New flaw in Intel chips lets attackers slip their own data into secure enclave - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/new-flaw-in-intel-chips-lets-attackers-slip-their-own-data-into-secure-enclave/ <comment><USER2> Could we change the link to the source?

[https://lviattack.eu](https://lviattack.eu)

It has a good explanation, videos and FAQ.

(the Techcrunch post is just horrible)

<comment><USER3> I often think Techcrunch should be banned on HN.

When I click on a Techrunch link, it tries to redirect me to some tracking url on advertising.com. That would probably collect data about me, set cookies and send me back to Techcrunch. Since I do not allow that, I cannot read Techcrunch articles at all.

Lets see what others think. I made an Ask HN from this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22539255](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22539255)

<comment><USER4> How bout we first ban articles behind paywalls?

<comment><USER5> I would not know how to feel about a community that both hates advertising and paywalls, and that also routinely causes DDoS-like spikes of traffic on smaller sites.

<comment><USER6> "When do we want it?" "Now!" "How much will we pay?" "Nothing!"

<comment><USER5> To be clear I admit I am in that camp, but at the very least I oppose circumventing paywalls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There was a CTF this weekend (UTCTF) featuring a task to exploit a program running in a secure SGX enclave. As part of solving that task I spent some time looking into the design of SGX, and I gotta say it doesn't sound promising.

The basic idea is to be able to run code on an Intel processor that cannot be tampered with or even examined by any other part of the system, including the OS, hypervisors, etc. The entire code and data segment of this program runs in its own world, the "secure enclave", in user mode (ring 3). The attack model is that every piece of software executing on the CPU (user code, OS code, hypervisors) and every bit of hardware outside the CPU (network interfaces, hardware buses, memory interfaces) could be compromised and attempting to leak data from your Secure Enclave, and the enclave code/data should still remain tamper proof and unreadable. The SGX implementation even includes an attestation system, using a trusted server operated by Intel, which will attempt to verify that the CPU itself is not compromised.

The entire thing depends on a lot of cryptography. Sealing keys to encrypt data that will be persisted to disk from the enclave. Memory protection keys to encrypt everything going to RAM. Page encryption keys to encrypt any memory that the OS tries to page out. Attestation keys to cryptographically verify that the CPU measured itself to be OK. Cryptographic signatures to validate the initial enclave code and data to protect against tampering of the initial state. Session keys to protect the enclave's communication with whatever application server is providing the code/data for the enclave's computation. The OS and even the ring 3 application hosting the enclave have a MITM position on absolutely everything the enclave does, so the disclosure of just one of these keys breaks the security of the whole system.

I am not surprised at all that SGX wound up being vulnerable to a low-level CPU attack. The attack surface is way too big and there are too many points of failure.

<comment><USER8> > I am not surprised at all that SGX wound up being vulnerable to a low-level > CPU attack.

Most secure systems assume that the CPU is functioning correctly. It is not clear that you can do anything securely if the CPU is buggy.

<comment><USER9> What is correctly? You have to understand that SGX was built on an existing infrastructure, without rebuilding the chip. Intel architects ignored side channels for years. So the security specification was being met, except it had ignored a crucial threat. Small comfort. My point is that "correctly" for security can only be defined in the context of a threat model. If the model is incomplete, then you are exposed. I am not aware of a complete threat model for TEE design. And the reason is clear. The threats develop over time, springing into existence as an emergent property of complex designs rewarded by a market that is not keen on incentivizing secure design.

<comment><USER8> The Intel instruction specification details which access control checks are performed when executing instructions. In most of the speculative execution bugs, the Intel implementors decided to skip those checks for performance reasons. Note that this is a implementation correctness issue, not a security issue (which is defined only for a threat model).

The SGX design was created on top of the instruction specification, not on top of specific buggy processors. Hence the vulnerability! The threat model for SGX did not consider incorrect processor implementation.

<comment><USER9> I think we are on the same page. I was referring to the specific SGX implementation that relied on existing processor infrastructure, and you are making the argument that no system can be secure that is built on a faulty implementation. No amount of threat modeling will help you if an implementation does not perform its function. All threat models are built under the implicit assumption that the implementation they will help derive will be correct. The threat model helps to answer the question of which function should be realized. Whether that function is in fact realized or not is a different matter. With the speculative execution bugs, the function being realized unintentionally deviated from the specified access checks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Intel continues to get beaten up by their decision to defer access checks in speculation. Meltdown, L1TF, and now LVI-stale-data are all rooted in one mistake. Fortunately, the silicon fix for Meltdown appears to mitigate these issues ("RDCL_NO"). But it also introduces LVI-NULL (which is admittedly more restricted, but still problematic).

The Intel deep dive [0] is a pretty solid addition to the original paper [1].

It looks like Ice Lake processors are going to be the first ones that are not affected [2]. Based on the deep dive, it sounds like these still aren't perfect (they don't completely avoid forwarding values to dependent instructions from faulting loads). They instead exhibit some behavior they call "zero-at-ret", which Intel says is not expoitable in practice.

Intel does not explicitly say Ice Lake is zero-at-ret, but reading between the lines this seems to be the case ("parts generally exhibiting Zero-at-ret behavior... will be documented as 'not affected'.") Only Ice Lake is listed as not affected, so they likely would not put this caveat in there if this did not apply to Ice Lake.

[0] [https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insigh...](https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insights/deep-dive-load-value-injection#injectnonzerodata) [1] [https://lviattack.eu/lvi.pdf](https://lviattack.eu/lvi.pdf) [2] [https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insigh...](https://software.intel.com/security-software- guidance/insights/processors-affected-load-value-injection)

<comment><USER11> This is a bit of a naive question, but do the Ice Lake mitigations address any of the performance impact from the software updates that address earlier issues?

<comment><USER10> Depending on your risk tolerance, mostly yes:

1) You can disable kPTI without opening the door to Meltdown (which let you directly read kernel memory as usermode).

2) You can re-enable hyperthreading while allowing virtualization (VMs) without obvious issues (l1tf used to allow users to read kernel memory through VMs). I don't know which, if any, distros do this, but it's the prudent thing to do if you care deeply about security. (Linux may have the scheduling fixes by now that also fix this, but I honestly haven't followed them, and they didn't have them in like November when I last checked.)

Others:

1) I'm honestly unsure if you can recompile kernels without "retpoline", but it's not a super big perf impact anyway, at least not compared to those two mitigations.

2) I'm not super familiar with the "MDS" vulnerabilities, so I don't know how bad the perf impact of their mitigations are, or how bad their impact is.

3) There's some TSX issues, which I'm also unfamiliar with, also probably don't matter much perf wise.

If you are paranoid, or have a multi-tenant machine, I'd still leave these on (and I'd particularly leave hyper-threading off, even on AMD), since we haven't stopped seeing new side channels. Hyper-threading is basically asking for problems on multi-tenant machines.

Honestly, if your machine is not multi-tenant, and you can tolerate some risk (e.g. you don't care if anyone sitting at your machine can read all of RAM, including potential malware), I'd just disable all this stuff. Unless you've run into particular hiccups (you compile linux kernels all day and you need the extra cores), I wouldn't do it.

<comment><USER12> regarding 2): latest betas of ChromeOS disable hyperthreading if one enables builtin Linux VM. Seems overzealous to me, as the OS is not multi-tenant usually

<comment><USER13> I thought that Chrome OS disabled this by default, as MDS crosses privileges boundaries in addition to the VM/host one?

<comment><USER12> By default on my ChromeOS 81 beta HyperThreading is getting disabled only after you start the linux vm. HT stays disabled until you reboot. There is scheduler flag in chrome://flags, but IME it does nothing

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm considering to upgrade my primary computer this summer and considering an AMD system. Following is my thought process:

\- Maybe I should buy an Intel system again because of the performance counters and other nice things.

 _Another Intel attack surfaces_

\- Yep, I shall go AMD this time...

<comment><USER15> [https://www.techspot.com/news/84309-amd-cpus-vulnerable- seve...](https://www.techspot.com/news/84309-amd-cpus-vulnerable-severe-new- side-channel-attack.html)

From 2 days ago, in case you weren't aware.

<comment><USER16> The "new" AMD attack depends on lack of already existing spectre mitigations. If I understand correctly, this one is a real new one that works against a correctly patched system.

<comment><USER17> the new AMD attack effectively breaks KASLR (the "metadata" that the attack reveals is page table layouts) and AMD has announced they're not going to patch it.

itself it's not a problem but if you pair it with something else it destroys a major line of defense against that something else.

AMD is still architecturally vulnerable to some variants of SPECTRE, they just consider it "hard to exploit", but they do recommend you run KASLR to harden against it. Well, so much for that.

<comment><USER18> Wasn't KASLR (really KPTI, originally a KASLR hardening technique) a mitigation against Meltdown, which AMD isn't vulnerable to, rather than Spectre?

<comment><USER19> As far as I understand it, KASLR is a general hardening technique to shuffle the kernel address space so that it's harder for attackers to use vulnerabilities successfully to attack the kernel. I don't think it's specifically for Meltdown.

<comment><USER18> ASLR is a general technique to try to prevent memory corruption vulnerabilities from being turned into code execution when the attacker can determine the location of already-existing code in memory and use the memory corruption to cause program flow to jump to it.

It works pretty well against remote code execution because it's hard for an attacker who can't already execute arbitrary code on your machine to determine the address space layout. In principle it can also be used to protect the kernel against user processes, but that's much harder because a process that can already execute arbitrary user code on the same machine can use a variety of side channel attacks like this to determine the kernel address space layout.

