Feds seize 64-year-old man's life savings, without bringing any crime charges - crypto-jeronimo https://www.iol.co.za/news/world/man-64-sues-after-customs-seizes-life-savings-from-carry-on-15262841 <comment><AUTHOR> Civil asset forfeiture is where the government directly steals your money without being supported probable cause and without being supported by Oath or affirmation. A sham trial is held against your money where you must prove your innocence to re-secure your effects. The money is then used to fund the police agency. Many have adjusted theirs budgets with the expected amount they will seize from the public.

You are not secure in your persons, houses, papers, or effects within the United States of America. They may be seized at any time on flimsy justification.

</comment><comment> xkcd-sucks In Albania: Corrupt cops take your cash. In the USA: Corrupt cops are protected by public policy set at the highest level of government, and you get a receipt when your cash is stolen. It's unfortunate that metrics of government corruption don't account for civil asset forfeiture.

</comment><comment><USER2> Is there anything we can do to help this person out?

<comment><AUTHOR> You could vote against the politicians who supported Jeff Sessions, the US Attorney General who openly supports and wants to expand civil asset forfeiture.

Here's the list of senators who voted for a man calling for expansion of stealing from the public: [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/08/us/politics/j...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/08/us/politics/jeff- sessions-confirmation-vote.html)

<comment><USER3> That's a 99% party-line vote. You could kick most of 'em out and those seats would just be filled with another republican who would have voted the same way.

If you want to see movement on this issue, then you need to communicate your views with your representatives.

<comment><USER4> There seems to be some opportunity at this point to try to steer the political energy opposed to the Trump movement in a direction where it, like, has a reasonable and just society as a real actual goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Come on, now.

If I can't travel with a pint of water. This man surely shouldn't be traveling with $58,000 of cash.

He should absolutely get the money back assuming there was no wrongdoing. But let's not pretend that his actions weren't suspect.

<comment><USER6> Speaking as a filthy foreigner, part of the longstanding claim of moral superiority of the US was that it didn't matter how suspect (sic) your actions were; that the USA was a place of rule of law; not rule by law. That habeus corpus was respected. That a man going about his lawful business need not have to justify himself to government bully-boys.

Turns out that was all bullshit.

<comment><USER5> Filthy foreigner? Don't insinuate that I have xenophobia.

Do you not hate the TSA and how difficult traveling in the US can be?

Given how hard it is to travel with innocuous items, no one should be surprised that he had difficulty carrying $58k in cash.

<comment><USER7> Those innocuous items are banned because they are supposedly, either directly dangerous, or just too difficult to verify as safe (liquids). But you'll find TSA has no problem with you choosing to leave the airport with your oversized shampoo bottle instead of taking your flight if that's what you prefer to do.

<comment><USER5> That's simply not true.

The TSA will absolutely stop you if you try to back out of the screening process once you've already started.

<comment><USER8> I've never tried that, and can't verify what happens, but I can tell you that if you bring too large a bottle of liquid they will let you put it into checked baggage to retrieve at your destination. Clearly the same offer is not on the table with cash.

Furthermore, nothing in the TSA rules says "no cash exceeding X dollars". If they don't want you to bring it, they should explicitly disallow it.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. They do say that in Aus and NZ. No cash over a few thousand IIRC. Then you have to declare it to customs</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Doctor T, don't you get tired of only seeing older patients? - happy-go-lucky https://twitter.com/TheRealDoctorT/status/1171831596724477952 <comment><AUTHOR> Do you see little kids losing it over little things like not getting their art work just right? Or a bit older kid getting very upset over something their friend said? Or maybe a young graduate taking their first job extremely seriously?

We even play along and parents share a chuckle at their "important" problems, appreciating their young and limited perspective, and knowing everything will be just fine. Now consider how grandma thinks of that critical deadline of your "world changing" project or that important deal that are losing sleep over. I always try to think about their perspective during stressful times :)

<comment><USER2> But is that stress what got the kid to be better at art ? Obsessing over what others said led you to understand other people and yourself ? Taking your first job seriously built habits and earned you credit among your peers ?

I don't think acting like a 70 year old in 20s/30s/40s is wise - you're not retired with most of your accomplishments behind you.

<comment><USER3> How do you know that most of your accomplishments are behind you at 70?

<comment><USER4> It's likely a reasonable assumption but is not always true. I don't know why people can't just say things that on average sound reasonable without some internet police officer having to call them out?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are a lot of older people in the complex where I live. They are some of the friendliest and most interesting people I've ever met. It's kind of funny because while I'm much more interested in their stories they always seem to want to hear about mine. I feel like the stereotype of the grumpy old man is falling apart, at least for me. Sure they exist but most of the older people I've been getting to know are very kind interesting people who don't fit that stereotype at all.

<comment><USER6> I've always felt like people after 60 calm way the fuck down. They're done, over it, just trying to take it slow and enjoy life.

I had a job selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door when I was young (like 15ish), the thing I noticed was that grumpy people are normally in the mid-30s to mid-50s range.

I worked that job for 9 months (it was awful) and I would talk to upwards of 30 people a night, 4-5 nights a week. What I noticed (and this is all anecdotal), 30's-mid 40's women were always very polite and would make time if they had it, men in that range were extremely rude and had little patience for a solicitor. Mid-40's to 60 the roles reversed, women would be a lot ruder, but the men would be nicer and almost had an appreciation that I was hustling and would make some time for me.

Over 60, most women and men were pretty laid back and accommodating if they had the time.

<comment><USER7> 30's typically are settling down years and might have a young kid or crying newborn keeping them steadily sleep deprived and agitated if I had to guess what was behind you observation for that age group.

<comment><USER8> My experience with raising kids is that you develop more compassion, empathy, forgiveness, giving people room to make mistakes and correct them -- extended towards people outside your family too. It's all very humbling.

But I am sometimes surprised when people tell me that's not a universal feeling. At some point I came across some study claiming to show that it made people less trusting of people outside of family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Seniors are some of the greatest treasures a country has. They're a living passport into another age, and incredibly fascinating to listen to.

When you stretch out the timescale, the importance of things changes.

90 years is a long time. My grandfather is 96. The Nazi's kicked him out of Vienna in 1938. A lifetime of lessons, of loss, of disappointment, of excitement, of calm, of contribution.

One of the more exciting recent trends in healthcare (in my opinion) is the emerging focus on holistic quality of life for seniors as they age and move through their healthcare transitions. A person is more than just their physical health; we have emotional, spiritual, intellectual, creative, vocational, and environmental health needs as well.

Considering and incorporating those ideas into how we, as a country, take care of our seniors is incredibly important and impactful.

I echo briandear, thank you to the person who linked these tweets.

Note: USA perspective

<comment><USER10> Wow 96, what an amazing grandfather to have! I hope to survive as long but it seems the my grandparents generation can't make it past 80. So much so that my nephew thought when you hit 77 you died and that was how life worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm amazed he has time to listen to patients talk about their gardens or hear their stories of meeting Elvis. Every doctor I know barely has enough time to diagnose a patient and enter everything into the EHR.

Do doctors for older patients have more slack in their schedules or is there some trick in how his practice works?

<comment><USER12> I've personally worked with doctors that had a lot more time because fewer patients see them in a day. They weren't older patients, necessarily, but this doctor (General Surgery department I think?) would only see around a dozen patients per day. Visits were scheduled for 15 mins, but could go longer if they needed it. This doctor had quite a lot of free time. It was a moderately- sized hospital in the Midwest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> For 27 years I saw the same doctor. He was a GP by the time I met him, but as an infectious diseases specialist had been on the front lines of AIDS in the 80s. I can still find old quotes from him now and again, calming people scared about touching doorknobs.

I trusted him thoroughly, with everything. He was about 10 years older than me and I worried what it meant when he retired and I no longer had access to this person who so deeply understood me--exactly when I started needing him most. This post is encouraging, to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER14> These are nice scenes, and I think we all could take care to remember the unique and compelling stories behind everyone else's lives, particularly the old. However I don't necessarily think the response is fair to the student, who could also be asking challenging questions beyond "old people suck, amirite?". Particularly:

\- Don't you get tired of [emotionally coping with interacting with people who tend to have more health issues and issues with worse outcomes]? (Is it fair to want to see healthier individuals for your own personal reasons? How does one defend their psyche from seeing trauma so often?)

\- Don't you get tired of [having to work primarily with a population that has a limited set of recurring problems that may not be as interesting or rewarding to work on]? (How ethical is it to want specific kinds of engagement from your job? Is it okay to be annoyed with individuals with preventable diseases and injuries?)

I have a number of close friends who are new doctors, and they grapple with these kinds of issues all the time.

