MIT Researchers Have Developed a 'System for Dream Control' - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywxjvg/steel-ball-control-dreams-dormio-mit-hypnagogia <comment><USER2> I was introduced to this phenomenon through Kurzweil's book "How to create a mind". He claims that the brain is massively parallelized pattern recognition machine, with consciousness being a censor that filters results. While in hypnagogia, this censoring function is suppressed and you are able to make "unthinkable" connections between ideas you normally think are unrelated. Of course, you should just take notes of these connections and later evaluate them rationally to see if they have any merit. It's very exciting that technology might be able to prolong and enhance this creative state of mind.

<comment><USER3> Until now I never knew that there was a name for "hypnagogia". For most of my life, I was never able to remember this period of sleep, but over the last few years that has changed (not intentionally, so I don't know what changed in my body to cause the difference). I've developed some level of awareness during it and can wake myself up from it, then remember at least some of it. If you've never experienced it, it's like every part of your brain is talking to every other part of your brain, and you have many bizarre connections of thoughts happening in parallel. It's different than a normal dream, where it seems there is only one "thread" running at a time.

<comment><USER4> These have happened intermittently through my life when my stress is high. This is only personal clue I can give to you "why" otherwise maybe you're just getting good at it.

In my last episode, I was floating toward a wall and all these thoughts were firing, "you're in a dream", "you'll go through the wall", "don't be afraid" but the rational side that felt like I was going to slam into a wall freaked out just at the wall & I woke. I still wish I just let myself slip through the wall..

<comment><USER5> I reliably have dreams that involve flooding when I am stressed or frustrated. I'm not particularly good at remembering dreams, don't try, but after one dream that seemed particularly 'symbolic,' I read some Jung and now I recognize that, in almost every dream I do remember, there are archetypes and symbols that he mentions. Jung wasn't really 'systematic,' but there are on order of 10-100 sub/objects in dreams that he emphasizes quite a bit and I see these in mine. Also, I tend to only remember a dream at times when my 'subconscious is [probably] trying to tell me something'

<comment><USER4> Yep, I see dreams same way and enjoyed reading Jung a lot in college. It makes sense that stress would induce more dreams if you saw dreams as mechanisms to heal your own mind, or at very least, point out the problem. I have read in other texts that we live out our ego fantasies in dreams (both scary & exhilarating) because otherwise it's a "pain" we can't handle until we get a taste for it.

You might find the dream dictionary[1] interesting.

[1] - [http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/](http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> squeaky-clean Sleep As Android can do this same thing. It uses your microphone/accelerometer to sense motion and estimate when you're entering REM sleep. It's not as advanced as the more complicated set up here, but anecdotally I can say it works fairly well. You can set it to play a trigger phrase when you enter REM sleep to help train lucid dreaming. I've never done it though because they default trigger phrase included is downright creepy sounding. It's some echo-y modulated voice that goes "You are dreaming-ing-ing-ing...."

I was expecting the article to be an actual dream control device and not just a device that helps you control your own dreams. Kind of misleading.

<comment><USER6> I still remember being scared awake by that audio loop many years ago. Lucid dreaming had caught my attention for a while, and when they released the lucid dreaming feature I thought I'd give it a go. The media volume on my phone being set to maximum definitively did not help when that creepy voice wrought me out of sleep and I haven't tried it since. I wonder if it actually works, but can't really try it out nowadays as I'm not sleeping alone.

<comment><USER7> I had the exact same experience, it was really freaky and I had to turn it off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the conference paper [1], 30s preview video [2] and ACM Digital Library entry [3].

There's also a project homepage with a FAQ [4].

[1]: [http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3190000/3188403/alt10.pdf](http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3190000/3188403/alt10.pdf)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYEbU2R57Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joYEbU2R57Q)

[3]: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3170427.3188403](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3170427.3188403)

[4]: [https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep- creativity/overview...](https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/sleep- creativity/overview/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Fascinating. I have a keen interest in Shamanism and more patience for "woo- woo" here than most. Navigating your dream state is a mighty Shamanic concept. It is one of two Shamanic practices that people here will entertain. The other is the idea of the memory castle.

New technological approaches like this will help us peel back the veil of the tangible, 'ordinary' realities of which we are comfortable. The world will be a much more funky and weird place once we realize there are non-ordinaries realities that we can explore, too.

<comment><USER10> I think the converse is true, no?

That the shamanic practices will be pealed back, to reveal the familiar reality of scientific investigation.

I've had many lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, etc. "Navigating your dream state" seems really just like a lucid dream.

You're pretty much able to create a life-like world at whim in a lucid dream. The ability of the mind to hallucinate sensation in great depth is tremendous, and im sure, tied deeply to dreaming.

<comment><USER11> The advantage to opening yourself to what is loosely called 'right brained' thinking, is that you don't have to wait around for someone to publish a rigorous study in a journal about the subject you're seeking a solution for. If I waited around for science as much as some HN users imply they do, I'd be paralyzed and barely ever make progress on things that matter to me.

I believe great scientists often start in wooville before they are able to distill science out of it. "Why should not a bold thinker have guessed something that is afterwards confirmed by sober and painstaking detailed research?" -Freud

<comment><USER10> The generation of hypotheses is "right-brained thinking" in these terms.

Science is a process which _includes_ the creative step of imagining a solution/explanation.

The differentiation between science and "systematic religous doctrine" is not in the character of the people, nor particularly in the way they think. Only that the scientist has an additional goal/duty to test his explanations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      > Ideas were not coming from me, they were just passing through my head

This might sound like I'm crazy but this brings back memories of a strange experience from some years ago that I can't really explain other than "coincidence".. but in the light of this article I started to think.. is it?

Me and my gf were really tired and both exactly in this "almost sleeping but not quite" state. We were lying down with our heads touching (my left temple touching her right temple.. not exactly the temple but just to give a generic idea). We were still talking with each other but at the same time I was seeing random fragments of dreams and the reality was fading away and coming back occasionally. At some point I saw a dream(?) about an orange (I think.. or a ball) that grew bigger and bigger till almost everything was.. filled by it and at that moment my gf says something in the lines of ".. and then there's this huge orange ball coming at me and growing bigger". I woke up immediately and asked her to explain wtf just happened because she was seeing the exact same thing that I was seeing at exactly the same time.

Could it be that one of our brains was picking up the brain waves of the other (..the brains were so close together after all :)) and as our consciousness was fading between being asleep.. it didn't filter out this random interference and interpreted it in the same way, producing the same dream like encounter? Was she, in essence, "reading my mind"? Am I crazy? :)

<comment><USER13> Consider an alternative hypothesis? In your hypnagogic state, your brain actually produced an image based on what she described to you, then reordered the chronology of events so that it seemed to you like you imagined the image before she described it. Not too dissimilar from deja vu.

It's well known that brains can sometimes reorder the chronology of events, especially if they occur within a short time window.

<comment><USER14> I was thinking even simpler: Maybe she started talking about the orange ball earlier, but he was asleep (or mostly asleep) at that point, and so started dreaming about it. Then he woke up at the last bit of the story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >"Ideas were not coming from me, they were just passing through my head," one subject reported.

Is consciousness even real, man?

Great books if you wanna chew on basically (for now) unanswerable questions:

Peter Watts' "Blindsight" and "Echopraxia."

Neal Stephenson's "Anathem."

<comment><USER16> Lots of Greg Egan's work deals with consciousness. For example, "Permutation City" is great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is great. The device is interesting. I've accomplished the equivalent thing manually by putting my elbow on the bed and keep my arm straight up. As I'm falling asleep, the arm would fall down, bringing me mildly back to consciousness again. It works, and is gentler than using steel balls, but the method used here is even more refined.

The even more notable aspect of the story is that it seems lucid dreaming and related phenomena is _finally_ moving firmly into the realm of reality in the minds of sleep/dream researchers, if this article is to be any indication. Though I'm aware that lucid dreaming was technically proven to be real ages ago, the notion that it's not seems to have stuck.

Side note; one of my favourite things to do when flying is to induce a hypnagogic state and then compose, and simultaneously listen to, music in my mind. Or rather, have music be composed almost automatically with gentle nudges from me using emotions (it's hard to put into words). It requires noise cancelling headphones and either white noise or a good binaural beats track. And of course, I don't always end up in the correct state of mind to be able to do it.

The music I hear in this state is incredibly beautiful. I'm no musician however, and I've never been able to "bring anything back" that's been of any significance.

<comment><USER18> What do you do when your arm falls back on the bed? Do you put it up again? And how many times do you do this before getting into the desired mental state?

<comment><USER17> Yeah, exactly. Sorry, the description was a bit rough.

Essentially; lie down on your back. Raise your arm from the elbow as if you were about to point to the ceiling, while keeping the elbow resting on the bed. When you are about to fall asleep, the arm falls down, waking you up (hopefully).

The point is to give you the opportunity to sort of traverse back and forth over the line separating waking and sleeping consciousness quickly.

The goal is first of all to be able to "spot" the state of mind. Since it's usually just something we pass by on the way to sleep, we don't normally have a very clear sense of what the state is like. Therefore it's hard to hold for any amount of time. Familiarizing yourself with the characteristics of the state of mind helps when trying to hold on to it.

Which is the eventual goal: to remain in the state for a longer time before waking up or falling asleep.

The arm thing is rigged to wake you up rather than letting you fall asleep. This is to increase chances that you're able to bring something useful back to full waking consciousness. If you have a very successful session in the liminal state, but then you fall asleep, chances are you won't remember the details later on.

