A Guide to Deep Learning - <AUTHOR> http://yerevann.com/a-guide-to-deep-learning/ <comment><USER3> The primary thing missing from all of these guides is that you need to have two things for ML:

1\. A purpose for utilizing it

2\. A data set to train/act on

Without that, all you get are a bunch of shovels and picks, but no idea of what kind of wood/bricks you need or a plan for the house.

<comment><USER4> I will mention that you can get surprisingly far with just a little bit of labeled training data now. Transfer learning is a pretty powerful technique.

<comment><USER5> You still need to train a model on what you're transferring _from_. It's not like you can manufacture trained models out of thin air.

<comment><USER6> I think the idea is that, for example, you start with some pre-trained visual object-identification network, remove the final logistic-regression layer, and replace with a layer which you train your problem on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Everyone's into deep learning, but what would I actually _do_ with it? With some other field, like computer graphics, one can fairly quickly get a 3D cube spinning on their screen and know it has some relation to the special effects in the Star Wars movie they just saw. No one makes it obvious what the hobbyist can expect to do with deep learning or how it relates to the broader world.

<comment><USER8> Everyones into Graphics programming, but what would I actually _do_ with it?

The uses are myriad, you can build Star Wars Movies, you can build computer games. You can do CAD and 3D modelling and printing, you can visualize fluid simulations

But each is an entire field.

The same with Deep Learning -

You can do image classification for medical diagnosis. Self Driving Cars. Realtime Translation. OCR. You can model chemical reactions by doing latent space exploration. You can model gene-gene interactions. You can build a image recogniser to tell if your cat is on the couch. You can build an AI that plays GO, or any other system or game where the rewards are time-delayed and sparse. You can make it play Atari games.

You can stitch satellite images together. You can reconstruct parts of photos that are missing. You can colour black and white images. You can de-noise wind sounds from microphones. You can search for comets. You can monitor deforestation. You can count cars in car parks. You can search vast ocean areas for survivors. You can build security drones that fly around at night and look for anomalies. You can turn a webpage of unstructured text into structured query-able forms (see named entity recognition). You can create visual art (google: neural style transfer)

These are just a small drop of some of the cool things that are going on - <USER2> while it might be difficult for you to advance state of the art without a GPU cluster (just as it would be difficult to advance state of the art in Graphics programming) the hobbiest can certainly start in any of these fields, just pick one that inspires you.]

EDIT: I run a Deep Learning startup - if you want some pointers or help getting started, or would like advice don't hesitate to email me - it's in my profile :)

<comment><USER9> One of my partner's tasks as a legal assistant is to go through mountains of OCRed PDFs and classify them and extract pieces of data so that lawyers and paralegals can go through them more easily. Do you imagine deep learning would be an appropriate means of automating that, or is it overkill?

<comment><USER8> No not overkill at all - I think the first step is to augment the human so the machine helps them, then it can totally replace all of the laborious stuff as time passes.

Imagine something like: A deep network reduces a 20 page document to a summary of 4 or 5 sentences, you can click on these sentences to "expand" them out, eventually getting to the original text. Saving them from reading the whole document

A separate classifier automatically classifies the document into one of say, 20 categories (or whatever is appropriate).

A Deep Learning named entity recogniser extracts the Human names, Dates and times, Email addresses, Company Names, email addresses, Money amounts, and numbers from each document, then off to elasticsearch for indexing and easy searching.

Then we can start to play with higher level legal concepts that (for example) set precedent, or search for certain logical fallacies. (the next step past machine learning is machine reasoning - and it's starting to be possible now)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If links are broken for you, then turn of your adblocker, because he is measuring clicks with Google analytics and he's JS is broken thanks to the missing _ga_ function.

#issue reported

<comment><USER11> thanks for reporting. It should be fixed now

<comment><USER12> Hrant!! maloch, front page :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'll bite.

We see these being posted every week. Why?

<comment><USER11> Many people (especially students from universities) keep asking me and my coworkers at YerevaNN about good educational resources. They have different levels of math background, some want to study theory and watch visualizations, others want to play with the code before reading formulas..

At some point we understood it's better to spend some time and build a guide that will cover most of these questions (and, as always, we spent a lot more time on this than we expected)

<comment><USER14> I think OP is asking, why spend time writing another guide when there's plenty that suffice, including full books and papers on the topic?

<comment><USER11> I was looking for something that would answer common questions for some time, but couldn't find anything. Pointing students to research papers unfortunately doesn't work in most of the cases. Deep learning book is too hard for some and they want to see a comparison of different sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks really good, and an interesting wag to describe the landscape. Is it just my phone or are the links completely broken on phones?

<comment><USER16> Confirmed that links are inactive on my phone as well, probably because they don't seem to be prefaced with URI schemes (i.e. their [http://](http://) and [https://](https://) prefixes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> this is by far the most visually attractive list of deep learning resources i've seen. and they hit a lot of the main points.

</comment><comment><USER18> I didn't see k-means nearest neighbor in the list. Also, wouldn't a mathematical statistics be a prerequisite?

<comment><USER19> As far as I can tell, Deep learning in practice is pretty far ahead of the theory, so people are largely following their intuition around rather than being guided by theory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I saw stars indicate difficulty; do colors also have some meaning?

<comment><USER21> They contain resources from the same source. e.g. all the "green" content comes from [http://www.deeplearningbook.org/](http://www.deeplearningbook.org/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good consolidation @adamnemecek...</comment>


Object Oriented C - <AUTHOR> http://sagartewari01.com/object-oriented-c-constructors-and-destructors/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm making an attempt to acquire a better understanding of object-oriented programming with this series. Let me know if you have any suggestions or advice regarding the series.</comment>


Facebook warns GDPR could flatten or reduce European user count - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/facebook-gdpr-users/ <comment><USER2> That's too bad, you'd hope for a reduction.</comment>


Why the original JSON license is not free - <AUTHOR> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON

<comment><USER2> IBM had the same issue, and it was politely resolved. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866) "I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."</comment>


SHARD - A triple store built on top of Hadoop MapReduce - <AUTHOR> http://www.dist-systems.bbn.com/people/krohloff/shard.shtml

<comment><USER2> What's the best way to make sure it's nearly impossible for someone to find your datastore on Google? Name it Shard (I guess "replication," and "failover" would be just as bad). :-)

<comment><USER3> Hilarious! I should of thought of that! Here's a quick link for you in any case: <http://www.dist-systems.bbn.com/people/krohloff/shard.shtml></comment></comment>


Apple Kills the App Store Affiliate Program, and I Have No Idea What to Do - <AUTHOR> https://toucharcade.com/2018/08/01/apple-kills-the-app-store-affiliate-program-and-i-have-no-idea-what-we-are-going-to-do/ <comment><USER2> Affiliate programs are sometimes yanked out of the hands of people making big money on a individual basis. I read about a fellow that was making something like $100K per month from the amazon affiliate program and then one day without cause or reason it was revoked on that guy. Imagine having an insane lifestyle like that and then suddenly losing it.

There really isn't anything you can do to make your old business model work. Maybe you can sell your website.

It can be dangerous to rely on a 500 lb gorilla.

<comment><USER3> I would guess if they started linking to some other website instead of Amazon, they can get at least a healthy fraction of that amount.

<comment><USER2> The trick is finding a good affilate program or diversifying programs if it is allowed. I'm thinking of setting up an affiliate account with hosting providers with software I am working on. I have found that there are a lot of affiliate programs from a lot of different hosting providers. Problem with apps is there aren't very many stores. I make some money from Apple as an app developer but I don't expect that income to last for ever or even from month to month. It could vanish at any time and I got no recourse for it.

<comment><USER4> Seems especially problematic if the entire premise of your site is iOS games. It's not like there are many different stores selling iOS games...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found affiliates to be a complete pain in the backside, they will do almost anything to insert themselves into the transaction including offering cracked versions of my software. I can understand why Apple wants to kill its program.

</comment><comment><USER6> Meh. Apple is known to milk every possible penny from its customers and companies that develop open their platform as well.

I know this doesn't help, but: this is what you get if you decide to depend on Apple.

</comment><comment><USER7> Stop referring sales leads to Apple. They need to understand that you are sending them sales.</comment>


Attention founders: Here's how you respond to an unfair post about your company - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/30/attention-founders-heres-how-you-respond-to-an-unfair-post-about-your-company/

<comment><USER2> I'd like to point out that this is NOT an isolated incident for Ben. I've replied to the MailChimp newsletter before with my thoughts or questions and on multiple occasions have gotten a response back from Ben within an hour or two with a thoughtful, specific response to my email. I also sent a rant to him after we had some trouble with MailChimp and he apologized and worked to make it right within a day.

The lesson you should take away from Ben isn't how to respond to unfair post - it's that you should be always open to communication (positive or negative) and that you should respond as a polite, respectful human, not as a "company" voice.