<comment><USER15> > people who tend to have more health issues and issues with worse outcomes

I wonder if that's true, from the perspective of the doctor. The stereotype, at least where I live, is that old people will go regularly to the doctor almost just to chat, whereas a young person will only go when there's something wrong with them.

<comment><USER14> True, though it depends a lot on the field: most of my social group works in emergency medicine, where people don't drop in just to chat quite as often!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow. Just what I needed to read. Thanks to whomever posted this to HN.

</comment><comment><USER12> >My student doesn't seem to understand. Someday, she will.

...Or you could just tell her right now, instead of going off and tweeting your smug thought.

Still, this was a nice set of stories.

<comment><USER17> > ...Or you could just tell her right now, instead of going off and tweeting > your smug thought.

Modernity in a nutshell right there.

<comment><USER18> \- Times I've learned my lesson by experience: 100

\- Times I've learned a lesson by advice: 0

\- Times a lesson taught by advice turned out to be false: 400

I don't know. There's so many things people take for granted that it is a dangerous thing to just take someone's word for it.

<comment><USER19> So did you get hit by a car before learning to look both ways when crossing the street? Or did someone tell you?

<comment><USER20> > So did you get hit by a car before learning to look both ways when crossing > the street? Or did someone tell you?

Are you suggesting the first people that learned to cross a road got hit by cars before realizing they had to look both ways? There was no one to tell them how to look, so how did they learn it except by "being hit by a car"?

<comment><USER21> Not OP, but...the advent of cars over horse-drawn carriages involved a _lot_ of deaths before both pedestrians and drivers learned. There was also a lot of propaganda put out by car companies to change the popular conception of roadways from being a place where people walk and children play to being a place for cars. [1] So...it's actually pretty close to people needing to be told to look both ways.

[1] [https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The lady doth protest too much, methinks.</comment>


Empiricism and the limits of gradient descent - <AUTHOR> http://togelius.blogspot.com/2018/05/empiricism-and-limits-of-gradient.html <comment><USER3> There are a couple of factual errors here. First, the difference between backprop and evolution is smaller than the author indicates. The error signal used in modern backprop training is stochastic because it is computed on a minibatch (which is why it's called stochastic gradient descent). This stochasticity seems important to achieving good results. And the most popular evolutionary algorithm in the deep learning world is Evolution Strategies, which effectively approximates a gradient. Ordinary genetic algorithms are not gradient-based and have recently shown promise in limited domains, but can't compete with gradient-based algorithms for supervised learning.

The key claim in the article, that gradient descent could not discover physics from equations seems, like it is a statement about neural networks, not gradient descent. Given sufficient training data, a neural network can probably learn to model physics. I sympathize with the concern that it's very difficult to translate a neural network's knowledge into human concepts, but I see no reason to believe that optimizing the same system with an evolutionary algorithm would make this problem any easier. You could e.g. try to do program induction (which was supposed to be the future of AI many decades ago) instead of modeling the data directly, but choosing to perform program induction does not preclude the use of a neural network. Neural networks trained by gradient descent can generate ASTs (e.g. [http://nlp.cs.berkeley.edu/pubs/Rabinovich- Stern-Klein_2017_...](http://nlp.cs.berkeley.edu/pubs/Rabinovich-Stern- Klein_2017_AbstractSyntaxNetworks_paper.pdf)).

[Edited to remove reference to universal approximation; as comments point out, even if a neural network can approximate a function, it isn't guaranteed to be able to learn it. But I am reasonably confident that a neural network can learn Newton's second law.]

<comment><USER4> > Given sufficient data, according to the Universal Approximation Theorem, a > neural network can learn to model physics.

It just says there are weights to approximate any function, not that you can actually learn the weights. Neural networks trivially can't learn how to approximate noncomputable functions to any accuracy, and there might be a lot of other functions that neural networks are terrible at actually learning.

<comment><USER3> It's a fair point that the Universal Approximation Theorem does not guarantee that the weights can be learned. OTOH, the physical laws that the article states a neural network cannot discover are computable functions.

<comment><USER5> You need a stronger bound than this. They have to be possible to approximate govern specific network size, architecture and activation functions. Calculating that (or good statistics that will say so approximately) is a hard problem... It is solvable for a bunch of activations in a layered perceptron but attempt extending this to something more complex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm optimistic about the potential for evolutionary algorithms. I've used both EAs and gradient descent in developing robot controllers.

But the argument here about why gradient descent won't be able to learn certain things is weak. Thought experiments are not a reliable guide to what what GD can or can't do.

It's fair enough to say that F=ma and E=mc² aren't in the data. Indeed, it took thousands of years of human thought to arrive at them. So the argument "it's not clear how an algorithm could extract F=ma from the data" isn't a strong criticism, because humans also can't do it by induction.

The long process culminating in F=ma involved a lot of abstract symbolic thought. Whether human-level abstract symbolic thought can be learned through GD (probably in combination with some sort of Monte Carlo tree search) is an open question. It can only be answered by trying to build things and seeing if they work.

If you want to make an argument about the limits of GD and induction, it'd be better to compare to a problem humans can solve reliably, rather than an insight that one genius had after decades of thought while standing on the shoulders of other geniuses.

<comment><USER7> I don't understand how E=mc^2 can _not_ be in the data. If it's a universal law, isn't it in more (all) data than any pattern that _isn 't_ universal?

<comment><USER8> The article is making a simpler point than that. If I show you the table:

      A	B	C
      1	4	3
      20	45	15
      8	15	7

And so on for some arbitrary number of rows, you can look at the table all you want but you will not _perceive_ "A+C=B". It's just not written there. To get A+C=B you have to generate something else in addition to the table, namely a hypothesis- but this is a _creative_ act, not an empirical one.

<comment><USER6> If you connect A and B as the input to a linear neural net, and train against C, it'll very quickly arrive at weights of [-1, +1] and be able to correctly predict C given A and B. Whether or not it represents it in notation humans are familiar with, it has learned it for the practical purpose of being able to compute the function.

<comment><USER9> But how would a neural network know to connect data for mass with data for the measured speed of light? Why would a neural network be looking for an equation for energy conversion in the first place? If you just provide tons of raw data from instruments, what does that mean? What do yo do with it?

Sure, a human can clean the data and put it into a format that gives meaningful results. But if we're just talking about an AI learning from raw data with no supervision, where does it even start?

<comment><USER10> As someone who finds this interesting but does not know enough to take a position, I think a bigger question would be how does it come up with the abstract concept of energy?

I am aware that Alpha Go Zero came up with various strategic abstractions of the game that are recognized by competent players, and some novel ones, but I do not know where this program and its self-play training stands in the dichotomy of this debate.

<comment><USER9> Go has a clear objective that you can train for. What would be the objective in coming up with a physics law from raw data? What would it even be training for? That sounds like asking whether DL could create a new board game from a bunch of data on human behavior.

> think a bigger question would be how does it come up with the abstract > concept of energy?

I don't see how it could, and that's kind of how Kant argued against empiricism. You can't derive a conceptual understanding of the world from raw data. There's nothing in raw data to structure or make sense of it without some way to interpret the data. Even calling it data is an interpretive act (as opposed to noise).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The points the author makes about gradient descent are accurate, in a sense. However, they oversimplify the technique (as it is currently applied today) and the context in which it is used. It seems as if the author, like many others, has a basic understanding of the subject's basic mechanisms, but not the context in which experts understand them.

The example the author cites regarding evo algorithms learning physical laws is laughable - "It's just not in the data - it has to be invented" applies equally to both the backprop and the evolutionary learning algorithms.

"In this case, the representation (mathematical expressions represented as trees) is distinctly non-differentiable, so could not even in principle be learned through gradient descent."

This is incorrect, almost like saying NLP data is not differentiable. For instance, set this representation up as the output of a network (or, if you wanted to be fancier, the central component of an autoencoder), and see how well it predicts/correlates with the experimental data. This is the error, which is back-propagated through the network's nodes.

FWIW, many theoreticians believe that the unreasonable effectiveness of neural networks and especially transfer learning _is a result_ of their well- suitedness to encode laws of physics and Euclidean geometry. The author's final points about a nine-year-old survey may be out of date w.r.t. contemporary neural networks, which often have spookily good local minima and do not behave in the way intuition about gradient descent might suggest.

</comment><comment><USER12> In my experience if you have even a little smoothness in your problem's cost manifold, taking advantage of gradients is invaluable to sample efficiency. Many losses which don't seem differentiable can be reformulated as such - <USER2> can look around and see a wide array of algorithms being put into end-to-end learned frameworks. If the dimensionality is small, second-order methods (or approximations thereof) can do dramatically better yet. However, I'm also a fan of evolutionary algorithms. I see no reason why evolutionary rules can't be defined with awareness of gradient signals.

