The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 <comment><USER2> It amazes me that this article _still_ pushes the agenda that "fat makes us fat." If there's one thing that hasn't proven out _at all_ , it's that fat makes us fat!

The NY Times has even run other articles saying as much: [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/what- really...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/what-really-makes- us-fat.html) (by Gary Taubes, whose book "Why We Get Fat" is a must-read.)

The problem with "low-fat" processed food in particular is that the fat is often replaced with sugar to add taste, but sugars and other high-carb grains are more problematic than fat consumption. Hence skyrocketing obesity.

Eating a low-carb diet and easing off grains (particularly "white" grains) and sugars will help you lose weight. From the article I linked above: "On the very low-carbohydrate diet, Dr. Ludwig's subjects expended 300 more calories a day than they did on the low-fat diet and 150 calories more than on the low- glycemic-index diet. As Dr. Ludwig explained, when the subjects were eating low-fat diets, they'd have to add an hour of moderate-intensity physical activity each day to expend as much energy as they would effortlessly on the very-low-carb diet. And this while consuming the same amount of calories."

I can also speak from personal experience: I went gluten-free after being diagnosed with gluten intolerance in 2009. In three weeks, I effortlessly shed 12 pounds--12 pounds that had refused to come off previously no matter how much exercise I was doing or how religiously I tracked my caloric intake. I wasn't doing gluten-free to lose weight; I got dragged into it by a diagnosis, so this was a wholly unexpected yet awesome side benefit.

I've since noticed that if I slide back into eating too many carbs and sugars (even gluten-free ones), I start to gain weight again, and I feel groggy and disoriented. As a side effect of this diet^Wlifestyle change, I've also completely been able to drop caffeine consumption--something I never expected. Put simply, I didn't feel like I had been hit by a train when I woke up. Caffeine and energy drink consumption has spiked right along with "low-fat", high-carb diets. Something to consider.

<comment><USER3> _It amazes me that this article still pushes the agenda that "fat makes us fat." If there's one thing that hasn't proven out at all, it's that fat makes us fat!_

Overeating makes us fat. Caloric surplus makes us fat. It's pretty trivial to consume a caloric surplus eating lots of fatty foods. In that sense: fat makes us fat and it's silly to try denying it. It doesn't mean a low-fat diet will make you lose weight, it just means that high-fat diets are going to make you fat.

Excellent refutation of Taubes hypothesis:

[http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...](http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate- hypothesis-of-obesity.html)

Insulin does not regulate fat storage, leptin does. Obesity is a complex state and there are no simple answers. A diet that may be best for weight loss in one individual may not be the same diet that is best for another. This seems particularly likely if one of the two individuals is not obese.

 _The problem with "low-fat" processed food in particular is that the fat is often replaced with sugar to add taste, but sugars and other high-carb grains are more problematic than fat consumption._

They aren't more problematic. Aside from the relationship to cholesterol levels, they are the same problem.

The problems are:

        1.  High caloric density.
        2.  *Vanishing* caloric density-- foods that prevent satiation.
        3.  Addictive flavors and sensations that cause cravings.

Calorie surplus makes you gain weight, and unless you're building muscle it's going to be fat. All Ludwig's experiments suggest (as reported by Taubes, with lazy citation[1]) is that obese people who have just lost 10-15% of their weight tend to have a higher daily metabolism without conscious addition of physical exercise on a low-carb diet, compared to a low-fat diet or a low-GI diet. This in turn suggests it might be easier to maintain calorie balance on a low-carb diet than a low-fat diet (for formerly obese people who have just dieted to lose 10-15% of their body weight).

postcript:

I would also add that lifestyle changes are a factor as well as diet. Addictive foods are more dangerous to someone who has a snacking/forager mentality than someone who plans and eats fixed meals every day.

[1] This appears to be the study referenced in the NY Times article: <http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154>

<comment><USER4> I'm not too impressed by Stephan Guyenet's article. He is wrong about one of his main points that fat is completely regulated by the brain and that insulin does not cause fat gain. You can Google for photographs of people who have done insulin injections in a single place over many years (rather than moving the injection point around) and see huge fat deposits at the injection site. That has got to be tissue regulation. Further, lipodystrophy is hard to explain by only invoking brain regulation.

We know that artificial insulin is a great way to gain weight. But is that only for diabetics? Hardly. It works just as well on athletes. Stop by your local gym and ask any of the chemically-assisted bodybuilders there for details. Insulin injections are a very common way to put on weight while bulking.

The idea that the body is "confused" by food density, which seems to underlie many of your ideas, is simply unsupported. The brain is very good at measuring calorie intake irrespective of density. I could point you to rat studies to confirm this, but I'd rather propose the following experiment that you can try in your own kitchen: Try making cream of cauliflower soup tonight, one with skim milk and the other with heavy cream. Measure how many spoonfuls of each that you can eat before getting full. Your brain does _not_ get fooled by food density.

<comment><USER3> _Try making cream of cauliflower soup tonight, one with skim milk and the other with heavy cream. Measure how many spoonfuls of each that you can eat before getting full._

The important question is not _how many spoonfulls_ it's, _how many calories_?

1 cup of skim milk is 86 calories. 1 cup of heavy cream is 821 calories.

Let's imagine something a little more simple than cauliflower soup: strawberries and cream. 50 calories of strawberries + 1/2 cup of heavy cream would be 460 calories. An easy, common dessert. You could also eat those 50 calories of strawberries along with 5 cups of skim milk. Or maybe eat a whole pound of strawberries (150 calories) and only need 3.6 cups of skim milk. Or maybe 50 cals of strawberries, 100 calories of shortcake, and 3.6 cups of skim milk.

Which eater is more likely to overshoot their ideal caloric intake by a bit? Which eater is more likely to stop eating the moment they get full?

The brain isn't fooled, but it doesn't have to be. The person who gorged on the shortcake knows they overate, but they still took on more calories than they're going to burn. And of course-- if the brain can be fooled, being fooled by high-calorie foods is going to be worse than being fooled by low- calorie foods, on average. Which is more likely to result in a calorie surplus: Salt on your mashed potatoes or salt on your buttered, cheese- smothered mashed potatoes?

That is why I listed calorie-dense foods as #1. Without understanding caloric density, it's very hard for anyone to know (without outside guidance) when or how they are being fooled.

<comment><USER5> Are you really putting a full cup of cream into a serving of cauliflower soup?

For your strawberries and cream example, I'm known to have blueberries with cream from time to time. Which ends up typically being a half cup or so of blueberries, and a tablespoon or two of cream. Much more than that is far too much (and that's from someone who's got an appetite).

<comment><USER3> Your appetite sounds much smaller than mine. But the examples are mostly a waste of time. Either you accept my premise or not, which is:

        You're more likely to get fat eating calorie-dense foods.

There are many mechanisms to regulate calorie intake. The fullness feeling is just one of them. If you are only relying the fullness mechanism to regulate calories and every meal is loaded with high-calorie foods like butter, olive oil, gravy, fatty meat, eggs and the like, odds are higher that you're going to be running a surplus more often than not. And thus: gaining weight.

Yes, not all weight gain is bad and there is more to body composition than weight. But weight was the topic under discussion for this thread.

<comment><USER5> I largely don't accept the premise in favor of: you're more likely to get fat eating foods that promote overeating,, and partitioning those calories into fat, while failing to burn off the excess calories.

That's a large part of the salt, sugar, fat trifecta. It stimulates overeating, it spikes insulin at the same time that you're dumping large quantities of fats directly (dietary fat) and indirectly (triglycerides from fructose) into the body, while depressing inclinations toward activity.a

As to my diet, intake typically ranges ~3500-4500 cal/day. I eat consciously and exercise portion control according to my goals.

<comment><USER3> _I largely don't accept the premise in favor of: you're more likely to get fat eating foods that promote overeating_

My argument is that the factors are not mutually exclusive.

Huh and yeah, 4000 calories per day would constitute an absolutely enormous intake, consistent with a professional athlete (marathon runner, NFL linebacker, etc).

<comment><USER5> Male, 6'2", 250#, athletic, weightlifting and rowing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's so funny how, over the past couple of years, good-tasting food is now a "conspiracy".

When a Michelin chef meticulously constructs a dish to give you pleasure, he's a creative genius whose dedication to his art is applauded.

But when the people behind Snickers do it to give you pleasure, they're nefarious conspirators trying to manipulate you and keep you addicted.

Yes, people who make food are trying to make it taste better, minimize their own costs, and keep you coming back. Why is this suddenly considered "news"?

(I mean, the article is plenty interesting, it's just the sensationalism of calling it "food engineering", "addiction", etc. that bothers me.)

<comment><USER7> Take a chicken. Roast it, with vegetables. Include some lightly steamed vegetables. Have some kind of gravy. If you really want it have some kind of honey glazing for the carrots.

That's a reasonably healthy meal.

Take the same chicken. Take as much meat off it as you can, and sell that as chicken breast etc. Mechanically recover other bits of meat from the carcass. Shape it into a tiny mouthsize bite, with salt and spices and fat and filler. Then cover it in a breadcrumb coating. Deep fry it. (That crumb coating soaks up the oils.) Serve it with a sugary-sauce. You now have something which is much cheaper than the roast chicken; it's much easier to eat; it's weirdly tasty; but it's also weirdly not satisfying.