KPTI was originally proposed to close some of those side channels, but it's kind of expensive. It only got enabled by default (on Intel) because it also mitigates Meltdown, which is a much worse problem. It also doesn't handle all of the side channels:

[http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~nael/pubs/micro16.pdf](http://www.cs.ucr.edu/~nael/pubs/micro16.pdf)

Meanwhile, if some kernel code is vulnerable to _Spectre_ (i.e. the Spectre mitigations are not implemented properly), it could allow the attacker to read arbitrary kernel memory. That is obviously very bad, but the ability to read arbitrary kernel memory implies that the attacker can already determine the kernel address space layout, so I'm not sure how KASLR would be helpful in mitigating that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The headline and a lot of the writeup is very confusing. This attack does not let you modify _architectural_ state, only speculative state. The headlines sound like you can corrupt the values that the program actually ends up using, but you can't. You can only modify speculative state and use those changes to get more control over what data is leaked through side channels.

</comment><comment><USER21> [Ignorant tangent] Is core hardware more exploited these days or are vulnerabilities just more reported in tech news? I'd assume the former, but I'm not a hardware person. If so is this just due to increasing complexity/optimization going on in chip design or better tooling/methods of exploitation?

<comment><USER22> It's probably a bit of both. Intel started implementing speculative execution decades ago but the first exploits like Specter/Meltdown weren't published until a few years ago so that alone is strong evidence that there might be ancient attack vectors that we haven't even considered yet.

On the other hand, interest in this topic among the public has definitely grown since branding departments started getting their hands on the exploits and Bloomberg published that sensationalist Micro story so it's a self reinforcing cycle.

<comment><USER23> Interestingly, there was a 1998 paper about speculative execution that basically outlined all of Spectre/Meltdown.

<comment><USER24> Sounds interesting. Do you have a link to it?

<comment><USER25> I'm not sure if there was another paper in '98, but this one in 1995 may be the one being referenced: [https://web.archive.org/web/20180506083456/https://pdfs.sema...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180506083456/https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2209/42809262c17b6631c0f6536c91aaf7756857.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> An 11 month embargo for a widespread security flaw like this is unacceptable. Researchers need to refuse to comply with this. 90 days by default and an extra 90 on request is more than enough. If they can't get their shit together in six months they won't be able to in 12.

<comment><USER27> We need an industry standard shut-up-and-pay-me system. First 90 days free. Then some sort of quadratic formula for every month after that.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I'd prefer 90 days and then unconditional publishing. I grant that making companies' desire for silence actually affect the bottom line has appeal, but 1. some companies have deep pockets, and 2. I'm not ethically comfortable with anything of the form "pay me to not disclose this bad thing".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is a good thing when the secure enclave is user-hostile and the attacker is the user.

Although it is unlikely, I remain wishful that this continued barrage of side- channel attacks will usher in the return of the era where people actually own their hardware 100%, rely on processor protections as defense against mistakes and not malice --- as was the original intent of 286 protected mode --- and understand that attempting to isolate trusted and untrusted code on the same hardware is ultimately futile.

<comment><USER29> Cloud providers already offer full blades, though they're quite expensive. I could imagine vendors commissioning custom hardware that electrically isolates CPU cores and caches, like a sort of hyper MMU. The challenge lies in combining these "nodelets" together dynamically to make larger VM skus when needed without compromising security when they're supposed to be isolated. Plus you'd have to design a ton of new hardware which isn't cheap.

Clouds will probably stick with traditional server blades until transient attacks are found which simply can't be defeated, even with new silicon. Even replacing entire DCs worth of blades would be cheaper than reworking the fundamental hardware.

(I have no inside knowledge, my opinions are my own.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If anyone's interested, I recently started a youtube playlist collecting talks on exploiting and securing x86 hardware and firmware: [https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Jsn37GlvSwYGaetkukERO...](https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7Jsn37GlvSwYGaetkukEROk9Ew8OUoHj)

Anything I should add?

<comment><USER31> [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4RrBxLcT1nZThUvIFjS0...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4RrBxLcT1nZThUvIFjS0cuR1REb_ZDJJ)

</comment></comment><comment> d--b Do all these vulnerabilities mean that manufacturers will have to remove those optimizations, rendering the cpu slower?

It seems to me that extracting or injecting data that way is very hard to do, and is likely to return very little information.

Is the tradeoff something like: we should prevent the one in a hundred billion chance that my cpu leaks a critical password to some intruder one day at the cost of rendering all my processes 30% slower?

<comment><USER32> Can I restate the go question as "is complexity of the machine effectively security by obscurity and effective in practice for reliance upon?"

Really how much unnecessary complexity is traversing boundaries we can shut down or at least gate effectively?

My company has used CICS for this purpose since forever and we're not so much a legacy that you will think about our architecture in this way if we talked about it, but CICS is a very rare interface in this era.

<comment><USER33> We call it serverless now :-) (I'm joking a bit but there are similarities.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder what would happen if a flaw were found that would render an entire line of expensive CPUs useless.

<comment><USER35> the closest I can think of was the famous floating point error that caused Intel to recall lots of parts[1]. Even that didn't render the CPUs useless for most users, only some scientific and business use cases really had problems.

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

<comment><USER36> >Thomas Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College, had written code to enumerate primes, twin primes, prime triplets, and prime quadruplets. Nicely noticed some inconsistencies in the calculations on June 13, 1994, shortly after adding a Pentium system to his group of computers, but was unable to eliminate other factors (such as programming errors, motherboard chipsets, etc.) until October 19, 1994. On October 24, 1994, he reported the issue to Intel.

Can you imagine debugging this for that many months only to find out there was nothing on your end to fix.

<comment><USER37> I had a similar experience when doing my first serious work in a compiled language. I found and reported a compiler bug in double-precision division (in a commercial C compiler). It took me years to stop blaming the compiler for my bugs.

<comment><USER38> I had the same, an embedded system with GCC 3.something. Managed to get a toolchain together with 4.something and suddenly our uptime and random corruption issues disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Quite sensational.

I think very few mortals out there use SGX, Intel apparently dropping public tooling support for it just shows for it.

Biggest scare is coming to DRM users, but even they I think are not much impressed as insecure trustlets for 845 in the wild already made then to give up few years ago.

<comment><USER40> Yes I just don't understand, most big vulnerabilities that make the headlines, even if they involves a lot of people, the vuln scenario looks it's still crumbs.

Of course the crumbs of many users can add up to a lot, so it's a still a concern, it's not really nothing.

Of course what matters is the PR involved, not the actual vuln. Hardware vulns are pretty bad since they can't be fixed. But still, it still sounds like worse than it really is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> much better link [https://lviattack.eu/](https://lviattack.eu/)

</comment><comment><USER42> also [https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-cpus-vulnerable-to- new-l...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-cpus-vulnerable-to-new-lvi- attacks/)

</comment><comment><USER43> Signal is planning on using Intel's SGX enclaves. [https://signal.org/blog/secure-value- recovery/](https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/)

Not sure how much of a risk this plays in that plan, though.

<comment><USER44> Signal already uses SGX for Contact Discovery, and has for many months.

In all cases, Signal only uses SGX to improve cases where data previously was stored in plaintext. The idea is to change the required attack from "compromise signal servers" to "compromise signal servers _and_ compromise SGX".

<comment><USER45> OK, but if compromising SGX is pretty easy, that just leaves the servers (hosted on AWS) for someone to be able to observe and decrypt all Signal traffic, right?

<comment><USER46> It is anything but easy. I guess that is why you get downvoted. The fact that only this academic group was able to come up with these attacks shows the amount of knowledge you need to have to carry them out.

<comment><USER45> OK, but how hard is it for a state-backed intelligence agency to come up with that knowledge? The Vault 7 leaks showed that the CIA has all kinds of very deep capabilities in this area. I'm not thinking of some random script kiddies doing this.

<comment><USER46> Past news should have shown that pretty much nothing is invulnerable from state-backed intelligence services. I would be more worried about what can realistically be hacked by random people on the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> [security noob here]can anyone explain this in layman terms, i.e can these be exploited remotely, what we can do to protect etc!

In short, who should be worried, a common Windows user, a *nix system admin or everyone who uses intel chips..

<comment><USER13> This vulnerability targets SGX enclaves (although I believe it would affect all memory loads?), which run code that is meant to be isolated from the rest of your computer and is probably currently only being used by DRM on your computer. This is a flaw in your processor and at the moment you probably cannot do anything to protect against this, although work is being done to come up with mitigations. Currently, it seems like they'll be the kind that'll slow down your computer.

<comment><USER48> it affects all loads, but for sgx the attacker scenario is that you have compromised the OS, which makes it significantly easier to create the conditions (faults/microcode assists) that cause the LVI than if you were just another userspace program (but it's not impossible there either)

<comment><USER13> Though I don't have much knowledge of this area, I'm waiting for someone to make a PoC exploiting this from JavaScript ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Good background info:New Security Risks Create Need For Stealthy Chips [https://semiengineering.com/new-security-risks-create- need-f...](https://semiengineering.com/new-security-risks-create-need-for- stealthier-chips/) Determining What Really Needs To Be Secured In A Chip [https://semiengineering.com/determining-what-really-needs- to...](https://semiengineering.com/determining-what-really-needs-to-be- secured-in-a-chip/)

</comment><comment> gjsman-1000 I'm not a technical expert, but check out the guy who made the fake movie trailer's channel. He has written parody songs for almost all of the Intel execution attacks there are, which is quite hilarious.

