Google Official SEO Guide For Your Blog - <AUTHOR> http://boostta.com/2010/03/15/google-official-seo-guide-for-you-blog/ <comment><USER2> Simply links to a PDF, sans any analysis:

[http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine- optimiza...](http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization- starter-guide.pdf)</comment>


'The bioeconomy will revitalize the Midwest' - <AUTHOR> https://sociable.co/technology/bioeconomy-will-revitalize-midwest-with-microbial-manufacturing/ <comment><USER2> As someone who lives in the Midwest, I'm inevitably skeptical whenever I hear bold claims like this. Recent history has shown that people are willing to move out of the Midwest in the search for better jobs, and even if some in demand jobs pop up in the Midwest, people from growing regions don't always want to move to the Midwest for those jobs.</comment>


It's Time to Return Verification to Its Intended Purpose - <AUTHOR> https://artplusmarketing.com/its-time-to-return-verification-to-its-intended-purpose-e0d24517c7a0 <comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, you can ignore the last part of the article now. That bit is just a mention of how my site is going to implement verification in the most 'pure' form (aka without political bias or moral judgement).

But I think the point generally stands none the less. Enough with the whole 'taking away' verification when someone does something wrong or treating what should be an objective fact as if it were a badge of honour. That's not the point of the idea nor meaning of the term.

Anyone else agree?</comment>


Blekko partners with DuckDuckGo - <AUTHOR> http://www.skrenta.com/2010/11/blekko_partners_with_duckduckg.html <comment><USER2> _Warning: This is a little off-topic._

This is a great announcement, and hopefully good news for both companies. However, I want to point out that this post is a classic example of what annoys me about so many startups' blogs:

1\. What is blekko? I've never heard of it, and there's not a clear link to the homepage in the post, only to the results pages, which still doesn't tell me a lot...

2\. What is skrentablog? What does that mean? Who is skrenta? Why am I not on blekko's blog?

3\. What the hell are "auto-fired slashtag categories"?

Now, I can click around and figure all this out, but I doubt many people will. I'm sure I'm guilty of doing this too, but it might be worth it to take a beat when writing our blog posts and remember that most users who hit your page have no idea who you are, what you do, and they probably don't really care much.

<comment><USER3> Really good feedback - thank you. You would think I would actually link to blekko.com in my post about our new partnership. The post could definitely have used some more expository material about who we are and what we're doing. That stuff gets added by default to the press release, but I assume skrenta.com has a pretty niche audience and that anyone on my blog already knows who I am and what we're doing....bad assumption obviously and I'll take that into account for future posts.

<comment><USER2> Hope I wasn't too harsh; I make this mistake myself. You're probably right about your blog audience knowing what you're talking about, but then stuff gets posted here or linked to from DDG and those people may not have any idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A long time ago I switched to DDG, and then switched back to Google. Then about 2-3 months ago, I tried DDG again (mostly because of how responsive Gabriel has been to the community, and because of all the privacy improvements to DDG) and it is now my main search engine.

I can still easily search in Google by appending "!g" to my DDG search, or by using "g" in my Chrome URL bar, but most of the time I don't have to because DDG does a good job.

I'm happy about this partnership as long as it actually does improve results and reduce spam. If it achieves that, then long live Blekko!

Update: The only question I have for Gabriel is: Are you running Blekko code on your servers, or are you pinging them every time there's a search? How do you keep it from slowing down DDG?

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think start-ups compete against each other. there's 1 800lb gorilla in the room and it ain't blekko or ddg. Partnering to make both of their services better makes alot of sense.

<comment><USER6> I view this as a win for everybody, it will avoid a lot of duplication of effort and fragmentation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's good news. Recently I've been unhappy with the amount of spam in Google search results, so I switched to DDG and it's been great so far. I've started to recommend it to others. It's also surprisingly good with finding German websites. Even shows the zero-click boxes for many German things. Better design would be great though.

<comment><USER8> Would love to know if you have any particular design ideas or areas where you'd like to see improvement.

<comment><USER9> I don't think you are using the horizontal space well enough. Unless it's reserved for future adverts I'd like to see results in a table with colour coding of the table (i.e. all entity/special results in one column, "classic" style results in another).

<comment><USER8> Thx, yeah--that space is for some anticipated contextual information, though I am currently pretty open to different ideas. Note you can also move to a wider format (or super wide) in the settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just curious, from long term perspective how does such partnerships help. Aren't Blekko and DuckDuckGo direct competitors?

<comment><USER11> IMO, if you're trying to make inroads into search market share against a juggernaut like Google then underdogs banding together makes a lot of sense. It's the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" model. In a way, Yahoo went this route with Microsoft's Bing search engine, except they're letting Bing lead the charge completely. If either Blekko or DDG began to grow too big for the partnership they could always pull back. Actually, that's what Google did, since they used to supply some search results for Yahoo.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Gabriel and the team at DuckDuckGo"

Gabriel has a team now?

<comment><USER8> Don't forget Eli: <http://eliweinberg.com/father-sonin>

While it is true I'm still the only one full time, I would be remiss to not highlight that there are many people who are helping out. We have a great community at <http://duck.co/> as well as some great official and third party tools largely not written by me: <http://duckduckgo.com/tools.html>

Also, I've started to work with a great designer on further improving the search UX.

<comment><USER4> The Amazon link doesn't work for me: "AccessDeniedRequest has expiredBC7549CE3F43E0C72010-11-23T19:56:11ZGABs1ncscRVMcXQTAq97xGGW59tDNmofovrwOmNtzVRQXq5iaL1xQYsyYN7/AD8d2010-11-23T20:26:11Z"

<comment><USER8> OK, fixed it. I wanted to link the full screen version, but I guess posterous puts some kind of access restriction on them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> [http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/duckduckgoblekko...](http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/11/duckduckgoblekko- search-partnership.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> Can someone explain to me how duckduckgo works? I didn't find much about it from a couple of searches.

It seems it just scrapes other search engines, is that true? If so, won't ddg just be blocked by those major search engines if it ever picks up any useful traffic?

Not trying to be inflammatory, just curious.

<comment><USER15> They do a combination of their own indexing and using the API of sites like Bing (not sure if I got the second part exactly right, the point is the Bing results are there with MS's blessing).

More discussion of ddg's internals are on the Reddit AMA[1] and the founder's blog[2]

[1][http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/bbqw7/i_am_the_founder_of_a_search_engine_duck_duck_go/) [2] <http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats to Gabriel!

</comment><comment><USER17> I want DDG to show me movie times like the way Google does "movies zip code". Otherwise, I'm all set.

<comment><USER8> Duly noted!

<comment><USER18> Also (and easier): Movie running times and metadata.

Check out this query: [http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=inside+man+running+time](http://www.google.co.uk/#hl=en&q=inside+man+running+time)

It's just taken from this page: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Man>

You could go one better by handling: "inside man release date" "inside man gross revenue" "inside man starring"</comment></comment></comment>


Google Reader Killed RSS - <AUTHOR> https://mcfunley.com/google-reader-killed-rss <comment><USER3> There's so little here, Reader was bad because it was good and it killed other people's attempts at making an RSS reader, but it was also bad because it didn't have social features? Hard, hard disagree. I wanted an RSS reader, not a social stream, and Google Reader filled that role spectacularly. I read more independent sources those days than I do now thanks to it.

<comment><USER4> Reader did have social features which differentiated it from other feed aggregators. The power was in the network effect; if your friends used Reader then you would use it too. Without the social features it was not that great; just another aggregator.

To some extent Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. have replaced this need, but with a lot of other noise.

<comment><USER5> Without the social features it was great, because it aggregated your feeds without needing to run on your machine. (It also stored the entire history of the feed without taking up storage on your machine.)

I used to use Thunderbird for RSS feeds. That failed one day while I was on vacation -- the PC shut down for whatever reason -- losing track of what had happened while I was away. Not a huge deal, sure, but Reader was a huge improvement because it couldn't fail like that. It tracked everything and knew what was new and what was old with no chance of slipping.

(It also let you read blogs that were blocked by the Great Firewall, back before google itself was blocked.)

Lacking a free online RSS reader, I use Thunderbird again now, but Reader was better.

<comment><USER6> _Lacking a free online RSS reader, I use Thunderbird again now_

Feedly's free tier works quite nicely if you miss Google Reader.

<comment><USER7> Glad to hear that :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ah the 3 month article rotation that RSS is dead. Yet I use RSS and Atom feeds as much as I did in the Google Reader days and the IndieWeb is starting to get hot as people finally realize publishing just in silos is a bad idea. Do not bother clicking on this regurgitated nonsense.

Social media tried to kill RSS because they wanted you on their site. Feeds are very much alive and the best content is far from Facebook or Twitter.

<comment><USER9> Completely agreed. I don't understand the word "killed". I subscribe to 15-20 podcast feeds with RSS. I've noticed it getting harder to find RSS feeds, but put that down to sites that want to be visited more often.

OK, I can live without their product. It will probably be stuffed with ads anyways ... ads never 'personalized' despite that being a favorite excuse for all the tracking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> RSS is fine. I got this link via RSS. The web-hosted RSS readers wrapped in proprietary sharing and discussion features died. I'm ok with that.

</comment><comment><USER11> I read this because this post came up on Feedly.

I have 168 subscriptions.

I don't feel especially "killed".

<comment><USER12> He means in the sense that the automobile killed the horse.