And the reason this is done is not to create the best tasting food possible (the motivation behind Michelin starred chefs) but to cuts costs while getting people to buy more. They don't care about the pleasure you get - they only want your money.

<comment><USER8> Or take the same chicken, cover it in salt, buttermilk, and highly processed white flour, then fry it in duck fat like the New York Times does in this recipe:

[http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/good- techn...](http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/good-technique- means-great-fried-chicken/)

Is it conspiracy that they use some of the same techniques as the processed food industry, or is it just those are some of the basic techniques to make food taste good.

<comment><USER7> There are a couple of differences.

Look at that recipe - you have big bits of meat, with bones, and some salt / fat coating. You take a bite, and you chew it, and then you have to fiddle about getting bits off the bone.

Popcorn chicken is tiny. You pop one in, and you're reaching for the next one as you're chewing the first.

The recipe uses big bits of chicken. Popcorn chicken uses the bits of the carcass that would normally have been used for soup.

There are different ratios of fat to meat content - popcorn chicken has a lot more fat, because it has a lot more coating.

Both of them are tasty, but one has been engineered to be maximally tasty at minimal cost.

<comment><USER8> Those are good points. The confluence of maximally tasty and minimal cost can leads to very unhealthy food. I just don't like the intent that is implied when the article uses inflammatory phrases like science of addiction or designed to addict.

<comment><USER7> I agree that the language is really poor. It's a shame that it sells papers and documentaries.

Food could be a fascinating documentary. Instead we get "supersize me", which is fun but not rigorous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do occasionally enjoy pointing out to people that the soda/pop/cola they've bought is a drink designed to disappear. The water is carbonated, so that you do not savour the drink but immediately try to gulp it down. There is phosphoric acid and a surprising amount of sodium, which both make you salivate, so that you briefly feel that you're refreshed -- and then your saliva is depleted so that your mouth goes dry. The other ingredients -- sugar, flavorings, and caffeine -- are essentially the same mixture which makes coffee so popular. The huge difference from coffee is that cola's design allows you to not merely sip at it as part of your morning routine, but gulp it down while you're not even paying attention, then reach thirstily for... presumably another cola.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Whenever I see an ad for cola with some variant of 'delicious and refreshing' I feel 'Well, why don't you just drink water? Sure its not delicious but certainly refreshing'. One thing that genuinely does refresh is lemonade; I wonder why that hasn't caught up though.

<comment><USER11> >>One thing that genuinely does refresh is lemonade; I wonder why that hasn't caught up though.

When was the last time you saw a lemonade ad?

<comment><USER8> Lemonade tastes great fresh, but it very noticeably tastes worse when canned/bottled. I think that disparity keeps it from being able to challenge carbonated sodas on a large scale.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WY_JKz9detM>

<comment><USER12> In France you can get citron pressee in any bar, they just take a fresh lemon, ice, water and sugar (mix yourself how you like). Just keep some lemons in the fridge... it takes seconds.

<comment><USER8> Some big sit down chain restaurants in the US do a good fresh lemonade. California Pizza Kitchen comes to mind, and I'll often order it. But there is still all that fast food and canned/bottled/vending machine consumption to deal with.

<comment><USER12> Can we not build a robot real lemonade dispenser?

<comment><USER8> Do you live near a Hot Dog on a Stick? I don;t think a robot could compete. And if it did it would be sad for the lemonade stompers...

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=unYgoUF- pdQ#t=29s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _... "As a culture, we've become upset by the tobacco companies advertising to children, but we sit idly by while the food companies do the very same thing. ..."_

Why aren't parents more responsible for their children's health?

As a parent myself, I know how damn hard it is for kids to eat anything consistently, especially "healthy" foods, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. And our kids have snacks in moderation.

It seems to me that if parents were more "responsible", which is a horribly generalized term, then the food executives wouldn't have private meetings to discuss how to deal with obesity - their products would have adapted to the healthy market.

Parenting is hard. Being a "responsible" parent is harder. Tough shit.

<comment><USER14> I've not found it difficult to get my kids (2 teenage daughters) to consistently eat healthy foods. Hell, we can't keep fresh fruits and vegetables in the house. A one pound bag of baby carrots lasts about a week, one pound bunch of bananas: about 3 days, a pint of blue berries: About an hour (blue berries never last long at our house). The list goes on, but that's not the point.

I don't think it's really a responsibility thing. I don't know any parent that _want_ their kids eating junk, but fresh fruit and vegetables are actually quite expensive and far more difficult to keep than your average junk snack. That's the hard part: justifying the higher cost and spoilage when you're just barely making the bills.

Most of my childhood was spent right at the government assistance threshold. During the down times, our health increased, and our dit included more fresh fruit and vegetables. During the times above that line, with no assistance, the high cost of fresh produce meant meant that it wasn't around.

So, to answer your question, "Why aren't parents more responsible for their children's health?" Because they can't afford to be. Though there are many factors that contribute to the obesity problem, claiming it's poor parental responsibility is a useless over-simplification.

Btw, I've been parenting for 18 years now. When is it supposed to get hard?

<comment><USER15> I've two teenage kids albeit a little younger than yours.

I found one way to hack their stomach share is to stick cut fruits/carrots on the table when they're doing homework. Another technique is to introduce subtle variety into the shapes, kind of like how pop songs have the same tune but a lot of work goes into varying the accompaniment. With carrots, give them a mix varying thickness, length, tapers etc. Observe how they eat. They'll start to play with the shapes etc.

Since you have daughters and they'd listen if you knew something tricks that'd help with weight. Talk to them about set points.

The level of sugar, salt and fat we prefer depend on what our "set point" is. A set point is like a thermostat. It determines what we feel is comfortable or not.

If you go to developing countries, you will find cakes and biscuits that are very plain tasting. It isn't because they don't know how to make cakes and biscuits. It is because the people have a different preferred set point. If you serve them typical American desert, they will actually react in disgust because it is overpowering.

The same with soft drinks. A person who consumes soft drinks regularly raise their set point for sugars. To the extent they will no longer drink plain water. One only has to look around at their friends to realize this is going on.

The trick though, is this - the set point can be altered. There are two parts to this - water, and attention.

Drinking plain water regularly will, after six to 12 months, increase your preference for water. It will also alter your set point that after a while, you will find rich foods a little too rich for your liking. Going cold turkey for two weeks can be very helpful when starting out. Initially, water will taste disgusting. But your ancestors have been drinking water for millennias. Put up with it for a while and your set point has to be down-regulated. I personally know of someone who lost 15 kgs from just changing their water- drinking habit alone.

Paying attention is another method. One of the common problems is food manufacturers have flavored their food to suit inattentive eating. Paying attention to the sugars in your foods will cause you to notice how overpowering it is. The same with salt.

<comment><USER16> >>It is because the people have a different preferred set point. If you serve them typical American desert, they will actually react in disgust because it is overpowering.

As a Indian I realize how true this is. People from my workplace generally bring chocolates when they come back from the US work assignment. I find it strange that chocolates are so cheap and easily accessible in the US.

I find that as an over dose of sugar. I mean one chocolate down and I don't feel like I need sugar for the next 2 days. That is how much I feel full and yet I see kids in US munching them all the time.

Its just how you are seasoning your body to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _"The snack that Dunn was proposing to sell: carrots. Plain, fresh carrots. No added sugar. No creamy sauce or dips. No salt. Just baby carrots, washed, bagged, then sold into the deadly dull produce aisle."_

Ha, I've actually been doing this since I was a teenager. It's really fantastic for managing junk food cravings, which arise not because I'm _hungry_ , but because I just like to have something to chew on while I work (especially while programming). A one-pound bag lasts me about three hours and is more-or-less guilt-free.

<comment><USER18> I'm curious how many pounds per sq. inch carrots require to chew. The article pointed to 4 as the magic number.

I wonder if there's a way to engineer healthy food to taste better without actually adding any ingredients. Maybe through bio-engineering or the like. Or maybe injecting them with air or drilling out little holes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> People want to blame others for their problems. Whether it's junk food, drugs, joblessness, etc. The fact is you can't get fat if you don't consume the calories. _Everyone_ I know who has restricted calories has lost weight.

I was 210, and lost 70 lbs by restricting my caloric intake (by eating vegan). I ate sugar during this time. I ate carbs.

Every single person I know who's overweight simply eats too much. They also are the first to tell you that its not as simple as eating too much. It is.

<comment><USER20> The human body has mechanisms for making you Hurt Real Bad when you don't have more calories coming in then going out. Maybe your ancestors had more reliable access to food resources and didn't have to develop these responses. The human population on this planet is incredibly varied. Good for you that you and the people in your social network do well following what you describe as a calorie-restricted diet.

The self-satisfied responses to your N=1 sample size study, just because it validates the commonly accepted nutritional orthodoxy is what makes me fear for the public policies that come out of this debate.