As a result of my interactions with Ben and his incredible product, I'm a loyal MailChimp user and regularly recommend them to people looking to setup newsletters for their companies.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. With a great product, you'll think even better things about the company. If you have a buggy, not-so-great product, more can be forgiven. Lesson: always have great communication regardless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ben is one of few modern day startup founders who actually give a damn and take the time to respond to customer queries. We live in a society where the startup industry is overpopulated by pretentious Harvard drop-outs who think they have some kind of sense of entitlement and are revolutionaries. It's refreshing to see Ben is anything but a decent, humble and respectable guy who finds the time to write a well-thought out response to even the toughest of critics.

I tend to use Campaign Monitor for emails, but this makes me want to try Mailchimp because I've never fully given it a chance and the fact the company is being run by a decent guy makes me even more motivated to do so.

<comment><USER5> "pretentious Harvard drop-outs"

I have no idea who you're talking about. Could you please elaborate? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of some of the advice in "How to Make Friends and Influence People"; a very good book for teaching people how to deal with difficult situations (like criticism of things you're close to).

</comment><comment><USER7> A really good job there, he doesn't put down others at all, he just plays his strengths. Quite respectable.

</comment><comment><USER8> It has been my experience that technology is full of naysayers who have strong opinions (it matters not if those opinions are based on actual experience). ___You are doing it wrong... I would do it with ABC.... I would write that in XYZ. No one uses that database anymore... etc._ __You should expect to be contradicted and told you are wrong by a lot of people. I always listen to them and try to learn why they think that because a few of them have insight, but the majority just want to tell you how they would do if they were you. You should expect this sort of thing. It's going to happen a lot.

</comment><comment><USER9> Why the fuck does he use the work "fuck" only to censor it afterwards? You either use it completely or not at all.

<comment><USER10> It's possible it was uncensored in the original message, then censored when it was published to a broader audience.

<comment><USER11> But why use it at all? Casual swearing has very few positive benefits, especially since the rest of the email was well-written and expletive-free.

<comment><USER12> For the same reason it tends to get used in Alternate Rock? A way to say, "we both know we're hipper than the average dude, and can use this word to shock Joe Q Public while just adding an inside emphasis for us cool dudes who won't over react to a four character word". Or that could be me overinterpreting :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> nice example of how to respond factually and with grace

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree that Ben's response is excellent, but I want to focus on the other half of the interaction for a second. Ben needed to send that email because Paul wrote something ridiculous. As Ben gently pointed out, Paul did not actually know what MailChimp (and, presumably, ExactTarget) are doing lately. From the post, it sounds like he fielded a pitch call and basically published what he heard. Sadly that does not seem unusual on tech blogs these days, although I'm surprised Paul fell prey to it.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm so thankful that my parents taught me rationalism and manners. So many of these types of things are just common sense to me. Pay attention in your technical writing class and don't be an arrogant hothead.</comment>


Crowdfunding is Great, But is it Right For Startups? - <AUTHOR> http://bostinno.com/2012/02/09/crowdfunding-is-great-but-is-it-right-for-startups/

<comment><USER2> I'm all for giving people more liberties to do what they want with their money and I see nothing worse about letting people invest their money in whatever startups they want, though a reputable investment mechanism should be established so as to minimize the risks of scams, etc. There are many other ways for a fool and his money to be parted (casinos, lotteries, booze, overshopping) and those aren't illegal.

Going back to the reputable investment mechanism, I think this is needed not only for investors, but also for startups. No startup company wants to deal with thousands of different ownership voices - its better to have a concentrated voice (e.g. VC fund manager) raising only the largest issues. Rather than encouraging individuals to invest (like Kickstarter), give all individuals the ability to invest in funds created to invest in specific startups (e.g. Turntable fund, Pinterest fund).

<comment><USER3> So creating a fund that has a clear investment strategy of investing in a particular startup. How about creating mutual funds that invest in startups in general. It'd allow for diversification of multiple startups and give founders one concentrated voice. That way retail investors can get exposure to startups as venture funds are beyond this investor class.

<comment><USER4> Venture Capitalists are basically mutual funds that invest in startups. The y get most of their investment from pension funds who are investing for a large chunk of Americans.

<comment><USER3> I guess I was looking to see if there could be a more direct approach to it. Your pension fund invests in multiple assets classes and in multiple industries because of diversification. With a mutual fund that strictly invests in startups individuals with small amounts of money could gain access to the startup market in a direct way but still with professional money management. It essentially would be a VC fund composed of retail investors where traditional VC funds are composed of institutional (pension funds, etc) and high net worth individuals.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if you will ever see this response because I took so long to write it but you do have a point. The casual investor cannot invest in venture funds. One problem with funds like this is that they could end up going to zero if they miss everything or could invest in businesses which are not sound to help their friends.

In an effort to prevent this type of mistreatment of investors it is harder for them to raise money from individuals. In my opinion, the returns to VC firms on the average (not just the home runs) are not worth the potential losses.

But, the reverse argument could certainly be made and it will be an issue that I'm sure is discussed long in to the future.

 __*One area that most people are not aware exists is the area of fund manager vetting and analysis. This is mostly done by institutional investors and is something the average retail investor would have a lot of difficulty with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems like of course you should be able to do this, but the article brings up some valid concerns. Still, I think it's a bit condescending to say to people we're just protecting you when most of us understand the risks involved with a startup. Most aren't Facebook. Most are the company you never heard of because it failed after 6 months.

<comment><USER6> _"...most of us understand the risks involved with a startup."_

With all due respect, I think that's a dangerously optimistic assumption. If anything, the tech bubble of the '90s showed us that most people clearly _do not_ understand the risks involved. (And that was with publicly disclosed companies!). Even some ostensibly very sophisticated people, like Wall Street traders and bankers, were unable to parse the tech landscape back then -- to say nothing of the legions of retail investors who jumped into the fray.

I think there needs to be a give and take here. If we're going to allow retail investment in private companies, then private companies who open their shares to secondary retail markets should have to have some sort of public disclosure of financials, performance, and trading volume[1]. You really can't have one without the other, or else you're inviting speculative bubbles and other such clusterfucks. I can almost guarantee you that 9 out of every 10 retail investors in America would blindly -- _blindly_ \-- leap into startup speculating. The results wouldn't be pretty.

[1]Thereby blurring the line between public and private, but that's a whole different can of worms.

<comment><USER7> Understanding the risks and ignoring the risks are two entirely different things... The current law basically says that anyone without $1 million and $200k in the bank is too stupid to invest in a startup but someone with that money is smart enough to. If they don't have to make those disclosures to people with lots of money now, why should they have to make them if they're crowdfunded (where people actually stand to lose less because the risk is spread over a larger pool)? I could see an argument for making those disclosures even with the system as it is now, but that argument is something entirely separate from the crowdfunding argument.

Edit: It seems I missed your "can of worms" comment. I guess I just really don't like the fact that the US govt has and is continuing to treat its citizens like they're mentally incapacitated. Now a lot of us do behave that way, but I don't think it's the government's place to try to change that behavior. The market will do that when they lose their money. If they don't learn their lesson, that's their own problem.

<comment><USER6> _"but that argument is something entirely separate from the crowdfunding argument."_

True, but I'm actually less worried about the danger to individual retail investors, and more worried about the externalities to the system imposed by a mass influx of speculative crowdfunding -- externalities that can easily wipe out the retail investors, even if their losses aren't concentrated too heavily in any one company.

 _"The current law basically says that anyone without $1 million and $200k in the bank is too stupid to invest in a startup but someone with that money is smart enough to."_

There are two ways to look at the meaning of the current law. The first is that yes, the law views net worth as a proxy for sophistication, and therefore those without high net worth are deemed "too stupid" to invest in private companies. The second interpretation is that those with net worth in excess of $1 million (or whichever benchmark we choose) are capable of absorbing speculative losses, while others are not.

I agree with you that crowd-pooling gets around this issue, and it's interesting in that respect. But I still think it opens the door to too many unintended consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well written article for explaining to someone new the "risks"/rewards of passing crowdfunding legislation.

</comment><comment><USER8> Sorry, but I'm confused. Historically, wasn't this the whole point of going public?

<comment><USER7> Going public is incredibly expensive and is only worth it if you're needing to raise $50million+. A small company therefore doesn't have access to the public markets nor do the public markets have access to the small companies that make this country strong.</comment></comment>


Artificial sweeteners linked to glucose intolerance - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872.600-artificial-sweeteners-linked-to-glucose-intolerance.html <comment><USER2> I like how all the people who benefit from artificial sweeteners are refuting something which the study doesn't claim. For example:

      "The International Sweeteners Association (ISA) says it strongly
       refutes the claims made in the study: 'There is a broad body of
       scientific evidence which clearly demonstrates that low-calorie
       sweeteners are not associated with an increased risk of obesity
       and diabetes as they do not have an effect on appetite, blood
       glucose levels or weight gain.'"

It's true that artificial sweeteners have no immediate effect on appetite, blood glucose levels, nor weight gain. None of these are claims made by the study. Everyone is refuting the immediate effects of artificial sweeteners. The study claims that _after_ consuming artificial sweeteners, if you then consume something naturally sweet, the prior consumption of an artificial sweetener alters your glucose tolerance levels.