A friend of mine achieves the same effect by putting his arms behind his head, tucked under his pillow. He finds it very uncomfortable to sleep like this, so eventually he gets tired enough to slip into hypnagogia, but he never quite falls asleep.

It doesn't work for me, I find that position very comfortable.

But basically, you can be creative in this regard. Anything that helps you hover back and forth between waking and sleeping mind helps you chase down the elusive middle bit.

Another friend swears by taking a double espresso and laying down in the afternoon. Apparently this is enough to keep her from going deeper into sleep than desired. I haven't had much success with this particular method either.

<comment><USER18> Thanks. Very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >> ... the world starts dissolving, but you still have awareness of your descent into unconsciousness and memories mixing with hallucinations,

>> Jibo robot would prompt them

So this is basically someone going on a guided acid trip. An induced state where real perceptions and illusions can be directed by an outside guide. As further proof, I'd like to see the robot say "your skin is covered in spiders". I'm betting that dreaming doesn't go so well.

<comment><USER20> Maybe just have it say "Coca-cola tastes great!" \- boom, billion dollar industry right there.

Or as in Futurama "Lightspeed briefs, as seen in your dreams!"

<comment><USER21> Reminds me of Brave New World.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Critic: "System for Dream Control", i.e., "People are suggestible as they fall asleep."

Fan: "But this is closed-loop. It keeps you in the hypnogogic state."

Critic: 1\. Optimize a simple open-loop system using, say, number of repetitions, inter-repetition interval as f(repetition), and amplitude as f(repetition). Use your outcome of choice (e.g. the Alternative Uses Task) and a factorial design to explore the space. 2\. Optimize closed-loop system for the same outcome, exploring its parameter space. 3\. Randomize 100 people to (1) or (2) 4\. t-test on the means 5\. Get back to me 6\. Even if p(2>1) < 0.05, (2) is still just a fancy example of "people's thoughts are affected by words that they hear."

Dr. Horowitz may be onto something. Let's not get ahead of ourselves with clickbait headlines while we wait and see.

</comment><comment><USER23> [http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the- dreamcatcher-3000/](http://pbfcomics.com/comics/the-dreamcatcher-3000/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Bizarrely timely for me. Just yesterday I experienced something much like this. I was working through a personal problem in my head but was pretty tired, and kept almost dropping off to sleep before realizing my chain of thought made no sense whatsoever and awakening myself. It happened a few dozen times (I was determined to get through the problem, though I wasn't having much success.)

But at some point, I was amused by where my mind was going to, so I started writing the dream fragments down. They _were_ dreamlike, too -- they would sort of take over my brain, it was very difficult for me to recognize that they weren't rational or at all related to what I had been thinking about, and after I fully awoke they'd slip away entirely. But like I said, there was a point before falling asleep where I would become aware enough to realize what was happening, then grab onto some fragment of the dream, and wake up enough to write it down. So here's the list (these are all snapshots, as that was all I could hang onto):

        * my son saying he's going to jump up to the sky and then him soaring upward

        * someone being trained in the Israeli army

        * getting kicked out of a band

        * cutting an Adam's apple out of a chicken neck

        * stomping on something that looks like a painting lying on the floor, and shattering it

        * holding and tilting up a spatula, onion, and lemon

        * shooting missiles at the butt of an enormous cow

</comment><comment><USER25> Where can I download the device schematics (or order a pre-assembled device) and an instruction manual on how to use it? I really bloody want a kind of "a crutch" that would throw me in a lucid dream without all that "dream journal" kind of exercises.

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't believe no one mentioned Queensryche's "Silent Lucidity" 'till now.

<comment><USER27> I remember now...

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > As they were falling asleep, the Jibo robot would prompt them with one of > two phrases: "remember to think about a rabbit" or "remember to think about > a fork."

I'd imagine a queue like this would work, regardless of if I was sleeping.

<comment><USER29> A cue* not queue

<comment><USER30> queue of cues

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Also see:

[https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/18/hypnagogic- nap/](https://www.artofmanliness.com/2015/02/18/hypnagogic-nap/)

</comment><comment><USER32> _although not all of the subjects remembered what they said to the robot, all of them "remembered and reported seeing the prompt word during their dream state, showing successful_ inception

Ha

</comment><comment><USER33> This title seems quite misleading, dream control has been practiced by individuals for thousands of years and is easy to learn if you just do some reading and dedicate yourself to it ('lucid dreaming' and everything related to it). It doesn't require any devices or technology, although some techniques can involve using technology to make various things easier or more reliable. If you learn it well you should be able to perform just as well as this device allows you to, although this device seems a bit more focused on the state before lucid dreams, it could be just as useful as a consistent trigger to attain lucidity.

It's strange that the title says 'dream control' yet 'lucid dreaming' is barely mentioned once in the article. It seems like they just mean more awareness in a hypnagogic state, or the ability to wake up quickly after entering one, which can also be attained just by practicing.

The data provided attempting to show the benefits of this is severely lacking as well. A sample size of six with little specific description of their alternative use task is not useful in the same way saying they spent 158 seconds longer writing stories is not. I'm sure someone who remembers all their dreams can tell you a long and 'interesting' story, but it's not necessarily useful.

<comment><USER34> I think it's interesting. Tech to create a feedback loop to keep you in a particular state.

When I was a kid I really had this thing for switching a light switch between off and on. Know what I mean? There's a spot you can hold it between off and on where the light flickers, and buzzes, at low power, sort of randomly.

I guess this is like that for wake-sleep. Cool state to be in and to get there without drugs, concentration, or whatever else. Very simple.

Can you lucid dream/OBE? Was it possible to learn?

<comment><USER35> I'm not who you're replaying to, but...

When I was learning how to lucid dream, one of the triggers that I used to tell I was in a dream was flipping a light switch on and off. When I saw nothing happened, I knew it was a dream. Another big one I use is looking at any words, numbers or clocks to see if they were legit, or random characters / garbage.

I started to "feel" what a lucid dream was because I would get some nightmares that would eventually wake me up. It felt real and I could remember everything about it (for a few minutes). The big ones always involved me falling from a building, and waking up once I hit the pavement.

Over time, I forced myself to try to mostly stay asleep during these nightmares. I remember falling from stuff, hitting the pavement, waking up, but keeping my eyes closed and trying to keep from waking up. It got to the point where I would "half" wake up, but still be in the nightmares. Then with some practice, I could do that to normal dreams too.

I can't really do it on demand, so it's more if I am having a crazy dream, I can usually snap out of it and fully control everything about it.

<comment><USER36> +1 on looking at words.

I once was having dinner with a girl and the topic of conversation drifted to dreams and how one might tell if one is in an "Inception" type scenario. I used the menu as an example-- read a line from the menu, close the booklet, reopen and reread the same line. I told her if the two lines aren't the same line, you're dreaming (the rendering hardware in your brain apparently uses different PRNG seeds for procedural texture generation).

I paused awkwardly as I realized that items in the menu kept changing each time I reread them.

She was very offended when I told her she was a figment of my imagination.

<comment><USER2> I like your explanation for changing lines of text, but I don't think brain is actively generating any content. I think brain is just trying its best to apply daytime pattern recognition to un-orchestrated neural activity. The most recently learned patterns are the strongest, which is why often you'll dream stuff that happened that day. If you spend a lot of time performing single activity (like gaming), the dream will be intensive and focused; this is called the Tetris effect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> arduino + bend sensor, really?

</comment><comment><USER38> one cigarette + laying-on-your-back nap = lucid dream

</comment><comment><USER39> All i can think of... _This is not a dream... not a dream. We are using your brain 's electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious state of awareness, but this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation._

<comment><USER40> This?

[https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref_=m_tttr_qt](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref_=m_tttr_qt)

Prince of Darkness (1987)

<comment><USER39> Specifically these. Scared the crap out of me as a 13 year old.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsv0pJemTY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGsv0pJemTY)</comment></comment></comment>


What the Expert Panel Should Have Told You About Impeachment but Didn't - <AUTHOR> http://archive.is/l08N7 <comment><USER2> I listened to some of the testimony. I'm curious to know how does someone become an (academic) "expert" on something that has rarely happened? With so little precedent?</comment>


CERN Stress-Testing Large Hadron Collider, Everyone Hide Under a Chair - Gearlog - <AUTHOR> http://www.gearlog.com/2009/07/cern_stress-testing_large_hadr.php <comment><USER2> I am not concerned at all about CERN destroying the world. I am more concerned about CERN never working. How many years of a non-functioning particle accelerator will it take for us to start hypothesizing about how just how bizarre (and probably simulated) our universe is?

<comment><USER3> It looks pretty real to me, that simulated universe, and that is quite possibly all that matters.

Everything else is philosophy, CERN is concerned with physics.

If they get it to work (and I'm pretty sure it will work, they have a pretty good track record there) chances are that they will discover some interesting new bits of data that will get us one step closer to a UFT and a better understanding of how all of this began.

That's worth some money, more in my opinion than another useless war or some lets-make-jobs project.</comment></comment>


Extracting Audio from Pictures (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://mediapreservation.wordpress.com/2012/06/20/extracting-audio-from-pictures/ <comment><USER2> Really interesting article. Unfortunately it looks like media preservation only goes so far: I'm getting 404s for all of the embedded audio files.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, .edu bitrot is the worst.

<comment><USER4> After .gov !

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are some interesting comments in these old threads: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9596410](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9596410)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5500473](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5500473)

</comment><comment><USER6> I like the suggestion from 1890 to use cotton in the ears as a low pass filter to increase fidelity.