<comment><USER19> The science is pretty basic. It's the law of thermodynamics. Your body can't magically create fat or other weight from calories you don't have.

<comment><USER21> The number of calories are measured in a food using a bomb calorimeter can be different from how many calories of the digested food are available for use to the human body. Also, some foods require more energy to be broken down. Some foods can trigger secondary effects that change behavior which could alter metabolism.

Now, I think those secondary considerations have a small impact on overall calorie consumption. For just about any food, a calorie measured by a bomb calorimeter is probably just about a calorie available to move the body, maintain the body, or stored in fat for later.

The body is a tough thing to study objectively.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that's really OP's point. The point isn't that 1 calorie for me = 1 calorie for you. We know for a fact that the digestive performance of people can vary greatly, and caloric use varies greatly also depending on person and activity level.

The high variance is really besides the point, which is that if you are gaining weight, _you are consuming too much for your current situation_. You can either work to expend more, or reduce your intake, both of which are perfectly reasonable options.

There is no objective measure for eating too much, but it's also trivially easy to find out if you're eating too much _for you_.

<comment><USER20> >You can either work to expend more, or reduce your intake, both of which are perfectly reasonable options.

Perhaps I should be more clear: Your body has mechanisms for defeating your ability to work to expend more (fatigue), and driving you to eat (cravings, hunger pangs). I'm not arguing with your basic premise: you must consume less then you expend. I'm arguing with your "calorie is a calorie" dogma. For insulin insensitive people (read: overweight people), 1 calorie of fat will satisfy you more (turning on the satiety mechanism) better then 1 calorie of sugar will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Out of all of the articles that I've read regarding weight loss, none seem to refute that: lowering calorie intake, and some moderate exercise will result in healthier body.

If you want to reach a certain aesthetic then that's fine, but as far as I know the "obesity problem" is more about a persons health and well being, not being aesthetically pleasing.

So we can sit here and point fingers at what diet is best or whether or not we should cut fats out of our diet, but at the end of the day the true issue is simply people do not have the will to exercise, and they either do not have funds or the will to eat a healthy amount of calories.

<comment><USER24> I love that you say some anodyne things and then, with no actual facts or reasoning, conclude that the "true issue" is something that fixes blame and dodges the issues raised in the article. And, naturally, is a classic example of the fundamental attribution error at work.

As somebody who has gone over the past decade from no exercise to running 15+ races and is now training for my first triathlon I am happy to say that "will to exercise" is not actually the problem for anybody I know. That certainly wasn't my problem.

The good news is that people actually study this for a living. If you want a readable introduction to the limits and uses of willpower, McGonigal's _The Willpower Instinct_ is a fine place to start understanding why, "Oh, those people are just weak," is a lazy and wrong answer.

<comment><USER23> My questions are:

a) Were you considered obese or over weight before you started training for these races?

b) If exercising wasn't the problem, then was it food choices? Did you have to resort to something other than simply lowering calorie intake to reach (and maintain) a healthy weight.

Your also correct I haven't posted any references, my exposure to dieting/lifestyle changes and weight loss is little more than what I hear from colleague, what few articles pop up on hacker news, CBC radio and the little research I've done myself.

Also thank you for the book recommendation, I'll be sure to check it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Silly: spoonfeeding junk-food CEOs facts about obesity, in the vain hope they'll take their share of responsibility. What, did anybody imagine they didn't know they sell the food equivalent of crack to our kids? They're not idiots; they make money doing this, and are responsible to shareholders.

<comment><USER12> Responsible to their shareholders to avoid the deluge of lawsuits that will come; it will be like tobacco, you can see the tide turning. That was their chance to change course.

<comment><USER25> They've had that info on their desks for a decade. They've had a chance every single day to do the right thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When designed in the way described in the article junk food is pretty much a superstimulus. Those are problematic not just among food: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_western/).

</comment><comment><USER27> Where is any mention of the disastrous consequences of the USDA "food pyramid" which has been drummed into children at school for decades, perfectly tracking the obesity "epidemic", and which promotes an obesity-causing high-carb, low fat diet.

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's an article I wrote about this that contains an embedded video of 60 Minutes' "The Flavorists" which is closely related. [http://www.humansarenotbroken.com/the-extraordinary- manipula...](http://www.humansarenotbroken.com/the-extraordinary-manipulation- of-human-beings-via-food)

</comment><comment><USER29> Company finds out what people want and offers to sell it to them: News at 11!

Seriously, this hand-wringing is ridiculous. Excellent article here: [http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/25/frito-lay-wont-make- yo...](http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/25/frito-lay-wont-make-you-eat- chips-at-gun)

<comment><USER30> Would you make the same argument about cigarettes? Heroin?

<comment><USER31> How is that relevant? This discussion is over junk _food_ , a human fuel, a caloric substance.

Are you really asking why chips and snacks are thought of differently than a drug like heroin, or a drug delivery system like a cigarette? I'd say you're playing your hyperbole card a little too strong if so.

<comment><USER32> There's no bright line between food and drugs. Alcohol is a caloric substance, and also an addictive one. That's not to say that we shouldn't distinguish between potato chips and heroin, but it's not clear to me that foods are unproblematic by virtue of the fact that they're foods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> " small but crucial move: the industry should use the expertise of scientists — its own and others — to gain a deeper understanding of what was driving Americans to overeat. "

LMAO, they probably employ dozens of scientists trying to figure how to get people to eat more. Could the speaker have been any more clueless? He would have been better off pushing some solution that had been user tested not to hurt sales. E.g. use Stevia instead of sugar, cost goes up 5%, but sales rise to match as you capture some dieters you wouldn't otherwise or something. Instead he told them to research getting people to want less of their product.

<comment><USER27> Yes, they sit around in smoke-filled rooms scheming about how to make kids fatter and fatter. They in fact would like nothing better than if all children died of diabetes before they reach puberty.

They do like we all do. Try to develop a product, test it, refine it, in order to sell more of it. One of the common mantras here is that its good to do A/B testing to get better conversion. But when General Mills does it, it's somehow evil?

<comment><USER34> When _we_ do it, it's sometimes evil - see <http://darkpatterns.org/>.

But we're not poisoning people, even in the worst case. All we can do is screw up the internet.

<comment><USER35> Food companies aren't poisoning people either. People are poisoning themselves.

You can make the case that these "poisonous" snack foods are so appealing because they are cheap, because the government only gives subsidies to agriculture used in making junk food, but that's a stretch & still assumes there are no other options (like eating healthier or eating less).

<comment><USER24> Your implied intellectual model here is that people are entirely in control of their actions and are (or at least can be) perfectly rational about them.

That's far from the truth. These junk food brands spend enormous amount of money on advertising, product placement, and other ways to influence consumers. Why? Because it works to manipulate them.

See, for example:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cognitive_biases> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_economics>

Or talk to anybody who works in mass-market advertising. Or hell, just visit Vegas. If people were rational actors, Las Vegas would still just be a place where the Hoover Dam workers lived.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Previously posted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250587>

<comment><USER37> There were only 2 comments on it then, barely worth linking to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The food that is most readily available to us is the food that is most profitable.

</comment><comment><USER39> but NYT, why some stupid equation on the top? [http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2010/08/know-your- science....](http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2010/08/know-your-science.html)

</comment><comment><USER40> If restrict the tone of dicussion to calories, fat, carbs and proteins, it is just not going to work out.

If something has been learned in the last 10 years is that whole foods matter and that you cannot reduce them to their macronutrient profile. Two foods with identical profile yield totally different results.I recommend to read Willet book on eat, drink and be healthy. [http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/eat-drink- and-be-healthy-wal...](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/eat-drink-and-be- healthy-walter-md-willett-md/1102499520)

</comment><comment><USER41> 1 second on the lips, for a lifetime on the hips.

Doing the slow carb diet for over a year now. Lost over 50lbs. With the 1 day to cheat rule, I definitely ended up eating more candy, sweets, cake, chocolate, etc. than I would have at any other point in my life. Crazy as it seems, I developed a sweet tooth while on this diet! But it just goes to show, a calorie isn't a calorie because our body has functions and reacts differently at different times.

</comment><comment><USER42> Soft drinks are one of the biggest offenders. Kids never fail to be amazed that there are the equivalent of 10 teaspoons of sugar in one can of coke.

</comment><comment><USER43> pg wrote on this some time ago: <http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html>

</comment><comment><USER44> love articles on this subject.

somewhat related there is a great lecture about Sugar (sucrose vs fructose vs ethanol) and some history on HFCS in America <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

</comment><comment><USER45> I read this last week when it was posted the first time (or maybe linked to on Twitter by pg). It reminded me of the details we heard about the cigarette manufacturers in the 80s and 90s. The junk food makers are operating in much the same manner.

</comment><comment><USER46> Mediterranean Diet Can Cut Heart Disease, Study Finds:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/health/mediterranean- diet-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/health/mediterranean-diet-can-cut- heart-disease-study-finds.html?hp)

</comment><comment><USER47> Hacking the consumer.