It's the equivalent of saying that removing all the trees from around rivers has no effect on fish population because clearly fish don't live in trees. But it's the secondary effects of this which such a statement ignores: the increase in soil erosion impacting water quality, change in water temperature due to having more direct sunlight, and so on.

Also:

      "'Decades of clinical research shows that low-calorie sweeteners
       have been found to aid weight-control when part of an overall
       healthy diet, and assist with diabetes management,' says Gavin
       Partington of the British Soft Drinks Association."

This has little meaning without having a reference point to compare the results to. If the study is correct, take one group of people who use diet soft drinks with an overall healthy diet and compare it to another group of people who consume the same overall healthy diet but drink water instead of diet soft drinks, and the group that drinks water should have a better glucose tolerance response than the diet soft drink group.

<comment><USER3> You just hit one of my pet peeves. "...when part of a healthy diet". Only cigarettes fail that test as far as I can tell.

Eating deep-fried Twinkies and a 32oz Mountain Dew is not bad for you, when done as part of an overall healthy diet.

<comment><USER4> Right, _by definition_ , consuming _any_ food is not bad for you, when done as part of an overall healthy diet -- any overall diet in which the food was bad for you would not, _ipso facto_ , be a healthy diet when that food was included.

The claim would only begin to be _meaningful_ if instead of "when part of a healthy diet" it was "when included in an _otherwise_ healthy diet".

<comment><USER5> Not necessarily. You could smoke one cigarette now, and you would be _less healthy_. But if you never smoked again, you would not have transitioned to _unhealthy_

The first term is relative, the second absolute. If the diet is overall healthy, it's possible it has some bad food. It's less healthy than if it didn't, but not unhealthy.

<comment><USER6> Which just made me wonder if it's possible to train a hidden markov model for detecting that. Trigger a flag that says "wowzers, now you're in unhealthy state territory". Otherwise it's real hard to tell if occasional engagements with unhealthy behaviors are having an impact on health overall. I imagine we'll get to the point of being able to do this sort of thing in about five years.

<comment><USER7> "In about 5 years" is often code for, "It is really cool, and it seems feasible, but I have no idea how difficult it really is."

Also, we have the basic capability for this now. Regular blood testing, etc. Get a physical. Get blood work every 3-6 months. Its just basic stats for your body. I do this. To me it is like checking the oil levels in a car. Why would you not collect this type of data for your body, which is arguably one of the most important "possessions" a person can own?

<comment><USER5> What's included in the blood testing?

I'm in Canada, and the idea of routine blood testing for young people (I'm 29) doesn't seem to have caught on.

<comment><USER8> That's because our medical system isn't for-profit, so we only get blood tests when they're medically necessary and not just for convenience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's a nice write up about the results: [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872.600-artificia...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872.600-artificial- sweeteners-linked-to-glucose-intolerance.html)

Note that the mice were given the human equivalent of 18 to 19 cans of diet soda a day.

<comment><USER10> From that article:

> The dose of sweetener was the equivalent to the maximum acceptable daily > intake in humans, as set by the FDA.

Now I realize that I, random commenter from the Internet, am unlikely to find a fatal flaw in an experiment designed and carried out by folks who do this professionally, but can someone explain to me why it's okay to give mice a human-amount of sweetener, and not a mice-amount?

It just seems to me that our larger bodies are probably better capable of handling... well, most everything, and to start dosing mice with human levels of sweetener is actually going to cause a much worse reaction than if humans were to consume that amount.

Edit: Also, it looks like the effects are reversible by "wiping" gut bacteria via antibiotics. If mice can survive the process of "wiping" gut bacteria, can humans? Is there a cure for this pre-diabetic state?

<comment><USER11> _can someone explain to me why it 's okay to give mice a human-amount of sweetener, and not a mice-amount?_

This means that the mice got a dose per unit of body weight like what humans would get if they ate that FDA-defined maximum. That's what equivalent doses are taken to mean in animal models of human nutrition or medicine. When there is known to be a different bioavailability or digestive response in animals from humans, then the dose is adjusted with that in mind before the experiment begins.

So, no, the tiny bodies of mice were not subjected to the large servings that much bigger human beings eat. They got a dose adjusted for the body weight of mice.

<comment><USER12> it's more than just a "per kg" dosing as well. Rats/mice have a very different level of metabolism than humans do just because of scale.

Basically there's a fudge factor of 0.75. Of course, the following article goes on to explain that it's actually drug mechanism dependent as well. Very complicated stuff!

"The value of the exponent for whole body metabolic rate was originally calculated by Max Kleiber in 1932 to be 0.74 (Kleiber, 1932). A few years later, Brody et al. published their famous mouse to elephant curve and calculated the exponent to be 0.734 (Brody, 1945). A value of 0.75 is now accepted because it is easier to use, and the difference from 0.734 is considered to be statistically negligible (Schmidt-Nielsen, 1984). However, it should be noted that exponents in the range 0.6–0.8 have been reported for metabolic rate (Agutter and Wheatley, 2004). A value of 0.75 means that the whole body metabolic rate increases as body weight increases, but to a lesser extent than would be expected of a simple proportional relationship. It follows on from this that the specific metabolic rate (the metabolic rate per unit mass) decreases as animals get larger (the exponent is −0.25); the metabolic rate of 1 g blue whale tissue is 1000 times less than that of 1 g shrew tissue (Kirkwood, 1983)."

from:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2737649/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2737649/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those not aware, other studies have shown that consuming diet soda may actually increase the chance of obesity. So that is not necessarily news. If you are curious, here is a pretty good study (full text):

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1038/oby.2008.284/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1038/oby.2008.284/full)

More recently, studies have tried to determine whether there is a satiety or protein mechanism that can explain this, whereas this new study demonstrates that gut flora may play a role.

This needs to be confirmed, and there may still be other mechanisms at play as well, but it is interesting.

(Disclaimer: I do have a healthcare background, but am not a researcher in this field. Would be happy to hear more from anyone who is.)

<comment><USER14> Indeed. I think it helps to unpack the various claims being studied:

1) Carcinogenicity. Do certain sweeteners cause harmful mutations and increase cancer risk? This is one of the oldest and most frequent allegations, especially against saccharin and aspartame. Mostly inconclusive, though both sweeteners have been exonerated at least as often as they've been accused.

2) Insulin triggering. Artificial sweeteners may not bear the caloric load of sugars and starches -- but do they trigger the release of insulin, just the same? Again, the jury is still out, but certain sweeteners (aspartame, sucralose, and possibly saccharin) are looking suspect.

3) Caloric load. Some sweeteners and putatively indigestible molecules (sugar alcohols, "resistant starches," etc.) may contain more _effective_ calories than in vitro studies predict them to contain. This is because the chemicals aren't digested in the traditional sense, but are fermented and absorbed in the gut. Caloric bioavailability is often different from nominal calorie count. (Indeed, this is the entire principle behind the supposed benefits of resistant sweeteners and starches; those benefits may have been overstated or misunderstood).

4) Disruption or adverse selection of gut microbiota. As detailed in this study. While not all sweeteners have been implicated here, this field of study is only just kicking into high gear. It seems reasonable to suspect that molecules fermented by / consumed by gut bacteria could have _some_ effect on flora composition. Many sweeteners fit that criterion.

5) Other toxicities. Liver or kidney toxicity, neurotoxicity, endocrine disruption, etc. As with carcinogenicity, the jury is still out. Unlikely for some sweeteners that are not metabolized via these pathways. Possible for others. Most sweeteners (all?) on the market right now are generally recognized as safe in this respect, despite popular beliefs to the contrary. Notable exceptions exist for those with rare metabolic or genetic disorders, such as phenylketonuria (aspartame contains phenylalanine).

6) Side effects. Some sweeteners, particularly those in the sugar alcohol family (and sorbitol especially), can cause laxative effects and other GI- related issues. Individual tolerance can vary. Breaking this category out from #4 because the action here can be purely mechanical (i.e., increasing intestinal water absorption).

I'm not a doctor or medical researcher myself. Just an interested nerd. But I have been following this area for awhile. I welcome any corrections, comments, or additions from people more knowledgeable than I am. I assume there are many such people on HN. :)

<comment><USER15> Good list. Among the patients I see metabolic disturbances rank high on the list problems to manage. Some people complain of adverse effects of NAS such as headache, GI symptoms, but in the clinical setting, it's very hard to establish connections between NAS and metabolic syndrome manifestations like DM2.

The article says mouse fed _any_ of 3 common NAS in water with/without glucose developed "glucose intolerance", which I take to mean above-normal glucose levels. That would point to either impaired insulin production or increased insulin resistance. I think the latter is much more likely.

This probably occurs in some humans too (among people genetically predisposed to develop DM2). Of course that's my extrapolation of the info, but seems a likely direction of future research. Getting insulin levels and measuring insulin resistance after NAS feeding are logical steps to take.

