Ask HN: Would you use an app that could help you tackle your many interests? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to validate an idea and I need your help!
I am building an application to help people manage and make progress on multiple, varied interests and goals. For example - let's say you want to teach yourself Machine Learning, learn Linear Algebra, study Philosophy, read more fiction, clean the house, fix the toilet, build a robot, run a marathon, etc - but you don't know where to start or if you can even do it all. The app I'm building would help align your motivations with your goals, assist you in overcoming 'analysis paralysis' and help you choose what to take action on at any particular time. I also have plans to keep track of how you spend your time so that you could analyze where you can improve.
Is this something anybody would be interested in?
I have a lot more ideas for this app, but I am trying to narrow it down to MVP and I think that the prioritization of goals and connecting motivations with goals will be the core of it. I know that there are many other productivity, task management and time tracking apps out there, but I really think I can improve this space.
So,
* Do you have a lot of interests and don't know how to get started? Do you suffer from 'analysis paralysis' ?
* Do you have a huge bucket list and don't know how to tackle it?
* Which tools do you currently use to manage your life, if any? What are some of the pain points?
* How do you manage multiple interests and decide what to work on at any given time?
* Do you plan your time or fly by the seat of your pants?
I'd love to hear your feedback and I'd be happy to share more information if anybody is interested. Thanks! <comment><USER2> I need to learn a new skill. The problem I have is building a habit to learn that skill in which I should do that habit everyday.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are plenty of habit tracking apps out there to help to solidify habits. The app that I am building would have some of those features but it would primarily focus on helping you to choose which skills you should learn first. Do you have a lot of skills you would like to learn?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: I'm a 19 year old high school dropout - <AUTHOR> I'm 19, I've been programming since I was 10 years old. I can work with node, Docker and a ton of apis/DevOps stuff. Though it's not super relevant here.
I recently got into the final stages of an interview, and may have a job offer shortly. I'm worried if I should take it or not. I currently live with my mom and she says I shouldn't because not having a diploma can really hurt my valuation down the line. However, I also see this job as one I can easily do that pays $60k/yr in Seattle, so it's ok for a junior role.
What should I do? I want to take the job and get experience, but I also feel I should either get my last year of high school done, or get the GED... But I don't want to waste time on it as well. <comment><USER2> Take the money. Programming is one career where, for _many_ firms, experience still trumps academic credentials. Get a programming job, succeed at it, stay there a couple of years, and barring some major change in the macro-economic environment, you won't have much trouble finding other jobs even without a H.S. diploma or college degree. That said, it wouldn't hurt to complement your experience with _some_ academic credentials, even if only an associate degree from the local community college. As somebody else said, consider night classes if you can.

You can also look at taking Coursera, EdX, Udacity, etc. courses to help fill out your resume. They might not count "as much" as a regular degree to some employers, but as somebody who is very involved in reviewing resumes, interviewing, and influencing hiring decisions, I can tell you that they are considered at some companies, including at least one very large computer company you've definitely heard of.

<comment><USER3>
      Programming is one career where, for many firms, experience
      still trumps academic credentials.

That becomes less true every year, unfortunately. And it's entirely predictable. There are millions of middle-aged and elderly adults today who as young people enjoyed employment in a growing sector with minimal formal education, only to find themselves economically stranded when the sector matured and shrank.

Counseling a young kid _not_ to get a GED is indefensible. Life is a lottery. Just because you can see a path forward today doesn't mean that path will remain viable tomorrow. And despite the increasingly rapid pace of changes in our modern economy, a high school diploma or equivalent has remained extremely valuable. Among other things, it will be difficult to pursue post-secondary education at accredited institutions without a GED.

Kid, there's no reason you can't take the job _and_ get your GED. And remember: formal education isn't for learning stuff you could learn on your own, it's for learning stuff you couldn't or wouldn't bother learning on your own. That's why it's simultaneously so difficult (in the sense of willing yourself to do the work), yet so important. It's a cruel world out there[1] and you want to acquire all the tools you can, especially easy ones like a high school diploma or GED.

Also, always remember success is more visible than failure. Similarly, people who succeed without credentials are much more visible than those who didn't succeed or who suffer significantly diminished earnings power. I can assure you, as somebody who has worked in IT _without_ a STEM degree for almost 20 years, and who makes much more than the median compensation in Silicon Valley, that engineers with a STEM degree enjoy a significant advantage, notwithstanding people like mindcrime and myself.

[1] It's cruel in the sense of being unforgiving. Many people, perhaps even most people, will enjoy a comfortable existence with nominal effort. But it only takes one illness, one accident, one crime, or one some-other-event to drag you to the bottom. Climbing out of a hole is immensely more difficult than falling in, and it's at times like those when decisions like you're facing now will matter most.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unpopular opinion: you'll probably find that people who went to college will tell you to take the job, not realizing how college helped them (honestly it sure seems like it wasn't that directly useful in retrospect), and people who dropped out of school will tell you to finish school first. How are those of us with degrees supposed to know what life would have been like if we'd never finished high school?

How many more months would it take to finish high school? Could the company not just wait until your last required day for your start date?

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately it'd take 1.5 years to finish, or I would ask such a thing. I dropped out because I went to full high school but didn't get credit for two years of it and was not going to make it up. I was a bit reckless.

<comment><USER4> Finishing high school at 21 certainly sounds strange. It sounds like you should take the job.. in part because you've already gone two years down this road of not finishing schooling.

If you can find a way to combine the job with a path towards college, seems like it'd be ideal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Take the 60K job. You can always go to community college at your own pace to settle the quest to learn and make mom happy. A degree no longer leads to a certain job offer these days, so take the job, if they offer it to you.

Get a few years experience and no one will care if you have a degree or not.

Plus it never hurts to spend a little time developing yourself. You may decide to go a whole different path (like a lawyer or doctor) and may wish that you didn't go into debt before you exposed yourself to more ideas (like programming as a profession). Make an informed decision, unlike 50% of college students these days.

</comment><comment><USER6> Have _them_ say no to _you_ , before you say no to yourself, imo. At least then you can always still go for those other options afterwardsif it doesn't work out, but also if it does, right?

</comment><comment><USER7> Work during the day and attend night school and finish up your HS Diploma. There is no reason you can't do both. You can then decide if you want to pursue post secondary education part time.

<comment><USER2> I believe in some places community colleges will accept you even without a H.S. diploma / G.E.D., although some "remedial" courses may be required depending on test scores. In theory it's possible to get a college degree without ever having earned a H.S. diploma first. Heck, as far as that goes, I believe it's possible - in principle - to get a Ph.D. without getting a H.S. diploma, or anything else, first although it would certainly be a rare accomplishment.[1]

[1]: [https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17841/phd- witho...](https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/17841/phd-without- previous-academic-degree-truth-or-myth)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's the conflation of education with job training that is pushing America down the drain and Trump is only one consequence of it.

The purpose of education is not to prepare for jobs, but to produce knowledgeable, reasoning, civilized, compassionate human beings capable of critical, independent thinking, which is what America most needs, not ignorant coders who can be manipulated to blindly program everything in sight, totally unaware of the inhuman, oppressive and exploitative implications.

</comment><comment><USER9> My understanding is this guy is a high school dropout who never got his GED:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jacquesm)

He seems to be doing okay for himself.

Keanu Reeves is also a high school dropout.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keanu_Reeves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keanu_Reeves)

</comment><comment><USER10> From my experience having a diploma is a huge boost in job hunting, at least until you have more experience.

Any company will have no problem in hiring you if you do not have a diploma but have credential from your work you have done previously or you are well know in your area of expertise.

But the longer you are out of high school the harder it is going back to finish it and get a diploma. Sometimes life happens .

<comment><USER8> Education is NOT a piece of paper for job hunting. It is development of intellect. Most coders without education have none.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Go for the 60k job. Seriously. This is your best option for your immediate income and future value.

You will have a head start over your peers who won't even enter the work force until age ~23, with college debt to boot. Go for it and don't look back.

The path to career advancement is to have a job, learn everything you can, then hop when you find another offer with a big bump in pay.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case anyone was wondering, I ended up getting the job :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Believe in yourself, take the job, work your ass off, learn all you can, and you'll be making $200K in 10 years.

Look me up when you get to Seattle and I'll give you some pointers.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually live in Seattle right now, and throughout Washington my whole life, which is why I got into programing (thanks Redmond!)</comment></comment>


2019 DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop CFP Open - <AUTHOR> https://dcbpw.org/dcbpw2019/ <comment><AUTHOR> The DC and Baltimore Perlmongers invite you to join us for a workshop at the Silver Spring Civic Building in Silver Spring, Maryland on Saturday, April 6, 2019. The workshop will have two tracks of speakers, discussing innovative, exciting, and fun real-world usage of Perl and related technologies.

