Two or more diet beverages a day linked to high risk of stroke, heart attacks - <AUTHOR> https://www-m.cnn.com/2019/02/14/health/diet-soda-women-stroke-heart-attack/index.html <comment><USER3> It is entirely unclear how any controls were implemented. They say "after controlling for lifestyle factors" but do not say which factors nor how they controlled for them. It is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that diet beverages are simply a proxy for some other factor. Maybe even just weight. To wit:

        "This association may also be contributed
        to by rising blood pressure and sugars
        that were not yet diagnosed as hypertension
        or diabetes but warranted weight loss,"
        thus leading the women in the study to take
        up diet beverages, said Dr. Keri Peterson,
        medical advisor for the Calorie Research Council, an
        international association representing the low- and
        reduced-calorie food and beverage industry.

This possibility makes the implication that there is some causal relationship pretty tenuous. This question:

        "What is it about these diet drinks?" asked
         lead study author Yasmin Mossavar-Rahmani ...

might well be answered with, "nothing at all actually".

(edited for quotes because I keep forgetting this is not markdown)

<comment><USER4> Welcome to all of nutrition science. As a field it is characterized by a dearth of studies which are actually capable of demonstrating causation. Almost every study is simply a measurement of correlation. And then you get these moronic interpretations of the studies, sometimes by the study authors themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I concluded a some time ago that soda drinks weren't adding a lot of value for me at all. And I heard some people claim that the artificial sugars actually are not that great for you. 1) they teach your body that sweet stuff has no nutrition, which then becomes a problem when you actually eat sweet stuff 2) sweeteners like aspartame build up in your liver and fat deposits, which may or may not have long term impact. 3) artificial sweeteners can cause issues with your gut bacteria/cause some irritation. All of that may or may not be true and I never really experienced any of that.

I used to just order a cola light/zero/diet in restaurants but it was more of a habit than something I actually particularly enjoyed. These days I usually go for water, tea, or coffee. Small change, probably a lot healthier, and I actually enjoy drinking it.

<comment><USER6> On 2 and 3: aspartame metabolizes into the amino acid phenylalanine, a precursor to dopamine and epinephrine[0]. In normal people, breakdown of the upstream neurotransmitters increase when phenylalanine increases, meaning there are no negative effects from it's consumption. It does not store in the liver.

There are some diseases that involve a malfunction in phenylalanine processing, like phenylketonuria[1] and hyperphenylalaninemia[2]. It would not surprise me a bit if people with subclinical forms of hyperphenylalaninemia self-medicate with diet soda to feel better, particularly energy drinks that come with other things that aid in dopamine synthesis. Disfunction in dopamine synthesis often affects other things like NO synthesis, affecting blood pressure and inflammation.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame?wprov=sfla1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame?wprov=sfla1)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria?wprov=sfla1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylketonuria?wprov=sfla1)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphenylalaninemia?wprov=sf...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperphenylalaninemia?wprov=sfla1)

Edit: changed serotonin to epinephrine, as phenylalanine is not a precursor to serotonin.

<comment><USER7> thank you! as someone who replaced ~100g/day of hfcs with ~450mg of aspartame by switching from coke to dietcoke I'm alway interested in what I should be specifically watching for as the downside of this tradeoff. thanks to your links i now know _an_ answer to that is "phe >120 <360, 600+ is a real problem".

by any chance is that number a standard part of a yearly blood test, or do you have to ask for it?

<comment><USER8> Phenylalanine is not part of your yearly blood test (Complete Blood Count, Complete Metabolic Panel) and generally isn't tested unless you specifically ask for it, or if a pediatric concern for phenylketonuria is manifested. At least, this is in general N. American, adult primary practice. (I'm interested if any other providers regularly test, as i've not done it at all)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've never seen a skinny person regularly drink Diet Coke/Pepsi

Diet carbonated drinks just make me gassy. I'd rather have the sugar from a regular Coke and just not drink one every day, or multiple ones per day. I have co-workers that drink 6-8 per day.

I find the "tiny" cans which are only 7.5 are about the perfect size. 3-4 drinks, only 80 cslories, a small bump of sugar...if I drink a 20oz bottle I usually can't finish it as it's way too sweet. Turns out the original size of a bottle of Coke was 6.5 ounces.

<comment><USER10> > I'd rather have the sugar from a regular Coke

I guess this is what the article tries to achieve. Just PR to steer you to more unhealthy consumption.

Safe choice here was always to simply avoid sweet beverages altogether, and not just Coke, all the juices too.

<comment><USER11> There's nothing wrong with having something sweet.. occasionally.

I made this mistake for a long time, trying to fudge my diet with faux-healthy snacks that were still basically just packaged fake sugar.

If you want a bit of chocolate, have a bit of chocolate. If you want a soda, have a bit of soda (the small cans are about the right size it seems). Just don't have 8 sodas a day, or eat an entire cake to yourself. Calorie count. Make sure most of your diet consists of things other than empty carbs. Eat your veggies, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Positive: The article links to a study

Positive: The study is open access!

Negative: The study is, to the best of my few minutes of ToC reading and Ctrl- F-ing, _entirely_ unrelated to soft drinks or sweeteners

Am I missing something? In either event, 2 out of 3 ain't bad, I suppose

<comment><USER13> I think they linked to the wrong study. I believe it's here:

[https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100)

Unfortunately, it's locked. So I'm going to go for 0.5 out of 3 on this one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder whether even if there is a causal link, the diet version will still be healthier (for low values of healthy) than the sugary version. I tend to think so.

I would assume the people most likely to drink diet beverages do so to wean themselves off of sugary drinks. That's one of the first steps in getting towards a healthier lifestyle. The article notes this too.

A mystery to me is why they haven't asked about consumption of sugary drinks at the same time. That would have allowed to get much more interesting correlations.

<comment><USER10> > A mystery to me is why they haven't asked about consumption of sugary drinks > at the same time.

Obviously because sugary drinks manufacturers are paying for the article and the "study".

<comment><USER15> But Coke sells Coke, Diet Coke, juices and bottled water. What difference does it make to them?

<comment><USER16> They're more dominant in cola than they are in orange juice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "...16% more likely to die from any cause than women who drank diet beverages less than once a week or not at all."

Doesn't this suggest that they actually failed to control for lifestyle effects?

<comment><USER18> All-cause mortality is a pretty common way to look at "side-effects", especially when it is not clear exactly what they might be.

These do need to be interpreted carefully though, lest you end up concluding that a drug increases your odds of getting into a car crash or something. There _could_ be a causal link—maybe the drug causes drowsiness or affects vision—but it could also be noise....5% of the time happens 5% of the time, after all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The linked CNN article is a very poor summary. It doesn't even include a proper citation, and the link to the study isn't directing to the one being discussed!? Come on, CNN.

I recommend reading the editorial in Stroke instead: [https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/STROKEAHA.119.02...](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1161/STROKEAHA.119.024456)

And you can get the article here if you have access to Stroke: [https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100](https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.118.023100)

</comment><comment><USER20> The problem is that diet sodas are seen as a cheat that allows a person to eat more calories than they should. This usually is linked to people with poor nutrition habits. Those same people are probably more likely to stroke out or have a heart attack.

<comment><USER13> That's unlikely to be the basis for this result as they controlled for weight.

In fact, of their cohort, if the person was obese _and_ drank high quantities of diet drinks, their risk of strokes shot up even further.

<comment><USER21> I would still guess it has little to do with the diet soda itself and everything about the persons habits, which led them to drink diet soda twice or more per day. It seems unlikely artificial sweetener can have this impact. If it can, that is definitely interesting and the mechanism should be discovered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The article states that the research was done only for women above 50, and that it is observational, does not show cause and effect, so not sure how to interpret this.

<comment><USER23> You should interpret it the same way you interpret any other study that demonstrates only correlation and fails to control for obvious confounders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Coke and similar drinks are q problem for patients with renal failure its the phosphor.

You normally take phosphor binders (Renagel) as well as giving up coke - <USER2> only knows what costs in the states it cost the nhs about £1000 for 2 months supply for me.

</comment><comment><USER25> I dunno, 1.23 increase in risk is tiny; seems likely that it's just lifestyle stuff (which you can try to control for a bit, but you can't know every single choice a diet soda drinker is making -- quite likely an overall less healthy lifestyle).

Compare this to e.g. 20x lung cancer incidence for smokers, where even w/ observational data, you can be pretty sure there's a causal relationship.

Maybe do some RCTs giving diet soda to animals or something and see what happens. And look into the chemistry to see what the mechanism might be...

(That said, probably prudent not to go too crazy with diet soda, or any other novel ingredients.)

</comment><comment><USER26> I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to chime in anyways.

I think if you're drinking 2 or more diet beverages a day, you probably have a "fuck it" attitude when it comes to your health. And that attitude probably pervades the rest of your decisions you make in your life.

Even the people I know who couldn't care less about their health all talk about not wanting to get cancer from drinking diet sodas, especially those containing aspartame.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ill just have one then....

</comment><comment><USER28> I think I'll go grab a diet coke.

<comment><USER14> Why not get the one with the sugar? The data on that one are clear. No worrying about whether it's bad for you.