I agree with your comment and others that the role of colon microorganisms is a truly fascinating subject, and remains quite a mystery. Other research shows gut flora are distinct among host species. The evolution of these microbes appears intimately bound to the evolution of their host, but the nature of the link is unknown. Odds are unraveling the story of the numerous friends within (and all over) us will fill in important gaps in our knowledge in surprising ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The headline is suspicious, but unfortunately, this article is paywalled, so I can't tell what's really going on. The main problem with the headline is that it lumps together "artificial sweeteners" as a category, when that is in fact a pretty widely varied class of molecules.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. From the article Nostromo just posted[1], looks like the mouse models were based on aspartame, saccharin, and sucralose, and the human subjects were taking saccharin.

[1] [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872.600-artificia...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872.600-artificial- sweeteners-linked-to-glucose-intolerance.html#.VBnjFWRdX4K)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> FDA acceptable daily intake (ADI) for aspartame is 50 mg per kg of body mass.[0] For an individual 180 pounds, that's about 82 kg. That means his ADI is 4100 mg. Aspartame in popular diet sodas is between 50 and 125 mg.[1]

You'd have to drink A LOT of diet soda to reach these levels.

[0] [http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/a...](http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/athome/aspartame)

[1] [http://static.diabetesselfmanagement.com/pdfs/DSM0310_012.pd...](http://static.diabetesselfmanagement.com/pdfs/DSM0310_012.pdf)

<comment><USER19> I have a friend who used to drink nothing but Diet Coke. He went through a few 2l bottles a day. According to that link (assuming it's the same in Europe), Diet Coke is 125mg per 8 ounces, so a 2l bottle is 125 / 8 x 70.4 = 1100mg. So if he drank four 2l bottles, that's over the daily limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is an impressive piece of work but I worry that a larger amount of work is needed in the relationship between glucose intolerance, diabetes and metabolic syndromes in general. The fact that glucose intolerance is induced by a high sugar diet and leads towards a path of clinical outcomes ending in diabetes, doesn't necessarily indicate that glucose intolerance developed via artificial sweetener consumption is indicative of being on the same clinical pathways towards metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'd be curious if they tried this study with xylitol. I chew xylitol gum for dental health and from my understanding it's not thought to contribute to metabolic problems in reasonable quantities:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol#Diabetes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol#Diabetes)

<comment><USER22> Xylitol was not included in the study. Because xylitol is absorbed more slowly from the gut and gut microflora appear to be the mechanism of action found in this study, I'd personally be at least a little concerned.

Mice in this study were given sweeteners for 11 weeks, long enough that their use apparently led to changes in microflora which were associated with glucose intolerance. Existing studies of xylitol could well be for much shorter lengths of time and might not have been able to detect these kinds of changes.

<comment><USER23> I wonder then if its the absorption of the gut or if it is the conditioning. If the gut flora have to adapt to trying to break down an impenetrable compound they might become super strong at breaking down simpler molecules no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does this mean diabetes could (in some cases) be caused by gut bacteria? Can we reduce diabetes risk factors with targeted antibiotics that attack certain glucose-intolerance-causing bacteria?

<comment><USER14> It's fiendishly difficult to pry apart correlation and causation for complex conditions like diabetes (which we're steadily reconceptualizing as less of a "disease," and more of a chain reaction of metabolic and hormonal disorders). Changes in gut bacteria are _associated_ with the condition sometimes called "pre-diabetes," or a "pre-diabetic state." But we're not yet sure if they are a causative factor, if they are the result of the condition, or if they're simply co-morbid with it.

Whatever the case, gut bacteria appear to play a vital role in our metabolic health, and we're only beginning to explore this area in earnest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This result seems pretty strange to me - why would artificial sweeteners affect bacteria's metabolism in this way?

It seems like a bizarre coincidence that bacteria would react in the same way to three different sweeteners, unless they have receptors that happen to match human taste receptors (which also seems unlikely). In other words, to bacteria these sweeteners should just seem like unrelated random chemicals.

(I read the Nature paper - most of it looks at saccharin since that had the strongest response, but all three artificial sweeteners caused marked glucose intolerance.)

<comment><USER26> Bacteria are, in general, much more capable at processing various chemicals than humans are. They can even pass around packets of genetics, called plasmids, across species. So it isn't really surprising if bacteria can flourish eating something that tastes sweet to people, but doesn't provide any calories to people. There have been some artificial sweeteners shown to hurt bacteria more than people - Xylitol is famously used in gum, for example, because it costs bacteria energy to try to eat it, but they gain nothing, thus helping to fight bacteria growth.

<comment><USER27> Aspartame is essentially just a collection of amino acids, so it's even more feasible (in a total guessing hand-wavey way) that gut bacteria would be affected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This seems misleading.

If you go through the graphs and results, what emerges is that only the sweetener saccharin has that altering effect on the gut bacteria. I cannot find among the results any claim that the other NAS that were studied (sucralose and aspartame) have the effect.

The thing is that saccharin is not widely used any more. If saccharin is found to be harmful, that is nice to know, but not highly relevant.

</comment><comment><USER29> The New Scientist article notes that four of the seven human subjects who consumed three to four sachets of sweetener a day saw a significant change in their gut bacteria.

As someone who has consumed significantly more than that for a very long time, my question would be, did their gut flora reconstitute itself after they stopped using the sweetener? And if not, how could you go about repopulating your microbiome short of a stool sample?

<comment><USER30> The gut flora is as resilient as any other part of human body. It might take a significant time though. I've heard Korean food helps a lot because it's fermented. Also usual bifido youghurts you'll find at any grocery store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This seems very misleading. The abstract (available without paywall) mentions a group of sweeteners, whereas the findings seem to show that only saccharin has these negative effects. I feel like NAS are probably bad, but without evidence to support it they should not claim that in the abstract.

</comment><comment><USER32> For some biological context, we have taste receptors in our digestive tracts identical or nearly identical to those on our tongue, only the ones in our digestive tract are not hooked directly to sensory neurons, but instead trigger endocrine signals and such. Since the receptors are identical, then anything that tastes sweet on your tongue will activate these receptors as well. If I recall my metabolism course correctly, studies have found that artificial sweeteners can trigger insulin release through these receptors in the same way as real sugar (leading to possible hypoglycemia as your body compensates for a rush of sugar that never comes).

So basically, I have no trouble believing that artificial sweeteners can have many of the same long-term health effects as excessive consumption of real sugar, since they're already known to have many of the same short-term effects, including effects on insulin regulation.

</comment><comment><USER33> So given a choice, between Diet Soda vs. Normal Soda, what would be worse for your overall health?

I imagine even with increased glucose intolerance, you're still better off choosing Diet?

<comment><USER4> You're probably better off _not choosing carbonated liquid candy_ \-- especially not doing so regularly and in significant quantities -- even if the sweetener happens to be non-caloric.

And the point where you've reduced your choices to regular soda vs. diet soda, you've already failed.

<comment><USER34> Failed at what?

<comment><USER35> Failed at having a healthy diet. (That is, if he does make that choice frequently - a one time event probably won't change anything.)

<comment><USER36> In what way is it unhealthy? Aspartame has zero calories, and decades of studies showing its safety.

Put another way, if you want to avoid sugar (which is much less healthy than aspartame), besides water, there's tea, coffee, flavoring mixes like Crystal Light, and various prepared sugar free soft drinks. Many prefer variety over water. There's little scientific basis to believe drinking any of these things are bad. Drinking a mix of these is quite a bit healthier for an adult than chugging juice or sugared drinks - unless you're explicilty trying to carb- load. Milk is a healthy alternative but debatable due to its effects on some.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm not really surprised Saccharin isn't great for you personally- but this isn't so damning there are many other artificial sweeteners to choose from.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_substitute#Artificial_su...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_substitute#Artificial_sugar_substitutes)

I'd of course like to see them all studied in this manner.

</comment><comment><USER38> I hope this doesn't hold true for stevia as well :/

<comment><USER39> Pure stevia is not artificial, but the verdict is still out on safety. It seems to be OK... for now. I use it, though I try to use honey as well.

<comment><USER40> The stevia whole leaf has been used for centuries in teas on Brazil. It has been used as an artificial sweetener in Japan for decades accounting for around 40% of the sweetener market there. Weirdly, I always bought it labeled as a dietary supplement in the US before the FDA approved some extracts as food additives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Overall, this was a nicely done study. The microbiome is fascinating and an exciting area of research.

One criticism however would be that the dose of artificial sweetener tested was atypically high.

It'll be neat to see further research into the cause of variable responses of the subjects to the artificial sweeteners.

<comment><USER42> According to the New Scientist article others have linked to, the equivalent human dose was 9-12 packets of sweetener a day. I'm sure there are heavy coffee drinkers that go through that much.

I also don't like those studies where the human equivalent dose is like 50 pounds of sweetener a day, or something silly. This one isn't so bad.

<comment><USER41> I guess I'm having trouble figuring out where the numbers are coming from.