<comment><USER48> he happens to be an author/co-author of all of those papers ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I understand how they turn incorrect store forwarding into an attack, but can somebody summarize what causes the store forwarding to be wrong in the first place?

<comment><USER48> short version: only the lower bits of an address are compared at first, because the rest might take a while to resolve so the cpu can speculate that the rest is gonna match as well and start to work with the data, and then either keep it or throw it away once the rest of the address is known

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Would buffered connectivity mitigate what is becoming a Swiss cheese infrastructure of hardware (security holes in everything)?

Direct connectivity (on Internet 1.0) seems to be playing with fire nowadays.

Security admins probably love the fact that they are guarding their assets from unknown threats/vulnerabilities that major manufactures have included in their products.

<comment><USER13> What is buffered connectivity?

<comment><USER50> Honestly, I think they need to create new categories for the protocols used for the traditional Internet and divide it into Local Area Protocals (LAPs) and Wide Area Protocols (TCP/IP is the defacto WAP) as well as adding a gateway (like AppleTalk to IP gateways of yore) so that there is more than an airgap (its a different language/protocol as well) separating your network from from the worlds biggest venerable network.

Or, as compute power, storage and hardware get less expensive, running two cryptoledgers for inbound and outbound communications would make it easier to sanitize every bit that enters a network.

I like squid and other products, but I think dropping TCP/IP from the LAN or tranfering all packets in amber (bitledger) would correct a lot of the present shortcomings with security, privacy and unfixable manufacturer defects.

<comment><USER13> How would that help with this issue, which is specific to the processor itself?

<comment><USER50> Really???

Needing physical access to compromise a system sounds like a much better way to play whack-a-mole.

If the hardware cannot protect itself, moving the defense to the next layer out sounds plausible to me.

<comment><USER13> Sanitizing input that you will then execute is known to be Turing-complete.

<comment><USER50> The bitledger-as-a-router/gateway/firewall was more of a joke, but replacing TCP/IP on the LAN only changes how we interface with the network without changing any of the building blocks in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> efabless becomes more and more relevant every day.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is a shameless plug, but I'm really hoping to increase the awareness and the level of understanding about these kind of HW bugs.

I made a blog post trying to explain the Intel ME hardware bug.

Understanding the Intel CSME Vulnerability for Mere Mortals - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22534259](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22534259)</comment>


Ask HN: Corporate nullification question - <AUTHOR> I have came across a major decision that I have to make, for the startup I'm leading. 4 of us have developed a big data tool, called "The Weapon", that combs through the entire internet looking for relevant documentation on contractors and there information. It grabs and creates data sets of relevant contractors (like a construction contractor, or a manufacturing contractor, etc) and goes through them, compiling lists of emails. The Weapon could be used for other purposes too. We may commercialize it later.
The problem is, I had a meeting with a VC firm, and they told me about Anti-Spam laws in Canada that could be pertinent. I looked through relevant documentation and the fines are minor for unsolicited emails, but according to a mentor of ours it could damage our reputation..
The thing is, The Weapon could be a great tool to help us get liquidity on the supply-side of our marketplace at launch. I don't want to take a longer, more strenuous route to liquidity, when there have been other companies like BuildZoom that have built and used similar tools to help them get liquidity (in the States). It would be a disadvantage to us to not deploy The Weapon.
The fines are minor, I'm not really worried about my reputation (Its comparable to when Travis Kalanick ignored San Franciscos cease & desist when Uber was in its infancy), but I also don't want to turn off potential investors who might think I'm reckless for nullifying regulations that are onerous and an impediment to our innovation.
I wanted to ask the community - would you deploy The Weapon, if it meant getting your startup off the ground, even if it meant risking a small fine, and your reputation with some people? I plan on always being straight forward with VCs and tell them how we used The Weapon to get to liquidity. I won't hide it, or conceal the fact that we may or may not have broken anti-spam regulation, because that would be illegal and I'd end up like Parker Conrad.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> You are going to have to define what you plan to do with the information. e.g. let's say you are harvesting email's, address and contact information on construction contractors and then you will create a database from it and sell access to that information to home owners looking for a contractor in their area. Your company is not sending unsolicited emails to the contractor, and in a sense you could be seen as a lead aggregator that is providing them with valuable business leads.

A difference scenario, you do the same harvesting, but you are contacting each contractor to determine if they want to join your lead generation business (or whatever you are planning). In this case, yes the email could be considered unsolicited but it is specifically business in nature and not a scam or spam and the company was advertising the email address/phone so they could be contacted for specific business purposes. You will need to understand the specifics of the Canada anti-spam laws but almost all leave exclusions for genuine business purposes. If you are contacting the business to sell him Viagra, then you are in obvious violation as a general contractor's business has nothing to do with Viagra.

All that said, to stay 100% above board still talk to an attorney and get a reasonable legal opinion. Just remember this, if you talk to an attorney and do it anyway after you have been advised you are breaking the law you loose the 1 time ignorance (oops sorry) defense. While ignorance of the law is not an excuse overall, most of these types of "violations" are excused with an oops sorry defense and maybe a small fine, e.g. its not the same as committing an armed burglary and saying oops sorry didn't know that was against the law.

As for your reputation, that is more important then what a VC thinks of you at this point. Guard that more carefully then caring what one or even ten VC's think initially. In the end, if your methods work, you gain traction, sales etc and you have not shown you have a reckless reputation the VC's will look and judge you on the results. There is a fine line between reckless and forward thinking or aggressive, just find it and walk it the best you can.

<comment><AUTHOR> This comment was really helpful. We plan on using the information to generate leads for contractors so that we can get liquidity on the supply-side of our marketplace. We are a "social marketplace for contracts" and The Weapon is only a tool we're using the get contractors signed up on the platform.

In some cases, we are able to create entire profiles (minus some aspects) using information we have harvested using The Weapon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Startup founders who "end up like Parker Conrad" are doing relatively well...in the context where "startup" doesn't mean any old new business but instead means a company structured so as to allow exponential growth. On the other hand, a local business probably depends more on reputation.

In any case, where reputation counts is among customers and reputation among customers closely trails product and service and less closely trails things that the customer doesn't care about. Of course if this weapon thingy isn't actually the product then spending time on it is a bit of a distraction. If it is part of the product but not part of making users love it, it's also a bit of a distraction because it puts a technology that scales in the middle of trying to find product market fit.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. The Weapon has the opportunity to scale into something more than what it is, but for now, it's purely a tool to help us get liquidity, which can be one of the hardest parts of running a marketplace. It's not part of the core product, and it has about 200 hours of work put into it by four of us.

<comment><USER3> For a startup in the technical sense used among Silicon Valley investors, liquidity means selling the company or going public. It's the point at which the growth in the value of equity can be realized as cash.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's a term that was used by one of the VCs, to describe the dynamics of the supply-side of the marketplace. Perhaps he wasn't using it in the right context. Thanks!

<comment><USER3> Most likely it was used in the general business sense as synonymous with positive cash flow. This suggests a different investment model than found in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem: the more typical model wherein investors seek regular periodic returns via a share of short term net income. In the SV startup model, investors seek their returns via increasing the value of their equity rather than via "dividends". This means their expectation is that net revenue is used to grow the company not to pay investors...since extracting cash every year or quarter impedes growth.

An investor seeking payments from operating cash flows may be a good investor, but the investment isn't really venture capital and the alignment of interests is not really conducive to a startup in the Silicon Valley sense. Not that that form of startup is better or worse, just different.

Probably the best example of how a startup is meant to work is Amazon. For many years its value grew _because_ it did not turn profits. Expenses generally totaled income plus any new investment. But at the end of the day its value was greater than its liabilities.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed. It was actually an investor from LA that introduced the term to me. I was familiar with liquidity meaning the cash that's available to a company, but had never actually heard it used before to describe the dynamics of the supply-side of the marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wrong audience. You need to talk to your corporate legal eagle.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your input. Will be seeing a lawyer before it's deployed. Will be interesting. Hopefully our servers will be busy on launch.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Fellow Engineers – What motivates you to go into work? - <AUTHOR> Okay 2 rules:
1. You can't mention money as your reason. 2. You can't quote Daniel Pink
Are you motivated by solving problems using a new technology or architecture design?
Do you enjoy being a part of a team who takes great pride in what they do? Elaborate a little if this is true.
Do you like the ownership it gives you in solving problems?
Is it because you enjoy using a mixture of languages and /newer/ technology like Kafka? <comment><USER2> Without mentioning money I'd have to say that I truly enjoy solving puzzles and problems.

But honestly, my main motivating factor for solving problems for somebody else instead of for me is money.

<comment><AUTHOR> I can relate to this. Now my question is "Why solving problems for others?" e.g., working for someone else and solving their problems?

<comment><USER2> I like solving puzzles and problems because I enjoy the process of going from unknown to known. From picking apart each individual thread in the knot, breaking down the problem into smaller and smaller problems until we can start to see the big picture.

In a way, it kind of feels like exploring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I love my coworkers (not just engineering) and the projects I am working on are interesting to me. I have the right amount of ownership/freedom and mentorship someone my age (23) should have.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's very important at an early age to have good mentors around you professionally and being exposed to various parts of the business.

Stay VERY hungry, curious and be careful with the Dunning–Kruger effect. Just remember, when older people give you advice, keep in mind two things.

