Some Fresh Twitter Stats (as of July 2012, Dataset Included) - <AUTHOR> http://diegobasch.com/some-fresh-twitter-stats-as-of-july-2012

<comment><USER3> I would be really interested to see some analysis on the latest ~50m accounts because I've noticed an insane amount of bot accounts recently. They all follow the same pattern: Never tweet (or tweet once), follow ~2000 people and are being followed by ~3 and have a bio + avatar. They're used by the Twitter follower selling companies and there's an absolute metric fucktonne of these accounts, some examples of such accounts:

<http://twitter.com/Yahairayqlcd> <http://twitter.com/Kenyetta992> <http://twitter.com/Jade_482> <http://twitter.com/Mozella_nxi> <http://twitter.com/Alane508>

It's becoming a really big problem, every day I come across accounts that have bought followers\\* (a few belonging to HN users) and it's... disappointing. Inevitable, but disappointing. I started putting together a website for checking if someone had bought their followers but haven't found the desire to finish it yet, but there are so many that do it, anywhere from purchasing 4,000 to 80,000 followers which can be done for ~$300.

I've been reporting the people doing this to Twitter but nothing has been done about it, ultimately it looks good for Twitter metrics so I doubt they care that there are people with 80k fake followers, that's an extra 80k users for their investors to salivate over.

As a side note, it's fun to pick out a random account (like those listed above) and see who they're following, there are some people you'd not expect to be purchasing followers that are. An alternate theory is that Twitter is responsible (after all, how can they not detect these obvious bots?) but I can't see why... well I can, but I don't think they would.

*I'm probably alone in this but people that buy followers really irk me because I like numbers to be accurate. The site I started making had a directory of people that bought followers, I'm wondering if I should finish it up, I figure it would be interesting for people to see that a large number of "media personalities" are just buying up their followers.

<comment><USER4> _It's becoming a really big problem, every day I come across accounts that have bought followers_

I am followed by users that match the pattern you're describing, but I assure you I have never bought them. It's not coincidence that the accounts are of attractive young women- they want reciprocal follows. I am almost always followed shortly after tweeting, so I would venture to guess that they are plugged into the Twitter API's "sample" feed, and sometimes I am unlucky enough to be included in that sample.

<comment><USER3> I don't see any followers on your Twitter account that match this pattern. I have a small number of followers (about 1,100) and I've never had an account like the type I listed (avatar, bio, ~3 followers, ~2000 following) follow me.

The Twitter account I use for the website I work for which has 10,000 followers that are follows mainly through our website (we have the "follow us" button on a high trafficed page) are mainly from Twitter "lurkers" and I can't find a single one that matches the purchased followers pattern I mentioned, you're welcome to check yourself: <http://twitter.com/i/#!/redstonewire/followers>

On top of that I've checked with all the accounts I suspect of purchasing followers when they gained their followers: it's always within a few seconds that they've done from ~1,000 to 5,000, or 1,000 to 60,000. Here's an example of one account I was monitoring, you can see the jump from 2,000 to 4,000 took place at the same time: <http://i.imgur.com/jUMNj.jpg> and here's another that went from 0 to 60k: <http://i.imgur.com/KwJZj.png>

I don't mean these sort of accounts in isolation: 1 follower matching the pattern out of 100 is fine, but when a user has 10,000 followers and 9,900 match that pattern don't you think that's an indication of follower purchases?

Another type I didn't mention are the type that are legitimate active users that have authorised applications that are using this auth to generate follows on demand. These are interesting but not relevant because they're not created accounts just for followers, but legit accounts being used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's a flaw in this bit, which leads to the 530 million account estimate:

"The highest Twitter user id when I started the experiment was around 637M (found by trial and error). I figured there would be gaps in user ids mostly because of massive deletions of spammer accounts, and a quick sample estimated the gaps to be on the order of 20%. So I generated 1.25M unique user ids in the range 0-637M, and tried to fetch the profile details for them.

[...]

After fetching the 12,500 batches I was left with 1,039,556 Twitter profiles. This means that there must exist approximately 530 million Twitter accounts: 83% of 637M."

The problem is that Twitter account IDs used to be sequential - every integer would correspond to an account, unless that account had been deleted. Then in 2011 Twitter introduced the Snowflake update <https://dev.twitter.com/docs/twitter-ids-json-and-snowflake> which changed the way IDs were generated (for scaling reasons - it's much better to have separate machines able to deal out IDs rather than rely on a single point of failure).

This means that if you were to create a pool of random IDs between 1 and 637,000,000 you'll find that the IDs below a certain number (the highest ID at the time snowflake kicked in) almost all correspond to an account, whereas the IDs above that number have a much higher number of misses.

<comment><USER6> Good catch. I just checked the data. The effect of Snowflake is not too high, the error in the estimate because of this is perhaps 10M to 20M accounts. It's almost in the noise considering Twitter's daily signup rate. Also, it may even offset the fact that Twitter wouldn't return accounts created in the past ten days through the API.

<comment><USER7> Can you explain what it means to "check the data"? The point here is that, for the last year, Twitter has NOT been generating sequential IDs. Just look at the source code[1]. They save a few low bits for the worker ID, data center, and worker-specific sequence. The highest bits are the timestamp bits.

Maybe you can correct me if my assumptions based on the code are wrong, but my guess is you'll magically find that Twitter's highest ID grows linearly with time. Then you're just randomly sampling within this maximum timestamp. At this point you're assuming that Twitter sees a constant rate of signups wrt time, which I highly doubt.

[1] [https://github.com/twitter/snowflake/blob/master/src/main/sc...](https://github.com/twitter/snowflake/blob/master/src/main/scala/com/twitter/service/snowflake/IdWorker.scala)

<comment><USER6> What I did was to measure the difference in yield between uniformly generated ids that would correspond to the time after Snowflake (when ids were at 380M) and the ones before. It's true that the yield is less. It went down from about 86% to 82%.

A separate problem is that my estimate of the highest id at the time of the experiment likely fell short. Since then I've encountered higher ids that are pretty sparse, but I don't know how many there are.

Do you have any ideas as to how to generate a better sequence of random ids that tracks Twitter ids after Snowflake? I'd like to redo this experiment in a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> By way of comparison, I ran the numbers back in 2009 using a similar sampling technique:

<http://blog.unto.net/sampling-twitter.html>

At the time, I estimated roughly 1,200,000 active and connected users on Twitter. This author currently estimates around 80M active users (as of mid-2012), or a 80x increase over three years.

Note that both samples considered "active" to be someone who posts, which is quite a bit stricter than the (reasonable) definition of consumption that the industry has been stabilizing on.

Neither of us knew how to account for spam/fake accounts, which must represent some non-trivial part of the ecosystem (at least judging from the followers my own dormant account continues to attract: <http://twitter.com/#!/dewitt/followers>).

I found it interesting, though in hindsight not surprising at all, that the average length of username is also going up over the years.

</comment><comment><USER9> I just downloaded your data set and here is one particular observation - <USER2> you retrieving the all the tweets of every user? Twitter allows you retrieve upto 3200 tweets of a user(if public) via pagination. You can download them to understand how "active" they are for a much better analysis.

<comment><USER6> That would require several million API calls. This sample was taken with only 12500 calls.

<comment><USER9> Ah No - it should be quite easy to achieve. There are two types of API calls for the Twitter API (IP based and OAuth). Oauth provides you 350 requests per hour. It's quite easy and off the shelf packages are available. So, in summary you could use 10 Twitter accounts and make OAuth requests from each of these accounts by polling.

1 hour = 3600 seconds Assuming you use 3500 seconds to make API calls (the rest 100 seconds is used for performing disk operations) 10 accounts should be more than sufficient.

:-)

<comment><USER6> Your math is off. You could do 3500 requests per hour with 10 accounts. You'd still need thousands of hours (i.e. a few months) because we are talking about _millions_ of API calls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Only 1 graph? Is Chrome broken for me? I thought we were going to get more visual representations like the Twitter "follow" graph with 33 billion edges!</comment>


Show HN: A pure Swift port of the Cassowary linear constraints solver - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tribalworldwidelondon/CassowarySwift <comment><USER2> Nice API.

