Germans Grow Frustrated with Their Slow-Poke Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-grow-frustrated-with-their-slow-poke-internet-11565002666?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> I recently did vacation at the North Sea (land side, not the islands). It was heartbreaking. In many areas the iPhone showed "No Service", in most areas we had "Edge" connection with virtually no data throughput. Even when it showed "3G" I was mostly unable to use WhatsApp. And this is a region where people live!

And let's not talk about the landline broadband.... our rented appartment had a meager 1MBit download speed and 10MBit upload (yes, the reverse from what you would expect).

On the Autobahn, on many, many kilometers we had Edge only.

Compare that to my last travel to Iran: we had very fast LTE almost everywhere especially in the middle of the desert (it was heavily censored, but the infrastructure was working).

Even very close to big cities like Frankfurt, having an uninterrupted phone call is a difficult thing to have.

<comment><USER3> The crazy thing I think is how expensive internet is, in whatever form, in Germany compared to the rest of Europe while simultaneously being so terrible.

<comment><USER4> It's far cheaper than the US. I get 6MB/s downloads for 15€/month. For mobile, there's a chart making the rounds on Twitter, and it seems to me Germany is very much in line with other countries. Of course it's more expensive than it is in poorer countries in eastern Europe, as everything is.

<comment><USER5> For mobile I have unlimited 4G LTE for $55 dollars a month, including talk/text/etc. The 'real' cap is 60GB were they 'review your account for violations of terms and services'.

Just did a speed test and it's 31Mbps download and 4Mbps upload, but it varies wildly by location. But it's consistently fast enough that I can share out over Wifi from my cell phone so I can do my work and while my girlfriend watches youtube videos when we are travelling or the internet is down.

For home internet.. once it got faster then my wifi I stopped really caring a whole lot. 176Mbps on my last test.

If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of metropolitan areas.

Verizon tends to have the best coverage in the mid-west. If I was travelling a lot in the boonies I would get a second data-only account on Verizon's network just to increase my chances of always having internet.

Although nowadays that is less and less necessary as every hotel and most restaurants have wifi. Just look for a Mcdonalds and you can get internet most of the time.

<comment><USER6> > If you are travelling in the USA as long as you stick to the interstate > system you pretty much get mobile data the entire way. IF you drift onto > smaller highways then that is when things get very spotty outside of > metropolitan areas.

This really depends on who you are using. When traveling between NorCal and SoCal, Sprint is basically garbage and Tmobile works decently for most of the trip.

<comment><USER7> I've experienced them all and across all various parts of the country. If you want to know what phone plan to get, just ask a trucker.

<comment><USER8> So, what phone plan should I get?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Germany's internet is slow because it relies heavily on unbundling, implemented poorly: [https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media- information/archive/f...](https://www.telekom.com/en/media/media- information/archive/faqs-on-the-unbundled-local-loop-ull--358710). Telekom has little incentive to invest in upgrading its infrastructure because it has to lease it out to its competitors anyway.

Contrasting Germany and the U.K. offers a really good illustration of how important it is to set incentives correctly. The U.K. also relies heavily on unbundling, through BT. But when British Telecom was privatized, the U.K. intensely studied the issue of how to set the appropriate incentives: [http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/cri/pubpdf/Conference_semin...](http://www.bath.ac.uk/management/cri/pubpdf/Conference_seminar/31_Model_Utility_Regulation.pdf). The end result was a regulatory structure where rates were set such that BT ended up being very profitable. (Last year, BT's profit margin was around 16%, versus 3% for Telekom.) That created the incentive for BT to invest in pushing fiber further into its DSL network.

<comment><USER10> Here in the UK, widely available fast internet access still _feels fairly_ recent.

I've had a 80/20 FTTC connection (~£23/m) for 5 years or so, but before that it was ADSL, starting really crappy and ending up at something like 8/1 IIRC, and it took _forever_ to get that - people were complaining for _decades_ about BT and OpenReach's slow rollout of ADSL, and then FTTC. All the time I was painfully aware that people elsewhere had 100 or even 1000mbit connections (e.g. South Korea, various Nordic countries).

Now, widely available and inexpensive FTTH is the next goal here, although I'd say the availability of FTTC is "enough" for the vast majority of people to be happy with it. Which is just as well, as I'd guess we're 20 years aware from seeing FTTH. I realise 5g is starting to become a thing, but it's unlikely to ever be ubiquitous outside of major cities, and is bound to suffer once contention becomes an issue.

* FTTC: fibre to the cabinet * FTTH: fibre to the home

<comment><USER11> I would agree Fiber to the CAB is really all that home users need. A lot of the whining in places like Faringdon Central London is one or two business wanting to do freeload off consumer BB.

I helped my last company move at super short notice < 2 weeks and we got Last mile ethernet 70Meg as a stop gap before our 100 Meg line was delivered a month early

<comment><USER10> Yes, I do think it's enough for most homes, even myself who is an "IT professional" and "power user".

I have 80/20 FTTC, and the only thing bandwidth has ever been an issue for is first-time cloud backups, where I'm uploading 1-2TB of data.

I'd still like it to be cheaper though. I'd also _like_ it to be faster, but perhaps part of that is just because I know it _can_ be, and has been for decades in other parts of the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I recently moved to Germany. I used to work as a software dev in India before this. I was horrified to learn that (urban) India has way better internet than Germany. When it comes to mobile data it's even more depressing - back in India I used to get 1.5GB _daily_ 4G mobile data for 200 rupees (around 2.5 euros) a _month_. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, 2.5 euros a month for virtually unlimited mobile data is super cheap. In comparison, I pay 10 euros a month for a _monthly_ quota of 1.5 GB with O2 here in Germany. Not to mention that it's slower, and yes, there are a lot of patches with no data reception. Considering that Germany has otherwise superb infrastructure, the internet was a let down.

<comment><USER13> You're getting ripped off on O2 or Vodafone. Get an Ay Yildiz Prepaid card, 25 Euros for 12GB and there's an option to top up of you run out. It's an EPlus MVNO, speeds are pretty good on 3G (~8Mbps).

<comment><USER3> Coverage is pretty bad on anything that isn't D1 or Vodafone. O2 has okay coverage in cities, but anywhere else it's mediocre to bad.

<comment><USER13> I used it in Recklinghausen, Dortmund, Dusseldorf and Koln, so yeah, within the cities. You're right, on the motorways the speed was sometimes atrocious, less than 1Mbps

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >"The whole problem in Germany is the lack of fiber-to-the-home strategy by Deutsche Telekom DTEGY -0.52% and other carriers,

No, it is not. The problem could have been solved decades ago. Helmut Kohl of the CDU (conservative party) turned back a decision of his predecessor to role out a fiber network across Germany that would have been constructed from the 80ies until the millenium [1]. Germany could have had fiber to the home for 20 years at the least reachable areas and for 35 in major cities.

Rumor has it that nowadays, Telekom is postponing fiber because they don't want to sublicense their network to other carriers so they wait until they are getting a better deal. This is funny because Telekom is owned by many German small sharesholders (since that's how they have privatized the former public agency) - which has led to a situation where Germans don't get better internet because they are hoping for higher profits.

[1][https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der- Kam...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Missing-Link-Der-Kampf-um-die- Glasfaser-oder-Der-verpasste-Breitbandausbau-in-Deutschland-3952581.html)

<comment><USER15> Hah! That's exactly what happened in Australia.

There is legit talk about changing the hugest plans here from 100/40 to 120/20\. It's that bad. Which is moot anyway because 40% of the "new" network probably cannot get that speed anyway.

<comment><USER16> Australia's situation is fairly different. And reeks of all the wrong steps of privatization of infrastructure

Telstra (at the time "Telecom Australia") was drawing up plans to roll out FTTH all the way back in 1994(!) before being privatized whole cloth in 1998

Some of their delightful missteps leading up to (and during) the NBN rollout included

\- Selling Dial-Up services cheaper than competitors by virtue of not needing to pay line rental or other fees

\- Describing ADSL as a "fetish" and saying ISDN was "good enough"

\- Running a competitor's (Optus) HFC rollout into the ground. Large swathes of Sydney/Melbourne/Brisbane to this day have "Telstra Cable" on one side of a street and "Optus Cable" on the other, simply because Telstra wanted to bankrupt Optus out of trying to avoid using their copper network, and thus, paying fees

\- Breaking the ADSL 1 standard to prevent having to buy more DSLAM backhaul. The 8/1 ADSL standard was changed to "at most" 1.5/256

\- Attempting to roll out FTTN across the country in 2006, on the provision that they NOT be required to allow competing providers access to their equipment (this was a large part of what precipitated Labor's original NBN vision in 2007)

\- Stalling NBN negotiations as long as possible while gold plating their "4G" network, along with NewsCorp (which owns a 33% stake in Telstra) parroting the "WIRELESS IS THE FUTURE!" line, complete with ads for the "FASTEST 4G NETWORK IN AUSTRALIA"

\- Staffing the entire NBN board after the LNP victory in 2013 with "ex" Telstra executives, whom were not required to divest their shares in Telstra, while actively negotiating terms to use Telstra's network(!)

There's many other egregious Telstra incidents like charging 5x the market rate for peering on their network (being the biggest ISP has its "perks") and repeated nation-wide outages of their services due to outsourced network operations, but these are the ones directly related to the NBN today

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just a bit more background from Germany: This article largely focusses on broadband connections. It doesn't even begin to adress the even bigger issue, which is that mobile internet is extremely bad compared to most other european countries.