And I agree, and was tweeting about exactly this yesterday. [https://twitter.com/eric_wvgg/status/1207374861955469317](https://twitter.com/eric_wvgg/status/1207374861955469317)

The problem isn't that Google killed Reader, it's that Reader got such traction to begin with. There were always better alternatives, and they're still around and better than ever, but they aren't doing anything to make RSS more accessible, user-friendly, or prevalent.

<comment><USER13> What Google Reader also had was a good API, which let you sync what you read. I used Google Reader more through the API than in the web interface.

With TinyTinyRSS and a plugin, I have similar functionality, but it still isn't quite as good as what Google had. That said, TinyTinyRSS has a better web interface than Google ever did.

<comment><USER14> My experience with TTRSS's web interface isn't super positive (though I'm not using the latest version, in fairness), so that says something about Reader's interface.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember a life before RSS. You would literally subscribe to online news emails delivered to your email inbox on a daily basis. And for me it was a Hotmail email inbox with a USA TODAY email delivery.

Every morning, a USA TODAY news email delivery in my Hotmail inbox.

Then came RSS. I didn't understand or pay attention.

Time passed. People died. People claimed RSS died. Podcasts rose into popularity.

I began paying attention to podcasts. And began subscribing to them via RSS via an Android App. I am doing this still, now, today.

For me RSS is not dead. I actively look out for RSS feeds on podcasts, online web comics, and similar.

I understand that Google Reader had a "bull in china shop" influence against RSS, but for people like me there is still RSS.

<comment><USER16> The way I remember life before rss was adding a site to my favorite list then visiting them all on friday night and saturday morning to see what was new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am subscribed to 100s of feeds via RSS. It is well and truly alive and most sites support RSS feeds.

FWIW, I self host TinyTinyRSS which works great and has an excellent mobile app as well.

<comment><USER18> TinyTinyRSS is how I got to this page just now. Not google reader, but pretty reasonable.

<comment><USER17> Ha ha, me too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just to add my voice to the choir, I too got to see this article from rss. I do however think that rss could have been a lot bigger than it is now: it hasn't gone mainstream, though it has had enough advantages to have dome so.

It has reached mainstream in one regard: as a carrier for podcasts. Given the wealth of user friendly tools to consume podcasts, this is perhaps not such a big surprise.

</comment><comment><USER20> You know.. RSS killed pointcast. Pointcast was actually much more like google reader, it was an app that would grab news from your favorite sites, and show you in the application, or as your screensaver. it was so popular, many companies banned it outright, because it had the effect of killing the bandwidth on very expensive at the time T1 lines when half the employee's computers tried to download tons of news sites at the start of every hour.

RSS came out later, if I remember right, as a way to do this without killing internet connections. you could grab the feeds, but only download the content when you were ready to read it.

pointcast was actually really nice. Now get off my lawn, you damn kids

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_%28dotcom%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_%28dotcom%29)

</comment><comment><USER21> Whether Google Reader hastened the decline in popularity of RSS, or whether Google accurately predicted the decline in popularity of RSS and killed Google Reader at just the right time is hard to say.

But it is weird that I was regularly consuming content from 50ish sources via Google Reader, and then, when Google Reader ceased, I just ... didn't really notice that I wasn't using an RSS reader anymore. I bookmarked about a half- dozen sources and now browse their content directly, but the rest were just stuff I casually read, and that's largely been replaced by stuff that surfaces on social media.

</comment><comment><USER22> I would say browser makers are more at blame here. They never really implemented features to discover feeds so it was always up to the webmaster to include some "what are feeds and how to subscribe" pages. Those are mostly gone now, though the feeds often are still there, just hard to find.

If we want them to become more popular, we just need to tell people about them. But then again, I always struggled to make many of my friends and family - even many other techies - understand what they were and why they are great.

Still, they are around and indispensable or many power users.

</comment><comment><USER23> I loved RSS for a while, and my client of choice was Google Reader. It solved aggregation of the articles, feeds implicitly have inherent notification, and the standardization of presentation elements bring calm to the consumer experience.

RSS has its flaws, some like the non uniformity of discovery were starting to standardize through customs, others, like the scaling and maintaining being left up to the individual while arguably a strength were at the time poorly supported.

When Google Reader disappeared there were few other quality readers polished enough to take over. Many offers tried to rush into the vacuum, some by revigorating their development, others by rushing out a Google Reader clone, but for the most part people did not follow because (a) alternatives were less slick and (b) for many the required housekeeping they had neglected for too long meant their overall feed file had accumulated so much cruft that they didn't want to reboot the effort.

I still do not know exactly why Reader which was extremely successful at the time was given the boot. I can imagine less add engagement, and also we were supposed to transition to Wave or G+ or was it still Orkut at the time?

Anyway, for the internet masses server side aggregation won, client side aggregation lost. The demise of Google Reader most certainly accelerated the transition, but longer term I do not know whether if it had been left to evolve it wouldn't have morphed it into another one of the server side aggregated/curated walled gardens years ago.

</comment><comment><USER24> All you nerds want to brag about how you still use RSS (probably from emacs or something) so much that you totally miss the point:

> You're having a funeral for the tame old fox that was mysteriously living in > your henhouse.

Google cornered a market then handed it to Facebook and Twitter. You don't use those? Good for you! I can't wait to hear how you don't have a TV either. Many people do. The author is suggesting that if Google hadn't used their clout to take over the space then a more worthy competitor (ostensibly their own project) could have prevented the takeover by centralized publishing silos. Disagree with that if you like but spare us the rss-brags.

</comment><comment><USER25> No it didn't. I never stopped using RSS. Today I use Netnewswire and Feedbin.

</comment><comment><USER26> I subscribe to hundreds of sites through an RSS reader, and I got a link to this post through RSS too. The author's own site even supports RSS, so I could subscribe to his content too. But I won't because I can't stand it when randoms on the internet claim something has been killed when it is very much alive and well. That's the kind of inflammatory banter I expect to see on Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nah, Google Reader was better than alternatives when it existed, and is _still better_ than every single alternative existing now. I just can't get used to Feedly's interface even though it's the best one I've found (don't bother listing the others, I've tried them all). As a result, I barely use RSS feeds at all.

</comment><comment><USER28> Google Reader was a simple RSS facility free of ads and free of yet another login facility. It might also have been one of the few web based readers that required no client. Others came along afterwards using GOOG authentication and were web based. We've survived in the post-Google apocalyptic world.

</comment><comment><USER29> RSS will never die. After Reader detonated I moved to Thunderbird and have been using it ever since.

</comment><comment><USER30> HN is becoming a tad repetitive...

Claims: RSS is dead

Reality: no, its not

Claims: Climate change claim "X" is bullshit after all

Reality: no its not

Claims: Diet "x" is actually good/bad for you

Reality: Everything in moderation people...

Etc...

we seem to be going through the same old cycle over and over.

<comment><USER23> Are you suggesting we should give each position on any topic as much praise and support as any other, regardless of its merit?

Or are you suggesting we should implement a sort of stack-exchange canonical topic/response regime where a group of 'community managers' rigorously partition the subjects into an imposed clustered domain by fast closing and marking as 'duplicates'?

Sure, this site has it's typical positions, and topics do tend to be revisited often, but isn't that the nature of a more conversational social space?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Well google helped in a few ways, and fbook dealt the mortal blows imho.

Fbook got real open.. open APIs.. (as a busniess, publisher, etc), add your stuff, get into everyone's feed..

people starting using fbook as their rss reader.. you started seeing the like button everywhere and less of the rss button on sites.

google helped with this as word got out that they were penalizing sites for blogrolls and such.. a lot of people depended on third party rss parsers (presenters?) - and the juice was not worth the squeeze to have a convenient feed if it killed your google rank and all your traffic.

While google traffic was going down, facebook engagement was going up and things looked okay that way.

It wasn't until a while, (couple? / few(?)) years later that businesses started to realize fbook was manipulating the feeds.. a few started to say hey this isn't right!

But that message has not gotten to most of the users. Most still assume that they are getting the latest posts from the people / places they have 'liked' \- and they do not know.

More and more businesses have started to notice the less and less traffic, and some have even been shaken down by fbook, offering to put them back into the chronological feed if they pay a price..

Users are now swamped with other things in their feed and they don't really notice.

I chuckled hearing Kim Kamando go off about this on her radio show a while back.. after hearing her tell so many people for a couple years about fbook this, and use fbook for that.. of course, many of her listeners never heard that show, as they had gotten use to getting updates for her shows through the fbk feed.

there's been a few other things over the years. The my.yahoo, pageflakes, startpages and similar never updated with modern graphics and thumbnails.. no one thought to give them a scroll feed or algorithms to push certain rss feeds to the forefront.. and the masses got use to the UI of the fbook non stop scroll..

I think to bring rss back we need more rss apps, ones with fbook like scroll, ones with sidescroll graphically like taptu had.. options for chronological only, add certain feeds to 'show first' \- tap a feed info to explore more / similar..

I don't know which ones have these options as I only test ones that are ad free or premium.. and it's hard to suggest people use the ones I like.

but also a service that will send rss links to whichever app you want... (and keep an opml for you, with current and previous versions of your subscribed lists); i have not moved my reader and feeds to my new phone as it's a chore one by one.

like a send-this-rss button on a page.. you click it (tap it) - it sends a url to a portal like about.me - which then pops up a list of choices to send that link to your app, to your fbk, to your whatever -

Love to have a segway screen that gives options when you subscribe to rss to choose 'all entries' 'certain category(s)', etc

I use to have many rss feeds for certain categories or keywords parsed into different places.. then they changes, I could never find most of them like there use to - even using search engines to find the feed for various places' category like yahoo news, bloomb and such..