</comment><comment><USER48> you know the first thing I did upon loading this page is to go buy a bag of Doritos... thanks HN! It was very tasty!</comment>


Xor Filters: Faster and Smaller Than Bloom Filters - <AUTHOR> https://lemire.me/blog/2019/12/19/xor-filters-faster-and-smaller-than-bloom-filters/ <comment><USER2> They praise bloom filters for being simple and describe how it works in two sentences. They criticize cuckoo filters for being too complicated. They praise their own algorithm for being simple, and then they don't describe it, and instead link to a repo of several hundred lines of code.

My guess is it's one of those things that are simple to understand for the guy that wrote it but inscrutable for everyone else. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have several such code blobs in production right now, but I won't pretend to call them simple.

<comment><USER3> > _My guess is it 's one of those things that are simple to understand for the > guy that wrote it but inscrutable for everyone else._

Or, one could just read the code instead of guessing - it's not that hard to follow, similar to Bloom idea + XORing the hashes.

<comment><USER4> > not that hard to follow

I'd say that the requirement to solve a system of linear equations that may or may not even have a solution in order to construct the filter might qualify as hard to follow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Neither the blog nor the repo contain benchmarks, which is bit weird when the title of a technical article has word "Faster".

Then after digging through the actual paper it turns out that the construction performance of Xor Filter is actually massively slower than Bloom.. May not matter for many uses, but critical for others (like mine).

> Blocked Bloom = 10 ns/key

> Bloom 8 = 40 ns/key

> Xor 8 = 110 ns/key

<comment><USER6> Co-author of the paper here. The repo [https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_cpp](https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_cpp) contains all the source code and benchmarks. Yes, construction of the xor filter is slower, but I wouldn't say massively. You should probably compare Bloom 12 against Xor 8, as those have similar false positive rates. Bloom 12 is 60 ns/key, versus Xor 8 at 110 ns/key. Cuckoo filter is somewhere between. Those number don't include calculating the hash code of a key, which might be another 30 ns/key or so.

What is your use case? Maybe Blocked Bloom might be better (if you have the memory).

<comment><USER5> Thanks, found the benchmarks (your blog links primarily to different repo, "/xorfilter").

My use case is a new kind of debugger ([https://BugJail.com](https://BugJail.com)), which works by capturing 20+ million events per second from running application, and then reconstructing model of program execution from the raw events. With 20+ million events per second that 110ns per key is just not going to work..

<comment><USER6> Very interesting! If both construction and lookup need to be very fast, and if you do have enough memory, then I would say a blocked Bloom filter would be best (without knowing your use case in detail). With a regular Bloom filter, you will have lots of CPU cache misses. Cuckoo and xor filter might make sense if you can do (batch) construction in background threads, multiple filters concurrently. That way you can save memory.

<comment><USER5> The filters are used to seek from database files, so lookup/query side performance is not major issue (Xor filters were mainly interesting because of the smaller size). Normally a secondary index would do the job fine, but because of the high sustained rate there is no time to write it. And all CPU cores are already maxed out, so moving more to background doesn't provide net- benefit..

+Thanks everybody for your encouraging words :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The paper claims that it is more space efficient than golomb coded sequences, but this is clearly not the case at least when the golomb parameters and FP rate are set optimally[1] a GCS can be well within a fraction of 1% of the information theoretic limit.

The main limitation of GCS in terms of communications efficiency is just that there aren't that many optimal rate options. Though arithmetic coding the differences isn't really that much more complex to implement and it's optimal for whatever parameters you want.

Now, if it wanted to talk about _access_ efficiency, then sure, GCS don't result in an data structure thats efficient for random access.

[1] [https://gist.github.com/sipa/576d5f09c3b86c3b1b75598d799fc84...](https://gist.github.com/sipa/576d5f09c3b86c3b1b75598d799fc845)

<comment><USER6> (Co-author here) For GCS, I also found the Golomb-Rice parameter Q-1 to be better, this is what we used. According to my calculation, the overhead of GCS is around 1.5 bit/key. See also [https://github.com/0xcb/Golomb-coded- map](https://github.com/0xcb/Golomb-coded-map) . Sure, with arithmetic coding, or ANS coding, it should be lower; it would be interesting to see how much. I kind of like GCS.

<comment><USER7> The overhead you're seeing is because you've mismatched your FP rate with the optimal size for your GCS code. If they're exactly matched the overhead is very low (not as low as an arithmetic code simply because each entry is still coded into bits, so you get something like a half-bit overhead on average from that).

<comment><USER6> I would love to see improvements to the GCS code I have, but I tested with many different sizes and Golomb-Rice parameters... I was not able to reduce the size overhead in any way. Maybe you can help? There are two implementations, one is Java: [https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_java/blob/master/sr...](https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_java/blob/master/src/main/java/org/fastfilter/gcs/GolombCompressedSet.java) and the other is C++: [https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_cpp/blob/master/src...](https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_cpp/blob/master/src/gcs/gcs.h)

<comment><USER8> Good point about Q-1. I never looked at optimizing parameters when writing up the GCM.

A quick empirical check shows a small improvement for Q-1, but the claim that it comes in under 1% from the minimum seems to be based on an unusual definition of the minimum. nullc gives it as log2(eM), but the real minimum is simply log2(M), in which case the unary terminator alone imposes a 5% penalty at M=2^20.

It may still be possible to optimize the parameters further, but the gain would be perhaps a tenth of a bit per item.

<comment><USER7> > but the real minimum is simply log2(M)

The minimum entropy to code such a thing is log2(MN choose N)/N bits per element.

log2(eM) is just an approximation when N is large.

You cannot code with N uniform choices out of MN options with less than log2(MN choose N) bits on average, by the pigeonhole principle.

> the unary terminator alone

The terminator carries information. If M is chosen well the terminator carries almost one bit of information.

<comment><USER8> The minimum for approximate membership testers is log2((M choose N)/(N + fp_rate * (M - N) choose N))/N, assuming M >> N. The asymptotic is log2(1/fp_rate). For simplicity's sake below I pretend we're dealing with a set of 1, and so 1/fp_rate = M.

I thought you had this in mind in the first paragraph with "1 / log(2) (around 1.44) times more compact than Bloom filters". However using your definition of the minimum, for practical purposes it isn't possible to be anywhere near 1.44 times more compact than Bloom filters.

Using your example of M=2^20, log2(M) log2(e) / log2(eM) = 1.34. Personally I've never spent more than 45 bits per item on such structures, but even at 64 bits log2(eM) only reaches 1.41.

The oft-cited 1.44x Bloom filter tax is simply taken from its per-item cost of log2(M) log2(e), absent the information-theoretic minimum of log2(M), leaving just the log2(e) multiplier.

<comment><USER7> I think I was caught up thinking the discussion was all about the efficiency of the GCS coding for the underlying bit-set; which it is indeed indeed nearly optimal for (but only for some parameters, which don't happen to be where the fp rate is 1/2^k, which unfortunately is the case usually considered in papers!). Sorry about that.

The bloom cost 1.44 times the lower bound. The difference between an optimally coded bitset and the asymptotic lower bound is an additive 1.44 bits per element. This is a pretty big difference!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Direct link to paper (pdf) - [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.08258.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.08258.pdf)

I haven't fully read the paper yet, but it seems like a variation of a bloom filter where membership is determined by xoring three hashes (see algorithm 1 in the pdf)

<comment><USER10> If that's the case then both membership and non-membership will be probabilistic, rather than one or the other being certain like boom filters, right?

<comment><USER9> "Membership test: returns true if the key x is likely in S, false otherwise"

I think they circumvent the problem by making a complicated insertion procedure where all of the keys need to be inserted at once, it seems uses a stack to avoid hash collisions

Take a look at [https://github.com/FastFilter/xorfilter/blob/master/xorfilte...](https://github.com/FastFilter/xorfilter/blob/master/xorfilter.go#L110)

I can usually read go, but I've never been that great at deciphering "academic code" so the exact details escape me here.

<comment><USER11> Yep, also the insertion procedure is retried with increasingly larger arrays until no "collisions" are encountered.

Reminds me of minimal perfect hash construction.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the underlying theory is from a minimal perfect hash function called "BDZ": [http://cmph.sourceforge.net/bdz.html](http://cmph.sourceforge.net/bdz.html) . Yes, sometimes a retry is needed, but the array is not made larger; it just retries with a different seed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of the advantages of bloom filters is that you can also do intersections, unions and cardinality estimations thereof on remote sets. These don't seem to support that.

<comment><USER6> Yes it is possible to do this, but do people actually use those features? For (pure) cardinality estimation, there is HyperLogLog, which can also be merged...

<comment><USER13> > do people actually use those features?

I did, not sure how common it is though. For much-larger-than-memory problems it can give a tremendous speedup to be able to do an estimate or logical operation(s) before having to hit the disk.

<comment><USER14> I used that to sum unique visitors on websites, by summing daily bloom filters corresponding to the set of visitors each day. It was pretty cool to be able to sum "unique" metrics, which is usually not possible in classic reporting tools.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As far as I can tell it doesn't support insertion operations. That's a massive drawback vs both cuckoo and bloom filters.

It's somewhat disingenuous that they are clearly attempting to position this as being superior to the other data structures, while their's cannot do one of the core operations.