</comment><comment><USER7> While the author used software to retrieve the sound, I bet it could be done with photochemical methods onto a copper disk, similar to how circuit boards are etched.

Or how soundtracks are photographed onto movie film.

<comment><USER8> I never thought about this until your comment. Fascinating!

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on- film](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film)

I'm blown away by the complexity of sound that can be conveyed in what seems a simple manner.

<comment><USER9> That's because in essence even the most complex sounds change just one environmental variable: local air pressure.

<comment><USER8> I'm falling in love with sound all over again. Yes, that is obvious now that you say it, but I never realized it before. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Excellent work and a great example of how sometimes the best presentation of archival assets is remediation.</comment>


Sneak peek at future of SaaS investing - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/get-rich-slow-in-software-57001f41f3a9 <comment><USER2> Only a little related to this, in recent months I've spoken to ~60 growth stage equity funds and found out that essentially all transformed to be SAAS focused investors.

That means they abandoned 1/3 portfolio strategy they used to have (1/3 loses money, 1/3 returns exactly 1, 1/3 returns fund) but instead are focusing on steady returns by SAAS companies at 2-3x of the investment.

There are a few major implications:

\- for the founders; if you don't fit their narrative, for example you have big chunk of revenue coming from services or you have only few enterprise clients, then you are out of luck

\- for the funds; the deals are overly competitive driving up the price and diminishing the returns

\- for the market; up until the economy is up to the right, things will be fine. Once things start changing, the first things to go will be a lot of these "nice to have" SAAS companies. In turn they will take down growth equity and freeze funding at the later stage (Series B, C, D, ...).

The last point applies to also to the the article. You can build bootstrapped $1M ARR business, but can you defend it? I think that's the biggest question.

<comment><USER3> The re-focus on SaaS as the only class of investment that can reliably generate returns and avoid zeros or capital loss is a very real trend.

Would emphasize your point around services - SaaS investors are generally allergic to this stuff and prefer services to make up as little of revenue as possible. It's typical low margin and not seen to be very "strategic" (though this could be debated).

SaaS is also much easier to analyze and diligence than the typical non-SaaS software company or consumer internet business. I won't say it's _dead_ simple, but it's very much not rocket science. In combination with excess capital, this leads to prices getting bid up as such ease of diligence leads many investors to throw in a term sheet. It's just so easy to get comfortable with this stuff.

One caveat to all this that ties to your last point around the market / economy is volatility. You can see in the data that companies that generate a higher amount of the their growth from SaaS-like retention/upsell see higher valuation volatility when the market turns for any reason. [1] The "best" SaaS companies in the eyes of later-stage investors are typically those with high net revenue retention - but these are also the ones that get whacked the most in corrections.

As far as a downturn taking down growth equity - time will tell.

[1] [https://whoisnnamdi.com/high-retention-high- volatility/](https://whoisnnamdi.com/high-retention-high-volatility/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Risk / return trade-off still holds - great insight!

Performance through-the-cycle is a big question. One can point to Salesforce (founded 1999, IPO 2004), which has been around for 20+ years... However, big sample bias here (ditto for my article, with sample n = 1). Salesforce, a big- category-defining company - may not be representative of moderately-sized businesses.

Whoisnnamdi - per your post, revenue retention looks like a key metric driving valuations!

<comment><USER2> My point wasn't that _all_ SAAS business are going to be in trouble, rather than the growth equity is going to be impacted because they are funding only SAAS businesses. There is no hedging and as such, once business stop paying for certain SAAS services, they will in turn stop paying for others and so on and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think we'll need more examples then just Buffer. Everyone knows Buffer is a successfully bootstrapped company that grew kind of big but not massive.

If the author gave five other examples, then there's a case, but pointing out the one known example doesn't provide enough evidence in my opinion.

A separate point on style and punctuation: too many em dashes in the wrong places.

> What would make Buffer — a good investment?

No need for an em dash here.

> And, if you want to start a get-rich-slow SaaS fund — what is your target > maturity?

Same.

> What if, at end of the holding period — investor sells the Buffer stake at > market valuation?

Replace em dash with "the".

> But wait… that perpetuity — is a "paper valuation".

Remove. The ellipsis could be an exclamation point, though it could be in the "personal style" bucket.

I would suggest removing every single em dash and practicing writing without them. They can be useful—for providing inline examples or explanation, for example—but should be used sparingly. Commas, colons, parentheticals, and semicolons can cover most of your use-cases.

<comment><USER5> I think the author uses these to imply a dramatic pause... like I sometimes do with ellipses. :-)

<comment><USER4> Yes. It's an example of trying to write how you'd want it spoken.

The written word is a different medium.

It would be like writing:

> She enters the room. Pan left and there's a photo on the wall. Cut back to > her, she's brushing a strand of hair from her face. Now cut to the > bartender. Zoom in on him. He's polishing a glass, staring at nothing.

etc.

It's a pastiche of a movie scene.

It's not that you can't do it or that the reader won't know what you're trying to do. Unless there's a specific reason to do so, it's probably not the best option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see more and more investors looking to do this especially as a solo-founder of a bootstrapped small SaaS business. As I march towards $1M ARR, the savvy investors are looking for ways to be valuable to my business as opposed to me begging investors for the next round of funding in traditional VC-backed ventures.

I would be very happy to share 15-20% if the value-add is strong enough.

<comment><USER7> What does that value add look like to you?

I own a few SaaS sites that I bought (because I don't have the patience and focus to build one myself) that I then work to increase the value of (based on lessons from a previous SaaS company I worked at), and I'm always interested in private equity arrangements.

<comment><USER8> How do you go about buying one. How do you get the leads?

<comment><USER9> Check out FE International: [https://feinternational.com/](https://feinternational.com/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All of the unnecessary punctuation makes this article difficult to read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Welcome feedback - you took the time for careful read-through, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Look at the return vs return std dev graph. The fact that fund of fund beats VC on both metrics suggest VCs add negative value

</comment><comment><USER12> Investment opportunities that provide 15% return exist in the public markets with easy liquidity options, so what is the benefit of trying to squeeze that out of a private company where you can't sell unless the company goes public or you try to find a buyer on the secondary market? Unless the company pays out a dividend I don't see the appeal - usually VCs trade liquidity for the hope of massive returns that aren't typically found in public markets.

<comment><USER13> What public investment continuously returns 15% yearly?

<comment><USER14> Almost any tech heavy ETF such as XLK or VGT will get you there. 10 year yearly returns are over 15%. For less risk, you could do a total stock market index like VTSAX (10 year returns around 13%.) Nothing is guaranteed or "continuous" though. This is less risky than investing in a single, private company that probably has little liquidity.

<comment><USER15> Looking at 10 year returns isn't good enough because we have been in a bull market for over ten years. You need to increase the horizon to get more accurate returns

<comment><USER12> Why would a private SaaS that sells to companies do better than the public markets in bear market? If anything if the market suddenly turns then holding a stake in a company that is illiquid is worse because you can't sell if you need to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 30% profit margin? I though most tech companies had a lot of trouble breaking even.

</comment><comment><USER17> Remember: Hacker News is not a financial service, and people upvoting articles about financial behaviour is not the same as financial advice. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is, and was probably written by someone who mistook the luck of doing the right thing at the right time for a transferable skill.

<comment><USER12> boasting about a 15% annual return with an illiquid stake in a early to mid stage private tech company is the opposite of "too good to be true"

<comment><USER18> I'm a little slow this morning but am having trouble parsing what the opposite of "too good to be true" is. Too bad to be false?

<comment><USER12> meaning it's plainly bad

the risk you take to earn 15% is way too high to justify such a small return. if you want to earn 15% just invest in some REITs and call it a day

<comment><USER19> Could you please expand "REITs"? (no clue what a REIT is)

<comment><USER14> REITs are "real estate investment trusts." Basically they are stocks in companies that own tons of property, bring in large amounts of rental income, and have to pay out a percentage as dividends. Many people like them for that guaranteed dividend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Tiny capital is relative.

EDIT: It's also the name of the VC firm. D'oh! Keeping the rest for posterity.

Notice how there's no actual values for what "tiny" means?

If you have cash to invest on a VC company, you're most likely already quite well off, with an equal amount invested in less risky ventures.

<comment><USER21> Tiny Capital is the name of the VC company.

<comment><USER22> It's not a VC company. We actually usually buy majority stakes, this was a bit of an exception - www.tinycapital.com</comment></comment></comment>


Kubernetes Security Assessment [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/wg-security-audit/findings/Kubernetes%20Final%20Report.pdf <comment><USER2> This is good stuff.

A nit:

 _Users should not use AES-CBC or GCM for encryption. Secretbox should be the default mode of storing information and users should be encouraged to use KMS._

I see where this is coming and agree in spirit, but GCM is actually idiomatic Go and implemented through the crypto/aead interface, which does about as good a job as any library at being user-proof.

I too would probably prefer code that used Nacl primitives over Seal/Open, but I would probably not flag code that didn't.

<comment><USER3> AES-GCM or even CBC for that matter is not vulnerable/broken. Why did they recommend Secretbox? Is there an implementation error? I am not talking about the potential of making mistakes and using platform supported constructs.

Does it make sense to make this recommendation even if the dev did not choose a vulnerable algorithm and there aren't any issues with implementation?

<comment><USER4> In the document they say that AES-CBC is vulnerable to padding oracle attacks, and AES-GCM uses random nonces and requires key rotation after so many iterations.

<comment><USER2> CBC is vulnerable to error oracles if you don't encrypt-then-MAC it properly (without the MAC it's also malleable, which is a game-over flaw). GCM is vulnerable to a bunch of its own misuse issues; it doesn't "use" random nonces, it is conceivably (through not really realistically) unsafe to use random nonces, and if you screw up nonce handling it blows up worse than CBC does.