Something similar to what you see on some music videos links on youtube - <USER2> you click them you get a list of places to do what you want , amazon, spotify, applemusic, beatport, etc

If we add a new spec to pull with sent data, like ask for rss and send a few kb of data to get an enhanced feed *while giving some creds for stats, and ugh possible ad targeting, maybe data showing i'm-premium-subscriber give me all the patreon perks) - they will get more resources on the other end.. and graphapi handles this well today and was not a thing when rss 2 came out right?

/some thoughts.. not complete

</comment><comment><USER32> RSS died because clients made easy to cut ads and hard to track engagement

RSS now are most often than not just links to the articles, cutting away all the original convenience of the format

<comment><USER33> > _RSS now are most often than not just links to the articles, cutting away > all the original convenience of the format_

Which is why there's a billion* services that generate RSS feeds for websites with their full content.</comment></comment>


Request for Node.js has been deprecated: 40K+ packages depends on it - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/frenchcooc/request-for-node-js-has-been-deprecated-422 <comment><AUTHOR> The creator of request npm package has deprecated it a week ago [1]. This follows a maintenance mode of the package that started in March 2019 [2]. Request is still the 4th most downloaded packages on NPM, with 40K+ packages that depend on it [3].

[1] [https://github.com/request/request/commit/aded7e4f8e57f6f33c...](https://github.com/request/request/commit/aded7e4f8e57f6f33cf39d65634bfb822bfcb2c8)

[2] [https://github.com/request/request/issues/3142](https://github.com/request/request/issues/3142)

[3] [https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended](https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended)</comment>


Ask HN: What's up with the state of pathetic business-class broadband in the US? - <AUTHOR>

I work at a web agency in LA. We build lots of apps and hack on Django all the time. We just moved offices into a real sweet spot. Everything about this place is rad, but right now we're using horrible 4G wimax internet because there is no fiber or coax running into this building, and the CO for DSL is something like 12,000 feet away. The best thing we can get is something like 5mbps.
Why can I pay $40 a month and get 20mbit at home, when I have to pay $999 a month to get a symmetrical 5/5 or 10/10 line? I understand you pay more for a higher level of service... but when the bandwidth you're getting is barely enough for 1-2 people, it's not very useful?
I'd love to hear some of your stories, comments, and info from everyone. If you're close to the inside of the telcom/cable/internet world we'd all love to hear what you have to say about this too.
I'm a firm believer that there are certain expenses that you just have to cough up. There are certain things that you just need in certain professions, and for whatever the reasons, it means you need to also pay more than expected. In the web/dev/startup world... high-bandwidth and low-latency is something I can't personally live without. <comment><USER2> My office is in San Jose, which likes to call itself the capital of Silicon Valley. The best connectivity I can get is either a consumer-grade DSL connection for approx $60/month, or a symmetric T1 for approx $500/month. I can't get Comcast "business class" unless I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars trenching someone else's parking lot for the installation.

The same was true at my 2 previous office locations, so it's not like the current setup is an anomaly.

If I wanted to be right in the middle of downtown San Jose, I could be in the same building as MAE-West and could probably get sweet connectivity - but that location would make my clients sad (parking is tough and not free) so I'm not gonna do it.

I shared office space for awhile with a guy who had a fixed wireless install - it was OK (the connection was fast but sometimes flaky) but it still amazes me how tough it is to get meaningful connectivity in a major metropolitan area on the West Coast. DSL in that building was nigh-impossible because the copper wiring in the building was damaged in some way that the landlord and the phone company collectively refused to fix.</comment>


Y Combinator's Hacker News NoFollows Some Links? - <AUTHOR> http://www.merricklozano.com/seo/y-combinators-hacker-startup-news-nofollows-some-links

<comment><USER2> (= follow-threshold* 5)

<comment><USER3> Another asterisk?

        (= *follow-threshold* 5)

The markup eats leading newlines and turns code blocks into normal text, and the normal text eats asterisks. Might I suggest backquote code quoting, and backslash escaping of special chars? (Markdown)

<comment><USER2> This is Arc, not CL. As part of the general plan to GC CL in Arc, I decided it would be enough to use one asterisk on globals. I now prefer one to two; an asterisk at the end is like one in text, warning you of an exceptional situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks for clearing this up.</comment>


Our Food Is Killing Too Many of Us - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/opinion/food-nutrition-health-care.html <comment><USER2> > _More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — > have pre-diabetes or diabetes._

Though one can't pin this staggering number on one thing (the article mentions 10 factors[1]) sugar-sweetened beverages are a nice first target.

Soda is looking more and more like cigarettes in terms of health effects and nutrition.

At a bare minimum we should stop subsidizing the production of corn syrup and other raw materials than enable soda to be so cheap.

[1] [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2608221](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2608221)

<comment><USER3> That sounds intuitively right, but that this might not be the main cause. Fried potatoes (french fries and chips) are causing obesity, which in turn causes diabetes. They also are high in carbs, though not sugar.

<comment><USER4> Where does that statement come from? I'm not saying it's wrong, but it's not exactly an opinion. The problem with (refined) sugar is that it's in damn near _everything_ (processed foods anyway).

<comment><USER3> French fries top this list, are processed, and contain no sugar. [https://www.ibtimes.com/what-causes-obesity-10-food-items- ca...](https://www.ibtimes.com/what-causes-obesity-10-food-items-can-cause- excessive-weight-gain-2554744)

It is strange that bread has sugar in it now but it's typically a small amount like one gram per serving: [https://saraleebread.com/our- breads/classic-100-whole-wheat-...](https://saraleebread.com/our- breads/classic-100-whole-wheat-bread) It does make snacking more harmful though, as a blood sugar spike can be added where not expected.

<comment><USER5> French fries contain no sugar? What? What do you think starch is?

<comment><USER6> This sort of context ignorant pedantry is extremely tiresome.

The comment they replied to literally says "(refined) sugar". They are talking about added sugar, not the constituent molecules of the food.

<comment><USER5> Okay, but lots of people don't realize the effect things can have on your blood sugar. Potatoes can raise your blood sugar just as quickly as white bread, or even sugary drinks depending on how you cook them (i.e. baked potatoes get processed differently than french fries). It isn't just added sugar, it's also _how_ you cook it, and the other things you eat with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The whole debate about nutrition confuses me.

We have all of this hyper-specific advice that sells a lifestyle, like telling people to eat kale or chia seeds or whatever the new hip of the week is. Hyper-optimization for overachievers; or at least those who like to pretend.

In reality, you could basically fix this situation overnight by killing off TV dinners and fast food. Yes, my pleasure centers are also tickled by a McDonalds, cause I'm an idiot just like you, we don't need it.

We call it "junk food" as a sort of humorous quip. If it's actually junk (and it mostly is), then it shouldn't be on sale, because it crowds out alternatives.

<comment><USER8> You need people to eat real food, which means cooking, which means taking time to cook. That's antithetic to the US way of doing things, which is to work all the time and outsource everything else to someone else (I'm caricaturing a little here of course).

<comment><USER9> It's not just cooking. The problem that we as Americans (and possibly other countries have) is that we don't understand our ingredients. It's easy to "cook" when you put a jar of store bought sauce over some noodles without ever looking at the ingredients. The grams of sugar in lots of store bought "pre- made" items is shocking.

As an example with the staple "PB&J" when you look at the P. One tablespoon of a popular peanut butter has 1.5g of sugar. If you get an "organic" or "natural" alternative you often see that number drop to 0.5g of sugar per tablespoon. If you've been fed the 1.5g of sugar version growing up then you're going to have a hard time accepting the 0.5g version.

Bread is another area. Bread shouldn't have sugar in it unless it's a dessert bread. Yet most store bought breads have corn syrup or sugar in them.

Detoxing from sugar sounds like it could be a joke. But if you cut out most sugar from your diet for a month (read ingredients and pick low or none sugar alternatives as best you can). You'll be amazed at how much sweeter items such as tomatoes, carrots, and other fresh fruits and vegetables begin to taste.

<comment><USER7> Well yeah, that's why you don't buy pre-made stuff.

It makes me feel like some sort of weird Zen-master to say this, but you don't need that. It's super overkill, not every meal has to be this thing with 500 ingredients like a budget version of what a high end restaurant might serve.

"Sauce" (saying that word without a qualifier makes me kind of shudder) is a tin of chopped tomatoes, an onion, and maybe some spices. Done. It barely takes longer than emptying a jar.

<comment><USER10> > "Sauce" (saying that word without a qualifier makes me kind of shudder) is a > tin of chopped tomatoes, an onion, and maybe some spices. Done. It barely > takes longer than emptying a jar.

If you have decent prep skills, you can prep the ingredients for a basic sauce of the type in question fairly quickly, but it still needs to be cooked, which is more involved than bringing a canned sauce up to serving temp. It's a lot more work than emptying a jar, when you consider prep, cooking, and added cleanup.

<comment><USER7> In the same vein, brushing your teeth is more work than not, cleaning the table is more work than leaving it, etc.

I dunno, I don't subscribe to this 'hyper-optimize all the things' mindset, you're already in the kitchen anyway, it's a normal thing for humans to do.

<comment><USER10> > In the same vein, brushing your teeth is more work than not, cleaning the > table is more work than leaving it, etc.