<comment><USER29> Because natural is uncool. The most "educated" ones promote artificial (because they created it, duh!) and the hippies and ludites promote "natural". See how human psychology works? If you want to be cool on the internet, you DO NOT go against science. (Except of course, when the science is disproving science). It's that simple. Carefully observe this for a while on similar subjects and make yor own conclusion abput what im saying. Good luck! Im gonna go take mud bath now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why do westerners treat everything as a cause and effect machine? Its such an amateur view. This is a great illustratin of "intellect" vs "intelligence". The entire western societies are based on "intellect". Also, don't consume fake anything ;)

</comment><comment><USER29> I noticed a pattern on sites where the userbase is more "science savvy" types, concencus os always to discredit anything against manmade like gmo and now this. Also, the entire perception on food in the west is so upside down its like the darkages here in that regard. Its fascinating to witness.</comment>


We Created a Planning Diary Making $160K in 6 Months - <AUTHOR> https://www.starterstory.com/planning-diary <comment><USER2> This exactly the kind of Bot problem which another HN post was talking about, the user patwalls recently boasted on reddit/twitter about automating reddit submissions & gaining a boatload of views & is doing the same to HN with clickbait metric laden titles of obscure stuff.

<comment><USER3> If it gets upped by the community (presumably because it's interesting) what do the intentions matter?

<comment><USER4> If you follow the link that amrrs published [1], the OP has a team that auto- upvotes all of his submissions. This is explicitly against the HN guidelines.

<comment><USER5> My interpretation was that his team are pressing the 'submit' button, not anything else.

<comment><USER6> Submitting a HN link with a URL that was posted recently will give it an upvote.

Per the domain submission history ([https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=starterstory.com](https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=starterstory.com)), he does not employ this strategy for all submissions, likely only ones with traction to obfuscate things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In our first year, we didn't want to use unnecessary plastic, so we didn't > bother investing in individual opp/poly bags UNTIL we learned that a few of > our diaries arrived with water damage.

I found this line interesting — many people don't realize that companies themselves don't like using unnecessary packaging — most packaging decisions are made for very good reasons. The despised clamshell happened because of shoplifters and on-shelf marketing tests. "Unnecessary plastic" happens because manufacturers know about water damage. Individually wrapped parts happen because of shipping damage or lost parts. What consumers see as "unnecessary" comes as a result of very good reasons and likely thousands of customer complaints when their stuff arrives damaged or with parts missing.

<comment><USER8> I also found it interesting, and depressing. Of course this is off topic, but it goes without saying that plastic is convenient compared to the alternatives. "We made $160k!" but "a few diaries" show up with water damage and their plastic-free plan goes right out the window.

<comment><USER9> Hey symmitchry, I'm Tom, the Co Founder of Saint Belford.

Thanks for your comment.

Receiving a wet diary in the mail is a terrible customer experience so from a business stand point, we want to rectify these types of issues as quickly as possible.

Thankfully, the plastic we use is recyclable at the correct locations, and we're educating our customers around using these options while continuing to look for viable alternatives :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is super interesting! I started selling my own notebook (not a diary) for musicians in February this year, and went through many of the same steps of trying to find a physical print shop without knowing anything about paper. I learned a lot!

What I haven't been able to reproduce is the rapid success! Sometimes I will get upvotes on, say, reddit, and sell $300 worth of books in a week. For the most part, social media influences have been a bust - promising to leave a review in exchange for a free book, but never doing so. I haven't spent tons of money on SEO, content, or advertising, so perhaps I should do that. Just hard to know what the ROI would be.

After reading this post, I might look at putting more money into some of these efforts (Instagram ads, google ads, creating content for my website for SEO purposes). Just hard to know where to begin!

(If you are curious, the product is themusiciansnotebook.com :)

<comment><USER11> Your notebook looks functional and useful, but pretty simple, based on the pictures on your website. There's nothing wrong with that (and if I composed music, I would probably order a copy), but it doesn't necessarily attract the eye.

You might want to consider an edition that has little things a musician might find interesting or useful included in it. That seems to be how these planner people attract people, is a lot of little things that people probably don't really need but enjoy filling out anyway (the link says they compiled all sorts of stuff into their planner, and for anecdata my fiancee is a huge planner nut and loves checking out planners with all sorts of different approaches to layouts and fields and organization and whatnot).

For example (and I don't recommend going this far necessarily, but it might inspire you), a board game designer decided to design a playtesting journal for other board game designers, and threw all sorts of little things in there, like a built in scoreboard, a die number on the page so it could be opened to a random page to simulate a die roll, added achievements with a sticker page, lots of fields to remind the designer to ask certain questions at the end of the playtest, a game contract checklist, a page with guidelines of sizes for various components for getting the game printed by a manufacturer, etc. He did a Kickstarter for it and raised $30k for it (not as much as the article, but still not bad). I backed it and got a few for myself, even though I've kind of settled on my own method for playtesting games, I'll give his a try.

Anyway, his journal serves a specific niche like yours does, so maybe something in there will inspire you to find ways to make your notebook stand out and attract more people to purchase it.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/828934174/fail- faster-t...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/828934174/fail-faster-the- playtesting-journal/description)

<comment><USER12> Sounds to me like you want it to be a different product than it is.

I would recommend memset to look at Field Notes[1] for inspiration. They do an amazing job of turning simple ruled notebooks into something desirable.

Some suggestions:

\- Make the cover look nicer and more inspiring (like Field Notes), not just plain white paper.

\- Find someone who is good at drawing sheet music by hand, to show some really beautiful examples of the product in use for your shop. Again, inspiration.

\- The site says you "pored over every detail". I think you can tell that story better (again, think Field Notes).

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

<comment><USER11> That's a good idea too. Field Notes do attract the eye.

No, I don't mean that they should change the product necessarily. I think there's value in what they currently have, and said that if I composed music myself, I would probably buy a couple.

But there's nothing wrong with seeing what other people have done and being inspired by them. I am constantly taking in ideas from all over and pairing them against all of my different game designs and story ideas and wondering if those ideas could be used in some way. Maybe seeing that link sparked a "Oh, maybe I could put in a... whatever... scale reference, or common key signatures list, or a box for a version number of the song, or whatever" and adds one extra page to the journal, and advertises it, and sees a 10% increase in sales or something.

I don't really have any desires one way or another in what the product should be. I'm just aware of that other journal, and thought maybe they might find it interesting, and probably aren't aware of it since it's for a different niche field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I enjoyed reading about how they got started. I loved the fact they were supporting two mental health organizations with donations. Since friend loves this kind of diary-keeping, after I was done reading, I checked out their website with the intention to buy.

Prominently on the home page is an article about using crystals for healing. Ugh.

I don't know if this is intentional, but it really turns me off their brand, and I'm not interested in buying one anymore.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately I suspect the majority of the population is far less rational than the average HN user, which is why quack health (or rather, "wellness" these days, likely because their peddlers are trying to avoid legal issues around implications of being medical) bullshit has always been a relatively profitable if not ethical industry. The sad thing is, the average visitor to the site would probably think nothing of it or even believe, whereas you and me both reacted with "Ugh."

<comment><USER15> Given "it's good that they're donating to mental health organisations" and "healing crystals are bullshit but profitable", it seems plausible to me that it's net-good to sell healing crystals if it leads to more money donated to mental health organisations.

<comment><USER16> So you take into account the positive effects of mental health donations but not the negative effects of the promotion of healing crystals. No shit you'll come out ahead.

Promoting bullshit has real costs associated with it. Those bullshit crystals cost people money and don't do anything. People get dumber being convinced to buy them, and will use that dumbness in other parts of life. Promoting a market for delusion and false hope is the last thing anyone needs.

It might be hard to put a precise dollar value on second order effects like these, let alone on things like moral integrity, but that doesn't mean this value isn't there.

There is no shortage of people who will do whatever bullshitting it takes to earn more money, and that's not something to be celebrated regardless of whether it comes with mental health donations or another trendy atonement mechanism.

<comment><USER15> "So you take into account the positive effects of mental health donations but not the negative effects of the promotion of healing crystals. No shit you'll come out ahead."

Ah, I see how my comment can be read like that.

I don't mean to say "only consider the positives of one and not the negatives of the other". And "the existence of negatives means the thing is negative" would also be a bad way of thinking about it.

The approach ought to be "The benefits should be weighed against the costs".

<comment><USER16> Yes well everyone has a different idea of what to include in the costs, that's all fluffy and can be twisted to suit whatever result one wants.

Which is why some people choose moral principles that are more rigid. And well scamming people into buying useless rocks is on the wrong side of mine, no matter what moral kickback it's artificially bundled with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Diary" in Australian English means "daily planner" or "date book" in U.S. English.

<comment><USER18> yes, "date book" growth market

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Self care is super important. So if this really helps people then more power to them. Though I can't help shake the feeling this is a sell-shovels-to-the- miners kind of market.

<comment><USER20> Most of California's gold rush prospectors went home empty-handed. Those who sold the shovels did not.

<comment><USER21> Samuel Brannan, the shovel guy, died poor and in relative obscurity.

<comment><USER22> Due to divorce, not unprofitable shovels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Not sure if this is deliberate, but the title misses the _How_ at the beginning compared to the title when you click the link.

Certainly it caught way more attention on my end than it should have. It has to do with the recent news and posts about We Company. I read a lot of them. Somehow my brain got conditioned to look out for _We_ :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Does anyone else feel it's disengenuous to list the revenue per month for a company less than two years old? It seems like they could saturate a market and then assume that people will keep buying new planners. But how many planners are one time purchases? I think it's presumptuous to think they could maintain the revenue stream without more data.</comment>


Labeling fact-check articles in Google News - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/topics/journalism-news/labeling-fact-check-articles-google-news/ <comment><USER2> Surely this won't be abused to push an agenda. The Ministry of Truth prevails!