Nitpick: you even ported the license from kiwi-java :-)

"Neither the name of _kiwi-java_ nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission."

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm actually unsure how it works when making a derivative work like this, because the license has the following statement: "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer." Surely changing the name in the conditions would _technically_ be changing the conditions themselves? Maybe I'm just worrying too much ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nice! Have you done any performance comparisons to C++ kiwi?

Question: Any reason you manually added backing fields for properties instead of using _private(set) var name: Type_ , for example? Since the latter has the effect of making it a _let_ property outside of the class (cannot mutate an array exposed like this from the outside, for example).

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't done any performance comparisons yet, unfortunately. I'm still working on improving the codebase to make it more Swifty. The backing fields are a leftover from the original Java implementation, and I didn't want to change too much initially, but now I have a bunch of tests and am using it in another project (a PDF generation library), I will start to make these changes :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Awesome work!</comment>


7 Things No One Ever Tells You About Raising Venture Capital Financing - <AUTHOR> http://www.instigatorblog.com/7-things-no-one-ever-tells-you-about-raising-venture-capital-financing/2007/11/12/

<comment><AUTHOR> I especially like point 7. A more succesful team where you make a smaller percentage is better than a failing team where you make a larger percentage.

</comment><comment><USER2> Maybe it's just because I went through Y Combinator, but I've heard those all before.

</comment><comment><USER3> _It might not be worth negotiating the finer points of the deal at the term sheet stage. The fact is, everything can be changed once a term sheet is signed, so negotiating on the finer points of it may be overkill._

This reminds me of <http://www.negativland.com/albini.html> :

"These A & R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on. The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little memo, is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band signs it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength. These letters never have any terms of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another laborer or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed."</comment>


9 Funniest Code Comments by Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.itaxsmart.com/9-funniest-code-comments-by-programmers/

<comment><USER2> I've tried this, and it takes about 2 weeks for your body to get used to it. I tried the exact same one every 6hrs a 30m nap. It fell great I lasted about maybe 4-5 days then kept messing up. It's best to do it with a partner to keep you up. They say to do something productive to keep you going, but when I tried to be productive I was craving sleep. And the fact that I was doing it alone didn't help. That's why they say do it with someone, because you can have a convo and keep each other up. Good Luck anybody who goes for it. The only reason people stop other than how hard it is, is simply that everyone else is on a "8hr sleep cycle" I quoted that because most people don't really get that much sleep. Point is the rest of the world is on a monophasic sleeping cycle.

<comment><USER3> Wrong thread. Probably the intended thread was: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9776902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9776902)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> procedure GetDown(AndBoogie: OneMoreTime);

That was in Apple's source.</comment>


Hacking... - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/EagsO.gif

<comment><USER2> Which application is this guy using to have so many terminals on the screen ?

<comment><USER3> you can do something similar using Tmux.

<comment><USER4> or ratpoison or stumpwm or screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> haha the thing in the top left hand corner if a gif, just some n00b</comment>


How to Build an Online Community - <AUTHOR> https://www.feverbee.com/how-to-build-an-online-community/ <comment><USER2> Awesome set of links. For those who are interested in starting your own online community (something like HN), check out HelloBox

[http://www.hellobox.co](http://www.hellobox.co)</comment>


Show HN: Elastic Hammer, An ergonomic elasticsearch frontend - <AUTHOR> http://elastichammer.exploringelasticsearch.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys, I wound up writing this tool because cURL, while awesome, is not very ergonomic for writing JSON heavy elasticsearch queries. This tool does the following:

      Auto-checks JSON as you type
      Compact, auto-sizing layout, for maximum information density
      Displays image URLs as actual images, URLs in search results as links
      Path based API detection enabling automatic smart settings during use
      Cross Platform
      Uses HTML5 localstorage to keep your request history</comment>


Show HN: New drone design for industrial applications - <AUTHOR> http://www.mirplatforms.com <comment><AUTHOR> We've spent the past 2 years developing this and we'd love to hear your thoughts.</comment>


How Much Caffeine Is Too Much? - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/articles/too-much-coffee-may-result-in-caffeine-intoxication-but-specific-risks-and-benefits-are-still-up-for-debate-1414432501

<comment><USER2> I went to the ER ([https://twitter.com/jprichardson/status/522084579906052096](https://twitter.com/jprichardson/status/522084579906052096)) about 2.5 weeks ago because I didn't get enough sleep and drank way too much caffeine. My body just collapsed.

From October 5th through October 11th, I actively rejected sleep (2 - 4 hours of sleep) and took in quantities of caffeine ranging from 1.5 g to 2 g. (A cup of coffee has approx 100 mg and a strong energy drink has about 250 mg). I was preparing for launch of my product and subsequent YC application. On Saturday morning, October 11th, I had massive chest pains and I collapsed. Fortunately, everything is alright with my heart. Overall though, I felt incredibly stupid about my actions.

As hackers and entrepreneurs, it's really easy to fall into the trap of your launch being the most important thing in the world. It's not. You need to be healthy, as business is a marathon and you'll be running for awhile.

<comment><USER3> My choice was the regular Rockstar energy drink at my worst I was up to the large 750ml cans per day, then suddenly I developed back spasms for the first time in my life I thought it was a kidney stone. I could not straighten up I was curved to my right as if I was made of stone, the only thing that helped were strong muscle relaxers.

I stopped for awhile and drank just the normal ("double" is normal) Rockstar. I felt tingly all over mostly extremities. Now I have a fatty liver I am sure caused by energy drinks, I haven't had one in at least three years.

Coffee and tea are no comparison to energy drinks even a four or six shot espresso is mild in comparison. Although I believe espresso has less caffeine than regular coffee even for equal volumes.

What's odd is I never drank any caffeine until I was about 34 since even a sip affected me making my heart race from just a sip.

I've now left the stupid energy drink drinkers club!

<comment><USER4> I suspect there are something else in energy drinks that could have dramatic effects on one's brain.

I usually drink one or two cups of coffee per day. I could drink more. After 7~8 cups of espresso, my hands start uncontrollably shaking, and I feel a little agitated. Those are all the symptoms I feel. Energy drinks is a completely different story. After two cans, I would have a big headache. I experimented a few times [call me crazy :)]. Every time, the headache came. So it was not a fluke, and most probably it was not caused by other factors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My first year in college I had a french press (a kind of coffee maker) and a tin of breath mints that had caffeine in them. One night, trying to finish a project, I drank an entire quart of strongly brewed coffee (~500mg)and ate the caffeinated breath mints like popcorn (30mg each)[0]. I recall walking down the dormitory hallways with extremely heightened senses. I was hearing whispers on the other side of closed doors and watching a fly buzz past me in what seemed like slow motion. I could feel the carpet texture through the soles of my shoes and time seemed to slow down.

At the time I thought it was one of the most incredible experiences of my life and vowed to repeat it sometime.

Thinking back I realize I was probably experiencing mild hallucinations and could have been on the verge of collapse.

edit: Added caffeine estimates.

[0]Can't believe I found this. [http://www.wegotcoffee.com/mints/zingo.php](http://www.wegotcoffee.com/mints/zingo.php)

<comment><USER6> I refer to that experience as going "trans-dimensional" while the senses are heightened the mind/body split seems to be much larger and time is definitely not monotonic.

Same, 2-3 french press carafe 1/3 to 1/2 full of fresh ground coffee at the rate of one carafe per hour.

While traveling take caffeine pills to stave off headaches since the coffee routine as been disrupted.

<comment><USER7> Caffeine withdrawal is not what causes the headaches from coffee cessation. It's something else (so far as I know unknown) in coffee that causes that.

<comment><USER6> my extra strength placebos are doing there job, don't Jones my fix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Though the article does not take into an account the possibility that some may consume caffeine in powder form. You can find 100 grams, or over 7 times the lethal dose, for 13 bucks in Amazon [1].

As for who would use caffeine in such form are weightlifters and people interested in nootropics in general. I follow both communities online and from time to time I find some people overdosing caffeine by mistaking it to some other similar looking substance, like creatine or taurine. Though typical overdose has been about 3 grams, it has been enough to make the consumers force themselves to puke it out or get into ER.