Yeah, and it would be wrong to suggest the opposite, just as it was when you did it for homemade sauce.

<comment><USER7> My specific quote:

> It barely takes longer than emptying a jar.

Because it doesn't. Making pasta takes the same amount of time either way.

You know just as well as I do that this is silly, we both exist in the real world and know how long things take, and you know the point I'm trying to make.

Realistically people don't do these things because it's not habit, or because their workplace has no cooking facilites, not because of some epsilon seconds longer on meal prep or whatever.

<comment><USER10> > Making pasta takes the same amount of time either way.

Making the complete dish does _not_ take the same amount of time either way, even ignoring added cleanup; the prep+cooking time of a from-scratch sauce is greater than the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta (while bringing premade sauce to temperature does not), so even though it can be parallelized (which may be problematic if you are already multitasking, e.g., supervising children while making dinner, as a prepping and cooking a from- scratch sauce also takes more _attention_ than reheating premade), it definitely adds before-serving time.

It also adds cleanup time.

I've got two young kids, and cook pasta with premade sauces (often, sauce I previously made from scratch, but sometimes store bought) and with scratch- made-at-the-same-time sauces each fairly regularly.

> Realistically people don't do these things because it's not habit, or > because their workplace has no cooking facilites, not because of some > epsilon seconds longer on meal prep or whatever.

I did nothing but scratch-made sauces, mostly in parallel with cooking the pasta, for several years before having kids; I now use store bought between a third and half the time.

It's absolutely because of the delta in work involved, which is not mere seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't get why Marianne Williamson gets labeled as some crazy person when she says we have a sickness problem and that we need to have a conversation on all the causes, including food, that contribute to people getting sick and thus needed to seek healthcare in the first place.

I think most rational people inherently get that, but for whatever reason talking about preventative care seems to be taboo at the national political level. That needs to change.

<comment><USER6> I imagine it's usually because of her other views.

I'm just guessing though, I haven't looked closely.

<comment><USER11> Possibly, though I think the bigger problem is that personal accountability has somehow become politically dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> why not brutally enforce cut down of sugar in sweet items (including softdrinks, ice cream, chocolates, cakes, etc.) by 50%? To he11 with the taste - sugar is as bad as cocaine when it comes to addiction.

Sugar is literally killing humanity as something inside of us makes us hooked to it. And some ethnic cuisines are culprit in this: The stupid practice of overloading sugar in sweets in Pakistan (I am Pakistani for record) and Middle East, weird North American sickly sweet kids cereals (and Krispy Kreme, etc.).

Not only artificial sugar but even the propaganda about stuffing our mouth with fruit needs to stop -- more than 1 fruit (e.g. banana or apple or orange) per adult is excessive in terms of sugar.

Finally, not only sugar, low sodium levels need to be enforced.

Would also be nice to charge 100% tax on deep fried items and fatty products such as cheese and white rice (in developed nations).

Frankly speaking, all unhealthy foods should be sold with a clear and bold "THIS FOOD PRODUCT IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH" type of warning -- similar to labels on cigarettes.

It is not about being a nanny state but rather than keeping our generations and humanity healthy. For far too long the greedy, unethical food corporations have been profiting off our health. This has caused untold misery for countless people around the World - not only diabetes and heart attacks but even forms of cancers are linked to unhealthy food.

<comment><USER4> >why not brutally enforce cut down of sugar in sweet items (including softdrinks, ice cream, chocolates, cakes, etc.) by 50%? To he11 with the taste - _sugar is as bad as cocaine when it comes to addiction._

No it's not.

>Not only artificial sugar but even the propaganda about stuffing our mouth with fruit needs to stop -- more than 1 fruit (e.g. banana or apple or orange) per adult is excessive in terms of sugar.

I'd love to see a source for that statement and you seem to be ignoring the effects of the fiber in apples and oranges on digestion (i.e. insulin spikes).

>Finally, not only sugar, low sodium levels need to be enforced.

Outdated and incorrect.

>Would also be nice to charge 100% tax on deep fried items and fatty products such as cheese and white rice (in developed nations).

And you completely lost me. There's nothing wrong with cheese and white rice. Like almost any food, in moderation they are fine and healthy. Also, I stay in very good shape; can I please opt out of your 2x tax on my occassional serving of french fries?

>Frankly speaking, all unhealthy foods should be sold with a clear and bold "THIS FOOD PRODUCT IS BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH" type of warning -- similar to labels on cigarettes.

Except the definition of what's bad for you seems to change about every ten years. Again, moderation is key.

<comment><USER5> > I'd love to see a source for that statement and you seem to be ignoring the > effects of the fiber in apples and oranges.

How many people peel their apples or take the seeds out of their oranges, which reduces the amount of fiber?

<comment><USER4> >How many people... take the seeds out of their oranges

...Everyone? Are you saying that you eat the seeds? What?

Either way, no one is developing diabetes because they eat three peeled apples on a daily basis. C'mon.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I eat the seeds ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

And yeah, assuming the rest of your diet is healthy, eating a few apples won't make you diabetic. The problem is a broader lack of knowledge about what is healthy. People will eat a lot of garbage, and then eat a few apples and think that it offsets all of the pizza/burgers/soda/etc they ate somehow.

Watch this show [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Eaters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Eaters)

<comment><USER4> >Yeah, I eat the seeds ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

Ha, well more power to you brother.

>And yeah, assuming the rest of your diet is healthy, eating a few apples won't make you diabetic. The problem is a broader lack of knowledge about what is healthy. People will eat a lot of garbage, and then eat a few apples and think that it offsets all of the pizza/burgers/soda/etc they ate somehow.

Sure, people tend to be pretty ignorant about how this stuff works on any level. When I see someone talk about fibrous fruit in the same vein as refined sugar though... I feel someone has to call that out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Cardiovascular disease afflicts about 122 million people and causes roughly 840,000 deaths each year, or about 2,300 deaths each day. Three in four adults are overweight or obese. More Americans are sick, in other words, than are healthy.

Jesus Christ. Aside from many of the obvious causes I think the public just has no idea what a "good" scientifically supported eating habit looks like. They turn to fad diets that go around social media. Their heart is in the right place but it's become difficult to determine BS from scientifically supported habits- even on this site I see fad diets being promoted. Internet searches usually turn up blogs touting fad diets and not real science. The deck is stacked against the average citizen in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER14> To get people eating more healthily you have to get them accustomed to eating healthy dishes. In India a go-to meal might be various curries with legumes and vegetables. In Japan an everyday meal might include grilled fish and tofu soup. In America many people default to foods like fatty ribs and butter-laden mashed potatoes.

They may want to eat healthier but people turn to foods out of familiarity and convenience. People don't have time to always think of new ways to eat vegetables. When you encourage Americans to eat more vegetables many will instantly think MORE SALAD. I mean salad is great but it's not enjoyable all the time.

You can think of different food cultures as providing different proportions of nutrients. American schools should introduce kids to food from other parts of the world early on that taste great and are great for the body. If they default to tried and true "American" foods like burgers and pizza, they prepare young people for a lifetime of unhealthy eating.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is way to radical to ever actually be tried, but sometimes I think what we need to do is put taxes or subsidies on pretty much everything that has calories to make it so that all foods cost the same per calorie to the eater.

That would make keeping track of your calories a lot easier, which may make it easier for most people to get to and maintain a healthy weight.

It would probably also result in healthier eating for most people. When you see that a big sugary soda takes up the same amount of your food budget as a nice big steak, you are probably going to drink less sugary soda. To avoid feeling hungry at the end of the day, you'll shift to more foods that make you feel full without giving a lot of calories, and/or to foods that provide high satiety.

<comment><USER16> IMHO, Calorie is an awfull unit when it comes to nutritions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm likely slightly biased due to recency (I'm researching the effect of tobacco taxes in LMIC's) but I think the tax component is critical here. It's not strongly emphasized here but as it's coming more into vogue, sin (or as they're rebranding) health taxes, are one of the more effective ways to get people to cut down on using something. I don't have the data on the company side, just the consumer side, but if you look to other inelastic markets such as tobacco, increased taxes have been massively effective. Add to this the fact that the higher taxes on these goods can also lead not just to reduced health care costs for individuals and the nation, but also to increased revenues that can be allocated for net positive uses. It'll also likely be more effective pound for pound than tobacco taxes because (well, I'm just wildly speculating here) I can't imagine Kellogg's and Kraft engaging in some of the schemes that the tobacco companies do to avoid taxes.

<comment><USER18> Increased taxes on sugary drinks in Seattle have not led to a decrease in consumption.

The consumption appears to be growing faster than the population.

[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/drink- les...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/drink-less-soda- the-sugar-tax-is-seattles-fastest-growing-revenue-source-for-2019/)

<comment><USER19> From the article:

 _> But by definition and by its main purpose, this tax should erode over time. If the revenues don't start dropping, at least relative to population growth, then it just isn't working._

This is an easy statistical mistake to make. He is comparing today's consumption to the past and declaring failure because the today isn't better. But the correct comparison to make is today versus _the alternate today we would have now if the tax had not been passed._

It may be that sugary drink consumption has gone up, but would have gone up _even more_ had the tax not been passed. In that case, the tax is a success.

Of course, figuring out how to estimate and measure an alternate timeline is hard. But that's what you have to try to do to make sound choices.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Lots of plonking pronunciations about "what humans should eat" in the comments here. Not everyone needs the same diet; sure there's some gross classifications we can make but any individuals level of "too much" sugar will be different from another's. There's little concern for this in most discussion of nutrition.

