How to Steal a Billion - <AUTHOR> https://oversharing.substack.com/p/how-to-steal-a-billion <comment><USER2> That's the funny thing about Billions-with-a-b: normal thinking about money and value just doesn't work IMO.

The Vision Fund is going to lose ~$19 billion. But Masa Son still controls _over $80 billion._ That's more wealth and power than almost any human being will ever have in history, ever.

At that point the numbers don't even matter. Maybe Neumann took Masa Son for $50 billion. Who cares? A person can live in the USA for their whole lives without working on as little as $3-5 _million._ Throwing billions around like this, especially when it's digital/paper money in the form of stocks and big corporate deals, really puts the absurdity sprinkles on top of this whole turd bowl.

It's this kind of thing that makes people lose confidence in the system. Most people out here are sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's, while the news is talking about billions being gained and lost in the span of a few weeks - so fast it makes you wonder if that amount of wealth really even existed in the first place.

How much has to be "lost" between digital transactions before the numbers become completely meaningless? A trillion? A quadrillion?

<comment><USER3> I am curious on how a person can live in the USA for their whole lives for $3 - 5 million. Serious question.

<comment><USER4> Really? $5M is $100k a year for 50 years. I can live comfortably off of $35k a year a long as I'm not in San Fransisco or something. With just $1M I could live indefinitely off investment income, which would be like $50k a year. Double those expenses to support a family, and you're still under budget.

<comment><USER5> $35k pre or post tax and what's your total tax rate?

<comment><USER4> Either one is fine. $35k post tax is super comfy and easy to do, while $35k pre-tax is a little trickier, and would be 15-20% tax rate depending on your state. Monthly budget of $1100 rent and utils, $300 food, $150 car, $60 entertainment, $300 misc, plus $150 for (bad) health insurance. That's $25k/year. Not exactly a comfortable lifestyle but a few hundred dollars extra in a few categories wouldn't dig into $5M much.

<comment><USER5> Everyone's situation is different, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume yours is reflective of most.

I take home 20k/30k, etr of 35%.

Everything else seems pretty far under average, or in the case of rent, unrealistic. My prices are reflective of a high tax/cost of living city in the northeast.

Just rent on a studio within a thirty minute drive averages $1k, only including trash, snow.

Add $100 for basic cable internet.

Double that car cost, 150 almost covers gas and insurance. Doesn't include paid parking. Some jobs and Some parts of the area can get public transport to workfor them, I can't.

$60 is pretty low for a decent cell phone plan. Be more like 120 in reality.

health cares an extra $800/mo (after insurance pays) if I were to follow my health care providers reccomendations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, this really drives home how absurd the whole WeWork thing was. And even until recently people were talking about how apparently Masayoshi San was playing some kind of three-dimensional chess and would come out the winner from WeWork. A fool and his money are soon parted, I guess.

Also, the post title is a nice nod to an Audrey Hepburn/Peter O'Toole movie dripping with '60s cool: [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522/)

<comment><USER7> To statistically show skill in investment it takes a whole lot more data than the human mind assumes, so this is a common occurrence in the world of finance. John Paulson, who became famous as one of the fund managers to make a killing shorting mortgage backed securities, lost 50% in a year (much of it to Sino Forrest, a Chinese fraud) a couple years later.

<comment><USER8> Yes, it is very difficult to actually judge skill versus just survivor-ship bias. I worked for a hedge fund that had around $20B under management, lost 60% in 2008, then made all of that back in 18-24 months. Now, they're worth 50% more than loss. Are they skilled? I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I object to the word "steal" being used to describe Adam Neumann's actions. He did not take anything by force or deception (as far as I know). If I take a piece of dog shit, spray paint it gold and sell it as a bar of gold, you could argue that is "stealing" (or at least fraud). If I say "this is a piece of dog shit that I spray painted gold but I am selling it for the price of gold" and an adult of otherwise sound mind accepts the deal, that is not stealing. What Neumann did is more like the latter scenario.

<comment><USER9> What Neumann did was unethical. He stole from We Work employees.

<comment><USER7> How?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> WeWork/Uber/Airbnb... it's interesting how WeWork is classified as tech IPO next to these (e.g. Softbank used its "technology fund" to invest in WeWork). How did this happen? Isn't it an obvious real estate company? Is it because WeWork appealed to tech startups and remote workers?

<comment><USER11> Isn't Uber an obvious transportation company?