Also interesting that even the reporter fell for one of the lamest excuses: "Among them are the country's large geographic area". Northern neighbor Sweden, which happens to be one of the countries with fiber connections even in very rural areas, is larger and much less densely populated.

<comment><USER18> It seems to me France also has a comparable surface, although with more concentrated population centers.

<comment><USER19> France has 30 millions less people and is 50% bigger than germany (550000km2 vs 350000km2), so no, it is not comparable. Germany is way denser than France, with a lot big cities.

<comment><USER20> Isn't Internet in France supposedly really cheap and very fast?

<comment><USER21> Yes and no. Broadband is really hit or miss. You can live on a street where half the buildings have access to fiber (and therefore triple-play gigabit for <40€/month) while the other half is left with piss-poor DSL, that isn't even sold any cheaper. (At least in Germany the pricing reflects the speed).

Mobile isn't terribly better than in Germany (there are still many areas with fairly poor coverage) but it's way cheaper, yes. For instance I use a French SIM card for traveling, since it covers the entire EU, EFTA countries and North America. Unlimited calls/SMS and 15GB for 15€/month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's a very obvious reason for why mobile Internet in Germany is flaky, slow yet at the same time ridiculously expensive:

During the UMTS spectrum licence auction in 2000 the incumbents, state-owned T-Mobil and Mannesmann (later bought by Vodafone) feared new entrants to the market and in order to keep other players out of the market placed bids much higher than the amount those licences could be reasonably expected to bring in in the subsequent years.

In the meantime, Germany and its finance minister at the time rejoiced in the sudden, unexpected windfall.

The whole spectacle was even televised. People just generally and shortsightedly assumed that the higher the amount raised by the auction the better.

The auction's 'winners' however wrote off the costs over the next few years and didn't make enough profit to properly invest in the necessary infrastructure.

Apparently, none of the participants learned from this disaster because in 2019 when the 5G licences were up for sale they by and large committed the same mistakes again (though not to the same frivolous extent as in 2000):

[https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany- raises-6-point-5...](https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/12/germany- raises-6-point-55-billion-euros-in-epic-5g-spectrum-auction)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm centrally located in Berlin, and have an unmetered 400/12mpbs cable connection for 40Eur/m.

I can't say that I'm impressed, but having just lived in Canada which is _far_ worse I'm happy about it not being quite as bad.

However, 10 years ago in Sweden I had an unmetered 1000/1000mbps fiber connection for 4Eur/m. I feel like I'm doomed to forever have a shittier connection.

<comment><USER24> 4Eur/m is really really cheap... .

I do have FTTH (Switzerland, outskirts of Zurich) with unmetered 1Gb/s upload & download but I pay 54 CHF/month (cable installed by Swisscom but I'm using another Internet provider).

My parents live in the south of Switzerland, in the middle of nowhere, and for unknown reason one day the local gas & electricity company showed up and installed there as well FTTH (I'll never thank them enough as before the copper cable often did not work at all) and if I remember correctly they're paying ~60 CHF/month for symmetric 1Gb/s (sunrise.ch).

In general I think that in Switzerland we're currently all ok with having to pay ~60 CHF/month for such a speed.

<comment><USER25> That's only in big cities and some random gemindes though (your parents are lucky).

I get my internet over 4g here because land lines are 10/1 mbps.

Still, 4g is 80/15 or so, so it's viable for now (sunrise too)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's really _expensive_ for companies, too. The company I work for (small to medium sized) has a 34/34 Mbit/s fiber connection and it costs us 600€ per month. Included are 8 IPv4 addresses and an 8h response time (which has never been met and when we sued after a week of non-working internet, we lost in court).

It's just ridiculous how expensive it is for businesses. We simply cannot afford a 100/100 MBit/s connection and we are located in a larger city near the center, not even in a rural area that needs an extra fiber just for us.

So it doesn't come as a surprise that German companies are so much behind Americans in the tech sector. My company has a lot of manufacturing customers and we don't even need to think about a cloud strategy because most of them are still on 6/0.6 MBit/s DSL connections. So it's on-premises or nothing.

<comment><USER27> When I worked for Audi in Germany, they had 1Gpbs internet.

Maybe German government wants everyone to work for big German companies instead of small ones.

<comment><USER28> I mean it's _Audi_ I'm sure they can afford higher speeds.

<comment><USER29> It meters high only when tested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> That speedtest graph in the article is a great example of why averaging statistics is often a bad idea. The US fixed broadband mean is ~120mbps, but the median is more like ~70 mbps [1]. A few people with gigabit-ish connections are hiding the many people stuck with crappy sub-25 mbps connections.

[1] [https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring- broad...](https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband- america/measuring-fixed-broadband-eighth-report#_Toc427484591)

<comment><USER31> Yeah I checked the source out: [https://www.speedtest.net/global- index](https://www.speedtest.net/global-index)

And the UK is 50th... I feel it should be higher than Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Yep... I returned yesterday from Germany and it is _awful_. I thought the UK (rural) was bad, but Germany takes the cake. There are even (expensive) hotels which still ask money for using their wifi. When you go to have only a meal at a hotel, they tell you internet is just for guests (we had this 5 times in 2 weeks). And driving around with 3g/4g you notice massive patches without data reception. I live in the mountains of Spain where I have cheap 4g and even cheaper 'radio' uplinks. They are enough to download gigs a day (not that I need that; I need stable, not a lot of bandwidth, but it's both). I was used to drive out of London a just a little bit and everything dropping, but Germany is even worse. And when it does work, it's slow.

Compared to Thailand (including in the middle of the forest), Romania and other random countries I have been, it is strange to see such a difference.

<comment><USER33> Talking about Romania: in the modem Internet era I cabled (with my brother)the block of flats where we lived to share a connection. The wires were hanging between floors and were simply stitched to the walls internally. These types of cabling were then bought by ISP for cheap and they found themselves with cities cabled for pennies. Now they pulled fiber on public light poles (for free, of course) and interconnected all these networks, changed the switches to Gigabit and got cheap and fast Internet for the masses. You cannot do this kind of shady work in Germany, you need to get permits, pull the wiring underground, these kind of things increase the cost a lot. Also the mobile Internet is fast in Romania because of the competition from the very fast land lines. In Germany both are missing.

<comment><USER34> Yeah bureaucracy and regulations is one of the reasons things suck here. Extending the network is ridiculously costly with all the planning, approvements required, the city having a say, some wavie complaining they get headaches, an old dude thinking the tower looks ugly, paying the construction company and finally having that thing certified after it's been built.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is what economic protectionism (for which Germany is famous for) and lack of competition leads to - no investments in the infrastructure.

<comment><USER36> National backbone level internet should be large government infrastructure projects. It's like roads and railways. Competition works _on_ the roads, but works poorly for constructing them. Infrastructure within cities and to premises can work though.

<comment><USER37> Germany has at least a dozen "backbones" from different companies. The problems mentioned result from stupid last mile politics and practice, which factually deny affordable access for endusers to these.

<comment><USER36> Regional nets should be regional politics. Just like for national infrastructure, the best thing for a city to do is probably to invest in subsidizing fiber and then have companies compete providing the service. Having providers dig their own cables and then get a monopoly in them is pretty bad in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > But Deutsche Telekom, Germany's dominant operator, took a less costly > route in 2012, upgrading its existing copper network through a > technology called vectoring.

The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom really the only game in town across the whole country?

I thought Canada's oligopoly was bad, but one company for a much bigger country sounds like the perfect recipe for this type of thing.

<comment><USER17> > The article keeps mentioning this company repeatedly. Is Deutsche Telekom > really the only game in town across the whole country?

Pretty much, yes.

"Deutsche Telekom" is the company that came out of the former state telecom company. So they own the national telephone network.

Appart from a few local networks the only alternative is Internet through the tv cable network. However that never got complete coverage in Germany.

So for a lot of people Telekom is the only company that can offer them Internet connectivity. All the others are just reseller offers.

Also there have been some pretty nasty strategies where they actively prevent other companies from building parallel infrastructure: Places where Telekom didn't offer fast Internet for years, then a competitor builds a fiber network and coincidentally just shortly afterwards Telekom offers fast Internet, so the competitor looses because he can't get as much income as expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> _> In Germany, for example, gigabyte connections—which handle more than 1,000 megabits per second—are rare._

Probably gigabit connections? More than 1000 megabits / second requires hardware that is still rather uncommon in consumer grade routers and computers.

 _> Telecom giants in France and Portugal were already rolling out all-fiber networks early in the decade, in keeping with a 2010 European Union report that recommended that national carriers invest in fiber. How Fast 5G Mobile Internet Feels

But Deutsche Telekom, Germany's dominant operator, took a less costly route in 2012, upgrading its existing copper network through a technology called vectoring._

Such kind of stupid short term greed driven decisions slow down progress by decades. I've seen somewhere, that Australia suffered a similar problem, where government decided that copper will be good enough, and halted deployment of fiber optics. And now it's becoming a big problem.

</comment><comment><USER40> The running gag of mobile internet in Germany is EU-roaming (no-charge use of you cellular internet service abroad in the EU): I can travel the 1-4 hours to any neighboring countries for the perfect cellular internet access I paid for. The only country where it doesn't perfectly work is the one I live in. Germany.

<comment><USER41> Came here just to make this joke, the sad part of it is that it's so true.

I have bette mobile internet and call quality on every tiny village of every other country in Europe than what I have in a large German city.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's not just Germany. Tons of places in the US have crappy internet connection. I'm average 2-3Mbps on really good days, on a bad day, I see below 1. On Comcast, $40 a month plan, suppose to be at least 10Mbps, it's not my modem. I was getting up to 15Mbps when I was paying $80 and suppose to get 50Mbps. It's oversubscribed or capped by Comcast. No competition, no other providers.