We also have a CFP open for a few more weeks -- we welcome any and all Perly- glot proposals! Anything from an introduction to Perl and tooling to how you deployed your latest Perl app on Kubernetes. We love it all!

</comment><comment><USER2> Related page on MeetUp: [https://www.meetup.com/Baltimore-Perl- Mongers/events/2564689...](https://www.meetup.com/Baltimore-Perl- Mongers/events/256468935/)</comment>


Back doors are bad for security architecture - <AUTHOR> https://blog.agilebits.com/2015/04/29/back-doors-are-bad-for-security-architecture/

<comment><USER2> In other news, the sky is blue. Just because you hand me a dog and say "look at my beautiful cat!" doesn't mean it's a cat. And people with access to "secure back doors" don't always have your best interests at heart, even in the implausible situation that the government does.

<comment><USER3> Sure, you know that. I know that. And anyone who has been through this before knows that.

In some of my earlier drafts of the article, it was titled "Back (door) to the Crypto Wars". But just because we've had this conversation before, doesn't mean that it doesn't have to be explained again (and again, and again).

Also, I think that I make a point beyond the obvious security problems of a back door, and go on to the architectural ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Also in tonight's news: chewing glass is bad for your mouth.

</comment><comment><USER5> Captain Obvious strikes again.

<comment><USER6> Your comment reads like a reflex action based on the title. It contributes nothing to the underlying political question of the essay, which concerns how the authorities want to define that government accessible backdoor ("secure golden key") is not actually a backdoor.

This is of course incorrect. But without articles like this, it's easy for the authorities to say that it's obvious that backdoors are bad, but what they are asking for isn't a backdoor.

<comment><USER5> Its also obvious that things itself aren't different just because you give them a different name.

<comment><USER6> What's a backdoor?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_door](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_door) says "a hidden method for bypassing normal computer authentication systems". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_%28computing%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_%28computing%29) elaborates:

> A backdoor in a computer system (or cryptosystem or algorithm) is a method > of bypassing normal authentication, securing unauthorized remote access to a > computer, obtaining access to plaintext, and so on, while attempting to > remain undetected.

What the government says is that they want access to the front door. They don't want a hidden method, and they don't want to remain undetected.

Ergo, they don't want a backdoor.

Why do you think they are the same things?

This essay says that that surface definition is incorrect, and explains why.

<comment><USER5> The german, simple english and spanish versions of the same Wikipedia article do not include the "hidden"-part. Doesn't that seem a little bit inconsistent?

Probably because Language in general is far from consistent and accurate, and i won't waste time discussing with you over abstraction details (thats what languages are).

What you say the authorities want is surely not what makes the security situation better, especially because of the increasing abuse potential. And just covering it up with some nice words won't make it any better.

<comment><USER6> "What you say the authorities want..."

There is no reason for you to care about my views of what the authorities want. The article goes into those details, with quotes from government officials about exactly what they want and links to sources.

> Prime Minister Cameron declared that there should be "no means of > communication" that his government "cannot read." Yet he also stated that > this would not involve a "back door."

> Why not, suggested [[NSA head] Rogers], require technology companies to > create a digital key that could open any smartphone or other locked device > to obtain text messages or photos, but divide the key into pieces so that no > one person or agency alone could decide to use it?

I suggested that your comment "reads like a reflex action based on the title". I still do not believe that you read the article before making your comment.

<comment><USER5> Look at the other first-level comments. /thread</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


More Nootropics: Racetams and Glycinergics - <AUTHOR> http://examine.com/blog/more-nootropics-racetams-and-glycinergics/

<comment><USER3> > The glycerinergics are those molecules that can bind to what is known as the > 'glycine binding site' of a particular subset of stimulatory receptors > (NMDA), and it seems that by stimulating this binding site the overall > signalling is increased.

'Glycerinergics' has only one result on Google - this article. Even if we assume that they mean it in the same way as we talk about GABAergic or dopaminergic drugs the definition they have stated is fundamentally incorrect. Glycerinergic drugs would be those that bind to any of the same sites that the endogenous molecule glycine binds to - not necessarily just NMDAr sites, this is an over simplification. Further more, to say that NMDA receptors are inherently 'stimulatory' is frankly ridiculous. Ligands can be either agonists or antagonists at a given binding site - examples of non-excitatory NMDAr binding drugs would be the arylcyclohexamine family (PCP, Ketamine, PCE etc) and Dizocilpine (MK-801). Finally, 'overall signalling is increased' is almost laughable. 'Signalling' through which neurotransmitters? In what manner? How is 'overall' measured?

While I may not have an absolutely perfect understanding of psychopharmacology, I do know enough not to trust this article - <USER2> when it is taking about drugs with very little history of human use.

If you are considering using the drugs in this article, it might be advisable to question why. Just because a compound is new, does not mean it is going to be better or the effects more desirable than it's predecessor(s). Of course it is possible that it could be, but it seems likely that in reality you are simply exposing yourself to unnecessary health risks for minimal reward. Would it really be so bad to use Piracetam for a couple of years while the phenyl derivative's action in humans is not well documented? Consider your health and the potential gains carefully and make a rational decision.

<comment><USER4> It looks like "glycerinergic" was a typo for "glycinergic," which has ~100k results on Google (they also mention "glycincergics" \- the poor copy editing would support your distrust).

But yeah, I'm not sure what's going on here. I guess it's just an announcement that they have added some info about these drugs to their database. To be fair, the article itself isn't really promoting their usage, and the subheading _does_ describe them as "A large amount of somewhat poorly researched compounds." Perhaps there is better information on the actual pages for each substance.

<comment><USER3> The spelling mistake would make sense, but I agree that it doesn't inspire confidence.

The impression I got from the article was the same as yours - they are not explicitly advocating the use of these drugs, but I don't think they were doing very much to inform the reader of the potential dangers that using any very new psychoactive compounds would entail. Perhaps the real fault here is in the manner that this has been submitted to HN, rather than the article itself? Personally, I think it would be more appropriate and safer to call the submission 'Racetams and Glycinergics of the future' or something similar. As the title currently stands the impression given is that these chemicals are appropriate for use now, by everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I see a lot of people here experimenting with racetams.

I caution you to do extensive research on pubmed.gov and at least flip through a few pharmacology and neuroscience books, if you plan on long term use of said racetams. Wikipedia as a last resort or to refresh your knowledge.

They all have different properties and on rare occasions, could have completely opposite effects, depending on the person taking them and their genetic markup. A lot of them act on the glutamatergic pathways, and/or have more obscure/newly discovered methods of action.

For evidence, I offer 'Levetiracetam as monotherapy or add-on to valproate in the treatment of acute mania-a randomized open-label study.' at [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18369598](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18369598) and conversly, 'Acute psychosis associated with levetiracetam.' [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12875956](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12875956) or 'Levetiracetam: An Unusual Cause of Delirium.', at [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23782757](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23782757)

Levetiracetam was initially approved for seizure control. I hope you can see from the above mentioned papers that while it can also help someone 'calm down', it can bring another unfortunate person into a manic psychotic state.

////

The best way to try a nootropic or a new medication for that matter, is to wean yourself off any other supplements and only try one at a time. You'll also need to have a good understanding of the Cytochrome P450, to be able to avoid enzyme induction or inhibition, if you plan to later on add other supplements to your regimen.

Especially if you will also be taking Rx medication.

You do not want to unknowingly overdose yourself with something or sabotage your 'treatment' by accidentally taking a product that happens to induce the enzyme complex metabolizing one of your other supplements or meds. A supplement or medication that also acts as an enzyme inducer will reduce the time spent in your system of the product's who's metabolism is controlled by said enzyme(s).

///

To sum up, before putting stuff in your body, do your due diligence and be wary of relying on anecdotal reports of success with said supplements. Results WILL vary, because every body is unique.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is one really awesome supplement that is often overlooked. (Neuroscience is one of my main side-interests and apparently I've been living under a rock in regards to L-Theanine. Well studied, It has a very good safety profile, with no apparent side-effects even in high dosage. It's the reason why I've switched from coffee to green tea.

_[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21040626](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21040626)

_[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18641209](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18641209)

_[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18296328](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18296328)

_[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22214254](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22214254)

_[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16930802](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16930802)

_[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23395732](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23395732)

<comment><USER7> L-Theanine is amazing stuff, it basically cuts a lot of the side effects away from caffeine and increases the positive effects of caffeine to boot.