<comment><USER13> > Many losses which don't seem differentiable can be reformulated as such...

agreed, especially with policy gradients.

> If the dimensionality is small, second-order methods (or approximations > thereof) can do dramatically better yet.

i have not seen second order derivatives in practice, presumably due to memory limitations. can you point me to examples?

<comment><USER12> They aren't common in deep learning, but if you look to estimation problems like odometry, optimal control, and calibration, the typical approach is to build a least squares estimator that optimizes with a gauss-newton approximation to the Hessian, or other quasi-newton methods. Gradient descent comparatively exhibits very slow convergence in these cases, especially when there is a large condition number. In the case of an actual quadratic loss function, it can (by definition) be solved in one iteration if you have the Hessian. However, getting it efficiently within most learning frameworks is difficult, as they primarily only compute VJPs or HVPs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Once again, there is a general conflation of evolutionary algorithms and learning without a differentiable error function. I've presented this argument again with a discussion with antirez here on HN [1], but the crux of is that Reinforcement Learning as it stands is optimization over (maybe)-non- differential errors. For AlphaGo there is no gradient, per se, that says you will optimize your wins if you go this way (now, it is optimized by training towards the win-rate "score", which could be an error score) -- look at REINFORCE for other variations. Evolutionary Learning and Reinforcement Learning as two sides of the same coin.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652138](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16652138)

</comment><comment><USER15> (This is of course my opinion, not scientific fact) The biggest argument for EA is that proper implementation does not get stuck in local minimum. GD and SGD have that tendency, if not in one spot then probably looping between many. Problem with EA by the other hand is that its mathematical model is based on probability which is quite tricky to operate on even for above-average programmer.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't see why stochastic has to be worse than evolutionary algorithms. In high-dimensional spaces, there is a large space of possible "mutations". SGD just biases certain mutations based on the gradient from a minibatch. That sounds a lot like evaluating the fitness of a mutated population on a minibatch and culling members with low fitness. In fact, there are many demonstrations that the stochastic nature of SGD (coming from the use of minibatches) is crucial for effective learning.

</comment><comment><USER17> Notice how blacks swans is a labeling/categorization problem. Whereas F=ma is a causal relationship. The first has no induction problem, there is no swan- ness except in our minds. The second has no induction problem, because you model causal relationships and predict from them, better predictions means less wrong. The problem of induction is only one of "ultimate reality".

</comment><comment><USER18> Meh, weird article. None of the nice modern results (imagenet family, etc) were achieved just through gradient descent - this article, like most, seems to be missing the forest for the trees with deep learning.

It's not about the network architecture, or gradient descent on their own - it's the interaction, the dynamical system over weight space that training is.

Behind every great modern deep learning result? An enormous hyperparameter search and lots of elbow grease to carefully tune that dynamical system juuuuust right so the weight particle ends up in just the right place when training finishes. Smells like evolution to me. Deepmind even formalized the evolutionary process a deep learning researcher runs manually when fine-tuning a model into population based training [https://deepmind.com/blog/population- based-training-neural-n...](https://deepmind.com/blog/population-based- training-neural-networks/)

<comment><USER19> "An enormous hyperparameter search and lots of elbow grease to carefully tune that dynamical system" i.e. the classic GDGS (gradient descent by grad student) approach where you have a grad student train a system, decide in which direction the parameters should be updated (i.e. look at the gradient), tweak the system and repeat until convergence.</comment></comment>


Monsanto must pay couple $2bn in largest verdict yet over cancer claims - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/13/monsanto-cancer-trial-bayer-roundup-couple <comment><USER2> Does anybody have insight into how the payout figures are determined in a case like this?

</comment><comment><USER3> The "independent' American justice going after European companies.</comment>


How to lose weight. No, really. - <AUTHOR> http://renatovaldes.com/?p=13

<comment><USER2> I did this same technique myself starting about a year before my wedding. I lost a lot of weight and became a lot stronger and it was pretty awesome. I didn't pay for a gym, but got some weights and a bench at home and did things that way.

Several years and one kid later, I'm back to being fat. Somewhere along the line the calorie counting became less disciplined and then faded away entirely - I don't even know when or why that happened. It just did. The weight lifting time got shorter and shorter to make room for other aspects of life and schedule changes, etc. And eventually, it was gone too. So now I'm back where I started.

Sigh.

<comment><USER3> I can't recommend this book highly enough: <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583870067>. Get an exercise ball (duraball is the best) and you can do a ton of work outs from your house. The dieting recommendations in the book are a bit out-dated but it's really a great book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Shangri-La diet is the lifehack of the century (not a diet in the traditional sense):

<http://www.sethroberts.net/>

Seriously. You simply won't want to eat, and if you _think_ you want to eat, you'll be surprised at how untasty that delicious looking candy bar or pasta is once it hits your lips. It's almost as if your body _conspires_ against your best efforts to gain weight, which is a nice reversal for once.

In conjunction, take a high-quality multivitamin like SuperNutrition or Alive and you'll also find yourself with enough energy that you'll go crazy if you don't exercise. Yeah, it helps you _want_ to exercise. That is key for me.

It's so much easier to take your daily olive oil and find yourself automatically disgusted at the sight of heavy food than to rely on sheer discipline, which is probably why you're overweight to begin with. And besides, olive oil is good for preventing disease.

It also helps that you'll feel the effects working on the same day you start, and you should see an encouraging difference on the scale a week later (I lost 5 pounds on the first week with no exercise - almost scary).

You win, like, 3 times on Shangri-La + high-quality multivitamin, and you don't have to have much discipline to get started.

<comment><USER3> I'd switch from olive oil to coconut oil if possible -- much healthier. Olive oil still has about 10% pufa in it. Check out <http://www.podbean.com/podcast- detail?pid=27477> for more info.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found Hacker's Diet (<http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/>) by John Walker (Autodesk founder) to be entertaining reading by itself, it also has some useful advice.

The Abs Diet ([http://www.amazon.com/Abs-Diet-Six-Week-Flatten- Stomach/dp/1...](http://www.amazon.com/Abs-Diet-Six-Week-Flatten- Stomach/dp/1579549985)) is written in a bit over-patronizing language for my taste, but has a lot of useful info about different nutrients, how to read food labels, how to structure meals to keep blood sugar level constant, etc. Exercises in the book are not bad too.

By combining these two approaches I was able to steadily loose weight and feel better for more than a year. Recent change it lifestyle changed that, I'm looking into reworking my routine to get back on track again.

</comment><comment><USER6> His advice is not bad, but it can be simplified: low carb diet. Avoid specially excess fructose, so yes, lose the sodas, and sweets and sugar. And cereals derivatives (like bread). Also starchy vegetables (like potatoes).

Exercise if you want muscle, but it's not necessary or sufficient.

</comment><comment><USER7> _Building up muscle tissue also helps you burn calories faster when not working out. Cool little details I learned at the gym._

This is a very common myth.

 _To their surprise, the researchers found that none of the groups, including the athletes, experienced "afterburn." They did not use additional body fat on the day when they exercised. In fact, most of the subjects burned slightly less fat over the 24-hour study period when they exercised than when they did not._ [1]

[1][http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/phys-ed-why- doesnt-...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/phys-ed-why-doesnt- exercise-lead-to-weight-loss/)

<comment><USER8> Except that adding lean body mass increases your Basal Metabolic Rate, which increases the amount of calories you burn when you are not exercising.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_rate>

<comment><USER7> You're absolutely right, the article above is referencing a different phenomenon. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good advice, though I think he overemphasizes the gym. The point of exercise is to emphasize how much overeating costs you. It's harder to justify that candy bar when it equates to an hour of hard exercise.

<comment><USER10> An hour of hard cycling burns about 700 kcals, which is a medium-sized meal. A candy bar is on the order of 250 kcals typically.

<comment><USER9> 700 kcals is on the extreme high end for an hour of cycling. You'd have to be fairly heavy already and pushing it as hard as you can go. A normal person putting in average effect is probably more like 250-300 kcal.

<comment><USER10> I weigh 145. 700 kcals is about "tempo" effort: hard, but still fun-hard. _All_ out, in the best shape of my life for one hour is around 900 kcals. I'm in good, but not phenomenal shape; my brief flirtations with road racing ended in utter humiliation.

I know this because of my on-bike power meter, which measures mechanical work in kJ. That "perfect hour" was around 280 W, and I've done it twice. (Cyclists have a very narrow range of biological efficiencies, so you can just multiply mechanical by a constant to reckon metabolic work.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So to lose weight, all I have to do is eat <1300 calories and work out for 3 hours daily? Sounds simple enough...

<comment><USER12> If you are a 90lb girl then yes. Everyone else can eat a lot more calories than that and lose weight

<comment><USER13> A sedentary 90lb girl may well gain weight on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Lots of diets tell you to reward yourself with one good meal or a really > yummy snack after a week of successful dieting and exercise. Fuck that. > You're fat. Punish yourself until you lose the weight

Awesome. As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.