Isn't AirBnB an obvious hospitality company?

<comment><USER12> It's an interesting point. If drivers are employees, I'd call them a transportation company. If they aren't, I'd call them a tech company. Analogous logic for Airbnb. But it seems like too subtle a distinction to be reasonable. More likely, "tech company" just isn't a super useful label anymore, with the grey area growing and growing.

<comment><USER13> I tend to view tech companies as companies that consider custom tech a competitive advantage and attempt to maintain in-house competency.

If you're a grocery chain and you contract out most of your technical needs then you aren't a tech company. But if you're a grocery chain and you hire and maintain a large technical team to provide you with various custom pieces of technology, you're both a grocery chain and a tech company.

This could be any piece of tech: from custom software to custom refrigeration systems.

<comment><USER14> This is a great way to think about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> >> He saw an excess of capital in Silicon Valley and a raw, unsatisfied ambition in SoftBank's Masayoshi Son and his $100 billion Vision Fund

It doesn't take a genius to see this opportunity but it does take an incredibly lucky person to be in a position to exploit it.

If Adam Neumann doesn't end up in jail after all this, then I will concede that he is not an idiot.

<comment><USER16> Adam was/is a promoter extraordinaire. He promoted a utopian future ideal state to his investors and created an investment frenzy though build outs of cool, edgy office space. He created a show and the investors came in droves. He negotiated the investment rounds well and benefited from demand for his product that caused the investors to let their guard down so as to not miss out. The Fear of Missing out (FOMO) is a terribly strong force in the VC community. Adam has set himself and his family up for generations and its all likely legal.

<comment><USER15> It says more about investor stupidity than it says about Adam Neumann. IMO, most investors are pretty stupid. Like herd animals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd like to think that Adam Neumann will see some manner of ill effect for paying himself $1 billion of other people's money, while delivering negative value, but then reality comes crashing in to remind me that no, he won't.

Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.

<comment><USER18> I'm going to bet that he has several months of hard reflection about life and maybe write a book about it. Maybe he'll try to pull a Steve Jobs and try a few new companies to redeem himself.

But you know, the next few years of his life are going to be mildly unpleasant, and we shouldn't forget about the emotional impact about that. Maybe he'll have a very public come-to-Jesus moment that will be cathartic for everyone involved, or maybe he'll disappear from public life forever with his vast WeWork wealth and live on some estate in an exotic locale.

But either way, this failure isn't going to be easy for him. He's going to feel several emotions and not all of them will be pleasant.

<comment><USER19> I think this is overly optimistic, what you're saying.

What's he gonna lose? Friends who invested with him? He can buy new ones.

Feel bad? You can literally hire a whole team of therapists for life.

He can sit in his mansions and not be in the public eye forever, it's not like being in the public eye is some sort of requirement for living.

Heck, he might even find a new following among people who want to emulate how he grabbed all that money.

<comment><USER18> I'm intentionally being tongue in cheek. Unless he's a total sociopath (which I don't think he is) he's probably going to suffer mild blowback, the kind of blowback and shitty feelings us mortals feel when we've been ousted from a job.

But it's the kind of disappointment and anger that you get over in a few months.

The only difference is he'll have a billion dollars and the ability to do whatever in life he wants.

If you were in his shoes, would you go back and do things any differently?

<comment><USER19> > If you were in his shoes, would you go back and do things any differently?

Maybe not hire a famous DJ for the announcement of layoffs.

<comment><USER18> Oh man, that's awful, have a link for that?

If this were reddit I would link to /r/aboringdystopia.

<comment><USER19> [https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-adam-neumann- layo...](https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-ceo-adam-neumann-layoffs- firing-tequila-shots-run-dmc-2019-9?r=US&IR=T)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm more concerned about the discrimination in finance/lending, which is thoroughly entrenched at this point.

Anyone can borrow $50,000 for a new car, $500,000 for a new home, or $5,000,000 in venture capital if they are connected enough. But there is simply no money available for anything outside of mainstream status quo thinking. That's why the Ubers and Airbnbs and WeWorks in these times are founded on hustling and even skirting laws in some cases.

That's great and everything (I guess?), but I am personally tired of the hustling/hacking mentality. I'd like to see real progress in the standard of living for everyone in the world. That's founded on the idea of self- actualization, that everyone has the modest resources needed to start their own business or invent the things that help themselves and their communities.

