near future, and Microsoft is as good a guess as any.

<comment><USER46> Yep. IMHO if Google would want to make a move here, now would be a good time. And as the creators of Kubernetes, they have some nice incentive to try to stay relevant.

MS gobbling this one up would not be a big surprise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> NPM is joining GitHub => NPM has joined GitHub

</comment><comment><USER48> It would be nice to have free private npm repositories like the free private github repositories ...

</comment><comment><USER49> Hopefully they'll revisit the decision to allow ads in install scripts that NPM sanctioned.

</comment><comment><USER50> Npm has joined Microsoft _

<comment><USER51> Great. They deserve each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I'm curious what's the roadmap for the npm CLI tool. Any word?

</comment><comment><USER32> If you cannot beat them, buy them.

</comment><comment><USER53> Which is now owned by Microsoft? :)

</comment><comment><USER54> Next is pypi

<comment><USER55> I really hope so, there is probably a bunch of malware on there that people don't even know about when is the last time that place has been audited? I don't blame them they are probably running with limited funds etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> What does that do for overall code quality on GitHub I wonder?

<comment><USER56> Why would it have any affect on that?

<comment><USER43> Isn't npm like a dumping spot for pretty much anything javascript good, bad and ugly?

<comment><USER57> Pretty much all of the code was already on github</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Angular 2 Release Candidate - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md <comment><USER2> I realize a lot of companies flocked to Angular and it's used in a lot of places, but from the outside it seems to be fighting on two fronts.

1\. Companies currently implementing it not wanting it to change or for there to be a quick and painless migration from 1.x to 2.x. So, less change, more hand-holding. The web changed a lot though, so its change is understandable.

2\. Trendsetters and upcoming companies looking for something new fresh and solid: Framework competition from React and the like. Maybe that second group is a lot louder in certain circles, startup-y hackernews being one, but it sounds like Angular will eventually reside in the shadow of React if it stays that way for long. Google pulling the plug on things fairly commonly doesn't help with the uncertainty.

Just seems like anytime Angular comes up in conversation, React isn't far behind. This post is no exception I guess, I just can't see Google maintaining Angular if it becomes Dojo in the eyes of developers.

<comment><USER3> It is the million dollar question. If you are building a large product with an expected life of 10+ years, can you trust Angular to still be maintained?

<comment><USER4> short answer: "No".

Explanation: In js land, Long term Support means "6 months". so your best bet is to have a framework which makes migrations easy and does not introduce changes.

With angular being backed by google, there is no guarantee if angular will be maintained 4 years down the line.

PS: feel free to keep your million dollar.

<comment><USER5> > With angular being backed by google, there is

> no guarantee if angular will be maintained 4 years

> down the line.

It's interesting to see that the reason why many companies choose Angular (Google backs it) now seems one of it's biggest disadvantages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lots more work to do here, but we're pretty happy with how the core looks! For those worried about size (which has absolutely been a fair concern over the alpha/beta process) - here's a "hello world" built with Rollup and our offline template precompilation. Clocks in at 200kb min/47k gzipped, with a bit more room from optimization over the next couple of weeks... [https://ng2-compiler- test2.firebaseapp.com/](https://ng2-compiler-test2.firebaseapp.com/)

<comment><USER7> That seems a lot for:

        <html>
        <body>
        Hello world<br>
        <blink>hello child</blink>

(yes, I know it's not the same under the covers - take it as a comment on the ecosystem, not on the implementation (although it can be a comment on dead code detection too))

<comment><USER8> I see a lot of complaints about toy app size/complexity. There's definitely a judgement call to makes about app complexity when someone starts a project with a framework. I inevitably find that development in the middle/end of the project is substantially easier when using a good setup like React/Redux/etc or Angular, and changes are easier to make, whereas vanilla development is (relatively) substantially easier at the beginning of a project.

Yeah, Hello World might be expensive in size, but when you've got a substantially complex and fast app for not much more size, you start to feel the real benefits.

<comment> glass-animal But what is Angular doing with that 200k (which is minified)? It doesn't seem like I should need to pull in the whole of Angular to make a component with a template.

Granted, React is pretty big too, but other frameworks, like Riot.js, have shown that they can be much smaller. Then there's Polymer which gets smaller as web components roll out.

In the competition again native apps, web apps have to load really, really fast. Their ability to run without installation is an advantage that needs to be maximized, an on potentially slow and high-latency mobile networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Having to rewrite for our Angular 1 app for Angular 2".

Honestly, there is so little continuity that you have the option of just switching to React.

Or perhaps, just maintaining your Angular 1 app - and then assuming the 1.x fork will be carried on for a long time.

<comment><USER10> > just switching to React.

That's what I did :)

I spent a whole bunch of time learning Angular1, was in a coma for close to a year after a bad accident, wake up and find my projects are all outdated and I have to basically learn a new framework. Decided if I was going to learn a new framework it was going to be something not made by google. React was simple to learn, unlike Angular. Everything you do in angular requires you to learn the "angular way", once you can create components and understand flux react is fairly straight forward and doesn't require you to re-learn web development.

<comment><USER9> Awesome that you bounced back from a coma!

Yes - you also make a great point about React, and switching to React.

We are talking about _JavaScript_ frameworks, the keyword being JavaScript.

It is not as much of a sunk cost to switch to React because it is very _JavaScript_ compared to Angular. Given that your team already knows JavaScript (probably, maybe, hehe) - they can pick up React fast.

And now looking at Angular 2, where people are suggesting writing Dart or TypeScript over ES6 - this seems like yet another unique Angular learning curve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> After taking a look at Angular2 I definitv know that my when I need to rewrite my app with something like that:

        app.AppComponent =
        ng.core.Component({
        })
        .Class({
        });

from

        angular.component('name', {});

I will go a totally other route than upgrading. I mean wtf. the JavaScript Part of Angular 2 is horrible. Since I'm on a Scala Server I possible try to look at Scala JS and rewrite something. It's too bad that our "application" fit's the SPA scheme so good, but these frameworks changes so much over the years that it's nearly not maintainable will a small group.

<comment><USER12> No problem. People like you have to stick with the old stuff because of this mindset. I mean WTF is bugging you? It's just code you have to write in order to get the thing running. You could also complain about the empty object in the angular1 method.

<comment><USER13> > I mean WTF is bugging you?

Not the OP, but having to write four lines of code instead of one does not look that good. Less is more. Code bloat should be called out.

<comment><USER14> The code blocks written don't tell the whole story - the analog to the .Class is the controller in Angular 1, which one would have to specify a controller name or define it right in the component, therefore giving equivalent lines for the most part.

It sounds like the person is awfully resistant to TypeScript as well, as the syntax for a component in TS is just

        @Component({
        })
        class Foo {
        }

<comment><USER11> Actually I'm not resistant to TypeScript. I just don't want it. Reasons are: \- Google changes their mind so freaking often that it's simple not a good idea to follow them there. (Just look at GWT, good project however the direction is more and more confusing especially the communication is really really akward. \- Why changing to Angular 2 and TypeScript when there are way many other frameworks that are either in JavaScript or just a little bit better suited for some things? \- Why can't I upgrade in a slow path with small deprecations? (i.e. emberjs, react)

That are the most reasonable. Actually there are some others which has more something todo with our internal things and that ScalaJS < = > Scala is so good at the current stage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Angular core team member here, happy to answer questions

<comment><USER4> I hear a lot about angular and that it has gotten quite a competition from react, aurelia and vue.