<comment><USER43> Good grief! I'm using a small ISP that gets me ~250Mbps, but it would be more like 500Mpbs if I didn't buy a cheap router. In fact, they told me they'll be offering gigabit plans next year.

And I thought I was getting screwed when I could only get 120Mbps with Spectrum Cable.

<comment><USER42> I'm in a major city too, not in a rural area. It's freaking ridiculous. I have learned to live with it. At one point, I was using my phone. Downloading things to a VPS and when I visit my folks, I'll download from my VPS to a usb stick. In 2020! If I liked downtown tho 15 minutes away where there's competition, I'll have Wow cable or fiber and much better service. Comcast is garbage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> It's not just the speed. The costs are depressing as well. A 50Mbps connection (DSL, because cable is not even available in this area) at my current location costs €40/month. 40! It's mind-blowing.

<comment><USER45> Why do you consider that expensive? If it's reliable, it sounds very reasonable to me. 1 dinner out.

<comment><USER46> I pay about that for '10 Gbps' in CH. I don't even have a machine with a 10 Gbps port, but there isn't anything cheaper here that makes sense.

<comment><USER47> That's connection speed what payload do you get on average.

<comment><USER46> That's why I put the speed in quotes. I get about 900 Mbps both ways on my computer that has only a 1 Gbps port.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I don't have faith in that chart. Average US internet speed is 120 mbps?! Do they mean advertised max speed? No way the average internet household speed is that fast. Maybe half. Maybe. I like to live away from town, but even when I could get FiOS, the normal package was 50 mbps. I happen to have 400 mbps now (which flies in the face of my argument, I know).

EDIT: oh, I see. They are charting megabits not megabytes. That is more in line with what I would have thought.

So Germany averages 10mbps?! That is terrible.

<comment><USER49> The source is speedtest.net, which probably biases toward "users that care about speed and run tests", but also average likely is mean, not median, and the mean can get to 120Mb/s pretty easily with a fairly small fraction of Gb/s-class connections. even if the rest are in the 1-20Mb/s range.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Come to Ukraine. They have the cheapest internet, mobile plans and Uber in the world. And likely the worst air, food and city structure quality. There is always a choice.

<comment><USER47> What percentage of homes get that speed ?

<comment><USER50> Basically everyone who really wants to. All IT pros move to cities, because anyway rural life is nothing like Western picture.

End even for suburban areas, there are options for high speed air links.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> It's not only the average/median that's bad, it's the lower percentiles that are the most embarrassing. My parents live in a central, fairly dense neighborhood of a town of 40k people. Their only option until 2017 (!!!) was 64k dialup or very flaky 3G. It wasn't only their street that was affected, but the whole part of town, including a newly developed (but mostly empty, what a surprise) business park built from EU development grants. In my mind the reason for disasters like this is a mixture of

1\. De facto monopoly of the state-owned telecom provider suffering from mind boggling not-invented here syndrome. They've been pushing their proprietary custom-built hardware and protocols for decades while the world largely moved to china-built commodity which is orders of magnitude cheaper.

2\. Political resistance against declaring broadband as an essential utility. There was a parliamentary vote in 2011 to declare a right for households/businesses to get broadband connections (as is the case for electricity/sewers/telephone). It was declined with votes of the conservative/liberal coalition at the time. Nobody even talks about this anymore, other culture war topics seem more important nowadays. Whether to allow wolves to be hunted seems like a more important topic in the national debates.

3\. In general there seems to be an unfortunate climate of hostility against technology that reminds me of the Luddites. Smart phones and laptops are banned in high schools, etc. People mostly focus on the dangers and downsides of technology vs the benefits.

Source: Born in Germany, I moved to California a few years ago and can see the difference.

<comment><USER52> > They've been pushing their proprietary custom-built hardware and protocols

Fritz!Box routers? I was shocked how expensive they are, and how widespread.

<comment><USER51> I'm more referring to the backend technology: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#VDSL2_vectoring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL#VDSL2_vectoring)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> In the 80s there were plans to roll out fiber every with a 30 year plan under chancellor Schmidt, but with reunifiction plans got dismissed.

[http://www.bundesarchiv.de/cocoon/barch/00/k/k1981k/kap1_1/k...](http://www.bundesarchiv.de/cocoon/barch/00/k/k1981k/kap1_1/kap2_15/para3_6.html)

</comment><comment><USER54> Let me tell you about slow internet.

In Ilorin, Nigeria, I can get 500kbps on good days. Most times, the speeds hover around 100kbps. I can hardly watch YouTube at anything more than 360p. Even that resolution buffers too much sometimes.

<comment><USER55> Not saying that slow Internet doesn't suck – it does. But when I ever I am stuck on a slow network i download YouTube videos (the command line tool youtube-dl [0] also downloads a lot of other streaming sites). This trades some time for quality: You have to wait while downloading, but you can download whatever quality you have patience for.

[0]: [https://youtube-dl.org/](https://youtube-dl.org/)

<comment><USER56> Also, use a scheduler to download this at night when you are a sleep or not at home.

<comment><USER57> Download schedulers, you brought up so many memories of my dial-up days...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> It doesn't help that German politicians think it's a good idea to let companies bid on frequencies - 5g frequencies just went for 5.5 billion to 4 large companies. So those now have the monopoly on that plus they have to earn it back from the customer. And the highest bidder got the best frequencies. So good coverage can only be achieved by one company.

Same happened with 4g & 3g beforehand. Result being, only profitable areas are covered and competition has no chance to get into the market.

Sadly in German politics it's easier to get voted for tax cuts (because they get money by selling frequencies) then promising good internet coverage :(

</comment><comment><USER59> My wifi in Berlin is so bad that when I make video calls on my phone I turn wifi off and use my mobile data.

</comment><comment><USER60> Most of the discussions focus on end-users, here is an anecdote how this affects businesses: my current client recently moved to Cologne, the 4th largest city in Germany. They ordered a broadband connection from Deutsche Telekom three months before the move. As it turns out, Telekom needs SIX months to provide service. This is in one of the top-tier business centers, which was built in 2009.

Depending on your mobile provider, you also only have edge connectivity in most of the building.

</comment><comment><USER61> I mean, almost every country should. I live in Russia and it baffles me how much faster and cheaper internet is here, compared to the most western countries.

<comment><USER23> What speeds/types/prices are available where you're located?

<comment><USER61> I pay around 8 dollars per month for unlimited internet. Speed varies between 90-100 Mbps + they gave me a free Wi-Fi router.

I live in Moscow. I've heard you can find even better deals here, but it all depends on your location. One block of a city is usually covered by 3-4 internet providers, so you have a choice, most of the time.

Customer support is top notch, they installed it the same day, never had any problems.

My providers is OnLime is you are interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Maybe I'm just behind the times, but I can't think of anything I'd do that would saturate my 20Mbps link, other than maybe downloading an iso or something. I'm using 1 und 1's ultra cheap plan, and browsing works fine, streaming works fine, video conferencing works fine, remote desktops work fine. I work remote, and only once have I experienced an outage.

<comment><USER31> Transferring data to and from the cloud.

<comment><USER63> Not necessarily the cloud, it can also be your own server.

That's my problem as a Dutchman in Germany. Server still in NL, hosted at my parents', because it would be impossible here to host at home without registering a company (volatile IP, forced to change very 24 hours, only business connections get a static IP). Right now I'm attempting an off-site backup a second time, which will take a week or so, just like last time. Due to the interrupts and resumptions every 24h, there are lots of unused pack files, which you can prune, but then the system ran out of RAM during pruning and the backup doesn't appear recoverable.

The 4.5MiB/s upload I'm getting is the fastest possible connection in the centre of a city of about 50k people. I checked what it would cost to have fiber installed, and I'm not even sure it would be worth it for a company, let alone for a private person. It's cheaper to hire a moving company and go somewhere else. In the village of 1k people that my parents live in, I can get symmetric 500mbps since 2012 or something, they give a static IP, a /48 IPv6 range, reverse DNS...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I really cannot concur. I live in the depths of Bavaria in a small village with ~2000 residents. Our apartment is connected by two 100MBit/s DSL and 500MBit/s Cable lines, set up in failover configuration in case one goes down (which always only happens on Cable for a few minutes, and that setup exists only because I work 100% remote). The village is located in a mountainous region, yet everywhere I go, I have +100Mbit/s LTE available, safe for the completely unpopulated areas between mountains.

For all of this I pay

\- 39,99 for the cable \- 29,99 for the DSL \- 30,00 for unlimited LTE

On the other hand, there are very small villages with population < 500 with only 10 or 20Mbit/s DSL available. However, I think that this is to be expected in these areas and any complaint about it is, at least in this day and age, a first world problem and your own fault for living in the middle of nowhere.

<comment><USER65> Sorry but your setup seems to be outragouesly unique. Often times you have either cable or dsl. But not both. Also what about your upload speeds? probably only 20MBit/s or 40 max.

I dream of a land with 10Gbit symmatrical networking for an affordable price. It would be future proof. I could role my own server. Heck i could probably start a cloud business and scale up if i wanted to somehow by buying more fiber lines.