<comment><USER16> There are real-world applications where this* would drop in. I believe Chrome's malicious-site blocker employs a Bloom filter blob.

* assuming it does what it says, I haven't looked.

<comment><USER17> Assuming you're talking about Google Safe Browsing it needs the ability to update the data structures. Implementations vary but I wouldn't use Bloom Filters and this seems even less appropriate.

I'm sure there's some application where this is the right choice, but the reaction here shows that people don't like being told the propaganda approach to new data structures. Just returning true is also technically "faster and smaller than Bloom Filters" as the headline for this item says when I write this. Almost useless, but faster and smaller.

<comment><USER15> I'm unsure if they do partial/delta updates — I've never looked at the spec in detail - but I don't know how we'll bloom filters deal with bulk delta updates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Also of academic interest; Neural Bloom filter: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04304](https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04304)

Achives optimally 36% space saving compared to BL but needs an fp accelerator to achieve the same throughput. Compares to perfect hasing, which also does not suppprt insertions.

</comment><comment><USER19> Comparing a static data structure to two well-known dynamic structures is disingenuous, to say the least. And for a static structure you can do better than just a minimal perfect hash table of fingerprints. You can use a succinct data structure to compress the fingerprints in a form that is still efficiently queryable (unlike say Golomb-compressed sequences): [https://www.antoniomallia.it/sorted-integers-compression- wit...](https://www.antoniomallia.it/sorted-integers-compression-with-elias- fano-encoding.html)

<comment><USER20> Elias-fano are overestimated without any proof or comparison benchmarks.

Like other integer compression methods, you still need offsets to small blocks for efficient random access.

Getting a single value in a block is done with slow branchy bit ops like ctz and bit shifting. That's decoding

The fastest elias-fano implementation is in [https://github.com/powturbo/TurboPFor](https://github.com/powturbo/TurboPFor) and is partially using SIMD

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> VLDB also just published a paper on a similar, improved bloom-like data structure "Vacuum Filters: More Space-Efficient and Faster Replacement for Bloom and Cuckoo Filters" [http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol13/p197-wang.pdf](http://www.vldb.org/pvldb/vol13/p197-wang.pdf)

It would be interesting to get a comparison between Xor and Vacuum.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the link! I wasn't aware of this. The source code is available at [https://github.com/wuwuz/Vacuum-Filter/](https://github.com/wuwuz/Vacuum- Filter/)

To me it looks like a version of the cuckoo filter that isn't restricted to a 2^n size. We made the same change in the benchmark of the xor filter against the cuckoo filter (and others made the same change). There are some more changes, and the paper claims the vacuum filter is faster than the cuckoo filter. I will try to add the vacuum filter to our benchmark suite at [https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_cpp](https://github.com/FastFilter/fastfilter_cpp) and see what results I get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. Where does 3 come from for the number of hash functions? Why not 4 or 5?

<comment><USER22> The minimum number motivated to work is also the cheapest. 2 was simply deemed insecure.

<comment><USER6> No, actually 2 would also work. It's just that 3 hash functions needs the least space for some reason (less than 2, less than 4 or more).

<comment><USER22> Well met, and thanks for identifying the solution using overhead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How is this different from a hashset where you simply never do the final key comparison? As far as I can tell both require linear storage space and have around the same storage complexity.

It seems like the main "innovation" here is simply using a perfect hash function for your hashset.

From the paper: "We store the fingerprints in an array B with capacity c slightly larger than the cardinality of the set |S | (i.e., c ≈ 1.23 × |S |)."

<comment><USER24> Bloom filters don't require linear space. You can essentially create a set of arbitrarily large objects, as long as you have a hash for them. It requires O(C) memory where C is the size of your largest hash function. As a trade-off, it's not deterministic, since there can be hash collisions due to pigenhole principle. So, even though bloom filter claims the object is in the set, there is a certain probability (that you can calculate) that it's not actually there. On the other hand, a tree-set or hash-set will be deterministically correct, but they require O(N) space and tree-set requires O(logN) lookup cost.

<comment><USER25> Bloom filters absolutely call for linear space if you are using them appropriately: given the hash collision probability you are working with the size of the required filter is linear in the number of elements you want to store. Yes, it is "technically true" (the most useless kind of true) that you can store as much stuff as you want in the filter... but you get increasingly worse false positive rates that eventually just saturate to near 100%. If you actually read any of the math--including this linked work on Xor filters--you will always see them described in terms of "bits per item stored" (where the number of bits is extremely small vs. what you would expect). Hell: Wikipedia even describes the algorithm's storage requirements as "A Bloom filter with 1% error and an optimal value of k, in contrast, requires only about 9.6 bits per element, regardless of the size of the elements.".

<comment><USER24> I disagree. It requires linear space in the sense that you need _another_ data structure to deal with hash collisions. If you read my comment I was talking about exactly that. In normal applications of bloom filter it's built before a cache layer to ask if your data is in the cache. For this you do not need a list of objects since if bloom filter wrongly determined that object is in the set, it will be a cache miss and as long as a bloom filter operation is faster than a cache miss this is usually a good tradeoff; because normally when you're about to have a cache miss, you end up not going to cache because bloom filter says the object is not there. For this application, you do NOT need O(N) space inside the bloom filter layer, but obviously eventually someone will need to go retrieve this data.

> If you actually read any of the math

I mean I did and I was trying to describe that math above. I built bloom filters many times before. I'm curious if you misread my comment.

<comment><USER10> You said the following, so I assume you agree with it:

> It requires O(C) memory where C is the size of your largest hash function.

For any given expected false-positive rate P, C must be chosen to be a size of O(N), so a bloom filter with expected false-positive rate P will be of size O(N).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> How big of a problem can false positives get?

In terms of the URL blacklist, is the 1% of false positives 1% of all possible URLs? Or of the amount of requests to the filter? Or what?

<comment><USER27> Of the amount of blacklisted URLs, for sure. The filter doesn't know anything about possible URLs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The C++ code, anyway, is remarkably prolix, probably 4-10x. It is probably best that they did not attempt Rust, under the circumstances.

<comment><USER29> From the blog post: > It would be relatively easy to start from the Go version and produce a Rust version, but I had to stop somewhere.

(I bet someone in hacker news is saying "challenge accepted!" and we'll have a xorfilter crate very soon)

<comment><USER28> Yes, I read that.

The point was that as bad as their C++ code is, their Rust version might be even more disappointing.

Downvoting me just for mentioning Rust only demonstrates immaturity.

<comment><USER6> (Author here) The project started by taking the cuckoo filter source code (which happens to be written in C++), and extend it. A lot of code comes from that conversion. Other implementations (Morton, CQF) are also written in C++. I write Java normally, so C++ code is not my strength, but C++ was needed to be able to compare with others. A Rust version would be nice!

<comment><USER30> I don't have a ton of time but the Go version does seem very easy to port, we'll see!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"I don't think Wikipedia can be saved at this point, but I might be wrong." - <AUTHOR> http://www.markbernstein.org/Jan15/Reckless.html <comment><USER2> I apologize if Mr. Bernstein is reading this, but does anyone else feel like this post as well as many of the others he linked in his article are meandering, circumferential... maybe even raving? I really cannot follow his reasoning or discussion at all. I was genuinely interested though because I have heard all about this 'infamous' topic but have had trouble finding objective sources (if they exist?).

The end of the post should say TL,DR:

I think Wikipedia admins are sexist and it is hurting Wikipedia.

<comment><USER3> TL:DR The Wikipedia processes lead to a lot of discussion. That discussion takes a long time. This can be gamed by some people to make the project include information that is used to harrass others. This does not require sexist admins, although they do exist. It just requires a few accounts who know how Wikipedia works so that their posts are not instantly reverted and ignored.

Trolling is a metaphor taken from fishing. Wikipedia is a big barrel full of hungry fish.

I agree about the rambling post. Surely it would be better to recruit people to guard against gaming of wikipedia; people who encorage an anti-harassment culture and who encorage a culture of non-engagement with toxic trolls.

<comment><USER4> _" Trolling is a metaphor taken from fishing."_

It really isn't. Perhaps you're confusing it with trawling?

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_%28fishing%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolling_%28fishing%29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is more writing of the kind that draws excessively far-reaching conclusions from little data.

Wikipedia, as an open project, is just as susceptible to "groupthink" as any other. This certainly causes issues, possibly like the one highlighted here (though it's difficult to figure out what the actual complaint is in this case).

But it's not possible to draw the conclusion that "Wikipedia can't be saved" on this basis. Broadly speaking, Wikipedia seems like a fantastic resource that is still growing in useful ways. The fact that it has problems doesn't really mean it can't be saved, and this conclusion seems like overblown nonsense.

<comment><USER7> Agreed. The prospect that wikipedia, which provides information to millions of people, is doomed because of a couple of dubious edits could be most charitably described as shortsighted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I suspect most people are up-voting this story because of the link-bait title.

The author's blog posts don't really give much in the way of a substantial explanation of what's going on here. The impression I get is similar to other comments here: he comes off as raving and kind of irrational? He's mad about something on Wikipedia and he says he's been blocked, but then doesn't say why?