My point is just, these things all have rough edges.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For me, the largest one mentioned is a known security issue with k8s architecture, which is the lack of support for certificate revocation.

So anywhere client cert's are used for authN, if one is lost there's no way to revoke it, short of rolling the whole certificate authority.

when you combine that with the 200k+ Internet exposed Kubernetes clusters, that's quite a large potential for attack.

The GH issue for this has been open since 2015 [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/18982](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/18982)

</comment><comment><USER6> The Trail of Bits folks also open sourced the code behind their audit:

[https://twitter.com/lojikil/status/1159190646478913536](https://twitter.com/lojikil/status/1159190646478913536) [https://github.com/trailofbits/audit- kubernetes](https://github.com/trailofbits/audit-kubernetes)

</comment><comment><USER7> I know the Kubernetes Assessment was the one to make all the news, but the teams actually audited a bunch of CNCF projects. Here is the one for the Vitess project

[https://vitess.io/blog/2019-03-12-vitess-security- audit/](https://vitess.io/blog/2019-03-12-vitess-security-audit/)

<comment><USER8> Vitess is

> A database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL

> Vitess combines many important MySQL features with the scalability of a > NoSQL database. Its built-in sharding features let you grow your database > without adding sharding logic to your application.

What a quirky project. Is this for folks who started out with MySQL then find themselves needing to scale out in "NoSQL" style?

> Vitess automatically rewrites queries that hurt database performance.

That sounds scary.

<comment><USER9> Vitess was created by Youtube.

But they're hardly the only places scaling out MySQL. Facebook and Slack are two other prominent examples.

<comment><USER10> Facebook has taken MySQL scaling to extremes well beyond what Vitess offers.

Not sure if that's a good thing.

<comment><USER11> And to understand scaling and extremes: FB basically uses RocksDB and/or MySQL as a low level storage layer for whatever thing they want to. (And on top they build the clustering stuff, with the particular CAP choices they think is best for that particular service/purpose.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a GH issue tracking the findings from the report [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/81146](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/81146)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Fix the hard-coded Docker daemon process name. The process name should be > dockerd instead of docker.

Why is this a security issue? Also, beyond naming convention, why?

<comment><USER13> It's definitely a bug, not just a convention-

> The container manager used in kubelet checks for docker daemon process > either via pidfile or process name. While the pidfile points to the docker > daemon process PID, the dockerProcessName constant stores a docker cli name > (docker) instead of docker daemon name (dockerd).

They're trying to look up the process by a name the process isn't using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the HTTP proxy based architecture is just weird and inherently insecure. Everything would be much simpler and and easier to analyze in a normal end-to-end scenario.

<comment><USER15> I think that's because of the WebSockets support in kubectl so you can tunnel things, but it's been a long time since I read about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Given all of the security issues I am curious who thinks this is production ready ?

<comment><USER17> Not sure why this is being downvoted.

Kubernetes is __5 years old __. This is very, very young for mission-critical infrastructure management software.

Having a certain level of doubt in young open source projects is responsible, in my opinion. I'm interested to hear other people's perspective on production-readiness of k8s for mission-critical applications.

<comment><USER5> If security got to be the number one concern for whether things were deployed or not, then sure we could likely take a more conservative view.

However realistically k8s is in heavy deployment in a wide variety of industries including public sector, financial services, retail, technology ... and it's clear that this kind of concern is not the primary consideration.

There were banks in the UK (Monzo) deploying k8s almost 3 years ago ([https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank- bac...](https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend))

<comment><USER18> The tradeoffs Monzo made are not ones that apply to most business. For most businesses, you have a profitable and sustainable model and you want to mitigate the possibility that you sink the ship by screwing the pooch on security or availability.

Monzo, on the other hand, was default-dead, so betting the farm on a relatively unproven technology perhaps wasn't risking as much. Nobody talks about the startups that used unproven tech and sank.

<comment><USER5> I don't think Monzo had to adopt k8s to survive. It's an infrastructure technology not something which provides a unique advantage from an app. development perspective.

Also k8s is far from only used in tech companies. the UK home office (not exactly a startup) were giving talks about their use of k8s in 2016 [https://www.phpconference.co.uk/videos/2016/kubernetes- home-...](https://www.phpconference.co.uk/videos/2016/kubernetes-home-office/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Seems as though a bunch of nonsense burgers. But then i realized they are all just low impact

<comment><USER20> There's a nice table with five high security issues. The lack of authentication within the cluster is pretty damning.

<comment><USER5> yeah that one is kind of interesting, really needs more detail. I _think_ what they're talking about is that it's _possible_ to configure insecure connections between the different components.

However, if that's the case, that's a distribution specific issue and not really anything intrinsic in k8s.

 __Edit __\- there 's a GH issue here [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/81112](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues/81112)</comment></comment></comment>


US Army Considers a Smartphone For Every Soldier - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.blorge.com/2010/12/14/us-army-smartphone-war-draws-closer/

<comment><USER2> it's astonishing that it isn't already standard equipment ...

<comment><AUTHOR> If they are going to issue a smartphone to every soldier, I guess they are probably expecting the phones being used under combat environment? If that's the case, i'm not sure if any current smartphones can endure that environment, not to say the the entire telecomm architecture is not designed to suit military purpose either. So I'd actually be surprised if they are really going to do it using just consumer smartphones.</comment></comment>


How to Develop an App Like Instagram - <AUTHOR> http://mlsdev.com/en/blog/70-how-to-develop-an-app-like-instagram <comment><USER2> $50.00 an hour? What?

Instagram is _incredibly_ polished. Notice how fast it is? As you're selecting an image, they're already uploading it to their servers. That is critical to maintaining and growing their user base. I go to Instagram knowing I can upload a nice looking photo quickly. The images load incredibly fast as well. Its simplicity is deceptively robust.

This is not recreated by a developer billing at $50.00 an hour.

So, if you're looking to have an app built, and you're reading this post, just know it's pretty inaccurate. You get what you pay for.

<comment><USER3> Contract iOS engineer here, based out of Colorado. My company bills $150-$200/hour for my time.

> Its simplicity is deceptively robust.

I've met some of the Instagram iOS team. Part of the beautiful simplicity comes from the fact that FB can afford to pay ~5-7 iOS engineers top salary to work on improving the app full time. And that's just the iOS app.

<comment><USER4> And if you were in the SFBA, it'd be ++$50/hr on top of that.

<comment><USER5> What could you expect as a freelancing contractor? Assuming you've previously done mobile work at a Facebook/Google/Apple/Microsoft tier company.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The hour estimates are off by at least an order of magnitude.

Not included is the infrastructure necessary to ship something like Instagram (testing, monitoring, deployment, beta, etc), even if you leave the massive scale of Instagram out of the picture.

Much more significant is that even the relatively rudimentary 2010-era Instagram was the result of thousands of hours of polish and refinement after the initial product was built and released to the public.

There are zero products that go directly from mockups to success. It's relatively easy to knock off something that already exists and is proven to work.

<comment><USER3> > There are zero products that go directly from mockups to success. It's > relatively easy to knock off something that already exists and is proven to > work.

Building a knockoff is a relatively linear process. The challenges have already been solved and the work that needs to be done is clear to all involved.

Creating a new product is significantly less linear and a lot of budget gets burned because of that. The time of engineers, designers, project managers and QA all cost money. Aligning them to the same (non-obvious) vision therefore costs money. There are additional real costs every time the plan changes even slightly (scope creep, customer feedback, founder waffling, etc).

"No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy" \- Helmuth von Moltke

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Or, granted you know how to quickly setup the push certs, and deploy a simple docker container with parse-server to AWS Beanstalk, you could launch a MVP (iOS, Android) in one afternoon, for $49.

[https://market.ionic.io/starters/photogram-ionic- instagram-c...](https://market.ionic.io/starters/photogram-ionic-instagram- clone)

<comment><USER8> To bake an apple pie from scratch only takes an afternoon too, after you finish creating the universe.

<comment><USER9> Driving to the store doesn't always require building a road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Well, they had 2 engineers till they hit 30 million users, and 6 engineers until they hit 150 million.

[http://www.slideshare.net/InfoQ/how-a-small-team-scales- inst...](http://www.slideshare.net/InfoQ/how-a-small-team-scales-instagram)

</comment><comment><USER11> This reads like something a freshman college student would write.

You're not going to scale to an 80 million pics per day service[0] on a $10,000.00 backend.

[0] Instagram is not an app, but a service.

<comment><USER12> It's not supposed to scale, this is an article about the cost and time to build a MVP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The estimates are for a "functional prototype", which is, the implementation of ONLY functional requirements. Non-functional requirements are not mentioned here, and in the case of Instagram, there are many.

Then, since Instagram is a service, you need some sort of operations team to manage and monitor the infrastructure. You will also need some sort of testing (quality assurance, performance and scalability, security...). Then you will need some degree of organization to accomplish this.

Additionally you will need some visibility and minimal critical mass of users to get the ball rolling (aka user acquisition). That is of course, not development, but this is one of the most expensive items, to the point that for some apps, development costs are marginal compared to user acquisition costs.

You might get a software with the Instagram user-facing features, but don't expect to be able to handle the volume of traffic that Instagram does, at the level of security they do. That last part is actually a key aspect of the business model that I couldn't found anywhere in the article.

</comment><comment><USER14> Definitely going to need an estimate of testing hours. Trusting devs with testing is like estimated hours times 2.