1) They were once younger and had people give them advice as well. 2) They're only giving you advice because they see potential in you; otherwise, they wouldn't say shit :)

Thanks for providing your perspective!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making useful things: [https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/08/07/do-something- useful/](https://codewithoutrules.com/2017/08/07/do-something-useful/)

</comment><comment><USER5> There are multiple reasons for me to get up daily for work.Related to my field is love for development and problem solving and learning new stuff.Currently the project on which i am working is really shit in a sense that the legacy code is full of nonsense shit and i have to handle that.this make my day,a really bad day.but in the end

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the best part of this post, at least for me, is that I had no idea who Daniel Pink was until a moment ago. This is why I stick around on HN. Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I guess its safe to say you're motivated by learning :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Providing for my family (ha! didn't mention "money" (well, until there).

Other than that ... I enjoy learning new stuff, solving problems, and helping other folks get their work done faster, easier, better.

<comment><AUTHOR> First, you have a syntax error in your lisp program ;) Missing a closing ) lol

What's so interesting is the theme of learning and doing for others. Are you ever interested in using a new technology and do you feel that also at times make you consider leaving a job because of it?

<comment><USER7> I've made changes a couple times (and tried a few others) that have opened me up to new technologies / toolsets / etc

Much of the time, I have not had to change jobs _just_ to learn something new (and a couple times, I've changed jobs and trained folks on what I already knew)</comment></comment></comment>


The 3D Scan-to-Print Web App - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/volumental/the-3d-scan-to-print-web-app <comment><USER2> looks awesome, we need one trendy use to make 3d printing popular at home, this could be it</comment>


PDF is not portable in the digital world - robert-zaremba http://rz.scale-it.pl/2017/07/05/stop_publishing_pdf.html <comment><AUTHOR> Rendering a Microsoft Word/Powerpoint document as a PDF is a good thing as then one does not need a Doc/Docx/PPT/pptx viewer anymore while most devices come with a PDF viewer builtin (eg. Chrome :) (and as a bonus it kills the anims if they are there) this while keeping the formatting intact (some minor color changes though depending on one export it).

I tend to keep a whole bunch of things I want to 'read later' in my iBooks collection, just save as PDF and transfer to phone, or if already a PDF just download it directly; zooms great too. I got all kinds of device manuals, but also PADI and other diving reference books; always good to quickly check up on it when in doubt and then to reinforce that information with the knowledge of your dive buddy.

Indeed, for content that does not really need a layout outside of some headers (<h1>) and paragraphs (<p>) HTML is perfectly fine.

Quite a few text portions of conference papers (read: Tex :) can be rendered as markdown and then easily converted to HTML, but it won't feel 'as well', thus PDF is a easier format that also reflects the original intent and format.

IETF RFCs typically can be rendered in a myriad of ways thanks to xml2rfc, then again, one mostly will end up reading them from tools.ietf.org or to keep local, render as PDF and load it into iBooks.

<comment><USER2> On the topic of MS Word, I really wish their export to html function was more simplistic. Most of the time I just want to export the document structure (headings, tables, bold, italic, etc.) and not include all of the styles and extra markup.

<comment><USER3> Pandoc?

<comment><USER2> That is what I use lately. It's not perfect but it's the closest thing I have found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> PDF is beautiful. Long live PDF.

I read a lot. I don't always want to read from a screen.

Making PDF's available on the internet just saves me from having to search through a journal stack.

PDF's have the advantange of the formatting looks good, and the author/publisher gets to choose how it looks. Usually with input from a professional. This is much better than the "styling" many websites and epubs provide.

<comment> robert-zaremba that's the thing. 1) If you use simple HTML / EPUB majority of publications are good for printing. 2) Think about a relief of storing this documents on an ebook reader

<comment><USER5> > majority of publications are good for printing

This is a problem. PDF supports "all". Epub would have to have equivalent support, as well as native support in most/all vanilla OS distributions to be a real competitor for PDF.

> Think about a relief of storing this documents on an ebook reader

For many people this is their phone or tablet. Both of which support PDFs as well (as do many standalone ebook readers). You also don't have to get an extra app to view the PDFs.

<comment> robert-zaremba Majority of publications are simple text with few tables or diagrams. We don't need complex typesetting for that. Printing from EPUB should be good.

You always need an extra app to view PDF. It's either installed by default or not. Phones, tablets, and other screen devices have available EPUB, MOBI, HTML browsers to install.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A few weeks ago I would have made the same statement but I started reading the PDF implementation docs and now I really like the format.

The main issue I think we all have with the format is that people make docs that are almost impossible to read on a small screen.

There are ways around this: 1. Tagged PDFs present the underlying content and semantics in order to reflow for accessibility purposes though right now very few people seems to use this feature and 2. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to make PDF pages closer to a paperback book rather than an A4 page with the resulting shorter line length and reduced margins.

PDF is indeed more complex than plain HTML with some cribbed CSS but in many ways it's a lot better: 1. It truly in portable in the sense that every computer will render it in exactly the same way, 2. It packages up all assets in an efficient manner (only the glyphs that are needed are included, not the entire font with all glyphs and position hints like web fonts), 3. The expensive layout computation is done once, on a computer in a galaxy far far away from my battery limited phone, and 4. PDFs are (by convention) free from all of the cacophony of crap like share buttons and navigation chrome and ads and articles-you-may-enjoy fluff.

The format itself is actually not that bad, it's a text format in that it's relatively easy to open up a text editor and bang one out. The only inconveniences are the places where you need to state exactly how long strings are (which your text editor can help with) and the creation of the index at the end (which I've been cheating by just running my hand created PDFs through a PDF lint-like utility.

The reason why most PDFs look crazy when opened up in a text editor is that the streams are almost always compressed. You can uncompress with them "qpdf --stream-data=uncompress in.pdf out.pdf"

<comment><USER7> The share buttons and navigation chrome certainly _can_ be put in a PDF, they're just incredibly uncommon. I've even played video games that were distributed as PDF files.

<comment><USER8> Pdf games? Do you have an example you could send me, perhaps? I'm really curious.

<comment><USER7> The ones I played were adventure games, basically a bunch of areas (implemented as pages) linked by buttons, with some extra logic thrown in. If you can imagine the kind of scripting capabilities you'd need to run a PowerPoint style presentation from a PDF file, and the kind of scripting you'd need to make sophisticated interactive forms, you're on the write track.

Unfortunately I don't know what the games I played were called.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I find PDF to be way more portable than most other document formats in terms of saving a document or for printing a document. Saving an HTML page has it's own set of problems, and if I share it I have to make sure to get all the images gathered as well. Word processor documents depend on system fonts, etc., and I cannot be sure that what my document depends on is installed on the other computer. With a PDF, I can be sure to get the necessary elements, be them font, images, etc.

<comment> robert-zaremba That's where EPUB / MOBI comes for.

<comment><USER10> EPUB is essentially an entire self-contained HTML web site in a ZIP file container.

Whatever you can do on a website, you can theoretically do in an EPUB. It might not display as expected when rendered by an e-reader or printed, however, which is why most EPUB files stay rather safe and unambitious in their CSS and JS.

I'm a bit disappointed that web browsers don't generally function as EPUB readers or include a "Save As... EPUB" option, but I can't seem to muster the motivation to write a Firefox add-on to do that. It wouldn't even be that difficult, as I have created EPUBs from filesystem directories using nothing more than 7Zip and a shell script.

There is a possibility that law firms would pay for a premium version that included a crawler and some form of cryptographic validation that could prove that the EPUB file was created at a certain time, from a certain IP address, and hasn't been altered since then. The idea being that trademark owner's lawyer takes a snapshot of a website selling knockoffs when sending the C&D letter, then another when filing the lawsuit, and the evidence for the complaint is preserved without having to rely on static snapshot images of the rendered website or third-party archive sites.

<comment><USER11> Someone already did it for us: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/dotepub/?src=...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/dotepub/?src=search)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Finally, in 2017, when PDF became abundant, does not require additional drivers to use it, has somewhat usable spec, and a lot of 3rd party and open source software to work with do we really need to get rid of it?

Bashing PDF is so 2000...

</comment><comment><USER13> My first thought on this is that EPUB is not fully portable either ... it's just non-portable in a different set of circumstances. If you want to publish on the internet, for general consumption, just use plain html. That's about as portable as you can get without moving into raw text.

<comment><USER14> Plain HTML isn't so good if you want to include images in your document or have multiple pages. You end up making the user download a whole bunch of files if they want a copy of the document.

The great thing about EPUB is that all the files are bundled together in a single .epub file. You can copy the file and move it around without worrying about keeping the structure intact.

I think that perhaps the main issue currently present with EPUB is that EPUB readers aren't really part of the standard installation on devices. Pretty much every PC or smartphone you come across in the wild will have software installed to view PDFs, but the same isn't the case for EPUB. I think Apple have done a good thing by including an EPUB reader (iBooks) as part of macOS and iOS, but that's not the case for other operating systems.

It might be nice if web browsers could natively act as EPUB viewers, in the same way a number of them natively act as PDF viewers. That way, the user already has an EPUB viewer installed, and they don't have to go and find and install one.

<comment><USER8> Now that I think about it I'm kind of surprised that browser _don 't_ natively show EPUB files.

<comment> robert-zaremba there are plugins for that (same as you have with PDFs, though you reuse same rwndering engine, since EPUBs are html documents under the hood)

<comment><USER14> There are plugins, but having to find and install one is an extra step that I think a lot of people don't take.