If you're interested in actually figuring out what's going on, it's worthwhile to read the actual page, which goes into a lot of detail: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/GamerGate/Proposed_decision)

As far as I can tell, none of the journalists who wrote stories about this read that page, and none of them talked to any of the members of the Wikipedia ArbCom committee. Seriously. Check out Wikipedia ArbCom member Molly White's twitter over here:

[https://twitter.com/molly0x57](https://twitter.com/molly0x57)

and [https://twitter.com/molly0x57/status/558687811298000896](https://twitter.com/molly0x57/status/558687811298000896)

She's pretty angry about the press' interpretation of the events here, wherein many of the articles basically flat-out said that "feminists have been carte- blanche blocked from Wikipedia!" The press loves to feed off controversy on Wikipedia, and also loves to not do their homework.

That said, Wikipedia does have an editor gender gap, but I'm not sure there's a lot that can be said based on these blog posts here.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I'm familiar with GamerGate (it is currently my favorite internet drama), and I have trouble figuring out what Bernstein is talking about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I quit Wikipedia many years ago when I recognized that opinion-pushers willing to dedicate way more time that I had could dominate articles.

That's really all it takes. Opinion-pushers can work completely within the rules of Wikipedia, and if they collectively have more time to dedicate to pushing their opinion than their opponents, they can use the Wikipedia process to push their view to the exclusion of others.

Arbitration and referendums are often ineffective against this; especially when long, long threads with lots of technical details, citations and counter- citations are involved, and when the arbitrators or referendum participants are themselves biased.

Most people just don't have the time or interest to read through long arguments. So arbitrarors and voters often make decisions with scant knowledge of what they're deciding on, or do so with a foregone conclusion in mind and without consideration of the evidence.

Frankly, I'm surprised that Wikipedia works as well as it does, and I still find it useful. But I just don't have the time or energy to endlessly fight off all the opinion pushers. As a consequence, I try to take what I read on Wikipedia with a big grain of salt.

<comment><USER11> Which sucks because the people that have the most time are those that are paid for their time. So that means that moneyed interests can push their messages via Wikipedia. And it will only get worse as more marketers realize this. In other words, Wikipedia is like every other medium out there. The reason Wikipedia works as well as it does is the same reason Google Search works as well as it does, for topics where there is no money it does a fair job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> A gender gaps exists on Wikipedia, and the community has been consciously working to address that for several years.

Encouraging contributions from females has probably been the Wikimedia Foundation's largest policy effort. Increasing Wikipedia's coverage of notable women is a common theme in edit-a-thons, events where Wikipedians get together at a library or cafe and edit Wikipedia together for a few hours. There is more to do, but these are effective and useful efforts.

I am not familiar enough with the editorial conflicts surrounding Gamergate to make an informed comment on Mark's post, but thought I would offer some broader context.

</comment><comment><USER13> I agree that Wikipedia is dead - because instead of encouraging contribution, it's become a place dead-set on enforcing endless rules specifically to prevent people contributing.

I run my own public wiki about a niche topic, and one of the hardest parts is convincing potential new contributors that their contributions will be welcomed and they won't be lynched for doing the "wrong" thing. Everyone says: "I know how wikis work - they're a bureaucratic nightmare". I have to continually tell people our wiki is nothing like wikipedia, other than the "wiki" part.

I originally thought that building my wiki on the same software as wikipedia would add credibility, when in hindsight it's done the exact opposite.

<comment> irq-1 StackOverflow has a (sightly?) different bureaucratic structure that I can't see or evaluate for fairness, but I still make the occasional anonymous contribution. I know from past experience with Wikipedia and others, that I'll eventually look up a few of those contributions and see how they fared. _Based on too little data_ I'll decide whether it's worth contributing in the future.

(I'm not going to make an account, there's no point in arguing that I should, and the same is true for the majority of potential contributors.)

Statistical information about edits, reverts, accounts and subjects, etc... could be a way forward. Published and standardized stats built-in to the Wikimedia software could let visitors peek into the culture and bureaucracy of a wiki. Lone operators like yourself, could also see who's contributing and who's trolling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's worth noting that the lady who was the center of the gamergate thing:

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

Her wikipedia entry, which would probably not exist if not for gamergame, doesn't mention anything about the details of her ex's blog post, who her ex is, what she was accused of, or anything that could be viewed negatively about her. Given all of this, I would say that wikipedia is capable of handling these situations delicately and Mark is a bit hyperbolic by saying wikipedia is incapable of doing this.

</comment><comment><USER15> It should be noted that the link is to a supplemental, providing running updates on the response to Mark's series of articles:

Infamous [http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Infamous.html](http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Infamous.html) Thoughtless [http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Thoughtless.html](http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Thoughtless.html) Careless [http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Careless.html](http://markbernstein.org/Jan15/Careless.html)

As such, it will be hard to read, appearing like a rant when taken on its own. A better place to start will be with the above articles, which provide context for the Reckless post.

</comment><comment><USER16> Why is it that the more I read about "Gamergate," the more I think it might be the long sought after anesthetic that can put anyone into a deep sleep with virtually zero risk?

<comment><USER17> It's boring stuff when you sit and listen to the _reasonable_ people, both sides which have completely valid points which all should be taken care of ("pro-gg" caring about ethics in journalism, "anti-gg" caring about mysoginy and sexism in games).

If you follow from that side, then you see that the entire ordeal is two sides that have valid points and that aren't inherently conflicting.

The "conflict" is a self-feeding circle of hatred on disgusting platforms such as twitter which only serve to point the finger. "Look at what those mysoginistic arseholes are saying" and "Look at what those unethical cockroaches are printing", more or less.

I spent five minutes reading through the feed of some gg-related (pro or against, doesn't f-ing matter at this point) "moderator". I got deeply affected. Way, way too much. The guy was fighting the "conflict" and not doing either side any favour. I got physically ill and wanted to cry.

The worst of the worst on the internet usually doesn't affect me, but this did, maybe because it showed me that sometimes, humanity is pretty damn hopeless.

Thanks a lot, Twitter, for enabling such senseless hatred to develop and literally destroy a large part of the gaming community. To enable the worst in people and harass people, I must stress, on _both sides of the pointless conflict_. An absolute waste.

I can only recommend people to stay the hell away from the entire subject and ignore it. If you care about ethics in game journalism, you should stay the hell away from gamergate. And if you want to improve the situation regarding women/feminism in games, being "anti-gg" won't help your cause. At this point, it's just a hopeless bunch of people arguing on twitter over the argument itself, rather than the actual talking points.

<comment><USER18> If "pro-gg" cares about ethics in journalism, doesn't that mean that "anti-gg" denies that journalism has poor ethics? What does mysoginy and sexism have to do with ethics in video games?

<comment><USER19> The anti-GG side claims that no reasonable person would expect journalism about video games to be ethical or free of corruption. Therefore, the "true" purpose of GamerGate must be something more sinister.

On misogyny:

1\. Many of the gaming journalists GamerGate have specifically called out as unethical (Nathan Grayson, Ian Miles Cheong, Shanley Kane, Arthur Chu) are public advocates of identity feminism.

2\. Gamer culture, in general, leans more toward equality feminism. Many of the gamer bloggers doing the calling out (Georgina Young, Jennie Bharaj, Angela Night) are public advocates of equality feminism. Christina Hoff Sommers, the founder of equity feminism (a related branch), has issued several pro-gamer videos.

3\. Identity feminists consider equality feminism and equity feminism to be reactionary, misogynist, anti-feminist movements.

With these factors combined, you get a category 5 internet shitstorm. Wealthy white men are writing newspaper articles denouncing women as misogynists, because those women wrote blog posts calling out the journalists as corrupt.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for this - I've never heard about the different "branches" of feminism before, it's going to be an interesting read!

Edit: actually, could you help me get any more info (or the definition) on "identity feminism" and the difference between it and "equality feminism"?

<comment><USER21> The wiki article is a reasonable starting point: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_and_gender_feminism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_and_gender_feminism)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> >The infamous draft decision of Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) on Gamergate is worse than a crime.

<comment><USER23> Yeah, it's not good writing.

</comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Wikipedia has always had problems with vandalism, though it has always mostly been adept to fighting it. There's been infamous high-profile cases such as John Seigenthaler being implied in JFK and RFK's assassinations, Bertrand Meyer (of Eiffel fame) having his death faked, Willy on Wheels using automated scripts to conduct mass article redirections and other shenanigans, a made up Polish historical figure receiving mainstream coverage, and other examples.

I don't see why some instances of vandalism that are puerile but directed towards certain women imply a downfall of Wikipedia just like that, especially when the author is so disjointed and unable to provide concrete data. This analysis seems awfully selective.

<comment><AUTHOR> The problem, as detailed quite extensively in the other articles in the series, is that this isn't simply vandalism.

It's calculated and organized action, explicitly aimed at manipulating Wiki's hopelessly bureaucratic and clueless system. This isn't just some dork defacing a page, it's a whole virtual platoon of really hateful people playing at false good faith just long enough to keep their libels active almost perpetually, while tarring anyone who actually questions them as obstructionist.