</comment><comment><USER15> Testing is free, apparently.

<comment><USER16> Hmm. Do you actually need full-blown tests for MVP?

<comment><USER17> How else would you know that your MVP actually worked?

<comment><USER16> Person doing QA ( The client himself can even do it ) + small test suite for critical operations.

IMHO MVP means a product that users can use, but not full-blown scalable platform.

<comment><USER18> IMHO MVP means a product that users can use, but not full-blown scalable platform. [2]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why does it take over 40 hours to implement features, which have been implemented for millions of times and have existing solutions and code in the Internet. Authorization (Social and Email) seems to be one or two hours of work with existing solutions.

<comment><USER20> And you think you can build a great integrated experience that just works with multiple platforms in "one or two hours of work"? Am I right in assuming that you never built systems like this?

<comment><USER19> why not? There are lots of existing scaffolding having authorization setting up using passport [https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport](https://github.com/jaredhanson/passport)

You don't even need to write code if you use [https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon](https://github.com/rethinkdb/horizon), firebase, or similar services.

For client side, you can reuse previously written code for authorization logic and just write user interface based on requirement.

40 hours are too much for such work

<comment><USER21> I agree, according to the article, the front end of "email authorization" takes the most time to do. For an MVP a login system really just has to work, and then you can personalize it more as you go. Most of the time for an MVP should be dedicated to the main features of app. (In this case uploading pictures, news feed, etc).

For my app we used Auth0 to quickly get login working before we had to present it. It took about total 5 hours to set up and test. Since then we have built our own login system and made sleek looking create/login screens; which in total took about ~15 hours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The backend estimation is laughable. I don't think the author really understand what he/she is talking about. For example, search. Having a search functionality is one thing, having a usable search is completely a different thing.

</comment><comment><USER23> Most people have an idea for a great app that they keep playing in their head. But these ideas never come live because either they don't have the expertise to build it themselves or they don't want to drop $12K just to see if users want it. How much will you be willing to pay for the MVP of you idea? (I have lined up a reliable team who can deliver most MVP app in 6 weeks at around $3800. Need validation for the price point).

<comment><USER24> I want an app that aggregates commercial loan data from across the industry, which is un-standardized, and creates a deep learning platform with a public api that can tell a customer what his individual risk is for both sides of the party in regards to underwriting, processing, and securitization. Based on real time market data and regional inputs. Also taking into account who I've done business with before and relationships.

How much would that MVP cost me?

(hint: $15 million)

<comment><USER23> The team will politely refuse to take this on. And maybe suggest a Snapchat clone :)

The last few app requests were: Tinder for shopping, QR code generator and scanner, chatroom app etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Thank you! i'm so glad someone did a post like this, maybe finally we can stop having people say things like 'oh i can build an MVP of Twitter / Instagram in a weekend, its just a photo sharing app'. No. There are a LOT of little features that need to be considered and they all add up (authentication / settings / notifications / mentioning etc etc).

</comment><comment><USER26> Very real answer to when friends and family ask "how long will it take you to make [ENTERPRISE APPLICATION CLONE] but with xyz for me"

</comment><comment><USER27> I found that very relatable as we recently made an app close to instagram in UI sense and with couple of features plus minus in react native . The app(react native) and backend(express) were written by me and including everything took easily ~10-15 days more as predicted by the author .

<comment><USER28> How did you find react native? Did you learn on the job? Wanting to take the dive but some articles seem to mention RN's teething pains

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is delusional.

</comment><comment><USER30> There is no way someone would build an MVP this involved. Think of what Instagram launched as, then you're a bit closer.

They say hindsight is 20-20, this guy is going at it with a telescope..

</comment><comment><USER31> Why is messaging on Android estimated at less time on the top? The other estimates are the same.

<comment><USER32> I can't speak for iOS development, but Google cloud messaging is dead easy to implement. Firebase messaging, even easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Clearly the article is by some dev shop and anybody who has worked on an app with the scale of Instagram, or even a fraction of Instagram's scale, knows that this entire article is misleading. If you wanted to actually create Instagram, as it is Today, it would be an incredibly large undertaking.</comment>


Lance Armstrong stripped of all 7 titles, banned for life.  - <AUTHOR> http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/more-sports/lance-armstrong-stripped-tour-de-france-titles-lifetime-ban-olympic-sports-drops-doping-appeal-article-1.1143295

<comment><USER2> It's an old cycling joke.

        How do you know if someone in Tour De France isn't doping?
        They come in last.

[http://www.theonion.com/articles/nondoping-cyclists- finish-t...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/nondoping-cyclists-finish-tour- de-france,2268/)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not sure why this is on hacker news, other than the fact that an epic athlete will be stripped of his honor and have an asterisk next to his name. In the footnotes it will say, "See Barry Bonds"

But his excellence and story is what we all pay to see. We don't really want to know. And who's to say those that receive Armstrong's awards weren't doping, too? Not trying to dismiss the situation, but PEDs are absolutely saturating ALL of sports today, no exceptions.

EDIT: Armstrong's response [http://lancearmstrong.com/news-events/lance- armstongs-statem...](http://lancearmstrong.com/news-events/lance-armstongs- statement-of-august-23-2012)

<comment><USER4> We spend our lives devising novel, elegant optimizations to complex systems and we call this hacking. Most people partake in novel, powerful biological augmentation and we call this medicine. Interestingly, in the realm of competitive, physical human achievement we call it cheating.

Consider that as computing becomes more ubiquitous and personal, as technology merges with medicine, as we move past augmented reality and pacemakers into the cybernetic age of the next 50 years, this is very much the future of hacking.

From the opposite side, consider how storage could soon be DNA, computation could soon be artificial neurons, and how computer vision could be lab-grown retinas. Still not seeing the convergence?

By the end of our lifetimes, the business of bio-ethics and optimization will become very, very relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No matter what the truth, I can sure as hell imagine anyone would get sick of literally being bled dry by bureaucrats and the media for well over a decade (not to mention, after losing a ball).

At the end of it all, at least we got what was possibly the best sentiment from a sports advert ever:

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxnqHvEbGnc>

"What am I on? I'm on my bike, busting my ass 6 hours a day. What are _you_ on?"

His own thoughts on the matter:

[http://lancearmstrong.com/news-events/lance-armstongs- statem...](http://lancearmstrong.com/news-events/lance-armstongs-statement-of- august-23-2012)

"Today I turn the page. I will no longer address this issue, regardless of the circumstances. I will commit myself to the work I began before ever winning a single Tour de France title: serving people and families affected by cancer, especially those in underserved communities. [...] We have a lot of work to do and I'm looking forward to an end to this pointless distraction. I have a responsibility to all those who have stepped forward to devote their time and energy to the cancer cause. I will not stop fighting for that mission. Going forward, I am going to devote myself to raising my five beautiful (and energetic) kids, fighting cancer, and attempting to be the fittest 40-year old on the planet."

Sounds like a damn better use of time than defending yourself against fiasco to me.</comment>


Show HN: Animated Gameboy in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://bchanx.com/animated-gameboy-in-css-blog <comment><USER2> [http://codepen.io/heero/pen/wylhv](http://codepen.io/heero/pen/wylhv)

</comment><comment><USER3> I liked that you've used CSS properties instead of creating endless <div>'s to get the desired effect, nice work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Amazing job! Thanks for going through the process in detail.

</comment><comment><USER5> Uhhh holy shit this is cool. Tedious as hell, but cool.

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing work!

</comment><comment><USER7> dude this is way too sick. Let's see some GB OG!

</comment><comment><USER8> extremely cool, you've clearly mastered this</comment>


Ways to Improve Click-Through-Rate On Your Banner Ads Without Being Spammy - <AUTHOR> http://www.launchbit.com/blog/six-ways-to-improve-click-through-rate-on-your-bannerads/

<comment><USER2> Though the headline above cleverly omits the 6, the linked to article is "6 ways to improve click-through-rate on your banner ads without being spammy", sure sign of link-bait and mostly vacuous content. In fact only 2 out of the 6 (#1 & #5) are ways that could help.

 _next_

</comment><comment><USER3> I think that the fact that "text-heavy banners get high click-throughs" is pretty counter-intuitive.

Also, have you tried using CPM rather CPC?

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if it is counter-intuitive. With text you can describe exactly what it is you are selling and thus provide a reason for clicking the banner.

Stuff that is mainly graphics is easy to just mentally filter out with the rest of the website chrome.

<comment><USER5> To take it a step further, we are so used to obnoxious banner ads on the internet that I think most people automatically ignore them.

Just a guess, but the less "bannery" the ad is, probably the better chance it has of being noticed. Ironic, since banners got so obnoxious in the first place as an attention-grabbing mechanism.

<comment><USER6> It's proven that people have become very good at ignoring banner ads. <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/banner-blindness.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Personally, as a casual browser, there are so many ads with "calls to action" that informative targetted ads like the Pusher one could actually pull me in. I want to read it because it has no bright-coloured button in the bottom left corner.

</comment><comment><USER8>
        Text-heavy banners get high click-throughs.

That is very interesting. Can the OP to back this up with some data?

