A new team at Reddit - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samaltman.com/a-new-team-at-reddit <comment><USER2> I realize that this sounds non-credible (and it's certainly one of the craziest professional things I've ever been a part of), but it's actually what happened.

Yishan wanted to move the office from SF to Daly City. The board pushed back but said we'd agree to it with certain data (we wanted Yishan to figure out how many employees would stay with the company through the move, get a comparison to other market rents, etc.--all questions I think a board should ask when thinking through a major commitment).

This is certainly not what I was expecting to be dealing with so quickly after investing in reddit, but we'll make the best of it.

<comment><USER3> Ellen Pao. Harvard Law, Harvard MBA, time at Cravath (very, very fancy law firm) and partner at Kleiner (which I imagine most of us know) is now to be the head of Reddit?

I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringing will be the one who figures out how to retain the spirit, activity, and engagement of Reddit, while satisfying that 10x, $500mm valuation.

This ain't sexist, this is anti-elitist.Cutting and pasting monetization templates from other media properties, and building projected revenue models off of traffic numbers just can't work here. It's not Buzzfeed or Business Insider.

I was suspect when Erik Martin left (had the pleasure of meeting him in NYC, he lived and breathed what makes Reddit wonderful), and this really seems to solidify what I guess should've been pretty obvious.

I genuinely hope Ms. Pao holds things together, and the return of Alexis helps things out. The more I've learned, it seems Alexis was already gone by the time Reddit really took off and has been writing and speaking ever since. Curious how his operational prowess shows through the new chairmanship role.

Rant done. We're praying for you Reddit.

<comment><USER4> _> Ellen Pao will be stepping up to be interim CEO_

 _> Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded reddit nine and a half years ago, is returning as full-time executive chairman (he will transition to a part-time partner role at Y Combinator)_

 _> There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things._

I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about Ellen Pao leading reddit in the long term.

Also from today's reddit blog post[0] by Alexis

 _> Instead, I joined the board and have done everything I can to not be a helicopter parent, but rather support reddit and all the amazing people who make it work as best I can. But reddit is and will always be my baby_

<comment><USER5> Alexis wants Pao as the permanent CEO, but the next few months are a testing ground for her.

Edit: Source: [http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be- int...](http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-interim-for- long/)

<comment><USER6> Given her background, I think it will be Pao as a very operations focused CEO and Alexis as a fairly involved Executive Chairman focused on guiding culture and general direction.

It could work out very well for Reddit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heh. I love the conceit that anyone would believe Wong resigned only over "location and amount of money to spend on a lease".

Previously from @sama: "Yishan Wong has a big vision for what reddit can be. I'm excited to watch it play out. " ([http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit](http://blog.samaltman.com/reddit))

<comment><USER8> Wong didn't want to move the company to SF. The board did. That's no small thing to disagree on.

<comment><USER9> Maybe I'm missing the context here, but Reddit is _in_ San Francisco. They're in the same SoMa office building Wired is in.

<comment><USER10> Maybe Wong wanted to move HQ to the Valley proper, rather than SF itself?

Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.

But also, there's a (plausibly-fair) knock on SF-city-based companies as being more superficial, frothier, and more prone to distraction and high-burn rates than those in the more-authentically-nerdy Valley.

Maybe someone can leak where Wong wanted the new HQ to be.

<comment><USER11> > Almost all corporate HQ relocations move closer to the CEO's home.

Is there any evidence of that? Seems quite interesting..

<comment><USER10> It was already folklore back when I was first part of a company discussing new office locations, in the 90s. (My father may have even mentioned it when I was child.) Since then, I've observed it often – though in fairness that may be confirmation bias.

The ~cschmidt sibling reply highlights a Joel-on-Software post about the phenomenon from 2003, attributed to a 20th-century urbanist/organizational- analyst, William Whyte, perhaps as coined in a 1958 book.

Here's a critique of a Connecticut tax incentive from earlier this year that notes all 5 resulting corporate relocations reduced their CEO's commute:

[http://www.raisinghale.com/2014/07/16/connecticut- taxpayers-...](http://www.raisinghale.com/2014/07/16/connecticut-taxpayers- fund-shorter-ceo-commutes/)

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the replies guys!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Relevant context: Wong wanted everyone who worked at Reddit to move to San Francisco in an attempt to increase cohesion. [http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after- raising-50m-reddit-f...](http://venturebeat.com/2014/10/01/after- raising-50m-reddit-forces-remote-workers-to-relocate-to-sf-or-get-fired/)

Some speculated that the move was to please investors, especially after a fundraise. This announcement indicates that the investors...disagreed?

<comment><USER13> From the previous thread here[1]...

From what I gather Yishan went to Sama after closing the 50m round and asked for advice on company structure and whether or not to consolidate workers into one location. How/why that was even a consideration hasn't been mentioned to my knowledge.

...anyway, Sama suggested that they do phase out remote workers and consolidate everyone in San Francisco.

> to state what should be obvious, this was a decision by the company not the > investors (also, the company made the decision before the round.) i'm > skeptical of remote work for early-stage startups. i'm not religious about > it for larger companies; i think it works for some and doesn't work for > others. if it works, great. if it doesn't, that's fine too. the only thing i > felt really strongly about (when yishan explained the challenges they were > facing and asked for my advice as a friend and not an investor) was that > reddit needed to be super generous to people that were unwilling or unable > to move, and i think they have been.

To me this seems like it was clearly a requirement of the investors. (honestly has getting rid of remote workers ever worked out for the employee?) and you'd be naive to believe otherwise.

This time around the dispute seems to be over where the new HQ should be located. Reddit is currently in SF and Sama states Yishan wanted to move to Daly City...

So we are expected to believe that the CEO of reddit resigns after not getting approval to move the office < 50 miles away? I'm very skeptical. My guess is that Yishan was being ousted so that Alexis could eventually be CEO again. Pure conjecture but that's my gut feeling.

1\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8398127)

<comment><USER14> Please delete some of your dashes, they are breaking layout.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Nice words, growing it 5x is great.

Resigning over office plans sounds like a last straw sort of thing. In the grand scheme of things office locations aren't _that_ big a deal.

But then again, Reddit has had some weird dis-coordinated public communications, maybe more cohesion really was necessary?

<comment><USER16> 5x growth is great, but Reddit definitely has a "if it isn't broke don't fix it" mentality (probably a fear of "digging"). I struggle to attribute that growth to one CEO's decisions, when it really seems more like inevitable growth due to the success of the product and community that was defined long before he took the helm. Arguably, by Alexis (community) & Steve (product).

<comment><USER17> > if it isn't broke don't fix it

This is the kind of mentality more companies need. It is why craigslist is still running a site that looks like it is from 1999. The opposite thinking is why digg when down in flames.

<comment><USER18> Have you done a search on Craigslist lately? They're still going for a basic- HTML4-user-agent "theme" (since that's basically their brand now), but the implementation is actually quite dynamic/AJAXified and CSS-heavy. (Also, apparently they use Redis everywhere on the backend for Matryoshka cashing, among other modern practices.)

Also, Digg's failure had nothing to do with a visual refresh; it was that they changed the dynamics of the "social game" the site implemented to make previously "winning" users suddenly irrelevant in comparison to sponsored posts by companies. It'd be like Youtube doing DMCA takedowns on all the "celebrities" with million-subscriber channels.

<comment><USER17> My point was just that users want the same experience as they got when they started using the site for the most part. Too many changes and you risk driving away your user base. Changes being anything from visual components to mechanics of the site.