I havent personally bought caffeine in pure form, but the idea has crossed my mind few times as these articles have started to pop out. I would not be surprised if caffeine would sooner or later be banned from being sold online.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/BulkSupplements-Pure-Alanine-Powder- gr...](http://www.amazon.com/BulkSupplements-Pure-Alanine-Powder- grams/dp/B00EIO4I5W/ref=sr_1_5?s=hpc&ie=UTF8&qid=1414487723&sr=1-5&keywords=caffeine+powder)

EDIT: tried to simplify few sentences

<comment><USER9> I worked for an e-commerce retailer focusing on gifts for a time, during my stint we came upon a style of breathmint that contained caffiene.

they were pretty potent and they worked, but they had a warning on the side which said "do not exceed 2 mints in 6 hours"

Some guy had 12 mints at 80mg of caffiene each, promptly had a heart attack- we never sold the mints.

[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2453928/John- Jackson...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2453928/John-Jackson-dies- caffeine-overdose-energy-mints.html)

<comment><USER8> I recall seeing same kind of products in my local grocery store, just a few years ago. Though after most chains prohibited energy drinks from under 16 year olds, I haven't seen them since.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, with that (kids) in mind, high-dosage caffeine products shouldn't be sold over-the-counter like that; caffeine is seen as a harmless recreational product, but not in those doses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently, caffeine makes it harder to intake iron.

[http://fscn.cfans.umn.edu/prod/groups/cfans/@pub/@cfans/@fsc...](http://fscn.cfans.umn.edu/prod/groups/cfans/@pub/@cfans/@fscn/@admin/documents/asset/cfans_asset_122645.pdf)

And anaemia, stemming from lack of iron, leads to fatigue and irritability, which both suck balls for coding.

edit: What did we learn in the article?

1\. 140 cups will kill me.

2\. Up to six cups a day will result in higher or lower mortality, depending on the study.

3\. A study has shown that caffeine may lead to higher bad cholesterol.

<comment><USER12> This article doesn't make it clear, but caffeine isn't the thing in coffee that raises cholesterol. That's cafestol, and it's captured by paper filters. So coffee made with a standard auto-dripper, or by pourover, don't have that.

<comment><USER13> As an avid french press user, I have to shove my head the sand every time I see this.

<comment><USER14> Get thee an Aeropress. Cheap, paper filters, 5 second cleanup, silly delicious output.

The phrase "I can't go back to drip, french press is so smooth" will seem laughable. :)

<comment><USER15> I just wish that I could make more coffee at a time with it, but I understand why I can't.

It's astounding how smooth aeropress coffee is, though.

<comment><USER12> Compared to french press, any filtered coffee is going to be smooth. I recommend you look into manual pourover brewers. The Chemex (my daily brewer) comes in sizes up 50oz.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In February, I had an aortic dissection. That's a big deal medical emergency with the kill ratio of a special forces operator.

Symptoms were similar to a heart attack, so it took a while to diagnose (John Ritter died of it, because they were treating him for a heart attack). In the ER they kept asking me if I was on coke, viagra, etc. Then someone brought up coffee.

I remember admitting that I had 6 cups that day, and thinking they'd stop taking me seriously. When they* finally figured out my medical situation and told me I needed to have IMMMEDIATE open heart surgery, the first thing I said was "thank god I'm not a hypochondriac".

Then I worried about my family and work and shit like that. But thanks to coffee my first worry was they'd think I "a bubblegummer".

* - "they" btw, was an awesome nurse and NOT the 3 doctors who saw me there.

<comment><USER17> I really doubt a nurse made the diagnosis, the legal issues would be a huge problem let alone the education and complexity required to make such a diagnosis. I would know, in 2 years I'll be the single guy on around 1 out of every 10 nights who would have to make that diagnosis and I work in one of the top 10 busiest ED's in the country.

<comment><USER16> What's up doc.

She absolutely did make the diagnosis. She suspected it based on my pedal pulses, and other things, confirmed it via a CT scan, and got the surgery scheduled. It was like when the Wolf showed up in Pulp Fiction.

Now the truth is she wasn't a random nurse. She is an NP named Nathania Francis and she has some feeding monitoring patent and her own startup in the medical space (this is her bio on her company's staff page: [http://www.gnftechnologies.com/gnf- management.php](http://www.gnftechnologies.com/gnf-management.php)). No way I wasn't googling the person who saved my life.

The surgeon that night, Gustave Pogo, was great too. Turns out everyone in the NY/LI area knows of him.

But the three doctors who walked in, looked at me, and walked out, they didn't save my life. And this includes at least one specialist from the cardio- thoracic unit.

I am/was a fireman with the FDNY (past tense due to this surgery...), so have encountered a lot of emergency medicine in real life. My own medical training is limited (I always joke that "I know enough to watch someone die"), but I can definitely recognize when someone is going through the steps of diagnosing a problem.

<comment><USER17>
          Interesting, didn't sound like an ordinary nurse. Sorry if I came off somewhat arrogant in my earlier post.

          Was she acting as a nurse or NP when she was taking care of you? The radiologist deserves some credit too in my opinion as they are the one to interpret the study. It is easy to include aortic dissection in differential along with other things that could kill you quickly (e.g. MI, pulm embolism, pneumothorax, etc ...) but harder to make the definitive diagnosis. Glad you made it.

<comment><USER16> >> Sorry if I came off somewhat arrogant in my earlier post.

I only trust arrogant & unapproachable doctors. This parody couldn't be truer: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/doctor-has-troubling- amount...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/doctor-has-troubling-amount-of- available-appointme,36884/)

>> Was she acting as a nurse or NP when she was taking care of you?

Don't know which one, I was focused on myself :). And definitely don't know other things you talked about (other than MI).

Well before I was scanned, she said suspected dissection based on pulses and some other monitors. Then the scan confirmed it. My 2 cardiologists (personal and fd ones) both say I'm lucky she was there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Your bodies reaction to coffee is interesting, the receptors for caffeine apparently expand up to a certain point, once you reach that level additional caffeine does not good for wakefulness but the side affects continue. It's a ceiling you cannot go beyond but people often don't recognize it.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's strange that the article hints at genetic differences in caffeine metabolism and sensitivity ("Some people will get edgy from a weak cup of tea. For others, a double espresso is required to get them into the shower in the morning.") but doesn't follow through on the implications. For example, my 23andMe results indicate that I'm a "fast caffeine metabolizer", which is associated with a neutral to slightly lower risk of heart attack due to caffeine consumption, whereas slow caffeine metabolizers have a higher risk. In other words, it's clear that the answer to the question "How Much Caffeine Is Too Much?" is "It depends on your genes."

<comment><USER20> I can see this in myself. I usually have about 48oz of coffee each day. Obviously less on some days and maybe more on others. On days that I don't drink coffee, I can't tell a difference in my alertness or energy. Honestly, I just really really love the taste, and knocking back a cup is a actually a great stress reliever for me.

Edit: Now that I think about it, my dad is the same way. I've watched him multiple times drink a cup or two before bed and have no problems sleeping. On the other hand, my mom can drink a 12oz cup and get a nice boost of energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you're not a coffee person: [http://www.caffeineinformer.com/death-by- caffeine](http://www.caffeineinformer.com/death-by-caffeine)

</comment><comment><USER22> The article doesn't talk about aggression. I'd be interested in seeing some good quality research comparing people's responses to stuff when they're had caffene vs not.

It's frustrating that the evidence around mental health is so poor. I think that small amounts of caffeine destroy my sleep hygiene so I avoid it after midday. But it'd be great to know if a couple of cups of coffee in the morning was probably good or probably not good.

<comment><USER10> The only one that can really gague that is yourself - have some coffee in the morning, check how you feel and how you sleep at night.

<comment><USER23> Better would be to separate decaf and fully caffeinated grinds into numbered packages, keep a sleep journal, and then after three weeks see if there were any meaningful difference. Otherwise the results are going to be heavily influenced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> tl;dr: "While clinicians may observe benefits and risks of caffeine intake, the effects are still being debated in academic circles."

</comment><comment><USER25> This may be too Talebian a reaction, but isn't the track record of "take this- doesn't-occur-in-significant-quanities-in-food chemical and your health will improve" quite poor? Non-food chemicals are often very useful for acute interventions (e.g. antibiotics, chemotherapy), but at least in modern times, they almost always do more harm than good when taken long-term.