To get useful amounts of it I just take it separately whenever I consume a caffeinated beverage. 250mg-500mg suffices (technically you can dose it in relationship to how much caffeine you are dosing, but since there are no side effects to taking too much l-theanine, I just take 2 and call it good)

<comment><USER6> Yeah diminishes the effect of any stimulants for that matter, so people on adderall and ritalin should be interested in this to battle inevitable events of insomnia. I usually dose about 200mg starting the day now, then basically based on the amount of Tea I consume throughout the day (and thus caffeine) dose about 200-400mg more right after diner along with a brew. But i'm quite lightweight, and for depression/anxiety higher doses are needed. It improves your REM sleep, promotes alpha-wave activity and stimulates dopamine production. Caenorhabditis elegans lived longer on it, and it even helps cQuring cancer..list goes on. [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2774573/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2774573/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In every discussion I have seen of "smart drugs" (nootropics), what is conspicuously lacking is discussion of the actual smart deeds performed by the smart drug users. Self-reported n=1 anecdotes have not established a convincing case that any kind of nootropic actually does anyone any good in the real world.

(Maybe I'll edit this comment some more below during its editing time window. Or perhaps this point is so evident that it needs no elaboration.)

<comment><USER9> There are, however, studies that show that racetams _are not_ harmful. If you don't believe they work, give them a try for yourself. They work for some and not for others.

Did you consult a double-blind study of caffeine before drinking your first cup of coffee? At what point does the plural anecdote at least refute the idea that racetams are just a placebo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Modafinil works great, racetams while they do something, I didn't observe some effect that would be specifically desirable. It's not that they don't have effect, just that they seem overhyped.

DMAE for example (if I got letters right), if you take it before sleep, it gives you vivid dreams, since it was suppose to help with generation of neural links, then, this would explain effect.

I am still looking and trying to find things that would be helpful without detrimental effects. I should note that anything like adderal I didn't try and don't intend to.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have done some experiments with nootropics (namely adderal) as well, but failed to notice anything. I am a chain smoker, that could be the reason, I am not sure.

I failed to understand the basics behind this "cognitive enhancer" hype, lets say these stuff "really" works, then why we don't see those multi-billion pharmaceutical companies investing on them? If they would really worked, then I should already find all those pharmacy shops around me teeming with nootropics (assuming they have negligible side effects), right?

BTW, I am actually from south-east asia, here you can buy almost anything (except LSD etc.) without prescription, and we have dozens of pharmaceutical companies outsourcing drugs to the other side of the world. Moreover, if these companies could really come up with something real, then it could be an "instant hit" here.

</comment><comment><USER12> Anyone use nootropics and want to share their usage/experience?

<comment><USER13> I take noopept 20mg daily sublingually or orally, and occasionally modafinil.

Modafinil works really well for me (300/400mg keeping me awake and FOCUSED but not buzzing/twitchy) but worked poorly for my brother (no noticeable effect at similar dosage).

Since taking noopept I have noticed more of a willingness and now desire to learn, something which was an issue in my past. It also seems to help me work for prolonged periods of time without getting burnt out. (anecdotal, could well be placebo effect but it works for me!) Feel free to ask me anything.

<comment><USER14> Do you have any recommended places to pick up noopept?

<comment><USER13> If you are UK based, send me an email and I'll give you a link. Otherwise check out [http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_where_is_a_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Nootropics/wiki/faq#wiki_where_is_a_good_place_to_buy.3F) be sure to read up on it first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Accelerator program start engine (powered by Accenture) is backing UCLA Neuroscientists on the nourishment piece to brain fitness. Full disclosure, I'm on the team for the summer. Have a look at what we are doing at trubrain and I'll bring on Dr. Andrew Hill to answer any Neurofeedback or nootropic question.</comment>


Canadian lawyer says he and refugee clients targeted since hiding Edward Snowden - <AUTHOR> https://nationalpost.com/feature/canadian-lawyer-says-he-and-his-refugee-clients-have-been-targeted-since-hiding-edward-snowden <comment> Sushi-san Isn't that a realistic risk of being a lawyer in his field?</comment>


Your Job is Not to Code - <AUTHOR> http://www.andresosinski.com/you-job-is-not-to-code.html

<comment><USER2> "Your job is not to Code"...."Your job is to solve problems" says the post

Now that it is #1 on the front page, I look forward to the sequel "Your job is not to solve problems, _your job is to prevent problems from happening in the first place_ "

Anyway, on a more serious note, my job is to code, my job also includes numerous other things. None of these things are necessarily an end to themselves, but semantic games aside, it is my job to do all of these things.

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess I'm the only one so far who kinda agrees with the author.

One thing not explicitly spelled out in the article: you should avoid doing coding that is not actually solving anyone's problem.

I've seen a lot of engineers, and worse yet managers, who fall into the trap of "more typing = more productivity".

<comment><USER4> Sometimes it's very hard to justify why a project needs to be done especially if it involves back-end refactoring. Additionally, there are many ways to implement a project; the fastest ways usually involves a lot of un-maintanable hacks. However, your project stakeholders won't care how terrible your code is as long as the project works

If it was up to business, they would have developers crank out features non- stop without time to go back and clean up technical debt.

The root cause is management not understanding how software development works.

<comment><USER5> Absolutely. I can't agree with this more.

A long time ago I worked on a codebase where (among other problems) developers who wanted to extend a particular feature needed to modify five or six different methods spread across a number of files. (This feature was basically a pipeline that took in JSON from our servers and translated it into views to display to the end user.) Forgetting to modify even one of these files would lead to code that compiled but would throw cryptic errors at runtime.

Developers from outside our team who wanted to work on the codebase and extend the feature would reliably lose several days to either the problem I described above, or hunting around the code trying to piece together how the feature worked from the disparate implementation details.

Eventually, I took some time off and refactored part of the feature so that only a single source of truth needed to be modified in order to extend it. As a bonus, this refactoring made the mapping between data models and views in our application explicit, making the behavior of the feature significantly easier to understand. I didn't ask management or submit any sort of formal proposal; I did this on my own time because I had become fed up with the limitations of the existing approach.

After the refactor entered the codebase, the aforementioned bugs vanished, as did many of the questions from outside developers about what models corresponded to which views, or how the feature worked, or how to extend the feature in general.

I tell this intentionally vague (and honestly quite pedestrian) anecdote not to brag (the refactor was reasonably straightforward), but rather because I wanted to emphasize the difference between feature work and technical-debt- payoff work. The refactor almost certainly saved a considerable amount of developer effort and increased code reliability. But how much so is not something that can be easily measured (if at all), unlike the impact of a user-facing feature. Not only this, some combination of apathy and political pressure from external stakeholders tends to lead management to deprioritize paying off technical debt. Proposals to management to formally set aside time to address other issues of similar scope were pushed back repeatedly or dropped.

PMs and product people can A/B test, gather analytics, get concrete data on hypothesis A versus hypothesis B when it comes to features. But it's rare that engineers get asked how much more quickly they could get their work done if they hadn't had to hack around unmaintainable hacks, or how much more reliable their code would be if bad design didn't muddy up the codebase or provide hiding spots for weird corner cases. Given how expensive software engineers are and how supposedly scarce they are, I'm honestly surprised that this isn't something management thinks about more.

<comment><USER6> Managers who don't know how to measure what they want settle for wanting what they can measure. Feature delivery is easy to measure, technical debt is hard to measure. Ofcourse, in the long run technical debt affects feature delivery, but people tend to look for causality relationships in the short term. That a decision not to allow refactoring slows down a set of features 6 months later won't be linked in a causality relationship unless proper root cause analysis is done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I read this article twice and really don't understand what it was trying to say.

From what little I gathered the author believes that it is more important to educate the customer about what software developers do than to code? Or that our job is solving problems, not coding? (which if you are a software engineer, solving problems and coding go hand in hand). But then he conflates software engineering with IT.

Can someone explain this to me?

<comment><USER8> Some blog posts are just written because the author wanted an article to attract people to their site.

I'm not necessarily saying that was the case with this article, but I do agree that it lacks substance, purpose, and a clear message.

Some people are code monkeys, but many software developers (especially consultants) are fortunate enough to be primarily problem solvers. There is certainly a degree of creativity required for programming, you have to be able to think outside of the box, approach the problem from several prospectives, and it requires a wide range of skills and experience to produce a good solution. Sometimes it's even necessary to throw everything away and start over, just like an artist. Many professionals are problem solvers, lawyers, engineers, architects, soldiers, etc.

Also, "How to Rant your Way Into the Front Page" by the same blog author and HN user, [http://www.andresosinski.com.ar/blog_view_entry?id=4](http://www.andresosinski.com.ar/blog_view_entry?id=4)

The problem is not that people are submitting these articles, it's that a huge number of people upvote it to #1 just because of the title (speculation on my part).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title is just linkbait. Coding is as much a means to solving a problem as walking is to getting to a destination.