How many people here have been on verge of financial ruin trying to get their ideas off the ground? I've been up, I've been down, but overall I've basically been running on empty for over 20 years. I'm tired of it. I didn't expect my career to turn out this way. And I'm deeply concerned about a looming recession forcing otherwise capable, intelligent people to scrape by underemployed, doing menial work to make rent because there isn't enough capital flowing. Because it's all locked up in a few wealthy peoples' hands, who have a very Laissez-faire view of economics.

All of the above is why I'm almost certain now that hard times are coming as early as next year. I've already been through it twice with the dot com bust and housing bubble popping, and we're overdue for the next downturn.

^^^ Note that this wasn't always the case. There were protections in place like the Glass-Steagall Act that lessened these boom-bust cycles, which were overturned by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act and others. What we've been going through with this vast increase in wealth inequality is by design.

I was born in 1977 so I remember when it wasn't this way. But many of you reading this now were born after the corruption was instated and might not realize how honestly affluent middle class Americans felt in the 1980s and 1990s.

It can be that way again, but please, look beyond private sector solutions to these problems. The government is We the People, not some specter out to get us. I know that many of you live in Silicon Valley and other big cities that suffer from high taxes or government micromanagement, but I live in Idaho and have seen how the lack of government can lead to widespread poverty and environmental degradation.

Laws can change and movements do happen, which is why I'm optimistic that reforms are also coming and that we might finally see some relief in the 2020s.

</comment><comment><USER21> So how do I get money from this Billionaire for my company? Not even looking for a lot maybe 100k a year for 4 years.

<comment><USER22> I think you're thinking too small :-)

To actually get anything, you should ask for 10-15 million in seed capital.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> fraud and stealing are different things

<comment><USER24> Correct. ~$2 billion dollar fraud - collective shrug. Stealing a $7 toothbrush (while being the wrong color) - prison.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I like Matt Levine's take on this: (re: Adam Neumann)

 _If you want, you can imagine him as a diabolical genius who explicitly set out to short the unicorn bubble and then walked away barefoot with a jaunty whistle and $700 million of SoftBank's money, but that does not strike me as necessary or accurate. My model doesn't require you to think that your startup is dumb! You don't need to worry about Neumann's personal beliefs and motivations at all, really. You can just think of him as a product of the invisible hand of the market. A lot of money was pouring into startups, there was a lot of demand, and the demand called forth supply, and the people who supplied the supply got rich; it is elemental and straightforward and has very little to do with questions like "is this a good business model?"_ [0]

 _"Capitalism occasionally makes huge mistakes," is part of the story, but the other part is that there are rich rewards for those who spot the mistakes and bet against them. This is a lesson specifically of financial capitalism: In most businesses you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and create value by doing a better thing, but the financial markets are special because you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and get rich by taking the other side, without creating value or doing a better thing. If you notice that people are buying dumb unicorn shares for too much money, you don't have to invent a better way of doing business or of funding companies. You can just sell them as many as possible of the dumbest possible unicorn shares; when the bubble bursts, you collect your winnings. This sort of thing—getting rich by being smarter than your counterparties, making markets more efficient by being on the right side of bets—is a classic path to wealth creation in the financial business. Tech, traditionally, has a different ethos, one of getting rich by changing the world. But sometimes there are crossovers, and anyway maybe WeWork was never really a tech company._ [1]

[0] - [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-02/the- tr...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-02/the-trades-will- be-free-now)

[1] - [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how- do...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do-you-like- we-now)

<comment><USER18> I mean, maybe he was a genius fraudster, but maybe he convinced himself to believe in what he was selling -- which made him all the better of a salesman.

<comment><USER26> As George Costanza famously said "it's not a lie if you believe it"</comment></comment></comment>


Sorites Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ <comment><USER2> I wrote my senior thesis on this topic when I was completing my philosophy major. One of the best texts on the subject is "Vagueness" by Williamson.

It's an arcane but super interesting topic that actually has wide implications. It's also IMO one of the most thorny problems in contemporary philosophy.

edit: I'm currently busy but can come back later to answer questions if anyone is interested.

[http://www.amazon.com/Vagueness-Problems-Philosophy- Timothy-...](http://www.amazon.com/Vagueness-Problems-Philosophy-Timothy- Williamson/dp/0415139805)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what the big deal here is. This has an obvious solution.

"Heap" is a word. Words have meaning to people. Different people ascribe different meanings to the same word.