I'm seeing that the FDA recommended maximum dose for aspartame is 50mg/kg/day. Assuming a 70kg Standard Man, that's 3.5g/day of aspartame. Diet Coke has 125mg per 12oz. can, so that would be 28 cans/day. Each packet should be around 35mg aspartame, so 100 packets/day (the amount of aspartame per packet was hard to find, and the approx. was from an American Cancer Society article).

Agreed that 9–12 packets doesn't sound like much, but I think we're talking way more than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The industry takeaway should be to try to isolate the bacteria that play the secondary part in the glucose resistance, then put ANOTHER additive in the drinks to kill that bacteria, then sell a more expensive NEW zero calorie drink?

People like sweet. Let's make sweet safe.

</comment><comment><USER44> Abstract can be found here.

[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13793.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> This raises more questions than it answers I think (which is a good thing)

1 - Is there such thing as a "sweet base"? Our tongues perceive sweeteners as sweet (duh) but it seems it mimics sugar in a way for bacteria as well.

2 - From the article "Wiping out the rodents' gut bacteria using antibiotics abolished all the effects of glucose intolerance in the mice. In other words, no bacteria, no problem regulating glucose levels."

Soooo... Bacteria affects absorption of glucose? They consume it? They change the intestinal PH? Or something else?

</comment><comment><USER46> Can someone post the full paper? The charts shown at the bottom seem to contradict some of their conclusions and implications. For example, some of the sweeteners seemed to result in lower chow consumption and increased energy expenditure. That would be a positive effect that isn't mentioned in the abstract.

</comment><comment><USER47> Can anybody explain or guess what the consequences of this intolerance are or could be?

<comment><USER48> You might find this video on fructose and metabolic disease (of which glucose intolerance is a symptom) interesting:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM)

<comment><USER49> It's worth noting that there are many critics of this guy.

<comment><USER48> True. As I understood them though, the criticism was primarily about his message that fructose would be the key or only reason of metabolic syndrome, or his depiction of sugar as pure evil rather than as something which you can consume in small amounts, more than about the effects of fructose itself. (When not, connections between the critic and the sugar or food industry were quick to Google, thereby reducing the credibility to zero.) This may have changed since I spent time digging into it, though, so please expand if it has.

<comment><USER49> My point was just to point out that criticism exists. Loads of people watch that video and don't do other research on the topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Do they compare pure sweetener diet with pure sugar diet calorie per calorie, and sweetness units per sweetness units? Sweeteners are still caloric, the point is that they provide the same sweetness for less calories.

</comment><comment><USER51> Raised insulin levels are much more complicated than we once thought. You can get an insulin response from artificial sweeteners just swished in your mouth and spat out. Solution, eat real food when you can

<comment><USER52> Do you have a source for that? The last time I checked this worked with mice, but humans showed no insulin response from sweet taste alone.

<comment><USER53> I don't right now, but from my times when competing, I used to read a lot of science based research on nutrition and there was a study that said swishing a carb rich liquid was enough to trigger it.

I think I first saw it referenced on an old edition of 'The Complete Guide to Sports Nutrition' by Anita Bean

<comment><USER54> Artificial sweeteners are not "carb rich". That's kind of the point of them...

<comment><USER53> What I meant was there is a possibility of it happening as a sweet taste (parent didn't mention sweeteners, just sweet taste) response since there is a similar response to carb rich drinks (study didn't mention the kind of carbs so no idea)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Doesn't seem so strange - if you create a sugar deficit in your body by significantly reducing your intake, wouldn't you expect the body to be more responsive to sugars when it encounters them?

<comment> mark-r I believe that's why they had a control group with unsweetened water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Now let's see a human study where people who consume those sweeteners, eat carbohydrates in moderation, and exercise regularly are still at increased risk for diabetes.

</comment><comment><USER57> "metabolic abnormalities"

Anyone know if they go into these into the paper? Really want to know what else is in the paper; I chew way too much sugar-free gum.

<comment><USER58> Most sugar-free gum uses some type of sugar alcohol (e.g. xylitol, erythritol). These are not technically-speaking considering NAS. Their mechanisms of absorption vary wildly and, while in some cases they can cause digestive stress in large amounts, there is no good evidence AFAIK that they have a deleterious effect on gut microbiota.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> People rarely consider how what you eat affects your microflora which then affects various other systems and may even affect your desire to consume.

<comment><USER60> Without delving into a bunch of scientific papers, how could I go about considering how my dietary choices influence my microflora for better or worse?

<comment><USER61> Well, you can't really do that. We don't know nearly enough about it. Hell, we're not even good at normal dietary science yet and the whole gut bacteria science field is really new.

You can find a healthy and fit person and get them to give you some of their gut flora and then eat it. That could probably work. It also might make you sick (I imagine) and it's terribly disgusting: "On a scale from swallowed to poo, how do you want my eaten food?"

<comment><USER62> I don't think that would work (bacteria living the colon can not necessarily survive all the way through the digestive tract). What _is_ an accepted form of gut biome therapy is a stool transplant:

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

<comment><USER61> Could it work if put in capsules dissolving in the right stage? Anyway, thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> The maximum dose is quite high, but does the effect also occurs when consuming more sane dosage a day?

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm paywalled out of seeing the whole article until I try a workaround (after which I may expand this comment), but I think we can all see the abstract of the article if we follow the link kindly submitted here. Yet some questions in other comments raise issues that are already responded to by the article abstract. Here is the full text of the article abstract available in the free view at the link:

"Non-caloric artificial sweeteners (NAS) are among the most widely used food additives worldwide, regularly consumed by lean and obese individuals alike. NAS consumption is considered safe and beneficial owing to their low caloric content, yet supporting scientific data remain sparse and controversial. Here we demonstrate that consumption of commonly used NAS formulations drives the development of glucose intolerance through induction of compositional and functional alterations to the intestinal microbiota. These NAS-mediated deleterious metabolic effects are abrogated by antibiotic treatment, and are fully transferrable to germ-free mice upon faecal transplantation of microbiota configurations from NAS-consuming mice, or of microbiota anaerobically incubated in the presence of NAS. We identify NAS-altered microbial metabolic pathways that are linked to host susceptibility to metabolic disease, and demonstrate similar NAS-induced dysbiosis and glucose intolerance in healthy human subjects. Collectively, our results link NAS consumption, dysbiosis and metabolic abnormalities, thereby calling for a reassessment of massive NAS usage."

AFTER EDIT: After reading all the comments in this thread to the time of this edit, I see that some participants here disagree entirely with how I commented at first (as above). I note their opinion with interest and say here for the record simply that I saw previous comments that raised questions about information that is available in the article abstract for all of us to read. I meanwhile did find my workaround to get the full text of the article (I have library access with journal subscriptions for one aspect of my work, which is rather slow and buggy) and from the full article text I see that the experimental approach the researchers tried--feeding mice with the artificial sweetener to see if that changed gut microbiota in the mice, and then transferring the gut microbiota to other mice--did indeed bring about clinical signs consistent with the idea that the sweetener itself might cause related clinical signs in human beings.

"To test whether the microbiota role is causal, we performed faecal transplantation experiments, by transferring the microbiota configuration from mice on normal-chow diet drinking commercial saccharin or glucose (control) into normal-chow-consuming germ-free mice (Extended Data Fig. 1e). Notably, recipients of microbiota from mice consuming commercial saccharin exhibited impaired glucose tolerance as compared to control (glucose) microbiota recipients, determined 6 days following transfer (P < 0.03, Fig. 1e and Extended Data Fig. 2e). Transferring the microbiota composition of HFD- consuming mice drinking water or pure saccharin replicated the glucose intolerance phenotype (P < 0.004, Fig. 1f and Extended Data Fig. 2f). Together, these results establish that the metabolic derangements induced by NAS consumption are mediated by the intestinal microbiota."

This preliminary finding, which of course needs to be replicated, has caused alarm in the industry, according to the link participant nostromo kindly shared in this thread.[1] There is epidemiological signal that human beings who consume a lot of artificial sweeteners are not especially healthy people compared to people who consume few. Teasing out the mechanism that may underly that observational finding will take more research, but this is important research to get right.

"To study the functional consequences of NAS consumption, we performed shotgun metagenomic sequencing of faecal samples from before and after 11 weeks of commercial saccharin consumption, compared to control mice consuming either glucose or water. To compare relative species abundance, we mapped sequencing reads to the human microbiome project reference genome database16. In agreement with the 16S rRNA analysis, saccharin treatment induced the largest changes in microbial relative species abundance (Fig. 2a, Supplementary Table 2; F-test P value < 10−10). These changes are unlikely to be an artefact of horizontal gene transfer or poorly covered genomes, because changes in relative abundance were observed across much of the length of the bacterial genomes, as exemplified by one overrepresented (Bacteroides vulgatus, Extended Data Fig. 7a) and one underrepresented species (Akkermansia muciniphila, Extended Data Fig. 7b)."