<comment><USER10> Likewise, if someone is paying you to reach a destination, it is natural they'd care more that you reach the destination & on time, not so much about various aspects of walking style, quality of walking, how your walking gives you meaning in life, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm 23 years old, and I'm a decent developer. Not the best by far, and have so much more to learn... but I command a very respectable salary for my experience, age, and location. I can do that because prior (and parallel) to being a software developer, I was a very very good salesperson (#1 for a company across their 250 stores, selling mobile phone contracts, retail not telesales). I'm super thankful for having done that (although the reasons I ended up doing that instead of development was not so nice), and I find it helps me every single day as a developer; dealing with clients, working with project managers, heck even negotiating my salary: all of these were made easier by my learning how to _sell_. I highly recommend learning it, sure it's not glamorous, but it is intellectually stimulating, albeit in a very different way to software engineering. That's my $0.02AUD anyway

</comment><comment><USER12> "Your job is to solve problems" \- This statement may be useful as a reminder, but most of the case - it is too obvious to gain something from it. What on earth are the jobs without solving problems? Of course understanding the problem is important, but still our primary goal is to code efficiently.

</comment><comment><USER13> Code is for humans. The machines only understand pulses of electrons. Your job is not to code, your job is to make machines do things. Code is just your means of communication with the machines. It's the tool, not the job itself.

<comment><USER14> Though the job description certainly has requirements for how to code. And knowing a common language allows quick and efficient collaboration among your team members. So I'd say it is your job to know how to code in order to solve a problem that the business has.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but details like common language, coding style, etc are all rules that humans have made up in order to aid communication with other humans. They are part of the job only insofar as you need to work together with other humans. The machine does not know or care about those things at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It looks like the job of this article's writer is to create lots of bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Pitch shamelessly

And link-bait shamelessly as well.

</comment><comment><USER17> Yeah yeah yeah, as a garbage man, my job isn't to mop the floor and throw garbage out, it's to interact with people, educate them about proper recycling, tell them about the layout of the trash bins and how to locate the nearest one in case of emergency. Throwing garbage is not what we're being paid for. Garbage men are thought leaders, influencers, communicators and teachers.</comment>


The Era of Windows Mixed Reality Begins October 17 - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/10/03/the-era-of-windows-mixed-reality-begins-october-17/ <comment><USER2> I'm amazed nobody on HN isn't talking about this announcement. It's not as revolutionary as Microsoft might want you to think but it's still interesting what they are trying to do.</comment>


14,766 Let's Encrypt SSL Certificates Issued to PayPal Phishing Sites - <AUTHOR> https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/14-766-lets-encrypt-ssl-certificates-issued-to-paypal-phishing-sites/ <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what's the outrage is about here. If they don't say PayPal before the URL, as PayPal's EV certificate does, then why does it matter that Let's Encrypt issued SSL certs to websites that have PayPal in their names?

By that logic, I would much sooner be outraged at registrars for allowing those guys to obtain domain names that put the PayPal name in the address bar. But of course even that is a silly argument, as it's not the registrar's job to enforce trademark protection for any company.

<comment><USER3> You are exactly right, not sure why you get down voted. Let's Encrypt does domain validation. It's perfectly fine that it issues a certificate to paypal.com.phishysite.com to the rightful owner of phishysite.com. It's not their fault that some people do not grasp what that type of certificate (which is nothing new) assures and what not. If you really want blame someone you have to blame browser vendors for not making it clear enough inside their UI.

//edit: Trademark protection gets even easier as CT logs present such potential violations on a silver plate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The certificates serve their purpose - they encrypt the traffic between the client and the website. I think Let's Encrypt does it's job perfectly.

It's not Let's Encrypts job to protect users from fraud.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the issue is an issue of education.

When I see the 'green' colour followed by the word 'secure' when visiting a website using chrome, I know that this does not mean immediately that I have to trust the site. I presume the vast majority of hacker news readers will know better too. But what about the normal, average users?

I think we should just be more proactive in telling people what an SSL certificate _actually_ is, and what https _guarantees_. Otherwise, we are not really having a discussion.

<comment><USER6> No, it's not about education, it's about a decent UX with some kind of anomaly based warning system and privacy protection. It's really easy to detect a fishing attempt. I've seen this idea proposed by security people in the past. But it might have serious consequences for an advertisement industry, so you won't see this in popular web browsers. You just have to accept that browser vendors don't care about security and you, as a user, is their product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am glad Let's Encrypt is working so well that this is viable for the scammers.

</comment><comment><USER8> This isn't new... there has existed DNS only SSL certificate verification for quite a while.

Let's Encrypt's only job is to not issue certificates to people who don't own a domain. Not to ensure the content of the domain is legitimate. That's what EV certs are for.

<comment><USER9> To be more specific: EV validates that the entity requesting the certificate is who they claim to be, in addition to demonstrating domain ownership. No validation level makes any kind of guarantee regarding the legitimacy or accuracy of content.

<comment><USER8> Yes. Thank you for clarifying, I wasn't clear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The DNS registrars should be held accountable and informed about the abuse, they are required to act.

[https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/abuse-2014-01-29-en](https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/abuse-2014-01-29-en)

<comment><USER11> You remind me of my friend, 'ollet', a close typo.

Your username has been reported. I was about to discuss sensitive information with you. Luckily ycombinator will act.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_(security)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_engineering_\(security\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps the use of the word "certificate" is somewhat to blame here?

.. in ordinary English, a "certificate" is a proof or guarantee of authenticity.

<comment><USER10> The simple 'domain validated' certificates, which are the only ones Let's Encrypt issues, only certify that the domain owner has access to the secret key. It guarantees that the data exchanged is private, not that the domain owner is doing nothing illegal.

<comment><USER12> Yes, _I_ know. Tell that to your grandmother.

<comment><USER10> Can't, they are dead. But I have an idea:

Since all new Let's Encrypt certificates get reported to certificate transparency sites, why not set up a bot that searches them for 'paypal' and send alarms to PayPal and the registrar about possible abuse?

<comment><USER12> Yes! Just like a DMCA bot searches for media and automatically files a complaint?

<comment><USER10> I doubt it will be the same amount. This is real criminal scam and theft, not drive-by ad-click farming.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


5 Reasons You May Not Want to Work for Google - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140603115508-7668018-5-reasons-you-may-not-want-to-work-for-google?trk=tod-home-art-list-large_0 <comment><USER2> _3) Subsequent job search will get harder. Employers will definitely want to interview you, but they 'll always worry that they won't live up to Google._

 _5) You 'll become a professional networking target. Get hired by Google and watch your LinkedIn inbox explode with requests_

Don't these two contradict each other?

<comment><USER3> No.

Number 3 is about you leaving Google, number 5 is more about people wanting to know you so they will be hired at Google.</comment></comment>


Average teen sends 3,339 texts per month - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/10/15/teen.texting.mashable/index.html?hpt=Sbin

<comment><USER2> As a teenager who uses texting a lot (16k sent last month)... here's some thoughts about why this isn't so extreme:

1) Texting works like IM for most people. It's a back and forth conversation where each message generally represents one line of conversation. A conversation on IM can span 100s of lines easily; having several long bits of conversation to different people throughout the day quickly adds up even if it is not especially consuming.

2) Further, on some plans texting can include other things. Somewhat ironically considering what I said above, Mobile IM on many Verizon phones counts as a text every time a message is sent or received. So if I'm using AIM, MSN, etc on my non-data plan phone, I can rack up text numbers quickly.

3) Twitter. I don't use it on my phone, but I know some who do. If you get Twitter texts every time someone you follow updates, you can have a lot of extra traffic being sent. The same goes for Facebook status messages and whatever other traffic can go through a phone.

I don't really consider myself a super heavy texter, but it's my main conversation with some people for even longer conversations. I also used about 1200 minutes on the phone; it's not just for texting. But when you're limited to no data plan, and you have a phone that has a default keyboard and so forth (I have an LG Voyager, chosen simply for having the best phone keyboard for me), it can look like a lot.

16k is only about 500 messages a day. Check your last IM log.. I looked at one on Skype text chat and it was at 650 from just a few of hours of off and on talking to a nerd friend as he messed with some stuff on his Droid 2.

</comment><comment><USER3> The numbers for older people are higher than I would've expected as well. 45-54 year olds send an average of 500 or so texts per month? I'm in my late 20s and don't average that (I'm closer to 200). I wonder what the distributions look like; are there a handful of people sending 10,000?

<comment><USER4> Median would be more instructive than mean, in other words.