The worst thing is, I'm ultimately not at all surprised. I stopped even attempting to edit anything on Wiki almost a decade ago, because the system was as hopelessly broken then as it is now. The site is, ultimately, run by a lot of amateur bureaucrats who're more interested in the fantasy than the reality of the system they've concocted. Yes, it mostly works, but it's more or less constructed to make actual good faith efforts to correct the site an uphill battle for anything but trivialities, while making it easy for local tribalism and policy to be used as a tool for nutjobs and fantasists to keep their version of 'wikiality' on the front page of Google for another day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Wikipedia is causing controversy? Glad to hear it's still working.

On a more serious note, "Wikipedia is wrong" and "Wikipedia is doomed" really need to be separated. These clickbait headlines are getting excessively tiring, particularly if anyone is taking them at face value. A solid attempt at collecting the whole sum of human knowledge will obviously have issues given the nature of how we operate.

However, claiming some >current and developing< topic being misrepresented spells the doom of the best attempt at a concise and well-indexed source on human history, the development of our species, and the thoughts/ideals that our civilization stands on is a bit much.

Perspective, please.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the author is taking the totally wrong action. If he wants Wikipedia to change, he should become MORE involved, not less. Like it or not Wikipedia is considered an authority and is here to stay. As terrible as the instances may be, the vast majority of people are not going to boycot Wikipedia for a few occurrences of misogyny.

<comment><USER26> How can he become more involved, if he's been banned from contributing to the site in the first place?

On top of that - GamerGate itself has already made it through to mainstream media. All that's needed in this scenario is for some BBC/Sky/CNN/Fox/... news reporter to pick up on the story, and before you know it, "Wikipedia promoting harassment of women in technology" hits every front page in the western world.

<comment><USER8> I believe he's only been temporarily blocked, but he doesn't say why (which doesn't lead much credence to his argument, IMO)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wikipedia is DMOZ. It suffers some of the same problems the DMOZ group suffered, no coincidence.

It will be replaced in spirit by dramatically more capable 'soft AI' (I know, I hate that term too) systems capable of answering most any question. That is, Google is coming.

Until that happens, Wikipedia will reign supreme at what it does.

<comment><USER11> Google's AI looks up most non-commercial topics on Wikipedia.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have not heard of "GamerGate". While reading the first half of the article, I thought it was intended to sound ironic. I had a hard time to find out what side he is on and what the actual point is.

When you criticize an institution the size of Wikipedia over one aspect of their culture and illustrate this through some fight of teenage boys vs feminists, then conclude that the institution is therefor doomed and go on to encourage people to tweet that they are not donating to it anymore, you risk to sound very childish. Especially when the article is written that bad.

On the other hand, I do not know him so this could also be a fantastically executed troll.

</comment><comment><USER29> For those having a hard time with the site color(s):

      (document.getElementById("content")).style.backgroundColor = "black";

<comment><USER8> Also consider dragging one of these to your bookmark bar: [https://readability.com/bookmarklets](https://readability.com/bookmarklets)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> My eyes!!

</comment><comment><USER31> It seems the OP is upset about the outcome but can provide no arguments whatsoever about why it's wrongful. The arbitration pages are viewable by everyone, you can take a look at the evidence posted there and make up your own mind.

</comment><comment><USER32> Wikipedia has shown itself to be firmly in the SJW/Quinn/Sarkeesian/Wu camp. So I'm not sure what he is upset about.

</comment><comment><USER33> off topic, but my god - that is a terrible background/font color combination. I couldn't read the article and my eyes are still adjusting.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just to go against the no-doubt-incoming influx of 'what's with the colours?!', I have absolutely zero problems with reading the text on this site.

Complaining about this sort of thing is ridiculous

<comment><USER34> I understand the annoyance. But surely coming from a site full of power users, people can just change the CSS, or copy/paste the text elsewhere.

<comment><USER26> What gets me, is that any site that pops up on the front page here that isn't black-text-on-white-or-light-grey-background gets hammered because of the sensitivities of those commenting.

This, despite the fact that the text on the vast majority of these sites is _perfectly_ legible.

You are right, though - select-all+copy+paste is trivial.

... and send-to-pocket is even easier

<comment><USER3> No one has yet complained about the text colours.

> This, despite the fact that the text on the vast majority of these sites is > perfectly legible.

To _you_. To other people they're not perfectly legible, they're unreadable. Why deliberately chose to exclude people?

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I don't see why it's so bad to point out that the site is completely illegible. Reminds me a bit of Wired magazine circa 1997.

<comment><USER34> It's fine to point out that the colors are troublesome. It's bad to complain about how you can't read it and your eyes still hurt, as if there's no way to avoid it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A Chrome extension that updates your css without refreshing* - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/refrecsser-live-css-refre/ndlkimdchjgnpchcpfbpninkkfhgkefc <comment><USER2> How does it know a file has changed? It constantly reloads it?

For a less magical tool, there's [https://www.npmjs.com/package/instant- server](https://www.npmjs.com/package/instant-server), which acts a simple HTTP server, but reloads your CSS whenever it changes without refreshing (it also refreshes on JS or HTML changes, but nevermind).

<comment><AUTHOR> yes it just keeps reloading the css files for the page

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its just a simple little extension that reloads your css files in the background so that you can view changes without having to reload the page each time

Github: [https://github.com/whatever555/refreshing/](https://github.com/whatever555/refreshing/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting idea.

</comment><comment><USER4> Doesn't work for me

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback. did you enable it for your domain? you can turn it on by clicking the icon and following the options</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Which web hosting service do you use - <AUTHOR>

I'm pretty fresh to having my own website, I've got some domain names now, and I'm testing out one site on Weebly, but I'd rather have my own go at building a site from the ground up, and I'm curious if anyone has a favorite hosting service out there.<p>FWIW, I used gandi.net to get my domains. <comment><USER2> Rent a dedicated server or virtual servers (latter only recommended for development and certain scaling scenarios). Set it up yourself. Shared hosting isn't great.

If you do want shared hosting, try the cloud-based ones: e.g. Rackspace CloudSites or Heroku.

Hide it behind CloudFlare to scale it and protect it.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are just starting out learning how to develop, I think going the shared hosting route is the most cost efficient model.

I personally use HostGator but I have friend who use DreamHost and FatCow. I've also used RackSpace in the past and looking to use them again.</comment>


In defense of "how it looks" - <AUTHOR> http://www.murketing.com/journal/?p=4899 <comment><USER2> _And yet: Please show me a product or object hailed by the design elite as Good that doesn't just so happen to be aesthetically pleasing._

craigslist, anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> I personally love craigslist's 1996 academic webpage design: very little divergence from browser default styles, minimal positioning, and "font-family: serif;".

The "design elite" _DESPISE_ craigslist. There was a long stretch a few years ago where prominent dimwits were putting up their total redesigns of craigslist just about weekly. There have been multiple organized design contests based around it!</comment></comment>


FCC sides with Google Fiber over Comcast with new pro-competition rule - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/fcc-gives-google-fiber-and-new-isps-faster-access-to-utility-poles/ <comment><USER2> Politics aside, of course.

The administration continues to act in removing Federal jurisdiction and regulations from being used as a tool to prevent startup organizations from entering established markets.

This case is a success in that it removes significant incumbent advantages. Let's hope poor behavior and sloppy work (breaking connections too frequently) doesn't become common. And shame on the incumbents using regulations for financial gain.

<comment><USER3> Is this really a good example of a success? I see it as one incumbent battling another incumbent over literally billions of dollars of future ad revenue. To me, a good example would be a true startup (fewer than 15 people, less than $5M revenue) getting the FCC to side with them without spending millions.

<comment><USER4> Likewise — and people often miss this angle — Comcast is a bit of an upstart itself in comparison to the two major incumbents, AT&T and Verizon. The two basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access, and they are using all their political power to prevent Comcast from becoming large enough to challenge them as a National last-mile telecom (they currently only offer service in something like 40% of the households in the US).

The prime case-in-point is the TimeWarner Cable merger that was scuttled — such a merger would have made Comcast effectively national, and a serious competitor to the old Bells. Meanwhile AT&T purchased DirecTV less than a year later (a deal worth more than the TWC acquisition in both dollars and customers) and the whole thing got rushed through quickly.

Do you think we would still have wired home Internet connections without Comcast? I know they're a terrible company to be a customer of (what telecom isn't though?) but when you look at the larger picture, they're constantly stymied by the FCC from getting "too big" — meanwhile, their two biggest competitors are 2-4x larger on a revenue basis. Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a heartbeat if Comcast weren't around driving demand for it — the way Comcast's tech architecture works makes it cheaper for them to serve the residential market than AT&T or Verizon will ever be able to do with wired connections.

<comment><USER5> > The two basically hold a duopoly on nationwide last-mile access

This is obviously not true since neither Verizon nor AT&T operate hardline access nationwide. Even if you mean copper phone wires specifically, you're leaving out CenturyLink.

Copper phone lines are of course the slowest last mile hardlines. Coax is far superior, and cable ISPs are growing relative to DSL--where the choices are Comcast vs Verizon DSL (for example), Comcast has higher market share.