<comment><USER19> They have made a lot of user-facing changes though, verified phone number, map search and map views for listings, search by distance, and contact info masking are a few that come to mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I logged out of reddit about a month ago. I changed my password to something incomprehensible. To me, reddit has become a link aggregator over being a social place. I still visit about a half dozen subreddits daily, but only insomuch as to get my news.

I think that will be its demise. Reddit's volunteer moderation and vote gaming makes it a poor non-biased link aggregator unless you want an echo chamber. Some people certainly do, but as HN has shown, that can only last so long. There's already talks about the way /r/iama is monetized and the changes to the default reddits (as well as the removal of some reddits as defaults) destabilized the site and trashed some of the more long-standing communities on the site in favor of more inter-subreddit traffic.

I think that the reddit technical model is fine. It worked for years before reddit was even around, and I think it can still work now, but reddit's business model is working behind the scenes to sabotage the integrity of the technical model. reddit as a social experiment seems to be coming to an end.

<comment><USER21> The trend that finally sent me out was when good subreddits focused on specific topics started turning into show and tell for adults - and usually just amounted to, "Hey I bought that expensive thing that all of the group says is THE one to get, here is a picture of it in my house, it probably looks similar to the one you have". I suppose in a way, the recent investment might match that consumerist focus.

<comment><USER22> Each subreddit needs a good set of mods, __especially __when there are thousands of subscribers.

Once a subreddit hits some magic number, it devolves into a stream of image links to "hey I made a cake/painting/object with [subject of subreddit] on it".

Mods can very easily guide users toward discussion. r/atheism infamously banned images altogether, and aside from the "REVOLT I WANT MEMES IN MY R/ATHEISM" posts, people actually started talking again. r/twoxchromosomes has a no-images-unless-it's-Friday rule.

<comment><USER23> The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.

<comment><USER24> >The challenge is that what we think of as high quality content is not what Reddit Inc. has seen leading the growth. Images and fluffy content are easier to consume, and therefore more profitable for the site.

Which is fine, but you have to make some attempt and consolidating that type of content as much as possible. An example being to let /r/gaming run wild with the image macros and meme posts, but then rule those out on the subreddits for specific games. If you don't, you just end up with each game's subreddit becoming basically a filtered version of /r/gaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> _Although my 8 days as the CEO of reddit have been sort of fun, I am happy they are coming to a close and I am sure the new team will do a far better job and take reddit to great heights._

Heh.."sort of". But seriously - good moves @sama. This part of your post seems to be getting less attention but it should be highlighted. It's tough as hell to jump into the middle of a fire when a top executive resigns, and it's commendable that you rolled up your sleeves and did it. At some point, if ever possible, a post about the past week would be hugely interesting.

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow, didn't expect this. The original founding team of Reddit were awesome.

1) Personally responded to feedback emails.

2) Actually cared about sensible moderation, instead of the terrible moderation practices that have taken over in recent years. Examples of reddit's recent problems: certain subreddit moderators perpetrating massive multi-million dollar scams by banning people who warned about scamming businesses. Moderators spamlisting competing photo sharing websites so that their own sites can get more traffic. All kinds of shady non-transparent moderator actions. I doubt these would have happened under the original founders' watch!

3) Generally seemed like nice guys. Too rare.

Hoping for great things!

<comment><USER27> regarding 2), sounds interesting. Got any more information on that?

Surely, if you are objective and just present facts, this can be discussed here? What multi-million dollar scams are going on on reddit?

<comment><USER12> There were a few Bitcoin/dogecoin scams, unsurprisingly.

Two incidents I remember are a) /r/hearthstone, where a moderator who owned a fansite killed links to other fansites and b) a moderator of /r/tumblrinaction posted a link to a MLM on the top bar.

<comment><USER28> Don't forget when it was revealed that a moderator on /r/adviceanimals also owned quickmeme.com. He apparently ran bots that downvoted any non-quickmeme images and upvoted quickmeme images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Straight from the horses mouth - answer here from Yishan on Quora: [http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit- CE...](http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Yishan-Wong-resign-as-Reddit- CEO/answer/Yishan-Wong?srid=X&share=1)

</comment><comment><USER30> Here's the announcement on the reddit official blog: [http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming- home.html](http://www.redditblog.com/2014/11/coming-home.html)

<comment><USER31> I find it rather ridiculous and unprofessional that his personal site is the version of this that's up here.

<comment><USER32> Huh? Where do you see his personal site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There's a few things that I'm guessing could have contributed to this final straw that broke the camel's back moment:

\- Yishan's response to the ex-employee publicly calling him out and revealing their work performance in a non-professional manner. (not undeserved, but not professional for a CEO)

\- The response or non-response to the Fappening.

\- Not a lot of movement on making the site work great for mobile leading to the rise of Alien Blue and other clients gaining popularity.

I don't know if there was a lot of pressure to improve revenues since generally the audience is pretty allergic to blatant advertising but we shouldn't forget that Reddit is a business.

</comment><comment><USER34> Could the new team please review and censor some of the unquestionably evil subreddits? (ie: brutalizing women, dead babies, animal sex, etc). There's just no reason whatsoever such places ought to exist.

Out of conscience, I chose to stop reading Reddit for allowing such subs to exist. I am not asking others to do the same or to adopt my beliefs, but I say this because I really enjoyed being a redditor. I'd like to return, but not if pure evil is allowed to continue there.

<comment><USER35> Not trying to be rude or anything, but I feel like you should also have a problem with the internet. There are many different websites, I'm sure, a lot for things that are pure evil. I'm actually very curious, why you only choose to boycott Reddit? What's your justification for still using the internet?

<comment><USER34> Roads connect me to the entire world, just like the Internet. When I arrive at a destination, it is a separate dwelling than all the other dwellings.

Make sense?

<comment><USER35> I suppose a little.

Actually, I modified the analogy to "arrive at a city". I feel like Reddit is more like a city than a single dwelling. And I can understand continuing to use roads while avoiding certain cities.

I still don't agree with your original point, and maybe the analogy is biased in your favor (it is your justification after all, so I cant really counter), but yeah, fair enough, I like your justification. Thanks for entertaining my curiosity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Amazing the the new SVP of Product is a guy who one day said "It would be cool if reddit had a secret santa." While not working there.

[http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret- sant...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/12/20/secret-santa-the- creator-of-reddits-gift-exchange-the-worlds-biggest.html)

<comment><USER37> It is very surreal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Does this mean that Reddit will start evolving again? It's been stagnating for years with few user-facing changes. The UI is a complete mess. From the outside at least, it looks like they've stopped investing in it and are just milking it until it dies.

<comment><USER39> Also, let me point out that advertising on reddit is a royal pain in the ass. They have all kinds of broken processes and weird quirks that have not been fixed since we started trying to advertise there in 2011.

We recently went back to try some new campaigns there and none of it was fixed.

I'm sure if you're doing big media buys (ie., you're microsoft) they will just do it all for you, but from the standpoint of the self-serve advertising, it's really, really broken and difficult.

<comment><USER40> New PM on ads here. Completely agree and it's one of my top priorities to fix. Feel free to ping me directly if you ever want to give me more detailed feedback - firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER41> Hey Ryan,

I didn't see your comment before I posted, but definitely take a gander at my previous comment for a good place to start.

Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This seems petty; you really didn't need to post the details of the resignation. Sorry Sam.