It's far different than being able to link to a PDF file and having it instantly display in the browser. As far as I'm aware, Firefox, Chrome and Safari (and possibly other browsers) can all display PDFs natively, so I think it would be convenient if they could also display EPUBs without the need for additional plugins.

As you say, EPUBs use HTML under the bonnet, so rendering should be pretty straightforward.

<comment> robert-zaremba I hope one day all popular browsers will render EPUB straight away. Should be lot easier then PDF.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The point of the story is as follows:

 _> PDF is not portable on digital screens. It doesn't scale. It's not comfortable to read PDF files on a mobile or ebook readers_

Arguing that PDFs are good for printing out, or better than some other format, doesn't actually address the issue ;-)

</comment><comment><USER16> 1a. .pdf is a fine format.

1b. unless -- as is increasingly the case these days -- you're reading it on a screen smaller than the one for which the .pdf was designed, in which case .pdf is an awful format.

2a. .epub is a fine format.

2b. unless you're reading it in a viewer-app which is wonky, which most of them are. (the inconsistencies of rendering with this so-called "standard" are unbelievably bad, and seem to be getting worse rather than better as time goes on.)

3a. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of a .pdf, you often get some really bad stuff that loses a lot of important styling.

3b. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of an .epub, it's not much better.

4a. the standard line is that an .epub is just "a website packaged into a .zip file", implying that anything you can do on a website can be done in an .epub.

4b. the standard line is a lie. an .epub requires .xhtml rather than .html, and a complex mess of associated files, and most .epub viewer-apps have trouble supporting the full gamut of .css, and also do not allow you to use javascript at all.

conclusion: the state of sharing documents on the web in a way that allows offline use while enabling the convenient re-use of text is a sad state indeed.

</comment><comment><USER17> PDF a perfectly _portable_ in the digital world (the only world in which it has ever existed.)

It's not perfectly _optimized_ for every display (or print page, the two being equivalent) size, resolution, etc., but then neither is any other format that can handle the same range of content, nor will any format _ever_ be until we have AI layout that does as good as professional layout from a single source file for all media sizes and properties.

I find professionally laid out PDFs that are designed for letter/A4 size pages to superior in practical use to any reflowable format I've yet seen at pretty much every size for most content more complex than plain linear text like you'd find in a novel. (Smartphone and smaller devices aren't great for it, but then they aren't great for reading content more complex than linear text regardless of format.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Most devices include a PDF reader, but not an EPUB reader. Yes, you can download one, but as a publisher, you can't expect your readers to jump through that hoop.

<comment> robert-zaremba EPUB / MOBI reader is not a problem this days

<comment><USER19> That really doesn't speak to his statement. The majority of devices read PDF by default where EPUB/MOBI, the user needs to go get an app.

<comment><USER20> 10 You should publish PDFs because devices include readers.

20 Devices have readers because everyone publishes PDFs.

30 GOTO 10

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Instead of calling for a 'ban' on a format by very much subjective reasons, how about calling for publication in multiple formats, so the people have a choice? It is certainly not much more work, and it looks in my humble opinion, professional.

<comment> robert-zaremba Good point! Sorry if my Call sounds repulsive. Your idea with creating publications in multiple format works. I will update my post for that. Though, in my post, I want to highlight that usually simple solutions works fine. Most of this publications are not complex in terms of typesetting. If there is an objective for complex typesetting than fair enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm understanding hard time understand some of the point this article makes; particularly the claim about that you need to think about typesetting and design more. Most of word processors these day have some type of style system that akin to HTML.

PDF is also one of few formats that is readily available that has a well defined archival spec (PDF/A) which further makes it more compatible across the readers. (As essentially it requires documents follow certain specs.)

</comment><comment> robert-zaremba Do you publish on the Internet? Do you read a lot of publications on your digital devices?

How about stopping using PDF for internet publications and using EPUB instead (or some other screen independent format)? Please, share your comments.

<comment><USER23> Trying to be helpful...

I think you may be getting down voted because it is generally considered bad form to submit your own blog unless it is a "Show HN" but if the content is good it can out weight that and an article can be up voted anyway. But if you do submit your own content it is probably best to let the content speak for itself vs trying to solicit HN as a discussion forum.

<comment> robert-zaremba Thanks for a comment. What's the reason for not posting own article to content discovery services / agregators? It's a common thing.

<comment><USER23> HN is not a typical aggregator.

HN historical is not a marketing site, it's a forum where technologist share things they find interesting. So any form of self promotion is usually viewed with a bit more critical lens than if it was submitted by a third party. Rightly or wrongly the bar is set higher.

People liked your article (it made it to the front page) but your comment above feel like it is extra "sales" oriented even if the article itself if not about a product.

If you must comment on your own story you should do it as if you were commenting on another user's post, in first person. For example, you could rewrite your comment as:

"I wrote this article because I was frustrated with the poor reading experience when content is delivered in PDF. What do you all think?"</comment></comment></comment></comment>


AWS introduces Elastic Transcoder - <AUTHOR> http://aws.amazon.com/elastictranscoder/

<comment><USER2> Unless I'm missing something, this is nothing that can't already be done by <http://Zencoder.com>

<comment><USER3> Pay as you go pricing

HD @zencoder: $0.10 per minute HD @AET: $0.03 per minute

<comment><USER2> Ok, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Seems quite expensive to me. Wouldn't it be cheaper to roll your own on a (few) EC2 instances?

<comment><USER5> Most people underestimate the cost of handling FFmpeg and all it's particularities and the complexities inherent to each video format. Especially if you support "any" format on the input you quickly end up spending a lot of time dealing with heuristics (which evolve with each FFmpeg release). Development and learning time might be a bigger cost than the potential savings.

The target format is also really important. WebM is around twice as slow to encode than h264 for the same resolution. And HD doubles the encoding time as well.

Now if you look at the Spot instance market, you can have a c1.xlarge for $0.07 / hour. Given that you can encode ~6 h264 SD videos in near real-time on that instance, it would cost you ~0.0002 / minute of video (if you don't need other infrastructure services). This is the bottom-line.

<comment><USER6> Its unlikely to be ffmpeg. A high quality transcoder or encoder that is used for broadcasting doesn't use ffmpeg. Its all h/w based codecs with specialized software. Take a look at [http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US- EN/Products-and-S...](http://www.motorola.com/Video-Solutions/US-EN/Products- and-Services/Video-Infrastructure/Encoders).

FFMPEG is great for personal use but unlikely to be used in production systems.

1\. Its not "enterprisy". By that mean there is company behind the codecs who can provide support 24x7 on quality issues, robustness, warrenties etc.. 2\. The ugly word - Patent covered. A lot of video technology has licensing and patenting. The moment sometime as big as Amazon tries to use a codec, the sharks will line up unless they have the right license.

<comment><USER5> We're not talking about broadcasting but transcoding, which is a very different workload.

FFmpeg is used by Youtube, Vimeo, ZenCoder, Transload-it and PandaStream (where I'm working at) to transform the videos. Hardware encoders are great for a specific target but FFmpeg just supports most the rubbish video formats that customers like to throw at us.

<comment><USER7> given that sites tend to only encode to a few formats, and given decoding is cheap cpu wise: couldn't you pipe the output of the ffmpeg decoder into a hardware encoder and get the best of both worlds?

<comment><USER8> When I worked at ClearChannel, it was the other way around...live feeds (e.g. Rush Limbaugh's HD video feed) came out of a bank of MOTU livestream encoders and was then fed through ffmpeg to be downsampled to web and mobile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Could something like this be used to live stream video?

Edit: at those rates, streaming to 1000 people for an hour would cost you 1800 dollars. I can't see that being worthwhile....

<comment><USER5> It's not the same constraints.

With video transcoding you push batch jobs that can be processed at any time. The video is taken from a S3 bucket and the result is put back in another place. When transforming the video you might use some heuristics on the whole file (because some formats have the metadata at the end). You can also implement fallbacks when the transcoding fails.

With live streaming you need to acquire a streaming video source, transform it in real-time and forward the stream without too much latency and without failure. Then you need to push that stream to the N connected people possibly fanning-out the traffic to multiple servers to dispatch the load.</comment></comment>


Show HN, Another Productivity App, Mac OS X - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bspace/id1092405727?mt=12 <comment><AUTHOR> I use this app daily and find it invaluable when managing projects or school work. There haven't been many sales yet so maybe it could improve.

Anyways, there is an Mac App, Bspace, that I made to keep track of my web searches for every project so they would be more accessible and less clustered.

The whole point was that the app was easier to use than existing bookmark managers.

Another use I found for it, was to open PDFs in the browser and saving the "links" or saved files into the app. Surprisingly, the app had no problems opening the files back up.

The app's cost moved up to $1.99 when it became chrome compatible. I am in a masters of science in analytics program so I was kind of hoping to make a buck from this app.</comment>


Drug prices to plummet in wave of expiring patents - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43882446/ns/health-health_care/ <comment><USER2> Regarding the potential drop in cost for heart disease medication:

      "It would be a tremendous help for us financially," she says. "It would allow us to start going out to eat again."

...

</comment><comment><USER3> Expect a wave of heavily marketed new drugs that just barely beat the old drugs in a small number of small trials.</comment>


How a dad entrepreneur increased revenue by 95% - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/this-tree-guy-has-good-business-advice/

<comment><AUTHOR> This was the key insight for me:

"So many of us entrepreneurs are stuck trying to grind it out. Having talked to a number of entrepreneurs, I think if you launch a full-time business and you're "grinding" for more than two years, something is wrong."