</comment><comment><USER9> You start by describing problems affecting publishers, then you provide solutions for advertisers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what you mean...the first paragraph reads "Lots of marketers combat this by creating banners that stand out in a "spammy-esque" way to achieve a high click-through-rate, but how do you do this without being spammy?" With this sentence, I had intended this to beg the question how can marketers get a higher click-through-rate without being spammy, but I apologize if that isn't clear.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much should I sell my company for? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I want to sell my wearable SaaS company but have no idea what its worth. Here is the summary of it:
Corporate: We founded the company 2 years ago. We focused on the LatAm market as a proof of concept. We are 2 founders and 2 investors. We all have 25%. We are willing to sell all of it or a percentage depending on the offer. We can also remain in the business if deemed necessary by the purchaser.
Product/Service:
- Its a GSM/GPS portable panic button, connected to a 24/7 assistance service.
- We began sales about 6 months back, and currently, have 368 paying clients.
- Each client pays $15 month. LTV = $250 USD.
- Churn rate <3%
- We invest in about $1,500 in google adwords a month, and acquire about 80-100 new customers per month.
Financials:
- Burn rate = $9,000 USD per month (without founders paying us salary). This is mostly for the call center and the GSM data payments. - We have about $120,000 USD worth of products in stock.
Technology:
Modern, agile stack > Ruby on rails / Twilio / Amazon EC2 We can manage the assistance of the service end from anywhere in the world thus lowering dramatically the costs.
Why are we selling? Investor 1 is thinking old school and wants to build a local team of sellers and do door-to-door. We think this must be an analytics first, SaaS-oriented business and as such, we should focus on keeping our churn rate low, customer acquisition costs, etc. Unfortunately, we personally dont have money to buy out this investor and my co-founder is burned out by the entire power struggle with him.
How much should I sell this company for? Thanks for the feedback!! <comment><USER2> If a big company believes that buying you could lead to them owning the panic button space, it could be worth a lot. Otherwise, it's probably close to $0.

Your biggest danger is spending a lot of time chasing deals and ultimately selling for close to $0 and having to work for the acquirer for a year or more. In that case, it'd be far better to pull the plug now (which you can do by all quitting) and move on to the next project.

More advice is at [https://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your- com...](https://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your- company-a1b2025c9481)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, @tlb. Agree that the biggest danger is to continue to lose my time on this.

<comment><USER3> I think there is a market in this, and I don't think ad-words is the best sales model here. Maybe investor 1 has a point. Just thoughts of a stranger on the Internet :) Are there other technical debt issues going on (either in your sw stack or the hw inventory you have)?</comment></comment></comment>


Ethereum.org Forums Database Compromised - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/19/security-alert-12192016-ethereum-org-forums-database-compromised/ <comment><USER2> So glad that when they realized they made a mistake they immediately came out and said exactly what happened, and the detailed steps they are taking to fix it. Nothing but respect for them.

Haha in complete contrast to what Yahoo prob would have done. (Given that Yahoo is a much larger company with more legal and bureaucracy so they may be unable to do this. but still, 3 yrs???)

</comment><comment><USER3> > The attacker used social engineering to gain access to a mobile phone number > that allowed them to gain access to other accounts, one of which had access > to an old database backup from the forum.

Forgive me if I'm missing something blatantly obvious, but how was a hacker able to gain backup access with just a phone number? What kind of auth is that?

<comment><USER4> 2FA with SMS?

<comment><USER5> Are you asking what it means or disagree with it?

If a: 2-Factor Authentication with Short Message Service (called "text" in the US).

If b: It's how Google's 2FA works by default, falls back to SMS.

Basically, getting control of (i.e. stealing) the 2nd factor in the 2FA scheme, and bypassing the 1st factor, the password (by resetting it). Plausible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To be fair to the Ethereum folks, this is the least embarrassing way to be compromised - that is, when it isn't your fault.

<comment><USER7> Yes, and also when it is unrelated to your main service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> wow, what a terrible year for Ethereum.</comment>


Google Recruiter - <AUTHOR>

Just got an email from a google recruiter saying they are interested in me. What is the best way to land this job? <comment><USER2> Always Be Coding (ABC): [https://medium.com/tech- talk/d5f8051afce2](https://medium.com/tech-talk/d5f8051afce2)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot</comment></comment>


Ask HN: how did my Nexus 7 know my wifi password? - <AUTHOR>

I got my Nexus 7 delivered to me at work today. I got to play around with it a little bit during the day, but didn't really do much except login to my work's WiFi and my Google account.
When I came home, I knew I had to look for the password to my WiFi (random string of numbers so never remember it). To my surprise, when I woke up my Nexus 7 it was already connected.
My WiFi still needs a password and nothing has changed to it since I hooked it up a year ago. How did this already know my password? <comment><USER2> Did you log in to a Google account on another device which has access to your wireless network? Did that other device have the tickbox that enabled your settings and wifi passwords to be backed up?

</comment><comment><USER3> "How can it not know what it is?"

</comment><comment><USER4> your mom probably connected it when you were asleep..</comment>


AWS Access Credential Rotation - <AUTHOR> http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/09/aws-access-credential-rotation.html

<comment><USER2> Very handy. Now if only there was a way to have multiple API keys so as to handle more API requests (even beyond batch requesting).

<comment><USER3> very handy indeed! I've been meaning to migrate our credentials but were having the same issues.

A couple of other things:

1) allow multiple credentials ( for example 1 per app, if one app is compromised then just disable that credential, update it and change the app )

2) allow the possibility of attaching a credentials to a bucket

3) allow reporting per credential

These would also allow you to give your credentials to a 3rd party and give them access to a particular bucket, and possibly charge them for the usage.

<edited for formatting></comment></comment>


A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi - <AUTHOR> http://diegobasch.com/a-relevant-tale-how-google-killed-inktomi <comment><USER3> Great article. One note: Google's dynamic abstracts were not only very useful, they also improved perceived relevance because they let users see why the pages were selected.

When I was at Altavista, we were also blocked from doing dynamic abstracts by cost.

Google's main advantages were:

\- managed by the founders with a total focus on search and measurable results

\- google's hiring process produced a very strong team early on

\- strong focus on controlling costs from the beginning (Altavista's use of the DEC Alpha was a huge handicap.

<comment><USER4> When Altavista launched, it was an impressive showcase of the DEC Alpha's power. Intel only became usable for serious servers (with the exception of exotic stuff like Sequents), as did Linux, years later. Google had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time, when Lintel became a commodity in the datacentre. 5 years earlier, they'd have been on Sun probably.

<comment><USER5> Initial versions of Google at Stanford ran on a mix of both Linux and Solaris.

<http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html>

<comment><USER3> I'll bet you a dollar that Larry and Sergei never actually bought a Sun server to run the search engine, but rather that they may have used some free resource available to them at Stanford.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Inktomi killed Inktomi long before Google helped put the nail in the coffin.

What the article doesn't say is Inktomi had a dual sided business. One side was in Caching Proxies the other was licensing a search API.

Inktomi decided to focus on the caching proxy business and de-emphasized their search product, only to watch the proxy business evaporate as internet bandwidth became cheaper/better.

The focus on a shrinking market (proxies) and the lack of focus on growing market (search) killed them. Had search been a priority from the beginning things may have ended very differently with Inktomi creating their own front end.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for that. I too remember Inktomi much more as the "cache kings" with licensed search a secondary focus.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another lesson from this article: If your engineers refer to those who make decisions as "the execs" instead of "we": Quit.

</comment><comment><USER9> _It was clear that Yahoo.com was the definitive result for the query "yahoo" so it would score a 10. Other Yahoo pages would be ok (perhaps a 5 or 6). Irrelevant pages stuffed with Yahoo-related keywords would be spam._

As someone who worked on search quality at Google for some time, this bit jumped out at me as a terrible mistake. The correct way to judge results for the query [yahoo] is:

(a) Where is yahoo.com? At the top?

(b) There is no (b).

It seems like a slight difference, but it leads to the wrong priorities. For the query [yahoo], it does not matter if spam or non-spam is in spot #5. The only thing that matters is where you put yahoo.com.

<comment><USER10> Can you elaborate a bit more on this? I think I understand your point but a few more details would be great. Thanks!

<comment><USER11> Most people don't look farther than the first 3 results, so what comes after that isn't very high priority. Might be the reason some more specific/obscure queries on google return terrible results :)

<comment><USER12> More specifically, if people find what they're looking for in the first result, they ignore the rest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just realized that Google won on search the way Apple has won on smartphones. They control the full stack -- frontend, relevance, indexing, advertising -- and tightly couple these pieces. Inktomi couldn't control the user interface the way Google can't really control the interface on Android.

<comment><USER14> You are right, but IMO you miss the real point. Both Google's search and Apple's iPhone were about delivering a wholly satisfying product/service, and controlling the whole stack was needed to do that _for those cases_. This is not always true (though it often is).

<comment><USER13> Yeah, it's pretty hard to know when it is and isn't. Vertical integration is as old as business.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Relevant: <http://youtu.be/E91oEn1bnXM>

It's a recording of a very very good talk by Inktomi co-founder Eric Brewer called "Inktomi's Wild Ride - A Personal View of the Internet Bubble"

<comment><USER16> Yes, that talk is excellent. Deserves its own submission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Most interesting to me is that Inktomi had all the power to beat, acquire or replicate Google but didn't have the right mindset. They were operating under a few bad assumptions:

\- search is a commodity for licensing (making them resistant to launching a "cleaner" engine that would alienate their clients)

\- what worked for a smaller internet (100 million pages) could scale appropriately with the growing internet (100 billion pages) without rethinking everything

\- "Page rank" only helped relevance (it was also about spam)

I think Google is stuck in a rut of their own right now. Here's some faulty assumptions I think Google is making:

\- users always want faster, more direct answers (rather than controlling the filtering/categorization of their searches)

\- users want Google to predict what they mean rather than clarify what they mean

\- algorithms > human decisions

<comment><USER18> \- users always want faster, more direct answers (rather than controlling the filtering/categorization of their searches)

That's a very power-user centric attitude, don't you think? As a power user I preferred to type long, complicated Sabre queries to find exactly which airplane flight I wanted. It was much faster, and I had memorized all of the complicated mnemonics. But that's not what a casual user would want to use.