</comment><comment><USER43> > It's interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more > users than Hacker News has in total.

I'm sure McDonalds sold more hamburgers in the last 8 days than my local butcher sold steaks too. If HN would ever reach that degree of attrition it would _be_ reddit.

At the risk of being elitist, let's hope that never happens.

</comment><comment><USER44> Man, the whole thing reeks!

The big guys invest in Reddit -> weeks later a wedge issue is found, CEO is isolated and out -> blog post to convince the masses that this is still the good old Reddit: 'Look! Ohanian is coming back!'.

The way this announcement desperately tries to water down the significance of the event, speaks chapters, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER45> Why did he write: "It's interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total."

Was that a dig at Hacker News?

<comment><USER46> No, I think it was just to emphasize how much Reddit is growing.

HN is targeted at a specific audience and is more like a subreddit for a particular topic. It wouldn't make sense to compare them directly.

<comment><USER47> Not to mention half of the user accounts at reddit are just stupid novelty accounts...

I'm exaggerating of course, but there are still a ton of novelty/alt accounts that people create on reddit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Will this affect Reddits offer to sell 10% of their last round to the community?

Presumably Yishan was heavily involved in the logistics of that.

<comment><USER37> No, it will not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I really liked the "move to Daly City" idea. Millbrae also seems like it would make sense.

<comment><USER50> What's the benefit of moving to Daly City vs SF proper? I'm not from the bay area, so I'm not familiar with why this would be a problem.

<comment><USER9> While I'm speculating, I'd imagine the advantage is simply that you can get more space for less money. Daly City is (in a very relative sense) inexpensive, especially given its proximity to SF.

The downside is that Daly City doesn't really have anything to offer _but_ cheaper rents; I suspect it'd be a terrible place to be stuck in for lunchtime and after-work options, nor from what I've seen would it be a terribly pleasant place to live. (That's subjective, of course.) Being in SoMa is a job perk in and of itself, given how many interesting things are within walking distance. If you're going to move out of SF there are considerably more interesting places to target that would still be within relatively quick BART or Caltrain commuting distance.

<comment><USER49> I work really near the current Reddit office. The SOMA location means:

1) Lots of good but expensive ($10-30/day, easily) lunch options. Reddit provides lunch, and most of the employees seem to eat there, so no much of a perk.

2) Shitty walk to BART -- it's 20min to BART and then the BART wait, BART trip, and whatever on the other end. BART is nice if you're within a couple minutes of a station, which basically means DT oakland, berkeley, or FiDi/market st for offices. Or Daly City!

3) Caltrain, but Caltrain confuses me; I'd always rather drive. You can do Caltrain to Millbrae and then BART, though, for Daly City.

4) 280 proximity (but, Daly City does it better).

5) Bay Bridge sort of proximity (but, 30-45 minutes to wait to get on it in the evenings 5-7pm). This is objectively a big win for Reddit's current location vs. Daly City -- people in Oakland/Berkeley who drive to work. (I do this, and aside from costing me $1k/mo pretax all-in in a paid off car, it gives me a 15min each way commute at 10a and 7p 95% of the time).

6) Utterly extortionate housing rents -- $3500++ for a studio, $4500 1BR. If you were lucky and got here years ago, it can be half that, which is still expensive in absolute terms, but based on Bay Area tech salaries sort of reasonable. Otherwise, insane. Daly City is 50-75% of that, or less, and Pacifica/other San Mateo County/Western SF areas are options. It's faster to go from Ocean Beach to Daly City by car than Ocean Beach to SoMA via Muni.

7) Obnoxiousness whenever AT&T park has an event. Parking goes from $12/day to $90/day, and crowds of roving drunken assholes take to the streets. Usually in the evenings, but baseball has day games :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> This is such a strange thing to resign over. For cooler companies like Reddit and more name brand places like Google and Apple, location is not incredibly important for hiring, but it's HUGE for retention.

When you're excited to start a new job it's easy to overlook the commute. Things come into perspective 6 months later when you're wasting up to 1/12 of your life on a bus/train.

I've personally made this mistake and have noticed when interviewing candidates that one of the top reasons they give for wanting to leave their current position is that it's too long of a commute.

</comment><comment><USER52> Recently watched the video of Ben Horowitz in How to Start a Startup class where he talked about How as CEO it is very important that you should take the perspective of Employees too. Got to know from recent article in NYTimes that Mr. Wong made mistakes twice : first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF and then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons.

Mr. Horowitz's lecture now made so much sense to me.

<comment><USER53> "then replying aggressively on fired ex employee's post to justify the reasons."

To be honest, this is what he should have done. One-sided stories without any sort of opposition on Reddit end up starting Internet mobs and people get fired over it (or forced to quit due to threats). This is exactly what happened with the Mozilla CEO. The culture of Internet mob mentality has created this environment.

"first by requesting company's global employees to move to SF"

I can see his point. I've worked remotely and not remotely more than a few times. When you work remotely, you really don't feel connected to the rest of the time and communication and overall progress does suffer over time. No matter how much you try to stay connected, it's just not the same.

<comment><USER54> Well, Mozilla's CEO had actually donated money to anti-gay causes.... as opposed to reddit, where what the ex employee was saying was false

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> "It's interesting to note that during my very brief tenure, reddit added more users than Hacker News has in total." Zing! =P

<comment><USER56> 8 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Knowing nothing more about the issue, I honestly believe he's right in wanting to move the office out of the most expensive area in the Bay. It's a strain down the line.

Unless something fundamental changes in city planning I'd expect a certain degree of crowding out of that area.

</comment><comment><USER58> I've always had a gut feeling that Sam Altman is not what he acts like. Just because Paul Graham says he is great doesn't mean he is. It's just his personal belief and could be just a propoganda.... Nothing can be believed in this world anymore, news are not actually news, People don't mean what they say, they say what they don't mean, they act different that the reality and internet world is going crazy, unethical, greedy and more... Start ups are just made to make money, People are easy to fool, one guy comes up and make millions, says start up is great and all the people like Donkeys and Yaks start a 'Start-up'. Why? To make money.... doesn't matter what their action's effects are, they are just crazy to make money. They are dishonest, greedy but they call themselves successful...why, because they earned money... Bring on the Artificially intelligent machines, get rid of the humanity... sooner than later...

</comment><comment><USER59> This post has an interview with Pao and Alexis: [http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be- int...](http://fortune.com/2014/11/13/reddits-new-ceo-may-not-be-interim-for- long/)

</comment><comment><USER60> This came out of the blue and unannounced on reddit.com. I have a feeling there's more to this than announced.

I will remind you a few weeks back Yishan shit all over an ex-employee on /r/ama.

<comment><USER61> though, it seems, that employee was incorreclty shitting all over reddit. The situation appears far grayer than "CEO shits on employee"

<comment><USER60> Agreed, but it is very very uncharacteristic to show up and just respond in kind.

<comment><USER62> uncharacteristic of what?

<comment><USER63> A CEO. Anything to be discussed though has most likely already been said in the multiple thousand comment threads that spawned as a result of this incident.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Understandably there's very little details here, but I'm curious to know if Alexis is moving to SF, he's played a big role in the NYC tech start-up world recently.

<comment><USER65> He replied on reddit :

      Splitting time! There's a small reddit office in NY.

      edit: The team is moving to SF and I'll get a cot in the office.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1...](http://www.reddit.com/r/blog/comments/2m7pf5/coming_home/cm1oqws?context=3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> > It's interesting to note that during my very brief tenure [8 days], reddit > added more users than Hacker News has in total.