<comment><USER64> There are a lot of places where you can get both. Upload is 50Mbit/s on DSL and 50Mbit/s on Cable

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> This is an old anecdote (~2010), so not completely relevant to the current discussion. But I was living in Germany and the only internet option I had was dial-up. I could hardly believe that such a thing still existed anywhere in Europe, but even more surprising was that it was pay-by-the-minute. There were a bunch of different providers that had different pricing plans where sometimes there would be a connection fee, but lower per-minute rates, and sometimes the rates would go down after so many minutes of connection. The landlord set me up with some software that would try to minimize the cost of an internet session. It would tell you which provider to go with based on an estimated connection duration that you gave it. You could also configure it to hang up and dial into another provider if rates changed enough based on the time of day.

</comment><comment><USER67> It's been a long time since I cared or noticed how fast my internet was. Experientially, there's not much difference between 25 megabit service and 200 megabit service. You can stream 4K video on either, and both will require you to go do something else while your 60 gigabyte game download completes. One does it in 5 hours and the other in 40 minutes, but neither are instant- access. There's no escaping from the 1TB data cap I've had for ten years and until that's dead for good I won't be moving my media archive to the cloud.

Now, offer service that cuts my average ping to multiplayer servers in half and I'll get excited. Give me a plan with guaranteed 4G coverage no matter where in the US I go and I'll get excited. That's not going to happen though.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm from Germany and it's very frustrating. I'm already using the provider with the best network here (Deutsche Telekom). Having a fast connection outside of cities is still the exception.

It's so bad that I can't even call many times during my daily commute.

</comment><comment><USER69> Took my cameras to Berlin in the hope of making a couple of YouTube videos.

Spent a day trying to upload my first vlog & just gave up. The cable based modem was not only slow, but unstable in the heat.

Same video takes seconds to upload on a Singapore gigabit connection.

</comment><comment><USER70> I live in Central Berlin and the issue is present here as well. I had to choose the Telekom, one of the most expensive providers, because they intentionally blocked requests from other providers to service me with internet in my apartment.

<comment><USER37> How did they do that? _No port free_? Do you know about [https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/_tools/VSTK/Form01Beschwerd...](https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/_tools/VSTK/Form01Beschwerde/SVNr10_Versorgung/node.html) ?

<comment><USER70> I don't know about that. Thanks for the link.

I ordered service from 3 service providers and each of them called me a month after ordering and told me that Telekom is telling them there are technical problems and my bandwidth target of 50 MBit is impossible to deliver, so they aren't able to serve me.

I called Telekom after that and they told me everything is fine and aggressively tried to convert me to a customer. Tried another provider after that, still failed, so I went with...Telekom...and who would've thought...a week after that I had internet again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> If you get bufferbloat at 20Mbit/s and have a 300Mbit/s line, I would argue that you only have a 20Mbit/s line for most practical purposes except downloading large files. Strange how little focus this gets.

</comment><comment><USER72> For what it's worth, the price/bandwidth in Cologne isn't bad: [https://www.netcologne.de/privatkunden/telefon- internet/tari...](https://www.netcologne.de/privatkunden/telefon- internet/tarifuebersicht/). And not surprisingly, it appears to be fiber (FTTB and HCF): [https://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/CaseStudies/NETCOLOGNE_...](https://www.ftthcouncil.eu/documents/CaseStudies/NETCOLOGNE_ENGLISH.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER73> Brit living in Germany here. I just bought a new home, and it came with Fiber to the Home. Great I thought! Then I tried to get connected...

I have zero choice of ISP: I had to first go to a small company who maintain my line, who then pointed me at another company for the contract.

Though rated at 1gbit, I can only get max 500mbit from my ISP, and then that costs a whooping 90 EUR a month, without any phone or TV service.

In the end I took 300mbit at just under 70 EUR a month. Happy enough here, Netflix is great in HDR, but the costs and choice are ridiculous even when you have full fiber in Germany...

<comment><USER52> I'll be moving within Germany at some point in the next 12 months, and one of my top considerations will be what broadband options already exist in the area, because of the reasons you mention. If you move to an area with slow/no broadband, you'll be stuck in that situation for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> It's not only a matter of speed..the prices are really high compared to neighborhood.

For instance, you pay 10€ / month in Italy and you get 50 GB of LTE data. In Germany you pay 10€ and you get at most 3GB

</comment><comment><USER75> Promises made

2009: Widespread broadband for everyone by 2010

2010: At least 50 MBit/s for most households by 2014

2011: 50 MBit/s everywhere by 2018

2014: Let's hope we can reach this

2015: Digital Agenda -> 50 Mbit/s by 2018

2016: The goal cannot be reached

2016: Gigabit nets by 2025, fastest internet on the planet

2018: The goal cannot be reached

I have a whopping 3 Mbit/s at my home. It's so slow the technician that wanted to sell me a 10 MBit line didn't believe me when I said that I decline because it's not possible. Mind you, I live in an area where most houses are from 2010 or newer so it's not like they had no opportunity to set up decent connections.

On my daily train commute there are two 10 minute patches where I cannot make phone calls...the list goes on.

Pretty embarrassing for a so called industrial nation. I had better connections in every single country I have been to.

A common excuse that you hear is that Telekom had plans to roll out fibre everywhere in the 1990s but had to cut that plan due to the cost of setting up a phone system in East Germany.

tl;dr: it's pretty bad

</comment><comment><USER76> It's particularly interesting crossing the border from Germany to the Netherlands and seeing how the internet speed can increase so much after riding 20km.

</comment><comment><USER77> I came back from Germany in April. Infrastructure (trains, roads, airports) are wonderful, compare that with crawling slow internet.

<comment><USER78> I can assure you that trains are as bad as Internet.

<comment><USER12> And I can assure you that the trains are much much better than in other parts of the world (eg: India). In India, trains running on time are an exception, not the rule. At least all the German trains that I've been on were on time to the very minute.

<comment><USER41> I take the train in a big German city every day. If my train were to arrive on time one day, I would share that information with all my friends as something more than exceptional. This never happens. I can't wait till i've saved enough to buy a car and stop using the trains and subway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> The promise of privatization of the Telekom was higher speeds and lower prices. The opposite of that happened. This country is now far behind many comparable countries in Internet speed and penetration. And the state, in selling the Telekom, lost the ability to do it themselves when private industry fails. Terrible development.

</comment><comment><USER80> Do keep hoping everybody complaining here about their speed, also check their latency on dslreports.com. Bufferbloat makes slow internet a lot slower than it needs to be, and there's cures for it (sqm/fq_codel,sch_cake etc) - deploying that on your link can be a rather nice upgrade.

</comment><comment><USER81> As a Canadian, I'm very disappointed about the graph showing that Canada has the 3rd fastest mobile data rates in the world.

It's fast because prices are 50-100x as pricey as other OECD country. ~$10/gb in Canada vs. $25 for a 100gb plan in France.

Of course it's fast when utilizing it has heavy costs.

So much wasted capacity...

</comment><comment><USER82> In India i had a BSNL prepaid plan for 2€ a month for 2GB 4G data "per day" which worked fast even in the rural villages there. But in Germany with O2 I get 2GB 4G data for 10€ a month which goes "No Service" or switches to Edge many times if i goes out of the city.

</comment><comment><USER83> Some Netherlands internet is garbage too, even the 4G. And a whole lot of US internet is garbage.

Meanwhile, I've experienced reliable high speed (both direction) internet in Thailand and even Bali. Perhaps I got lucky, but imo there's no excuse for shit internet in US or NL (or Germany).

</comment><comment><USER84> I can understand this. I literally lost interest in moving to Düsseldorf when I realized that for a higher price than I currently pay I would get just a 60 Mbps down / 5mbps up internet connection, whereas I can get a 1gpbs down / 200mbps up FTTH connection.

</comment><comment><USER65> The only Good Thing about German Internet access is the FRITZ!Box. Best basic Internet Router with minimal required setup. Still missing some things, but they do their job much better than what any provider can give you (or they are rebranding the FRITZ!Box itself)

</comment><comment><USER85> Wait, _average_ internet speed in the US is 120 Mbits? About a gigabyte in 1 minute?

<comment><USER86> The source of the "data" is Speedtest.net tests, which is absolutely not an actual survey. At best, it represents the average speed of "enthusiasts who like to test their internet speed". Who, not surprisingly, are going to have faster connections than the actual nationwide average.

Shame on WSJ, this is a blatant example of using poor data to support an already-written article.

<comment><USER87> ISPs boost traffic caps to speed test sites so they are completely useless for any real assessment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> It is so bad that one German Minister does not take a call anymore, if he is driving on the Autobahn. Because it would be too embarassing to redial again and again because the call will drop. Not might. It will!

</comment><comment><USER88> I'm not an expert in economy but it just shows that there's a monopoly in the internet industry in Germany

It doesn't make any sense that a country so developed will have a slow internet.

<comment><USER89> There is no monopoly in the internet industry in Germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I was frustrated 8 years ago. I upgraded from 16mbit to 32mbit to 50mbit and every 2 years the internet speeds keep getting higher until I stopped caring.

</comment><comment><USER91> Canadians have slow AND more expensive Internet but are, for some reason, not frustrated. :<

</comment><comment><USER92> I'm in Hamburg and it's not great, not terrible but not great.

</comment><comment><USER93> I live in Berlin. Mobile networks are indeed a bad joke here. Most third world countries have much better networks. I always joke that I live about 1 km from the biggest FFing antenna in Germany (the TV tower, 350m tall, a major landmark and tourist destination) and yet cannot seem to get a reliable connection. I consistently get edge only near touristic areas because all of the base stations in those areas are apparently over provisioned. E.g. on the Alexander Platz right next to the before mentioned TV Tower I get edge only. That's the very definition of an incompetent operator. There is no excuse for being allowed to get away with that poor level of service. They just don't care here. In case you are wondering, the operator here is O2. I'd switch but doing so takes quite a lot of hassle (and paper work because Germany) and there is little evidence of other operators actually doing a much better job.