(To avoid getting sidetracked by chronic medicines that some people swear by, I'm directing this point more at non-food drugs that are designed to take people from normal health to great health rather than from a disease state back to normal.)

<comment><USER26> Googled "Talebian" and came up dry, but yeah. One thing that comes to mind that's used widely to thicken things like non-dairy milks (Soy/Rice/Almond) or anything that needs to be thickened/gelled is carrageenan, a seaweed extract that's been tied in multiple peer-reviewed animal studies to cancer.

<comment><USER27> Google instead "Nassim Taleb", in particular his ideas surrounding iatrogenics (harm done by the healer), and "via negativa" as a heuristic for fixing systemic problems, i.e., removing things (chemicals/drugs) from a system (human body) to reduce the complexity of interactions and side effects.

See also, [http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af- glossary.pdf](http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/af-glossary.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Exercise is an amazing alternative.

I'll never cease to be amazed by how much more alert, focused and productive I feel when I take time away to get to the gym instead of grabbing another cup of coffee and keeping at it.

</comment><comment><USER29> I remember a couple times I went to DefCon there was a guy with a booth selling pure caffeine powder in little baggies.

I didn't start drinking coffee until my mid thirties. I can resoundingly say I slept better and woke up easier without it.

<comment><USER30> Sleep patterns do tend to change with age.

I find that caffeine after ~2 P.M. is a lot more disruptive than before. I drink ~40 fluid ounces of strong drip coffee and don't have any trouble waking up (or any sort of headache, at least not anything immediate, I definitely service the habit). If I stick closer to 30 floz, I don't think I get a headache at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> in the reddit nootropics forum the other day there was a post from someone who almost accidently OD'd on caffeine.

Alot of the users there use caffeine powder, and he had his bags of powder mixed up with his vitamin c powder and almost drank a drink with multiple grams of caffeine in it. He realized it at the last second and stopped.

moral of the story: caffeine has a fairly low lethal dose and can be dangerous when using the powdered form

<comment><USER32> Even if it's "multiple grams of caffeine", it's still very far from the 14 kg mentioned in the article... Actually the only way I imagine someone being able to have such an intake would be to use many, many caffeine pills... Way more that the number of sleep pills suicidal people use...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This guy knows: [http://www.tmcm.com/tmcm/](http://www.tmcm.com/tmcm/)

</comment><comment><USER34> 400 mg = too much

200 mg = too little

</comment><comment><USER35> Quoting from Pubmed (via nih.gov):

"The present study compared the effects of caffeine on subjective arousal among introverts and extraverts.... caffeine improved the task performance of extraverts but overaroused introverts and thus impaired their performance."

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10472512](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10472512)

<comment><USER36> The second part of your quote (which comes first) was previous research they were setting out to repeat, instead they conclude with "Results do not support the hypothesis that caffeine differentially affects extraverts and introverts".</comment></comment>


China Bans Free Text Editor Notepad++ - <AUTHOR> https://in.pcmag.com/news/137565/china-bans-free-text-editor-notepad <comment><USER2> It's open source software: there's nothing to prevent the CCP from simply re- branding it as Mao++ and preventing people in China from ever knowing that it was called Notepad++ in the first place... I'm curious why they didn't just do that.</comment>


Fiber Optic Bliss - <AUTHOR> http://www.loomcom.com/blog/2015/08/04/fiber-optic-bliss/?hn=repost <comment><USER2> I'm glad it worked for him but he asks the right question: How can we get this to work for other people in Washington State? I live in Seattle and have fiber optic service from CenturyLink. The gigabit is nice, but CenturyLink is running my fiber drop over a "route of convenience that, if the next door property owner ever gets snippy, will turn into a battle of lawyers. Why? Because CL won't use the utility poles in front of my house because they don't want to coordinate with the transit agency.

The whole infrastructure argument is getting absurd. KPUD can't sell to end users because Washington law prohibits it. I have service but might not someday "just because." A city in Washington that owns its own utility agency _could_ serve but has to do it by selling bonds that require 60% voter approval. Meanwhile, everybody is left wondering what next.

<comment><USER3> Who exactly wants those laws in your state? If the answer is "nobody", then get your neighbors together and fix the problem. And if there _is_ somebody who wants those laws, at least you'll know who the problem is, and can start raising public awareness of who is needlessly keeping them from having better Internet.

<comment><USER2> It's a mix. Both of the incumbent providers push heavily to keep the restrictions on the books. In addition, there is a large contingent of voters who do not want the restrictions repealed because they are opposed to public operation and/or financing of a telecommunications system that can serve the general public.

Much like a lot of things, folks here are generally opposed unless or until it directly impacts them. There is a group in Seattle that is pushing for a ballot initiative with accompanying property tax levy to get the city to build an open-access last mile system. The areas of the city that already have good service, whether Comcast or CenturyLink fiber, poll at slightly under 50% support. Areas that are stuck with Wave Broadband or only CenturyLink DSL poll at well above 70%.

<comment><USER3> You originally said "CL won't use the utility poles in front of my house because they don't want to coordinate with the transit agency.". Given that those poles already exist, if CL was willing to pay for the work to string the new fiber on those poles, that shouldn't cost the city anything at all.

<comment><USER4> At the electric utility I worked at we charged bell $10 for each pole of ours they used per year

<comment><USER5> I'd agree w/that take based on my experience in the field -- key issue is finding the right person at the utility to help you w/rhe solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have fiber optic in China rated at 20mbs but it's really spotty. Downloads can be really fast but latency can be terrible. I realize that browsing foreign sites is sharing bandwidth with a pool the size of China but sometimes even domestic sites time out. I think it's either being oversold or badly misconfigured by the ISP.

<comment><USER7> Why was this downvoted so deeply into the gray?

<comment><USER8> Every story about broadband attracts random, totally unrepresentative anecdotes that aren't interesting or informative. Such comments may even be harmful if they trigger various cognitive biases.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry if my comment wasn't interesting or informative. I posted in the hopes that someone else with similar experience could offer advice. I know anecdotes are not of general interest but there's usually a long tail of comments that are useful to _someone_ and can be found by search engines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I had a similar situation in Mexico where no provider gave me the bandwith I need it. The biggest provider (Telmex( refused to sign me up for a better plan because their infraestructure near my home wouldn't support it, at least they were honest.

I called my local cable company and contracted their 50 mbps plan. Had a lot of issues with the installation and never really received the complete service. They didn't had enough bandwith in the zone so very few times I received my contracted bandwith.

At the end I contacted a Telcom (EnlaceTPE) which specialize in providing fiber internet to companies. They did the entire fiber instalation to my home. I only had to commit to 3 years paying around 70 usd with a 200 mbps service. From the first call to installation took around 3 months, best decision made so far.

<comment><USER10> Curious, what's wages (low and medium) in USD for someone in your area? As an American reading anecdotes, I like to look at it in terms of cost relative to income instead of cost in isolation. Helps me get an idea of where the cost would _start_ here and how much value that company delivers.

<comment><USER9> I really have no idea. I get paid very well but that is not representative of the common wages around here.

The service by itself is expensive, considering it's just Internet. The most common package for internet + phone, on the most popular provider, costs around 24 USD monthly. If you want cable add another 20 bucks.

According to some websites the median wages in Mexico per home at 2013 was around 740 USD monthly.

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I decided to do a comparison using the percentage of monthly income for the Internet. I decided to use $30,000 a year per household to represent middle end of working class. I figure it's a fair class to use and pretty large. I used price of good Internet (50Mbps) in my area. So, here's the costs:

USA: 2.8% of household income; Mexico: 3.2% with your number

So, they're quite similar. For that, I get 50Mbps down and a fraction up for $70. You get 200Mbps down and how much up? Either way, you're getting a good deal as a percentage of income. If you're better than $740/mo, you're getting a _really_ good deal. I'm envious. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Fibre techies - even residential FTTH - are pretty clued up. I was pleasantly surprised by the guy that activated my fibre...got a distinct feel of "he is one of us". Hidden benefit of a cutting edge tech I guess...you get real techies instead of people following a fkn script.