Interesting, indeed.

</comment><comment><USER67> Yishan, I'd like to buy you a beer.

</comment><comment><USER68> So do reddit employees still have to move to San Francisco in a month?

<comment><USER69> we are asked to move to the Bay Area still, but timing is flexible per employee. That's been the case since before Yishan stepped down.

<comment><USER36> Of course, once everyone is on site, it's very dangerous to be the one employee left offsite.

<comment><USER70> Redshirt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> Oh, good. Put a SJW at the top of Reddit's chain of command. The drain circling is making sucking sounds now...

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao- Complaint](http://www.scribd.com/doc/111050031/Pao-Complaint)

<comment><USER72> I'm not going to lie: I dislike a lot of what's called "social justice" (there's no justice in a lynch mob) -- but that complaint is a pretty straightforward sexual harassment case?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2 months after a $50 million round of financing and the lead investor of said round steps in as temporary CEO. You would have to be very, very naive to believe that this was solely a dispute on the cost and location of a new office. It seems fairly obvious that with the new round of investment Wong saw his control of reddit significantly reduced and his decision making second guessed and overturned finally culminating in his resignation. He likely already knew his days as the CEO of reddit were numbered.

This is purely speculation, but it's definitely not just a dispute about the office.

<comment><USER40> reddit employee here. there were no signs to justify your speculative argument.

<comment><USER73> You are mixing the point here, the speculation is true.

<comment><USER74> Actually, maybe we should listen to someone with an inside perspective, rather than speculate?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Book Review: Limited Strategic (I.e. Nuclear) War Knorr/Read - <AUTHOR> Knorr, Klaus; Read, Thornton (eds) "Limited Strategic War" Frederick A Praeger NY (1962)
Well, this is a chilling book. It contains 8 essays, including one by Schelling (The Strategy of Conflict, (http://elcenia.com/iamapirate/schelling.pdf) also a must-read book)
The essay by Burns (Chapter 6) "The Problem of Alliances" sets up an all-too-real China-Australia conflict (China gets most of its coal from Australia). This could make the South China Sea Nine-Dash line into a "bit of a kerfluffle" (to use British understatement).
This is a collection of essays on limited nuclear war. In chapter 5, p156 we see:
"The effort to distinguish sharply between "conventional" and nuclear weapons is necessarily an effort to impede such reprisals, as in Khrushchev's contention that nuclear war necessarily must be all-out nuclear war. If he can convince us that he really believes this, he effectively deters us from resorting to nuclear reprisals. We might be able to meet this in part by effectively establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy before a war occurs. This would have the additional advantage, were it politically feasible, that the strategy would not be initiated during the heat of a losing war, when the newness of the policy and the lack of defined limits might make the coordination of expectations more difficult than if the policy were enunciated in advance. Moreoever, failure to enunciate the policy in advance that any use of nuclear weapons will be opposed -- for example, by double retaliation -- thus making the coordination of expectations more difficult."
Note that "establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy" JUST occurred. The Pentagon published "Nuclear Operations" https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/jp3_72.pdf
So if you're sitting around thinking that Nukes will never be used, you need to read this book. <comment><USER2> _> Note that "establishing limited nuclear retaliation as official policy" JUST occurred._

Ehhh, limited nuclear retaliation was the keystone of the "flexible response" doctrine that was in place for most of the Cold War (see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_response](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_response)).

It was probably inevitable that it would be so. The core strategic problem the West faced in that period was that the Soviets had substantially larger conventional military forces, and Western public opinion wouldn't tolerate the kinds of measures (truly universal conscription, 10%+ of GDP dedicated to defense, etc.) that would have been needed to match them. So the only way out of the dilemma was to apply deterrence by threatening to meet any Soviet conventional attack with a small-scale nuclear response.

This is also why administrations of both parties consistently rejected the demand of the anti-proliferation movement for a "no first use" pledge ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use)) -- they knew that, in any real shooting war, NATO would almost certainly _have_ to bring out its nukes first, simply because it had no other realistic way to stop the much larger Soviet armies from steamrolling across Europe.

<comment><AUTHOR> Watch "Inside the War Room" [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3q8go9](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3q8go9)</comment></comment>


Help me find jpg displaying api for any word? - cupcake-unicorn

I think there was previously a service that I saw posted on here, not sure if it was a placeholder image service or just an experiment, but the api would let you go /cat.jpg or even /beautiful.jpg and it would come up with an appropriate image for pretty much any word. I had fun with it for a while but now I'm interested in it for a project, if the API is even open? I remember the site had a very basic unstyled layout and perhaps some ascii art. If anyone could help me I'd be very appreciative, thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> how about google image search api?

<comment> cupcake-unicorn Yes, but this site interested me and I'm trying to find it in particular. I don't even know if it's really useful for projects but it was greatly amusing to type in something like ugly.jpg and get back a funky picture of an old man.</comment></comment>


Things to commit before you quit your job - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/aras-p/6224951 <comment><USER2> "Things to commit before you quit your job if you want to get sued your ass off by your former employer."

</comment><comment><USER3> Author of the linked gist here. Some backstory: someone tweeted a "C++ protip: #define private public" joke. I replied with the excellent "#define struct union - saves memory!" that I saw somewhere (all valid C programs will still compile, though not necessarily C++ ones).

And then twitter conversation went to more and more evil suggestions. I just captured them in the gist.

My favorites are "#define strcpy(a,b) memmove(a,b,strlen(b)+2)" \- which can go unnoticed in a long, long time; and "#define InterlockedAdd(x,y) (*x+=y)" \- which would be total hell for someone to debug, as if lockless programming wouldn't be hard enough already.

<comment><USER4> > all valid C programs will still compile, though not necessarily C++ ones

I don't think that's true:

        struct foo {
            int a;
            int b;
        };

        char arr[sizeof(struct foo) == sizeof(int) ? -1 : 1];

<comment><USER3> Ok, proved me wrong! The ones that check for struct sizes at compile time (like in your example) will fail since sizes will be different now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      #define if(x) if ((x) && (rand() < RAND_MAX * 0.99))

its pretty awesome. I'm a fan of:

      #define == =

</comment><comment><USER6> Not a good time to submit links to github, I guess.

</comment><comment><USER7> oh man I love these.

Here's an old gem I came across a few years back:

[https://gist.github.com/bsamuels453/5819204](https://gist.github.com/bsamuels453/5819204)

This is a bitch to detect if you have a huge project. The #ifndef _DEBUG is like frosting on the cake. Templates are truly C++'s greatest 'gift'

</comment><comment><USER8> This calls for hygienic macros.</comment>


What one may find in robots.txt - <AUTHOR> http://xn--thibaud-dya.fr/robots.txt.html <comment><USER3> I needed some real-world MS Word & Excel documents years ago to test some parsing code against. So I started crawling Google results for 'filetype: _.doc_.xls' style queries. Left it running for a weekend, then the whole Monday was wasted as I was sucked into looking through the results - <USER2> stuff in there was certainly not meant for public disclosure...

<comment><USER4> Did you really crawl Google? That has to be a long time ago. But speaking about searching on Google as a user:

Google's Advanced search used to be a great tool, until around 2007/08\. For some reason it never received an upgrade and several things are broken or don't work any more or were removed (e.g. '+' which is now a keyword for Google+, the '"' does mean the same; e.g some filetypes are blocked, some show only a few results).