Asking users to specify categories for what they want means requiring a certain orientation in their thinking which is shared by computer scientists and trained librarians. But to an average user, that's extra work. And think about how this might work if you're talking to an actual human librarian: if you start asking about TV shows, and then mention "The Big Bang Theory", do you think the librarian will ask you, "Did you mean the scientific theory, or the TV show?" That's only something a stupid computer would do. A smart librarian would take the context of the previous queries that you've made of him or her, and provide the right answer quickly and efficiently. Wouldn't you want the same thing from a search engine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> After I had switched to Google, I never understood why all of the competition just disappeared over night. You would think they would have given it a fight, but that never seemed to happen. At least this article gives a little insight to that. I still wonder what happened to Altavista.

<comment><USER20> AltaVista tried to jump on the 'portal' bandwagon. I remember at the time how stupid I thought they were, trying to beat Excite and Yahoo at something that was already old hat, a concept that had the Internet had outgrown. Then they screwed up pretty much the same way Inktomi did.

AltaVista still exists. It's awful, and it's powered by the Yahoo search engine. Which is pretty much the same thing, I suppose.

<comment><USER21> Yahoo! bought Overture (which owned AltaVista) way back in 2003. They only replaced the search results with Yahoo!'s a year ago after announcing the site would be shut down. Seemed like they were using it as an occasional test bed in the meantime.

<comment><USER22> Yup, when I worked at Yahoo back in 2006 I remember altavista being described as a useful site for running experiments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I had no idea that that Diego worked on Inktomi. Although it makes sense why IndexTank worked fantastically.

If I had to pick one reason why Google triumphed (and you can only pick one), I think it would be their Page Rank algorithm. It added that extra bit of awesome-sauce to and already tasty stew.

<comment><USER24> I'd say: The Google CEO's have the point of view from an end user.

The Inktomi managers had the point of view of a generic MBA.

Everything followed from that difference of view.

<comment><USER25> I would modify that to read (since this article even stated that the engineers there found this to be obvious):

>The Google CEO's have the point of view of an engineer.

And, more generally:

>The Google CEO's have the point of view of the people doing the actual work.

The lesson to take away from this is that one shouldn't try to manage what one can't do themself. The disconnect between the manager and the problem domain becomes too great and they end up making ridiculous decisions since they are acting on the wrong information.

<comment><USER26> I'd disagree on a couple of points.

First, engineers very often build crappy products when left to their own devices. The ones that they do the best at are ones where they are also the users and are more or less representative of the target audience. Google's a great example, and so is Firefox. So I think Google execs' perspective as a user was much more important. Consider as contrast Google Plus, which definitely was not built because was an avid but dissatisfied Facebook and Twitter user.

I think your second point is almost right. You should never try to _control_ things you don't understand. It's ok to _manage_ things you don't understand, because good management in that case is not directing the people who understand, but supporting them in achieving common goals.

As a non-tech example, few hospital administrators can perform brain surgery. But that's fine as long as they ask the brain surgeons what they need rather than telling them how to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> According to a friend of mine who worked on the search team, Inktomi shifted its (management and CapEx) focus away from search and onto other projects. He thought at the time that even with the constraints of not competing with their own customers, there were things they could have done to better compete if management had chosen to do so.

Edit: fixed typo

<comment><USER16> Yes, that's true. They didn't think search would be a huge business. Back then the model was to sell search to portals charging by query volume, and it was a race to the bottom. Our Solaris servers were more expensive than Google's Linux boxes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> After reading the "Tale" it appears that Inktomi killed itself. It is a good example of what happens if top dog companies fail to innovate in face of sudden superior competition. RIM is another example, but would be wrong to say that Apple is killing them. Apple is just making and selling superior products.

<comment><USER29> _Apple is just making and selling superior products._

Agreed. If I had a nickel for every time my Blackberry crashed since I upgraded the OS a year ago, I'd buy some Apple stock.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not competing with your customers is a not-invalid reason, tho' there are real-world examples that go either way.

<comment><USER16> True. In this case, I forgot to mention that not having a world-facing UI deprived us of vital signals that Google used to improved their experience. We had query logs, but we had no idea of what our customers' users were doing within a session, no user history, etc.

<comment><USER30> We had a world facing UI, and all the insight that produced, and we _still_ weren't able to sway management that there might possibly be a profitable search business.

In the age of napster people were using our service-- and falling in love with it-- finding music on the internet.

Nope, no money there. Better to sell to ISPs in canada and hope they integrate our results with Inktomis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Think I would qualify his key takeaway somewhat:

"Are there any lessons to be learned from this? For one, if you work at a company where everyone _wants to use_ a competitor's product instead of its own, be very worried."

This is because companies sometimes (maybe often?) ban the use of competitor products to their detriment.

</comment><comment><USER32> That was a good read. I remember I used Yahoo for searching the web. Due to relevancy factor I moved to Altavista (but it didn't improve anything until the day I found out about Google and still use Google). I didn't know that Inktomi was powering search at that time. If Yahoo was so dependent on Inktomi or Google for its Search, I wonder why didn't they work on Search by themselves. After all they were information organization tool. Why did they ignore such a huge market. VC's were going crazy for funding search engines and number of search engines companies were either getting funded or going public. Based on these signals and the traffic they had during dot com era, they could have easily built substantially good search engine; yet they ignored it. Can anyone shed light on it?

<comment><USER33> Yahoo owned Overture so their results were pure pay-for-placement. If anyone wanted to pay $100 per click to have the #1 spot on "beef" go to a site about chicken, that was a-OK with Yahoo management. When Yahoo realized their auction system was stupid, they had "project Panama" which was also a joke and by that time Google had the market to themselves anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Inktomi engineers using Google reminds me of TI engineers using HP calculators. TI banned them, which apparently just moved the calculators under the desk

<comment><USER35> When I started at Yahoo Search (in 2005; it was Inktomi), I quickly learned that "just Google it" was frowned upon, and modified my vocabulary to say "just use web search". To this day, I still use this phrase.

Most engineers that I knew in YST did not use Google at all. We preferred to eat our own dogfood, and filed query triages against bad results (and only used Google to compare).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Ok, so the timing on this is really amazing. Techcrunch, reporting on Facebook's S1, mentioned that Yahoo! has suggested another 12 patents they may try to throw against Facebook and their Open Compute project. The Yahoo! letter is here: [http://www.scribd.com/doc/92280387/TechCrunch-Letter-From- Ya...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/92280387/TechCrunch-Letter-From-Yahoo-to- Facebook-regarding-Yahoo-Inc-Server-Patents-and-Facebook-Data-Centers) and the source of many of these patents? Inktomi!

Is that crazy or what?

</comment><comment><USER37> Why I switched to google.

A) it was fast, it loaded fast. B) it was not filled with ads and pop ups.

Only one of those is still true.

<comment><USER38> I suspect quality results also played an outsized factor in most people's switching, even if they don't admit it.

Easy test: are you using Bing now? (with their new clean results pages)

<comment><USER39> Oh yes. I remember back in early 1998 I was using Copernic to aggregate and filter results from a whole bunch of search engines, because individually their results where so poor and irrelevant. Then I discovered <http://google.stanford.edu> and never looked back.

<comment><USER40> Same here except I used dogpile.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M._

This is unrelated to the main point, but does anyone know if Yahoo re-used a significant amount of Inktomi tech acquired for that $250M? Or was it spoiled?

<comment><USER41> I've been told (by people from Inktomi who then worked at Yahoo), that yes, the Inktomi technology became the main Yahoo search engine. (How much it changed or not in the process, I don't know)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Anyone else notice the really weird link supposedly of the Ipad Screen Resolution that contained the initial query of Domino Pizza Phone Number?

x's so it won't become a link!

hxxps://wxw.google.com/search?ix=aca&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=domino+pizza+phone+number#hl=en&gs_nf=1&tok=DBTJEp2_3oW1F2ietDMecQ&pq=ipad%20screen%20resolution&cp=1&gs_id=5w&xhr=t&q=new+ipad+screen+resolution&pf=p&safe=off&sclient=psy- ab&oq=nipad+screen+resolution&aq=0&aqi=g2g-b2&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=8316e992ae23057e&ix=aca&biw=1363&bih=647

</comment><comment><USER43> If the stock went from 25 G$ to 250 M$, that's a decrease of 99% not 99.9%.

<comment><USER16> It peaked at 241 1/2, bottomed out at 24 cents in 2001 before going up 10x again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Diego,

Thanks for capturing the train of thoughts that seem to run through my head almost daily. Lots of lessons to learn from that experience. Although it is easier to connect the dots in the rearview mirror that it was looking forward at the time, There were some clear lessons about not forgetting the actual end user (which is not always your customer), using a single metric as a proxy for user experience, obsessing about a competitor and trying to get big instead of great.

</comment><comment><USER45> As an Australian I used to use 'Anzwers' as it seem to give great relevance for Australian specific information. I think it used Inktomi?

I'm not sure why I switched to Google. Not to discredit the Google UX, but I think I switched because the name 'Google' was so catchy and eased it's way into my university's vernacular. "Just Google it" rolls of the tongue nicely.

</comment><comment><USER46> Wow, not only is there still a search page under hotbot.com, its also still run by Lycos! It's like time travel...

</comment><comment><USER47> I want to check out at that period of time does stuff in Google use Inktomi to do some experiment also?