<comment><USER6> > As my friend put it, there's a shortage of discipline in the world.

This is very wrong. Obesity is not a shortage of discipline, is a hormonal disruption. We play havoc with insulin eating too much of things we didn't evolved to eat.

<comment><USER14> I'm sorry but I don't buy it. I'm not obese, most people I know are not obese and they are all exposed to the same modern, engineered food that obese people are. I'm not claiming that hormonal disruption doesn't influences it nor am I saying the modern Western diet is any good for you, but I will claim that the majority of obesity, from my limited life experience, comes from lack of self control.

If one exercised discipline and consumed 1500 kcal of even modern, terrible, HFCS-infused food, they would not get fat. Period. They won't necessarily be healthy, but they will not be overweight.

Anyway, this argument is not novel nor is it in the scope of this thread. Just wanted to say congratulations to the OP.

<comment><USER15> I _am_ obese and I don't buy it either. I've lost 40 pounds over the past 3 years following a scaled down version of the exact same plan as in the post. And I've gained 5 back over the past 3 months by being lax.

There are many people who do have legitimate health problems that cause obesity, sure. But the vast majority of us fat folk (I still hover around 280) eat too much and move too little.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I need to lose weight (I'm about 320lbs now, his maximum, though I'm 5' 9", and somehow I never, ever hear anyone say anything insulting about my weight), but I'm not sure the personality and attitude problem that appears to go with it is worth it. ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Founder of mynameise, impressed by his determination. Some good takeaways there.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've had huge success with the following: no sugar, no white flour, 20 minutes of intense exercise every day.

</comment><comment><USER17> you lose weight by eating fewer calories, then get your metabolism going with exercise on a daily basis. You need to stay disipline to eat the right things and follow your workout goals. It is simple in theory, but hard to execute for most.

</comment><comment><USER18> calories burned > calories consumed

<comment><USER7> If you only you could expand that into a book or expensive program... darn it all.

<comment><USER19> I wish I could upvote you twice!</comment></comment></comment>


Working on an open source Project that I hate... - <AUTHOR> http://songthinks.com/working-on-an-open-source-project-that-i-hate

<comment><USER2> I hate to say so but welcome to the real world. You can't always expect to work on cool and hip projects using the latest tech. There will always be "boring" clients with real world problems that need to be solved. It's all about what YOU make of it.

Often the little things make an assignment challenging. If it's not the client or the problem itself you should be looking in another direction. Perhaps you can practice on your soft skills and get your co-workers motivated. Building a motivated kick ass team is a real challenge and will gain you useful experience.</comment>


Symantec's detailed breakdown of Stuxnet [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/w32_stuxnet_dossier.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Hopefully this should put an end to all the drivel and hype that's floating around. This combined with the F-Secure Q&A (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1746401>) is all you really need to understand what it is.

As for where it's from and what it's targeting? Well, that's largely something that's best left to the intelligence communities, and they tend not to publicise their findings.</comment>


Instagram Needs to Be a Major Part of Your Marketing Strategy in Every Industry - <AUTHOR> https://blog.startuppulse.net/powerfully-boost-advertising-on-any-project-using-instagram-growth-hack-948821a1513e <comment><USER2> Great info. How would you approach marketing a B2B business on Instagram vs a B2C?</comment>


Water crisis coming in 15 years unless the world acts now, UN report warns - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/water-crisis-coming-in-15-years-unless-the-world-acts-now-un-urges/article23551722/ <comment><USER2> They point to population growth as a contributing factor, yet they never suggest anyone do anything about that.

How about free birth control to anyone who wants it? How about permanent birth control to any adult who wants it? I'd say free to anyone below some income level since the middle class can afford it anyway. With increasing productivity we don't have jobs for all the people anyway, why not encourage making less of them?

I'm not talking about mandates or government deciding who reproduces, just having them help folks that would prefer not to have kids to not have them. The solution doesn't always have to be more regulation.

<comment><USER3> I think one of the keys to "controlling" population growth is to bring people out of poverty. Most studies I read, show dropping birth rates as people/nations climb the economic ladder. Education, and health care also play a big part.

<comment><USER4> Since the original topic is the global fresh water crisis, wouldn't the increased per capita resource consumption from greater standards of living offset any gains in population growth slowing?

<comment><USER5> Hopefully the developing world can learn from our mistakes and not build cities and farmland in deserts.

<comment><USER4> I will offer a brief and unenthusiastic defense of that practice... the desert/arid climate can result in great yields as a result sunlight, lower use of pesticides and fungicides (dry climate unfriendly to mold and insects), and be less disruptive to - subjectively, on my part - less important ecosystems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> With all the talk of water running out in CA and the world, I am wondering why desalination is not part of the conversation. According to Wikipedia:

"Supplying all domestic water by sea water desalination would increase the United States' energy consumption by around 10%, about the amount of energy used by domestic refrigerators."

Is this true? If so, why isn't desalination happening on a massive scale in CA?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Considerations_and_criticism)

EDIT: The Wikipedia sentence I quoted was not clearly written. It should have said "supplying all household water" not "supplying all domestic water." Far more water is used by farming.

<comment><USER7> Simple: cost

As long as it is cheaper to exploit an existing clean water source than to spend the energy, and invest in the massive and in some cases unproven tech and engineering infrastructure to build desalination plants, then that's what will happen.

It's unfortunate, because the cost to future generations, or the biosphere doesn't calculate into our current economic system, and most of the commercial infrastructure is aligned against re-calibration of that kind, because it would cost them dearly.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megasca...](http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/534996/megascale- desalination/)

$0.58/m3 seems pretty cheap to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something that bears mentioning when you read this type of report:

If something is 10-20 years in the future in these types of models, this has:

a) Already happened unless b) there are major changes / interactions that scientific models have not had factored in while c) Anthropic actions cannot change this, but it can change x+n where X is original time and n is the 'down ramp' from your curve.

For instance: if your Co2 is 400ppm now, then the effects have already happened 20-50 years into the future. It can be made much much worse through events before you hit that time (let us say either Yellowstone or the entire of India / China buying a car per family) but your actions in the interim are merely altering the effects after time X.

In the case of water we can say: model presents X+n time > if action: such as massive investment in desalination and/or new osmosis materials (positive to time change) minus climate impacts we've not noticed yet (negatives to time change) where n is less than continued effect without any other imputs.

This is a rather loopy way to say:

People think of these types of announcements as future based predictions: they're not, they're present events if (and only if) your models don't change.

[Note: this isn't to say they're scientifically incorrect - but this inability to understand time in these types of reports fuels a lot of ignorance from both "sides" of Climate / Ecological debates]

<comment><USER10> > models don't change

I wonder if the software running those models has finally been corrected[1] to use floating point properly. Giving different results from the same data+software when run on different hardware suggests rounding wasn't being handled properly[2].

As these models are already so sensitive to initial conditions that "ensemble prediction" are necessary to avoid chaotic results, mishandling floating point rounding could completely destroy the results.

[1] [http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.ht...](http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html)

[2] [http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/137209/same- progr...](http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/07/28/137209/same-programs-- different-computers--different-weather-forecasts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

<comment><USER12> so, what i hear you saying is, you're proposing we double down on desalinization?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Possible water crisis in the future, and governments are selling water supplies for $2.25 per million litres! [http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/06/outrage-boils- over-a...](http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/03/06/outrage-boils-over-as-b-c- government-plans-to-sell-groundwater-for-2-25-per-million-litres/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I bet they've got their finger right on a set of great solutions: (1) more money for the UN, (2) more sovereign power handed over to the UN, (3) more money _from_ the UN to fund more studies on why more money should be given to the UN, (4) more posh conferences for UN and UN-related bigshots in exotic locales, (5) annihilate Israel, (6) new Nobel prizes to be handed out to UN- grant-funded researchers promoting increased funding of the UN at UN-sponsored conferences...

</comment><comment><USER15> With the rising sea levels (due to global warming), wouldn't now be the best time to figure out how to pipe that desalinated water all over the continents?

<comment><USER16> I don't think we'll be able to desalinate all that water, but figuring out an affordable pumping solution to combat sea level rise would be worthwhile, nonetheless. It's a "pipe dream" (sorry) at this point, but who knows what kind of energy technologies might make this doable someday. And if we have the affordable energy to achieve that, then I think we'll have a lot of options. Not buying Florida beach-front property any time soon though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If our weather is getting more unpredictable due to climate change why don't we get better at capturing the heavy rain we experience in some parts of the world and allowing it to sink in to the ground rather than running off into rivers.

Particularly thinking of some of the flooding in UK and Europe over the last decade.