<comment><USER5> Google never had an advanced search that was as useful as altavista where I regularly (daily!) searched for things like:

("term1" and "term2") not ("term3" or "term4")

and whatever tiny "power user" features that google had, like "allinsite:term term term" or '+' don't seem to work at all now.

Google is not optimized for finding things. Google is optimized for ad views and clicks.

<comment><USER6> so you mean like "term1" "term2" -"term3" -"term4"? or if I wanted to do this without returning results from hackernews "term1" ... -"term4" -site:news.ycombinator.com ?

I don't see how altavista is superior here

<comment><USER7> The problem is "whatever tiny 'power user' features that google had... don't seem to work at all now."

I think I know what they were talking about. A lot of times it appears that adding advanced terms to a query will change the estimated number of results yet all the top hits will be exactly the same. Also, punctuation seems to be largely ignored, e.g. searching "etc apt sources list" and "/etc/apt/sources.list" both give me the exact same results. Putting the filename in quotes also gives the same results as before.

Searching for specific error messages with more than a few key words or a filename is usually a nightmare.

<comment><USER6> This is all true. I do wish there were a flag you could set like searchp:"/etc/apt/sources.list"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find this submission of this article interesting because it underscores inconsistent handling of I18N/punycode domains. The domain is "thiébaud.fr". Should submission sites (like HN) show the sites in ASCII? Is there a fraud risk? Should the web browser show the domain in ASCII?

For me - at no point was I shown the domain decoded to ASCII (either on HN or in the browser). I recognized the pattern and decoded it manually. For users who are not technical - this is a failed experience because the domain looks suspicious and at no point was it decoded.

I wonder when punycode decoding will begin to get attention from developers. Last year's Google IO had a great talk about how Google realized the inconsistency of their domain handling with regard to I18N:

[https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule/session/22ce27dc-7...](https://www.google.com/events/io/schedule/session/22ce27dc-7cbf-e311-b297-00155d5066d7)

<comment><USER9> I'm on firefox, and it showed me the decoded domain.

<comment><USER7> Also on FF, 37.0.2 Linux x64 build, and I see `xn--thibaud-dya.fr` on HN but `thiébaud.fr` in the status/address bars.

<comment><USER9> 38.0.1 Linux x64

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> User-agent: *

Allow: /

# A robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm.

# A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law

# A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

</comment><comment> ar-jan Hm, the article several times says "required not to be indexed", while robots.txt is more like "request not to be _crawled_ ". An important distinction, because a page may well be indexed without being crawled, typically when there is a link to it. Better to use the noindex meta tag (at least if you are only concerned with search indexes, not access control).

<comment><USER11> Yes. This need to be emphasized: Disallowing URLs in robots.txt will not necessarily exclude them from search results. Search engines will still find those pages if they are linked to or mentioned somewhere else.

The search result will consist only of the URL, and the snippet will say "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"

Use the noindex tag, folks. Also, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to remove URLs from Google's index.

Ref.: [https://yoast.com/prevent-site-being- indexed/](https://yoast.com/prevent-site-being-indexed/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "At worse, only the internet etiquette has been breached."

Proceeds to announce the name of a stalking victim. Classy.

<comment><USER13> It'a name that's in a plain text document that anybody can personally look up on its browser. What's the point of hiding it, if it's a very good point for his article?

<comment><USER14> He could have made exactly the same point with a fake name and institution. The information became public due to incompetence, he's made it _much_ more visible… I don't care to speculate on what personal failing might be the reason.

<comment><USER15> It won't be _exactly_ the same point.

With a fake name there is no proof that the information in question ever existed.

I would've probably masked a name, but institution url should stay there, so anyone could check that the point is valid.

<comment><USER14> Okay, that's fair, but it would be the same point for practical purposes, in my opinion. I don't personally believe that it's necessary for people to get hand-holding to independently verify his individual claims. Certainly other people could copy his methods to reproduce the results, but I'm not sure what the benefit is of links into the individual leaks of sensitive information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I like to put a Disallow rule to a randomly named directory with an index.php file that blocks any IP that accesses it. Then, for a bit of added fun, I put another Disallow rule to a directory named "spamtrap" which does an .htaccess redirection to the block script on the randomly named directory.

<comment><USER17> You understand that all you are doing with that is giving people possibly looking for attack vectors an attack vector, right? All an evildoer has to do is embed the blacklist directory as an image somewhere, send it to someone they want to lock out of the service, etc.

<comment><USER18> It wouldn't be too hard to prevent that. eg the honeypot directory name could be a hash of the originating IP. You'd need to then have a dynamic robots.txt but that's easily done.

The destination directory doesn't even need to exist. Worst case scenario you could handly the hash via your 404 handler or via .htaccess file if all of your hashes are prefixed. Those are only examples though - there's a multidude of ways you could handle the incoming request.

<comment><USER19> Just check the Referer header.

<comment><USER18> You can't trust the referrer header for anything security related.

<comment><USER19> [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross- Site_Request_Forgery_(...](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross- Site_Request_Forgery_\(CSRF\)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet#Checking_The_Referer_Header)

<comment><USER18> Your citation does reitterate my point. I quote " _However, checking the referer is considered to be a weaker from of CSRF protection._ "

The referrer header can be subject to all sorts of subtle edge cases such as switching between secure and unsecure content (or is it the other way around, I can't recall off hand?) which many broswers will then refuse to send a referrer header. So while checking the referrer might work most of the time, it's really not robust enough to be considered trustworthy for anything security related.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What's with the domain name? it says _thiébaud.fr_ but when copied/pasted it becomes _xn--thibaud-dya.fr_

Edit: Thanks for the links! :)

<comment><USER21> Interestingly, Hacker News doesn't support this standard, and the link on the front page shows the unfriendly version.

<comment><USER22> It's because IDN domains became a standard after tables stopped to be used in page layouts </sarcasm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I like:

      [...]

      User-agent: nsa
      Disallow: /

From slack.com/robots.txt

</comment><comment><USER24> Wow, all the US Department of State files have just gone missing from archive.org. The servers hosting those files are conveniently down.

<comment><USER25> Check out the Internet Archive FAQ on how to remove a document from their archives. [https://archive.org/about/exclude.php](https://archive.org/about/exclude.php)

It looks like they used robots.txt to do that.

<comment><USER24> Huh, so the wild-card user-agent will block not just searchbots, but also archivebots. Wonder how OP managed to get screenshots of archive.org having archives available for those documents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Regarding the Knesset website, it is actually just a boring recordings of the parliament discussions. Nothing to see here, move along... :-)

</comment><comment><USER27> Now if someone could do an analysis of humans.txt, that would be cool.

<comment><USER28> You'd have to get a bot to do that, since us human's can't access the content it points to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > xn--thibaud-dya.fr

Looks like HN needs to learn how to decode Punycode…

<comment> ryan-c It's _very_ difficult to render decoded punycode domains in a way that does not facilitate spoofing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder how could you gather a huge _domain name_ list.

I guess using DNS, or by query some engine, like google, or archive.org

is there a service somewhere?

<comment><USER31> 1 million domains ranked by Alexa: [http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa- static/top-1m.csv.zip](http://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip)

For more try [https://commoncrawl.org/](https://commoncrawl.org/)</comment></comment>


Growth Hacker Blogs You Should Be Following - <AUTHOR> http://zack.onisko.com/50-growth-hacker-blogs-to-follow/

<comment><USER2> Great list. And while not a blog, <shameless plug> GrowthHackers.com is like HN for growth knowledge. </shameless plug></comment>


Convolutions explained with... MS Excel - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/convolutions-explained-with-ms-excel-465d6649831c <comment><AUTHOR> Just finished my series of posts on Convolutions using MS Excel that I hope will be useful for everyone here...