The authors sum up their experimental findings by writing

"In summary, our results suggest that NAS consumption in both mice and humans enhances the risk of glucose intolerance and that these adverse metabolic effects are mediated by modulation of the composition and function of the microbiota. Notably, several of the bacterial taxa that changed following NAS consumption were previously associated with type 2 diabetes in humans13, 20, including over-representation of Bacteroides and under-representation of Clostridiales. Both Gram-positive and Gram-negative taxa contributed to the NAS-induced phenotype (Fig. 1a, b) and were enriched for glycan degradation pathways (Extended Data Fig. 6), previously linked to enhanced energy harvest (Fig. 2c, d)11, 24. This suggests that elaborate inter-species microbial cooperation may functionally orchestrate the gut ecosystem and contribute to vital community activities in diverging environmental conditions (for example, normal-chow versus high-fat dietary conditions). In addition, we show that metagenomes of saccharin-consuming mice are enriched with multiple additional pathways previously shown to associate with diabetes mellitus23 or obesity11 in mice and humans, including sphingolipid metabolism and lipopolysaccharide biosynthesis25."

There have been a lot of questions raised in this thread, and indeed the article itself raises plenty of interesting questions to follow up with further research. When discussing a new preliminary research finding like this, we can work outward from the article abstract to news reports about the article findings to the article text itself to focus on the known issues and define clearly the unknown issues. I appreciate comments from anyone here about how I can help contribute to more informed and thoughtful, in Hacker News sense of "thoughtful,"[2] discussion of research on human nutrition.

Other comments here asked why we should respect journal paywalls at all, and the basic answer to that question is a basic principle of economics, that people respond to incentives. (That's the same reason you don't found a startup that you expect will always lose money for all time.) _Nature_ is one of the most-cited scientific journals in the world, so it's a big coup to be published there, and that means _Nature_ gets a lot of submissions. To slog through all the submissions with adequate editorial work does cost money. (I used to be a junior editor of an academic journal.) The article gets more attention (it has received a lot of attention in this thread) if it is in a better rather than worse journal. Some journals are lousy enough to publish anything, and those journals beg for submissions, but _Nature_ can charge for subscriptions and impose paywalls (which expire for government-funded research, with author sharing of author manuscripts on free sites usually being mandatory after a year embargo) because what it publishes is often worth reading (as here).

AFTER ONE MORE EDIT:

I see that while I was reading the fine article from _Nature_ submitted to open a thread, my comment is now part of a thread that is about the _New Scientist_ popular article on the same research finding. This will be confusing to readers newly visiting this thread. The title of the _Nature_ article is "Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota" (the Hacker News thread title I saw, per the usual rule of using the article headline as the submission headline) and the article DOI is

10.1038/nature13793

for the full article published online (behind a paywall) on 17 September 2014.

[1] [http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872.600-artificia...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329872.600-artificial- sweeteners-linked-to-glucose-intolerance.html)

[2] "The most important principle on HN, though, is to make thoughtful comments. Thoughtful in both senses: both civil and substantial."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

<comment><USER64> I meant to downvote your comment but accidentally upvoted it.

You wrote that you have nothing meaningful to say and quoted the abstract, contributing nothing to the conversation. Next time, instead of using your accumulated karma to monopolize the top spot while saying nothing, just say nothing.

<comment><USER65> > instead of using your accumulated karma to monopolize the top spot

You only get to the top spot in a comment section by getting _that specific comment_ upvoted there.

... at least, that's certainly how I would expect it to work! If the site gives preference to comments based on preexisting karma, at least after any upvotes have been cast, then that would be highly disappointing.

<comment><USER66> The site gives preference to comments based on preexisting karma, especially shortly after they're posted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> So the public funds studies, which they give to journals for free, who then sell access for $3.99/view. I'm really not sure this was the "free exchange of ideas" which science is based upon.

Even the New York times only charges $3.75/week (the nature price is per article/view NOT per week, it would be $4.14 if their $199 plan was weekly) and the NYT has to actually pay journalists to create the content. Nature gets all their content for free.

So what are Nature's expenses anyway? They no longer have to type set as it is just an identical PDF which is sent to them. Is hosting and management of the web-site really so costly that it is $3.99/article?

<comment><USER68> The peer review process, I would think.

<comment><USER67> They don't pay for people to peer review as far as I know.

<comment><USER4> That the individual peer reviewers aren't paid does not imply that coordinating the peer review process is cost-free to the publication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Diet soda makes you fat.

</comment><comment><USER70> Sweeteners are suspected to have downed the Roman empire (via lead poisoning), so, learn from history and just change your taste norm and you'll live longer and happier. I had a sweet tooth once and it took about a couple of years to even not being able to tolerate it. The weak find excuses, the strong adapt and improve. Just reject anything with refined sugar or fancy new "healthier" sweeteners - do you like sugar more than tomorrow? Cane sugar is not healthier than HCFS (it might be just slightly less harmful). Agave "Nectar" actually has significantly more fructose than HCFS... and it's not unprocessed as claimed, and so on. Stevia is slightly different, the plant has other benefits, but I wouldn't ever use the adulterated version (Reb A or whatever). Hack your taste buds, hackers!

<comment><USER70> Sugar alcohols (xylitol, sorbitol, maltitol, mannitol, erythritol) have the same negative effect on the gut microbiota.</comment></comment>


What are some cool batch file program codes? - <AUTHOR>

Comment your batch file codes,and scripts that seem cool, and shareable. OR Where i can find a batch file command directory. <comment><USER2> "batch files" like bash scripts? Look in your system directories for some. A quick Google search found <http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/> and there are many others.

Or do you mean IBM mainframe batch programming, like with JCL? I've never had to deal with that system. That domain isn't really part of the free/open source culture and I can't find a good source of example programs. Lots of IBMers also use REXX, and there are 71 projects on Sourceforge in REXX ( [http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/?&fq%5B%5D=trove%3A17...](http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/?&fq%5B%5D=trove%3A179) )

Or perhaps you mean DOS batch programming? I hear that Windows is moving towards PowerShell. However, I know about as much of this field as I do JCL.

</comment><comment><USER3> Have you tried using Google?</comment>


Box acquires MedXT - <AUTHOR> https://blog.box.com/2014/10/box-acquiring-medxt-to-modernize-collaboration-in-healthcare/ <comment><USER2> Interesting move, but: this, folks, is why hospitals buy from $BIGCORP (Epic, GE, Siemens).

edit: to clarify, by "this" I mean "stability". One path to build a medical software company has been to start by targeting individual practices, clinics, and small hospitals. That is still possible, and there are plenty of companies doing it. But that path is getting harder to take in the US because of medical industry consolidation. Even "independent" practices now usually have referring affiliations, and more often than not this means that they use the hospital network's existing software infrastructure.

<comment><USER3> Is it?

I have no solid idea, but my impression from glancing at solutions for healthcare years ago wasn't that Hospitals are choosing Big Co so much as they have little choice.

As I understand it, smaller companies don't try / give up on keeping up wit the costs of required certifications (possibly the wrong term) and the like.

This also seemed to help explain the slow pace of advances and updates to such systems as patches and changes have their own onerous process.

<comment><USER4> Yes. Three reasons:

1\. Healthcare is _heavily_ regulated. HIPAA is the most well-known law, but there are also countless local and state laws hospital systems must comply with.

2\. Any new software needs to be sufficiently integrated with several existing systems and databases. What this means is that you can't just develop a stand- alone solution that deals with just one part of the process.

3\. Many hospital staff are technophobic. Doctors especially.

I'm oversimplifying of course, but this is basically why incumbents (big co) are preferred. They have tons of domain expertise in healthcare, are deeply familiar with processes and requirements AND know plenty of people in the right places to grease the wheels when necessary. This makes it very difficult for startups to break into the industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Congrats to the MedXT team they built a beautiful DICOM viewer and had a good cap structure which makes this a win/win for them and Box. Box now has an Saas offering into the most on-premise space in enterprise IT.

<comment><USER6> Nice, Geoff! The viewer is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> MedXT is YC 2013.

Congratulations to Reshma and Cody, they've been working extremely hard on producing a very impressive product.

</comment><comment><USER8> Congrats Cody and Reshma!

</comment><comment><USER9> Url changed from [https://www.medxt.com](https://www.medxt.com) because this one contains a bit more information.

</comment><comment><USER10> Can we please discuss this acquisition and its impact instead of a thread at the top - and several below - about the reference to the "incredible journey" and the acquainted Tumblr on the topic?

It's well known that anyone a bit into SV and its surroundings is aware of this "meme" and founders are often placing bets whether they will include it in their end-of-product-PR or not.

</comment><comment><USER11> Between gdrive and dropbox I don't understand how Box continues to exist.</comment>


Show HN: Hello – Video chat with upto 8 people from browser - <AUTHOR> https://sayhello.li <comment><AUTHOR> Hi I am the maker of this application. To give you some insights about this, it is a web application that runs on most recent browsers that support WEBRTC (Try it in Google Chrome :) ). It enables video conferencing to upto 8 people.

Feel free to share your thoughts here.