If the ice caps melt due to rising temperature surely this means more water in the atmosphere and more rain in some places?

<comment><USER18> This might work in the UK. There is no national water infrastructure, so although it rains a lot, there are regular droughts - especially in the South East where most of the population lives.

There's been some noise about fixing this, but after privatisation there's no commercial interest in taking on national-scale projects without government subsidy.

Somewhere like CA is largely desert anyway, and there's no obvious wet climate area to collect water from.

So practically, only draconian conservation laws and perhaps a huge string of desal plants can save CA. I guess neither of those are likely. And then you get a repeat of what's happening in Sao Paulo and Rio in Brazil, where there's no water for days on end.

The terrifying thing about climate change is that it's literally making some areas uninhabitable. Large parts of FL have less than fifty years, CA and NM are drying out, the East Coast will become more prone to flooding and perhaps also to extreme winters.

Europe is going to have similar problems as flooding becomes common. There are already places in the UK where buildings insurance is no longer affordable.

At some point the economics stop making sense. Not long after that people either leave or become homeless.

It would have been smart to avoid these outcomes, but that doesn't seem to have happened.

<comment><USER17> When ever I go to the US I'm surprised at how water inefficient many places are - hotels with square flat basins that need a huge amount to water to fill to a usable level, to toilets that just seem to flush gallons down the drain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a non issue, provided that economic growth continues. That 10% of energy costs which desalination would add, we just choose to spend it on things not as vital. With economic growth, we just spend more and more of the new wealth on building desal infrastructure. If we're able to add nuclear to the mix, it lowers our total energy cost freeing up some additional room for desal. Fusion will definitely make this a non issue.

</comment><comment><USER19> As more of the world becomes middle class, there is more demand for meat protein. This is a problem since it takes about 10 times the water (and also energy) to support non-vegetarian diets.

</comment><comment><USER20> Introducing Aquabob! Imagine: a dome that collects condensation (think morning dew). It waters your greenhouse, and leaves you with plenty to water down for those midnight cocktails

</comment><comment><USER21> Once again, Silicon Valley is way ahead of the curve.

<comment><USER22> Guess who will be called in to help them get more water, somehow?

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Whew, thank god. Cause the Peak Oil guys sure need something new to fret about.

And these things always come true exactly as predicted because, you know, progress doesn't continue along, Moore's Law doesn't continue along.

<comment><USER24> Progress would be the world acting.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any things you learned but wish you hadn't? - <AUTHOR> I've found countless pieces of advice in HN of the following nature:
>things you wish you had learned earlier in your careers? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10026146
>what do you wish you knew 4 years into programming? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14366070
>things you wish you knew when you started programming? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10026146
>...etc
But I couldn't find a single instance of the opposite, namely:
Are there any things you learned but wish you hadn't?
For instance, are there things you wish you hadn't spend as much time and effort on. Or things that you would have been better off not knowing because of the way they shaped your mental frameworks or outcomes. Or tools that limited your abilities. Think anti-patterns. Have you had such instances of 'bad knowledge'? <comment><USER2> Knowledge is good, however, better than knowledge is simply doing. And many times knowledgeable people over think whereas less knowledgeable people will just go forth and accomplish because they don't know it can't be done.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any legit answer to this question would be contextual therefore not really practical for anyone.

For example, I may say "I wish I hadn't learned to play video games", but who knows I will go on to build a video game empire because I was so inspired by it? Or, I would turn into a video game junkie and live in my mom's basement till I die. The only difference in the two completely opposite outcome is how I dealt with the reality, and has nothing to do with the skill I learned.

The only correct answer to "I wish I hadn't learned" is about timing. A lot of innovation in the world is achieved by people who's relatively a newcomer in the field because they have a fresh perspective. All the "experts" think the same way so they can't really come up with a true innovation.

But even in this case it's more about timing and context, and there's no absolute answer to it.

If someone thinks "I wish I hadn't learned X" NOT in the context of timing, I think it just means the person needs to see the world in more positive light and realize that they can change themselves at will and do whatever they want. A skill doesn't ruin you. You ruin yourself.

</comment><comment><USER4> I feel like I've wasted a lot of time trying to use Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I've used it only for side projects, and I always ended up spending so much time on setup, getting everything to compile, debugging random things, etc, that I never really felt the productivity gains were worth it.

Once it is up and running, Ruby on Rails is great, but I dread the day I have to update or migrate one of my Rails projects...

People who use Rails every day seem to really love it (and they know what to do when stuff fails). Everything seems so effortless when you watch an experienced Rails dev.

I wish I'd known ahead of time just how much of an investement Rails requires to reap the benefits, and that I shouldn't bother trying to use it for small side projects.</comment>


Ask HN: Would an open source SDK for federated/distributed ML be useful? - <AUTHOR> I've been working on a federated learning system, and I realized the practical applicability for a lot of organizations. Would an sdk be useful?<p>Also, so you think there are any advantages to automating and distributing ML operations for large companies/orgs? <comment><USER2> A little bit off topic, we were actually thinking about implementing federated learning for a client but in the end didn't went through with it, I've just read about it in a research environment.

What are your use cases for it, are you using it commercially or just for research?

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting! Well I haven't really thought about its implications commercially, what would the benefits for be really? I was considering it more from the research perspective, but i'll give the commercial applicability some thought.</comment></comment>


A Cult Japanese Retailer Making Billions Breaking All the Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-17/the-cult-japanese-retailer-making-billions-breaking-all-the-rules <comment><USER2> I think it's important to point out: There is large variation between different locations of Donki. As the article states, floor staff have a large say in what is sold at each location.

If you go to a location in a crowded tourist spot, then most of the customers are going to be tourists, and the selection of items will reflect that (more throw-away crap). At the Dotombori location in Osaka, for example, it felt like almost every customer there was speaking Chinese, and the staff also spoke Chinese.

Out in more rural areas, in my experience, people primarily shop there for discounted household items. The more bizarre items (and sex toys) seem limited to the urban locations. There is a degree of dichotomy between the two that is worth keeping in mind.

</comment><comment><USER3> It really is one of the worst examples of a retailer anywhere. Shelf after shelf of semi-disposable, plastic tat, destined for landfill. Crap, processed food. Knock off cosmetics. Crowded, uncomfortable, unfriendly.

If this is the future, I don't want it.

<comment><USER4> It's the one store/retailer I didn't find interesting _at all_ while visiting Japan.

I have to confess that, in small doses (so as not to lose my sanity), I sort of enjoy the all-sorts-of-random-crap stores. I could spend unhealthy amounts of my time in those 100 Yen stores (or whatever they are called, I might be misremembering their names).

But Don Quijote was just garish and uncomfortable. It was even difficult to walk the aisles. Everything about it screamed to me "get out of here fast!". I can't understand how it is successful.

PS: while on the subject of these crap/budget stores, can someone from the US tell me if my hunch is right about the following? While visiting the US I discovered those Five Below stores (everything between $1 and $5) and I think I figured their trick: while the advertised price range is true, this doesn't mean what they sell is actually cheap! For example, I'm pretty sure I saw Hot Wheels cars at about $3 when everywhere else the same toys were near $1. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> Yes, you are correct.

All retailers play the same game though, with products priced as loss leaders to get traffic in the door in the hopes you don't notice you're paying 1.5x as much for anything else you grab while there.

The dollar stores take it to the next level (as you noticed). They thrive on the financial illiteracy of poor and rural demographics.

Look at the price of paper towels. Only $1, right? But it's half the size of the $1 rolls at Walmart.

Other stuff is just poor quality. $1 for a gallon of watered-down "bleach", versus $3 for the real deal elsewhere.

God help you if you swing a dollar store hammer around. Those dollar safety glasses will be about as effective as taping an actual dollar across your eyes.

Like a timeshare salesman or casino, they make you think you're winning to keep you coming back.

<comment><USER6> I would not be so casually disparaging of the intelligence of the poor. Sometimes you know its crap and more expensive in the long term but just don't have the funds to buy the better version. Poverty in the United States is an endless series of traps and gotchas to take advantage of people too weak to properly defend themselves.

<comment><USER7> Not to mention "rural"? You're rural so you're financially illiterate?? Might make sense to follow some farmers on twitter if you think rural means financially illiterate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Donki actually has plenty of useful stuff. The quality might be cheap but I lived in a mostly donki furnished apartment for 6 years. Bookshelves, kitchen table, lots of utensils, no issues. I've also bought lots of foodstuffs, some clothing, stationary, and lots of toiletries and cleaning supplies.

If you want a company that makes completely useless landfill stuff see Flying Tiger from Sweden. That store is nothing but trash and deserves your wrath far more than donki

<comment><USER9> I absolutely despise Flying Tiger and its array of absolutely useless one-time use non-recyclable plastic-glitter-trash and am perversely gladdened by its spread across Europe as it means my partner can no longer use it as a one-stop shop for last minute gifts, as the recipients now have a branch in their town so she'd be caught out.