Expect copious amounts of this: [http://i.imgur.com/1Y0sN6b.png](http://i.imgur.com/1Y0sN6b.png)

<comment><USER3> Genuinely curious; did you read the headline? Google is labeling articles based on the type; not saying whether something is a fact or not.

<comment><USER2> You need to read the article again. They are allowing anyone to label their site as a "Fact checking site".

Just use ClaimReview and my-agenda-is-the-truth.com can be put in front of the eyes of millions of people who only read the title.

<comment><USER3> So? Why would you trust someone just because they say they're fact checking?

<comment><USER4> Well, it looks like google is the one saying they're fact-checking, and people trust google.

<comment><USER3> So, that just makes me trust the page is fact checking, but doesn't tell me the accuracy of the page's fact checking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Imagine that this existed right before the Iraq war. If a news article said that Saddam Hussein had WMD's, how would Google's 'fact-check' algorithm work?

1\. on the one hand, official reports suggested that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction

2\. on the other hand, those reports were fabricated or based on false evidence

Any 'fact checking' is limited by the information currently available to everyone. Further, not all evidence is presented equally well.

<comment><USER6> The most interesting part of those reports is that they were not based on fabricated or false evidence. Most intelligence agencies in the world said it was very likely that Iraq had some WMDs. This brings up many questions about what methods they used for estimating the likelihood, and what should have been the minimum level of certainty to trigger a military response.

For answers to the first question, I suggest you read Tetlock's masterwork on prediction, "Superforecasting". I am still unsure what the answer is to the second question.

<comment><USER5> Intelligence services didn't have bad intent, they had bad intel.

Specifically, they used an informant (Curveball[0]) who was later discredited.

However, this still supports my argument that Google's "fact-checking" algorithm will not tell us what's true or not, it will tell us what the prevailing belief is. But that's not what people want -- they want the truth.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_\(informant\))

<comment><USER7> Two issues come to mind there.

The first is that some of the intel those agencies were acting on wasn't baseless. (See Operafion Avarice.)

The other is that Hussein's deliberate strategy was to make the world believe he was in possession of WMDs. (Specifically Iran.)

True or not, it worked. So whether it was suicide by cop using a real weapon or a realistic looking fake, it was ultimately still suicide by cop on a global scale. And the more we learn as things become declassified, the more it's looking like his position wasn't entirely a bluff.

(Leaving aside the extraordinary incompetence displayed by SECDEF Rumsfeld, the WH, and numerous other senior officials.)

<comment><USER8> "extraordinary incompetence" This goes back to the great-great-etc grandparent. Was it actually bad intent? There were plenty of instances that certianly were, but overall?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> 'Fact Check' articles are often just as biased by what studies they cite, whose projections they choose to use, and what information they supress, as any other article.

I would venture to say that the majority of 'Fact Check' articles are more biased than average articles, as they were specifically written to push or to punish a point of view.

I wonder which sources Google will bless with this new trust symbol? Just kidding! We all know.

<comment><USER10> > I wonder which sources Google will bless with this new trust symbol? Just > kidding! We all know.

Enough of this nonsense. Try reading the actual blog post:

> Publishers who create fact-checks and would like to see it appear with the > "Fact check" tag should use that markup in fact-check articles.

Perhaps you should go and check your own "facts" first.

<comment><USER9> I did read that. Do you imagine that Breitbart or Drudge Report will be given the 'Fact Check' tag, even if they use that markup?

You know they won't, but fake outrage is proven effective, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Years of internet use have immunized me from relying on the word "fact" in the title of anything.

</comment><comment><USER12> It seems that the masses are implementing a kind of online tribunal for politicians.

This makes me wonder, would it be possible for a group of fact-checkers to successfully sue politicians based on their statements?

<comment><USER13> Funny, can Nobel Price sue Obama to take the medal back?

</comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk I wish [https://angel.co/skeptive](https://angel.co/skeptive) still existed!

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there any Google News guy here? May I ask why WikiLeaks in not trending in Google News? They have been publishing Podesta emails for weeks, but neither WikiLeaks / Podesta / DNC / HRC is in "Top stories".

</comment><comment><USER14> Fact: this is the best thread on HN right now. Comment upvote.

</comment><comment><USER15> If it cuts down on crazy conspiracy theories and fear mongering, that would be good.

Political maneuvering and pivots are one thing, but dredging up UFO type conspiracy theories is really dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER16> It can help to fight Russian lies (called «propaganda» or «informational war»[1] in Russia), but, IMHO, they will just create their own «true fact checking network» instead, with their own facts about «double standards of Western governments».

I was puzzled by their tactic for long time until I found answer in Russian book for FSB newcomers: they use massive campaigns of FUD to break trust in victim country (their troll tasks are labeled like «inspire more suspects about government [in target country]», etc.) and to quickly hire agents in enemy organizations. Even USA cannot protect their own citizens from Russian «propaganda» (see case of John Demianuk[2]).

[1]: [http://cepa.org/reports/winning-the-Information- War](http://cepa.org/reports/winning-the-Information-War) [2]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Demjanjuk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Demjanjuk)

<comment><USER9> Are you seriously this naive, or are you astroturfing?

The corporate media in the west is a lustily willing tool of neocon and neoliberal propaganda itself, no Russians needed. If you have ignored that fact for the last four decades, I wonder how you continue to ignore it in the face of the contents of the daily WikiLeaks dumps?

<comment><USER16> I am already in Russian kill list, since 2008, so I'm not naїve anymore.

IMHO, you are mismatching regular propaganda with Russian propaganda (AKA Informational War). Please, read linked book above, it contains in depth explanation of the topic by European Union.

<comment><USER9> John Demjanjuk? What the hell does a Nazi guard have to do with Russia?

As for your other link. I did look at it. Here's a paragraph talking about Russian Television News.

        The underlying message is simple: the United States is engaged in a selfish, ruthless bid for world
        domination. By implication, anything Russia or any other country can do to resist this is commendable
        and justified. It portrays the foundations of modern Euro-Atlantic security—including NATO enlargement
        to former communist countries and Western support for Ukraine—as hypocritical and unjust.

I gotta say dude, I agree with Russia here. Putting Nukes on their border when we freaked out (rightly so) when they put nukes on ours in the 60's, is fucking hypocritical and unjust.

<comment><USER17> The US put anti-ballistic missiles in Poland, not nuclear weapons. Or am I missing something?

<comment><USER18> Putin made two points about this in June, 2016[0]. First, it's not possible to verify what's in the warheads of anti-ballistic missiles. Second, defense and offense are part of a single set of capabilities. If you remove the opponent's ability to retaliate against a first strike, that is just as dangerous to them as if you had increased your offensive capability. I'm well out of my depth in terms of judging if these statements are true, but this is what he said.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqD8lIdIMRo)

<comment><USER17> The issue isn't the tactical implications of putting ABM launchers in Poland. The issue is the false claim (propaganda?) that the US put nuclear weapons in Poland.

<comment><USER9> I'm actually talking about Romania, which isn't technically on the border, if we now insist that Ukraine is not Russia affiliated, but still damn close, missile fly time wise.

And yes, they are Nukes. They were moved there after the Turkish 'coup'.

[https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/us- moves...](https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/us-moves- nuclear-weapons-from-turkey-to-romania/)

<comment><USER17> Do you have a reputable source for that?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Front-end dev wanting to self-learn CS, please help? - <AUTHOR> Hi, I am a front-end developer since 2 years freelancing for local clients. A week back I fell in love with computer internals and now want to learn CS fundamentals and become a full time software engineer. The problem is I am graduating a university with a civil engineering degree in a few months, so I want to self-learn CS and not attend another university.
So far, I have started with http://teachyourselfcs.com and have been independently auditing Berkeley and MIT courses online (from OCW and Archive.org, following their CS curriculum).
Could you give me a roadmap for how I should go about learning CS fundamentals? What books and papers should I read? How did you learn, what step and approaches did you take?
Thank you <comment><USER2> I am currently a senior in computer science and from what I saw in the [http://teachyourselfcs.com](http://teachyourselfcs.com) link, that is basically all you would need to know to get started in most sub fields of software engineering. I wouldn't expect many companies to expect you to know much more than that. I would just focus on taking your newly learned knowledge and build awesome projects. That has been key in landing the internships that I have had in the past couple years. Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really encouraging, thank you :)</comment></comment>


Tinychat.com wants my tiny.chat domain for free - <AUTHOR> First things first tinychat.com is an online video community. tiny.chat is a small chat application with text only chat.
I wanted to start a tiny/small chat application, that used less bandwidth and less data.I have already developed most parts.
But received an email from a lawyer that
tiny.chat is a trademark infringement. (Just before a month from expiry of domain on May 20, 2016)
Is it allowed that for tinychat.com to get the domain ownership from me?
The domain is worth $15000 http://www.estibot.com/appraise.php?a=appraisal&k=8a87bdda37259b454bda4477ac78f31f&domain=tiny.chat <comment><USER2> Their trademark predates the .chat TLD (I looked it up on TESS).

Nevertheless, your use is arguably different (this distinction matters under trademark law). You're no doubt going to call the business (if it even is a business) something other than TINYCHAT, and are going to have a substantially different trademark.

This is tricky (and IANAL), but I'd simply not respond if you are actually in good faith preparing a different product with a different market. Simply owning a domain doesn't make you a trademark infringer. There is no dot in their trademark (service mark) name. They could have included a dotted version in their trademark application, and they opted not to.

In addition, to avoid further headaches with those people, consider coming up with a different name for your product, and simply redirect your URL to that different name.

</comment><comment><USER3> A. When did "tinychat.com" launch?