I survive on meat, cheese, and refined sugars, chiefly dextrose. I wouldn't recommend my diet even to those with my medical condition, universally; but it does work for me. Most of the dietary advice thrown so confidently on this thread would kill me quick.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a theory that added food sugar makes people more aggressive as that what is happening in monkeys. Could sugar have the same effect in humans? Reason human and monkey dna are quite similar.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/monkeys- bann...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/monkeys-banned-from- eating-bananas-at-devon-zoo-9058856.html)

<comment><USER5> Any stimulant is likely to make you act more aggressively.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One of the interesting things mentioned here but not really explored is the claim that custom provided meals according to health needs delivered to the home actually saves money.

Does anyone know if this is true and where this came from?

</comment><comment><USER6> There's no inherent reason that new technologies will increase costs.

They are often introduced with high prices, but a closer look also often shows that they are still cheaper than the care they replace.

</comment><comment><USER23> Watch "fed up" and "cowspiracy" on netflix about how powerful the food industry is to shut all this down, they rather you get ill and buy more meds

</comment><comment><USER24> The ideas in "Sustainable"[1] are a good start.

[1] [https://sustainablefoodfilm.com/](https://sustainablefoodfilm.com/)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm noticing this in my peer group. Folks way too young to be having serious health issues dying or seriously sick, all diet related.

</comment><comment><USER26> Coca-Cola is gonna do a counter study with findings that shows health benefits of drinking Coke™

</comment><comment><USER27> any way I can read this without a paywall?

<comment><USER28> Try clicking on the 'web' link under the HN title and going through the google search results page.

<comment><USER27> got it, thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> It is sad that the photo illustrating this article shows cheeseburgers. Cheeseburgers haven't killed anybody. Cheeseburgers are not junk-food. Stop making amalgams.

<comment><USER30> Highly processed flour bun. Processed cheese. One cheeseburger is basically a quarter of your fat and sodium for the day.

Agreed that the large soda that many wash that cheeseburger down with is certainly worse (320 calories of pure sugar), but they are certainly junk food.

<comment><USER31> > _" Highly processed flour bun. Processed cheese"_

If you choose to make a cheeseburger out of that sort of garbage, that's on you.

> _" One cheeseburger is basically a quarter of your fat and sodium for the > day."_

A cheeseburger is also one third of the meals I might eat in a day, so if anything, one fourth of my daily sodium and fat intake is too little.

<comment><USER30> Those WERE the cheeseburgers in the photo. Those are the garbage cheeseburgers we are talking about.

If you make a burger out of lean ground chuck, a whole grain bun and real cheese that is a different discussion.

Also, the burgers pictured (McDonald's cheeseburgers) are only ~250 calories, so I don't see how that is one-quarter of your daily food intake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's sort of ironic that the NYT decided to caption a shot of a soda fountain calling for more taxes on sugary drinks when the high fructose corn syrup is only so cheap in the first place because of subsidies. Maybe instead of subsidizing on one end and taxing the other we could just stop subsidizing unhealthy foods?

<comment><USER33> Perverse incentives. Corn farmers are in Iowa. Iowa is where presidential elections start [1], and several Congressional reps are from. Hence, the need to pander to these folks and their biofuel and ag subsidies if your run for office touches Iowa ag.

If you can't dissuade unhealthy subsidies as a state or other jurisdiction, you're only left with enacting your own opposite disincentives. Farmers are going to hold onto their subsidies to the bitter end, no different than fossil fuel/O&G industry. I'm always surprised when people assume these economic actors would do the "right thing" voluntarily.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_caucuses)

<comment><USER32> The Presidential caucus may have something to do with it but "and several Congressional reps are from" makes it sound like they have disproportionate representation in Congress, or don't deserve representation. Iowa has 4 reps. California, for comparison, has 48. I don't think those 4 reps are the reason for these subsidies. Maybe the Caucus makes it a political third rail. I think most voters are simply ignorant of the situation, however. That ignorance could be alleviated by better reporting by large organizations like the NYT.

<comment><USER10> > and several Congressional reps are from" makes it sound like they have > disproportionate representation in Congress

They do, specifically in the upper house of Congress: Iowa has about one Senator per 1.55 million people; the US as a whole has about 1 per 3.3 million, California has less than one per 19 million.

> Iowa has 4 reps. California, for comparison, has 48.

Actually, California has 53 seats in the House, but the House is approximately proportional to population; while there is a pretty big range in representation ratios for the songle-district states because of the limits of whole representatives, the real ddisproportion in Congress is in the Senate.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Life Behind the Stacks: The Secret Apartments of New York Libraries - <AUTHOR> http://www.6sqft.com/life-behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-of-new-york-libraries/ <comment><USER2> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.6sqft.com/life- behind-the-stacks-the-secret-apartments-of-new-york-libraries/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Tangentially, but I love the aesthetics of having lot of books on shelves, but now that's clearly obsolete with digital libraries. In the future, digital e-books may be superior to traditional books in all the way it matters, even.

<comment><USER4> I like the smell of old books. I also like the ability to flip back and forth through a reference book.

I also speak as a person who does about 98% of his reading on ebooks.

I don't get why ebook makers don't have a proper "bookshelf" display of the ebooks. Arggh.

<comment><USER4> I've used maybe 20 different ereaders on various devices. Pretty much all of them have some stupid fatal flaw on them. None of the vendors ever respond to my suggestions.

1\. touchscreens and eink do not mix. give me fwd/back buttons

2\. the newer kindle can only remember your last read place in one pdf. Open another pdf, bam, you're reset back to the beginning on the other! This makes me furious.

3\. Windows' pdf reader ups the ante by remembering the place in the last 4 pdfs you were reading. Open a 5th, and the oldest one gets pushed off the bed. You'd think with a 512G machine there'd be enough memory to remember 5, maybe even 6!

4\. no MicroSD slot in most of 'em

5\. miserable bookshelf display. Come on, how hard can this be? Just look at a real bookshelf. Do it like that. Click on the 'spine', and you can then see the front and back covers. I'd like to sort the bookshelf by a 'star' rating I assign myself, so I remember which ones I want to read next.

6\. some correctly display the first page of the book as the thumbnail. Some display a stupid generic PDF logo. It makes you want to scream.

7\. Microsoft does even worse, if you add a folder.jpg of the cover, it warps it into some ridiculous trapezoid, surrounded by so much whitespace you have to do lots of scrolling.

8\. The Kindle DX has this stupid toggle button that sticks up so it's easily busted off.

Amazon got it (mostly) right with the ancient Kindle 3 (the keyboard one) and my beloved Kindle DX. I am very careful with the DX so I don't damage that button! I regularly buy their newer Kindles, and they just wind up in a drawer somewhere or given away as I go back to the old ones.

iBooks in the iPhone is pretty good, except for the small screen, which is uncomfortable for dedicated reading. The bookshelf view is barely acceptable, still making poor use of the screen real estate. I suppose getting an iPad would fix that. Battery life is an issue for it.

<comment><USER4> Ebook dev departments ought to have a checklist entitled "Critical Features List". For example, Windows 7 had a PDF reader that incredibly forgot to have a method to go to page N. Can you imagine furiously swiping the touchscreen trying to get to page 462 of a 700 page PDF? The next update, that was fixed :-)

<comment><USER5> Ya theres another issue, sometimes on my textbooks the page that is in the book (ex pg 100) is not the same as the page in the application (ex pg 107) this causes issues esp. because sometimes their way off. that would be a must have fix.

<comment><USER4> The Kindle e-format has a way to embed page numbers that correspond to the physical book. It's optional, though, and you can blame the ebook author if it wasn't done or wasn't done right.

<comment><USER5> yeah thats true, but most text books pdfs that are passed around in higher education are not from the publisher, if you are picking up what I'm putting down. >.>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This may also be a way to reduce vandalism. E.g. in France, libraries are a favorite target during riots, apparently as they are seen to represent the state: [http://www.booksandideas.net/Why-are-people-setting-fire- to....](http://www.booksandideas.net/Why-are-people-setting-fire-to.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> That sounds like a pretty fun job, actually. I've always had a knack for mechanical things, I write software, I use software, and I don't mind a fair amount of on-call if it's in my own house. Where do I sign up?</comment>


Show HN: Feedsearch – An API for finding RSS feeds on websites - <AUTHOR> https://feedsearch.dev <comment><AUTHOR> OP here, I've been working on and off on some version of an RSS feed search library for a few years. RSS is still an incredibly useful tool, and it's a bit sad that the ecosystem isn't nearly as vibrant as it used to be. The library that this site runs on is available at [https://github.com/DBeath/feedsearch- crawler](https://github.com/DBeath/feedsearch-crawler) and pull requests or suggestions are welcome.

<comment><USER2> Are you also going to support JSON feeds?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, the search supports RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds. There's an example using jsonfeed.org, but other than that I haven't actually seen any JSON feeds in the wild.

<comment><USER2> [http://plurrrr.com/feed.json](http://plurrrr.com/feed.json) ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be great if this was a bookmarklet!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, yeah, I've been thinking about it. A bookmarklet is the next task now.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can you recommend some quality videos on C language? - <AUTHOR> I made a quick search on youtube and only basic tutorials showed up <comment><USER2> One answer, and it is solved: on iTunes, under Podcasts, search for a Stanford course called "Programming Paradigms." The first few lectures by Jerry Cain cover C and he is great at getting down to the detail and really clarifying the fundamentals such as pointers.