Each grain added to a pile of grain measurably changes the probability that an observer will classify the resulting collection as a heap. While it's not a linear function, it's generally a positive correlation, more grains means a higher probability of any individual calling it a heap.

That is a collection of grain of size n+1 has a probability of being classified as a heap that is usually greater than the probability of a collection of grain of size n being classified as a heap.

Where's the paradox?

<comment><USER4> It's just interesting when you have discrete entities and you can't show inductively that there is any point where the classification changes from non- heap to heap, but clearly that point must exist. It's interesting from the same perspective as what makes the ship of Theseus interesting.

the probability of something being viewed as a heap could only be measured statistically as the probability doesn't derive from some direct process. The issue can be viewed in both an axiomatic and a empirical way and both views lead to interesting conclusions.

<comment><USER5> That point may not exist though, if it just gains more 'heapness' over time. Even if 99% of people agree that a collection of grains of sand is a 'heap' there might be some people who still insist that it is not.

<comment><USER6> After a point, 100% will agree (anybody not agreeing that an obvious heap of say 100kg of sand is not a heap but just grains, can be discarded as a madman).

But still the exact point can't be specified, we only know when it's over- surpassed.

It's like in the famous trial, when they asked someone to specify is a film is "porn" or "erotic art", and he said:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love this paradox! It actually transforms into an interesting general heuristic for life[1]: basically, any time reality throws a categorization boundary at you (you observe f(a) = X and f(b) = not-X), gradually transform it (a to b) until you see exactly where the category flips.

For example, if you have a bug in case A but not case B, gradually transform A into B and see where it disappears.

If a law says that you can do X in condition A but not condition B, see if it's legal midway between A and B.

[1] which I call the "continuity heuristic" since it depends on reality obeying a rule that if a is close to b, f(a) is close to f(b).

</comment><comment><USER8> _Given then that one grain of wheat does not make a heap, it would seem to follow that two do not, thus three do not, and so on._

The weasel words in this case are "and so on." Four grains of wheat can make a heap. Put 3 on the bottom and one on top. If it's too windy to work where you are, slather them in honey. A sticky heap is still a heap.

<comment><USER9> You're right, that isn't really the best statement of the paradox. Try this:

Imagine you have a heap of sand. Now, if you remove a single grain of sand from a heap, it's still a heap, right? But if you remove every grain of sand, then eventually, you're left without any sand, which is definitely not a heap. So somewhere along the way, when removing individual grains of sand, the heap stopped being a heap. But where, exactly, did that happen?

<comment><USER10> It happened at the exact moment when none of the grains were supported by any of the others. A flat, single grain layer of sand on the ground is not a heap no matter how many grains are in it.

<comment><USER11> Soros in Greek does not have the structural connotation of heap in English (which I infer from your reply, given English is not my mother tongue).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For the HN population, translating this into security can be useful.

Here is a Sorites argument for AES key strength.

A key of length 1 bit is not secure

A key of length 2 bit is not secure

A key of length 3 bit is not secure

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

A key of length 1024 bits is not secure

We would consider the conclusion absurd. Why?

Because we have a definition of security as such: The expense of breaking the key is not worth the value of the secret it protects.

For 1 bit, the expense of breaking the key is so low, it is very easy to come up with secrets that are greater than the value.

For 256 bits, the expense of breaking the key is so (literally) astronomically high, that it would be very hard to come up with secrets that have greater value than the expense of breaking the key.

In addition, note that for a given secret 1 bit can make the difference between secure and not secure.

Notice as we increase the key length bit by bit, more and more secrets are having values that are less than the expense of breaking the key.

Now let us look at a heap. First let us come up with a working definition. Let us say that we define a heap as an amount of grain that is larger than can be held in a closed fist.

Notice how this varies from person to person. Also notice for a given person, there can easily be the case where 1 extra grain makes the difference between heap and not.

Also notice, that as we increase the number of grains by one, more and more people would consider the collection of grains a heap.

</comment><comment><USER13> So, mathematics has this concept of an expression being "well-defined". It means you can always tell if something meets the definition, exactly, in every case.

Almost no definitions in the real world are well-defined. Heaps are just the tip of the iceberg. Any practical thing, a cat, a tree, a table, a car -- if you mutilate it enough, it turns into something else, and the transition point is rarely sharp. And the reason is very simple; it's that in practical life, we don't define things propositionally, we define them inductively. This is a cat, and that's a cat, and that's another cat, and cats are things with this constellation of properties that you learn over time, so when you come across an item where some of those properties are true and some aren't, you say, "Well, that's sort of a weird cat".