As an aside, it's from Denmark, not Sweden - either/or would be surprising to me - my ignorant British perspective is that Scandies tend to be more Calvinistically-prudent and Gaia-centric and not beholden to landfill crap.

<comment><USER10> H&M, the global benchmark for disposable clothing, also hails from Sweden. And Ikea's cheaper particleboard furniture ranges are also pretty disposable.

<comment><USER8> I've heard the complaint but I can't help but wonder if that complaint is propagated by expensive clothing makers upset their over-priced clothing is not selling.

I've bought clothing from H&M and had zero problems with it. Same with Uniqlo, Zara, and other cheaper/cheapish clothing places.

I feel like there is a big difference between H&M and Flying Tiger. H&M actually sells useful items. Shirts, Pants, Jackets, Jeans, Suits. They all work. I haven't found them to be of poor quality.

Flying Tiger on the other hand seems to sell mostly useless stuff meant to give away at a white elephant gift exchange and then thrown in the trash.

As some economists will argue, being able to by clothing for less allows poorer people to buy clothing and allows all people to spend more money somewhere else (food, shelter, education, entertainment, ...) so it's hard for me to see how H&M is hurting things but maybe I don't have all the facts. I know they do have a recycling program. I suppose you could argue that's part of the problem though.

<comment><USER11> > They all work. I haven't found them to be of poor quality.

It does works but the quality control is questionable. You will often find poorly done and finished sewing or pieces which are cut approximately. They also often use the cheapest fabric they can get away with. It leads to clothes which really don't age well.

Where I agree with you is that a lot of brands which present themselves as mid range actually don't do much better and are just selling over-priced pieces.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> No discussion about Don Quijote can be complete without the theme song playing in the background: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJyYrrDKYZE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJyYrrDKYZE)

This plays on continuous loop at all stores.

<comment><USER12> They have an English version in Singapore. They relented on the continuous loop, but you still hear it quite often.

They also have hilariously bad Engrish on their in-store signs. I assume it's deliberate, because anyone I talked to there speaks English just fine.

The baked yams the article mentions are really super popular here, too.

<comment><USER13> I've been in a few and also assume it's deliberate.

To be honest, I get a huge kick out of funky/odd/slightly off translations. I know they're trying their best and I seriously appreciate that, but I still find it humorous when it's really bad, just as I expect them to find humor in me goofing up trying to say something in Japanese.

On the really bad note, I saw what I assume to be donation box on the memorial to mobilized children in Hiroshima that said 'Please Help Yourself'. I had to do a second read of that and it conjured up a mental image of some American digging around in the box for spare change to the sheer horror of Japanese onlookers.

But who knows, maybe that was the proper translation and it was for the poor who couldn't quite make the change they needed for something essential. But when I see a box of money bolted to a memorial, I generally assume it's either for the people being memorialized or upkeep of the memorial.

Other interesting translations from my Japan vacation:

\- 24 hr Reparking

\- The coke of food for specified health use.

\- A lamp warning label that said "mind the burn."

<comment><USER12> Oh, my remark on the signage was about the in-store signs in Don Don Donki in Singapore (where English is the most common language), not in Japan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> To me they are like a bizarre Japanese take on a Wal-Mart. Prices are cheap, the aisles are narrow, there's tons of Chinese-made crap, but they also have really inexpensive food too (steaks that are gigantic by Japanese standards....I think mostly imported American meat, pumped full of hormones and whatnot).

I like to go there at 2am (no traffic = short travel time) to buy food, or maybe some small tools (socket wrenches, etc..) that I need while working on my cars at night or even radiator fluid. You can also go earlier in the evening (around 7-9pm) and scope out the makeup section, try some "nanpa" with the kabakura girls before they head to work.

Between Aeon MaxValu (supermarket), DonQ, and Family Mart convenience stores, you have access to easily 90% of the consumable products you might need in a typical month, and available 24/7\. Clean stores with all-hours convenience like this are one of the highlights of living in Japan compared to some other places in Asia. Ttry buying batteries at 2am in Hanoi...

</comment><comment><USER15> I've been witnessing a new store being built very near to our house.

A typhoon tore away the sign of a pachinko place near us (it hit a nearby building), and apparently instead of fixing their store they decided to close it down and sell the building to Don Quijote.

Seems like a good match for them, as the pachinko place is huge, with 6 wide floors that used to be gambling machines shoulder-to-shoulder, but I guess will now be tightly packed cheap goods instead.

Everyone here is excited by it, as we have no interesting stores otherwise nearby. The first I heard the rumors was from wife's barber, and they quickly spread and other random people started telling me about the new store.

<comment><USER16> We had a similar thing happen in our town -- pachinko place went bust, and they bought it.

Next town over they bought an old local supermarket (again, with huge amounts of floor space)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don Quixote is infamous. Murakami (the other one) highlighted it in his long essay on Japan and pop culture, 'Earth in My Window', as emblematic of post- WWII Japanese consumerism: [https://www.gwern.net/docs/eva/2005-murakami](https://www.gwern.net/docs/eva/2005-murakami)

</comment><comment><USER18> I had the best time in this store in Ikebukuro. It is a bit trashy, but what a rats-nest of wierd. Bought a pikachu makeup/cleanser face mask for somebody, they wore it for christmas and looked like a zombie...

The traditional 100yen shoppe is more my speed, but this place is where you need to be, if its random gift time, as long as neck-pillows for airlines and trains, in the shape of a crotch with red undies are your idea of a random gift.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been into these shops a couple of times when traveling in Japan, and while I mostly didn't end up buying much, they're definitely a lot of fun to browse.

I like Muji, I like Daiso (branded as Living Plaza here, and which I always describe to people as "what if Muji did a pound shop?") and I'm looking forward to the first Don Quijote store opening in Hong Kong later this year!

<comment><USER20> Muji has fantastic socks.

In their European branches, that is. Possibly they are also great in their Japanese shops.

With a shoe size of 11 1/2, however, you don't really get a chance to test that, since you won't find anything for your feet in that size.

Even sneakers are problematic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> While not explicit, I do get the sense that they are trying to glamorize these atrocious stores. If you are American just imagine a 6 story "Big Lots!" that happens to also sell designer bags and sex toys.

Those stores are a mess inside and I can only imagine make a profit because they sell everything. In central Tokyo, most of them are just tourist traps at this point.

<comment><USER22> They're certainly not tourist traps; they're a staple for people living in central Tokyo.

Many years ago I lived in Shibuya and Donki was the only place I could get a lot of basic supplies, including even groceries, at a reasonable price. Now I live somewhere else in central Tokyo and don't go nearly as often thanks to Amazon, but it's still the only place to buy a lot of items.

<comment><USER21> Perhaps not many years ago, but they are certainly full of tourists now. Check out the Shibuya or Roppongi Donki on any given day, and the number of tourists is far greater than that of locals -- same with Daiso, recently.

Also my comment doesn't preclude Donki having some daily necessities. As for calling it a "staple" for central Tokyo, that's a bit of a stretch. If you said outside of the 23 wards, then I would agree.

<comment><USER23> You're taking the two places that have the most tourists and lowest residential concentration in Tokyo. Obviously it's going to be mostly tourists in the shop.

Go see a Donki in a residential neighborhood and it'll be full of locals. I live in Shirokane, an upscale highly residential neighborhood off of Meguro station, and even if it's reputed as one of the richest place in Tokyo there is a Donki and it's packed with local families shopping.

<comment><USER24> Ditto Nakameguro, a tony neighborhood with both lots of tourists and a dense residential population. The local store is, by casual observation, mostly people from the neighborhood buying shampoo, coffee, liquor, and sundries.

<comment><USER25> So similar to many parts of Manhattan?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This makes me feel good about my life's goal of starting a parody store of Linens 'n Things called Batteries and Shit that just sells random crap that doesn't really go together.

</comment><comment><USER27> > And they come anytime they please, since all locations stay open 24/7

Not quite right, they do open till very late but the one I've been to (in Iwate) closed at around 3 am.

</comment><comment><USER28> As a Japanese individual, Donki is the best store if you wanted to do midnight disappearing act.

Some typical bikes, junky foods and meat and vegetables to energize, a lot of liquor, battery for smartphones, some condoms for emergency, hangers and clothes to live in the new place, travel luggage, most general amenities, lightbulbs, contact lenses, bandage, medicines, and some funny stuffs ... they are all there!

You can also buy an adorable doll named DonPen there during the act. Of course I have it.