To fix this, the country needs lots of investments. E.g. they lack fiber optic cables in most of the country because the state monopolist pretending to be an actual company simply chose not to invest in this and the German government was completely OK with this for decades. This probably is part of the reason why 4G sucks here because there simply is nothing decent to connect the base stations to in most of the country. Fixing this will take ages and there are very little signs of this actually happening. E.g. most of Berlin has no access to fiber optic cable even though most of former East Berlin has gone through 25 years plus of heavy construction, renovation, etc. Apparently it never occurred to anyone here that stuffing some fiber optic cable in the ground would have been a clever idea. This is a key difference with e.g. the Netherlands where they've been putting cables in the ground for decades whenever there was any opportunity to do so. As a consequence, you can get fiber to your home in most places and reliably fast 4G in most of the country. This is the case across most of Europe with the exception of Germany.

The German government meanwhile is pretty hopeless. They have a "digitization" minister even. No idea what that means but it does not seem to yield more than weird photo opportunities for politicians without any apparent clue babbling about digitization (which is an actual word they keep on using with a straight face as if it means something). Also this minister is apparently not actually responsible for straightening out the dysfunctional mess that is the Deutsche Telekom, O2, and Vodafone kartel. That apparently is the responsibility for the traffic minister: [https://www.dw.com/en/germany-aims-for-faster-internet- digit...](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-aims-for-faster-internet-digital- progress-with-new-digital-affairs-minister/a-42872383).

</comment><comment><USER94> That also includes Germans in New Zealand

</comment><comment><USER37> Which germans? All of them? The rural "Landeier"? The suburbians? The failed capital Berlin? In my personal experience they are mostly too lazy or anxious to switch because of FUD, and/or stingy. The situation is complicated because in most places the so called last mile is in the hands of the former state monopolist, which now is playing a joint-stock company, while the state holds about one third of shares directly and indirectly via the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KfW](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KfW) Then there are the tv-cable companies and the really complicated "Netzebene 4", the last mile equivalent for anything Docsis in .de Complicated because of ownership, and non-sharing. This all feels really backwards, and _IT IS_! Nonetheless i got away from the Deutsche Telokom ASAP when i had the chance. A few anecdotes... Lived in a not so large town about 199x. Got ISDN and payed them insane amounts of money for dual-channel (128Kb/s). Flatrate? Not existent. Moved to a smaller town some years later, first DSL available, but not in my part of smalltown. Too far away from the exchange. Well, there was another option from Versatal. ISDN Flatrate(which Telekom didn't even offer!) for 40 or 50 DM a month. Most people didn't even knew, or didn't dare, because the company had some mishaps(years) before. I didn't care and had an excellent experience for the time, one could see the way the packets went via traceroute, which was very different from the way the telekom routed. Of course! Different company, different network. Anyways, blazingly fast(for ISDN). The € came, DSL didn't. I moved to Hamburg and had the option to choose DSL from [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HanseNet](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HanseNet) Again, excellent service, the speeds went slowly up without getting more expensive! Then they've been bought by Telecom Italia and it was renamed Alice. Didn't matter, speeds went up further without getting more expensive(€29,90 flat with landline flat to other german landlines) Some years later Telekom Italia sold Alice/former Hansenet to spanish Telefonica, which is branded O² in .de That was a sad story because one could see how a good company with a good product went bad. Slower speeds, crappy routing/peering, disconnects, changing dsl-standards without announcing them, or sending a modem capable of handling that. One hand not knowing what the other does. What to do? [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm.tel](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm.tel) to the rescue! Another local provider born out of a public utility, very progressive since its beginnings, best thing i ever had. I even got _more_ instead of the announced _up to_. Fibre to the basement and some VDSL with 100/31 for the usual €29,90 flat with landline to german landlines phone flat included. Excellent peering, latencies, whatever. Which will be upgraded to fiber to the home until end of the year, begin next year with gigabit, which i don't really need. Anyways, this is not the only provider apart from the big, mostly crappy ones, or resellers of them. There are [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCologne](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetCologne) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-net](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-net) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TEL](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWE_TEL) [https://www.dokom21.de/](https://www.dokom21.de/) [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAachen](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetAachen) These were the ones i remembered, i'm sure there are more. Then there is this comparison site [https://www.onlinekosten.de/dsl/provider/](https://www.onlinekosten.de/dsl/provider/) And to be honest, if you are a business, ask COLT, Zayo, BT, KPN, or something like that? So, that was the wired side of things. Mobile is more expensive and patchy. Depends on region, again. Shit happens. Maybe waiting for Starlink? Though i don't believe in that because of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic- crystal_fiber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photonic-crystal_fiber)

<comment> iso-8859-1 Needs more newlines.

<comment><USER37> Why? how does it look? I'm typing this in Firefox on desktop. Are you on something mobile and need to scroll sideways?

<comment><USER95> Not OP, but I'm on desktop and it's the type of comment I'd scroll past since this wall of text looks rather unreadable - it lacks structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> nearby post-communist country...Slovakia...the coverage and quality they have is outstanding.

</comment><comment><USER27> I am in Yoga city of India and this hilly region, I am getting 50mbps up and down.

So yea, it's finally getting better in India?

Food delivered in middle of nowhere in 20 minutes.

Everything is soo good here except the heat but now with monsoon it's more bearable.

I wonder what Germany will do. Maybe Germany wants everyone to work for big automobile companies because when I worked at Audi, we had 1gbps internet.

</comment><comment><USER97> I can assure you that their slow-poke internet is a reason of a feeling of entitled superiority over their neighbours, especially eastern ones.

</comment><comment><USER98> Germany sounds like it's about in line with suburban America.</comment>


"So, let's build a pro soccer team from scratch…" - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@dens/so-lets-build-a-pro-soccer-team-from-scratch-69a7588bb2da# <comment><USER2> It's a sports startup!

Well, not quite. As he says in the article, the team can't get promoted the way teams do in Europe. So there isn't the possibility of a large financial reward by being "successful" at running the team.</comment>


Announcing Open Live Writer – An Open Source Fork of Windows Live Writer - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/AnnouncingOpenLiveWriterAnOpenSourceForkOfWindowsLiveWriter.aspx <comment><USER2> This is cool. I used to use Windows Live Writer for about a year before moving on.

But with WordPress's Calypso now a thing, I wonder... what will OLW's relationship with that be? They're direct competitors.</comment>


Reduce Your Stress in Two Minutes a Day (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2013/11/reduce-your-stress-in-two-minutes-a-day <comment><USER2> Thank you for sharing, easy to follow read with some practical steps one can take.</comment>


Twenty-somethings, Quit Bitching and Write Your Own Ticket. - <AUTHOR> http://throwawayfornow.posterous.com/define-your-own-position

<comment><USER2> My dream job is one where I have full control over my position, can make every business decision, can take a vacation whenever I want, and get all of the profits from my hard work. It also involves not having a manager or boss.

No matter how good my job is, if I'm not the one in control of my destiny, I won't be happy. I hate knowing that my boss/manager could potentially start making ridiculous decisions that I am forced to follow.

"I understand not every place is as flexible, but if you prove you are worth it, companies will let you make your own rules."

I've been in the computer industry for awhile and I have never worked for a company that allowed me to make my own rules. I suppose it's the equivalent of a prisoner being allowed to make their own rules in their cell.

"This means showing your passion, doing this work past 5 PM and generally progressing in time. Quit complaining and using execuses. You have plenty of time to get what you want, you just need to put in the effort and work."

I'm very passionate about my work, but I refuse to do any work for any employer past 5pm.

You can always earn more money. Time is something you will never get back.</comment>


When Did Sex Become Fun? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sapiens.org/blog/origins/sexual-evolution-pleasure/ <comment><USER2> Sadly, the really-terribly-written article doesn't actually have anything useful to say about the question in the title.

<comment><USER3> The title also begs the question!

Is sex fun? Most people might say "Yes", but not quite 100% of the population.

<comment><USER4> It's a leading question, not begging the question. Begging the question would be "sex is fun because of X, and X always happens because sex is fun"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's a quite specific answer from Philip Larkin:

      Sexual intercourse began
      In nineteen sixty-three
      (which was rather late for me) -
      Between the end of the Chatterley ban
      And the Beatles' first LP.

(from [https://allpoetry.com/Annus-Mirabilis](https://allpoetry.com/Annus- Mirabilis))

It doesn't answer the _fun_ part, though, because Larkin was known to have a tedious love life.

</comment><comment><USER6> Somewhere somewhen I read something that said that the common housefly has an enthusiastic copulation lasting half an hour. If true, this seems to suggest that sex was fun long before vertebrates.

</comment><comment><USER7> It became fun when I got married.

<comment><USER8> I know you're getting dv'ed but I actually like this comment. It _may_ have something to do with the true answer to the question. Perhaps developing social structures were somehow important or perhaps sex-as-fun was important to developing social structures.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, and by the way this is honestly how it has worked for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What is this article about? I see sentences, but they don't seem to make a point.

</comment><comment><USER10> Since we discovered the orgasm!

<comment><USER11> That doesn't really answer the question, when did "the orgasm" arise?

<comment><USER12> When sex started to be fun!

<comment><USER13> Oh. So, the 1960s, then.

<comment><USER14> Well, the Kama Sutra is said to origin from around 400 BCE.