</comment><comment><USER2> Really cool and simple! Love it.</comment>


A bottle that captures sound and remixes it - <AUTHOR> http://vimeo.com/42921558

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd really like to see this open sourced.

<comment><AUTHOR> it would be great to make this configurable via a mobile app. maybe the ability to save time synched midi data from individual bottle opens.

I'm in love with this idea.</comment></comment>


Joyent Is Great, but We've Switched to Amazon EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.davidmisshula.com/blog/2012/11/22/joyent-is-great-but-we-have-switched-to-amazon-ec2/

<comment><USER2> Many people seem to associate AWS with EC2, and make comparisons with that assumption. For us EC2 was a small part of the decision. As stated in the article other AWS services (ELB, SQS, Route53, DynamoDB,etc), multiple locations, all through APIs were the main factors for selecting AWS as well.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know what "Bode" is? He referenced it as something related to node but a quick search on DDG and github show nothing.

<comment><AUTHOR> woops! thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't use code that only runs on Linux. Swapping one monoculture for another isn't an improvement.

If you're writing stuff for server use, and it's not being tested on a few Unix implementations, you're quickly working towards being a single-platform monoculture. This limits your options if a platform falls out of favor or is EOL'ed by a vendor.

It's a good thing that OS X is so popular among the hacker set - if it wasn't, I think the quagmire would be even deeper.</comment>


Is Yahoo insane in going on a buying spree like this? - <AUTHOR>

Yahoo! some months back could barely stand on its feet.  Now they are buying successful companies and the internet users have no idea on what they intend to do with them. <comment><USER2> They seem to be targeting growing businesses that are consistent with their "global media company" ambitions. Why do you think it is insane?

<comment><AUTHOR> A year back Microsoft was buying them

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Previous to Marrissa Mayer, we hardly heard anything about Yahoo! Now, we are all talking about it. Don't underestimate Mayer.

<comment><USER4> ...At the price of billions of dollars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Answer: yes

The shelf life of a tech company is 7 years. After that, it simply loses a "cool factor"

<comment><AUTHOR> The company Yahoo! itself have no prospects, its search and email are not doing well. 7 years of hulu?

<comment><USER6> About their e-mail.. While their new interface product was in beta, it was an amazing classic e-mail interface that included an API and features left missing when it was released as the default mail application. In one day it was replaced by a boring, minimal feature set with a lacking positive experience in its whole. While Yahoo! is still one of the leaders in web based e-mail, I am certain Yahoo! can do to Tumblr what they did to e-mail in just one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mayer.</comment>


The history of the history of technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2013/07/28/the-history-of-the-history-of-technology/

<comment><AUTHOR> Profile of Charles Singer, the British historian of science and medicine who was commissioned by Imperial Chemical Industries in the late 1940s to create the first (?) encylopedia of technology, [http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/3219/1/Charles_Singer_and_the...](http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/3219/1/Charles_Singer_and_the_early_years_of_the_British_Society_for_the_History_of_Science.pdf)

Singer's volumes are not easily available, but Frances & Joseph Gies covered post-Roman medieval technology from 500 AD to 1500 AD in _Cathedral, Forge and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages_. It's available on Kindle, [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=877](http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=877)</comment>


VS Code – February Release - <AUTHOR> http://code.visualstudio.com/updates/ <comment><AUTHOR> Realized a slightly better link might be [http://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/03/07/Feb2016Release](http://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/03/07/Feb2016Release) .

The current link shows the release notes, but is not a permalink.</comment>


This URL crashes Chrome/Chromium - <AUTHOR> https://demo.cmrg.net/ <comment><USER2> Flagged. That's pretty annoying reirob; I assumed that would be a link to an article about the URL, since just crashing my browser was obviously a bad thing to do.

Question to downvoters: You don't ever click down the list of Hacker News submissions without thinking too hard first, or you don't think crashing my browser (and losing any state I had in them) is annoying?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I have got it from Fefe's blog [1] directly as the link. I tried it out before submitting, i.e. I opened a Chromium browser and put the link. The title says what it does - I do not think it is link bait. And Fefe's blog gives as explanation (rough translation from German): The TLS handshake of this site kills Chrome browser.

I too want to know what goes on and I actually think that HN IS the place to submit this kind of bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> ...I didn't think that one through.

<comment><USER4> Well... nobody can say the title is misleading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I didn't try it in Chrome, but in Firefox I get the following. Is that right?

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to demo.cmrg.net. SSL received a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key in Server Key Exchange handshake message. (Error code: ssl_error_weak_server_ephemeral_dh_key)

        The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
        Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem. Alternatively, use the command found in the help menu to report this broken site.

</comment><comment><USER6> Anyone explain what it does to chrome?

I'm using chrome on android, and it doesn't crash and the lock icon info doesn't show anything that jumps out as wrong.. ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Document explaining the root of the weakness in the TLS protocol: [https://secure-resumption.com/](https://secure-resumption.com/)

Blog from Chrome- and TLS developer Adam Langley: [https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/03/03/triplehandshake.ht...](https://www.imperialviolet.org/2014/03/03/triplehandshake.html)

<comment><USER7> Those links just talk about some weakness, I don't see anything saying they're related to the crash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This also works in a html file with an img tag:

<img src="[https://demo.cmrg.net/">](https://demo.cmrg.net/">)

</comment><comment><USER9> Firefox says

SSL received a weak ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key in Server Key Exchange handshake message.

<comment><USER10> (Error code: ssl_error_weak_server_ephemeral_dh_key)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It didn't crash Chrome for me, but that's because I was using an out of date version.

</comment><comment><USER12> Relevant Chromium issue: [https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=348987](https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=348987)

</comment><comment><USER13> The crash is caused by very short parameters for diffie hellman key exchanges in TLS. I did some further tests on that: [https://dh.tlsfun.de/](https://dh.tlsfun.de/)

Here's what I found in my blog: [http://blog.hboeck.de/archives/841-Diffie- Hellman-and-TLS-wi...](http://blog.hboeck.de/archives/841-Diffie-Hellman-and- TLS-with-nonsense-parameters.html)

</comment><comment><USER14> IE11 gives a page can't be displayed. Investigating console reveals "code on this page disabled back and forward caching".

</comment><comment><USER15> I thought the process-per-tab thing was meant to stop this sort of thing from taking the whole browser down.

<comment><USER12> That helps when the website code itself is malicious/broken. This crash is due a bug in the underlying TLS code itself. I don't think TLS is sandboxed or separated-per-tab, nor should it expectedly be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't know what I expected.

[http://i3.kym- cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/014/009/mic...](http://i3.kym- cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/014/009/michael.jpg)

<comment><USER17> exactly what I came here to post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not entirely sure what I expected when I clicked this.

</comment><comment><USER7> Crashed Chromium 33.0.1750.117 x86_64 built on Gentoo.

</comment><comment><USER19> Crashes Chrome 33.0.1750.146 on OSX 10.9.1

</comment><comment><USER20> Fell for it. I see what you did there...

</comment><comment><USER21> Opera 12 shows a big warning dialog warning the user that the site uses outdated and unsafe encryption.

</comment><comment><USER22> It didn't crash Chromium for me. Arch Linux, Chromium 28.

<comment><USER12> Seems like a regression in the latest (33).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Crashed Chrome Version 33.0.1750.146 m on Windows 8.0.

</comment><comment><USER24> Btw. it didn't just crash the sandbox.

</comment><comment><USER25> Opera 20 on Windows. Boom!

</comment><comment><USER26> Stop posting a direct link that crashes the whole web browser, that is down right malicious!

It's some sort of regression and a patch is already in review: [https://codereview.chromium.org/178003011/](https://codereview.chromium.org/178003011/)

Stop karma whoring with this irresponsible shit.</comment>


Awesome hacks from the Docker Global Hack Day - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.io/2013/12/1716/

<comment><AUTHOR> awesome community = awesome hacks</comment>


Ask HN: Anybody want to join the Solo Founders Telegram chat? - <AUTHOR> I have to admit I love Telegram more than anything else. It's a perfect tool for communicating to me. But alas, there are no chats for discussing technologies, news, growth hacks, startups, design etc.
That is why I've created an open Telegram room for solo founders. It's a community of talented solopreneurs, indiehackers & Product Hunters where people (will) chat and share their projects & marketing strategies, find partners and instantly get valuable feedback!
I also maintain a Google Doc with the projects of the members. There is a location field, so hope people will connect in real life too.
Since this message looks like spam, I will reveal the link in a comment once there is a demand of at least one man. <comment><USER2> I'd love to join - can you please share the link?</comment>


Show HN: Info overload when trip planning is annoying, we made Your Local Cousin - <AUTHOR> https://www.yourlocalcousin.com <comment><USER2> Curious regarding cousin qualifications and current locations.</comment>


Memo to Microsoft: You Can't Bribe People To Ditch Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2191993?nav=wp

<comment><USER2> They sure are gonna try. Ballmer has to be getting kicked out in the next year, right? Please. I want a job where I could put out a video game system where they forgot to do heat management, and to test it, at a cost of 1 billion dollars, a zune that mostly serves as a punchline and to make the iPhone stand out, and vista, and then to mess up this yahoo deal, and release this desparate bribery scheme, and still be in charge.