Once clearly illustrated by my psychology professor: She said if a student asked her what the average salary of her graduates was, she'd answer with the median, considering one of her students went on to become an NBA star, but most earned small fractions of his salary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's over a hundred a day. Bollocks. This "study" has people in their mid thirties sending ten a day, which also seems ridiculous. Some of them, sure, but on average? Nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is really surprising. The volume for teens completely blow everyone else out the water. At this rate, they're sending 7 texts per hour ALL day and night, assuming they take 8 hours to sleep.

What the hell are these kids talking about?

<comment><USER7> You have to realize that once you get an unlimited texting plan, you don't hesitate to send a ton of one or two word texts.

<comment><USER3> Newer SMS interfaces also encourage that by making each text look like just another line in a chat, instead of a separate "message". I have an older phone where you have to read each text message as a separate message, and it causes a bit of an expectations mismatch when I'm texting with someone who's using a client that makes it look like a chat window.

I usually send something concise but information-packed, sort of like a tweet, and minimize separate texts. So I might send something like:

      just got downtown, at cafe whatever. heard from jim?

But if I had a chat-like interface on my phone, I might write three separate messages,

      just got downtown
      at cafe whatever
      heard from jim?

For me, the latter style is _really_ annoying to receive, because it gets queued as a series of incoming messages I have to read and dismiss separately, but I think that's becoming less common on newer phones. If I switched to that style, I could easily see sending 3x+ more messages without actually changing how much information I send.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wait, what? This can't be accurate. I'm 17, and the heviest texter my age I know sends around 800 a month. Among me and my friends, the average is roughly 30.

<comment><USER9> it can be accurate, I think it just depends on the circumstances. I blew over 300 messages just yesterday. As for age, I just barely turned 18, but when I was in high school I would easily text at 2x or 3x that rate. Reasons it was so high can be attributed to not being challenged in school (so text in class), i could easily talk to all friends through the same medium (and multiple of them at a time), and its fairly easy to mass message to figure out plans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Original article from Nielsen, with related charts:

[http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s- teen-m...](http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/u-s-teen-mobile- report-calling-yesterday-texting-today-using-apps-tomorrow/)

</comment><comment><USER11> You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

Forcing kids to sit in school all day doesn't result in them paying attention to school. They just text all day.

Something needs to change.

</comment><comment><USER12> My 13 year old niece is within this range, maybe 1000 more or so. And her average monthly voice time is about 18 minutes. All to her parents.

</comment><comment><USER13> That is one text every ten minutes counting a day as being 24 hours. As most people sleep at least eight hours, some ten minutes have two texts sent, that is a highly dubious if not an absolute outright made up claim!

</comment><comment><USER14> This ties in well with the Scott Adams blog post that came up recently.

"Wireless Voice Calls Are Obsolete" [http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/wireless_voice_calls_are_o...](http://www.dilbert.com/blog/entry/wireless_voice_calls_are_obsolete/)

</comment><comment><USER15> This would explain why I have had to wait for a teen to finish texting while they should of been working at a Best Buy, a local ice cream place, and a carnival I took my kids to just in the past month. And in two of the cases they seemed to think it was rude of me to interrupt them.</comment>


Rv8 – RISC-V simulator for x86-64 (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://rv8.io/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477054](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15477054) Of course there is also qemu-system-riscv{32,64}.

<comment><USER3> According to the benchmarks on their page (about 1/3 to 1/2 way down), this is generally better performing than the qemu alternative in the benchmarks they have tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does that compare to [https://bellard.org/tinyemu/](https://bellard.org/tinyemu/) ?

</comment><comment><USER5> There is also a RISC-V simulator in JS: [https://riscv.org/software- tools/riscv-angel/](https://riscv.org/software-tools/riscv-angel/)

<comment><USER6> From that page:

NOTE: ANGEL is not under active development – it implements old draft versions of the RISC-V specs (~late 2014)

Perhaps best to avoid if you're doing anything more than playing around with it.</comment></comment>


Use Bit.ly to Expose Click Traffic of Tweets - <AUTHOR> http://www.michaelapproved.com/articles/use-bitly-expose-click-traffic-tweets/

<comment><USER2> I don't think a 4.13% CTR is all that amazing in the context of "Hey, person who finds me interesting enough to subscribe to my stream, here's something that I thought was interesting enough to share with you."

Then again, this kind of hints at the crazy number of Twitter 'users' who are either bots or abandoned accounts.

<comment><USER3> But keep in mind that all 1+ million followers aren't always watching the stream all the time. So the true view/click rate is much much higher.

Though several people probably click on more than one article it's still an amazingly high number from a free marketing tool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have found a high CTR on my links, but have read somewhere that a good number of those clicks are bots.

One thing that I would love is a tool that surfaces all of the links that have been sent into my Twitter stream (meaning that they are links from people I follow only)...does that exist.

<comment><USER3> If I'm understanding this right, I think you can do a search to find that out. Here's a link that shows the links I got to my twitter account: [http://search.twitter.com/search?q=http&to=MichaelApprov...](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=http&to=MichaelApproved)

It searches for any tweet with "http" sent to me.

<comment><USER4> No, I am talking about anyone who puts a link in their tweets and it's someone I follow. Bonus points if the ones that are coming from multiple people bubble up to the top.

Depending on how many people you follow, there's a good bet you miss some links. You can swim through your feed, or, if you are like me, you want for a better solution. Maybe I code this up over the next handful of days.

<comment><USER3> What about if you load your stream [http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/BrandonWatson.r...](http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline/BrandonWatson.rss?count=200&page=1) into a program and use regex to fish out the links? Throw it in a for loop to search beyond the first page.

<comment><USER4> _cough_ _HACK_ _cough_

=)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Thoughts Can Fuel Some Deadly Brain Cancers - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/04/23/401723235/thoughts-can-fuel-some-deadly-brain-cancers <comment><AUTHOR> Here's the journal article this is based on:

Neuronal Activity Promotes Glioma Growth through Neuroligin-3 Secretion

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867415004298)

</comment><comment><USER2> This seems obvious in hindsight.

We know that thinking causes physical effects on the brain. (I mean: half of our (limited) understanding of the brain comes from measuring bloodflow.) So yeah, of course something that's affected by bloodflow (like, say, cancer) will be affected by thoughts.

The better question is: is there a strong enough effect from actual thoughts (as opposed to direct neural stimulation, which is what this paper uses) to cause the same effect?

<comment><USER3> We won't know for several years, so in the meantime we'll all just worriedly try to reduce our general cognition through natural and artificial means.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Stanford's release on this goes into more scientific detail, and has a nice interview with the senior author in which she discusses the background behind the work.

[http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/04/brain-tumor- gr...](http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2015/04/brain-tumor-growth- stimulated-by-nerve-activity-in-the-cortex.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It is interesting that meditation, insofar that it (temporarily) seeks to the rid the brain of any activity, would be a natural antidote to anything like this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if this really means what they say it means.

When you aren't "thinking" your brain runs a "default network" that consumes about 98% as much energy as when you are thinking hard. That is, in terms of metabolic activity, it makes very little difference if you are "thinking" or relaxing.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article does not elucidate and I don't have access to the full article, but is this for any kind of brain activity or a particular kind of thought - perhaps attached to high stress or anxiety?

<comment><USER8> It just says that cancer cells near "active" brain cells are affected. So it would depend on where in the brain the cancer is. It also mentions one kind of cancer, diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, occurs in the brain stem. Since you kinda use that all the time for stuff like breathing, it might not matter what kind of "thoughts" you have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Similarly, it is widely known that an effective treatment for lung cancer is to stop breathing.

</comment><comment><USER10> This sounds lile the premise to an Orwellian dystopia: the sugeon general is now requiring that all Americans stop thinking - for their own medical well being. Thought Limiters will be surgically grafted starting next thursday.

</comment><comment><USER11> What about grief ? A High School friend told me he developed tumor afterwards. I know first hand how it impacts all your body (including brain), and am wondering if there could be long term harm.

</comment><comment><USER12> The National Public Radio report kindly submitted here to open discussion reports on the study lead author saying something that can fairly be summarized by the report title. The report goes on to discuss the methods of the study, noting "The discovery came from a team of scientists who studied human glioma tumors implanted in mouse brains. The scientists used a technique called optogenetics, which uses light to control brain cells, to increase the activity of cells near the tumors." So this wasn't a human study, and it wasn't an intervention of asking the mice to think more or less, or to think differently, but rather an intervention of stimulating certain brain cells.

As the NPR report points out, it's hardly likely that physicians can recommend that human patients reduce their brain activity to keep their gliomas from growing, but perhaps a treatment can be teased out of interrupting the signal that leads from neuron activity to glioma growth. I hope so. I have a close relative who list a fiancee to a glioma, and that kind of brain cancer is a very frightful disease.