[https://www.tellusventure.com/blog/cable-gains-subs-as- consu...](https://www.tellusventure.com/blog/cable-gains-subs-as-consumers- flee-dsl/)

Verizon FiOS competes directly with Comcast, but is offered in only about 20 metropolitan areas--and even then, incompletely. (FiOS is available in DC but not in Alexandria, which is right across the river.) Verizon stopped growing their FiOS footprint years ago.

> Verizon and AT&T would drop their residential landline business in a > heartbeat if Comcast weren't around driving demand for it

Verizon and AT&T (and CenturyLink) are required by law to provide residential telephone landlines to anyone who asks for it. What does that have to do with last-mile broadband?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting to see this decision today, as I was just speaking with my Google Fiber tech about their Nashville rollout.

Apparently there was so much heel dragging pole access, they ended up laying their fiber in tiny channels cut into the road.

As an aside, I also heard the channels weren't cut deep enough initially, so they were forced to go back and redo part of the work after much of it was considered complete.

</comment><comment><USER7> Is Google Fiber still expanding? Last I heard it was pretty much cut.

<comment><USER8> I don't think Google Fiber is expanding, but it did spur the rest of the ISPs.

AT&T seems to be expanding its gigabit footprint rapidly ([https://m.att.com/shopmobile/internet/gigapower/coverage- map...](https://m.att.com/shopmobile/internet/gigapower/coverage- map.html?referrer=&fromDesktop=true)) and not just to most affluent sections of the metro area where I live. Comcast is trying but they are still overpriced compared to AT&T and the upload speeds are abysmal- 35Mbps

<comment><USER9> There is an assumption among folks in the tech community that there is no competition between providers serving different markets-- _i.e._ what Verizon does in Maryland cannot affect what Comcast does in Delaware. However, the idea that Google Fiber is "spur[ring] the rest of the ISPs" to roll out gigabit is accepted without question, even though Google Fiber serves very few markets. Verizon, for example, upgraded FiOS to gigabit even though Google Fiber serves no Verizon territory and has shown zero willingness to overbuild another fiber provider, and after Google Fiber announced it was downshifting deployment.

One of those premises has to be wrong.

<comment><USER10> It's hard for big telcos to move fast (it was hard for Google to move fast in this area). What telcos are doing today is responding to what happened 5 years ago. Where they're doing it is responding to what happened 6-12 months ago.

Because Google wasn't able to get traction on their construction in San Jose, AT&T had time to do street surveys and order custom multistrand fiber with drops for a splitter at every pole, and then get the fiber actually on the pole before Google got much of anything done. Existing carriers can run new cable on poles they already have access without a lot of hassle.

Otoh, Google primarily wanted to show it could be done and spur others to, faster eyeballs without capital costs is a win. If you can't get 10mbps for YouTube on a gigabit connection, something is clearly broken.

Edit: pole instead of poll (thanks unmonk)

<comment><USER11> Did you mean to write "pole" instead of "poll"? (Genuine question - I'm not sure whether "poll" is a term with some meaning in the telecom / isp industry.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Am I just grotesquely cynical that my first thought was "Pai liked this because it hurts AT&T and Comcast, not his paymasters at Verizon."?

Still, good news whatever the reason. Competition is desperately needed here, even if it's only going to be between three or four major options.

<comment><USER13> Yes, you are cynical.

Republicans simply have a different utility function. They consider deregulation, and ease of running a business more important than enforcing fairness via legislation.

They believe the market will do a better job than they can do. Democrats don't trust the market to do that, and feel they can do a better job.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately we have no alternatives to choose candidates from that understand neither extremes will work, and that you actually need a mixture of legislation/regulation in the right places, and no legistlation/regulation in others.

<comment><USER9> To the contrary, there is broad consensus and what people are all arguing about is actually the mushy middle. The Republicans won on this one--the 1996 telecom act broadly deregulated the telecom industry. Most of Europe followed suit and deregulated their telecom markets similar to how we did it in the 1996 act.

What republicans are worried about is attempts to undo the 1996 reforms. There are people who think that rate regulation, municipal utility boards deciding where infrastructure should be built, etc., are actually good ideas. Probably not a majority of people even in the democrat camp, but there are enough people who don't remember why the 1996 act was a good idea that it makes republicans nervous.

<comment><USER15> > Most of Europe followed suit and deregulated their telecom markets similar > to how we did it in the 1996 act.

But one big problem with "attempts to undo the 1996 reforms" is that Europe kept (and expanded) linesharing and unbundled network element rules; the United States threw out most mandatory UNE rules and never expanded them to include companies operating networks over coax or new-build fiber optic networks.

So now we have this farce where, in some areas, people served by DSL have the choice of several (slow) ISPs because the copper is still technically, kinda unbundled. But if you can't get DSL or can't get a sufficiently fast speed, your sole choice is likely your monopoly cable provider.

<comment><USER9> Most large European countries didn't expand unbundling to include cable and fiber either: [https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf](https://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf). None of the five largest EU countries (which comprise the majority of the EU population), applied unbundling to coax. Most don't apply unbundling to fiber either.

U.S. copper unbundling rules are weaker than the U.S., but copper is also largely irrelevant in the U.S., because most broadband is over cable or fiber. Unbundling matters more in Europe, but primarily because DSL is much more common in Europe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> More competition is good news. Even if Google doesn't push Google Fiber hard enough, it serves as precedence for other competitors to come in.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll admit, this one surprised me. I didn't expect the new admin to support it.

<comment><USER18> Why not? Seems like a common sense rule.

<comment><USER19> Exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Go figure. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then

<comment><USER21> Color me wholly confused by this metaphor. Who's the blind squirrel; Google Fiber, Comcast, or FCC? And what's the acorn?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > _FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rejected this argument, saying that startups are > unnecessarily delayed when they have to wait for incumbent ISPs before > hanging wires._

I thought I was supposed to not like this guy.

<comment><USER23> This does seem very 180 degree different than his stance on net neutrality. The tin foil hat wearing side of me says that Google's donations must have been larger than Comcast's. The real world side of me can't figure out how somebody can logically justify these two opposing views.

<comment><USER24> > The tin foil hat wearing side of me says that Google's donations must have > been larger than Comcast's

I'm curious: donations to whom?

The FCC doesn't have campaigns, so any "donations" aren't campaign contributions.

<comment><USER25> "Who are your friends? Let me know and I'll donate to them if...."

<comment><USER23> Exactly. "A gift was made to xxx in your name". A bag with large $$$ printed on the side being handed over is just for the comics. In the real world, "donations" is just a word with multiple meanings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >>Verizon supported OTMR,

hmmm... The "Former" Verizon Lawyer supported Verizon's position.... I am shocked I tell you....

</comment><comment><USER27> This is bad. I love google fiber and see that what they are trying to do is valid but when one utility company touches another company's facilities it compromises the other facility and makes it vulnerable for service disruption.

But the regulation to ban or allow should not come at the Federal level. It should be governed by the utility pole owner.

In NYC for example con Ed owns a large number of poles. And then Verizon owns the next number of poles. Verizon and other utility companies pay ConEd based on how high their utility is placed. If it's a Verizon pole, Verizon will put their facility on the very top and spectrum will put their facility on the lower part.

This means that another utility company cannot just come and move someone else's facility around.

<comment><USER28> I understand where you are coming from, but you must be blind to think that the biggest issue facing the American telecom industry is service disruption due to competitors having too much access to the utility poles. While you are right that this does create a bigger opportunity for small service disruptions, the bigger issue is that even when its not disrupted service in many area's is horrible, and expensive. While a private company might have paid to put the poles in they should be treated like the shared limited resource that they are, and there should be universally accepted rules on how the current "owner" has to allow other to access it.

I will go so far as to say there is not a single citizen who will have a net negative result of this ruling.

<comment><USER29> This isn't a hypothetical issue. Comcast has historically been known to "accidentally" sever competing service lines when installing their own: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit- comcast-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/lawsuit-comcast- sabotaged-small-isps-network-then-took-its-customers/)

Why are poles a "shared limited resource"? They're sticks of wood, companies can either pay to put up their own, or pay to use someone else's.

<comment><USER30> And then you'll have beautiful cities with nice streetscapes.

Seriously, if you don't want your street corners to look like a black deathball or [something straight out of Stranger Things][1], you need to consider those poles as "shared limited resource".

[1]: [https://twitter.com/pketron/status/938097381064654848](https://twitter.com/pketron/status/938097381064654848)

<comment><USER9> You can't have everything. People crow about how Japan has fast fiber and why can't we have it too. Have you ever seen Tokyo? There are above ground electric lines and cables everywhere. This is right downtown: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,139.7314866,3a,75y,1...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,139.7314866,3a,75y,187.37h,163.45t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1swl2TCK1FRWRIke7fGd3jrw!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Dwl2TCK1FRWRIke7fGd3jrw%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D259.41785%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656). There's a reason why Google targeted Fiber in places like Kansas City first—few dense American cities habe above ground utilities, primarily due to aesthetic concerns.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>