From a CS perspective, it's a basic introductory class, but the level of detail means that following this course will get you very clear on C as well as what you need to understand before C like memory layout.</comment>


Groupon considers sale to Google or fundraising - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/20/BUFU1GENAB.DTL <comment><USER2> If I were heading Groupon, I'd absolutely sell.

They are the market leader by far, their valuation is high right now, but there are some well funded competitors just coming into the space. Most importantly, their customers have low switching costs.

What's to stop them from losing 30% of their customers to AOL, Yahoo, or Yelp once these new entrants ramp up their operations?

Sell now, while they have the stratospheric valuation and the leverage & profitability to defend that value.

<comment><USER3> Or facebook...I still haven't figured out why facebook hasn't stepped into this space yet. They have the distribution, they just need the marketers in select regions.

<comment><USER4> They are. Though I don't use facebook enough to really know if it makes sense.

Facebook Places:

<http://www.facebook.com/places/>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1616082>

Facebook Deals:

<http://www.facebook.com/blog.php?post=446183422130>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865817>

EDIT: Updated style.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fundraising? I thought they were making money hand over fist.

What is up with all these Silicon Valley "success" stories that can't get profitable enough to sustain themselves w/o more financing (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Mint, etc).

Fundraising is fine early on, but these companies are pretty big and mature. When do you actually start turning a profit? We have some weird definitions of success in the valley.

<comment><USER6> Amazon was losing money for the first 7 years of its existence. It didn't turn a profit until 2001, a full 6 years after it had sold its first book.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Groupon's "flash in the pan" days are behind it. They created a new niche on the Internet and now, a very large number of clones are nipping at their heels.

Online, Groupon's business is about leadgen. Offline, Groupon's business is about selling the exposure they can give to a local business. Both their online leads and their access to offline local businesses are quickly being diluted.

If Groupon takes funding (for the right reasons), they will have thought up a great new product that contributes to the new vertical they have created in a unique, limited way. Based on their "Groupon Stores" idea, I don't think that they have have this in them.

I wrote a blog article a while ago that describes what I think is the only natural course for Groupon: [http://robisit.com/idea-of-the-day-saturate-the- groupon-mode...](http://robisit.com/idea-of-the-day-saturate-the-groupon- model/)

In my mind, Groupon needs to do what they've been doing. They need to move hard and fast as far into every hyper local market that they can. They need to refine their leadgen, their delivery and their formula for local businesses to succeed.

As an outsider looking in, I don't think that Groupon has the capability to move hard or fast enough. As a result of these things, I think that Groupon should either sell now or obtain enough funding to hire a significant number of sales people. Personally, I'd sell.</comment>


Megaupload Is Dead. Long Live Mega - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/10/megaupload-mega/

<comment><USER2> Wow. Its just so incredibly obvious that this is just MegaUpload in a new form and that the entire point is to allow sharing of copyrighted data. Kim is hanging this whole thing on plausible deniability but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what's really going on. This infuriates me. Sharing copyrighted files isn't what pisses me off. What does is the arrogance of Dotcom to try to pass this thing off like its for legit sharing of files. We have Google Drive, Dropbox, Box.net, Amazon's thing, iCloud and a billion others and no one really messes with them. There's no doubt in my mind that those services are storing some copyrighted data but they don't get messed with because they're truly legit. The feds didn't go after MegaUpload because it allowed people to share files that may or may not be copyrighted. It did so because the worst kept secret on the web was that if you want to download the new Lady Gaga single you could probably find it pretty easily on MegaUpload because that's basically what everyone was using it for. I honestly have no qualms about not backing up my claims with specific examples and evidence in this case because everyone here knows what was going on at MegaUpload and anyone trying to deny is either twisting their minds into a preztel with the mental gymnastics they'd have to do to convince them otherwise or they're just outright lying. I said it.

So now that they have this new approach I doubt they'll be successful. Because of the way the new Mega is set up you can't search for content. Allowing the ability to search for content would necessitate getting rid of their whole privacy scheme. I predict that the new Mega could still be used to share copyrighted files but the onus will be on third parties to keep track of such files in a database or something in order to provide links to people searching or it can just become a safe place to store your copyrighted files and share them on a case by case basis (through email, links on forums, or wherever). But if this really is supposed to be a legit service, which it isn't (come on, you know it), then I don't see how it can gain market share or mind share given the alternatives we already have had for a while now.

<comment><USER3> Your own post undermines your point.

"...easily on MegaUpload _because that's basically what everyone was using it for_ "

You can never blame the creators of a tool for what their users do. Not to rehash an old argument, but you don't blame suitcase manufacturers for making suitcases that criminals use for convenient cash lockboxes. You can't blame a knife maker because a housewife stabbed her husband.

Unless you can empirically prove that MegaUpload courted people to break copyright I don't see what case you have. All of your "claims" seem to be anecdotal bluster, couched in a defensive posture to automatically discredit anyone who disagrees.

I find it so hard to comprehend that people refuse to believe that MegaUpload was never used for legitimate reasons. It's widely known that MegaUpload was well used in the corporate world[1], however it's unfortunate that no specific companies (to my knowledge) have come forward publicly. As a personal aside, I used it many times to send files that were too large for email to classmates and friends.

Beyond all of that, you are overlooking the problem. Attacking filesharing websites is simply slapping a band-aid over a symptom. The websites will continue to pop up, there is a demand and someone is going to supply it. Plus, it's incredibly easy to set up your own file-sharing website... I expect it won't be too soon before we start seeing people rolling their own just like blogs today (though admittedly not nearly as widespread).

We need to be addressing the real issue. Admittedly, I don't have a solution to "piracy" on a grand scale, however I can certainly say actions like targeting MegaUpload and then vilifying a business that has yet to even land a single customer over it's first press release definitely _do not_ help the issue.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/01/before-shutdown- mega...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/01/before-shutdown-megaupload- ate-up-more-corporate-bandwidth-than-dropbox/)

Edit: phrasing

<comment><USER4> As for blaming the tool for what the users do: I believe this has been tested in court with the Sony vs. Universal City Studios case (The Betamax case).

Since the recorder wasn't explicitly made for breaking the law, the makes of the recorder can't be held accountable.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Univer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc).

<comment><USER5> Also, every gun and tobacco manufacturer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My inner civil libertarian cheers at this, although one wonders how useful a public storage locker is without any associated content discovery tools.

But my inner policeman hesitates. If actual bad guys (organized crime, drug cartels, spies, terrorists, governments, script kiddies, or anyone else working outside the law) can communicate and operate with impunity, the technology is not an unequivocally good thing. The broadly accepted way we deal with this is to have warrant-based interception and eavesdropping; it's hard to argue that our law enforcement services would best operate without any tools other than direct physical surveillance. So presumably even Mega would need to comply with legal wiretapping requests. Happily for Mega, and unhappily for law enforcement, doing it at the server doesn't get them anything with this scheme. But that simply compels law enforcement to get much more invasive, in a way that's hard for citizens to monitor: Find a way to install eavesdropping tools on the suspect's machine so access is gained before encryption.

I'm not sure where all this is headed; it's a brave new world.

(Heading off potential replies about the growing use of warrantless wiretaps -- of course those are unacceptable. But wiretapping _with a warrant_ is a vital, crucial tool, and that's all I'm discussing here.)

<comment><USER7> > But my inner policeman hesitates. If actual bad guys (organized crime, drug > cartels, spies, terrorists, governments, script kiddies, or anyone else > working outside the law) can communicate and operate with impunity

This tool is still just a cyber-locker, it doesn't allow you to launch a ddos attack, or run scripts, or even communicate, you need a channel of communication established elsewhere to pass the keys. It's just an easier way to share files with people you're already communicating with in some manner.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This will probably go the way of Aimster. IE: You can't play dumb to shield yourself while knowingly assisting copyright infringement.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Aimster_Copyright_Litigat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_re_Aimster_Copyright_Litigation)

 _The court held that in this case the users of the systems were the direct infringers, these who are ignorant or more commonly disdainful of copyright and in any event discount the likelihood of being sued or prosecuted for copyright infringement, however companies such as Aimster that facilitate their infringement, even if they are not themselves direct infringers can be liable for copyright violations as contributory infringers._

<comment><USER9> (IANAL)

The key question is whether Mega is practicing "Willful Blindness" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness>) by providing this service. The players involved, especially Dotcom, seem to have already "tainted" themselves as being _knowledgeable_ of infringement through their involvement in MegaUpload. So in what way is their "design" of a client-side encrypted system different from "designing" a drug trafficking briefcase so that the courier doesn't have a key? If the courier/service has reason to believe that the service is being used for copyright infringement, it could be argued that they are being criminally negligent by offering such a service.

<comment><USER10> If the postal service invented physical systems that didn't allow mail to be opened in transit, would you accuse the postmaster general of facilitating criminal conspiracies?

All they are doing is keeping private communication really private.

What is the difference between this and encrypted email? Hint, you can break a large file into many chunks of email too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think it's a conspiracy directed by an occult media producer's conclave to destroy the public image of file-sharing in general using this guy's butt-ugly face...

(No really, I'd rather hear more about what happened to the poor Demonoid guys than see his face taking up more media space - it's obvious that he likes publicity even more than money so even the FBI just gave him what he wanted!)

</comment><comment><USER12> Both Megaupload and The Pirate Bay have recently announced plans to use redundant datacenters in a multi-country approach to eliminate downtime.