<comment><USER13> "it's hardly likely that physicians can recommend that human patients reduce their brain activity to keep their gliomas from growing,"

I have to admit my imagination flashed to an image of somebody wearing a portable biofeedback rig that buzzed (or perhaps zapped) them every time they used the target portion of their brain, in an attempt to starve the tumor.

It would make a really fascinating experiment to hook someone up to such a device, then see whether the brain considers that enough of an aversive stimulus to move the targeted functionality to another part of the brain, as if that part of the brain was damaged. No way to get that past the ethics committees, I'm sure, but interesting.

There's probably an interesting sci-fi story in the crazy home DIY tinker diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer who just puts together such a rig anyways with no medical approval... if we don't already have the off-the-shelf tech to do that today we're pretty darned close. (But I've never really worked out how to move from "high concept" to "actual plot", despite a few attempts.)

<comment><USER14> > I have to admit my imagination flashed to an image of somebody wearing a > portable biofeedback rig that buzzed (or perhaps zapped) them every time > they used the target portion of their brain, in an attempt to starve the > tumor.

Hopefully the target portion of the brain isn't the part that responds to being zapped.

<comment><USER13> I imagine there are a lot of very entertaining failure cases, or, at least, entertaining failure cases as long as they aren't really happening to someone.

Heh, perhaps that's the proper angle for the story... macabre comedy. Think Doc Brown meeting Marty McFly in the past for the first time ([http://eol_images/Entire_Site/2012220/DocBrown.jpg](http://eol_images/Entire_Site/2012220/DocBrown.jpg) ) meets existential pratfalls. We laugh, we learn, we question the fundamental nature of the relationship between brain and mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know that obsessing about money can alter the physical shape of your brain, I guess this is the next obvious step.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if meditative activities that promote lower frequency brain waves would be useful here.

</comment><comment><USER17> I lost the game

</comment><comment><USER18> Now I understand why cannabis is a growing treatment for DIPG.</comment>


Principles of Effective Pricing Pages - <AUTHOR> http://conversionxl.com/10-principles-of-effective-pricing-pages/

<comment><USER2> i find it hard to take advice from a site which puts a newsletter signup pop- up over the article before i've read it.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a conversion blog, and I test what works. Results speak for themselves. Using popups increases email subscriptions 10x. It'd be silly to stop using it because some people don't like it. Personal preference is not a business case.

<comment><USER3> Maybe it's not a business case. But respecting your customers is at least a possible business strategy.

<comment><AUTHOR> I only have the highest respect for all my customers. Using an email capture tactic is not disrespect.

<comment><USER2> degrading the experience for your existing customers in order to gain new customers is the very definition of disrespect.

how much value do you actually get from those customers who are willing to sign up for your email newsletter before they even read any content on your site?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> From a business perspective converting every potential customer to a happy paying customer that you can profit from is the best. Extracting the highest dollar that each customer is happy to pay will make you the most money but is very hard to do.

Flat pricing can keep some customers that would have paid more from having to do so, which is one reason I like it so much as a consumer.

I am amazed with the success of <http://www.humblebundle.com/> in non traditional pricing. more economics should be built around what people are happy to pay.</comment>


Switzerland's valley of the cable cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180509-switzerlands-valley-of-the-cable-cars <comment><USER2> I commute by cable car too, here in La Paz Bolivia [http://www.lapazlife.com/the-worlds-highest-cable-car- ride/](http://www.lapazlife.com/the-worlds-highest-cable-car-ride/)

<comment><USER3> I was just in La Paz and was going to make sure it got recognition as well. What a beautiful city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > To the farming families of Switzerland's Engelberg region, cable cars aren't > built for ski holidays and scenic views

The simple farmer's cable cars _are_ used by skiers as well though. The terrain around Engelberg is excellent for skiing and many skiers use them (paying a small fee to the farmers) to reach areas not heavily skied like the nearby resort

</comment><comment><USER5> More Swiss cable car porn:

[http://www.stahlseil.ch/gallery/main.php](http://www.stahlseil.ch/gallery/main.php)

[http://www.uri.info/de/wunderwelt/seilbahn- eldorado](http://www.uri.info/de/wunderwelt/seilbahn-eldorado)

And those are only the ones which are officially allowed to carry people.

</comment><comment><USER6> The idea of using ski lifts in cities has been around for a while. [https://www.wired.com/2012/11/austin- gondola/](https://www.wired.com/2012/11/austin-gondola/)

<comment><USER7> I still wish for this in Austin. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing! I've been trying to decide whether to go to Gimmelwald on a holiday in June (no cars, cable car and hiking access only) and this might be just enough to convince.

</comment><comment><USER9> IIRC a gondola cableway is one of the cheapest means of transportation to build (compared to railway tracks and trains, or bus systems if you would need to develop streets first).

</comment><comment><USER10> [Spoilers] It's Switzerland.</comment>


Kubernetes Ingress Controller for Kong - <AUTHOR> https://konghq.com/blog/kubernetes-ingress-controller-for-kong/ <comment><USER2> Some thoughts:

\- This implementation is a good example of why Kubernetes ingress has been in beta for 2 years ;-). Ingress doesn't do very much, so the Kong team has had to implement a custom set of extensions to Ingress ("KongIngress") so you get functionality such as rate limiting, etc. This blog post [https://blog.getambassador.io/kubernetes-ingress-nodeport- lo...](https://blog.getambassador.io/kubernetes-ingress-nodeport-load- balancers-and-ingress-controllers-6e29f1c44f2d) covers some of the nuances of this.

\- I wonder how the REST APIs of Kong are reconciled with the declarative config. Seems like this could be complicated.

\- IIRC, all of the NGINX ingress controllers take the route of custom annotations on the ingress object vs the KongIngress approach. I wonder what people will prefer.

\- The post alludes to intelligent connection draining with Kong but doesn't give any details. I'm particularly curious because I thought Kong was based on NGINX so wondering how Kong does it given the underlying engine.

<comment><USER3> Do we know what the Kubernetes' team's official plan for fixing the ingress situation is?

My opinion is that ingress portability isn't really that useful in practice. You _want_ implementation lock-in at the ingress level, since the implementation matters. If I need to target platforms in a generic way (e.g. make something that works on both AWS and GKE), I can use Helm or some other templating solution to generate the right manifests with the right settings.

So "KongIngress" isn't a problem for me, and rather than struggle with today's situation on GKE, I'd much rather have a "GoogleIngress" with all the GLBC bells and whistles (well, there aren't many, but at least timeouts and a CDN toggle!) and not care about it being portable.

<comment><USER2> At KubeCon Austin in December there was a lot of conversation about it. Some want portability, some want expressiveness, everyone agrees that current ingress isn't expressive enough.

In practice, everyone adds custom annotations one way or another (whether it's NGINX ingress, or Ambassador, or KongIngress). So at some level, the notion of Kube ingress is a moot point, since everyone has forked it :-).

<comment><USER4> I kind of agree. At this point it may just be better to write controllers that read generic policy from a different object and the base definition from the Kube object. But at that point, the extra ingress object is just a convenience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great. I currently do the samething but not rely on Ingress but rely on label and annotation of service.

Plugin config is also annotation.

It's a bit complex to make plugin concept work because Kong doesn't support some kind of idempotent request so lots of code is require to check for exist and set.

Such as when a service is updated, have to check/unset plugin and reupdate plugin config etc.

Great to see Kong made this step.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've had great success with Kong acting as an API gateway running on a DC/OS cluster. It was simple to work with and it's pairing with Cassandra as a backend was an added bonus for multi region and availability zone setups.

I'm looking forward to giving this a shot on k8s. Nice work KongHQ team!

</comment><comment><USER7> It's hard to tell what you get from deploying Kong as an Ingress vs as a Deployment and Service pair. Is it just a declarative config process rather than a REST API one?</comment>


Css iPhone6 - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/fbrz/pen/vlrnd <comment><USER2> I'm not quite sure what else to say about this but: damn that's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> impressive

is there a wysiwyg editor that removes the discipline out of this form of expression?

</comment><comment><USER4> This is amazing.

</comment><comment><USER5> That is amazing!</comment>


Ask HN: Does your company require time tracking? - <AUTHOR> My company recently introduced the requirement of time tracking for stories / bugs / tickets in general. One is supposed to log their time to these so that accounting can use the data for capex math.<p>Is this normal? Does your company do this? How do you keep track of everything? <comment><USER2> We call this actuals. So, you put an estimate then you track how long it actually took. I've done it before. If it's accurate and used responsibly it's a somewhat useful metric. But getting accurate data is hard and tends to cause overhead.

This is different from tracking ticket age. A ticket may be open for 3 weeks but that doesn't mean it was being actively worked on for 3 weeks. That's easy to calculate and can actually be more useful for tracking velocity.