I personally will never use react. but i want to know, in which situations, it would be better to use angular and in which situations it would be better to use aurelia or vue.

<comment><USER6> This really comes down to your team - try them out and see what feels good for you. React is a great library, and as an angular1 dev before joining the core team, I learned a TON from playing with React and especially Dan Abramov and Redux - most of the same patterns are immediately portable to angular2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm looking forward to trying this out. Having written Ember, Angular, and React apps now, I feel like they are all getting closer, but a lot of rough edges still exist.

Ember: interesting framework, but all too often, you would hear a team mate say "wait, why is that working, it shouldn't be?" Mixed with equal parts "logically, that SHOULD work, what am I missing?"

React: I love the component focus, and redux is pretty slick. However, the insistence on using JavaScript in lieu of helpful abstractions that clean up the code for easier maintainability, is frustrating. The whole point of JSX is syntactical sugar, but the team went with half measures. You also end up with a lot more plumbing code than the other two. Sure, I can reuse some of these components, but in truth, most of your components will be single use.

Angular 1: by far the easiest and most intuitive. Enough magic to make setup and a basic app easy, but not so much magic that you can't figure out why something is working. However, the more complex an app, the less Angular 1 serves. And you really need to use directives as a component, and follow a more react pattern, or you're going to have a bad time. Also, the dependency injection is a nice thought for simple directives, but when you're done, you'll very likely have so many dependencies being injected that unit testing becomes burdensome. And if it's burdensome, it won't be done as much as needed.

All that being said, if your app is primarily collecting data through forms, you can't beat angular. If it's highly dynamic, and you want a more native feel to your app, react is the clear winner. Ember is a neat, but I won't be using it again.

Angular 2 doesn't fix all of my complaints, but it's getting closer.

<comment><USER16> > However, the more complex an app, the less Angular 1 serves.

That's not really true.

The problem is that all three frameworks are supposed* to require the same discipline when it comes to managing state, but only React forces that discipline onto the developer.

I'm not saying React is better, but learning from React is important to be able to write maintainable applications in any framework. You don't want to have 30 services, each services managing there own little state in AngularJS for instance. Unfortunately that's usually what happens when an app grows with time.

Angular2 does seem to get rid of the dirty checking, allowing better performances. It also has a good router. But does it really bring something new in terms of view layer and state management, considering the cost ?

I like Angular1, it's one js file you drop in an HTML page, no need for nodejs, NPM, a third party language and what not. And it's mature. It's absolutely unfortunate that Angular2 basically forces developers to use Typescript. That's a huge mistake IMHO.

edited _

<comment><USER15> I'm curious, what would you consider a complex app?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm coming at this from the perspective of someone who has never used Angular 1.x or 2.x.

I guess the first thing on my mind is: can I make Angular 2 work just like React does? Is there any way to use it without making/(being allowed to make) separate HTML templates and CSS files? If not, this is a serious disadvantage. Having the view layer scattered across 3X the files (vs React) would make it very hard to follow the code in a large project.

Also, are there any real advantages over React that would be big enough for someone to consider pushing for a switch? If so, what are they?

<comment><USER18> I read something a while ago that I think really sums the key difference, is that angular and other frameworks inject javascript into html and its awkward. React injects HTML into javascript, and it seems, that way around is a lot more powerful as you have all of javascript to manipulate html rather than having HTML/Templating/Extensions to manipulate Javascript.

The two advantages are speed (it's supposed to be faster) and its closer to the web component standard than react, so if/when web components become mainstream it could be a lot easier migrating from angular2. However, both of those wouldn't be my prime reasons for choosing a framework though.

<comment><USER19> So Java Servlets was the right approach all this time?

<comment><USER20> Pretty sure PHP predated Servlets (if not by much).

<comment><USER21> Which is predated by CGI scripts working conceptually in the same way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> thomas-b I'm happy to see Angular2 getting closer to a release, and as many other companies we are in the case of what decision after Angular1.

One thing I think will be a great push for Angular2 is Ionic2 which alone is reason enough but to be honest I prefer the `Aurelia way` when it comes to writing web apps which sounds more natural, Sad to see Aurelia hype haven't took much so far (understandable that it's getting harder to get people on board a new `revolutionary` JS framework).

<comment><USER22> I too like the look of aurelia. However, I really like the auto import management, refactoring, syntax highlighting. I use Webstorm & didn't see any blog posts or anything about how to set up Webstorm with Aurelia. So I'll go on learning Angular 2 for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Saw references to rc0 in the angular2-seed earlier - wasn't too sure what to make of that, as I still saw the beta in the main repo.

"This is the first release candidate that contains repackaging of Angular into individual packages one per each feature area. ... This changes how Angular is installed via npm and how you import the code"

This seems like a pretty big change to include as part of the first RC??

</comment><comment><USER24> Ask HN: Why would I spend time upgrading my Angular1 code to Angular2 when I can migrate to React Or Vue.js.

I am honestly intrigued as to what Angular2 offers, that other JS frameworks wont?

<comment><USER25> They are competitors. People will make arguments to either side.

In my point of view react is easier to use while angular is better for testing.

My personal choice is angular. I'm really excited for v2. But both are super powerful.

<comment><USER26> Perhaps the question could be rephrased as: I am happy with how React handles my view layer. What more does angular bring that would make me want to switch, from React + whatever else I'm using as libraries?

I don't really think angular and React are direct competitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When I read up about Angular 2 a year ago or so, based on my very shallow understanding it seemed like the perfect combination of the automagics of Angular 1, and the light-weightedness of React. But what do you JS folks think about this?

<comment><USER28> What gave you the impression of light-weightedness though? My understanding was that Angular 2 is aiming at being a fully featured (and thus heavy) framework.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't it ironic that, as we are moving away from fat servers, we are now writing even fatter clients ( which still need a server since one wants in many case to be able to render pages server side and one has to serve static assets anyway ) .

So what is the concrete difference between an API + a node-js server to serve assets and render templates server-side (so with a lot of business logic) + an angular2 client written in typescript , all this VS something like Rich Faces or Prime Faces in a servlet container ? We just rebuild the exact same thing that is hated by most "modern developers", with worse tooling on top of it. Both solutions need a third party language that is not Javascript, both solutions need a compilation step, and command line tools(or an IDE in the case of Java).

Some will say "Well, now the client and server are independent, and if the server changes, one can keep the fat client". But in practice, which side gets rewritten ? the server or the client with the "framework du jour" ?

<comment><USER29> This was designed for the enterprise C#/Java developers. Anything this monstrous can only ever be fully appreciated by enterprise devs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Angular 2 is a great option especially for people who like TypeScript. Hope release will be ready soon.