B. When did "tiny.chat" launch?

If B < A: tell them to go jump

Else: contact a lawyer

</comment><comment><USER4> You'd probably have to look into whether TLDs count toward copyright, e.g. if company ABCXYZ (TM) could claim against abc.xyz.

The reallllly important thing is that you're not calling your chat app TinyChat, but Tiny. If you are calling it TinyChat and started after they opened, you'love need to reassess. If you're calling it Tiny, then you're better off.

Not a lawyer, just what I've experienced the laws around this to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great Idea!!!! I can call my Tiny, It sounds better too.

I just hope there is no TM violation for Tiny. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> [IANAL]

Paying a lawyer to draft a letter was deemed cheaper than trying to purchase the domain. That's why they did that instead of offering to purchase it.

There's an asymmetry of expense involved if they "lawyer up" and you just stonewall. To them, that's the minimum value of the domain name. You can always "lawyer up" later to further increase their costs.

However, none of that matters. What matters is how much it is worth to you to keep the domain.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think you are ok in this case, but see if you can get a free consultation with a lawyer that deals with trademarks.

If you had a domain like macbookprocase I would be a bit more worried.

</comment><comment><USER7> free, online domain appraisals are worthless.</comment>


MDBM – High-speed database - <AUTHOR> http://yahooeng.tumblr.com/post/104861108931/mdbm-high-speed-database <comment><USER2> I'm so excited that they finally open-sourced this. It's relatively old tech at Yahoo, stuff folks outside never got to see. It was difficult to explain to later colleagues the stuff I knew about shared-memory databases because I couldn't give them a frame of reference.

mdbm performance is even better on FreeBSD than Linux because FreeBSD supports MAP_NOSYNC, which causes the kernel not to flush dirty pages to disk until the region is unmapped. Perhaps mdbm's release will finally get the Linux kernel team to provide support for that flag.

<comment><USER3> Same here. I remember wishing we could Open Source it back in the early 2000s. Good to see this coming out so people can take a little credit for work they did back in the day.

<comment><USER4> I've been providing people with source all along. SGI was pretty pleasant about letting me retain copyright on stuff like that.

<comment><USER5> Didn't Yahoo have copyright on a bunch of the modifications to mdbm?

<comment><USER4> Yeah, they wacked it pretty hard and I don't have anything to do with that. I asked them to call it YDBM but that idea came too late.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, YDBM was _another_ thing (looks a lot like Project Voldemort, except in C, not Java) that maybe someday will be released.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks interesting. At this stage of the game a more meaningful benchmark might involve LMDB, Wiredtiger, and, yes, LevelDB.

<comment><USER7> I don't think it's comparable to benchmark MDBM against LMDB or WiredTiger as keys are not kept in sorted order (no range queries), there is no support for transactions, and MDBM does not offer durability in the event of power loss.

MDBM is pretty much an optimized persistent hash table. LMDB and WiredTiger aim to be full-fledged ACID compliant database storage engines with functionality similar to that of BerkeleyDB or InnoDB.

<comment><USER8> You make some good points. We benchmark LMDB against LevelDB and its derivatives even though none of the LevelDB family offer ACID transactions. ([http://symas.com/mdb/ondisk/](http://symas.com/mdb/ondisk/) ) Despite this fact, people will ask the question and try to make the comparison, so we run those tests. It's silly, but most people seem to pay attention to performance more than to safety/reliability.

From my totally biased perspective, MDBM is utter garbage. They use mmap but make absolutely zero effort to use it _safely_. This was the biggest obstacle to overcome in developing LMDB; I had a few lengthy conversations with the SleepyCat guys about it as well. It's the reason it took 2 years (from 2009 when we first started talking about it, to 2011 first code release) to get LMDB implemented. If you want to call something a "database" you have to do more than just mmap a file and start shoving data into it - you have to exert some kind of control over how and when the mapped data gets persisted to disk. Otherwise, if you just let the OS randomly flush things, you'll wind up with garbage. As Keith Bostic said to me (private email):

"The most significant problem with building an mmap'd back-end is implementing write-ahead-logging (WAL). (You probably know this, but just in case: the way databases usually guarantee consistency is by ensuring that log records describing each change are written to disk before their transaction commits, and before the database page that was changed. In other words, log record X must hit disk before the database page containing the change described by log record X.)

In Berkeley DB WAL is done by maintaining a relationship between the database pages and the log records. If a database page is being written to disk, there's a look-aside into the logging system to make sure the right log records have already been written. In a memory-mapped system, you would do this by locking modified pages into memory (mlock), and flushing them at specific times (msync), otherwise the VM might just push a database page with modifications to disk before its log record is written, and if you crash at that point it's all over but the screaming."

The harsh realities of working with mmap are what dictated LMDB's copy-on- write design - it's the only way to ensure consistency with an mmap without losing performance (due to multiple mlock/msync syscalls). None of these design considerations are evident in MDBM.

LMDB's mmap is read-only by default, because otherwise it's trivial to permanently corrupt a database by overwriting a record, writing past the end, etc. MDBM's mmap is read-write, and the only "protection" you get is a doc that tells you "be Vewwy vewwy careful!" Ridiculously sloppy.

LMDB's design and implementation are proven incorruptible. MDBM (and LevelDB and all its derivatives) are proven to be quite fragile. [https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical- sessions/...](https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi14/technical- sessions/presentation/pillai)

Leaving reliability aside for a moment, there's also the issue of performance and efficiency. We used to use DBM-style hashes for the indexes in OpenLDAP, up to release 2.1. We abandoned them in favor of B-trees in OpenLDAP 2.2 because extensive benchmarking showed that BDB's B-trees were faster than its hash implementation at very large data sizes. The fundamental problem is that hash data structures are only fast when they are sparsely populated. When the number of data records you need to work with increases to fill the table, you start getting more and more hash collisions that result in lots of linear probes (or whatever other hash recovery strategy you're using). The other problem is that the very sparse/unordered nature of hashes makes them extremely cache unfriendly - you get zero locality-of-reference for groups of related queries. So as your data volumes increase, you get less and less benefit from the amount of RAM you have available. When the data exceeds the size of RAM, the number of disk seeks required for an arbitrary lookup is enormous, and every read is a random access. Using a hash for a large-scale data store is just horrible. (We tested this extensively a decade ago [http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap- devel/200401/msg00077...](http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap- devel/200401/msg00077.html) )

<comment><USER4> You pretty clearly haven't used MDBM because the MDBM I worked on at SGI (and still use to this day) gets to any key in two page faults (aka 2 disk seeks) at the most. That was the whole point of it.

If you want I'll go shove a few GB into an mdbm, drop caches, and time a lookup.

<comment><USER8> If you've already ported the levelDB benchmark driver, feel free to send it to me: [https://github.com/hyc/leveldb/tree/benches/doc/bench](https://github.com/hyc/leveldb/tree/benches/doc/bench)

2 seeks at the most, are you talking about a 32 bit address space? The only way that's possible in 64 bits is to direct map a hash into e.g. 2 32 bit chunks and use the hash as an actual disk block address for the first chunk, and an index into a block list for the 2nd chunk.

<comment><USER4> 2 seeks. Address space doesn't matter, you have one seek to read the directory (I'm assuming 100% cold cache), and one seek to get to the page in question.

Not only that, we watched the bus on an SGI Challenge and counted cache misses and TBL misses. 2 TBL misses to get a key.

Saying that it isn't possible on a 64 bit VM system makes no sense to me. If I have a 2TB file and I seek to location A and read it, then seek to location B and read it, you are saying that's not possible? Same thing with mmap, I set a pointer to the mapping, read _p, p += <number>, read _p. Two seeks, two page faults, whatever you want to call it, it does 2 and only 2 I/O's to get a key/value (unless the pages are bigger than disk blocks but then those are going to be sequential I/O's, no extra seeks).

<comment><USER8> I was actually thinking of a >2GB DB file on a 32 bit server. But leaving that aside, it sounds like you're assuming a perfect hash function with no collisions. If you have collisions, you have to deal with the possibility of a hash bucket overflowing and requiring an additional seek.

Anyway, I don't doubt that you can operate in 2 seeks in the normal case.

<comment><USER4> It is 2 seeks, at most, for 100% of lookups.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not very comfortable with storage engines that directly build on memory mapped files. MongoDB's current storage engine is mmap based and it's sub optimal at best which is undoubtedly part of the reason they're building a completely new storage engine now (WiredTiger).

<comment><USER8> Using mmap well takes great care. MongoDB was careless. There's good reason to believe the MDBM designers were careless too.

<comment><USER4> MDBM guy here. Care to elaborate on what we got wrong?

<comment><USER8> See below. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734356](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734356)

<comment><USER5> Umm... the lack of transactional integrity is part of the mdbm design. So it's only "careless" in the strictest sense of the term (the designers explicitly wanted to exploit not having to care about it).

mdbm is certainly not without limitations, but is careful about its use of mmap to an extent that comparisons with MongoDB are laughable.

<comment><USER8> I have already admitted my obvious biases, but seriously - when you design such a trivially corruptible system, you can't call it a persistent database; it's at most a cache. It won't survive a system crash at all, it probably won't survive an application crash intact either. To call it persistent is laughable.

<comment><USER5> > I have already admitted my obvious biases, but seriously - when you design > such a trivially corruptible system, you can't call it a persistent > database; it's at most a cache. It won't survive a system crash at all, it > probably won't survive an application crash intact either. To call it > persistent is laughable.

There are a number of use cases where in the event of a node failure it is better to rebuild from a replica or a log. Statistically, the RAM on another host is actually more reliable than local storage. Additionally, the database does have sync'ing primitives that allow for a variety of persistence strategies... just not the traditional ACID strategy.