</comment><comment><USER3> My understanding from working at a company that did that was that it's technically required in case they're audited.

That is, to treat your salary as capital investment instead of operating costs (which has certain accounting benefits), they need to allocate that salary to specific investments (projects).

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is exactly what was explained to us. I only hope it doesn't become used for more than that. I already feel self conscious about if I'm logging too little time.

<comment><USER3> Where I was, that was very much all they used it for. Hope it's the same for you.

FWIW, they only asked us to very roughly divide our time up with a minimum of 8 hours per workday (anything not allocated to a project or maintenance went to a bucket that included meetings, PTO, and more). I responded to that by tracking (partly for my own purposes) as many hours as I put in in a day, so I'd know when I was working too many hours per week. And to passive- aggressively make sure they'd know too!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I keep track of how much time I spend on each customer, so that my company can send the right invoices. There are quite a few applications out there that can help you automate this task. I sometimes use HoursKeep.</comment>


Registered Replication Report – Facial Feedback Hypothesis [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/StrackRRR_manuscript_accepted.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> It you don't have the time to read the whole paper, jump to page 11 and check out the graph at the bottom of the page. Top confidence interval is from the original study and the rest are confidence intervals from studies that tried to replicate it.

<comment><USER2> The 95% CI for the original study contains zero? How does a study with a non- significant result which can't be replicated become "seminal"?

<comment><USER3> The same way people write "citation needed" and then put their brains to sleep.

It's not as if they will then go to replicate and evaluate those citations (if they were, they could just as well try to evaluate what the other person told them directly, or at least try finding those citations for or against it themselves).

They just need some comforting assurances -- which will then repeat freely, few (or nobody) bothering to examine those "citations" at any step of the chain.

For me, unless the science is old enough to be including in University 101 courses, I don't much care about it. Unless you work in the field (and will actually use and evaluate the results mentioned in it) a peer reviewed paper is worth almost nothing to the casual HN reader.

<comment><USER4> By the way, "holding a pen in your mouth makes you feel smiley" is definitely in psych 101 courses, and social 201, and also showed up in cognition 301 if memory serves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also see previous discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030791](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12030791)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure the first picture on page 4 shows a misunderstanding of how the pen is supposed to be used. You're supposed to put it in your teeth cross- wise, so your mouth is forced into a kind of smiling position.

<comment><USER7> Actually, the replication seems to be correct. See Figure 1 in the original here: [http://datacolada.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Strack- et-a...](http://datacolada.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Strack-et- al-1988-cartoons.pdf)

I applaud both the original and replication authors for including clear illustrations. And at a glance, Strack et al seems to be a well written paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought I knew the basic premise of "Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow" even though I haven't read it... but I don't understand why this would be a key study for the book. Can anyone provide a quick explain?

<comment><USER9> Biting a pen with your teeth or your lips should induce one of two different "Type I Thinking" facial expressions, associated with Kahneman's "fast thinking" as I understand it.

This study appears to discuss the link between forcing a type I physical response, while attempting to prompt a type II response (laughter/humor). As I'm reading it, this study is talking about a previous study in which fuzzing the "fast thinking" system affected the "slow thinking" system. This new paper calls those results into question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here's a link to the 1988 paper they're disputing [http://datacolada.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/Strack-et-a...](http://datacolada.org/wp- content/uploads/2014/03/Strack-et-al-1988-cartoons.pdf)

I wonder if it'd make a difference if the pen was horizontal in the participant's mouth, touching both corners of the lips. That's the mental image I walked away with when I read "Thinking, Fast and Slow".

</comment><comment><USER11> There's a fun p-hacking game embedded in this article from Fivethirtyeight:

[http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt- broken/](http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/)

Really drives home how tough it is to thread the needle of both interesting and useful results.

</comment><comment><USER12> The more I see these the more I am thinking these psychological conclusions are just placebos. You pick the one that appeals to you most and ignore the rest. They work only because you want them to be true.

<comment><USER13> It's funny, because your statement is a topic in the book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the pdf, data and registered protocols in the Open Science Framework site: [https://osf.io/pkd65/](https://osf.io/pkd65/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Psychology (and social science in general) has a serious problem.

Standards for publication are far too low, incentives for replication almost nonexistent, negative results rarely reported.

How many of the published results in social science are trustworthy?

[https://www.xkcd.com/882/](https://www.xkcd.com/882/)

<comment><USER16> what do you think can be done here? These people obviously know that their studies can't be replicated, they are not ignorant so they are obviously malicious.

<comment><USER17> > These people obviously know that their studies can't be replicated

I don't think that's fair to say at all. I can come up with several ways a study can non-maliciously arrive at a false conclusion:

1\. The researchers may accidentally leak information to the participants regarding the hypothesis being studied. When using human subjects, it's very difficult to avoid biasing them toward results they may _think_ you're looking for.

2\. Researchers may not sufficiently blind themselves during the experiment, causing them to have undue influence on the outcome, even if they're not consciously trying to exert it.

3\. Some unknown confounding effect may be at play during the experiment that wasn't properly accounted and controlled for.

Those are just three I could think of. When dealing with behavioral sciences, I can't imagine how difficult it must be to design a test protocol that eliminates all the messiness of the meatbags being studied.

<comment><USER4> I helped run a clinical trial for an antidepressant one time. It was a double- blind randomised within-subjects-replicated crossover design. All that control was complicated, time consuming and very expensive. Only the hospital pharmacy knew whether participants were in treatment or placebo for a given session, and we never met the pharmacist, just received an orange vial. But we're pretty sure information still leaked, because drugs have side-effects. There's nothing to be done about this. Use an active placebo, you might say, but now you've added "get ethics approval to administer a nauseating placebo" to your 9-month-long ethics todo list. And then your placebo is worse than your active and the whole study is screwed because everyone spewed up in the MRI. Meatbags are tricky indeed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", and the study in question is hardly "key" to the book, it gets all of one paragraph in chapter 4.

<comment><USER19> Both valid points, but this failure-to-replicate does erode some confidence in the general notion of embodied cognition (and I believe deservedly so because these phenomena have always seemed rather incredible). Much of Kahneman's other work has a more solid empirical foundation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is the post title referring to "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, or something else?

</comment><comment><USER21> That study wasn't really key to the book.

</comment><comment><USER22> It's not key study, as title suggests.

</comment><comment><USER23> Also, smelling farts prevents cancer. Look it up.

</comment><comment><USER24> Sigh. I wish I could explain this better to my business managers who read PopSci like this, and try to remold the business to follow them.

</comment><comment><USER25> The rise of social 'science' is equal to the demise of intellectual rigour and common sense. The sad part is that social science could be done right, but few do it right because most people who don't suck at statistics go for fields that are more worthwile.</comment>


The best service providers for startups - <AUTHOR> http://blog.robwebb2k.com/2008/03/31/my-picks-the-best-service-providers-for-startups/

<comment><USER2> Decent list. I'd include:

Google's GrandCentral (for phone #) 37Signals' Campfire (for chatting... in office or not) ThePlanet (dedicated servers)

<comment><USER3> I'd put SoftLayer on par with ThePlanet. It was founded by former ThePlanet execs and I've had a great experience with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does anyone else have experience with BrainTree? They look good and seem to offer a very robust API (which would make -my- life a heckuva lot easier), but my boss is still leaning towards PayPal due to brand/stability.

Also, they talk a lot about "up-front pricing," yet I can't seem to find any information about pricing and fee's on their website. What gives?

<comment><USER5> @dmpayton - I work for Braintree and the company does not publish prices because they depend a lot on many variables including the business type, credit card volume, type of credit cards that are most commonly accepted (e.g. debit, credit, rewards, business to business, international, etc.) and other variables. There is no one size fits all pricing model that applies to all businesses.

Braintree practices full disclosure pricing with no hidden fees which is rare in this industry. Here's a blog post that describe where credit card fees come from if you're interested in learning more: [http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/where-do- credi...](http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/where-do-credit-card- fees-come-from-cc/)

<comment><USER6> If that were the reason, couldn't you simply publish a web form where we can enter in all those variables and get an idea of the price? I suspect that you would already be using such a tool internally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mediatemple -- the author of this piece says "no, bad!" I've heard very good things from others about MT. Is there a consensus here on the quality/price ratio of (mt)'s services?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the responses. i put up a long one 2x earlier but the site was all jacked up. in short i think ringcental has more corporate type options than GC, i haven't been psyched with 37 signals stuff (although it looks sweet!) but will check out campfire as well as theplanet (and lots of people psyched on slicehost - i'll check that too).