</comment><comment><USER31> I just love how the same people that called me the devil for using WPF back when .NET 3 came out are now calling me about angular with 'have you heard about this new and exciting paradigm?'...

</comment><comment><USER32> Really like the new npm multi-module architecture under the @angular namespace. Thumbs up.

</comment><comment><USER33> Aurelia ([http://aurelia.io](http://aurelia.io)) is the ONLY framework that I have seen where you DON'T see the framework when you look through the code. You see YOUR app and YOUR logic. To me this is incredibly important for the longevity and simplicity of your code base. Please people, do yourselves a favor and checkout Aurelia.

</comment><comment><USER34> Half off topic but I want just to add that Webstorm IDE has already quite a good NG2 support. For example you can jump from html to a component function via F12 or auto import unresolved statements. You see VS Code on many NG2 presentations. I think Webstorm helps more getting quicker into NG2. Also Angular-CLI helps a lot. I mention this here because many people seem to struggle with the boilerplate code.

<comment><USER6> WebStorm has been pretty amazing in keeping up with us, a fair number of our team use it. Even more exciting is upcoming tooling integrations we'll get from Typescript - there's a cool GIF in this issue tracking the work [https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/6508](https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/6508)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Congrats on the RC.</comment>


Photobucket bought by Myspace - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/exclusive/photobucket-goes-to-myspace-258222.php <comment><USER2> Any word on the actual exit value?

<comment><USER3> Photobucket was profitable, with tens of millions of annual revenue IIRC (there was an analysis I read somewhere, but can't find it now).

They could be going by the old rule of thumb for acquisitions (three, four times revenues) or, since this is the Web 2.0 world, by some other (more extravagant) equation.</comment></comment>


New Israeli tank features Xbox controllers, AI honed by 'StarCraft II' & 'Doom' - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/07/28/new-israeli-tank-features-xbox-controllers-ai-honed-by-starcraft-ii-doom/ <comment><USER2> What a desperate click bait. Considering Israel's groundless ever (self) perpetuating myth of technological sophistication is crumbling before our eyes, if you watch the news. I guess sticking an Xbox controller into anything should make it cool and headline worthy.

Most Israelis that care about Israel are now realizing Ben Gurion was a fascist bustard who's best friend was a eugenist (Arthur Rupin); The kibbutzs myth of self sufficiency was based on the employment of underaged Israelis, both jews and non Jews; "startup nation"'s IT infrastructure is horribly dated compared to anywhere in Western Europe; IDF has been busy training generations of Israelis to disregard human live and ignore the crimes the government is carrying in the occupied territories and Palestine; and to make it really bad, 1.5 Russian economical migrants imported to change its demographics turned Israel into a developing country plagued with corruption at every level.</comment>


Ask: Does anyone have a ASP.NET site to show off? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> well, atwood & spolsky have the stack exchange network. the biggest show off i guess.

</comment><comment><USER3> Pretty much everything I build where it's my time that I'm saving and my money I'm not buying extra servers with is running ASP.NET. Here's one of my better known products:

[http://www.twiddla.com/](http://www.twiddla.com/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes, have a look at [https://www.bunkerapp.com/](https://www.bunkerapp.com/)

Both the website and the app itself are written ASP.NET/C# using MVC. I'm happy to answer any questions you might have :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks pretty slick:) Any good books you could recommend on the subject?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.rac.co.uk](http://www.rac.co.uk) is built on ASP.net as is [http://www.dell.com](http://www.dell.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> Just curious, why do you want to know? You probably won't notice any difference with a RoR or PHP website, the C# code is in the back-end.

</comment><comment><USER7> abtobolo.com created using Asp.Net MVC.

AbToBolo is a hindi word which in english means "Speak Now".</comment>


Hedge Fund Still Wants Its Tax-Avoidance Profits - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-06-23/hedge-fund-still-wants-its-tax-avoidance-profits <comment><USER2> IMHO the more interesting story is the linked to article on the mechanics of what the firm was doing.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-04/dividends...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-04/dividends- annuities-and-hedge-funds)

Dividend arbitrage is one of those activities that was common for a while and it launched alot of funds that were active for a couple of years until the space got too crowded and the tax implications became too gray for most funds.

I think I've made this point several times on HN before, but taxes, specifically tax minimization is a huge factor, and becoming larger all the time in the returns of many hedge funds.

Rentec is one of the more famous funds who is known for making large returns that is very aggressive with its tax avoidance. As i said in a previous comment, Rentec is full of incredibly smart people but when a tell all book is written about them, I'm betting that a much larger portion of their gains than most people realize will be shown to come from tax avoidance.

[http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-21/how-rentec-made- mor...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-21/how-rentec-made- more-34-billion-profits-1998-fictional-derivatives)</comment>


Ask HN: Reasonably priced video cameras for startups? - <AUTHOR>

I am in the process of creating promotional material for my product's landing page.  I'm a strong believer that people trust companies with names and faces, and I want to create a video of me giving the elevator pitch on my product.<p>Does anyone have a recommendation for a reasonably priced video camera?  Something that will get the job done reasonably well without breaking the bank.  (Or, can I get away with using my MacBook iSight?) <comment><USER2> Do you want to film the video with the camera and then import into your Mac for post-processing (recommended). Or, do you want to hook a usb/firware camera to your Mac and record directly from that?

For doing the sort of thing you're talking about, I recommend an external camera. The recording media (flash, hard-drive, tape, etc.) doesn't really matter because you're not going to be doing hours of continuous filming. You DO (IMO) want a camera with an external mic adapter. This is important because you'll likely want a wired or wireless lavalier mic in order to get good clear audio.

Check your local craigslist. Lots of people are upgrading to newer HD cameras and selling older units. You don't need HD for what you're talking about. Just google "[camera model] + OS X" and you'll find reviews for most popular cameras of how well it does (or doesn't) work with OS X and iMovie or Final Cut.

I've had good luck with Canon cameras (but there are some models out there that don't work very well) overall.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this info is really helpful! (Especially the microphone, I hadn't thought about that.)

I'd err on the side of quality as long as it didn't mean breaking the bank, which probably means I'd go the import route.

In your experience, has iMovie been enough to get the job done on the software side?

<comment><USER3> Spend money on the microphone, or borrow a good one, and get a mike stand and a pop shield. Particularly if you are doing any audio work, whether recording or podcasting, or otherwise. A decent low-end cardioid condenser produces audio output far superior to a cheaper mike, and vastly better than the audio you'll get from an integrated mike.

And yes, iMovie and GarageBand and the rest of the tool-chain can be used to produce reasonable content, once you get the hang of the tools, and can also be combined with the application screen recording that is available within the QuickTime tool in Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6.

Another area with the Apple iLife tool-chain involves how you can generate graphics (diagrams, moving plots, etc) for insertion into technical presentations. While static pages and screen captures and screen video are all easy, I haven't found an entirely satisfactory way to generate more advanced graphics for inclusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The new iPhones and iPod Nano's are actually pretty good. So is a Flip. The flips can even do HD.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love my FlipCam. I've been keeping a video diary of my startup on it, and I also used several to record my vacation to Australia and New Zealand in October.