Actually, I don't want that job. That would be a hollow, meaningless life in a swamp of mediocrity.</comment>


Show HN: hnapp – RSS feeds of HN posts filtered by points, title, etc. - <AUTHOR> http://hnapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> A side project of mine that I felt like was ready for publishing (far from perfect yet, but it works). I will add more advanced filters soon, as well as make a couple live visualizations of HN activity.</comment>


Net Neutrality: President Obama's Plan for a Free and Open Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.whitehouse.gov/net-neutrality

<comment><USER2> I am glad Obama is finally speaking up on this, but man. He sits on the sidelines for years without strong support for net neutrality (other than his original campaign promises), while the EFF takes up the charge fighting for net neutrality, and now it's "his plan"? Huh?

<comment><USER3> "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit." \-- Harry Truman

I don't care whose plan it is, so long as it gets done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nothing like a major republican victory for the president to come back to life. Thumbs up for the "new" plan!</comment>


Announcing Envoy: C++ L7 proxy and communication bus - <AUTHOR> https://eng.lyft.com/announcing-envoy-c-l7-proxy-and-communication-bus-92520b6c8191#.fk8c6rbku <comment><USER2> The info in [https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/comparison.html#prox...](https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/comparison.html#proxygen- and-wangle) about Proxygen not supporting HTTP/2 is not correct. Proxygen has had HTTP/2 support for a while ([https://github.com/facebook/proxygen/blob/master/proxygen/li...](https://github.com/facebook/proxygen/blob/master/proxygen/lib/http/codec/HTTP2Codec.h)).

Disclaimer: I work on Proxygen at FB.

<comment><USER3> We will fix the docs, apologies. FYI, your README still says that "HTTP/2 support is in progress".

<comment><USER2> Thanks for pointing out, will fix that on our side!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, with L7 routing on path (not just host) this does almost everything I'm using bud+fabio+consul to do. It's like Hystrix+sidecar-HAProxy in one.

The one thing I must have is SNI. The docs only have a short blurb [1], does someone know the full status of SNI support?

[1]: [https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/arch_overview/ssl.ht...](https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/arch_overview/ssl.html?highlight=sni)

EDIT: Also is there any kind of visualization for the resulting network topology? It looks like Envoy should know everything about who is talking to who.

<comment><USER3> Visualization is going to be a big area of future investment for us. We already have some pretty cool tools internally and obviously lots of dashboards, etc. but we would love to have a dedicated UI for Envoy. If you know any good UI devs who would want to work on this please send them our way. :)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for all the info. Any insight into the service discovery issues described in the docs [1]?

      Many existing RPC systems treat service discovery as a
      fully consistent process. To this end, they use fully
      consistent leader election backing stores such as
      Zookeeper, etcd, Consul, etc. Our experience has been
      that operating these backing stores at scale is painful.

[1]: [https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/arch_overview/servic...](https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/arch_overview/service_discovery.html?highlight=consul)

<comment><USER3> Mainly just years of experience at different companies watching ZK, etcd, etc. fall over at scale and require teams of people to maintain them.

We have had zero outages caused by our eventually consistent discovery system with active health checking (knock on wood), and haven't really touched the discovery service code in months. It just runs.

I'm not saying that a system using ZK, etc. can't be made to work. It certainly can since many companies do it. It's mostly that I think those solutions are actually making the overall problem a lot more complicated and prone to failure than it has to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This looks really neat! We are deploying a few new microservices every month now and I'm afraid that things will get out of hand networking wise (we are too using ELBs for both load balancing and service discovery), so I'm looking forward to try Envoy, thank you for open sourcing it guys.

</comment><comment><USER6> Pardon my ignorance, but would someone mind explaining, in a little more detail, when this software would be necessary, and perhaps other tools that do the same thing? Envoy seems like it does a lot, I'm just trying to wrap my head around it.

<comment><USER7> Their docs actually compare it to a lot of other stuff like haproxy, nginx, Amazon ELB, and more.

[https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/comparison.html](https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/comparison.html)

<comment><USER6> I didn't see these, thank you!

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I read a fair bit of their docs before I happened across it. I feel like they should make that comparison more prominent. Even knowing it was in there, I had a little trouble finding it again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This does seem incredibly useful for service oriented architectures. As I understand, it's basically a per application, per machine monitoring library for quickly detecting problems up and down the network stack.

However it also does load balancing. But doesn't that defeat the purpose a little bit? If your monitoring tool is the same as your load balancing tool, then who's monitoring the load balancer? :) I might be misunderstanding the architecture here.

<comment><USER9> So correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to maintain a web socket 'mesh' that it proxies all inter-service communication through. So whenever you need to speak to another service, you don't need to worry about the extra cost of creation/teardown of a new web socket. It also says that it handles automatic retries, global rate limiting ([https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/what_is_envoy.html](https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/what_is_envoy.html)).

Because all inter-service requests are going through Envoy, it is really easy to keep incredibly detailed stats about network health, request success rate & more.

Envoy performing the task of load balancing does not defeat the purpose, because it provides extremely detailed stats for ALL THE THINGS, they reported it helped them find problems much quicker, instead of checking service code, EC2 networking, or the ELB. Essentially by creating a supersolution with better stats reporting for all, troubleshooting seems like it would be easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If there's anyone from Lyft here answering questions, I have a few.

#1: cost. Doesn't it basically cost double to move the request from the client application to the proxy, and then from the proxy to the backend?

#2: upgrades. What happens to the clients when the proxy is being rolled out?

#3: head-of-line blocking. If an application has two streams to the same backend, one stream which is low priority and one which is higher, how does the proxy handle that?

<comment><USER3> Hi,

I work at Lyft. To answer your questions:

1) There is added cost, though it varies depending on how many things Envoy is configured to do (e.g., logging, tracing, stats, rate limiting, health checking, etc.). Even in complex scenarios (Envoy being used to proxy both inbound connections into a service, as well as proxy outbound connections to Mongo or Dynamo), we measure Envoy overhead to be < 1ms, which for almost all applications is negligible. There are definitely certain cases where this might be prohibitive, but in general we find the common functionality we get (again stats, tracing, etc.) to be invaluable in a production setting.

2) Envoy supports hot restart ([https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/arch_overview/hot_re...](https://lyft.github.io/envoy/docs/intro/arch_overview/hot_restart.html)), as well as graceful drain of existing connections, so there is limited/no impact to existing clients. There is one enhancement that we would like to make to our HTTP/2 graceful draining to make it even more seamless, but that is more complicated than I can type here. :)

3) Right now Envoy does not support HTTP/2 priority so all streams are treated equally. We are currently working on priority support at the routing layer, with different connection pools available for high and low priority traffic, as well as circuit breaking settings. In the future we will likely merge this back into a single HTTP/2 connection with proper priority support. In practice though, within the DC, head of line blocking at the TCP layer isn't too much of an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nicely done! Quite impressed since my company also has had similar problems with a fine-grained service oriented architecture. Envoy seems to cover almost of them, kudos.

However, I couldn't find a performance benchmark test or something compared to alternatives such as haproxy, nginx, etc. So I'm going to make my hands dirty now. ;)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Envoy works with any application language. A single Envoy > deployment can > form a mesh between Java, C++, Go, PHP, > Python, etc.

I find it odd that they did not include Rust in their list of preferred languages. Rust is safer than C++ and Go.

<comment><USER13> Rust barely registers outside HN and a few other web gathering places.

All those other languages have their niches and ecosystems and are safe enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any explanation on not using Asio instead of libevent (or libuv)? Performances?

</comment><comment><USER15> Wouldn't this require private keys to be sprinkled on all machines running it to inspect the traffic?

<comment><AUTHOR> I work for Lyft.

For this we have a secret management system, called confidant ([https://lyft.github.io/confidant/](https://lyft.github.io/confidant/)), that we use to distribute any necessary secrets. So, yes, you may need to have keys on every node (depending on your monitoring system), but assuming you securely distribute them, it's not a big deal.

This is, of course, a general problem that's not necessarily related to envoy.

<comment><USER15> This increases your attack surface area. Any breach to one of those machines and the attacker can start doing mitm attacks. It also limits auto scalability assuming newly provisioned machines require manual approval of priv key distribution (that stays in memory) via hsm, and the same goes if the process dies. One way to limit the key distribution is to embed the routing information you require in the SNI at a second lb layer that's shielded from public traffic. This way your public machines don't hold any keys and if they get compromised, limiting the damage.

I agree it's a general problem. But sometimes certain architectures would require more vulnerable approaches vs others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just seems like another piece of code in search of a problem and ways for things to go wrong, because someone didn't take to time to research how things work now.

<comment><USER17> Do you have any relevant criticisms, or are we all supposed to just pretend we already know what your problem is?</comment></comment>