In practice, there are _lots_ of cases where the freedom to ignore transactional integrity is very handy, and yes, a cache would definitely be one of them.

<comment><USER8> If DB updates are not atomically visible, then no sync'ing strategy will protect you from corruption during a crash.

So in other words, you're saying "MDBM is not a persistent database." Glad that's clear. Totally agree, there are probably lots of use cases for it. But persistent data store isn't one of them.

<comment><USER4> MDBM is a hash, a pretty scalable one and fairly light weight. It is so fast that a common usage is to log updates to a log file and just rebuild the hash from that after a reboot. We've been doing that for years, works well for us.

I'm guessing you are one of the people behind some other technology. Goody for you but do you really think you make your case by dissing anything else? If you have a solution that works for you, great. SGI, Yahoo, and other companies have found a use for MDBM. SGI was using it ~20 years ago and at the time there was _nothing_ that came close to the same performance.

<comment><USER10> It doesn't mean he's wrong, but hyc_symas is the CTO of Symas who produce the Lightning memory-mapped database, so part of his business is in direct competition. He does dance around this a bit below, but I think how aggressively he's trashing MDBM with broad & unsupported statements in this thread doesn't really speak well of his company or his personaly integrity. You can have a technical disagreement without looking like you're spreading FUD in place of valid technical arguments. This isn't how you do that.

<comment><USER8> I stated up front that I am totally biased. I provided multiple links backing up my statements. Nothing I've said here is unfounded.

The only FUD here is advertising a piece of software as a high performance embedded database when in fact it's not suitable for such use _on its own_. The most viable use cases the authors have presented is when using MDBM as part of a larger distributed system such that the loss of a single DB instance isn't fatal. The above comment talks about restoring from a log, but the actual log mechanism isn't part of MDBM. I.e., MDBM is incomplete on its own and you must provide additional pieces in order to use it effectively.

I'm not solely interested in promoting my own DB. If you read the On-Disk microbenchmarks I linked you'll see that there's a broad range of use cases where LMDB gets trounced by LevelDB and other LSMs. I'm interested in facts.

From the original link:

"On clean shutdown of the machine, all of the MDBM data will be flushed to disk. However, in cases like power-failure and hardware problems, it's possible for data to be lost, and the resulting DB to be corrupted. MDBM includes a tool to check DB consistency. However, you should always have contingencies. One way or another this is some form of redundancy…"

The fact is, this is a system that can lose data on a crash and it doesn't include its own recovery mechanism. Without such a mechanism you can't call it a persistent data store because MDBM _by itself_ is not persistent.

<comment><USER5> > The fact is, this is a system that can lose data on a crash and it doesn't > include its own recovery mechanism. Without such a mechanism you can't call > it a persistent data store because MDBM by itself is not persistent.

Persistence != ACID

By your definition, ext2 is not persistent. Give it a break.

<comment><USER8> ext2 comes with its own recovery system: fsck.

<comment><USER4> The yahoo people claim to have the same thing for mdbm. As someone who worked on it, I can easily see how you would write such a thing, it's way more trivial than fsck (and I'm a file system guy, I'd much rather write a mdbm_fsck than a file system fsck).

<comment><USER5> They don't just claim to have the same thing for mdbm, it's right there in the project.

Sounds like you are shooting off without really understanding what you are criticizing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm curious to see what the total timings would be like to get the data in a useable form - as opposed to just fetching a record from a data store. As noted - these data stores just store and retrieve data and don't do things like joins or ordering, etc.

Could there be a comparison between these datastores and the traditional ACID compliant databases when it comes to retrieving actual data in a useful format? E.g. perhaps doing a join or an ordering of some sort? I don't expect databases (e.g. Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2) to be faster in raw performance, but I do expect them to be faster in terms of total development time and bug fixing since the application developer wouldn't have to do the locking, page pinning/unpinning, etc. manually.

</comment><comment><USER12> Let the horrors of MDBM not get to you. I've used it when I worked at Yahoo, and the client support for Java etc. sucks.

</comment><comment><USER13> Could not install this in Ubuntu 12.04 - basic commands are failing. I think they tested only in BSD?

ln -s -f -r /tmp/install/lib64/libmdbm.so.4 /tmp/install/lib64/libmdbm.so ln: invalid option -- 'r' Try `ln --help' for more informatio

</comment><comment><USER14> Thoughts on using this as a cache instead of memcache or redis? Yes, it does not have nearly as many features or functions but when raw performance is needed I could see this working (given an api for using this via Node.JS, PHP, etc.).

<comment><USER7> why even pay the cost of memory mapping if its a transient embedded cache not shared between servers?

just use a std::unordered_map, or better yet a tbb::concurrent_unordered_map or whatever the equivalent is for your language

<comment><USER2> Because it's shared between processes on the same server.

<comment><USER15> In theory STL implementations, if used with a custom allocator, should be able to pull this off... that's why the STL containers all have internal 'pointer' typedefs.

Practically speaking, Boost.Interprocess includes a shared memory hash table implementation. Boost Multi Index, which is a further generalisation of containers to allow the construction of database-like indexes, is also Interprocess compatible.

[http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_57_0/doc/html/interprocess/a...](http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_57_0/doc/html/interprocess/allocators_containers.html#interprocess.allocators_containers.additional_containers.multi_index)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I dont want to brag. But there is also DBM inspired Java port. And in-memory mode outperforms java heap collections such as j.u.HashMap.

</comment><comment><USER17> Can anyone say whether it would be hard to port it to Windows? Maybe there already is something for Windows that is as good as this ?

<comment><USER4> I can't speak to the yahoo version, they've wacked it, but the base mdbm that we still use today works fine on windows, has for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How is MDBM for concurrent access? How does it handle locking (i.e., one big lock that blocks everyone else, or key-level locking)?

<comment><USER4> So the SGI owned code, that I don't have, did page level locking. There two kinds of locks, rd/wr on the directory, and rd/wr on a page. If you are inserting a key you get a read lock on the directory and a write lock on the page. If it fits in the page then you are done. So you can have lots of concurrent writers until a page is full and you have to split it. Bob Mende did that work I think, you might track him down for details.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How similar in performance is MDBM to GDBM (the GNU DBM)? They appear to be similar (if not identical) in functionality.

<comment><USER20> Not sure, but in my experience GDBM is a bit on the slow side. MDBM uses mmap(), so for that reason alone it should be faster.

<comment><USER4> MDBM was designed to be fast with special care taken on the lookup path. The goal was to do lookups with as few cache misses as possible. You can get to any key with at most two page faults.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Where is the original open source release from Silicon Graphics which Yahoo based this work on? Did they ever make one?

<comment><USER4> Nah, they didn't care and I didn't want to piss them off so I just handed the code to anyone who asked for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a very big deal, especially because of the BSD licensing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Where does it say that this database is persistent?

<comment><USER23> It is memory mapped, which means that it is persisted to disk, perhaps confusingly if you aren't familiar with mmap.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> How is this different than memcache?

<comment><USER25> Memcache is an in-memory cache. This is an on-disk key-value store.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Do people get annoyed by all the JavaScript frameworks and Databases coming out in regards to adoption from a company point of view? I mean every other day a new database comes out and claims to be better in one way or another than something else and then its like "fuck I picked X when now there's Y"

It seems over the last year technology has been growing more rapidly than any other period.

Fun times but so hard to keep track of everything!

<comment><USER27> For those old timers who did distributed systems work there's not that much new under the sun. I look at something like this and say "ah, a quirky and somewhat dangerous cache layer." What's different is bloggers promoting it as a "database."

While I'm sure someone out there will see this and say "wow, that's exactly what I need!" chances are that if you have these sorts of scale issues you're going to have to figure it out on your own.

I'd rather see a write-up of how they arrived at this particular conclusion than another non-database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> yahoo back to IT company ?

</comment><comment><USER28> interesting. follow</comment>


What Web Designers Can Learn From Video Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/07/27/what-web-designers-can-learn-from-video-games/ <comment><USER2> Uhh, a custom cursor! Whoops, i left your site...</comment>


Feedbin now supports PubSubHubbub - <AUTHOR> http://blog.feedbin.me/2013/12/03/pubsubhubbub/

<comment><USER2> I wrote up a blog post a couple years ago about how to integrate PubSubHubbub yourself.

[http://blog.newsblur.com/post/20371256202/building-real- time...](http://blog.newsblur.com/post/20371256202/building-real-time-feed- updates-for-newsblur)

That blog post includes what to look for in the RSS feed and how to subscribe to updates. It's written in Python, but that's just a short-hand way of saying it's in plain english.

It also includes details on how to then push the real-time updates out to clients using JavaScript and Socket.io.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great one! I sent a bunch of people who asked how to get started into that direction :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, did you know that the Feedbin 'Subscribe' button is a SubToMe button? Add one to yoru blog too!</comment>


If we work day and night, we can match our competitor's features within 12 mos. - <AUTHOR> http://dilbert.com/fast/2009-12-09/ <comment><USER2> I got a good laugh out of that comic, and it's frighteningly familiar for a lot of enterprise developers.

But taken too literally, it sends entirely the wrong message to a startup. In some cases I guess you really do want to swing for the fences and bypass everything that's been done in your industry. However, I suspect that the failure rate among those that take a completely divergent approach is pretty high.