I don't think you need super-high quality, even though the FlipCams are HD. Content counts more than style or featureset. What I like about the FlipCam is ease of use, portability, and connectivity to various video-sharing services.

The vacation was a bit of a testbed. Everybody in the family had a FlipCam, and we posted to the net a lot. After a few days, however, we realized that some sort of post-production really helped make the video much better. So I started using Camtasia Studio for basic titling, popups, splices, and transitions. It also allowed me to tweak the codec settings when I rendered the file, which was nice.

Another interesting lesson: the more you film, the better you get. At first everybody was stiff as a board the second you turned the cam on. Must be some kind of hangover from the still camera days. But after a dozen or so shots with us all watching the results, we realized that relaxing was the only way to go. The videos got a lot better at the end.

Here's a sample of the more relaxed video we got at the end of the trip instead of the start: <http://www.vimeo.com/7121046>

EDIT: I'm a bit of a movie buff, so this is a pet topic for me. I know that you're receiving conflicting advice, and I really can't emphasize enough how content trumps style. We found the the emotional context of a piece -- setting, reactions, flow, body language, vocal inflections, narrative -- win out so solidly over technical attributes that you can shoot a great video on the crappiest equipment imaginable and it will still be great video.

I could point to major motion pictures going the handy-cam way, like Cloverfield, or I could point to the popularity of amateur internet video, or even America's Funniest Home Videos.

But I won't.</comment>


Ask HN: How will the world change after the global coronavirus pandemic? - <AUTHOR> What future scenarios can we hypothesize? how will people behave in everyday life? how will the scenario of travel and consumption change? I am very interested to hear your opinion. <comment><USER2> What we are seeing is an unprecedent level of supply and demand shock. What this means is that there is going to be much lesser spending and businesses making much lesser money.

If this reflexive loop kicks in people have lesser disposable income and a lot of people will get unemployed ( we can see the early signs in the hospitality and airline industry already)

If this continues, then there will be foreclosures. Asset prices are going to go down. We will enter a recession. If Banks stay alive and liquidity is pumped into the system by the Fed, then we could see a reversal, if the shock persists for longer and finding the vaccine takes more time, we could head towards a depression.

Obviously there are tons of moving parts and there is no way to predict the future, but its likely that we will have a recession. There is a low probability that this will head to a depression because the Fed has been printing loads of money, but if this stops working, they have no more tools in their arsenal to revive the economy.</comment>


The Impact of Covid-19 on Small Business Owners - <AUTHOR> https://www.nber.org/papers/w27309 <comment><AUTHOR> > The number of active business owners in the United States plummeted by 3.3 > million or 22 percent over the crucial two-month window from February to > April 2020. The drop in business owners was the largest on record, and > losses were felt across nearly all industries and even for incorporated > businesses. African-American businesses were hit especially hard > experiencing a 41 percent drop. Latinx business owners fell by 32 percent, > and Asian business owners dropped by 26 percent. Simulations indicate that > industry compositions partly placed these groups at a higher risk of losses. > Immigrant business owners experienced substantial losses of 36 percent. > Female-owned businesses were also disproportionately hit by 25 percent. > These findings of early-stage losses to small businesses have important > policy implications and may portend longer-term ramifications for job losses > and economic inequality.</comment>


Deduction Theorem: The Problematic Nature of Common Practice in Game Theory - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.00409 <comment><USER2> This paper is almost entirely incomprehensible to me, and I have a background in formal logic. It might be that there is some error in the proofs that this author is referring to, but the paper does not make any clear point about what the problem is. There is a lot of unusual use of language (talk of propositional formulas "existing" and things like only being allowed to make deductions where the formulas are "previously known to be true").

Even in the introduction there are statements which do not make sense, like the statement that you are required to show that A and B are true in order to conclude that A logically entails B. This is simply not the case, since it is very well possible for A to be a formula which is always false (unsatisfiable/inconsistent), in which case A entails ANY statement, including B.</comment>


Twitter needs to get their shit together - <AUTHOR> http://bruun.co/2012/08/17/twitter-needs-to-get-their-shit-together

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why people think it's fair to criticize a move like this without offering a plausible alternative that will sustain the business. Sure, letting other people build on it got them to where they are today, but where exactly is that? With massive infrastructure and engineering costs, but little income.

Twitter doesn't owe anybody anything. We owe them. If they don't find a way to monetize, then everyone loses.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps this is inevitable. A necessary step for Twitter to stay alive. But then maybe instead we should be asking ourselves what's next? What's after Twitter? Twitter (et al.) have proven how valuable this kind of service is, but also that it can't be sustained as a business, at least not without some pretty ugly changes.

App.net is a start, but I think it gets it wrong. The value in Twitter is that anyone can use it, anywhere, for the cost of getting online. If we boil it down to just being a highly-scaled service layer with a standard API, maybe the it's the developers themselves that should be paying for API access. Let the 3rd party app ecosystem thrive, but make them pay for what they use. Right now Twitter's doing the opposite and might end up dying slowly over many years as a result.

<comment><USER4> The problem with Twitter is that they took way, way too much investment money. Now that we know what Twitter looks like, you could build it from scratch for much less. If Twitter dies because it's impossible to sustain the valuation their investors were hoping for, perhaps someone would build a less ambitious alternative.

Even though the magnitude is bigger, it could be similar to the Digg-Reddit saga. Digg was hyped as the next big thing, took too much money, made extremely risky moves and collapsed. and then collapsed. In the meantime, Reddit slowly built a less ambitious product that eventually replaced it.

<comment><USER5> Morg: I can't reply to you directly, but it looks like you've been hellbanned. Might want to chuck a quick email pg's way and see if you can't get it sorted out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Twitter replaced IRC.

Facebook replaced Email.

In both cases they were easier to use solutions to social communications on the Internet. But these profit-seeking corporations are now standing in the way of futher progress. The gatekeepers need to go. A new decentalized protocol to replace both of them desperately needs to developed.

<comment><USER7> >But these profit-seeking corporations are now standing in the way of futher progress. The gatekeepers need to go.

Neither IRC nor Email are companies that own the rights to their communication method.

<comment><USER6> Yes I know, I was referring to Facebook and Twitter.

These companies improved upon open protocols, but their business models and motivations are now standing in the way.