</comment><comment><USER29> "Store managers control merchandising, negotiating prices directly with suppliers"

This sounds like it ought to make scaling to different countries difficult. If you don't have a unique supply chain, then what advantage do you have over a mom and pop discount store?

Uniqlo, Muji, and Daiso (which is less well known but has quite a few US stores) seem to source centrally, just like other global retailers.

<comment><USER30> > If you don't have a unique supply chain, then what advantage do you have > over a mom and pop discount store?

In the article it mentioned those managers dictate what gets on the shelf and mention how they chase after surprise hit (wax nose hair). It seems they're more agile than their competitors and let managers living in those area decides what products to stock.

Perhaps they don't need a unique supply chain?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Whilst possibly overwhelming or discomforting, walking through Donki gives an honest display of consumerism, and manages to make it exciting. Like Walmart, it's essentially an incredible variety of stuff jumbled together. But Walmart is an Amazon warehouse in which the customers do the picking. It's systematic and depressing, and one feels like they might be in an item in a production line. Donki is chaotic, musical and risqué. It's not uncommon to see well- dressed couples on dates swinging tipsily through, because it's somehow conducive to romance, or at the very least, not a very shameful place to be seen. A store will have a variety of atmospheres, not all of them pleasant, but I much prefer the honesty of the chaos to the censored productions of most consumer 'experiences'.

</comment><comment><USER32> That's a place I've been to in "VR".

In the Yakuza games you get to go to a Donki store.

If I ever go to Japan there are a few places that I'll have no trouble getting around because I've been all over them again and again in video games.

</comment><comment><USER33> It just looks like a regular Chinese bazaar store except Japanese. Do they sell pens that dries out after a few weeks? USB cables that starts glitching after two weeks? Shoes that fall apart after a few days?

<comment><USER10> Pretty much, but Donki's main selling point is the incredible array of completely off-the-wall shit in no discernible order. For example, this pic has rubber chickens, an exploding hat, a helium dispenser for making your voice squeaky, gorilla plushies, retro gaming consoles, sexy maid costumes, a giant robot toy, a RC helicopter and a waffle iron:

[https://photos.app.goo.gl/n3Cri8BKUDWyfiAG6](https://photos.app.goo.gl/n3Cri8BKUDWyfiAG6)

I think they intentionally put these in nightlife districts, so they can be a sort of drunk man's IKEA where you always end up buying more than you planned to.

<comment><USER34> >I think they intentionally put these in nightlife districts, so they can be a sort of drunk man's IKEA where you always end up buying more than you planned to.

Complete with food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of Christmas Tree Shops.[0] Small isles, home goods from China but unlike the big box stores it's not quite one stop shopping for the junk you need.

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

</comment><comment><USER36> I've been to the one on O'ahu (Hawaii), I thought it was a fun store and great place to buy omiyage(souveniers)

<comment><USER37> The Hawaii stores were taken over from Daiei (Japanese supermarket chain) and I don't think they've changed that much, still a different animal from the Japanese Donki stores I've been to. In comparison they've opened a couple Daisos in Hawaii recently and the goods are identical to what you find in any Daiso in Japan.

<comment><USER38> I had a coworker once bring back everyone some decorated chopsticks from Daiso after a trip to Japan. We worked across the street from a Daiso that got the same chopsticks in stock about a week later.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > Floor staff should have near-total autonomy to decide what to sell. Store > managers control merchandising, negotiating prices directly with suppliers, > and decide how to change sales displays...

Does that scale? What's the point of a mega-corp at that point, beyond providing capital to start a local store?

</comment><comment><USER40> For Australians, I'd compare this place to a red dot store, just a little larger. I wasn't really that impressed by it, didn't seem like it's doing anything better than other stores. Maybe it's unique in Japan because other stores are so organised and neat.

</comment><comment><USER41> My impression was that in Japan, retail establishments are typically expected to be elegant, cute, neat, etc. How did Don Quijote become so popular while going so heavily against this trend?

Or perhaps my impression was completely wrong?

<comment><USER42> If you go to an supermarket or any department store in japan you will see that's not the case. Maybe the touristy stores are neat (that's the case everywhere) but the stores people use in their daily lives are more or less just filled with stuff from top to bottom.

<comment><USER41> Somehow I feel even the basic 7/11 in Japan is more elegant / neat compared to the 7/11 in the US. I don't know, maybe it's just some subconscious bias on my part.

<comment><USER42> I don't know how it is in america but coming from the northern europe for me most of the stores here are borderline messy and hard to navigate even if i know the language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Further marching towards the dystopian future where a certain class of people can only afford cheap easily broken trash that creates landfills the size of the himalyas

</comment><comment><USER44> It's called Don Quixote in the article but I love that the name on the marquee is "mega donki." Mega Donkey seems more apropos to me.

<comment><USER12> They are branded Don Don Donki in Singapore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Never been inside a Donki store despite living in Japan, but I've owned the stock for a while and it has been a solid investment.

</comment><comment><USER46> Bloomberg is paywalled so I wasn't able to read much of the linked article; Reuters, however, wrote about Don Quixote in August 2018 [0].

Interesting retailing concept. I do wonder if Japanese consumers will ever tire of the novelty. Then again, 29 years of growth might suggest otherwise.

[0] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-don- quijote/japans-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-don- quijote/japans-don-quijote-rides-high-on-rule-breaking-reputation- idUSKBN1KZ0OV)

</comment><comment><USER47> sounds like an alternative to the 'flying tiger' stores here. with more sex toys. they're ok to walk through with friends and chase them with unicorn dolls and the like. but i never bought a thing there.</comment>


How long can you survive on bootstrapping? - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone. I'm looking for some advice from fellow startup founders/alums about taking the leap from releasing your prototype into the wild to scaling your userbase and product. I'm a single founder of a Boston-based mobile app startup – the product is released, we continue to iterate and build further enhancements, our userbase is excited and giving constructive feedback, etc. We've reached the point where we are receiving interest from companies to buy the app or discuss licensing deals, but interest from local angels is basically non-existent at this point. I quote from one VC: "idea is a feature, not a company".
Here's the problem: I'm completely broke. For this startup, I chose the bootstrapping route. I plunged most of my savings and used credit cards to work with an offshore team and received investment from friends and family to make it past the prototype stage. My development team is willing to take an equity stake to improve the product, but server costs are expensive. Our userbase increased 20x when I dropped the app to free 1 week ago. I cannot afford to pump in $30-40 a day to pay for server costs.
The acquisition talks are positive (it would be a very small exit), but I'd really like to work on building out a company here. Is there any option other than an angel round to make it to the next stage? Would licensing the app to other companies be a detriment in future financing rounds, if we ever make it to that point? <comment><USER2> I don't understand how your company works. Your product is free. You've maximally leveraged yourself personally. You have no recourse in negotiations. Your BATNA may be bankruptcy. Your question is, "how long can you survive on bootstrapping". But you haven't booted yet.

Figure out something your team can do that will make money. Then think about the long term.

If you can strike a licensing deal with your technology, you should do it. You can't hurt your valuation any more by creating cash flow than you can by driving your company to the brink.

You can talk to companies that have expressed interest, and set up a contracting arrangement to build things for them. There are tons of mobile dev consultancies. Do that for awhile.

<comment><USER3> +1 for "Figure out something your team can do that will make money. Then think about the long term."

I'm in the same boat at the moment, we've raised some seed money and are somewhat in the same boat. In our case, we spent 2-3 weeks of June talking to ~2K of our users _on the phone_ to get some real feedback on how they use the product, what sucks and what else they want to see. At the end of it, we had a pretty solid list of bugfixes and enhancements... but, better yet, we noticed that there were 2-3 specific features that people actually offered to pay for. So, as a final sanity check, I emailed a small sample of those users with a credit card authorization form and asked them to fax it in... I got most of them back (and then shredded them since I don't actually have a way to process them just yet). :)

If your userbase is actively giving you feedback, maybe it's worth spending a little bit of time having in depth conversations to see whether any paid features might emerge?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks paul. I think the most immediate answer is: improve the product and keep pumping out features. In the short-term our costs are really under control. I apologize if my initial thread sounded like I was shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. With the recession and downturn in the economic climate, startup logic (understandably) has shifted from the web 2.0/YCombinator preaching of: build, find users, get acquired or profit. The difficulty is that competitors in our space operate on this "free" model and are backed by substantial angel or VC money. In fact, the only widely visible startups that seem to still be operating under this logic were founded and funded pre- recession. What is going on here?

I'm somewhat confused by all the conflicting recommendations I get on early- stage startups. Again, cash is king and we have some ideas for monetization (which, of course requires more $).

In today's economic climate, can startups afford, literally, to avoid realizing a business model after you've scaled? I realize that YC has increased the number of seed investments, but has the angel community also increased the pace at which they invest in these fledgling ideas at the >$100k investment stage? I'm in Boston, so my perception is a little bit warped. Can someone offer their thoughts?