<comment><USER5> Y, based on my experience, the utilities generally have different teams that handle the fibre installs.

<comment><USER10> I thought it was specialization and cost-cutting. I know Comcast out here contracts their cabling to a company where the few managers make a decent amount of money while the technicians make little ranging from amateur to experienced in skill. Keeps them out of Comcast's HR approach and branding, too. Maybe some blame-shifting potential. Not sure all the reasons but plenty of possibilities come to mind.

Cost is probably the main one, though. This company has way less overhead and more flexibility than Comcast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wow. Kudos to this guy for working through a corporate/bureaucratic nightmare.

Good on KPUD for putting in a solid effort here too: looks like everyone in the area might benefit from this one.

</comment><comment><USER13> <quote>but state law forbids them from retailing directly to consumers, so as of yet they have no way to do this directly and no residential pricing model. So we had to be creative.</quote>

isn't having in writing the intent to go against the law (even if creatively) a very dumb thing to do?

<comment><USER14> No. They aren't going against the law, they're finding creative ways to obey it.

I hereby announce my intent to pay as little taxes as legally possible.

<comment><USER13> but if you say how you plan to do something to evade the spirit of the law, that is pretty much a crime. people got their assets taken by the IRS by moving to another country and giving up citizenship when it was proved they did that with the intent to not pay taxes.

<comment><USER15> Wait wait wait.. what!? How can it be illegal to say "I don't like paying your tax rate, so I'm leaving your country and move to another country with lower tax rates. Here is my citizenship."

<comment><USER13> well, IANAL, but it is. there is the famous story of the founder of one of the big french game studios. forgot which now now. but i'm confident you can search.

the gist is that he got his series A or B, on a french bank, frozen because the US IRS told them to, because he gave up his green card (not even a full citizenship yet!) to go back to his home france and start a company there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm curious if the author ever looked into HamWan. [1] They provide non- commercial internet access for hobbyists who have their amateur radio licenses (very easy to get) and buy some basic equipment. They cover a number of places in the Puget Sound region. The author would have to build a tower to get above the trees but I can't imagine that this would run more than $4-5k (on the high end).

I am not actually a user of HamWAN--I'm down in Tacoma and my line-of-sight is impeded by terrain and building a tower in my dense urban neighborhood isn't an option. Also, I have biz-class Comcast.

[1] [https://www.hamwan.org/t/Wiki+Home+Page](https://www.hamwan.org/t/Wiki+Home+Page)

<comment><USER17> Can you meaningfully do things like ecommerce over HamWAN, given the restriction against using encryption on amateur radio bands?

Losing that capability would severely limit the internet for most folks...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This one is doing a good job. For ideas, I posted on that site and am here this other project that got good results:

[http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is- bui...](http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-building-its- own-gigabit-fibre-network)

Deploying to rural is quite an uphill battle. But their model seems to be doing the job. Might be worth copying aspects in deployments like original post's.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for sharing the Vice article, it was great ... good to see some of these projects succeeding now that the capex has come down (a decade or so ago there was a long list of similar ventures that failed).

<comment><USER10> Yeah I enjoyed it too and it's quite hopeful. I like how the communities are essentially coming together to get themselves on the Internet's, Fast Lane.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This person should have been awarded mid five figures from Comcast. I wonder if any legal team looked into the possibility of suing them and/or the the municipality?

<comment><USER19> Why do you Americans always think about suing someone?

<comment><USER20> Presumably Canada or wherever you are from has some sort of formal system in place for situations where, for example, contractual terms are breached

[http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/america...](http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/24/america- litigious-society-myth)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >They do very much want to serve residences too, but state law forbids them from retailing directly to consumers

Why does the law forbid selling directly to consumers?

<comment><USER22> Specifically because cable companies don't want competition, so they lobbied for this.

[http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband- roadblock...](http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/)

<comment><USER23> If they don't want competition, they should at least provide the latest technology at a reasonable price...

<comment><USER24> There can't be any meaningful competition between a private company and a government entity that can tax people to pay off its infrastructure bonds and take land by eminent domain.

<comment><USER25> I see this statement bandied about quite frequently. Would you like to substantiate the claim and/or provide examples of actual public harm where such faux competition exists?

<comment><USER10> It's actually self-evident in the claim. Tell any venture capitalist they'll be doing the same thing as the competition in a regulated market except the competition can get exempted from regulations or pull in tons of extra money in form of tax revenue. Who wants to take that risk in the U.S. system? I think you could say it's played out in the areas where utilities introduced cheap broadband. Articles on those usually major players are suffering over there compared to where they're competing with private companies like their own.

I do have a specific example, though. My background is high assurance security & systems. The government once used incentives + good criteria to get market to create quite a few products their pentesters couldn't break. Then, NSA started competing with private sector under a new initiative. Market went away with Boeing guy clear that was largely why. Only a few remain and stay stagnant because companies won't invest much further in them due to risk posed by both market demand and government decisions.

[http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell- Looking-B...](http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-Back- Addendum.pdf)

<comment><USER22> I see that you have proven the nonviability of FedEx, UPS and all other package carriers that compete with government postal services.

I also note that you have proven the nonexistence of private security companies, since they compete with the police and are much more restricted, by law, in what they can do.

And there can't be any private shuttle bus services, because there are municipal bus services.

I think you need to modify your claim.

All of these companies do reasonably well by competing with government-run services by offering things that the government isn't providing and is unlikely to provide because it unreasonably benefits a single user: on-demand pickups and guaranteed delivery times; full-time guards in a particular location; a bus that runs directly to your campus.

<comment><USER10> My above claim indicated that there was a lot of risk in competing directly with government and for about the same thing they're offering. It doesn't preclude that success is possible. Besides, most of the examples you give are poor because, as you said, the private firms weren't trying to offer the same thing.

For instance, much USPS expense comes from the fact that they have to ship cheap anywhere. The overlap between them and private sector is the closest you come to a valid example. Private security in most states doesn't have to do much past issue warnings and call the police, while police can take direction action. A bus that runs directly to your campus isn't a general purpose bus or serving most people. So, yeah, it's certainly easier to offer a service that does less than the government one for fewer people and be successful.

Back to the actual topic at hand: fiber infrastructure. Laying out fiber all over the place has a high cost with low amount of money coming in. That's for lowest tiers. The Tier 1's expend 8-9 digits maintaining backbones. So, if government started competing, you can bet the private market would suffer & re-consider new fiber investments. The only model making sense at that point would be offering value-added services on top of connectivity while doing private investments where government wouldn't go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> These days buying a house without internet is like buying one that has no running water or not functioning electricity. How can an area in the US not have any sort of internet coverage? When does the FCC step in and provide this basic utility to the tax payer?

<comment><USER17> More than a quarter of the US states — most of them very large — have population densities below 50 people per square mile. Even providing wireless internet to all those people is a staggeringly expensive undertaking.

I'm not saying people shouldn't have internet access. They absolutely should. But it's not something you can just _should_ into existence, either.

<comment><USER25> I call BS. Finland has less than 48 people per square mile _and_ universal cell and broadband service. By law the locally dominant service provider has to deliver a minimim of 1 Mbps to _all_ inhabitants. In practise the delivered speed is a lot more and the minimim will be raisdd to 10 Mbps shortly. 3G is almost 100% and 4G covers most areas.

The population density excuse is just that, an excuse not to do cell and broadband service properly. As such broadband definitrly falls into the _should_ category.

<comment><USER24> Rhetoric aside, I'm not sure the broadband situation in Finland is actually any different: [http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2014/01/11/OECD-fixed- bro...](http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim2/2014/01/11/OECD-fixed-broadband- type-by-country.png).

The U.S. has a larger percentage of people on fiber, and Finland has a much larger proportion of people on fixed wireless. The U.S. has way more people on cable, while Finland has way more people on DSL.

94% of the U.S. has access to at least 4 mbps broadband. 59% has access to at least 100 mbps, versus 50% for Finland. According to Akamai, average connection speeds are about the same for the two countries: [https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/aka...](https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/akamai- state-of-the-internet-infographic-q3-2014.pdf).