<comment><USER7> Right, and my point is that if they don't want people to mess with their product then its entirely their right to prevent it. While it may not be smart, it's a different situation than email/IRC.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although I disagree with how twitter is handling things, I believe this is twitter getting their shit together as they get ready to roll out ads via their API. Third party apps will display sponsored tweets very soon.</comment>


New YouTube player live (only on certain videos) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFDOI24RRAE Not sure if it's just me. Here's a screenshot: http://i41.tinypic.com/142wnkl.png <comment><USER2> They have a nifty feature which tracks your bandwidth: <http://www.youtube.com/my_speed>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure if it's just me. Here's a screenshot: <http://i41.tinypic.com/142wnkl.png>

<comment><USER3> I see the new player too...nice, modern look

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Its been live for me on all no-ad videos for about a month+

<comment><AUTHOR> I would have expected some more press about it. I only found this article from yesterday: <http://geeksmack.net/internet/1316-youtube-goes-minimalistic></comment></comment>


The list of all coroutine and user-space-thread libraries - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/baruch/libwire/wiki/Other-coroutine-libraries

<comment><USER2> You're missing libco:

[http://byuu.org/programming/libco/](http://byuu.org/programming/libco/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Added it now.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> so most likely this is not all of them (I just found today about another one) but it is my attempt to collect a comprehensive list of them.

If you know of others either add them yourself or let me know and I'll add it.</comment>


Cleaner, More Elegant, and Wrong - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=39683 <comment><USER2> Great post, although I would like to know his approach for handling the last case. There is a related post: "Cleaner, more elegant, and harder to recognize"

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=36...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050114-00/?p=36693)</comment>


Old emails hold new clues to Coca-Cola and CDC's controversial relationship - <AUTHOR> http://lite.cnn.com/en/article/h_68085ce19a6ef086049ef2a60b73a149 <comment><USER2> It's great to see that newer CNN article links are submitted via their lite text-only version (lite.cnn.com/lite.cnn.io). They read just like HackerNews :)</comment>


The problem with taking too many vitamins - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24563590 <comment><USER2> I don't feel this is a very good article.

IMHO the key to understanding vitamin supplementation is first, to know which are fat-soluble (and will be stored by your body) and which are water-soluble (and will be flushed by your body when you urinate).

So, it is almost impossible to over-dose on Vitamin C, since, your body will easily eliminate anything it doesn't need - C is water-soluble.

This article covers the differences well enough: [http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=10...](http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=10736)

I think what drives vitamin taking is a combination of

i) people not fully trusting doctors

ii) knowing that today's food is factory-produced and may be deficient in micro-nutrients like vitamins and minerals

iii) being willing to spend a few dollars per day as an insurance policy; after all, how many drop $5 a day at Starbucks?

<comment><USER3> In school, I was taught a mnemonic for fat soluble vitamins: DEAK. In other words, you want to "deke" [1] out of the way from these vitamins. You want to watch how much of vitamins D, E, A, K you ingest because they are fat soluble and you can easily overdose on them (unlike vitamin C). It's not a catch-all but it helps when you are taking vitamins.

[1] it's a play on words and a homonym, "deke" comes from hockey where you dodge or fake out an opponent to get around them. It must be the Canadian school system further injecting hockey into our lives. :)

<comment><USER4> Then again, there have been several studies [0] that show that many people in the northern hemisphere are deficient in vitamin D and that the deficiency could be the root of serious health problems.

[0] E.g. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310306)

<comment><USER5> True, for example half of Finns receive less than recommended amount of vitamin D. To combat this dairy and edible fat products have received vitamin D supplements since 2003. For example skimmed milk (the most popular one) would otherwise have very little D because it gets removed in the process along with fat. First you take it out, then put it back in...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sometimes visualisations are useless overillustrations. Other times, they are enough to put a complex argument to rest. One of the latter ones:

[http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil- supplem...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/play/snake-oil-supplements/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Everything I've read about this in recent years seems to boil down to one simple rule of thumb: Supplement vitamin D and forget about everything else.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, my doctor recommends 5000 IUs of D3 for the north bay area.

<comment><USER9> Interesting, particularly since recent recommendations say that 4000 IUs should be the maximum dose. Any reason why s/he recommended 5k?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I used to eat the gummy vitamins like candy, I got Hypervitaminosis, and my hair started to fall out. I thought I had a horrible disease. Then we figured it out. It wasn't much fun.

<comment><USER11> Ignored the "Do not exceed the recommended dosage" warning eh?

<comment><USER8> They taste SO good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I hope everyone understands that there is NO reliable evidence that any dietary supplements, including vitamins, provide any health benefits whatsoever to healthy people.[1] Occasionally individual studies will find an association between a particular positive outcome and a particular supplement, say breast cancer survival and vitamin D.[2] But it is just as likely to find an association with a negative outcome, say higher breast cancer risk in regular vitamin takers.[3] However none of these results has ever been found to be reproducible AFAIK.

For example a 2009 thorough review of all research on vitamin D and calcium supplements by US DHHS concluded:

The majority of the findings concerning vitamin D, calcium, or a combination of both nutrients on the different health outcomes were inconsistent.[4]

Most if not all of the studies initially finding these spurious correlations are large studies looking at lots of factors and outcomes. Unfortunately due to the nature of statistics there is always a small chance of a false positive or negative relationship and if many possible relationships are examined, such as in these large exploratory studies, it is almost a certainty that some false correlations will be found. This is why almost all of these studies say that confirmation in additional studies is required but this warning does not always make it into press reports. Occasionally a new relationship will be found that is confirmed in follow up studies. Unfortunately this confirmation has yet to be found for any supplement for any outcome in healthy people AFAIK.

FYI - Peter Norvig has a nice writeup of what to look out for when considering the results of a study.[5]

[1] Some supplements can help people with specific health issues but ask an expert such as your doctor as there are many false claims about supplements helping with specific conditions.

[2] [http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/BreastCancer/...](http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/BreastCancer/42208)

[3] [http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/183880.php](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/183880.php)

[4] [http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/evidence-based- reports...](http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/evidence-based- reports/vitadcal.pdf)

[5] [http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html](http://norvig.com/experiment- design.html)

<comment><USER13> _" I hope everyone understands that there is NO reliable evidence that any dietary supplements, including vitamins, provide any health benefits whatsoever to healthy people."_

I sort of agree with that, but I also know it is kind of a tautology. 'Healthy people' can't become 'healthier people', by definition. Yet, every healthy person can imagine himself, but slightly better: better vision, more willpower, stronger, faster runner, more intelligent, etc.

Because of that, there are no 'Healthiest people'. Even the hypothetical person who wins the decathlon at the Olympics at the age of 40 in the year they won their fifth Nobel will have something to desire (a bald spot? Feeling more tired after exercise than he used to be?). In that sense, nobody is truly healthy.

That is what all the supplement sellers play at.

<comment><USER12> This is not a tautology. Every "healthy" person will someday die and will often develop cancer or heart disease or have a stroke or have one of thousands of rarer medical conditions. If any supplements actually worked they would prolong life or reduce the occurrence of any of these diseases. All of these out comes can be measured in a properly designed study. So far there is no reliable evidence that supplements help with any of these outcomes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What I'm interested in with all the recent talk (/hype) about gut health and gut bacteria transplants: Are there studies into whether the nutrients we can supplement actually don't enter our own metabolism, but instead benefit our gut bacteria which in turn benefit us?

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, then don't take too many vitamins - problem solved.

And as Patrickg_zill said, fat soluble vitamins are the dangerous ones, as they accumulate instead of being flushed. Pretty much all of the other vitamins and minerals are well controlled by the body...