Maybe you don't have to match the competition feature-for-feature, but you do need to match them need-for-need. If you don't address customer needs, good luck with your conversion rate. And in the end, a feature matrix is just one company's articulation of what it thinks those customer needs are. Maybe you disagree or maybe you have a better way, but if the same 70% of features show up over and over again amongst your competition, you'd better find a way to satisfy those needs.

In the interest of not posting a tome, I've elaborated on my blog (see profile for link).

<comment><USER3> _you do need to match them need-for-need_

I disagree. In particular, you may not be addressing the same niche that the "competition" addresses.

To use an example I've been thinking a lot about today: it is stupid and suicidal for any startup to go head to head with Google on a core Google competency, right? Well, Wingify just released an A/B testing product which is about 5% as featureful as the Google Website Optimizer/Google Analytics tag team o' doom. It lacks on enterprise features, it doesn't have the Google ops team backing it, etc etc. It also won't be free due to a cross-subsidy from Google AdWords.

Instead of trying to reach feature or need parity with Google, they said "There is a portion of the market here which is untechnical and knows they want to do A/B testing but whom are undeserved by EVERY vendor. We're going to make A/B test easy enough for them to incorporate it into their businesses in a few minutes." With respect to those users, they're going to eat Google's lunch. Granted that might only be a couple hundred thousand customers but, well, how many customers do you really need, anyhow. ;)

<comment><USER2> Well, my surreply would be that for those customers, there is only one one need, and Google's feature matrix attempts to address more needs than actually exist in that segment of the marketplace.

But segmentation is a good point that I hadn't really addressed. I'd presumed competitors going after the same market. A more mature competitor may simply be seeking a bigger market (and thus requires more features). If you're satisfied with attacking just one segment, everything else is extraneous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've had this conversation in the game industry more times than I can count.

</comment><comment><USER5> We were just talking about this in my office the other day. How "feature match" is such a popular strategy because it's something a non-technical manager can say without having to rely on his technical staff (which in many managers' eyes makes them seem weak)

</comment><comment><USER6> Or... you can work just as hard to find a new approach to the same problem that gives you an edge over them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ah! A modern example of Zeno's Paradox! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes>

I bet Douglas Hofstadter would appreciate at this one.

</comment><comment><USER8> 37 points for posting a dilbert?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's my opinion that this dilbert is fairly relevant to HN. A lot of pg's early articles were addressing this feature-matching sentiment and how they approached it at viaweb.</comment></comment>


The Science Behind Hawaii's 'Smiley Face' Volcano - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/55630-science-of-kilauea-volcano-smiley-face.html <comment><USER2> Why men always try to rationalise everything?</comment>


To retire comfortably, under-40 workers need to seriously bulk up savings - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/16/AR2010071606833.html <comment><USER3> I realize this probably won't be the most popular of opinions around places like this one, but the more I think about it, the more I conclude that leaving everyone to individually save for their own retirement is not the best of ideas.

There are far too many variables in the system for most people to navigate successfully for 40 years straight, even if they are earnestly trying. You could have an extemely well diversified portfolio and still lose money when The Market as a whole tanks as a result of bad decisions of other people. You could have money saved up in multiple savings accounts or bonds and be out of luck when a government you didn't vote for fucks up and causes a period of hyperinflation. I'm not even mentioning things utterly out of individual control like a war resulting from an invasion by an aggressive, more powerful neighbour.

Implementation details such as retirement age are very important, of course, but a from mile-high view, providing a decent if not extraordinary living standard to millions of people seems exactly like the type of infrastructure and public good projects governments are normally the best option for.

/jarek, who nevertheless has more private savings right now than "a quarter of those surveyed"

<comment><USER4> That's basically why Social Security was first introduced, and I think it still makes some sense. Looking at it in the other direction, it's more or less a fact that a large proportion of people won't save for retirement. Therefore, you have three choices: 1) a bunch of destitute and possibly homeless old people; 2) some sort of after-the-fact spending to provide emergency services/shelter/care for destitute elderly; or 3) some sort of mandatory pension system to make sure elderly don't become destitute in the first place.

People generally find #1 unpalatable, so the practical choices are #2 versus #3: do we set up some sort of general pension system to make sure elderly make at least a bare minimum income to stay off the streets (currently $20k/yr or so), or do we instead set aside money to spend on housing and caring for destitute elderly, e.g. through government-run nursing homes?

<comment><USER5> > Therefore, you have three choices:

You missed the one that was used for all of human history:

4\. Family ties, raise your kids well and establish that they should support you in old age. Bonus: Also gives an incentive to keep strong, healthy families together.

<comment><USER6> There's another historical alternative:

5\. When an old person becomes useless, drug him senseless and throw him off a cliff.

Allegedly this was customary among the ancient Sardinians in pre-Roman times. The drug they used on the elderly before killing them induced a sinister grimace, giving root to the expression "sardonic grin":

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science- news/5344257/Myst...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science- news/5344257/Mystery-of-the-sardonic-grin-solved.html)

<comment><USER5> Facetiousness aside, that's a neat anecdote, but the point stands. Original commentor said there were three options - destitute and possibly homeless old people, after the fact emergency spending, or some sort of pension system. That ignores family/community ties, which is in my opinion a much better solution. You can disagree, but not even presenting it as an option is either being disingenuous or missing a really obvious potential solution.

<comment><USER7> The government can't mandate interdependent families and communities. Those either happen or they don't. They can mandate social security.

Interestingly, the government can also mandate compulsory euthanasia for the elderly.

<comment><USER8> > Interestingly, the government can also mandate compulsory euthanasia for the > elderly.

I can't see it happening with short-term elections to office.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Basically, if you're not either a Wall St trader, or in a government retirement plan, or a company owner, then you're screwed.

Quote from the article:

"In other words, if you have saved just $25,000 -- and remember, that describes about half of all workers -- you are less than 2 percent of the way toward your goal. Your future definitely doesn't include cable."

My situation is that I have diligently saved 12-14% of everything I've ever earned, in the 12 years I've been in the US, into a 401K.

Sadly in those twelve years, I've endured 2% mutual fund fees and two market crashes, all of which hit my savings pretty hard. In fact, I lost money after inflation is taken into account.

So at 42, I basically need to build something I can sell and assure myself of some income over a reasonable time period. In my case as an engineer, I need to build a software company.

I also need to stay healthy, live as cheaply as possible, and shed as many expenses as possible once I get nearer to retirement. Boat or RV living looks like a great way to do that. Certainly paying the fixed costs of a house or apartment is going to be a killer for those on a small income.

<comment> brown9-2 I am not a financial advisor, but don't put everything into a 401k. Only put the minimum required to get your employer's matching contribution (if anything). But the rest of your intended retirement savings into an IRA, where you can completely control what your money is invested in.

Hell you are probably better off putting a bunch of money into an index fund that tracks the S&P500 and paying less expenses than the 401k funds do, for the same or better performance.

Make sure you are still saving a sizeable amount of money in a traditional, FDIC backed savings account, for emergencies.

<comment><USER10> My 401k _is_ an index fund. Or a couple of them, rather.

I dunno what other people's 401k plans look like, but I've got about as much flexibility to invest as I do with my Roth IRA, and pay _less_ in fees. A lot of that's because I knew more about finance when I set up the 401k, so I was already on the index-fund bandwagon and didn't pick it because, say, my dad had an account at the same firm.

Fund selection and account type are mostly orthogonal. The reason to decide between a 401k, IRA, Roth IRA, or individual account are tax and withdrawal considerations, not investment decisions. Then you make investment decisions _within_ the account based on where you want your money to go.

<comment><USER11> Withdrawal options are interesting. I always get conflicting information (from financial advisors no less!) about the options for early withdrawal from a Roth IRA. I think I'm finally comfortable (after confirming specifically with my Roth IRA provider) saying that you can withdrawal from your Roth IRA as long as it's only capital invested, and not money earned on that investment.

As spammy of a title as it is, Ramit Sethi's "I will Teach you to be Rich" book is a great no-bullshit look at understanding your personal finances.

<comment><USER10> That's my understanding too, for the Roth IRA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> My startup is working on exactly this problem. Our customer development reinforces that people - of all ages - know intellectually that they're supposed to save. But they have no idea how to start, or if they've started, if they're actually on track to have a decent retirement.

You can request an invite for our preview at <http://www.blueleaf.com> and shoot me an e-mail to email@example.com with HN in the subject and I'll make sure you get in before we launch. If there are any pony requests - "someone should really do [x]" - I'd love those too, even if you're not interested in our preview.

<comment><USER13> So this is cool, looks like a great app. Will it be as a service only, or will you offer customers the chance to buy the software and run it on their own hardware? I for one am leery of giving out all of my financial data.

<comment><USER12> Webapp only for the foreseeable future. The security/privacy is something we've spent a lot of time and effort on. (Our CTO is a crypto by trade with a focus on financial applications: <http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~cat/> ) Thanks!

<comment><USER14> Mint.com has millions of users who have provided that information. That said, in the medium to long term we're working on a unique solution that will permit you to keep your usernames and passwords only on your local computer while keeping the less sensitive data (transaction history, balances, etc.) on our servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I told the financial adviser that administers my 401K at my current job that "it's clear that putting money in a 401K makes Wall Street rich, it's not clear that it's making me rich."

There's a serious breakdown of trust between Main Street and Wall Street, and it's got (at least) three angles: (i) I'm not confident that money I invest in retirement plans is going to grow, or even keep it's value, (ii) I'm not sure that the "system" currently knows how to distribute capital to places where it will promote prosperous business (if it did, investment funds would be making money...) and (iii) I'm worried that giving money to Wall Street is like giving it to an enemy that's going to actively make my life worse: it's going to go into lobbying to keep Washington D.C. corrupt an ineffective and it's going to be used as a club to force businesses to eliminate jobs in the U.S. and ship them out elsewhere.