<comment><USER3> No apologies necessary, you're asking a good question that I also have been thinking about for some time now. Feel free to email me if you'd like to talk about this in-depth or just need to bounce a few ideas off of someone. :)

I don't have a whole lot of insight into what's going on in the minds of the investment community but, IMHO, I think we all tend to think that there's more investing going on out there than is actually true.

<comment><USER4> If my own experience is any guide to answer your last suggestion there is almost no investing going on other than a few proven horses. Risky stuff is way down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Actually, you should have named this 'how long can I survive on bootstrapping'. It seems as though your answer is 'not much longer' at your current trajectory.

So you need to change something.

It sounds like you couldn't afford to release a free version, with all the costs involved. So don't. Stop releasing the free version. Think of a price you would be comfortable charging for it.

Now double that price. Chances are you undervalued what people might be willing to pay for your application. You have a growing user base, but most unfortunately if it grows too much you'll just be out of business that much sooner.

Sure, it wouldn't hurt to keep talking about acquisition. The beauty of that is in most cases these talks take forever, so you have plenty of time, and can always back out or tell them you'd like a few more months. The downside to this is they might just wait until you run out of money, and then whatever small amount they were offering you will become surprisingly smaller. When they have a meeting about whether to acquire your product or not one of their strategies is going to be 'let's wait and see what happens in the next couple months'. It's only to their advantage.

And at least give us the link so we can let you know if we would pay for it! Your company is failing, this is not the time to be discreet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your well thought out comments, cmos. And I apologize for not including the link in the original posting!

[http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...](http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=313428257&mt=8)

<comment><USER2> Can somebody who can actually click on iTunes links where they are tell me what this thing is?

If you've built a successful iPhone application, you're a marketable contracting operation. Stop talking about getting funding.

<comment><USER6> It appears to be a chat application.

Which naturally raises the question: "Doesn't the iPhone already have a perfectly usable chat application built in?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You may realize this by now, but you should never "fund" your startup with credit cards. Get that debt out of the way as soon as possible and never do it again. I've been bootstrapping companies for 20++ years and always used what was in my pocket already and/or found investors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course, thanks jhancock. In the end, the total initial capital (pocket money, friends/family round, and credit) was comparable to the amount invested using the YC seed formula of $5000 + $5000n.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> first, if your server costs compete in any way with your own living expenses, get them down. Most people massively overpay for servers. what kind of server do you have that is costing you $30-$40 a day? for that kind of scratch you can get a full rack, two circuits and a nice big chunk of bandwidth. that's operating cost for 16 of my dual quad-core opterons with 32GiB ram.

but then $1200 a month isn't much, really. that's what, two, three days of contracting at bay area SysAdmin rates?

Get a dayjob. Yeah, it sucks. But if you bootstrap, that's what you've got to do. I do consulting 3 days a week, and you know what? if prgmr.com revenue stopped tomorrow, I'd go back up to 5 days a week, and I'd have no problem paying for my server space for as long as I cared to do so. (and I have done this... prgmr.com is doing ridiculously well at the moment, but if you look at my history, well, I've been doing this since 2005, and have made my expensive mistakes. All paid for by contracting income. It can be painful, I mean, in 2006, I got a little optimistic and locked myself into a year-long contract for almost two orders of magnitude more bandwidth than I ended up needing. a $15K mistake or so. But eh, it looks like we might have that much revenue this month alone, so I was right to stick with it.)

It sounds like your business is one with low capital requirements, and low monthly overhead. That is the best kind of business to bootstrap, I think; you just need to build your life so that you are OK with supporting the business until someone notices you and the business takes off.

</comment><comment><USER9> How many requests per day does your server handle? 30-40 dollars per day seems pretty high... I know Hacker News doesn't spend that much serving 10s of thousands of people per day.

And after looking at your app, it doesn't seem like you have nearly enough reviews to justify that high of a cost. I'm no server expert, but it seem like you should be able to cut costs on the back-end.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would strongly consider the licensing or acquisition. Couple reasons for this:

1\. Compelling products tend to have willing buyers. If you saw a 20x increase in your user base when it became free, it sounds like people really like the product, but don't see it as a must-have (it's not addressing a serious pain for them). On the flip side, it looks like it could be a great nice-to-have for an existing device/product.

2\. You'll be much better-positioned for future endeavors if you're able to realize a positive exit. Past success can give you a lot of credibility. If you can get positive returns, it'll be much easier to raise money for your next venture.

</comment><comment><USER11> When negotiating you need to be creative with alternatives. From what I understand from your situation, you could consider doing a joint venture rather than selling out or licensing. It appears that you have the skills in creating a product that has "pulling power" but not much expertise in building a business. My definition of "business" is one that makes money. It doesn't take much skill to throw $40 / day at some hosting provider. As many of the posters have commented you need to charge in order to have a business. You probably need to shift your marketing when you start asking for money.

From a product / technical perspective, you also need to look at how many of your "users" continue to use your app after a month or more and how much they use it. That will give you an idea of how many tyre kickers you got and how many switched on, passionate users you got.

Do do a joint venture, you decide on split of revenue, a buy-in value that gets you off stressing about where your next Ramen meal is coming from. Heck, I'd even put the word out to your user base and invite applications for a venture partner. You can't get a better marketer than a passionate user with sales, marketing and business expertise.

</comment><comment><USER12> So we're bootstrapping, also in Boston, and also use GAE.

We've been able to manage to stay afloat by keeping day jobs. One of us works full-time and the other part-time, while working on the startup all nights and all weekends. Obviously, it takes a toll on you, and isn't very sustainable in the long term. But we've also learned to delegate: we hired two excellent interns, and we pay them in munchies and free lunches.

$30-$40 in CPU costs seems very high. I'm not sure if you have a technical background, but there might be room for optimization, especially in datastore entity structures and queries. Just the other day, we refactored the way we were storing a certain entity to be able to compute a list of key_names and then fetch them from memcache or the datastore in parallel rather than seriallly. That resulted in a 16x performance boost (measured by response time and CPU cycles). There are some other tricks, like "relational" index entities to speed up datastore lookups so that you're not doing too much processing in Python code.

I would be happy to chat more about our experience with GAE. mahmoud [at] thesponty

</comment><comment><USER13> What is your current cash flow? That is all that matters. At a minimum your cash flow needs to be enough to service your debt and living expenses. Then, you can all work for equity and make a go of this.

Figure out what this number is, and then ask yourself how you can earn that money. You may need to do a part time job in order to get that money. Yes, your ability to focus on this company will be hindered. But imagine how much of a bottleneck being absolutely broke and potentially bankrupt will be to the progress of your company.

EDIT: You may as well call up your credit card issuers and ask them to drop your interest rate. I've had about a 50/50 success with this approach. Both times I was successful I went from an 18% interest rate on an account down to 12%.

</comment><comment><USER14> IMO, you need to do 2 things to be successful with this app:

1\. Integrate with major IM services, AIM, Jabber etc, and have your own "Say Hi service" in there for LBS chat.

2\. Put something around the app, as in make it do more than just chat. Explore making it a dating app, so that you can chat/"quick date"/"lunch date" people around you that are signed up with your service. Companies like match.com etc have just stopped innovating in this space and you may be able to get traction.

I haven't done the research to see who else is doing this but it seems like for your app these two things look like an obvious steps.

</comment><comment><USER4> It looks like you need a business angel _NOT_ a VC, they are two completely different things (and from your description above it doesn't look like the distinction is clear).

Find someone that is already fairly wealthy from being in business for themselves and pitch your idea to them, make it a partnership and not an outright investment, that would help to get some interest going.

How much money are you looking for ?

30/40 per day for server costs seems to be outrageously high for any mobile startup, why is it that expensive ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your reply, Jacques. This was helpful.

We released on GAE and we're also using Amazon SQS. At our peak load, we were getting over 1.5-2k users streaming in during the initial price drop. CPU Time was our biggest drain: we've combined instant messaging with a local and global search option which eats up resources fairly quickly. I was very surprised at GAE server costs given a userbase that is <10k at this point (given the costs I had to put the breaks on growth very quickly).

The VC approach was for seed-stage capital (~100k) - I found a few "programs"/funds targeting early stage companies. Basically, I'm looking for a business angel that could assume a mentorship role and provide some "smart capital" at this point to scale.

<comment><USER4> How hard would it be to port away from GAE and get your costs under control ? The 'cloud' is a great place to be when you want to scale but it can also be quite expensive.

So far for the projects that I'm involved in I have yet to find a single case where I can make a case for a cloud solution vs hosting the stuff directly. (but there are other reasons than financial ones to use a cloud).

Where are you located ?</comment></comment></comment>