<comment><USER2> I like Campfire a lot, because it's simple and gets the job done. I can't recommend Basecamp and other 37Signals products, because they've just never been right for me and I don't have enough experience with them. ThePlanet, on the other hand, has been my dedicated server host since 2004 and has always been superb.

<comment><USER8> I'll vouch for Campfire also. It's relatively easy to hook notifications into it so that commits, test failures, and bug reports show up. In my last two companies we've ended up with then dynamic of "if it doesn't notify campfire, it didn't happen."

I use Highrise also for CRM. If it's just one or two of you then it's probably the only CRM out there that's simple enough to get into your workflow. If you're managing a salesforce then you probably want something different. But for just remembering who my clients are and when I need to contact them, it's amazing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd also include slicehost for hosting...cheap, great documentation , and you can install many linux distros

</comment><comment><USER10> we use GoToMeeting at work for giving demos and telecons</comment>


Facebook's New Privacy Tool Is a Data Landfill - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/off-facebook-activity-tool-download-website-data/605680/ <comment><USER2> Dont use FB, but for FF I use a plugin to block this type of behavior.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook- cont...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-container/)</comment>


Show HN: Backand – AngularJS Back end - <AUTHOR> https://www.backand.com <comment><USER2> Great service! I use it all the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Love it!</comment>


Mechanical webpage hitcounter - <AUTHOR> http://spritesmods.com/?art=mechctr <comment><USER2>
         every time a person requests a page from my site,
         the counter would give a satisfying 'Click!'

This is going to be a pretty loud night for the author ;)

I guess most people here know this site well, but if not it's definitely worth exploring. Lots of cool projects and much to learn.

<comment><USER3> I wonder what will happen if the frequency of requests is faster than the counter refresh rate. Does the counter stay consistent ?

<comment><USER2> It reacts to a pulse, so you could solve that with a queue in software, without that, my guess is that it would be missing clicks (pulses would overlap, since I'm assuming there is some minimum required width of it)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Suggested improvement: put a webcam in front of it for full-circle :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Another nice electromechanical hit counter: [https://vimeo.com/119746422](https://vimeo.com/119746422)

</comment><comment><USER6> Hm, this seems like a pretty risky way to connect this device to your PC - using a serial port.

Edit: And THAT connection: [http://meuk.spritesserver.nl/foto/foto/misc5/img_1999.jpg](http://meuk.spritesserver.nl/foto/foto/misc5/img_1999.jpg)

<comment><USER7> He has discussion about that hack here: [http://spritesmods.com/?art=mechctr&page=2](http://spritesmods.com/?art=mechctr&page=2)

Seems reasonable enough to me.

<comment><USER6> Sure, depending on your computer. If you have a $500 graphics card plugged into a 600W power supply, connecting wires into ports that might short circuit could be seen as a 'bad idea'.</comment></comment></comment>


What happens to chirality at relativistic velocities? - <AUTHOR> http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/racem.htm

<comment><USER2> I thought one of the many paradoxes of relativity is that while the moving bodies would appear changed, their "self-world" view is invariant. They see the relativistic effects applied to the atationary frames. It's been a long time, so I might be misremembering...

<comment><USER3> No, you're right. Its a classic error to accidentally mix in a little fixed reference thinking with your relativity when first coming to terms with relativistic reasoning. What helps me most is to remember that something somewhere is going .9c relative to me right now, and more importantly, I, it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Bullshit. The "relativity" part of "relativistic" means that the physics are the same in all inertial (non-accelerating) reference frames, independent of their relative velocity. The author isn't keeping his reference frames separate.

If I'm in the spaceship, I don't notice any shortening of my molecules in the direction of travel, the outside world just looks longer along that axis.

<comment><USER5> Thankyou, I picked up on this to. It amuses me that someone can know quite a bit about the theory and then completely miss the most obvious flaw in his idea. The ridiculous mass of objects, however, is (theoretically) true.

<comment><USER4> ... mass as seen from another reference frame ...

but yeah, there may be a reason to make your interstellar ships have small cross-sectional area ... and ice shields ... _wonders why he forgot to take an Alastair Reynolds book on vacation_

<comment><USER5> Haha thanks for the correction. I forget that I need to take care with definitions when it comes to physics concepts.

I just finished reading _Redemption Ark_ , that leaves _Absolution Gap_ and _The Prefect_. Only a good 2000+ pages to go!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The first part about small bits of interstellar matter impacting the starship becoming an increasing problem as the speed approaches the speed of light is something as surprising as it is obvious in hindsight.

I had hever had though of that until yesterday when, coincidentally, I finished reading Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth".

<comment><USER7> According to an interview about Gene Roddenberry (with one of the writers who had worked with him), this is the problem that deflectors (which are separate from defensive shields) are designed to solve. The dish on the front of the Enterprise's drive section projects a cone of force in front of the ship, moving dust and other small things out of the way.

I believe this was on one of the TNG seasons' DVD's special features.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but the idea that a single atom of hydrogen was a threat hadn't occurred to me, and this was the real eye opener. Even though I've seen Star Trek and understood that deflector dishes were supposed to move "tiny bits" of matter from the ship's path.</comment></comment></comment>


Previous Square Website Screenshots - <AUTHOR>

Do anybody have screenshots of the old Square web layout? Google cache has already updated. I want to keep it for future reference. I liked the old version vertical scrolling with whitespace much better than the new horizontal scrolling. <comment><USER2> [http://web.archive.org/web/20101127164625/https://squareup.c...](http://web.archive.org/web/20101127164625/https://squareup.com/) is a capture from 11/2010, but that has horizontal scrolling too. Was the vertical one prior to that, or was it new for 2011? Guess horizontal works for them...

<comment><AUTHOR> Vertical was the newest, besides what they just released today.</comment></comment>


First critical Kubernetes security hole discovered - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/kubernetes-first-major-security-hole-discovered/ <comment><AUTHOR> Heads up, this is a critical Kubernetes security vulnerability that can be exploited without any credentials via a network vector and without leaving a trace.

It fixes Kubernetes issue 71411 [1]: CVE-2018-1002105: proxy request handling in kube-apiserver can leave vulnerable TCP connections.

[https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/71411](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/71411)</comment>


Challenge – AI Initiative - <AUTHOR> https://aiethicsinitiative.org/challenge <comment><USER2> > From Sept. 12 to Oct. 14, 2018, we're inviting you to submit your idea to > win a share of $750,000, which we'll award in February 2019 to the most > compelling teams and projects.

It's a bit late.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't understand what they are looking for.

What kind of year-long project can say a journalist, designer, or lawyer run for $75k - $200k to address those problems?

It's too much time and money to simply write an article about it, but not enough money to build say a software solution.

<comment><USER4> I personally submitted one of my past projects, [https://www.quod.us](https://www.quod.us) \- I stopped working on it, but with a grant I would put some more time in.

It's already built and live (although it didn't take very long to make). It's just a simple platform for people to report misinformation encountered online, and the idea is to make the database open to developers who want to make tools to address the problem of misinformation.

I requested 85k from them. I'm not getting my hopes up, however it seems like a good fit for my project.

<comment><USER5> First impression: your site claims that $15/hr is a living wage in a major city, when in Seattle you'll be spending at least half that on an apartment anywhere in the metro area.

<comment><USER4> Users submit the reports, you should vote that one down or reply in the comments with some evidence if you disagree.

I actually don't like the fact that it's a controversial site by nature because I generally try to avoid controversial stuff. If the site ever took off I'd have to figure out how to do moderation/employ fact checkers, etc.

I stopped working on it for many reasons including that one, but I think there's some potential for the idea. It's pretty similar to what Elon Musk was suggesting (pravduh or whatever). I think he stopped working on his too actually, but I haven't been following it.

BTW I just looked - here's some data [http://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/42660](http://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/42660) and you're right, the housing cost is roughly half

I'm not saying I endorse that data though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> bra-ket [deleted]

<comment><USER6> no u tho

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> A little awkwardly named as this appears to have little to do with OpenAI.

<comment><USER8> This does not have anything to do with OpenAI (though it's a cool initiative.) Source: I work at OpenAI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So basically what they want is somebody to start working on solving the fake news problem?

Can anybody explain to me why exactly we find it increasingly necessary to try and censor the internet?

<comment><USER10> Ah, I don't think we should "censor" the internet. I liked the interned the way it used to be: Like a goddamn jungle.

With that being said, Internet has a huge influence over everything now. We need to make sure it's not fucking over societies.

Right today I was reading an article how people are drinking their own pee and applying it to their skin as a health measure to heal and have better skin. And they find an audience (who craves for that stuff).

I don't think the internet needs to be censored but I think we need to fix the problem of credibility on the internet: I would love to be able to call BS I read but it's becoming incredibly hard. There's just too much out there.</comment></comment>