Given that business, government and such doesn't have a vision that makes sense five years down the road, never mind 25 or so when I retire, it's hard to avoid a "carpe diem" attitude and to simply try to minimize your use of financial services: spend what you make, don't borrow or save.

I've noticed some people here are enthusiastic about index funds; now, "seldom is heard a disparaging word" about index funds, but personally I think they're a lot more harmful than hedge funds could ever be.

I mean, index funds just spray money indiscriminantly at companies that are lucky enough to be on some list. It gives the big shareholders a great opportunity to collect rents, but it means that investors aren't doing there job -- why does an investor deserve to get a return on capital? Because they do some thinking about where they can put their capital to get a good return. If you don't do that thinking, you don't deserve any return... Just as if if you've got some job and you don't do your job... You don't deserve a paycheck.

"Bubblenomics" made index funds look brilliant from 1980-1999, but in the long term, I think mass investement in index funds is one of the major reasons why Wall Street doesn't work...

<comment><USER10> The interesting thing about index funds is that the better they work, the worse they work. If _everybody_ put their money into an index fund, then nobody would be actively researching stocks, and the valuations reflected in the index would be wildly out of whack with respect to the true values of the stock. But if _nobody_ puts money into an index fund, then we have a lot of people chasing high returns, a very efficient price-discovery system, and index funds that should return the exact mean of all your actively-managed funds.

As a very broad heuristic, I take the size of the financial industry to be a pretty good indicator of the efficiency of index funds. When the financial industry is large, you have many eyes actively looking over stocks, an efficient market, and index funds that should track the performance of the underlying assets well. When the financial industry is small, you have fewer eyes keeping an active watch on stocks, and so you're often better off becoming one of them than sticking everything into a dumb index fund. Right now, the financial industry is still pretty large.

As another interesting heuristic, I've found that oftentimes the best asset class to invest in is the one that _everybody_ is _certain_ is a bad investment. In the early 2000s, that was probably precious metals; in 2007, it was cash. Both asset classes have zoomed up since then. You don't want to invest in asset classes that people are actively looking at and decide are bad investments, though (eg. penny stocks). You want asset classes that people just take on faith to be bad investments.

<comment><USER15> I find your arguments somewhat convincing, but I've got the feeling that the "size of the financial industry" is one of the major reasons why it's not working. The housing bubble, for instance, shows that it can make very bad decisions -- I wonder if there is more money seeking a place to invest than there are places where the money can be profitably invested.

<comment><USER10> There was some prominent economist (Greenspan? Krugman?) who agreed with you, and blamed the recent string of bubbles on a "global savings glut", caused mainly by Asian development and the high savings rates of the newly-wealthy Asian middle class.

Anyway, I think there's a lot of truth to that, but you've got to work with the zeitgeist you're given. When the financial industry is large, index funds perform well _relative_ to actively managing your own money. They may still perform poorly on an absolute scale. When capital is abundant, rates of return for _everything_ go down.

You could also broaden things a bit to look at the economy as a whole. One of the reasons I'm interested in entrepreneurship is that capital is abundant, labor is abundant, and so logically the scarce resource would be their complement: _innovation_. You'd expect rates of return for entrepreneurship to skyrocket in a low-capital-cost, low-labor-cost environment like today. Which seems to be the case. Innovation has a high barrier to entry though: you need to have the skills and foresight to make something happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. It seems, perhaps, that the best rates of return come from investing in education in a narrow field of specialty that's broadly applicable to many emerging technologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article needs to be printed everywhere, at all times.

I have no idea how some of the people I see every day are going to save up the $1.5 million (in today's money) they'll need to retire. Half of 'em can't even pay off their credit card bills every month.

<comment><USER17> My retirement strategy is to die young. If I start making a lot more money or my cost of living magically decreases over the next decade I might reconsider this but otherwise I don't think social security is going to provide any quality standard of living. If I can't continue to work (which I don't mind doing) I plan to check out. (sad but true)

<comment><USER18> Okay, it takes effort to make me suspend my rule against politics on HN, but I have my limits. If you are some kind of troll, I nominate you for an Academy Award.

First: Social security is solvent, it will be solvent for years, and to fix it will require a minor tax increase decades from now. Quit believing propaganda.

Second: Our future budgetary problems are nonetheless real. But they are all about health care. If you really want to worry about balancing budgets in 2040, worry about that. Social Security is fine and will continue to be fine unless somebody deliberately fucks it up. (By talking like a fatalist, as you do, you inadvertently help the cause of the people who are trying to fuck it up; that is why we are having this little chat.)

Third: The major problem in the USA today is that we have a _massive excess of productive capacity_. Not only can the country afford to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you quite nicely, but our biggest problem is that after we did this we might _still_ have too much capacity. The economy is not well designed for such a situation, and it needs fixing.

(Aside: The fix is called "stimulus", literally known as "printing money". People won't spend money? Make them spend it now. Create new money and give it away; make the old money move by threatening to inflate it away in the future. That nobody in power understands this, or that they pretend not to, is an epic failure of education and/or governance; the consequence will be millions of impoverishments and, likely, early deaths, perhaps even your own. Tragedy sucks.)

To the extent that the country _does not_ choose to feed, clothe, house, and entertain you and everyone around you, it is a problem of government, economics, and politics. It is not that we are physically incapable. It is that we are not so organized.

The solution is to organize.

Where will "the money" come from? Money is not a physical thing, like platinum. It's some numbers in a spreadsheet by which we keep score: If your number is higher, you get to control more about what the economy does.

If you wake up and discover that all the money belongs to a handful of people who have gamed the ruleset by which money is distributed, and that they are failing to use their giant pile of money to direct the economy to keep everyone else fed, clothed, housed, and entertained to the correct extent: You change the rules, or you stop playing the game.

By many orders of magnitude, the best option is to change the rules. Or, rather, to change one rule, to turn one knob that was _designed_ to be turned: Raise taxes on the people with the money.

That anyone _contemplates suicide_ rather than go down fighting for this simple rule change is a triumph of modern propaganda.

Get up out of the fetal position and be an American, for the love of all that is holy.

<comment><USER19> _First: Social security is solvent, it will be solvent for years, and to fix it will require a minor tax increase decades from now. Quit believing propaganda._

Solvent in the sense that next month's check won't bounce? Or solvent in the sense that if it were an independent entity entitled to its current revenue streams, and nothing else, you'd happily buy someone's future SS income at 100 cents on the dollar?

Or, wait, solvent in the sense that if _I_ had a balance sheet that looked like theirs, and I made the promises they make, I wouldn't be going to jail?

<comment><USER20> Solvent in the sense that there's enough money to pay full benefits until the late 2030's or early 2040's without any changes. And solvent in the sense that minor adjustments to benefits or taxes will fix it beyond that.

[http://www.brookings.edu/multimedia/video/2009/0514_social_s...](http://www.brookings.edu/multimedia/video/2009/0514_social_security_aaron.aspx)

<comment><USER19> The accounting profession has created a term for entities that are _almost_ solvent, and can _almost_ pay off their debts. The term is "insolvent."

It's dangerous to have entities for which the clock is running out. What we should aim for is the opposite: a social security system that's gradually accumulating assets, and can eventually use that to offload its risks (by, for example, paying a life insurance company to assume some of its obligations).

That way, 1) we know how much things cost, and 2) our problems are gradually getting solved. Now, we have the opposite situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A lot of things are likely to change over the next few decades, so I wouldn't bank on retiring in the same way that people have done in recent history. The whole notion of retirement is actually quite a modern concept, which really only arose within the last century (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retirement>). There's going to be more automation which will mean that people can work for longer, and I suspect that the whole notion of what it means to "work" will change.

<comment><USER22> > _There's going to be more automation which will mean that people can work > for longer, and I suspect that the whole notion of what it means to "work" > will change._

why doesn't automation eliminate the need for work?

<comment><USER21> Automation has greatly reduced the amount of agricultural work, and jobs today which we regard as central to the economy are also likely to be eventually automated. Probably what constitutes "work" will change, and things we regard as recreational today may become "work".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> frankly I think retiring in the U.S. just won't be a viable option for many people...the cost of living is just too high.

I mean think about it....to retire properly, you need to pretty much put away all your spare money for decades.

What I think will happen, is people will just start retiring to other countries where the cost of living is so small, that you can live comfortably on 10-15K a year.

<comment><USER24> I've heard that Costa Rica has a thriving American retiree community for exactly that reason.

<comment><USER25> Which in the longer term will drive up the cost of living in Costa Rica.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The whole thing gets a bit less scary if you decide to retire at 75, rather than 65, which is not a problem if you take care of yourself, and don't have a physically demanding job (which most of us don't). You need 1/3 less money and have ten years longer to get it.

<comment><USER27> You might not have a choice, though. Better be prepared for other scenarios (bad health, etc).

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> $1.5M is a ridiculously high target. If you retire at age 60, you have a 20 year life expectancy (males) and 24 years for females. With $1.5M you can spend $50k a year for thirty years without even factoring in continued earnings on that money or $20k/year in social security payments. Once you do factor those in, you'll die with more than the $1.5M you started with in retirement funds.

<comment><USER29> Right, and you'd have to save over three thousand dollars, every single month, for forty years, to reach that goal.