</comment><comment><USER8> To hell with Vitamins. Eat fruits and vegetables.

<comment><USER15> ...except Vitamin D, which doesn't really come in fruit and veg. Vitamin D deficiency can be a real problem if you're a vegetarian and/or work in an environment without much exposure to sun. I just had a physical and my D was way down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem with taking any amount of vitamins is that they give the false feeling of security.</comment>


120M American Households Exposed In 'Massive' ConsumerView Database Leak - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-american-households-exposed-in-massive-consumerview-database-leak/#412ed5e37961 <comment><USER2> Personal data right now is considered an asset. It needs to be seen as a liability.

Maybe the solution is a data tax. You pay a set amount every year for every piece of personal data you have. If you buy personal data from another company, you still have to pay the tax for the data you acquired.

If you have a breach of data, your tax goes up for a period of 10 years.

In addition, every piece of personal data needs to have provenance which must be tracked. There must be a way to track from when a consumer input the data all the way through. Fraud in regards to this provenance is punishable by jail time. If you have data that does not have provenance, the company will be severely fined and people will go to jail. In the event of any data breach, not only will the company that had the breach be taxed extra, all companies that provided the data to the company (which is in the provenance information for the data) that had the breach will also be punished with increased data taxes.

EDIT:

In addition, maybe require annual personal data reports. The reports should contain

Amount of personal data.

Amount of personal data last year.

Data breaches.

Amount of personal data acquired directly from consumers.

Amount of personal data purchased and from whom at what prices.

Amount of personal data sold and to whom for what price.

This will be a filing to a government agency every year on penalty of perjury and be signed by all the board members and the c-suite. This will be publicly made available by the government. That way people can see what is happening with their data, and who is profiting off their data.

<comment><USER3> Instead of a data tax, I like the idea of mandatory data insurance, with payouts to users whose data is leaked/stolen. If your company has shitty security, or a history of leaks, your data insurance provider will charge out the ass.

The financial math has to clearly be on the side of it being more profitable to practice proactive security.

<comment><USER4> > _I like the idea of mandatory data insurance_

Why not just liability for lost data? Companies could then choose to hold the risk themselves or field it out to insurers.

<comment><USER5> If it doesn't need to be insured, you could just spin off a smaller entity responsible for holding the data for you, and shut the company down if the data leaks. You can do the same if insurance is required of course, but any brand new 'personal data holding' company would likely have very high insurance premiums to offset the risk.

<comment><USER6> Its fairly common in the temp employee industry that if a temp worker gets injured the temp agency folds and restarts to avoid the penalties.

It would be nice to require insurance or a bond to hold personal data so a company can't just disappear when data is lost.

[0]: [http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment- agencies/](http://projects.thestar.com/temp-employment-agencies/)

<comment><USER7> And people wonder why I am so hostile to the our way of creating and governing corporations, and our way of divorcing business from the lives and reputations of of those who run it.

<comment><USER8> While simultaneously championing corporate personhood.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The linked article is not very good imo. It goes into almost no detail, despite including two directly contradictory statements: "Yet another cloud storage misconfiguration has exposed personally identifiable information (PII)" and "the data in question contained no names of any individuals or any other personal identifying information"

Can we change this to link to the Forbes article referenced in the linked one? It goes into substantially more detail, including reconciling the researcher's claim with Experian's. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/12/19/120m-american- households-exposed-in-massive-consumerview-database-leak/#707af8c47961)

edit: didn't even notice the substantially more click-baity headline "Every single American household" vs. "120 million American households".

<comment><USER10> The Forbes article also points out that the DB is now secured. I have 2 take- aways:

1\. This isn't an announcement that our details have been leaked, so much as a reminder that our details are now and will perpetually be leaked, in one form or another by an externalized party.

2\. Databases mapping all American households exist.

<comment><USER11> | 2. Databases mapping all American households exist.

And they can be pretty comprehensive. Short anecdote but the last time I moved, and before I had updated any address information on my accounts/ID, the first piece of non-forwarded mail I received addressed to me was a credit card offer from AMEX. I still have absolutely no clue how they knew where exactly to send it to me.

<comment><USER12> I'm assuming a lot here but there is always the chance that your door-to-door post man or woman went to deliver any generic piece of mail to your old address only to find out you no longer lived there. I'm fairly sure there is a mechanism in place where a post man or post office can set a recipient as "moved" or "moving" to let the entire postal system know that until that recipients new address is figured out that no mail should be going to the old address.

That said the cynic in me won't allow the positive optimist within me to win this one. While I do believe there to be many wonderful postal workers I am going to assume that corporate greed is winning out over the kindness and caring of the human heart in this specific situation :(

<comment><USER13> There is that mechanism but you have to trigger it yourself via the USPS website or by going to the local post office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently anyone who wants this data can simply purchase it from Experian. The leak doesn't change anything except the price.

<comment><USER15> Back in the day (20 years ago) you could buy a CD with everyone's name, address, phone number and so on..

<comment><USER16> Lotus Marketplace cause quite a stir back in the day. Seems rather quaint today. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Marketplace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Marketplace)

My understanding is the information was readily available to businesses from other sources. It just popped up on people's radar because Lotus was such a high profile company at the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> At this point the only reasonable conclusion is that all of your bio/demo, employment, residential history, medical history, insurance claims history, credit history, etc is exposed. These things are no longer valid for identity verification.

</comment><comment><USER18> Here's the report from UpGuard, who found the breach: [https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak- alteryx](https://www.upguard.com/breaches/cloud-leak-alteryx)

It has more detailed information about the dataset.

<comment><USER19> Exactly this. Data intermediaries should only be notaries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> All personal information sharing should now be purely digital and encryption- keyed. We have all of the protocols, interconnected networking and ubiquitous computing necessary to make it practical.

The only "data" any organization should receive is an encrypted blob that is constructed using the key of the person who owns the data and the key of the entity that was directly given the data. Furthermore, the encoded blob should have a date of encoding and a duration of validity. In other words: "I, John Q. Public, authorize You, DataLosingMegaCorp, Inc., to receive This Blob, which is valid for 6 months or until either party revokes the key".

Other public systems in society should be upgraded to require additional layers of security. Want to send commercial snail mail to my home address? Great: please provide the postal service with a one-time authorization code that you received from me (after all, you _are_ using an address given to you by me and not bought from somebody else, right?).

Another nice feature would be for data to include bank deposit info for the data owner and bank withdrawl info for the data-receiving entity, where EVERY SINGLE TIME your data is decrypted you receive a cash deposit from the data- receiving entity. And make it sting, a lot: I want it to cost real dollars to use data (and of course, I can still revoke my key at any time if you still manage to do something stupid with my data).

<comment><USER21> A big problem with this is that a lot of data _about_ you isn't _owned by_ you. The fact that you took out credit card X on Y date and have paid the balance on time since then is owned by the credit card company you do business with (well, it belongs to you too, but businesses are more willing to trust Chase than you). This information has real business value from being a leading indicator and costly signal of your future propensity to repay debts.