Why would a person host their entire company from one location, like AWS US- East?

<comment><USER13> In order to minimize complexity in your set up maybe?

<comment><USER14> As well as to avoid paying transfer fees between regions. If you're querying a database in a different region, you're gonna have a bad time.

<comment><USER15> Wouldn't you have a DB set up in each location with some sort of replication? So there would be DB -> DB log shipping inter-region but everything else would be intra-region.

<comment><USER14> That can still add up a ton. I was thinking regional sharding where you might end up having records in a different region that are local to 'that region' queried by other regions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "the so-called Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm" What?

<comment><USER17> AES?

<comment><USER16> I found the "so-called" bit weird.

<comment><USER18> I think they were using so called in the traditional sense rather than the colloquial sense. Rather than being sarcastic like is common with that phrase, they meant "using what is known as the Advanced Encryption Standard".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It sounds like a lot of the things that SpiderOak (<https://spideroak.com/>) is doing.

</comment><comment><USER20> _> Mega will also grant direct access to their servers for entities such as film studios, allowing them to remove copyright-infringing material themselves._

How? Is this if the person that uploaded the file is openly distributing the key?

<comment><USER21> I guess this was a joke. They can look through the data stored on the servers for as long as they want; they won't find anything because they don't have the keys.

<comment><USER22> But they will have the keys if something is being widely distributed.

<comment><USER21> So they can pop in and remove it, just to have it reappear ten times. It will be completely futile waste of time, unless Mega lets them automate this process somehow.

<comment><USER22> Chances are that the most widely distributed things will be on centralized sites (e.g. ThePirateBay). The RIAA/MPAA could probably easily write a bot to scrape these sites for access information and then go into MegaEncryptedUpload and remove the files.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Users are required to hand over encryption keys in several countries, including the UK. Worse, encryption keys are likely to find their way to Google ("check out this great $POPULAR_ARTIST song: www.mega.com/mykey"), so proving that Mega hosts lots of infringing content will be really easy. Finally, Mega can easily detect such files just by looking at the access patterns (10MB plus lots of hits from all over the world? Likely pirated MP3.)

Of course, all of this assumes that they get the crypto right in the first place.

<comment><USER24> >Mega can easily detect such files just by looking at the access patterns (10MB plus lots of hits from all over the world? Likely pirated MP3.)

How is that pattern any different from a musician legitimately distributing an mp3?

<comment><USER23> Musicians legitimately distributing their songs don't get any hits. (No musician likely to generate a pirate-ish number of hits is going to use Mega to distribute the song - people who make money don't send their users to sites with completely different branding.)

<comment><USER24> You can say that, but there's no way to prove it short of commissioning a study. I don't think the DMCA requires you to hire statisticians to investigate the usage patterns of your site.

And what if someone uploads a wikileaks like pdf that gets downloaded by thousands of people? Is that going to get automatically shut off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So would this be AES written in JS, or an extension?

<comment><USER26> AES JS libraries do exist: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES_implementations#Javascript>

<comment><USER27> But there is no way to use that to download a file.

Javascript has no way to output data that is then saved to disk.

It will have to be a browser extension or an offline tool (download the encrypted file, decrypt it once you are done).

However I shudder to think about how much malware people are going to get from sites purporting to make "special megaupload decryption tools".

<comment><USER28> > Javascript has no way to output data that is then saved to disk.

First, there's HTML5 window.saveAs which apparently nobody has implemented. Second, you can always fall back to some swf.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2897619/using- html5-javas...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2897619/using- html5-javascript-to-generate-and-save-a-file)

<comment><USER26> <https://github.com/eligrey/FileSaver.js>

_FileSaver.js implements the W3C saveAs() FileSaver interface in browsers that do not natively support it._

No IE support, but what's the intersection of Mega users and IE users?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As someone who never used Megaupload how did it differ from Dropbox/google drive/etc in terms of being good for piracy?

<comment><USER29> Anything that allows the free flow of information is good for copyright infringement, but when you are contorting Laws in absurd perverse ways its better to have a fat ugly obnoxious guy on the receiving end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> that's all good and well, except for it to resemble the previous model, there would need to be a mechanism for key exchange and search by title => key, which would need to move underground. without a search facility it loses most of its piracy value.

<comment><USER12> If Mega doesn't do that, another group will. Then that group will be partially liable too.

Part of the point of this is to make the problem too big to raid, too many people to litigate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> how are they going to implement the browser based AES on files before/while they are uploaded?</comment>


Telegram Suffers DDOS, Criticism For Enabling Human Rights Lawyers In China - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/13/did-china-take-down-messaging-app-telegram/ <comment><USER2> You can't be big in China if you don't have local contacts. If you are a small startup or a small company, you are fine. But if you are a big one, you will be blocked unless you have political contacts. Then, once your company is blocked; a Chinese company is going to create the exact same service but with a lot of censure added to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe it is now time for them to open the server side so we can run our own federated nodes.

They did say that they may open up the server side. Maybe this is the only way to keep the network from running and preventing governments from blocking it. [1]

[1] [https://telegram.org/faq](https://telegram.org/faq)

<comment><USER4> I like Telegram and that's why I wouldn't want it to happen. This would result in a mess, similar to Blockchain currencies. Suddenly everyone thinks they need to roll their own. That is, unless everyone would still communicate on the same platform, but I don't think Telegram was built with distributed servers in mind.

<comment><USER3> I am not sure that this would result in everyone trying to roll out their own. The reason that is happening with bitcoin is because of the direct possibility of financial gain.

BitTorrent works well and has not split into hundreds of clone protocols.

The way skype used to work may also be a possibility where there are super nodes outside of the main cloud.

<comment><USER5> > The way skype used to work

Those were the good ole days... I hate the new skype.

Also, it's 2015, can Skype stop leaking subscriber IP information? Someone can resolve your IP from your username without even messaging or adding you as a friend. Seems like a design flaw to me

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To me the more interesting thing is that the Chinese government is making such a big deal about a relatively unknown app such as Telegram, but isn't saying or doing anything at all about iMessage, which is _supposed_ to be end-to-end encrypted (by default even, unlike Telegram).

Are you telling me that those same lawyers don't have iPhones and don't use iMessage even more than they do Telegram? Because I don't believe that.

So either the Chinese government has just recognized there's nothing they can do about banning Apple's iMessage - or Apple already provides them with a way to look at iMessages.

I'm inclining to believe it's more the latter.

<comment><USER7> >> Are you telling me that those same lawyers don't have iPhones

SUDDENLY, you know nothing about China and other developing & 3rd world countries.

<comment><USER8> Not sure what you mean but Apple sells more iPhones in China than the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The United States censors links to foreign propaganda as well. They DDOS sites sometimes, especially ISIL-active forums, etc. I don't know if they DDOS state sponsored sites - they are probably more stealthy (something the Chinese don't care about).

<comment><USER9> It's true. Downvotes don't change that.

<comment><USER10> Downvotes for making an irrelevant _tu quoque_ don't imply people disagree with your statement.

<comment><USER9> Well it's not irrelevant tu quoque.

Telegram is like ZunZuneo and other initiatives by Western governments to force their adversary to choose to either censor something and take a PR hit or have their countrymen radicalised.

I ought to have made that link clear. I apologize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If China wants to do it, they will just block Telegram servers. Why bother to DDOS?

<comment><USER12> Because people would like to think China as a single entity acting in a clear single minded way using a single method.

The fact is China is the largest bureaucratic country, the DDoS may or may not coming from any administrative authority layer, or just business strategy to spur your competition to anti-China side, so government will act accordingly and take care the competition for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised Telegram hasn't done anything about this yet, as they have been having DDoS attacks since September 2014.

<comment><USER14> And what can they do against this exactly?

<comment><USER15> Install [http://wiki.debian.org/iptables](http://wiki.debian.org/iptables)

<comment><USER13> Is that sarcasm, or are you being serious?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Not much they could do about this but it's resulting in a lot of bad reviews on the app stores. It would be in their interest to do better with communication to users. They are in the communication sector after all!

Maybe they should respond to the reviews directly in the app stores or put something in the app which explains what is going on. Not sure if they have the ability to broadcast message affected users but it could be as simple as implementing a better connection error message. Most of their users aren't going to read their blog or the tech press.</comment>


Does my project have any value? - <AUTHOR>

This is a post about a personal project, so if you lose interest halfway, I apologize. This is not a review-my-website post, I'm not looking for usability advice (yet).
Over the past few years I've worked on a browser game project. It's very niche and therefore very small, and thereby not financially interesting (current revenue is about $250 per year). It does however have a loyal following of a couple hundred people who use the game site on a daily basis. I've been wondering whether I should increase my dedication to this project (I've been slacking on it the past half year) or just let it be in its current state. Ideally I'd like to get some decent revenue out of this. It's probably not feasible to get a full-time income out of it, but I'd surely appreciate a nice extra on the side to justify the time I put in it.
The project is a political browser game. It simulates elections in which you control a party, and you vote on bills and such to establish yourself in the political landscape. I have a "Classic" version (up since '05) and an alpha of the new version (up since '08). The code base is huge so it's been a pretty large investment in terms of hours.
So I'll evaluate my project's pros and cons here:
Cons
* The website looks like crap. Even the new version looks unprofessional. I'm not a designer, but I do realize that its looks need a lot of work. I'm not really looking for usability advice here since that would take up a whole thread on itself.
* It's a niche subject, which means it can't scale indefinitely.
* Gameplay for a single game world actually depends on <1000 player population, so it's really not scaling-friendly.
* I could be putting my time into something more dollar-efficient.
* Time-intensive: politics can be controversial and personal, so a lot of effort goes into moderation. This is mostly handled by the community though.
* Aside from google ads, the occasional donation and wacky one-time actions like selling a virtual island, there's no business model.
Pros
* Very dedicated player base (players typically hang out for years).
* One of a kind: it's the only political game that offers this kind of depth. Competing games in the same space are little more than glorified social networks and my players appreciate the difference.
* I get around 10,000 page views and 300 uniques per day. That's peanuts, but it's a lot more than zero.
* I like the project personally, but I often doubt whether the hours I invest are at all justified.
* As stated above, there is some revenue, though neglegible.
The game site is http://www.particracy.net/ Make sure to check out both the Classic and Alpha versions.
Thanks for the feedback. <comment><USER2> It's a political game. You can already make inferences about the average age, education and income of your players. Run various ads and do A/B tests, keep what works.