* 2D convolutions (with stride, padding and dilation): [https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/convolutions-explained-with-...](https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/convolutions-explained-with-ms-excel-465d6649831c)

* 1D and 3D convolutions: [https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/1d-3d-convolutions-explained...](https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/1d-3d-convolutions-explained-with-ms-excel-5f88c0f35941)

* multi-channel convolutions: [https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/multi-channel-convolutions-e...](https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/multi-channel-convolutions-explained-with-ms-excel-9bbf8eb77108)

* transposed convolutions: [https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/transposed-convolutions-expl...](https://medium.com/apache-mxnet/transposed-convolutions-explained-with-ms-excel-52d13030c7e8)</comment>


YouTube Obeys Fake Takedown Request From 15 Year Old - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2007/04/14/youtube-takedown/ <comment><USER2> The problem is the take down request system is flawed. Theres no easy way of verifying if the takedown is coming from the copyright owner and if you do delay acting on the notice and request the sender prove that they own the material then you become liable for the infringement. [IANAL of course]

</comment><comment><USER3> This story can still be outdone though:

How long until someone writes a virus that mass sends takedowns?</comment>


Beer? A straight forward app to invite friends for a beer - <AUTHOR> http://www.producthunt.com/l/d8e506e87f

<comment><USER2> This is great! I have exactly this problem.</comment>


Researchers find another vulnerability inside Intel CPUs - <AUTHOR> https://www.techpowerup.com/264535/researchers-find-unfixable-vulnerability-inside-intel-cpus <comment><USER2> Remote exploitation is not possible. So that should be reassuring to most people. If you are a high profile target then they need physical access to your device. But then they would have already bugged your clothes, pens and bags etc...

<comment><USER3> Until it suddenly becomes remotely exploitable, due to that other vulnerability, that they will discover in a few months … I did not read the article, but with all the vulnerabilities being discovered in recent years, this sure feels like a house of cards, collapsing on the heads of consumers.</comment></comment>


Is the Era of Cheap Food Ending? - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/5643788/is-the-era-of-cheap-food-ending

<comment><USER2> I disagree. If anything, buy stock in McDonald's.

While the world's economy continues to suffer, people will be working longer hours, more depressed, and stressing out. This is basically a recipe for fast food profits.

On the other hand, it isn't all roses. Some things may be working against fast food profits next year:

\- This year, U.S. farmers had higher wheat yield, but the rest of the world had problems (particularly Russia), so prices were high. U.S. farmers are not making assumptions about the yield for next year, but to be safe are prepping for lower yield. If there is lower yield throughout the world, it will mean further increase of costs.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2010/08/05/129009148/rus...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2010/08/05/129009148/russian-wheat-export-ban-sends-prices-higher)

\- Unless they get the sugar beet problem worked out, that is going to eventually make cola costs rise, which will be bad for the fast-food business.

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1298917...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129891767)</comment>


The New Old Age - <AUTHOR> https://thewalrus.ca/the-new-old-age/ <comment><USER2> My father retired from the fire department at fifty-three and has been collecting a gold-plated pension for twenty years already, and will probably get ten more years. Assuming my mother outlives him, she will collect ninety percent of his benefits until she dies, possibly ten years further.

The pension plan includes full health benefits including dental. The monthly payout is periodically adjusted for inflation.

How can retirement funds survive people working for thirty years and collecting benefits for forty?

I'll say this - if you have yet to decide a career - pick firefighting! Firefighters still have insane retirement plans almost everywhere, although some are being converted to 401k as reality sets in. Maybe a very small percentage of tech workers will have full _lifetime_ compensation anywhere near what firefighters will have.

<comment><USER3> Well, it is not everywhere as good as this.

But I would add, that compared to a tech workers, firefighters risk their life at work. And exposition to toxic gases, etc. But I assume that the pension compensation might be from a time when protection equipmemt was less sophisticated..

<comment><USER4> Pizza delivery workers risk their lives more than firefighters:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_m...](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/hey_wait_a_minute/2003/10/smoke_and_mirrors.html)

<comment><USER3> Well, I guess nobody ever said, life is fair ...

But it would be actually nice, if we can arrange things a bit more adequately..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a Canadian (and Walrus print subscriber to boot!) this article shines a bit of a bit-too-positive hue to the realties that we're starting to deal with. Unlike our American counterparts, and thanks to the technocratic leadership of the Chretien, Martin, Harper, and Trudeau Jr governments many long term decisions were made that are going to soften the blow, but the reality is we're going from a one-to-five retiree to worker ratio to a two-to-three. Harper was great for our net-debt to GDP / and hospital expansion and the Liberals before him made sure that the CPP was fully funded on an actuarial basis and fixed our credit rating, but it's still going to be a brutal couple decades financially.

Honestly the worst part isn't even the way it's hitting / going to hit our healthcare / welfare[0] systems. The worst part is that due to the mental effects of aging our electorate is getting dumber just when it needs to be smart.

Against their own interests as a demographic, boomers voted in Doug Ford in Ontario, the brother of former crack mayor of Toronto Rob Ford, and his plan is to "find efficiencies" and bring back "buck a beer" whilst lowering taxes.

I'm starting to think that democracy needs to be adjusted either for mental capacity, or for expected longevity. I wasn't able to vote when I was ten even though I was taking college courses nights, weekends, and summers. I was fine with it. I'd be fine losing the right to vote at 80 or 85.

It's just a second childhood. When I'm that age I can trust that my family won't vote to take away my social assistance.

[0] Many seniors and soon-to-be seniors get on disability or qualify for OAS, or qualify for other healthcare or housing programs not actuarially balanced for demographic distortions.

Edit:

Never before have I made a comment that seems to oscillate so wildly with upvotes and downvotes.

<comment><USER6> > due to the mental effects of aging our electorate is getting dumber

Youth is well known for wise decisions ...

<comment> T-A Sadly, 3pt14159 has a point:

[http://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/02/aging- brains.aspx](http://www.apa.org/monitor/2015/02/aging-brains.aspx)

(though peak age in that graph is quite a bit higher than others you see floating around).

<comment><USER5> Most of the research I've seen shows that mental capacity is strongest in the 30s where the decreases in fluid intelligence are minor compared to the 20s and the gains in crystallized intelligence are measurable. It falls off a cliff in your 80s.

But I really don't need a guy in a lab coat to tell me about mental capacity and age. I'm old enough to have seen first hand what happens even to very intelligent people.

I've only met one person that made it to 90s with a mind I would call fully operable, and he was a well known and respected engineering researcher his whole life. Most get stuck in a pattern of thinking that they can't break out of. It's eery to observe the slide into it.

<comment><USER6> > very intelligent people.

Good points, but I'm just pointing out that wisdom and intelligence are not the same.

A wit once said he'd rather be governed by the first 400 names in the phone book than by the Harvard faculty ...

<comment><USER5> I completely agree that they're different and I really do prize the wisdom of others because I feel like its the weakest ability score on my character sheet, but unfortunately the world is getting so complicated that obvious solutions are ill-advised.

A wise person can see that Donald Trump is a villain because they understand his character. An intelligent person can see that his policies produce outcomes that are counter to their aims.