<comment><USER22> At the risk of speaking for OP: The point is that the data _should_ be owned by me. Yeah, I get that it has value to other people, but I'm the one that has to deal with the fallout, not them. Just because something is useful to a business doesn't mean that they have the right to it. If they want information about me, they should be asking me, not some third party.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I don't disagree, but then how do we trust it? I suppose (thinking out loud) that we could have everyone on your credit report sign it, but then encrypt it to your public key? That way only you can let others see it, but it's still tamper-proof.

<comment><USER21> There's a legit need for tampering, though - to arbitrate disputes between creditors and debtors. Also to comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. So there's _four_ parties that contribute to the document:

1\. Credit applicants, who release all-or-none of their credit report information, and can see it at any point in time. Means it needs to be stored encrypted with their public key.

2\. Creditors, who can add, edit, and remove information from someone's credit report. Presumably this adds a way to verify that the addition/edit/deletion is from them and not some other party (sign with private key).

3\. Other creditors, who can - with approval - view an applicant's credit report and know it is complete and up-to-date.

4\. Arbitrator, who resolves disputes and deletes or corrects inaccurate information from reports.

And presumably you'd want some sort of additional safety mechanism to prevent dissemination of the unencrypted result? Like, if you gave an organization an unlock code, maybe it's possible to arrange things such that that organization's private key is able to create legit-looking data, so nobody else could trust third-party sharing of credit report data?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> >At issue is once again an Amazon Web Services S3 cloud storage bucket that was misconfigured and inadvertently left open to the public internet, where anyone with a connection online could have found it.

I use S3 and I have noticed that by default it's locked down and secure and in order for it to be open you have to open it for the public. Maybe AWS could improve the way it can secure the S3 buckets by making it easier to whitelist access by IPs or some variant to this. Although I personally find it fairly straight forward to use in the projects I work on but it appears it may be difficult and my developers just open it up to the public so their apps can easily access it.

<comment><USER24> My biggest problem with S3 is the old multi-layered security model with bucket policies and ACLs. They need to update it to just use IAM like everything else.

<comment><USER25> IAM is also super hard to configure.

I would like to see more sense of responsibility from AWS for these leaks rather than blaming the users.

It's bad usability.

<comment><USER26> That's ridiculous. AWS provides infrastructure and tools, it's up to developers and companies to properly deploy them and implement the appropriate security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Class action lawsuit?

How is it okay that this information is even available from Experian in the first place?

I don't think anyone opted in to this. And I don't think there is any obvious way to opt out.

And Experian is not just some data tracking company watching your behavior on a website; they're supposed to be protecting our credit system. Do they obtain some of this information through special privileges because they're a pseudo- official credit score agency? If so, is this grounds for a class action lawsuit?

(As others have argued, this data is legally available through Experian, it just normally isn't free. [https://www.experian.com/assets/dataselect/brochures/consume...](https://www.experian.com/assets/dataselect/brochures/consumerview.pdf))

<comment><USER28> And they even have us all classified into consumer categories (and sub- categories!) with snappy little names: [https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing- services/brochures...](https://www.experian.com/assets/marketing- services/brochures/mosaic-brochure.pdf)

"Blue Sky Boomers," "Significant Singles," "Pastoral Pride" (subgroups: "True Grit Americans," "Countrified Pragmatics," "Rural Southern Bliss," "Touch of Tradition").

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Apparently I take better care of user information on a hobby project running on localhost that will never see a remote server than these giant companies do with real life data.

</comment><comment><USER30> The data is just way too spread between too many companies. Someone will screw up somewhen for sure. Not sure how to solve this. Make it illegal to store data and instead only allow access with permission for specific purposes?

<comment><USER31> Let companies share and do whatever they want but put huge fines on data breaches. Make it a felony to hide, fail to report or otherwise lie about data breaches. Money if you fuck up, prison if you lie about it.

that should align some incentives and get you a good way along. It will incentivise proper security measures, and help quench the thirst for data in the first place.

<comment><USER30> If no one went to jail for what Wells Fargo did with opening unauthorized accounts I don't have much hope that there will be meaningful fines for data breaches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My reading of this is that anyone who "just want's to see the world burn" needs to pay $40k to Experian and then post this data on the web.

<comment><USER33> I think the data probably comes with a license that you can't redistribute it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Maybe companies like this just shouldn't be allowed to store data on people anymore. It's becoming clear that none of them know how to keep it from being stolen. I reckon most people don't even know they're affected by this.

</comment><comment><USER35> I really want to see the information relevant to me, assuming I'm in the leak. Just to see how accurate it is.

</comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know what happened to MIT's Enigma project?

This is their white paper: [http://web.media.mit.edu/~guyzys/data/ZNP15.pdf](http://web.media.mit.edu/~guyzys/data/ZNP15.pdf)

<comment><USER37> [https://enigma.co/](https://enigma.co/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does it still make sense to shred our personal documents with our names and addresses? Given so many leaks, it may be more easy to get our information online than going through our garbage.

<comment><USER39> If I don't shred it, I usually dump it into a particular trash can. The bag from that trash can is the one I usually use for cleaning out the cat litter. If someone wants to steal it from my trash can, it may be possible, but they're going to _earn_ it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> How is it that addresses and phone numbers are not considered personal identifying information???

Forgetting for a moment the fact that with even a few data points on someone it is getting easier and easier to cross reference other data sources and de- anonymize almost anything - but address and phone numbers are so directly and easily tied to real people this seems like a massive oversight in current regulations on "personal identifying information".

</comment><comment><USER41> On a related note, here's an open-source project I created that you can use to check your own S3 buckets: [https://github.com/ankane/s3tk](https://github.com/ankane/s3tk)

</comment><comment><USER42> Sigh, Amazon S3 bucket scavenging is today's version of 'war dialing'

</comment><comment><USER43> I imagine this scenario now in EU, where the Smart Meter Gateway will enter millions of households, tracking the electricity consumption.

Where goes this data? Who will use this information?

<comment><USER44> Somewhere there is a law enforcement organization that's drooling over the thought of automatically generating a list of suspected grow-ops by cross referencing power usage with marketing demographic information and automatically applying for a search warrant.

They'll probably stop doing it after they kick down the door of a day-care in a rich neighborhood and only find hot glue guns and those beads you fuse with an iron.

<comment><USER45> That's why savvy grow-ops bypass the meter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I would not mind regulation requiring such assemblers have to purchase insurance which provides payouts to those who are damaged by such leaks.

</comment><comment><USER47> The headline might as well say "ALL households exposed". The number of households in the US is 126M.

</comment><comment><USER48> Like a bank with an open safe in front of the bank holding all its customers treasures and files.

</comment><comment><USER49> If everyone is exposed, no one is.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

</comment><comment><USER50> Another day, another leak, another mass shooting. This is starting to be daily occurrence in the US.

</comment><comment><USER51> Glad all of this stuff is happening before I move to the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER52> So what is the right order

LEAK-DISCUSS-FORGET-SUFFER-REPEAT?