You traffic is not as bad as you think. If you sold political satire books, for example, at a $5 commission each and 1 sales a week, that's another $240 annually. If you target the ads geographically, you can catch both local and federal election seasons.

Try to infer something about the political affiliation of your players and you can hit them with even more targeted ads. Show leftists merchandise to the progressives, and rightwing merchandise to the conservatives.

P.S. I am in the online advertising, yield optimization and targeting industry. Please excuse me if I sound just a tad bit too creepy :-P

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right in that there's a wealth of data I can use. In fact, my game already knows the political affiliation of the player (or rather: the affiliation he's playing, which is often similar).

But how do you go about finding affiliates for advertising? I wouldn't even know where to start. Do I find a publisher of political literature and straight up email them? Or are there proper channels to go about this?

The google ads it shows are terribly irrelevant, so there's indeed a lot of room for optimization here.

<comment><USER2> Google is really dumb and we have beat them in the lab so bad, it's not even funny.

If you want to sign up for our ad delivery platform, click on my profile and find my email therein. But here is what you can do to get started: political advertising is typically seasonal, it's not an election season (in the U.S.) so you can weather the storm by signing up for an Amazon affiliate account and selling political books. Your classifier function would be very simple, it's basically a parity predicate; someone is either right wing or left wing. Assign a probability that someone is, say, left wing, to a few conditions and add them up then divide by their count (frequentist statistics, bayesian system is even more powerful.) Once you determine what someone is, display a few amazon book ads in rotation. After a month or so, remove the least performing 1/2 of the books and ad new ones.

This is the dumbest and most straightforward ad delivery platform. Feel free to talk to me in private for more sophisticated stuff :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm definitely interested. I've contacted you by mail (let me know if the mail didn't arrive).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You might want to have a look at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Loathing> \- this is another browser based game that's quite successful despite using frames and XKCD-like graphics. Plus they get by on donations as well as merchandise.

Also congrats on getting this far with your project, all I have to show for my spare time for the past few years is a reddit account full of sarcastic comments.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see your point. KoL is a complete different genre of game, but it's similar in that it looks like it was designed more than a decade ago, just like my game. For niche webgames that offer a little more depth, graphics seem to be far less important. Still, I'd like to invest some time in making it look more professional, if only to be able to show it to people without making excuses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 200 players at $5/month is $12,000 a year.

"it was always our intent to make an experience accessible to anyone interested in politics and strategy gaming, the game is still free"

If there is anyone who, seriously, can't afford $5, nothing stops you from offering the game to them for free.

But $5 for many people is nothing. People spend $5 a _day_ at Starbucks without even thinking.

And it's not just about making money for you either. An income from the site gives you time to make it better, add additional games worlds, etc. To provide real service to your players.

<comment><AUTHOR> In theory, you are 100% right. In practice, if I do that, I'll scare 98% of my player base away. Most of them are high scool or college students, and don't even have a credit card. Maybe in a glorious future where micropayments are as trivial as email.

<comment><USER4> Interestingly, IMVU had the same issue: many of their target customers didn't have a credit card, and apparently they were able to get mobile phone payment to work for them [www.stanford.edu/class/e140/e140a/handouts/IMVU_Case_Draft.pdf]

But you're right, you need _some_ way of differentiating among your players; some have money and some don't. If you try to charge everyone you lose those who don't want to pay, but if you charge no one then you lose the revenue (and the benefits that would come to the site and for your players if you had revenue) that you'd get from the players who could pay.

What about a premium service? Anything nifty you could offer to paying customers, while the basic game remains free?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually I'm planning a premium service on the new version of the game. There are several small featurettes that, grouped together, could represent some added value. I'd estimate a conversion value in the low single digits for that (based on anecdotical questioning and prior donations), and obviously I can't charge much more than, say, $3 per month. That's the standard going rate for browser games' premium models.

It all boils down to scaling the game up though, as any form of revenue scales along. But before I can do that, I have to put still a lot of work in the new version, and sometimes I doubt whether it's all worth it.

<comment><USER4> What would make it worth it to you? I.e., is there some $/month revenue where you'd say, "yup, I wouldn't mind putting in the work if I were getting that"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent question. I've no idea how many hours I've put in it currently. If I add up the codebase of the classic version plus the under-development new version, I get to at least 150,000 lines of code (including comments and whitespace). I know LOC is a crappy metric, but it does give a sense of scope.

I haven't tracked the amount of manhours at all. Ten hours a week gives me 2000 over four years, that seems realistic (although a little low considering the amount of code). At market rate that would make the project cost about $100k but of course something is only worth what a buyer would pay.

To answer your question: I'd be a happy camper for a couple hundred each month. Enough to pay for expenses (hosting) and justify a day off from the day job. To spend on projects like this of course.

<comment><USER4> Sounds like your catch-22 is that you'd be willing to put in the programming if you knew it would pay off, but you're reluctant to put in the programming if it's not going to pay off.

So how about doing an experiment. The purpose of the experiment is to gather information, without doing any more programming. First explain to your players that you're going to run an experiment: you're looking for ways for the site to be self-supporting so it can continue to grow and meet the needs of its players. The experiment isn't going to affect game play, and that it's just an experiment: you'll take it down if it doesn't work out.

Every business faces the issue price differentiation between customers: some customers have little money and some have a lot, so how do you get the customers with money to pay more without turning away the customers who have little (or, in your case, no money).

For the experiment add a tiered membership: free (what you have now) and patron ($5/month). Both are identical in terms of gameplay (both for fairness and so you don't have to do any programming). By becoming a patron a member has their name listed on the homepage as a patron of Particracy (which is literally true). During new user sign up prominently display the patron option "you can become a patron for $5/month, or join for free". On the homepage above the patron list have a button "Join the Patrons of Particracy".

If anyone signs up, that tells you that there are people eager enough the support the game that they'll give you money even though they don't get any tangible extra features.

Next you might try running a Google ads campaign, max $5 total and max $0.05 per click, using a keyword of "political simulation game". This will deliver 100 people to your landing page. Track how many of the 100 become users (if any) and how many become patrons (if any). This will tell you how easy it will be to draw in new users when you have a way to make money.

Now you look at your conversion rate (is it 0%? 5%? 1%?) and get a sense of what it would take to get to $200/month (40 paying customers). For example, if your conversion rate is 1% then you'd need 4,000 customers to get the 40 paying ones. Then you can look at a) if you want to go for that, or b) do you think that doing things like more programming and adding the premium service you're thinking about might get the conversion rate up.

The point of the experiment isn't for it to make money by itself (though of course it will be nice if it did :), it is to gather information and to give you encouragement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Beijing-Tibet highway jam enters its 9th day, spans 100km - <AUTHOR> http://china.globaltimes.cn/society/2010-08/566070.html

<comment><USER2> The traffic jam occurs near the Beijing end on the Beijing-Tibet highway. I'm sure the Tibet end is fairly clear since they are couple thousands of miles apart (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Highway_109>). It's like the traffic jam near NYC on the SF-NYC highway (if there's one) having no impact on SF.

</comment><comment><USER3> Expressway?? the photo in that piece shows a one lane road with pedestrians walking along the sides.

<comment><USER4> That is an expressway in China.

Cars/carts/people can enter at any point on most expressways, so the average speed is poor at best and stop and go during busy times of the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> on the slashdot comments they were saying that the jam has lasted 9 days but it doesn't take that long to get through it. Rather there has been enough new traffic to sustain the event for 9 days.

</comment><comment><USER6> This one jammed for months: (Chinese text with video)

<http://news.qq.com/a/20100605/001157.htm>

</comment><comment><USER7> I know China's been trying to bring Tibet into the fold over the years, but calling just outside of Beijing "Tibet" is a bit of a stretch ;-)

<comment><USER7> The headline has been _changed_ since I posted. It said the jam was in Tibet when it clearly is not.

It's a shame there's no way to notice ninja edits on HN (like the "*" on Reddit) that put later responses out of context.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Custom vs. Template Website Tool. Results show 62% need a template site - <AUTHOR> http://labs.brolik.com/custom-vs-template-website

<comment><USER2> 62% need template? That's surprising. I'd love to see a case study on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is the long term plan.

We found 35.28% of participants need a custom website (21.55% probably and 13.73% definitely) while 31.78% of people definitely needed a template website and 29.78% probably needed a template website.

For the time being we're going to continue to collect data and plan on writing a full case study based upon our findings.</comment></comment>