</comment><comment><USER48> From the article, it's clear that more than Google, inktomi killed itself.

</comment><comment><USER49> I remember why I switched to Google: 1. speed, 2. simplicity. Relevance, meh. Never noticed much difference there. This led me to believe that PageRank was more about marketing (brilliant marketing) than technical edge.

<comment><USER50> Are you kidding? I was using Altavista, IIRC, and would routinely have to page down to the second or third page to find any kind of relevant link. When I switched to Google, I almost immediately stopped looking at more than the first page of results.

<comment><USER4> There was nothing wrong with Altavista's algorithm for "finding stuff" - <USER2> was just too vulnerable to SEO pollution. I remember the quality of it declining almost overnight once spammers (yes that's what SEOs are) figured it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Sounds much more like Inktomi killed Inktomi.

</comment><comment><USER30> This was a very interesting read. I was working for a vertical search engine in this very same period. I, and the other engineers, also attempted to get our management to recognize what google was doing right. Unfortunately, we were delayed greatly by bad technology choices forced on us by venture capitalists (e.g. "build your search engine on top of Oracle! they say they have full text search, it will save you time!"[1]) and management short- sightedness ("our future is selling audio video search results to ISPs and portals, not being our own portal." -- this despite google not being a portal.) They actually got worried when the search box on our homepage started getting more queries than some of our larger customers.

Now, FWIW, I'm building another search engine. Instead of 20 engineers we have just me. Instead of 4 years, we're going to do it in one. While I have no interest in going up against google (different plans entirely) the radical change in leverage you get with open source and PAAS or IAAS, combined with Google's having taken their eye off the ball and run off to chase Facebook down a blind alley, means that something like DuckDuckGo actually could take real share away... maybe. (%1 of google's volume would be "Real share" right?)

[1] Oracle did have full text search but did not have the performance or per- machine-efficiency we needed, so it cost us a lot, and it was a constant fight to get it to do the kind of queries our relevancy algos required. we had a constant stream of consultants in from oracle HQ, and in the end dumped it and wrote our own db from scratch in about 4 months.

<comment><USER52> As you haven't mentioned what exactly your search engine will focus on, I'll just throw this idea out there. I would love a search engine that returned results equivalent to Google, yet offered me the privacy level that I desired. With Google, currently I am the product. I know this. I understand this. Thing this is, I don't want to be the product any more. I want to pay for the product on say a yearly fee which guarantees me I won't be sold ads or have my search habit information sold.

<comment><USER53> Like <http://duckduckgo.com/>?

<comment><USER54> It seems like a nice idea. But I use other Google services like GMail, Google Docs, Google Maps, etc. If I switched to duckduckgo but still used the other Google products I'd feel wrong about it. There aint no such thing as a free lunch.

Now if their search results got so bad that other alternatives were clearly superior, that's different. They have an obligation to provide a good service to us the customers too, but we're not there yet. For me.

<comment><USER55> After the recent penguin update, their search results have got REALLY bad.

Don't you guys agree?

That's an opportunity, right there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Bitter?</comment>


Expired food: how best-before dates create a waste mountain - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/17/the-truth-about-expired-food-how-best-before-dates-create-a-waste-mountain <comment><USER2> Here in Norway yoghurt pots have Tine's new slogan:

        Best før, men ikke dårlig etter.

In English:

        Best before, but not bad after.

Shops are also required to reduce the amount of food that they throw out which results in every supermarket having a chiller with almost out of date food marked down by 40 or 50 percent. I buy a lot of this.

<comment><USER3> they would get sued to oblivion in USA.

<comment><USER4> _Almost_ out of date food, which is commoly sold at a discount in the US as well.

<comment><USER5> I think they were referring to saying that a product is "not bad after" it's expiration date.

<comment><USER6> A vendor could be sued for that in the US, but not a manufacturer. Expiration dates have no legal meaning for manufacturers.

(A manufacturer actually was sued when, after encountering production issues, they recovered by simply relabeling the expiration dates on existing product. But the manufacturer won that suit decisively.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've never paid attention to use by or best-before dates. I think generally trusting you nose, eyes and instincts does you fine.

The one that most surprises me is the loaves of brown seeded bread I buy. The use by date is normally only a week from purchase, where as the bread is normally fresh for 2 weeks, and edible but starting to harden up to 3 weeks.

If I followed the use by date, I'd be throwing away half a loaf of bread every week.

<comment><USER8> Just a single gone-off meal can kill you, so you can't try all that many times and hope to find the limit of survivability. Damp gain and rice based things are particularly hazardous in that regard - sure it's unlikely to be bad, but when it is bad, it can be very bad.

<comment><USER9> A single crossing of the road can kill you. A single car drive can kill you, hell you could go to sleep one night and never wake up for many many reasons.

You can't avoid things just because they _could_ kill you.

You've listed the one exception to being able to rely on your senses, and it doesn't really correlate with best before dates, cooked reheated rice is the main risk.

<comment><USER10> It's about the statistics, same reason we have seatbelts and helmet laws. If a less aggressive sell-by date means one in a million loaves of bread gets moldy, that might kill a handful of people a year. If nothing else, allowing people to die from preventable sales of expired food is bad politics.

<comment><USER9> How many people a year die from moldy bread?

Best before and sell by is a guarantee. Its the company saying this product will last until X date. Just like your car doesn't become unusable when the warranty runs out, neither does bread, especially when you make some attempt to store it properly, because best before dates are based on the opposite.

<comment><USER11> Each year about 3000 people in the US die from food poisoning. About 100,000 people are hospitalised, and some of them will have been caused permanent harm.

<comment><USER10> To add: even if we throw out a few hundred million dollars worth of food, that's more than a fair trade for a few thousand lives and 40x that in hospitalizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why don't stores offer work the expiration of goods into the price? E.g. a 5% discount on things 25% into their expiry, 10% for 75% etc.

It's a common technique to pay staff to stock shelves in such a way that the goods about to expire are at the front, savvy customers will dig at the back to get the new stock. Right now there's no price incentive _not_ to do that.

<comment><USER5> In the UK, some supermarkets do this. At my nearest supermarket, they can have very large discounts (maybe 75% or more) when an item's expiry date is today, and occasionally they do increase the discount over time like you suggested.

Each time they change the price, they put a sticker with the new price and barcode over the old one, on every discounted item. The employee time required to do this is non-trivial. I imagine that in some places, stores would decide that it's not worth the effort, since a discount might not increase sales enough to match the reduced profit per item (especially in affluent areas where customers can easily afford the full-price item, and maybe turn their noses up at items near their expiration date).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use eatbydate for all my perishables, which usually buys me another week or two on the refrigerated food. I also keep a labeler by the fridge, so I can relabel opened containers with the reduced date instead of trying to remember when that jar of alfredo was last used

</comment><comment><USER14> One of the perks I remember from working in a grocery store many years ago was free pickings of stuff that was going to be thrown out that was past the expiry. Got a lot of free food. Never got sick or had any ill effects once.

<comment><USER8> But is a small chance of dying from eating toxic bacteria worth it?

Best before dates act like a 'hard cutoff', but the reality is the risk of eating food is typically an exponential increasing from the time it was made. It just starts from a very low value.

Just a single gone-off meal can kill you, so you can't try all that many times and hope to find the limit of survivability.

<comment><USER4> Genuine question: are there any foods that go bad in such a way that you can't see, taste or smell it, but it can kill you anyway? (Emphasis on "go bad": things like listeria were there from the start.)

<comment><USER15> If you have a condition that means you'll react very badly to something that would most other people nothing more than an upset stomach, yes. For example, if your immune system is already compromised (from HIV, cancer, etc) something as simple as mild botulism can kill you.

About 3000 people die from food poisoning every year in the US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On youtube there are plenty of videos of people eating old military rations. The oldest is from the Boer War. But here is "1942 WW2 US Army Field Ration C B Unit MRE Taste Test Vintage Meal Ready to Eat Oldest Food Review" at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8f5Kj_CrY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm8f5Kj_CrY)

</comment><comment><USER17> I just bought some fancy chocolate for almost nothing the other day. Best before was end of january but it tasted very good! If I didn't know old chocolate goes white I might have throw it away.

<comment><USER18> > _If I didn 't know old chocolate goes white I might have throw it away._

It's called a bloom: [https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/36380/test- if-wh...](https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/36380/test-if-whitish- chocolate-has-bloom-or-is-spoiled)

<comment><USER17> Good to know! Things that has gone bad usually doesn't taste that great either so that's a good way to find out!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 I usually keep stuff like bread for a little longer and I usually don't waste most of it. If I'm not sure I'll eat it in time I'll freeze it even though it won't be as soft.

</comment><comment><USER19> Last night I ate skyr (kind of yogurt) with expiry date at February. So far I am OK.

<comment><USER9> Well yoghurt is already off milk.

<comment><USER18> Yoghurt is also acidic, making it less hospitable to mold, and moreso to lactobacilli and other similar bacteria that are generally safe to consume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Dumpster diving is a way to both mitigate it and increase social justice.

But the problem is that many big stores lock their garbage bins in an almost evil decision.

<comment><USER21> No, the _problem_ is that people can sue (and win!) if they eat food from a company's garbage bins and then get sick. Remove the liability, and you remove the motive to protect against said liability at the expense of the commons.

<comment><USER20> Hmm, I can't find (in one minute searching, busy, sorry) someone winning such a case..

I find it a bit strange. First, because many people do dumpster diving. Second, because it is mostly the big companies locking their bins, so why do the smaller ones don't if it's risky?</comment></comment></comment>