<comment><USER15> BCE has always weirded me out a little. Making it secular by just changing the suffix isn't really doing anything imho. I just read the Wikipedia entry and noticed that "vulgaris aerae" or "Vulger Era" for AD was once common. Now that is an equally problematic fix, but one I like.

<comment><USER14> BCE has the advantage of pleasing everyone.

Before Christ Era

Before Common Era

Before Current Era

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Probably around the same time people realized it felt good</comment>


"To say 'my religious law trumps your secular law' is a radical idea" - <AUTHOR> http://www.salon.com/2014/03/19/to_say_my_religious_law_trumps_your_secular_law_is_a_radical_idea_partner/ <comment><USER2> I keep wondering about the "my religious law doesn't allow for abortions" exception to things. As in, "Why does the Legislative Branch push that kind of thing?" Because when push comes to shove, and the USA institutes conscription for war, the Quakers, Mennonites and other "peace churches" will use that sort of exception as a wedge into conscription. If the Catholics and Baptists get to have some privileges about abortion, why shouldn't the Hutterites and the Amish get a pass on conscription? That will go down really well.

<comment><USER3> Apparently you've never heard of a "conscientious objector"?

<comment><USER4> Moreover, a CO is still conscripted. Quoting from [http://www.sss.gov/FSconsobj.htm](http://www.sss.gov/FSconsobj.htm)

> The person whose beliefs allow him to serve in the military but in a > noncombatant capacity will serve in the Armed Forces but will not be > assigned training or duties that include using weapons. ... Conscientious > Objectors opposed to serving in the military will be placed in the Selective > Service Alternative Service Program. ... Length of service in the program > will equal the amount of time a man would have served in the military, > usually 24 months.</comment></comment></comment>


We launched our second startup today - <AUTHOR>

We would love to get some opinions or suggestions about our product, because we cant rely on friends to judge from their biased opinions. Link: http://peoplepointnetworks.com/ <comment><USER2> You guys ripped some pretty obvious things (like the background) from <http://kippt.com>

<comment><AUTHOR> design wise, we both use bootstrap, so yes, I'll give them credit for that. the background, i forgot to change it to the one i made my self. thanks for reminding me!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Clickable: <http://peoplepointnetworks.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> About Us page is less informative, focus on an exciting para explaining your stuff !

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd rather see "...those _who_ matter."

Feels more human to me.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a Maryland resident and Ravens fan, I'm built to hate all things from Pittsburgh, but this looks quite good.

As you asked for critiques, I'll list out whatever I see:

\- Awkward amount of space on the home page between the left and right columns (@1440px). It looks like the left column is left aligned, and the right is right aligned, but on larger monitors that doesn't seem to have an upper bound, so those things are too far apart for me.

\- The screenshot is too small, and hard to discern. This is mostly an issue only because of the aforementioned space -- so there's clearly room to make it bigger, but even if you made it bigger within the faux monitor, it'd be more visible.

\- The feature list is a little too close together, space-wise. Horizontally everything's okay, but vertically I'd add about 10-15 pixels between rows. Also, I'd left align the column headers, and perhaps even push the icons for those headers out of the left margin a bit. It's not as bad as the space at the top, but it feels a little off.

\- The tagline is great, by the way. "Create your own private social network blah blah" is a great, immediately-understood description. I wouldn't mess with that.

\- The pricing table should have a 'highlighted' default probably.

\- The 'About Us' section should probably be relegated to sub-pages. I don't know what the honest judgement call is, but at least until you've gotten some more traction, my suspicion is that three college sophomores aren't going to be able to provide the most full-time customer service as a 'real' company. It's impressive to me, but I'm not sure how most people would feel about it -- might ask somebody other than me.

I don't have a need for the service enough to sign up at the moment, so my apologies on only critiquing the homepage. Like I said, on the whole it looks good, and my remarks are mostly superficial, but I tried to be as critical as my eyes would let me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the input! I am considering just cutting the about us section out completely, because I really doubt anyone cares who made some no name product. Whitespace wise, that is something I will have to tweak and adjust. It does look quite cluttered on bigger screens.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> it dosen't work

<comment><AUTHOR> sorry, i was doing some stuff to the server. its back online</comment></comment>


Show HN: MyWarranties.net – An online warranty database (Open Beta) - <AUTHOR> https://www.mywarranties.net

<comment><AUTHOR> Created using Django and Google's MDL.

Would love to hear some opinions from HN about the general idea and implementation.

Android version available at [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ebserver.m...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.ebserver.mywarranties)</comment>


Ask HN: What's the current thinking on doing plain JavaScript development? - <AUTHOR> Is there a current approach to front end development that is pure JavaScript - with absolutely no use of a compiler, no use of webpack or other code processors, and no use of other JavaScript build tools?<p>I'm wanting to know if there's anyone/any group that is doing modern, plain JavaScript with zero of the complexity introduced by the modern build systems. <comment><USER3> In the past several years I haven't seen a non-trivial app built without some kind of a build system, but I'm sure there are folks who don't use them.

Why are you asking? Learning how to use webpack (for example) can be difficult depending on your background, but once you set everything up it's pretty solid. Plus you could use boilerplates like create-react-app if you're not willing to invest too much time into figuring it out.

<comment><AUTHOR> >> Why are you asking?

I'm trying to decrease cognitive load in development.

Every single thing I need to learn takes time and introduces complexity.

I try to the greatest extent possible to program the underlying technology. This does not mean I don't use frameworks/libraries - I use lots of them - <USER2> I always try to decide if I'm better to learn the underlying tech than the framework/library - if the library is a better way to go then I use it. I'm just very pragmatic about whether or not I _need_ to use that framework/library cause I cannot afford to expend time on learning new stuff if I can afford to.

Full stack development means building everything from the OS to the cloud to the database, the back end web server and front end. I already pay a huge cognitive price to know all that and task switching between parts of such systems incurs further brain cost.

I already know ReactJS very well but I'm just thinking maybe I can reduce the cognitive load further by not using it.

<comment><USER4> All of the JavaScript written for [https://cloudbuddy.cloud/](https://cloudbuddy.cloud/) is raw and developed from scratch (zero frameworks / libraries / dependencies). It was my belief at the time that maintenance costs would be zero or extremely minimal over time since there was basically no dependency on anything external. Since inception (over 2 years), the benefits have held true. The disadvantage of course is that it took longer to finish the service and offer it.

So, I'm an old timer. I've been doing software development professionally for 25 years. For me, new development is stimulating; maintenance - not so much.

Andrew, here is what I would suggest - create and finish a small project and code it in ReactJS. Then code the same one using only raw javascript. With the experience, you'll have your answer whether the cognitive load is worth it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I understand why you are curious, because I too often feel encumbered by the complexity of frontend development. I came to conclusion that I can't do much about fighting off the tooling since I have already bought into those. But I can reduce complexity in other ways like reducing dependencies and instead building simple things in-house.</comment>


On the folly of asking the same question once - <AUTHOR> http://etilevich.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/on-the-folly-of-asking-the-same-question-once/

<comment><USER2> This actually frustruates me because it indicates the author has the reverse problem - caring about and evaluating a candidate based on whether they ask him questions at the end of the interview. I'm really skeptical this is a good screen for any kind of future performance. Interviewing is hard, but more often than not the mistake I see people making isn't ignoring what matters; it's failing to ignore what doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've had this problem on interviews before, you get scheduled to talk to a bunch of people, serially, and end up saying/asking the same things over and over. An entire day of that is grueling and can wear down virtually anyone.

For this reason, I actually prefer panel interviews where 2 or more people interview a candidate at the same time. This way less time is wasted and the interaction between interviewers can be useful for the interviewee as well.</comment>


Ask HN: Must-have Vim Plugins for JavaScript Dev - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to setup Vim for JS/Node development but there seem to be so many different plugins that I just don't know where to start. Are there any Must-Have Plugins for a minimal setup? Some standard plugins? <comment><USER2> [http://oli.me.uk/2013/06/29/equipping-vim-for- javascript/](http://oli.me.uk/2013/06/29/equipping-vim-for-javascript/)</comment>


GOOGLE: This NDA never existed - Valleywag - <AUTHOR> http://valleywag.com/tech/google/this-nda-never-existed-230407.php <comment><USER2> Most NDAs I've read have a similar bit of boilerplate in them. When I signed my NDA with my current employer I asked them to take out that clause and they did.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you 'finish' your projects? - <AUTHOR>

So here's my issue. It's a long standing issue that I've always had, but has never really been an issue until now. I was given a big project for a big company for a big eCommerce platform. The extension I wrote will soon be released to the masses for consumption and use.
Now here's the problem. I keep looking at the code and trying to find bugs, add more little snippets of validation, etc. I keep finding ways that I can make parts of the extension better in some way. All the code is completely commented and I keep finding ways to make the thing better (or at least I think I am).
Does anyone else ever do this kind of thing? When do you say it's "complete" and move on to the next project? This extension works and works well, and has been tested all kinds of ways. I'm not the type of person to half ass a project and this is for a very large company and I really don't feel like making the company I work for nor my self look bad. <comment><USER2> You can look at this as more of a "philosophical" question. Is software ever really "done"? There will be much back and forth, I don't think this question is really answerable. If you need to hand it over to someone else; then yes. Once it matches the specs that they intended for it, then I would consider it done.

If you wish to continue making changes as you come up with them; that's perfectly fine, but remember the more that codebase changes, the higher the likelihood that something can (and will) go wrong.

It's a good question and this will certainly drum up a good discussion here, I look forward to seeing what everyone else says.

bw

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it works and thus it's done. It's meet the specs, but it seems I can always find something more to add. It would add more complexity and the age old KISS method should come into play here.