</comment><comment><USER53> > He found the data was sitting in an Amazon Web Services storage "bucket," > left open to anyone with an account,

This is hard to believe. S3 bucket names are unique. I can't make a bucket named `bucket`; I'd have to call it `dashkb-bucket` or something (a common convention is to prefix with your company's domain)... anyway...

The point is: for the bucket to be named `bucket` Alteryx must have had one of the very first AWS accounts, and from there isn't it reasonable to assume this bucket has been exposed for many years?

<comment><USER54> This sentence is not saying that "bucket" is the name of the bucket.

It is saying that the data was in a thing that Amazon Web Services provides, which AWS calls a "bucket".

Most people who are not web developers don't even know Amazon Web Services is a thing, much less the cute names of any of their services.</comment></comment>


Why Is Microsoft Competing With Backend as a Service Startups? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kinvey.com/blog/item/217-why-is-microsoft-competing-with-baas-startups? <comment><USER2> The Azure Mobile Services look to be a first step for Microsoft to wrap up some of their Azure offerings in a nice little package with a bow on top. Azure goes very much beyond what's mentioned in this article. Azure is something like a mashup of Heroku, AWS, and App Engine. It supports java, php, python, anything you can run in an IIS process, and anything you can run in a Windows/Linux VM. And, the new management interface is HTML/Javascript, not Silverlight.

See: <http://www.windowsazure.com/>

<comment><USER3> I'm not too familiar with Azure, and that's mostly because of bias from my side. I have this idea in my head, that Microsoft never ever just sells a development tool on its own merits. As if any product created used Microsoft tools automatically makes that product part of the vendor-lock-in of Microsoft, in some sense.

And while I was thinking that, I came to the conclusion I haven't looked at any of their products targeting developpers in almost a decade. Maybe things have changed. But all the stated differences in the linked article seem to suggest, things are not that different. But it's just one article, and you seem very informed, am I wrong, in this assumption? When Microsoft creates a development tool, is the intention to capitalize on me, as a developer (which I would like), or to control what I can capitalize on in the market space? (which is just unacceptable)

Is it not smart, that the majority of developers, tend to always favor independent parties, where we are the core customer. From Heroku, to Github. Neither one has any interest in what platforms we support. They only care about supporting us, so we keep paying them. One could even argue, that most development tools provided by platform vendors, are intrinsically destined to be anti-competitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That table makes me cringe: "Azure" vs "BaaS Players"

Are we comparing Azure to ALL of the startups in the scene? What about features that one has but others don't. Is there even one service that the "BaaS Players" column completely and accurately describes? I literally don't know, and the article doesn't tell me.

My gut says this is like comparing the USA (or whatever single county) vs. "Europe" and only picking your favorite parts from each country, and shaking your head at the USA for not having all of these positives. In fact, however, no single country in Europe would actually have all those positive points, or even a majority (usually)

<comment><USER5> >no single country in Europe would actually have all those positive points

Oh, you must not have visited Switzerland. :-) Anyway, I'm the author, I am providing a high level comparison, yes, between Azure and the feature set that is establishing with most BaaS companies. If I've missed anything important I'd love to be corrected.

<comment><USER4> Ha! Switzerland came up last time I made that point.

I actually don't know what you missed, if anything. I came to your article having never heard of any of the players in the BaaS scene (besides Azure). I left with the impression that everyone besides Azure is basically exactly the same thing, running the same technology, and offering the same features. My brain dismissed that as unlikely, or at the least, some wallpapering. In fact, it might not be that unlikely after all.

Of course, I'm not in the market for a BaaS anyway, that's just the impression I was left in as a purely curious reader.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> 'It is worth noting that Azure provides a "dynamic schema" feature for the backing relational database.'

There are two different Azure table-like stores: SQL Azure, which is indeed a relational database, and Azure Tables, which are not. It's only the latter whose schema is dynamic in the sense the author means.

(Although I'm a Microsoft employee, I know nothing about the "Baas" product.)

<comment><USER7> The link to Scott Guthrie's blog announcement implies SQL Server only, both the diagram and the text say SQL Database and relational, implying no Azure Tables. I thought the absence of Azure Table storage offering was odd myself. Maybe the communication just wasn't clear?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> What I find interesting is Azure Mobile Services was apparently built using node.js.

</comment><comment><USER9> I read the article, it starts with a questions and ends with no answer. The only thing interesting was the info-graphic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Go Kinvey!!!!</comment>


Japan extracts gas from methane hydrate in world first - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21752441

<comment><USER2> If we could extract them at economic prices, that could have enormous significance.

The resources of methane hydrate are enormous. By some estimates there are more of them there other fossils: <http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/gas-hydrates/>

On the other hand, if they start leaking we will have incredible strong greenhouse effect...

<comment><USER3> Extracting and burning for energy is leaking.

<comment><USER4> Methane is 25 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide so you really need to burn it rather than just let it escape. Of course it just might be better to leave it frozen at the bottom of the ocean.

<comment><USER5> Methane unlike CO2 is unstable and breaks down fairly quickly producing CO2. So, it's really a short term problem.

<comment><USER4> Yes, that is true. The lifetime of methane in the atmosphere is 8 years compared to 100 years for carbon. The possible problem with extracting it is destabilizing the hydrates so you get a very large eruption which would release colossal quantities of the gas in a very short period of time.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_methane> has lots of useful information and <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis> has some interesting info on methane hydrate eruptions.

Edit: got my eruptions and irruptions in a twist.

<comment><USER5> Extraction can lead to leaks and what would amount to localized coal fires. However, to get a meaningful eruption, on the global scale, you need to change sea temperatures over a large area. Which requires insane amounts of energy making it vary hard to do accidentally as part of said extraction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm reminded of Homer Simpson confessing during an AA meeting that he was so desperate for a drink he ate the dirt under the bleachers at the football stadium.

C'mon world, enough with the fossil fuels.

<comment><USER7> _C'mon world, enough with the fossil fuels._

Easier said than done. Meanwhile Japan wants to power its factories, heat its homes and we want to pay 0.10 cents /KWh

<comment><USER8> Especially complicated after Fukushima's effect on popular domestic opinion regarding nuclear power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Too bad natural gas is trading about what it was in 1980 (largely from lot of new supply from fracking), and about 60% below its peak in 2009 - at least in the US [1]. Although prices in Japan are about 5X higher [2]

1 - <http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9190us3a.htm>

2 - [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-natural-gas-prices- resha...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-natural-gas-prices-reshaping- global-market-2012-12-12-144851222)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is the start of building technology that should hopefully satisfy South Korea's need for more vespene gas.

</comment><comment><USER11> We could just start burning old people. More energy, less social security. Double win!

<comment><USER12> They are already planing for that in the UK: [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/8917633/A-dead- heat-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/8917633/A-dead-heat- crematorium-to-sell-power-for-National-Grid.html)</comment></comment>


The Science of Herbs and Spices - <AUTHOR> http://luckypeach.com/the-science-of-herbs-and-spices/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting read.

I love the style of this site, clean and easy to read, while still managing to be a pleasure to look at.</comment>