The trouble arises when you have someone that has good character; but is misguided _technically_. They want to, say, help the poor so they nationalize the farms or end trade agreements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've thought about offing myself at 60. I watched my dad get old, and life isn't really that fun anyway, so what is the point? To run the risk of outliving my kids or finances?

I think I'll just hit the eject button early.

<comment><USER8> I watched my father die when he was 59, after a decade or so of bad health that meant he had to give up lots of his favourite hobbies.

I'm now 57. I have one or two minor health issues but (famous last words!) can still do most of the things I want to. I've also decided which side of the life-work balance I want to maximise (life, obviously) and have gone part time, with the support of my employer. So I don't make the mistake of putting things off until I retire, and then finding I don't have the capability to do them.

I decided that the next time someone asks me how old I am, I'm going to say positively 'almost 60' rather than 'late 50s' to show that I am still me and not planning to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet. Even if my feet are nailed to the perch, as it were. I'd change my mind for certain categories of disease, but there is no way I'd set an arbitrary limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The present rate of increase of life expectancy at birth is 1 year every 5 years. The rate of increase of life expectancy at 65 is 1 year every 10 years. These are highly artificial measures, a metric of what will happen if technological progress freezes at its present point.

Technological progress will not freeze. Past increases in life expectancy due to slowing of aging (versus control over infectious disease to reduce early life mortality) have been incidental, not intentional. They arguably largely arise from that control over infectious disease. But the research and development community are now transitioning into a deliberate targeting of the mechanisms of aging. The difference will be night and day. Great discontinuities in the curve of life expectancy lie in the near future, upward leaps of five years here and ten years there as therapies that repair the root causes of aging become available. Senolytics will be the first of these - already something that the adventurous can get out there and try. There will be many more.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

I will be 85 somewhere in the mid 2050s. It seems like a mirage, an impossible thing, but the future eventually arrives regardless of whatever you or I might think about it. We all have a vision of what it is to be 85 today, informed by our interactions with elder family members, if nothing else. People at that age are greatly impacted by aging. They falter, their minds are often slowed. They are physically weak, in need of aid. Perhaps that is why we find it hard to put ourselves into that position; it isn't a pleasant topic to think about. Four decades out into the future may as well be a science fiction novel, a far away land, a tale told to children, for all the influence it has on our present considerations. There is no weight to it.

When I am 85, there have been next to no senescent cells in my body for going on thirty years. I bear only a small fraction of the inflammatory burden of older people of past generations. I paid for the products of companies descended from Oisin Biotechnologies and Unity Biotechnology, every few years wiping away the accumulation of senescent cells, each new approach more effective than the last. Eventually, I took one of the permanent gene therapy options, made possible by biochemical discrimination between short-term beneficial senescence and long-term harmful senescence, and then there was little need for ongoing treatments. Artificial DNA machinery floats in every cell, a backup for the normal mechanisms of apoptosis, triggered by lingering senescence.

When I am 85, the senolytic DNA machinery are far from the only addition to my cells. I underwent a half dozen gene therapies over the years. I picked the most useful of the many more that were available, starting once the price fell into the affordable-but-painful range, after the initial frenzy of high-cost treatments subsided into business as usual. My cholesterol transport system is enhanced to attack atherosclerotic lesions, my muscle maintenance and neurogenesis operate at levels far above what was once a normal range for my age, and my mitochondria are both enhanced in operation and well-protected against damage by additional copies of mitochondrial genes backed up elsewhere in the cell. Some of these additions were rendered moot by later advances in medicine, but they get the job done.

When I am 85, my thymus is as active as that of a 10-year-old child. Gene and cell therapies were applied over the past few decades, and as a result my immune system is well gardened, in good shape. A combination of replacement hematopoietic stem cells, applied once a decade, the enhanced thymus, and periodic targeted destruction of problem immune cells keeps at bay most of the age-related decline in immune function, most of the growth in inflammation. The downside is that age-related autoimmunity has now become a whole lot more complex when it does occur, but even that can be dealt with by destroying and recreating the immune system. By the 2030s this was a day-long procedure with little accompanying risk, and the price fell thereafter.

When I am 85, atherosclerosis is curable, preventable, and reversable, and that has been the case for a few decades. There are five or six different viable approaches in the marketplace, all of which basically work. I used several of their predecessors back in the day, as well. Most people in the wealthier parts of the world have arteries nearly free from the buildup of fat and calcification. Cardiovascular disease with age now has a very different character, focused more failure of tissue maintenance and muscle strength and the remaining small portions of hypertension that are still problematic for some individuals. But that too can be effectively postponed through a variety of regenerative therapies.

When I am 85, there is an insignificant level of cross-linking in most of my tissues, as was the case since my early 60s. My skin has the old-young look of someone who went a fair way down the path before being rescued. Not that I care much about that - I'm much more interested in the state of my blood vessels, the degree to which they are stiff and dysfunctional. That is why removal of cross-links is valuable. That is the reason to keep on taking the yearly treatments of cross-link breakers, or undergo one of the permanent gene therapies to have your cells produce protective enzymes as needed.

When I am 85, I have a three decade patchwork history of treatments to partially clear this form of amyloid or that component of lipofuscin. Modified enzymes are delivered here, a gene therapy applied there. I will not suffer Alzheimer's disease. I will not suffer any of the common forms of amyloidosis that degrade heart muscle performance or disrupt function in other organs. The potential for such conditions is controlled, shut down with the removal of the protein aggregates that cause cellular dysfunction. There is such a breadth of molecular waste, however: while the important ones are addressed, plenty more remain. This is one of the continuing serious impacts to the health of older individuals, and a highly active area of research and development.

When I am 85, I am the experienced veteran of several potentially serious incidences of cancer, all of which were identified early and eradicated by a targeted therapy that produced minimal side-effects. The therapies evolve rapidly over the years: a bewildering range of hyper-efficient immunotherapies, as well as treatments that sabotage telomere lengthening or other commonalities shared by all cancer cells. They were outpatient procedures, simple and quick, with a few follow-up visits, so routine that they obscured the point that I would be dead several times over without them. The individual rejuvenation technologies I availed myself of over the years were narrowly focused, not perfect, and not available as early as I would have liked. Cancer is an inevitable side-effect of decades of a mix of greater tissue maintenance and unrepaired damage.

Do we know today what the state of health of a well-kept 85-year-old will be in the 2050s? No. It is next to impossible to say how the differences noted above will perform in the real world. They are all on the near horizon, however. The major causes of age-related death today will be largely controlled and cured in the 2050s, at least for those in wealthier regions. If you are in your 40s today, and fortunate enough to live in one of those wealthier region, then it is a given that you will not die from Alzheimer's disease. You will not suffer from other common age-related amyloidosis conditions. Atherosclerosis will be reliably controlled before it might kill you. Inflammatory conditions of aging will be a shadow of what they once were, because of senolytic therapies presently under development. Your immune system will be restored and bolstered. The stem cells in at least your bone marrow and muscles will be periodically augmented. The cross-links that cause stiffening of tissues will be removed. Scores of other issues in aging process, both large and small, will have useful solutions available in the broader medical marketplace. We will all live longer and in better health as a result, but no-one will be able to say for just how long until this all is tried.

<comment><USER10> Fingers crossed! Certainly much more will be known about human biology and the mechanics of aging by then, given that what we know currently is mostly so recent (it's instructive to remember that the two of the guys remembered for discovering the nature of DNA, Watson and Crick, are still alive, and the latter is still an active researcher [1]. Molecular biology is _that_ new.)