I like the idea of thinking of this as a philosophical question. When asked like that. Is any of the code we write complete? Makes me ponder since I see open source projects go on for years =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While I strongly agree that no product is ever finished and improvements can always be made, I do want to make a statement in regards to a comment you've made in reply about "more to add". Sometimes improving means removing as well and sometimes it does mean adding, or just changing something. It depends.

That said, just because adding something makes the product better, does NOT mean it always make sense. There was a story about another company who, because of customer feedback, ended up building a bunch of features into one of their products. Turns out, only a small minority of their userbase even cared to use those features and that the mass majority were fine with the features that were already there. In hindsight, they said it was wasted time and resources and really didn't add much to the bottom line.

Also, rather than believe what you're doing is "better" or an "improvement", things should be split tested and verified as to whether you should spend time and resources. While I don't disagree that you can do more with any given product, the question you really should be asking is are you wasting your own time and that of your employers with these things you want to improve or add. Remember, opinions don't mean shit. Hard data does.

</comment><comment><USER4> The only finished projects in my opinion are failed projects.

Successful projects are never finished. You need to keep working with them and making them better to improve your offering so that you can retain your users and keep your competitive edge.

<comment><USER5> There are other reasons for done besides failure. The original "super mario brothers" game is done and not a failed project. When holograms become the next big thing in TV flat panel TVs will be done, and not a failure. Projects are done when they are no longer needed. One cause of "no longer needed" is failure but certainly not the only one.

<comment><USER4> Good point. I was being very narrow sighted on that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A product is never really "complete". Your personal "completion" date will be when the responsibility for support, modification, and enhancement is transferred to someone else. There will always be room for improvement in any product, but we all need to eventually step back and see where our efforts will have the greatest value.

Eventually, there will be a new unit of work for you to tackle with a bigger payoff for your time. The transition is not instantaneous... gradually, that new project will consume more of your energy, until it becomes your main focus.

</comment><comment><USER7> No project is ever finished. Once it meets the basic requirements given to you before starting, it is finished. Bug fixes are an ongoing process.</comment>


When Women Outrun Men - <AUTHOR> https://thewalrus.ca/when-male-runners-lose-to-women/ <comment><USER2> I have seen many women win overall races, at distances from 5k to 200 miles. But what is always left out of these articles is the relative talent and fitness of the entire field. Elite-level women can beat 90% of all men. So if a male in the top 10% doesn't show up to race, elite women can win the overall. This is what is happening in all of these cases. I love to see women win the overall, but even they would say it depends entirely on who shows up on the start line.

<comment><USER3> The most intriguing 'graf in the article for me was this:

'After scouring the results of nearly 100,000 marathon finishers, Sandra Hunter, a professor of exercise science at Wisconsin's Marquette University, made an interesting—if not intuitive—find. The more men there are in a race relative to the amount of women, the bigger the performance gap between those genders. "If you had one female for every twenty men, the likelihood that that female is going to be the best . . . compared with the best male in that age group is pretty small," says Hunter.'

Which suggests it has a lot more to do with the statistics of outliers than anything else. Elite performance is signal (training!) plus noise (daily variation, environmental variance, Athena rooting for you, etc), which can overwhelm the signal on any given day. But each participant is also a random draw on the /signal/ variable as well. Get more people in the event, and you get more draws on the signal variable. Get more people on race day, and you get more chances for outliers on the noise variable.

<comment><USER2> I'm not exactly sure what you are saying. Elites are outliers by definition. Elite runners are mostly elite because of genetics. Then they train hard to realize their potential. 99% could never become elite in traditional running events, no matter how much, how hard or how smart they train. The top 1/10 of 1% of the general population is more likely the definition of elite in running.

<comment><USER3> Outlet statistics work differently from measurement of means. The distribution of the largest draw from a collection of draws from a normal distribution depends heavily on the size of the sampled population.

Consider each runner's skill, training, etc as a sampled variable. Then the top score in the sample depends heavily on the population size. Comparing the best draw from two equivalent groups of different sizes is thus going to favor the larger group. And this sounds like what they observed in the study.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's a related scientific study that gives a possible reason why: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4899381/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4899381/)

> Women have more body fat than men in both elite (Vernillo et al. 2013) and > recreational (Hoffman et al. 2010a, b) athletes. In both elite and > recreational runners the percentage of body fat is higher in women compared > to men (Blaak 2001). It could be argued that fatty tissue may be used as an > energy reserve and this could be an advantage for ultra-distances since > runners tend to lose body fat during multi-hours running competitions > (Karstoft et al. 2013; Schütz et al. 2013). Women might benefit from their > higher percentage of body fat since both sexes lose a similar amount of fat > during an ultra-endurance performance such as a 100 km ultra-marathon > (Knechtle et al. 2010a, b, 2012a, b).

<comment><USER5> Sounds reasonable to me. I've been eating keto for a long time and I always feel like I have fat energy reserves to draw on. I wonder if keto-adapted men and women would outperform carb-adapted counterparts in ultra-endurance.

From personal experience there is a difference and it is a big difference.

<comment><USER6> The body can only convert so much fat into energy at a given moment. Usually we have both carbs we've recently eaten to fuel us plus a store of glycogen. On Keto you should have little to no glycogen and only whatever small number of carbs you've eaten recently. If your energy expenditure exceeds what they body can convert from fat along with whatever it can extract from your limited carbs and whatever glycogen is hanging around, you'll get an energy crash. Keto might be good for ultra endurance events where there is little to no sprinting involved. Just keep a nice steady pace at the level that can be fueled by the body's capacity to convert fat into energy.

<comment><USER7> Except then you would still eat carbs the night before a race because not having glycogen is just intentionally gimping yourself for no imaginable possible gain. It's not like the mj of glycogen energy is weighing you down.

You should absolutely train in a glycogen depleted state just so you will know what it feels like and can deal with it. But it's not how you would ever start a race.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I recall reading in an older running book (maybe one of Jeff Galloway's) something along the lines of: because of physiological differences, in theory women may be able to outperform men in ultra-high mileage events. I suspect the author of this piece is overstating the "conventional wisdom" of the running community.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, this (that women have some advantages at longer distances that may prove decisive) has also been something that's been something that's been imparted on me as "conventional wisdom" so long ago that I can't really remember when, so I was also surprised by the author's use of "conventional wisdom" for the opposite claim.

If you look at marathon winners, it's clear that the male advantage of more muscle mass doesn't help here. You want to have as little energy-consuming muscle as you can get away with, and as little total weight to lug around as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It would appear studies have been done on relative body fat % between male and female long distance athletes.

But have they included relative different upper body muscle mass between males and females?

IF upper body muscle mass differential between genders exceeds the same differential for body fat, perhaps it may explain the declining performance gap between genders over distance?

Might male upper body physiology, excess to ultramarathon requirements, become a net negative compared to women's excess body fat?

A human physics and engineering problem that possibly favours females at extreme distance?

I've got data for hundreds of people travelling 80km, but carrying 25kg.

Including female participants.

Different story with the additional weight carried though.

However, we did have 1 truly exceptional/outlier female who once came in 1st place.

Mental resiliency is very much an individual effort.

Having a lot of experience assessing humans in this realm, I don't see any gender based causal factors.

However, the one human I met who was truly willing to push themselves to the point of true failure was a female. It was the only time I was nervous in my role. But that is strictly anecdotal.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ultrarunning is such a niche sport. That's why it isn't an olympic sport. There aren't enough people in the sport to make finishes consistent across similar terrain. The winner of the race could be 2 hours ahead of the second place finish.

<comment><USER12> My spouse has gotten into trail running, and has done a couple of 50k's along with shorter events. This amount of variation is really noticeable. I also have a friend who rides cyclocross, and it's a similar thing. My impression as an outsider is that perhaps as a result of this level of inherent variability, the social atmosphere surrounding these sports at the amateur level is much more laid back.

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</comment><comment><USER14> This phenomenon isn't just confined to extreme distances. It is present during various high caloric stress events. Another example is potentially marathon ruck marching with a heavy backpack and possibly other hand carried gear.

</comment><comment><USER15> I am a bit tired of this male-female competition.

If you care so much go climbing, you'll see all women doing better than guys. Nobody cryes. Next topic please!

<comment><USER16> I doubt that, climbing relies heavily on upper back muscles

<comment><USER15> Not really, it's all about the legs, and the hands are mainly to keep the balance. Also women are lighter so they dont need to be that strong, it's all about technique

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> See too: Lael Wilcox.[0]

[0] [https://youtu.be/qqigzj97Vpo](https://youtu.be/qqigzj97Vpo)

</comment><comment><USER18> UTMB is probably the most famous Ultra, if you win you will get sponsorship, huge exposure etc. Check the finisher times.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Trail_du_Mont- Blanc](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Trail_du_Mont-Blanc)

Spoiler. It is not even remotely close.

</comment><comment><USER19> Talk about bait and switch.

Headline:

"When Male Runners Lose to Women: Conventional wisdom has long asserted men outperform women in long-distance races. Ultramarathon results prove that assumption wrong"

Actual article: men outperform women in long-distance races, usually but not always winning:

"By the most common perceptions about the biology of strength and endurance, physiology was stacked against St Laurent. On average, her male competitors had bigger hearts, larger lung capacities, and leaner bodies. And most results reflect that: in last year's marquee Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc TDS, a 145-kilometre mountain race with more than 9,000 metres of elevation gain, the first female to cross the finish line came twenty-third. St Laurent, who placed fifth among women, came sixty-first overall."