</comment><comment><USER2> "The result? Almost 95% of his revenue comes from this suburb."

Maybe I'm just missing something, but wouldn't that be a 1900% increase?</comment>


The Reactive Manifesto - <AUTHOR> http://www.reactivemanifesto.org/

<comment><USER2> [NOTE: There's a bit of negativity here. But I'm not trying to be anyone's enemy. It is hoped that this will be taken (esp. by the author, if he's around) as the respectful critique it is intended to be.]

I'm wondering about this. It's a heck of a lot of text to get a across a couple of simple ideas.

It feels like the author has been stuck in a little a corner of the programming world for some time, and he thinks that everyone has been doing things the way he has. So if he needs to learn something new, then everyone else must need it also.

People have been writing interactive, event/message-driven programs for the mass market ever since the Macintosh came out ~30 years ago. Sometimes interfaces between internal components have been written in that same style; sometimes they haven't. Doing a whole system that way is a nice idea, but hardly a revolutionary one.

And scalability? One can't really design a scalable architecture until it is clear how a system will need to scale. Will it be huge number of app instances talking to a central data store? Will it be a huge amount of data managed separately by each app instance? Will it be huge numbers of P2P connections between instances? Etc. And information like that is sometimes unavailable until a system has been in existence for a while.

And let's not forget Knuth and premature optimization.

OTOH, the resilience ideas are definitely worthwhile. Reliability standards for computer systems are rising like crazy. Architectural ideas for improving reliability, robustness, etc., need to be thought about more. So good for the author on this one.

Now, put it all together and clear out the fluff, and I get this: A good way to design computer systems is to use modular components that talk to each other using non-blocking interfaces, in such a way that component failure does not bring down the system. That's a fine thought, although not a terribly revolutionary one. And it hardly needs an 18,000-word essay with 4 figures to get it across.</comment>


Don't Mawk Awk (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and-most-elegant-big-data-munging-language/

<comment><USER2> Why have we discovered so few local optima outside of general-purpose programming? There are important classes of problems that don't require the full complexity of a general language. It can be much simpler to solve those in a limited language, and that gives the programmer more power. Limited languages also give implementers more power, since they can exploit invariants that hold for programs written in that language, that are not true of programs written in general languages, to gain efficiency wins. This is why the author is able to say that Mawk "wins on both LOC and performance criteria — a rare feat indeed, transcending the usual competition of slow-but-easy scripting languages versus fast-but-hard compiled languages". The fact that that kind of win-win can't be had in general-purpose languages seems like a strong incentive to pursue more specialized ones.

I wonder how many subspaces there are that are small enough to be exploitable in this way yet large enough to address valuable classes of problems. It feels like we should have more of these.

</comment><comment><USER3> that's a good article. small tools that do one thing well can also be optimized pretty nicely. unix is a nice philosophy indeed.</comment>


Study Finds Ultra-Processed Foods Drive Weight Gain - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/05/16/723693839/its-not-just-salt-sugar-fat-study-finds-ultra-processed-foods-drive-weight-gain <comment><USER2> This is pretty interesting, the paper is here: [https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)...](https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131\(19\)30248-7)

I liked the experimental method, two weeks on one diet the two weeks on the other without restricting food intake.

I've been doing some dieting of late and made the facetious conclusion that if you limit your diet choices to only foods you don't particularly like to eat, you lose weight :-). But the converse of people working very hard to make their food really tasty (generally by adding sugar and salt according to the paper) people consume more than they need.

I'm not sure what we could do about it though, we can encourage better eating choices but there is a limit on how much that works.

<comment><USER3> I mostly agree, but I've never spared the fat when dieting, just the carbs. You can make a highly varied diet of delicious food if you're cool with fat (you have to be very conscious of how many calories you're consuming, though, because it's very easy to go overboard). A Kale salad with an oil-based dressing and absolutely loaded with nuts and cheese is not something I would consider a chore to eat.

<comment><USER4> _A Kale salad with an oil-based dressing and absolutely loaded with nuts and cheese is not something I would consider a chore to eat._

That depends. Eat anything a bit too often, and it becomes a chore. As you note above, the diet being "highly varied" is very important.

<comment><USER5> There are people who eat literally the same meals every day, for years, and the opposite would stress them for a number of reasons. There was a recent article about it linked in HN too, I think ?

<comment><USER6> there is some anec-data that very repetitive diet, as long as it actually covers all your nutritional needs, is actually better for you, health-wise.

Some guess it has to do with immune system activation, GI biome optimized for digestion of these repetitive specific foods you eat, etc.

I often wonder if benefits of keto actually come not only from ketones themselves, but also from the fact that keto diets are often very limited, and often to often (relatively) hypoallergenic foods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Study participants on the ultra-processed diet ate an average of 508 calories more per day and ended up gaining an average of 2 pounds over a two-week period._

Is this a fair trial? Popular science [0] claims that ~3500 calories equals a pound. Well, 508 extra calories a day for 14 days = 7112 calories, or about 2 pounds worth of calories.

Edit: whoops! I was missing the fact that the people in the trial controlled how much they ate themselves. I incorrectly assumed that they were given the food.

0 - [https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight- loss/in-...](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in- depth/calories/art-20048065)

<comment><USER8> It is calories in calories out, as always, but the point is that the processed diet drives more calorie consumption. The same people were given both diets and told to eat as much or as little as they wanted. They consumed more calories when given the processed diet, and thus gained weight.

<comment><USER9> > but the point is that the processed diet drives more calorie consumption

My main gripe with this line of argument is that people rarely take price into account. It's pretty expensive to eat 2,000 calories of fresh food vs. 2,000 calories of junk food. I don't think it's some intrinsic quality of the food that's causing people to gain weight. I think many people who struggle with weight will eat as much as their money can get them, and your dollar goes a lot farther when you're buying junk food.

I also think we have a serious affordability problem when it comes to things like fruits, vegetables, lean meat, etc. People say fruit is cheap and sure, you might be able to get an Apple for $1, but that doesn't get you many calories. You need to fill out your diet with a lot of stuff like rice and beans if you're trying to eat cheap _AND_ healthy. It's even worse if you look at prepared food, e.g. $11 for a 400 calorie salad at Panera. Assuming all your calories come at the same cost, you're spending $1,600 _per month_ on food.

A fresh salad shouldn't be a luxury that only the rich can afford, but that seems to be the current state of affairs.

<comment><USER10> > I don't think it's some intrinsic quality of the food that's causing people > to gain weight.

This study seems to suggest that there is some intrinsic quality that causes them to eat more of it, and thus gain weight.

I'm not saying that money isn't a concern (it is). But the money concern doesn't negate the intrinsic qualities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not a scientist, and my experience is anecdotal. But there is something very very wrong with most of the food in our grocery stores. I had nearly debilitating GI issues and body composition problems until I completely cut out processed foods and started cooking from scratch. My symptoms cleared up within weeks, I lost 35 lbs almost effortlessly, and I've never felt better.

I think what we're feeding the general public is a health hazard and should be much more strongly regulated.

<comment><USER12> I think what people choose to eat is extremely personal to them. I'm glad you made a lifestyle choice that benefitted you, but I would shudder the thought of living in a society where the government tells you exactly what you can and can't eat.

Education, public awareness, these kind of initiatives I can get behind. Regulation of food intake, is a step too far.

FWIW, I've eaten processed, fried, GMO foods my whole life (and consume fast food drive thru at least 5-6 times a week) and have no health issues whatsoever. But I try to not eat to excess and I exercise regularly.

<comment><USER13> >I think what people choose to eat is extremely personal to them. I'm glad you made a lifestyle choice that benefitted you, but I would shudder the thought of living in a society where the government tells you exactly what you can and can't eat.

This canned "the government shouldn't choose what I eat" argument is reductionist to the point of deficiency at best, and disingenuous at worse.

The fact is an unregulated free market forces choices on us no different than government regulation. The quality and type of food a consumer has access to is highly dependent on market decisions — that is the food demanded by other consumers — not individual decisions. The problem is consumers in the US at large are either ignorant about health/nutrition or just plain don't prioritize the future (sustainable health) over the present (what I'm eating was iteratively designed in a lab to maximize my immediate dopamine hit).

Good regulation isn't binary. You can regulate the food industry to protect consumers from predatory/harmful practices (such as engineering food so that consumers overeat by "growth hacking" food via salt/sugar/fat in order to drive revenue growth) while still allowing an abundance of dietary choices.

>FWIW, I've eaten processed, fried, GMO foods my whole life (and consume fast food drive thru at least 5-6 times a week) and have no health issues whatsoever. But I try to not eat to excess and I exercise regularly.

Some people smoke two packs a day and die at the ripe old age of 100. The vast majority of smokers die significantly earlier than average. Much like you wouldn't consider a lottery ticket a wise investment even if it pays off, you shouldn't interpret your personal health and dietary experience to much other than good fortune. Your experience is an outlier in the face of mountains of data that tell a different and honestly quite depressing story.

Lastly, I know sometimes tone can be misinterpreted easily in text. So if my comment came off as brash or an attack etc, please re-read it with a polite and friendly tone in mind. I'm passionate about this topic because I want to help.

<comment><USER12> Don't equivocate eating food to smoking. There is no evidence that someone who consumes a healthy level of calories (whether those calories are wheat-based, meat-based, potato-based, etc) are putting themselves on any kind of path to cancer or heart disease.

Carbs are carbs. Protein is protein. Fat is fat. Sure, some types of foods (including fried foods) have excessive calories for the average American lifestyle. That's been known for decades. But there is no evidence that calories from broccoli are any less or more cancerous than calories from potatoes or bread or vegetable oil.