<comment><USER25> I have no idea where you got the idea that people in Finland use fixed wireless. The OECD graph is few years old anyway. Here are the most recent statistics from three months ago:

[https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...](https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics/internetandtelephone/fixed- linebroadbandsubscriptionsbyconnectiontechnology.html)

The access methods by popularity are: xDSL, cable, Ethernet, FTTH and others, which might include some obscure fixed wireless operators using Wimax in the 3.5 Ghz band.

<comment><USER25> Furthermore, I'd say that the broadband situation in Finland is substantially different from the US, despite the very low popularion density of Finland.

In Finland everybody that wants broadband can get broadband. In fact everybody that wants it has it. 92% of Finns have an Internet connection, either fixed only (22%), mobile broadband only (i.e. 3G or 4G at 28%) or a combination of both (42%). Source: [https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...](https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics/internetandtelephone/take- upofbroadbandconnections.html)

Fast broadband (100 Mbps or faster) is actively promoted and developed by the government. All permanent recidences shall be within a mile of an Internet backbone access point where service is available at 100 Mbps or more. This means local residents, co-ops or ISPs will easily be able to hook up anybody at 100 Mbps or more. Since a mile is the maximum distance average loop lenghts will be much shorter. Source: [http://www.lvm.fi/pressreleases/4425644/broadband-for- all-20...](http://www.lvm.fi/pressreleases/4425644/broadband-for- all-2015-project-gathers-steam)

Funds are actually made available to provide broadband access to not-spots. The last 5% of a population is always hard to reach with fixed broadband, but subsidies are provided to hook up areas which aren't commercially viable otherwise. Source: same as above.

3G/4G mobile broadband is cheap, unlimited and uncapped with three facilities based operators and a handfull of MVNOs on top of that. 4G is actually faster and cheaper than a xDSL connection. Mobile broadband is thus actually a viable fixed broadband substitute.

20% have a fixed broadband connection of 100 Mbps or more. Not as in has access to, but as actual delivered connections. 46% have 10 Mbps or more and 7% 30 Mbps or more. Source: [https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics...](https://www.viestintavirasto.fi/en/aboutthesector/statistics/internetandtelephone/fixed- linebroadbandsubscriptionsbyconnectionspeed.html)

It is left as an excercise for the reader to figure out why Finland does better at broadband than the US despite a low population density.

Further required reading: Regulatory capture in telecommunications

<comment><USER17> If your point is, "Finland does broadband better than America," then well done you. It can join the club with just about every other first-world nation on the planet.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for anything that looks vaguely like a solution to that problem, and not merely gloating about it.

EDIT: I'm sorry for the tone, but I see no value in pointing out flaws and failings without offering solutions to them. It's plenty easy in today's world to hate on the US. Most of it is probably even deserved. But it doesn't make anything better, so I don't see what it contributes to the discussion, beyond an opportunity for smugness.

<comment><USER25> No worries, mate. I'm not that thin skinned. As to solutions, I've already pointed out the USF in a sibling comment, but using that would actually require the political will to, you know, actually do something to solve the problem.

EDIT: my actual reply to rayiner wasn't made to gloat, but to point out the substantial differences as a counterpoint to the statement that the US and Finland are statistically similar. It also contained the core problem, the lack of a properly constructed regulatory regime, which also points out the obvious thing to fix i.e. the solution required.

However if political activism isn't your thing then the only other solution is to build your own network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious what the monthly cost is for the line (not considering the upfront cost).

</comment><comment><USER28> We really know how to paint ourselves into corners don't we. Here we have a slew of people who want broadband and companies willing and able to provide it. So what prey tell is the problem? Laws.

<comment><USER24> > So what prey tell is the problem? Laws.

KPUD isn't a "company." It's a public utility district.[1] It wouldn't exist without "laws."

[1] With special powers of condemnation and taxation. See 54.16.005 RCW _et seq_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Just curious, but what does she need that bandwidth for? I am expecting the usual replies of running a server, having better upstream capabilities, and the very typical 'techies gonna have bandwidth', but I would love to hear some weird unexpected ways to use bandwidth like that.

<comment><USER30> I honestly have no idea. I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to saturating it.

FiOS keeps upgrading it every year or so (it started as a 15/5 I couldn't saturate), so that's nice. At least I'm basically in "first world" territory even if I live in the U.S.

I suppose when 4k video becomes more common I'll feel it, but I don't even have anything that can display 4k right now and Verizon will probably just upgrade it to 75/75 or 100/100 by that point.

One nice benefit, I have a plex server I can access remotely and it works well outside of my network. But I'd live with just my netflix account if I had to "rough it".

<comment><USER31> > I have a 50/50 fiber connection now and even with multiple people watching > HD video streams, torrents and other files I don't believe I come close to > saturating it.

Unless you've throttled your torrents, or you're connected to a really slow swarm, you have almost certainly saturated your download. I have -er- 100/10 or 100/15 service from Comcast. If I'm downloading anything >= 100MB, and a member of the household is going to start a new Netflix stream, I need to pause the download, or else the stream will be degraded for a _long_ time.

Also, unless you're using a decent router, it's very possible that your router can't route and/or NAT at 50mbit or faster. I know that Apple Airports can and Ubiquiti EdgeRouters[0] can. I would also expect that an ISP-provided router would route fast enough.

[0] If you're in the market for a new router and are somewhat network savvy, or are comfortable with running OpenWRT on your router, I strongly recommend the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. It routes and firewalls at ~1Gbit/sec (when offloading is enabled) and costs right around $100. Check out the Newegg reviews that aren't "It's slower than I expected" or "It's totally broken" for an idea of what you'll be getting in to. I've had mine for nearly a year and -other than the eventually dodgy external power supply[1] it shipped with- it has been rock solid.

[1] The unit I got had been sitting in a box in a warehouse in Florida for ~two years before it arrived on my doorstep. The failing power supply presented as infrequent spontaneous reboots with nothing unusual in syslog, which became more and more frequent until the power supply just stopped providing power entirely. Replaced it with a wall wart that I had on hand and have had no trouble since.

<comment><USER32> The ERL-3, ER-X, etc, run a Vyatta fork, not OpenWRT. I love mine.

<comment><USER31> I didn't intend to imply that the EdgeRouters run OpenWRT. I guess that wasn't clear. :(

'Tis true that the forked version of Vyatta (Vyatta 6?) that the EdgeRouters use is rather different than OpenWRT, but if one has figured out how to work with OpenWRT's UCI configuration system, one can figure out how to work with Vyatta's configuration system, too. And, both OpenWRT and Vyatta run on top of Linux, so -if needed- one has a Linux system that one can configure directly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Easy Secure blog - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for suggestions for 'one place' to get a easy to use blog configured and managed, including but not limited to ddos protection. I just want to concentrate on content and not management. Cost control is keen; may a button for donations too.<p>Suggestions? <comment><USER2> [https://www.liquidweb.com/wordpress/](https://www.liquidweb.com/wordpress/)</comment>


Ask HN: A solution for click bait headlines? - <AUTHOR>

I'm getting really tired of seeing incomplete headlines on news articles all over the web and in my news feeds. What specifically irks me are headlines that tell you virtually nothing about the article, but try to arouse your curiosity or interest on what usually ends up being a flimsy premise.
When I first noticed it happening, I would be slightly annoyed that my attention had been stolen and my time wasted. That annoyance was compounded by the fact that my stolen eyeballs had provided revenue to the publisher via ads.
At this point, if I see a mildly interesting link, I don't know whether to click it and risk rewarding poor behaviour.
Are there any existing solutions I can use to determine if an article is something I want to read? (Or even nullify my view of the page if it was useless!) <comment><USER2> If the "articles" permit comments, post the links to NoScript, AdBlock Plus and Privacy Badger.

Alternatively, email the links to the author.

Writing articles is one of the best ways to earn money online, but the common practice yields poor results. Most articles are only long enough to make the ads fit on the page without leaving too much blank space.

What works well for me is to spend quite a long time - anywhere from three days to a month - to research and write an in-depth, insightful article, ask for constructive criticism from readers, and then to post just a couple small ad units.

This works because those who read my article will generally give me organic links.

Clickbait articles might get clicks from those who actually read the articles, but they're not likely to get any inlinks.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a product of a systemic issue with "journalisms'" current business model and how they're paid.