<comment><USER20> > most results reflect that

But sometimes women do win these ultramarathons. You'd never see that at any other distance.

<comment><USER21> There's a whole lot of "might" and "maybe" being thrown around here. Honestly, I think the biggest factor in these longer distances is the smaller sample size. There just aren't as many elite athletes competing at the ultra distances as there are at marathon and shorter distances.

The article throws in a bit of speculation about how men might be socialized to run too hard at the beginning of a race. I disagree. That observation says, to me, that the men competing in these events are not as well trained, not as experienced.

Look at the men's marathon and you'll see everyone taking it easy at the beginning of the race! They have to hire people to push the pace in the beginning because the elite runners don't want to do it. That directly contradicts the speculation about male socialization.

<comment><USER22> There's actually very substantial differences in the metabolism inside of muscles for men and women. Nobody realized this because literally every study that created baselines for what was going on inside the muscles in relation to the metabolites that ended up in the blood was done with men. So when women were later included in studies they just used the blood workup or VO2 to estimate energy expenditure and the like, and it turns out those are nearly completely wrong.

Long story short, women switch to catabolism way earlier than men, while they still have glycogen inside their muscles. Men don't switch to catabolism until after they are completely out of glycogen and are creating fucktons of lactic acid. Since your muscles run on glycogen, and lactic acid is not a great thing to have kicking around, women actually appear to have a better metabolism for endurance.

Unfortunately a lot of doctors and researchers are men, and are extremely dismissive of the idea that there is any reason to actually study women, instead inventing behavioral reasons for why you don't always get the same results for men and women in studies.

I think the fact that you are willing to chalk up the fact that women are winning these races on occasion to there not being enough elite runners has signs of a similar chauvanism.

(This is mostly off the top of my head, but I have a degree in biology and I have studied metabolism fairly extensively)

<comment><USER20> > you are willing to chalk up the fact... has signs of a similar chauvanism.

You were making a good point until the ad hominem. The personal attack makes me want to discount everything you said.

<comment><USER23> That's an unreasonable thing to do, especially since it was less an ad hominem attack than it was pointing out the fallacy at the root of your misunderstanding. They were doing you a favor. But mostly because, "I will take this one line from your statement, to show that you were arguing in bad faith, and use it to nullify the rest of what you said," is... very obviously a rhetorical tactic, rather than a substantive counterargument.

<comment><USER24> Or perhaps it's simply a form of peer pressure. "Be civil or nobody here will listen to you".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Return on Investment for Digital Tokens Hasn't Been That Good - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-17/digital-token-returns-prove-fleeting-after-euphoria-wears-off <comment><USER2> to me ICOs seemed like buying gift cards at a store that hasn't been built yet.</comment>


Paid answer website..feeback wanted - <AUTHOR> http://www.ansmart.com

<comment><USER2> I like your design, but the logo is kind of weak.

As for the concept, I can see the appeal of going to the site to make money from answering questions, but I don't think many people are going to pay to have their questions answered.

Maybe you could just keep asking your own questions and if monthly ad revenue > what you pay out for questions. You profit!</comment>


Family intranet startup - would love your feedback - <AUTHOR>

My partners and I are building a service that lets any family set up a family intranet site. We've just put up a beta and would love to get your honest feedback (even the brutal stuff.)
http://kinverge.com/
Registration is required, but it's just an email and password. (The site lets you upload photos and other content, and lets you invite others to your group, so it's easier to check it out within your own user account rather than using a single generic test account.)
Really interested to hear your input and advice.  The idea for the site grew out of our frustration with not being able to keep track of family information -- photos, birthdays, giftlists, announcements, etc. -- all in one place.  We also wanted to make that place so easy to use that even our non-tech-savvy family members can participate.
What do you think?  What's working for you, and what should we be doing better/differently in your opinion? <comment><USER2> I would really like to see a demo before signing up, but I think a family based social network is a phenomenal ideaf or the very reason you said: keeping track of things going on with detached families.

Maybe detached isn't the right word, but I know in my case, family spread across the US and even Europe, with some members in Iraq I think this is GREAT.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Glad you like the idea. (And good point about seeing a demo first -- we definitely want to add something along those lines as a next step.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a nice idea: How is it better than using Geni.com?

<comment><AUTHOR> While Geni does have family-oriented tools, it focuses first on genealogy. The implicit "goal" is to build the largest possible family tree, and presumably to use its social networking features to learn about and create new relationships with distant relatives on that tree. While Geni does a great job of it, there are a lot of families that don't have time or interest in genealogy, and are instead just looking for a simple way to stay in touch with a core group.

So we're focusing instead on immediate families and other closely-connected groups that need a simple way to share and manage information among existing members. They're looking to save time, rather than pick up a new set of information to manage (family tree). That's why I say Kinverge is more of a family intranet site than a social network.

To think of it another way, the Geni social graph is a traditional mesh, while Kinverge's is formed of circles that touch at points where members belong to multiple groups (your family group and your in-laws' family group, etc.). You could make Geni work that way, but it would require changing a lot of the default privacy settings, which non-tech-savvy family members have a hard time doing.

Thanks, keep the feedback coming! Much appreciated.</comment></comment>


Indie Game Devs Post Own Game on The Pirate Bay  - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/indie-game-devs-post-pirated-game-on-the-pirate-bay-110909/

<comment><USER3> Great little story, if I wasn't supposed to be working right now I'd check out the game more. (Maybe it'll hit the Humble Bundle next time around.) They seem to understand that the greatest threat to any creator trying to monetize a product is obscurity, not piracy. Also, when you release something, some amount of Value is created and you're not going to be able to capture all of that Value no matter how hard you try. But things like this that actively play the torrenters can let you capture more of it than you otherwise wouldn't have.

<comment><USER4>
        Maybe it'll hit the Humble Bundle next time around.

I hope so for them, but you realize the HIB is basically the lottery of indie games? A tiny fraction of all indie games get on it, so the chance of each individual game is minuscule.

<comment><USER5> How is it the lottery of indie games? All the games sold on HIB - that I've played - are good, original, well polished games. Some, I believe, are some of the best games ever made, indie or non indie. It wasn't luck that put them in the HIB shelf.

<comment><USER6> I don't think the GP was implying a purely random process, rather the fact that if there are 20,000 games submitted for the bundle, your chances of getting picked are pretty low (akin to a lottery). As an indie dev, you have some knobs in your control (how good you make the game), but many knobs won't be.

<comment><USER4> Exactly.

There are a lot of really good indie games out there, but most people are only aware of the famous ones, or the ones they get exposed to via stuff like the HIB or high-visibility steam sales.

If you enjoyed the HIB games I suggest you keep digging as there are many, many games out there at the same level as the average of the game in the 4 bundles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ugh, most indie platformers haven't yet reached the level of the original super mario bros. nintendo spent a LOT of time fine tuning the controls. The lack of fine tuning is very noticeable in games like this (another really good example is meatboy). Intuitively the controls don't feel "tight". What's really going on is that there is a lack of a way for the player to create repeatable conditions so they can do experiments and thus learn the fine degree of control exhibited in speed runs of SMB. This generally happens below the conscious level.

<comment><USER8> _ugh, most indie platformers haven't yet reached the level of the original super mario bros._

This is hardly surprising when Super Mario Bros is widely regarded as one of the very best games of all time, some would say _the_ best [1], and sold more than 40 million copies, making it the best-selling game ever until 2009 [2].

You don't rubbish a new play by complaining that it's not as good as Shakespeare, or a new album that's not as good as Thriller. And you don't rubbish a platformer for not being as good as Super Mario Bros.

[1] <http://top100.ign.com/2005/001-010.html>

[2] <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros>.

<comment><USER9> Bad controls sink a platformer. I haven't played this one to evaluate it, but if it's sloppy, that really does make it a no-go--the difference, for me at least, between "good and worth playing" and "unacceptable, give it a pass" is really narrow.

Given that developers have had about twenty years to study and reach deep into the guts of games like the original _Super Mario Bros_ , it really does make it harder to rationalize that, as the GP poster noted, very few games are really even in the same ballpark in terms of fluidity of control.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you can't beat 'em, join 'em! Encouraging bootleggers helped the Dead. Why not others?

<comment><USER11> But that wasn't bootlegging, that was people legitimately recording the shows with the Dead's blessing (many bands followed suit). But it still remains it was the Dead's choice to give that blessing, and I still feel creators should maintain that right. Even if they choose to exercise that right poorly (ie, if the Dead disallowed recording) that is their choice, not the piraters.

<comment><USER10> Same as in the article. The firm themselves chose to give away a pirated version. I am certainly not trying to claim that all piracy is good - <USER2> that some who embrace it on themselves do benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The lack of a proper full screen mode really kills this game for me, I end up click outside of the window and inadvertently switching to a different application.

</comment><comment><USER13> direct link to torrent file: [http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/6617784/No_Time_To_Explain_...](http://torrents.thepiratebay.org/6617784/No_Time_To_Explain_Windows_tinyBuildGAMES.6617784.TPB.torrent)</comment>


An Intro to Reverse Induction - <AUTHOR> http://www.ghalib.me/blog/an-intro-to-reverse

<comment><USER2> Not really reverse induction, but related: The principle of induction is equivalent to the axiom that all non-empty sets of natural numbers have a smallest element. And one can always convert proves from one technique to the other.

As an exercise, try out converting the "Interesting Number Paradox" (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number...>) to use induction.

("If there were uninteresting numbers, there would be a smallest uninteresting number - but the smallest uninteresting number is itself interesting, producing a contradiction.")</comment>