My experience is not an outlier.

This guy has eaten 30,000 Big Macs, perfectly healthy: [https://people.com/food/mcdonalds-big-mac-supersize-me- don-g...](https://people.com/food/mcdonalds-big-mac-supersize-me-don-gorske- world-record/)

Studies on diets with a variety of macros (but the same calories): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246357](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19246357) CONCLUSIONS: Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasize.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17413101](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17413101) CONCLUSIONS: These findings provide more detailed evidence to suggest that diets differing substantially in glycemic load induce comparable long-term weight loss.

<comment><USER14> Carbs are not carbs (high vs low GI, for example), and fat is not fat (trans fats vs MCT, for example). Many other factors go into whether or not input calories are digested, whether or not input calories are stored (and whether or not as glycogen), and whether or not input calories end up as long-term fat.

It isn't that simple.

That said, that's absolutely no argument for regulation. People should be free to entirely destroy themselves seeking short-term dopamine hits—if they so choose. It is staunchly immoral to impede them.

<comment><USER13> >That said, that's absolutely no argument for regulation. People should be free to entirely destroy themselves seeking short-term dopamine hits—if they so choose. It is staunchly immoral to impede them.

This ignores the entire premise of my comment, which is that people's choices in this context are not made in a vacuum.

If the market demands unhealthy food, then that is what the food industry will supply, and thus be the option made generally available to all.

The food industry has exploited human evolutionary traits (cravings for salt/sugar/fat and other nutrients that are high-value in moderation but detrimental in excess) to push the market in a direction that boosts consumption (and thus revenue growth) at a cost to our health.

<comment><USER14> The cost to people's health is not caused by "the food industry". It is caused, moment by moment, by those same people _choosing to harm themselves_.

Grocery stores still sell broccoli and chicken. People choose to buy oreos and croissants and other refined carbs. That's not "the food industry".

It's variously described, but "consumer choice" and "market demands" don't really capture it. It boils down to other adult humans, just like you and I, choosing what they want to spend their money on, choosing what foods they want to eat.

It is nobody's place but the eater to tell them what they should or should not be doing. Full stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Many Study Says that Ultra Processed Foods Drive weight gain, but according to BMJ published processed foods contain 90% Added sugar, and that increase type 2 diabetes or heart disease. Here is [https://www.fitnesshealthforever.com/](https://www.fitnesshealthforever.com/) many health awareness tips for people.

Ultra Processed Foods Lists 1\. Boxed cake mix 2\. Soft drinks 3\. Packaged bread and buns 4\. Fast food burgers 5\. Instant noodles 6\. Energy bars

that is some ultra processed food list that is also shown on NOVA report.

</comment><comment><USER16> Here is two pieces of diet advice:

1) At the grocery store, shop the edges (Fruit, Vegetables, Meat, Fish) just stay away from things with a nutrition label.

2) Don't drink calories. Water, Tea, Coffee (no artificial sweeteners).

Fixes most peoples problems.

<comment><USER17> stevia should be fine, imo

<comment><USER16> I agree, but I wanted to give advice that is healthy and easy to follow. You don't need to look at any labels. Just eat real food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The basic problem with processed foods is that they mimic the qualities of natural foods.

If you leave kids to eat whatever they want with an abundance of food, they will create a perfectly balanced, healthy diet. They did a study of this in the 1950s and the kids who had certain vitamin deficiencies would naturally even go for the fish oil they needed to supplement their levels back up.

Take something as simple as bacon flavored potato chips: you eat them, and your body thinks it's getting the protein it needs, but it's not, it's getting something that mimics protein. But your body's kind of dumb, so it wants more chips, because they should have protein in them!

Almost every obese person out there is someone who's had their natural feedback loop completely destroyed by learned behavior. They don't feel "full" the way people without eating issues do.

<comment><USER19> Add to that our sedentary but stressful lifestyle. When I am backpacking for a few days I don't eat much and have almost no food cravings. But as soon as I am in the office I start eating all kinds of crap I would normally never touch. I think the same happens to kids in school being forced to sit still for hours.

"Almost every obese person out there is someone who's had their natural feedback loop completely destroyed by learned behavior. They don't feel "full" the way people without eating issues do. "

I am really sorry for kids that grow up on frozen dinners and junk food. I have read that your food tastes develop in the first few years so if your parents have bad food habits you have a very good chance to be imprinted with them for a life time.

<comment><USER20> I have had some mild success with "do not talk to me about food except at mealtimes" in conjunction with "canonical mealtime is between 6 and 8 PM, and absolutely nothing past 10 PM".

What I really need now is an AR ad-blocker--like Joo-Janta context-sensitive sunglasses--that will detect food-related advertisements and displays in the real world and blot them out with black rectangles and/or white noise.

Being hungry stimulates appetite, but so too does just _thinking about food_. And after priming my awareness of it, nearly everyone around me does something or other to make me think about food, and quite a lot are doing it intentionally, to get at my money. (Even just reading this thread is sort of screwing me up for the rest of the day.) I get the sense that Pavlov's dogs might get fat if someone followed them around all the time, continually ringing that bell.

Even my office has that stupid kitchenette right outside the door, with people frequently in there messing with the coffee and fridge and microwave. So then I close my door and blot out the world, and I can easily ride out hours 11 through 20 of fasting. Unless someone sends "donuts in the lab" over e-mail, or "Food Truck X is in the parking lot until 12:00". _Aargh._

So now I'm sitting here with one part of my brain telling itself, "No, you are _not_ really hungry. That's the spoiled punk asshole part of your brain trying to get you to eat by injecting obsessive thoughts about food." Any little thing can set that douchebag off, and then it's a fight for the entire rest of the day. When out alone in the wild, or isolated in a sealed box, no one cares whether you eat or starve, so that "go eat something" lobe never gets triggered externally. But the instant you're back, there's that 20-foot-tall Big Mac on a billboard telling you what exit to take. Even if you don't get off and buy one, it wakes up the appetite jerk, who starts offering unhelpful alternative suggestions. And it only shuts up after continuously whining for many hours, or when sleeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While I'm sure they're considerably better than processed foods, I wonder how the whole fruits, grains, and vegetables that have been selectively bred, or genetically modified to be all about tastiness(or growth speed, shelf life, etc) would stack up against other strains. All tomatoes can't possibly be equal, so it'd be interesting to see studies like this, but comparing a roma tomato, vs heirloom or something.

<comment><USER22> Vegetables have been getting larger, but nutritional density is decreasing. I think I read vegetables are something like 20% less nutritionally dense than 50 years ago.

<comment><USER19> From what I have read they are selected for looks, taste and ease of storage and transportation. There is no consideration for nutritional value.

<comment><USER23> Consumers don't have tricorders to scan two tomatoes and compare their relative nutrition. Meanwhile, they are extremely sensitive to price and appearance differences in their groceries.

It's a bad situation for everybody. But, selecting for nutrition over appearance would go almost completely unnoticed by anyone except for how it made the accountants and shareholders sad.

I can dream about a marketing campaign focused on nutritional value. But, in the end, I expect consumers would brush it off as BS and buy up all the cheap, pretty, non-local, out-of-season produce anyway :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I often wonder how much the difficulty of chewing a food effects how healthy its consumers are. Processed foods are "pre-chewed" and easy to eat very quickly.

<comment><USER25> A lot of foods that are really bad for you are kind of a pain to make. Potato chips. Fried chicken. Anything deep fried, really. Coffee cake. Chocolate chip cookies aren't hard but aren't exactly make-on-a-whim either and require resting the dough for a good long while if you want them to be really good. Most stuff that's easy to eat within minutes of a craving without having it prepared in advance are whole fruit or salads or something like that. Nuts are probably among the worst ready-to-eat foods but at least they're full of protein and vitamins, and arguably their eat-quickly-ability is well balanced with their nutrition level _if_ you buy them in the shell, which prevents tossing back whole handfuls at once. The truly bad stuff takes planning, unless you buy it already made.

[EDIT] oh man, crackers! A fair amount of effort for a pretty small yield in a home kitchen, even using electric mixers and such. Enough of a pain you'd hesitate to just eat them as-is rather than using them as one part of a larger meal. But a whole box is a couple bucks at the store....

<comment><USER26> My rule lately for junk/bad food: I only eat it if I take the time to make it myself. Works pretty well!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Processed _food_ is not really food.

It's just designed to be really, really cheap to make (so usually bad quality ingredients + sugar), sell for a premium based on marketing (often bullshit health claims like added vitamins c or just nice cartoons), sit on a shelf for ages without going rotten (lots of preservatives, or more sugar and definitely no fibre to help level out that sugar spike) and be very morish (more added sugar / caffeine / salt).

It's a product designed by a big corporation to make them as much money as possible. At no point is anyone thinking about making food.

It's hardly a surprise that it's non-functional as actual nutrition, and equally unsurprising it's going to make you ill.

But some of it does taste pretty good.

</comment><comment><USER28> What's the measurable difference between "processed" and "ultra-processed" foods?

<comment><USER8> [https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge- core/c...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge- core/content/view/2A9776922A28F8F757BDA32C3266AC2A/S1368980017000234a.pdf/un_decade_of_nutrition_the_nova_food_classification_and_the_trouble_with_ultraprocessing.pdf)

See page 5 of the pdf.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Basically processed food is much more dense in calories so you can easily eat more calories than you need. You'd have to eat a lot of vegetables and salad to get calories. The study is new, but the conclusion is ' hacker diet' \- people eating processed food ate more calories than they burned so they gained weight.