Ryan Holiday sums it up pretty nicely in his book Trust Me I'm Lying.

After reading it and having it talk about so many things I was unable to put a finger upon until now, I've become extremely distrustful of media in general.

It's pretty bad actually, communities like HN or getting news directly from trusted sources on emergent networks like Twitter is really what's left.

The web has spawned "iterative journalism" and floods the internet with all the bullshit that passes it's ethical standards. This met with a general lack of peoples attention spans has created a god awful state of journalism.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've thought about creating a Chrome extension that allows you to say "This is clickbait" on any article, and then it'll remove it from other users' DOMs. Or, if not remove it, at least it'll prevent you from clicking the link.

My solution is to use StayFocusd on Chrome to block sites that are almost always clickbait. I then use FeedBin to subscribe to sites that never post clickbait (Quartz, mainly).

That's the only solution I've found that works for me. There are probably subreddits that would also serve your purposes.

The unfortunate thing is that hard news doesn't get clicks. Every media company has to use clickbait to survive.

<comment><AUTHOR> What about a chrome extension that notified you how many points a link in the wild got on hn, reddit or similar? Seems like that would be simple to make, and very resilient to gaming or noise.

<comment><USER4> That's a great idea.

I actually rarely come to HN itself, though, because so many links are (what I personally consider to be) clickbait. They don't live up to the promises of their titles.

I now use a service that converts HN posts with 150+ upvotes into a feed. That gives me the cream of the crop, and it's limited to maybe 10 articles a day.

So your solution would probably limit _uninteresting_ posts, but I personally am trying to find a way to limit posts that don't help me learn/grow/stay informed.

A good example are recent posts of the Ant-Man trailer. I find it interesting, but I don't actually get value out of watching it. I need to be protected from my own curiosity, so to speak.

Another solution I thought of would be to have a site where editors can curate the news every day. You find an editor you like, with similar values to you, and you follow that editor. They can only publish a certain number of stories a day.</comment></comment></comment>


How To Make Money From Your Passion - <AUTHOR> http://icashblog.com/fastest-easiest-way-to-make-money-online/

<comment><USER2> It's a scam. Look at the domain name icashblog.com. Pretty pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any way to tell if this is legit or not?</comment>


Top reasons why entrepreneurs hate lawyers - <AUTHOR> http://venturehacks.com/articles/hate-lawyers

<comment><USER2> I am currently in the process of getting a VISA to work in the US and would have to agree that every single one of these points is extremely relevant. Awesome article.

My father, also entrepreneurial, hates lawyers so much, he even refused to use one for his divorce (he represented himself). Needless to say, he got the best settlement I've ever seen in a divorce case!

<comment><USER3> I know a divorce lawyer (no I'm not divorced) that says to the other lawyer "cut the crap, come to terms immediately, I won't stand for pitting these two people against one another just to pad our bill". He's my hero.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If only all lawyers were like grellas.</comment>


Umblical cord blood rejuvenates the aging brain - <AUTHOR> https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2017/04/25/aging-research-plasma-protein-revitalizes-the-brain/ <comment><USER2> Might want to mention that it's especially interesting if you're a mouse.</comment>


What happens when a robot kills someone? - <AUTHOR> https://thehustle.co/when-robots-kill/ <comment><USER2> Haven't we reached the point in AI when it would be realistic to assume that a robot could identify a human? If so perhaps we need a law to force manufacturers to comply.</comment>


Ask HN: How to keep overseas contractors aligned with non technical founders? - <AUTHOR> I recently chatted with a startup.  The two cofounders are in a space I'm interested in (food).  We had engaged briefly a while ago, but this time I was just providing a sanity check for their development process.  Neither founder is technical, though one is a project manager.
They are dismayed with their current development team.  This is an overseas team, hired through a site like oDesk (not sure which one).  This is the second team they've worked with, having parted ways with the first one.  The founders were wondering about ways to keep the current team engaged and productive.  When this team was first hired, they were very productive (in terms of stories completed, etc), but now the pace seems to have slowed down.
I've worked with overseas teams occasionally, but usually with technical talent on both sides.  I suggested a few things to help keep everyone aligned, but was curious what HNers thought.
I'd also be curious if anyone has found engagement to be more difficult because of time zone and/or culture differences. <comment><USER3> Engagement is more difficult because a foreign team may not understand some aspects of what they're building because of cultural differences. Time zones make communication more difficult and so clarifying stories or making product decisions is more difficult. More importantly is that for some of these foreign teams, they're part of a company that just wants to keep being paid. There's no incentive to finish projects early or at all.

That said there are some ways to make foreign development more engaged. Make sure the team is demoing the improvements made in this sprint. Give bonuses for accepted demos. Make sure that there is some communication window when the team can ask questions or just talk to the founders.

Most important find out why development is taking a long time. Is it because they've switched out developers or added junior developers? Is it because of new product decisions/scope creep? Are they focusing on the critical path? Is the dev team blocked overnight

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, thanks for the feedback. I think your suggestions are applicable for development teams regardless of location.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would not take a startup that is outsourcing their development seriously. All of the institutional knowledge of how a product works goes right out the door. If you cannot fix your own product if it breaks, do you really own it?

<comment><USER5> A couple of things spring to mind:

Naur's "programming as theory building" essay [1]. E.g.

      > programming properly should be regarded as an activity by
      > which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of
      > insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This
      > suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more
      > common notion, that programming should be regarded as a
      > production of a program and certain other texts

This suggests that it might not be a great idea to outsource understanding. The entire essay is worth a read.

Yosefk also gave a fairly amusing characterisation of what it is to work for a software company [2]:

      > Basically the "knowledge worker's" contract is
      > something like this:
      >
      >   > We'll give you a precisely defined salary
      >   > and a benefits package. In return, we
      >   > request that you handle some problems that
      >   > we're told we're having. We hope that you'll
      >   > solve them well enough to prevent us from
      >   > having to know what they were in the first
      >   > place. Please help us maintain the feeling
      >   > that we own an asset similar to land or gold
      >   > or something. Please keep the realization
      >   > that we're more like the operator of a
      >   > flying circus than a landowner from
      >   > disturbing us. And certainly, never, ever
      >   > ask us what to do with any of the moving
      >   > pieces of this flying circus, because we
      >   > seriously have no idea.

[1] there's a copy here [http://alistair.cockburn.us/ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn...](http://alistair.cockburn.us/ASD+book+extract%3A+%22Naur,+Ehn,+Musashi%22)

[2] [http://yosefk.com/blog/information-asymmetry-cuts-both- ways....](http://yosefk.com/blog/information-asymmetry-cuts-both-ways.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, those are fantastic excerpts.

Thanks for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From my experience the only way to keep an external team engaged is to visit and to work with them. The longer, the better. During that time find out who are the best people to work with and make sure these folks stay on the project when you are away. Make a visit every 4-6 weeks and stay for at least 1 week.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Kinda cuts down on the cost savings, eh? Thanks for the advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Formally, the only way to align interests between a contractor and client is by expressing those interests in the contract and then both parties deciding that their primary interest is in execution of that contract. The essence of contracts is to resolve unaligned interests.

Informally, relationships usually do much more. However, finding the right contractor for that kind of relationship is going to be harder than hiring someone. Probably more expensive to boot because the needs of a contractor are salary + overhead + profit.

To put it another way, the popular YC advice about hiring should probably double down for engaging contractors for anything critical: careful interview for competence and culture.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I should mention that they were way over budget and over schedule, and that they were using a relatively obscure third party platform to build their application.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most software developers love to deliver. If the overseas contractors have slowed down to a crawl, it's probably not that they aren't "aligned" or willing, but that they can't.

If they had the ability to fix the project themselves or their process, they would have.

The usual non-technical customer approach would be to demand or plead for the developers to work harder. I've never seen this turn a problem overseas project into a successful one.

To unstick, you've got to first is to figure what is wrong, and secondly fix that.

But at this point, you don't know what is wrong, and developers don't know what is wrong or find it culturally impossible to communicate the problem.

I'd recommend getting some skilled local technical talent to take a look at the code and the recent commits to get a feel for what the underlying problem is.