 _But_ \- all your examples suppose not only advances in biomedical science, but also medical care aimed at correcting each of these problems. It adds up to a _lot_ of drugs, therapies, or other interventions. In today's system, a well-off and health-conscious individual would receive that level of care as a matter of course- but today's system is a sprawling and highly dysfunctional apparatus already, and I don't feel entirely confident about how it will change in the face of future economic upheavals, political madness, climate- change-fueled social instability, etc etc etc.

The lifespan of humans is increasing, but the lifespan of social infrastructure such a the medical industry may be decreasing... which is especially problematic since the former depends on the latter.

[1] Rosalind Franklin, sadly, died of ovarian cancer at the young age of 37.

<comment><USER11> Nitpick: Watson is still alive, but Francis Crick is most certainly not here anymore.

<comment><USER10> Ack! Serves me right for googling without thinking. I suppose I saw the figures for a different Crick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Want to help the elderly? Then help with the logistics needed to get current first generation well-characterized senolytic drugs into widespread use. The failing health of the elderly is the root of every challenge related to old age, and that failing health is driven by the fundamental causes of aging such as accumulation of senescent cells. To the degree that rejuvenation can be achieved with reliability and low cost, such as through these senolytic drugs, it should be a priority.

The dasatinib + quercetin combination for clearance of senescent cells is an excellent candidate on the basis of cost, evidence, and amount of information on these compounds, as well as a clear, low-cost, legal path for companies to bring it to patients. The eventual size of the market is every human being much over the age of 50.

1) Senescent cell accumulation is one of the root causes of aging, supported by decades of scientific evidence [1]. In lab mice, removal of senescent cells has partially reversed progression of osteoarthritis, lung disease, kidney disease, tauopathies such as Alzheimer's disease, and a long and growing list of other age-related conditions.

2) A single treatment of dasatinib + quercetin clears a fraction of senescent cells in aged mice, leading to lasting improvement in health as a result [2]. Monthly treatment of dasatinib + quercetin starting in late old age reverses measures of age-related decline and extends life by 36% in mice [3].

3) Dasatinib is a generic chemotherapy drug, originally approved for the treatment of cancer in 2006 as Sprycel. Pharmacology and side-effects in humans are well characterized [4]. Quercetin is a widely used flavonoid supplement. Quercetin is not effective versus senescent cells when used on its own [5].

4) The non-profit Betterhumans is running human trials of dasatinib + quercetin, as is the Kogod Center at the Mayo Clinic.

5) Dasatinib costs less than US$100 per dose if obtained from manufacturers, deriving a human dose from the mouse studies. Perhaps US$200 per dose in the form of Sprycel via the pharmaceutical market. Quercetin costs less than a dollar per dose.

6) A drug approved by the FDA for one use can be prescribed by physicians for other uses, if in their professional judgment it is safe and effective. This is known as off-label use, and is commonplace for many medications.

[1]: [https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2002.tb02115.x](https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2002.tb02115.x)

[2]: [https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.12344](https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.12344)

[3]: [https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0092-9](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0092-9)

[4]: [https://doi.org/10.1124/dmd.107.018267](https://doi.org/10.1124/dmd.107.018267)

[5]: [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190374](https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190374)

<comment><USER12> How many doses does a person need per year?

What does "partially reversed" mean?

What are the side effects?

<comment><USER9> Arguably one dose per year. Arguably several in close sequence, but still very intermittently, such as once a year. Senescent cells accumulate slowly, so there is no reason to dose frequently on an ongoing basis. Different mouse studies of dasatinib + quercetin used single doses or a few monthly doses in sequence. This is true of dasatinib, but varies for other chemotherapeutic senolytics. Bcl-2 inhibitor chemotherapeutics generally want a week or a few weeks of dosing, rather than a single dose, which is a compelling reason to avoid them until better versions come along. The FOXO4-DRI injected peptide was a single treatment of three doses over a week in mice. That again is probably once a year in humans until someone turns up with evidence to suggest otherwise.

Validation of the above educated guess, and some form of dose optimization, will arrive sometime after the introduction of good senescence assays that don't involve staining tissue samples, something that isn't viable for everyday human medicine.

As to what "partially reversed" means, the answer is "read the literature". It is all out there. Search PubMed for "senolytic". Use Sci-Hub to read papers. The comparison pictures of treated and untreated mice in papers that have them are particularly telling, but no substitute for the raw data on arthritis, cardiovascular function, inflammation, neural function, tissue elasticity, etc.

For side effects, a single dose dasatinib pharmacokinetics study in volunteers with lots of references to start you off: [https://doi.org/10.1124/dmd.107.018267](https://doi.org/10.1124/dmd.107.018267)</comment></comment></comment>


The World Might Run Out of People - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/the-world-might-actually-run-out-of-people/ <comment><USER2> The only concern I have about their approach (from what is in the article, I presume their book has much more detail) is that what people say they will do and what they actually do are often very different things.

That said, it isn't a crazy prediction given that we already see large declines in the fecundity of developed nations. So if the assumptions the UN have made about the rate of development of Africa etc. are wrong then it seems reasonable that the population projections will be inaccurate.

</comment><comment><USER3> As I understand what UN doesn't not take into account is cheap smartphones.

Women are getting educated not by schools run by governments but thanks to smartphones.

And women education correlates with low natality...

Cheap smartphones are indeed is a relatively new phenomenon that probably don't show yet in demographic charts...</comment>


How to Build a Great Apple Watch App - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/building-parable/hot-to-build-a-great-apple-watch-app-58b24d2956ef

<comment><USER2> This is the kind of thinking that worries me: "The effort involved to create a Glance is minimal, so all watch apps should bundle one." ... And I'm guilty myself of this. The glance board (or whatever you call it) is the new home screen. All apps will be fighting for attention on this, greatly diminishing the minimalistic utility of the iPhone. That, and apps abusing notifications even more to grab my attention.</comment>


Google Fiber's Next City...Austin, TX? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/5/4187994/google-fiber-could-expand-to-austin-as-city-preps-for-joint-announcement

<comment><USER2> KVUE news a local station is saying they have enough sources to confirm it.

[http://www.kvue.com/news/Google-Fiber-coming-to- Austin-20169...](http://www.kvue.com/news/Google-Fiber-coming-to- Austin-201695291.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Good news for everyone. Even if Google Fiber doesn't reach your city, it may lead to other ISPs increasing speeds in order to compete.</comment>


Mechanical lock with magnetic key – exposed - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/Yqioc6CIqFE <comment><USER2> first to make an electromagnet based combination tryer is a boss - there are a lot of combinations though but differences in resistance when you get one bit bit in place may be the key to decoding</comment>


Low pay, high SF housing costs equal 1 homeless math teacher - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Low-pay-high-SF-housing-costs-equal-1-homeless-11130936.php <comment><AUTHOR> % of homes affordable to teachers, per Trulia SF 0% Oakland 8% Austin, Denver 13% LA 17% Seattle 21% Portland 30% Happy #NationalTeachersDay [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_aB6iZVwAAd0q7.jpg](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C_aB6iZVwAAd0q7.jpg)

[https://twitter.com/ByRosenberg/status/862019797025865728](https://twitter.com/ByRosenberg/status/862019797025865728)

<comment><USER2> home n. the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.

So this includes townhouses, condos, duplexes, etc.?</comment></comment>