<comment><USER30> This math is grossly oversimplified...you're assuming zero interest. I'm on a train and can't do the math right now, but compounding interest + other variables like employer 401k contributions, tax shelters, etc make a huge difference when doing this calculation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe someone needs to start paying those under-40 workers what they're worth. Perhaps salary increases should be considered annually in context of ACTUAL cost of living increases, not fairy tale inflation figures? Well, executives are having no problem hanging onto their savings. Actually, oh - they're hanging on to our savings. Maybe it will start trickling down soon!

</comment><comment><USER32> the hardest part for me to truly believe, since i'm currently in my 20s and enjoy work, is that i'll _have_ to retire. is it true that when i get old i won't be able to program/manage or find some kind of reasonably enjoyable and sustainable employment? will my flaws, such as physical and possibly memory constraints, out weigh my virtures, such as experience and knowledge? there's so much unknown to getting old and i am so confident and able right now. do i really need to be _scared_ of old age?

<comment><USER33> It's not about being scared, it's about being prepared. It's about making sure you have the choice as to whether or not you'll be working when you are 70, 80, 90, or whatever age you start to feel old.

Do you live to work, or do you work to live?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> doesn't this problem reduce to the availability of labour?

i'd like to see a thorough accounting of how much labour is required to maintain: our food supply, our residential properties, basic services, etc.

and i'd like to see that compared to current price of these things, to see if they make any sense.

it makes no sense to me that as we've progressed technologically, it seems to have become increasingly difficult to survive.

<comment><USER10> A lot of this has to do with marginal value. The cost of basic survival has gone way down - but in the process, it's freed up a lot of disposable income, so people build bigger, better, and yet less efficient ways of doing things to soak up that extra money.

Health care's perhaps the biggest example. A hundred years ago, millions of children died in infancy from things like measles, whooping cough, polio, etc. Now this has been wiped out by vaccines that cost maybe a day's salary for a parent (and cost the manufacturer probably pennies to make). Same with antibiotics.

The money all gets spent on the other end of life. We now have the technology to keep patients who would've died within the hour alive for months in an ICU. That costs _millions_ , and doesn't work all the time. But when it does - <USER2> can you put a price on that? What price is there on a father being able to see his kids grow up, or a grandparent being able to meet their grandchildren?

The same goes for many other areas. We can build 1200-square-feet houses pretty cheaply. But why bother, when there's some family that's willing to pay over $1M for that 5000-square-feet McMansion?

I think a lot of the problem is that American culture is so damned competitive. It's not enough to have _enough_ \- you also have to have more than the neighbors. There's really no end to this game - it will _always_ be possible to have something slightly better, it's just that it becomes increasingly expensive the more you try to squeeze out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> What if you don't plan to retire? If you're making money doing something you love (in my case, web development), why would you ever need to retire? To rest? To do all the things you've always meant to do but didn't make time for when you were younger? To see the world?

I'd rather do that stuff while I'm young; learn a new language in my spare time now, start that band now, travel to foreign countries now - hell, I can do my work there if I need to. I think retiring makes sense for people slogging it out 40 hours a week at jobs they hate, but it doesn't make sense for those of us who actually find our work fulfilling.

<comment><USER35> Web development may not be around in 20-40 years, certainly not in the way it's done today. That said, I'm sure that type of technical ability will be in demand, you may have to learn some new things.

<comment><USER34> Well, I think the internet will be around in 20-40 years, and if you're not constantly learning new skills then you're dead in the water anyways. I just don't see retirement as the goal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Its great to save up but imagine you get a chronic illness or cancer and you have a 20% deductible on your insurance. Suddenly your life savings are gone or seriously reduced.

</comment><comment><USER37> First some advice you should take: Check out Bob Brinker (<http://www.bobbrinker.com/portfolio.asp>)

I don't worry about retirement because when I was 19 years old and working in the valley I happened to catch his radio show when he said to pull out of the market. It saved me $20,000 that's still working for me today.

(The 10 year numbers might look low right now but keep in mind the Dow was DOWN 14% in that same time frame)

Second some advice that's based on my semi-educated opinion: 401(k) is a scam for anyone under 50. Yes your employer might match it but even the risky portfolio of a 401(k) is usually very conservative and the guy running it usually isn't the firm's star (no one ever got rich managing a 401(k) accounts). If you're over 50 and can't afford to lose the money than go with that but if you have some time I personally think it's better to take a little risk and hopefully get a bigger reward.

<comment><USER38> The big advantage of 401k is that it is a tax deferred account which can be a good amount depending on your tax bracket. Also they don't have to be limited to just a small number of funds, some companies also provide the option to invest on your own( if this is not an option at you company, have a chat with the person running the benefit plan) and if you leave you can roll it over to a rollover IRA at any broker you want. Finally, if your company does provide a match, that is money you are essentially throwing away for what is usually a very small percentage of your salary.

<comment><USER9> You have written down the generally promulgated wisdom. i.e. what you're being sold by Wall St and the Government.

However, if you actually need to withdraw any of these savings ahead of time, you're looking at a 10% penalty. And who's to say that taxes won't have risen on 'fat-cat' retirees in 10 or 20 years. Why not take the ( _known_ ) risk now, pay your taxes and have _risk-free_ savings _now_.

What about another market crash?

Can you invest in property, or in metals, in a 401K?

Can you avoid 2% mutual fund fees.

I posted elsewhere in the thread, but think very carefully before pumping a lot of money into a 401K. 20 years is a long time for the government to keep the value of money stable, or for Wall Street to not sucker you in a crash, or for fees to T Rowe Price to eat away your nest-egg.

If I had another opportunity, I'd sock 5% away in a 401K into Treasuries, and put the rest in cash and metals. There's a reason banks have vaults with gold, silver, platinum etc.

Answer this question: Do you trust Wall St and the government with your money for 30 years for the small benefit of maybe a 10% tax saving, or do you actually want to maintain the control of, and the value of that money, by paying regular taxes on it now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> My grandmother is in her 90s and mentally she is at 100%. She gets around a little slower now.

That is a scary thought for some. She retired in her 50s!

<comment><USER31> So, maybe she should be working!

<comment><USER39> She has always been active in the community. Since retiring she has volunteered at the hospital, nursing homes and in the community 5 days a week.

Combine that with her great-grandchildren and she is working a busy schedule!

<comment><USER31> No doubt, one doesn't get to that age feeling fine without staying quite active mentally and physically.

<comment><USER39> Agreed - If I ever retire from paying work - I will still be working.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> My plan is one mentioned on NPR several years ago: retire, but work part-time at a grocery store that has insurance benefits.

<comment><USER41> All these clever plans fall apart when everyone does them.

What are the barriers to entry to working part time in a grocery store? What makes you think you can compete with a teenager who wants that job?

<comment><USER40> fair enough. I'd still like to do some job that is more socially involved and keeps me standing up every day, and talking to people. We have a fairly wealthy guy in his sixties who decided to work as a manager just to have something to do every day. Along with that my similarly-aged pension-era parents are starting a business for the first time. My point is that retirement isn't a requirement for living your older years. If anything retirement is more of a nascent American concept.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Or migrate to countries that offer free health care.

<comment><USER41> There's no such thing as "free" - you mean healthcare paid for by their taxpayers. Who might not be keen on non-contributors showing up and using it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yes save that money and watch it disappear down the rat-hole the next time some Too-Big-To-Fail bank decides to raid whatever fund you've put it all in.

He's right, of course, that younger people need to save more because institutions are failing all around us. Too bad he neglects that second part...

</comment><comment><USER42> I think globalization and internet will saturate <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_dream>

<comment><USER22> i don't understand what you're saying.</comment></comment>


Low-Latency HTML Canvas - <AUTHOR> https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/05/desynchronized <comment><USER2> what's the drawback of enabling it all the time? why isn't this the default?

if only the inner content of a canvas has changed (i.e. the size of the canvas hasn't changed), why do we still need to update the dom?

<comment><USER3> Ive experimented with this in a 2d canvas app but did not notice any performance improvement, but did get some issues with the rendering.

<comment><USER4> Low latency doesn't imply overall performance. Maybe high high latency they can process things in batches for higher throughput.</comment></comment></comment>


Traffic Jam in China Could Last for Weeks.  Cars move half-mile per day. - <AUTHOR> http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/aug/23/chinas-massive-traffic-jam-could-last-for-weeks/

<comment><USER2> Reminds me of Dr Who series 3 episode 3: "Gridlock".</comment>


5 MB from IBM in 1956 - <AUTHOR> https://www.instagram.com/p/_P7IS0KdCv/?taken-by=acremades <comment><USER2> The caption on the photo doesn't say what's actually in the crate. However, 1956 is when the first IBM 350 disk drive was shipped, and it stored 5 million characters:

 _" The IBM 350 disk storage unit, the first disk drive, was announced by IBM as a component of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system on September 13, 1956. ... The first engineering prototype 350 disk storage shipped to Zellerbach in June 1956 ...

Its design was motivated by the need for real time accounting in business. The 350 stored 5 million 6-bit characters (3.75 MB). It had fifty 24-inch (610 mm) diameter disks with 100 recording surfaces. Each surface had 100 tracks. The disks spun at 1200 RPM. Data transfer rate was 8,800 characters per second. An access mechanism moved a pair of heads up and down to select a disk pair (one down surface and one up surface) and in and out to select a recording track of a surface pair. Several improved models were added in the 1950s. The IBM RAMAC 305 system with 350 disk storage leased for $3,200 per month."_ [1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_350) (includes photos of the device)

</comment><comment><USER3> Back in 1970, I worked at a place that had a box about half that size that contained 1 megabyte of core memory – which cost about a megabuck at the time. It was a third-party addon to the 360/50.</comment>