-

Off the top of my head, the four mostly likely problems would be:

1\. Frameworkitis - Many frameworks, when doing something the framework is not designed to do, require far more code than would normally be require. This even ends up hitting harder since often these overrides must be done in ways that either can't be reused, or must be done in one place, tangling everything together.

2\. Overwhelming technical debt - Spaghetti code, untested business logic, the usual.

3\. Too much business complexity in the code - Given that the cofounders are not technical, they may have been asking for things that make for a lot of complexity, and the development team may not have pushed back. This can kill later development, since adding new features to complex systems is usually much more difficulty. Alternately, since this is a new business, it's possible that the requirements have been changing, leaving the system more complicated than it needs to be.

4\. The developers could simply not have the skills required - A company had me see if I could speed up their application. It was days away from launch. The home page took EIGHT MINUTES to load. (with no customers using the site, only 50,000 records in the database, and static data that only changed every couple months.) Eight minutes to generate a single page!

The customer had been telling the overseas developers that this was a problem for weeks. The overseas developers were unable to figure out why, for weeks. After tracking down the problem, I added a cache in front of one piece of code, and took the site from an eight minute page generate time down to under a second.

The speed problem was not just due to a terrible architecture, nor a complete ignorance of what the frameworks involved were doing under hood, but mostly that not one person on the overseas team - even the "senior" developer - <USER2> that it was possible to find out which parts of code are slow.

-

To summarize again, probably the contractors cannot fix whatever is currently wrong, and outside eyes are needed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. More details.

1\. Could definitely be the case. I'm not familiar enough with the framework to say how flexible it si.

2\. Can't imagine there is a ton of technical debt, since this project is less than a year old and is greenfield.

3\. Could definitely be that. I scanned the current backlog and it seems like a big project, but have no insight into "the weeds".

4\. I guess this is a possibility, though the fact that they delivered some good work early in the engagement points away from this. Great story though! (8 minutes, OMG!)</comment></comment>


An Engineer's take on Chrome OS - <AUTHOR> http://synack.me/blog/an-engineers-take-on-chrome-os

<comment><USER2> I feel like we as a community are being wine-racked[1].

I had long ago written off Chromebooks as completely useless for my purposes, but all of the attention being paid to the Pixel really shows off how much ChromeOS is already capable of.

Once you realize that, why not buy a $250 version that does everything the more expensive model does?

[1] In which restaurants place $100 bottles of wine on their racks, not in the real expectation that many will buy it, but to make the other wines look cheaper.

</comment><comment><USER3> The pixel seems like a total waste from a hardware standpoint, everything he mentioned would work just as well one of those $250 samsung chromebooks. He also had to fight with the os to get anything useful done. Again i can see myself spending a few hundred bucks for a laptop to carry with me and not worry about to get some basic tasks done, but why would anyone want a pixel?

<comment><USER4> The Pixel's screen is a reason why some people want it.

<comment><USER5> Also, unlike the $250 laptops, it doesn't feel like garbage in your hands.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm still perplexed by the Pixel, but I'm in love with my ARM Chromebook as an 'away' computer for it's simplicity. It's not a full PC, but 90% of the time browser + SSH is all I need away from the desk anyway, and it does both very well (not to mention the keyboard and trackpad are far better than most laptops in the $300 range I've used)

Pedantic note: you can tweak the font size for the SSH app from it's options ('right'-click the app, it's not exposed in the UI)

<comment><USER7> I feel the same way. My Samsung ARM Chromebook is one of the best gadgets I have ever purchased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Just in case anyone is interested: I haven't tried it, since I don't own a Chromebook, but Crouton (<https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton>) seems to do exactly what he's doing in the article, only automated.

</comment><comment><USER9> My wife and father both use the Samsung ARM chromebook (guess who doesn't like tech support). I was a CR-48 tester too. I love ChromeOS, but I'm kind of disappointed in how little uptake there has been of NaCl. In particular, if there were a way to run a decently feature-filled emacs in a tab, I'd probably make the jump.

<comment><USER10> This makes me think - is there any reason you couldn't compile Emacs or Vim in Emscripten, and adapt it for the web? Maybe with some kind of in-browser terminal emulator? Quick googling suggests no one has tried this yet... I find that surprising.

(The Vim bindings in CodeMirror[1] are surprisingly decent, but it's still not the real thing.)

[1] <http://codemirror.net/demo/vim.html>

<comment><USER11> Stuff like this is where search in its current form fails.

Action.IO allows for browser based coding, and potentially development in the cloud. Heroku started out doing development in the cloud before they pivoted to PAAS.

<comment><USER10> I watched the video. That's cool, but not what I had in mind — they're running Vim on a remote server, not in the browser itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was given a second hand CR-48 when my 'regular' laptop died 4 months ago. I repartitioned it and installed Ubuntu, and have been using it as my primary personal computer since then.

Every time it boots up, it does have an annoying and scary unhappy chromebook, "press space to make chromeos normal" screen, but since I rarely need to boot it from scratch, it's not a big deal.

I have an external 64GB USB stick which I'm using as my main media & other storage, as the on board SSD is tiny. Fast though - LibreOffice opens faster than MS office on Windows... That is in fact one of the most annoying things about it, is the lack of HD space. I have to constantly be aware of how much/little space I have left, and make sure to clear the apt cache frequently, not install too many big packages, etc.

I'm running awesomewm as my main window manager, often with firefox fullscreen when browsing.

Work wise, I'm mainly doing dev ops, and full stack development on this machine. I also do enough media related work that I couldn't use this as my main work computer, and have a work iMac at the office.

It's kind of limited, but I kind of like it. I'm thinking to build a desktop computer (since I have an external screen already) with the beef for working on large photo editing, and using that as a server & workstation when needed, but sticking with this for portability.

I'm not sure I'd buy one - certainly not a pixel at that price... the long battery life is great, the weight and form factor is great, but a better processor and "real" HD would make life quite a lot easier at times.

<comment><USER13> So you're saying that the 2.5 year old CR-48's test hardware (2 GB Ram, 1.6 Ghz Atom processor, 16 GB SSD) is why you're not buying a Pixel?

<comment><USER12> No... I can't afford a Pixel, and if I was going to spend that amount of money on a computer, I'd probably buy something with more 'oomph'. Sure a hi-res screen is nice, but apparently not enough content is there to make it really worth while. For DTP and media work, I could see it being really good, but since those applications aren't really ChromeOS friendly (yet?), I don't see the point.

For general web use (browser, email, terminal) a 'regular' chromebook is quite usable - even a 2 year old one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> OT, although it was mentioned in the article:

I've found that the ctrl+[ shortcut is much more effective than ESC for switching out of insert mode in vim. Is this shortcut not commonly known?

<comment><USER15> I'm always surprised when others don't know about it. To me, using escape defeats the purpose of Vim. It's almost like having to reach for your mouse.

<comment><USER16> Unless you've swapped CapsLock for Esc. Then it's easy as pie. In ~/.Xmodmap:

        ! Swap Caps Lock with Esc
        remove Lock = Caps_Lock
        keysym Escape = Caps_Lock
        keysym Caps_Lock = Escape
        add Lock = Caps_Lock

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A much needed perspective. All I've read are the H/W specs. Though I'm still apprehensive about spending so much on it, it does change how I see it. Still, better options seem abound.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reads like an advert.

</comment><comment><USER19> >Boot into recovery mode with Esc-Refresh-Power, hold Ctrl-D at the right moment, confirm that you want to wipe the stateful partition, and away you go. Yes, switching to Developer Mode requires deleting all non-OS data on the Chromebook.

Why would you need to wipe the main partition in order to be able to dual boot? Also, I hear that this scary screen comes up every time you boot for 30 seconds unless you press Ctrl-D everytime.

[http://liliputing.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads...](http://liliputing.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/02/dev-mode.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Developer mode's designed[0] to avoid using it to bypass CrOS's security. The relevant points:

* the 5-minute wipe both hinders access to the owner's data and makes it unlikely the OS can be replaced with a malicious variant without being caught in the act

* the warning screens ensure the owner's aware they're in devmode

* Hiding the Ctrl-D bypass makes it appear the only option is recovery, you won't know about it unless you've enabled devmode yourself.

[0] [http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design- docs/d...](http://dev.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design- docs/developer-mode)</comment></comment>