If you want to lose weight just burn more calories than you eat.

Usually the easiest solution is a mix of better diet and some moderate exercise regime that burns some calories and increases your metabolism.

</comment><comment><USER30> I suspect emulsifiers are playing a bigger role than people realize. They wash away your gut mucus layer so that bacteria can't live there. This study didn't get much attention when it came out, but I think it will prove to be prophetic: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940336/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5940336/)

</comment><comment><USER31> Refined sugar and alcohol are the worst for me. I can easily stay in my target BMI range without doing any diet plan apart from eliminating these two things.

The refined sugar especially seems to aggravate my appetite. It's been shown that drinking a sugared soft drink before a meal increases the amount of food you'll eat, and that's definitely been my experience. At the beginning of this month I eliminated sugar and alcohol from my diet. No other change, and I've lost 5 lbs so far. In the past I've used this diet hack for longer stretches and easily dropped ~30 lbs in four months.

</comment><comment><USER32> Here is the paper:

[https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(19)...](https://www.cell.com/cell- metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131\(19\)30248-7)

I'm comparing with the Nurses Health Study results:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mozaffarian%2C+D.%...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Mozaffarian%2C+D.%2C+et+al.%2C+Changes+in+diet+and+lifestyle+and+long- term+weight+gain+in+women+and+men.+N+Engl+J+Med%2C+2011.+364%2825%29%3A+p.+2392-404).

</comment><comment><USER33> Tastes good, cost less, uses substitute ingredients that is higher in calories but less nutrition, in turn it digests faster causing you to eat more. That's processed foods.

</comment><comment><USER34> This paper seems to assume that "ultra-processed" is a previously defined term. Is there an agreed upon definition somewhere?

<comment><USER35> There's a Wikipedia article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra- processed_food](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-processed_food)

That links to a report from a United Nations organization that also uses the term:

[http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4690e.pdf](http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4690e.pdf)

On page 30, there's a section titled "Group 4: Ultra-processed food and drink products" which describes what an ultra-processed food or drink is.

That PDF also has 10 references to papers that use the term in their title.

<comment><USER36> Wikipedia article linked also says "As of 2018 the concept is loose and evolving" linking to a newer article than the UN report, so why would I think this paper used the UN definition?

The Wikipedia article further goes on to state "The utility of the NOVA classification has been subject to criticism. However, a 2018 publication from the founders of the NOVA classification uncovered misleading and incorrect statements in the critical appraisal, as well as non-disclosed conflicts of interest."

Basically, I don't see a terribly agreed upon definition. Things point several ways, and the GP's concern about definition is entirely valid.

<comment><USER37> > so why would I think this paper used the UN definition?

Because if you read the paper from the OP link, the authors cite that their definition of ultra-processed food is from Monteiro et al 2008 viz. the same UN definition the OP refers to which is widely agreed upon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Isn't this study a bit unfair in that the ultra-processed diet was 508 calories more per day than the minimally processed one?

<comment><USER39> That's how many extra calories one group ate than the other. It wasn't prescribed.

The article explains reasons why, like how the appetite-suppressing hormone was found in much different levels between the two groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Easy to digest food for us ... is also easy to digest for bacteria, so they can forget about us and go straight to the source: [https://phys.org/news/2019-05-overfed-bacteria-people- sick.h...](https://phys.org/news/2019-05-overfed-bacteria-people-sick.html)

<comment><USER41> Reminds me of the manufactured sugar that feeds C Difficile strains in our guts and kills people. [https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/the-curious- case-of-...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/01/the-curious-case-of-a- boring-sugar-that-may-have-unleashed-a-savage-plague/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I wondered what exactly they meant by "ultra-processed" foods. I looked into it, and found that they were using the NOVA classification system:

[https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova](https://world.openfoodfacts.org/nova)

It has a reasonable explanation of what is meant by ultra-processed.

</comment><comment><USER43> Note:

> "But is it something about the highly processed nature of these foods itself > that drives people to overeat?"

It's still _overeating_ that drives weight gain. It's just easier to do with highly processed foods that are calorie dense and not "psychologically" filling....

<comment><USER44> "Overeating drives weight gain" is like "more movement on the gas pedal causes speeding". Yes, but uninteresting. "Loud rock music makes people drive faster" is not saying the same thing, and is interesting.

Even if it reduces back to "they're going faster because they move the gas pedal more".

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's interesting that the "ultra-processed" food example they give here is quesadillas, refried beans and diet lemonade. Not exactly the typical example of pre-packaged cookies and chips.

Another interesting thing is they're saying that stir-fried beef and veggies over basmati rice was not as processed. Both examples include meat, veggies and carbs (rice vs bread), is the simple addition of cheese enough to make quesadillas "ultra-processed"? The form factor? I certainly would never have come to that conclusion on my own. Is there a guide for this?

We need some better definitions here, maybe it's a little too cynical of me, but I'm wondering if all this study discovered is which foods tasted better.

<comment><USER46> The quesadillas have, like most frozen foods in the grocery store, their calories primarily come from highly processed corn/wheat. I suspect that's a big part of the issue.

<comment><USER45> They don't say anything about the quesadillas being frozen in the article at least - but regardless, I'd say it's probably a similar amount to the calories from rice in a stir fry on rice dish. I eat about 1/2 cup (uncooked) of rice with my stirfry typically, ~350 calories compare with the flour tortillas I normally use at under 200 calories each. Most basmati rice is white which I'd say is just about as "processed" as most flour.

I'm not sure what the exact definition of "processed" being used is though so I can't say for certain. But both are being stripped of outer layer, mixed with water and cooked. I suppose you need a tablespoon or so of oil to cook the tortillas but I'm assuming you're sautéing the veggies for the stir fry in oil too.

I just don't get what processed means in this context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I would guess based on what I've read the absorption rate of energy is too fast with highly processed food, while the opposite, eating fibrous plant material seems to be very good for you as you have a far slower energy intake, in relative terms.

<comment><USER48> Working understanding at this point for me is highly processed food results in chronically high insulin levels.

Insulin signals your cells to convert glucose to fat and store it. Insulin also inhibits leptin receptors which tell your brain to keep your pie hole closed.

Likely your gastro-intestinal nervous system also has a good idea of how much reserves it has stored. Processed food confuses it.

<comment><USER47> So I like your details... so in this case, the "intake" being too fast results in the body storing the excess energy as fat. I noticed that I feel more tired in general when I eat this kind of fast food crap. Side note on top of this I started skipping breakfast now so have a built in fasting period each day and my energy has gone way up in terms of being present.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> For a study that mentions keto/low-carb diets directly a few times I would've loved to see a group consuming these "ultra-processed foods" but selecting only from those with low glycemic index/carb count.

<comment><USER50> Me too, since keto wisdom is that highly processed oils (e.g. seed and "vegetable" oils) should be eliminated, presumably from some hormonal impact, but I've never seen any research on that. It's not hard to avoid canola oil usually, so I don't think much of it.

<comment><USER51> [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417387](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11417387)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20930468](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20930468)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365303/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4365303/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> But processed foods taste so good...

It reminds me of what a friend, who'd been through AA said: She can abstain from alcohol, drugs, and sex. But she can't stop eating.

</comment><comment><USER53> This should have been obvious to anyone for ages now.

Ultra processed foods are almost always significantly higher in calories.

<comment><USER44> Shouldn't the "obvious" conclusion be that you'd eat less of them, because you got enough calories sooner?

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> "Hyper-palatable" is probably a better label than "Ultra-processed". The problem isn't the processing, the problem is that its just hard to stop eating food like Doritos, chocolate chip cookies, etc. And while I love simple food like lentil soup, yet feel no compulsion to eat more than a serving.

<comment><USER19> I once read an article where they interviewed food scientists for something like Doritos and they had very intricate science around foods that don't satisfy you so you keep eating. In one sense it was really interesting how sophisticated these foods actually are but on the other hans it's amazing how much damage they are doing to the health of the country.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> That's cause they taste so darn good you want to eat more of them.

<comment><USER39> > Study participants were allowed to eat as much or as little as they wanted, > but ended up eating way more of the ultra-processed meals, even though they > didn't rate them as being tastier than the unprocessed meals.

<comment><USER21> Tastier is pretty subjective, and they weren't comparing them side by side. But something can probably be said about shifting tastes as you eat a certain kind of food repeatedly. I know if I'm eating healthy for awhile, then have a super rich dessert, it overwhelms me, as if my taste buds have adapted towards the healthy food.

<comment><USER39> Sure, but the article also explains things like how the appetite-suppressing hormone was found in much higher levels in the group consuming unprocessed foods.

So I think I'd focus on facts like that before circling back to "well, it was probably tastier, they just didn't know it."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Did they control for food taste and preferences ? It could simply be the processed food happened to taste better as well. Not sure if pleasantness and familiarity cover that.

</comment><comment><USER36> 20 people for 14 days on one diet then 14 days on another. I don't see how this is a terribly illuminating study. This is not sufficient time or statistical sample to extrapolate to, well, really anything. What confounding factors were unrevealed by the small sample size? What structural problems are introduced by such a short time span?

We need to either collectively start ignoring these studies on somebody's 5 fraternity brothers over a weekend, or we need to start demanding more people, longer time horizons and better controls for confounding factors. I'm pretty disappointed to see NPR hocking this crap or Cell publishing it.</comment>