It is such an incredibly common thing in daily life to run up against fuzzy definition boundaries. "Can you get milk from the store for me if it's open?" "Well, there's some sort of demonstration going on right outside -- how bad do you need it?" We handle it just fine. We recognize when "open" may not be well-defined in every circumstance and valid in the same way for every intent, and we're able to discard the simple definition for something more complex as needed. It's not even weird when you consider that definitions are just models you are using to describe the world, and those models can be made simple or complex. We rarely describe the world as it IS, down to the atom. We simplify.

Sure, when you throw inductively defined practical models intended for communication into a rigorous logical framework, they don't have the sharp edges such a framework expects. So? That really shouldn't be unexpected. :)

Everything we have to say about the real world is an abstraction. Some ideas are leakier abstractions than others, but it's all simplification and modeling in the end.

</comment><comment><USER14> "Vagueness" is one side where the other side of the same coin is abstraction - instead of counting number of sand grains in any given case and using "set of N grains" we abstracted such cases - where N is large enough for precise value of N not being important - into "heap".

Abstraction is a convenient tool, and trying to put abstracted out details back in - like the precise number of grains - makes the tool more of a unnecessary liability, i.e "heap" abstraction disappears the moment you ask the precise number of grains, and instead "set of N grains" appears back.

</comment><comment><USER15> A related question (I think), is what counts as "impossible"?

According to quantum mechanics, anything that is not prohibited by a conservation law is possible, with some non-zero probability.

So we have to pragmatically redefine "impossible" to mean "the probability is so small that it won't happen".

But then where do we draw the line between "too small" and "not too small"?

(We can also qualify "won't happen" by saying "cannot have happened in the history of the observable universe", and take into account an upper bound on the number of "events" that can ever happen in the history of the observable universe, eg ~ 2^380. So, for example, an event with probability 2^-500 on one occasion has probability < 2^-120 of ever having happened that we could know about.)

</comment><comment><USER16> It might not be apparent from the examples provided in the article, but I would argue that this paradox is the primary polarizing force behind most people's morality disagreements.

A lot of the disagreements come down to the question "Well where do we draw the line?"

<comment><USER17> This is why I feel like I'm transitioning, over time, from value ethics to deontology. Value ethics are really susceptible to this paradox. But if I can induce what appear to be my principles from my value-ethics instincts, and then, as an exercise, try to reason out from my principles and act accordingly, then perhaps I am more consistent.

That's if you see being consistent as an axiom to try to always meet. A lot of people don't, and I don't know how to argue with them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why is it necessary to reduce language to set theory?

I say it is a heap when doing so improves the odds of my preferred outcome in a conversation. Being labeled a heap doesn't have to be a binary truism. Or even a probability. I guess I reject the entire field of study :).

<comment><USER6> > _Being labeled a heap doesn 't have to be a binary truism. Or even a > probability._

That in itself is the whole point of the original observation.

That there are things, and not fleeting things like notions and feelings, but actual tangible things, that are nevertheless not in a specific binary state, but in some non-specified intermediate state.

<comment><USER18> The semantics are difficult here, apologies. I can't tell if we are agreeing :)

Why do things have to be in any state, even a "non-specific intermediate" one? The original observation seems to have devolved into an argument on the fundamental nature of language expressing "state". State here implying some sort of formalism, like sets.

Can't we just assert that language doesn't assign or derive from a formal state? Rather, the use of language is highly correlated with outcomes/observations, but not intrinsically meaningful.

<comment><USER6> > _Why do things have to be in any state, even a "non-specific intermediate" > one?_

Because being in a state is just another name of being a thing (or plain "being"). If you "are", by definition you are in some state (at any given point in time).

> _Can 't we just assert that language doesn't assign or derive from a formal > state? Rather, the use of language is highly correlated with > outcomes/observations, but not intrinsically meaningful._

Well, even without using language, we experience things as being in particular states -- we see them having color, making a noise, being there and not here, etc.

<comment><USER18> I'm enjoying this too much :)

Let us say "the sky is blue". With formalism, you'd argue that blue is a state, and the sky is a thing, and they have a relationship.

I'd argue that language does not actually assign strict identities/state. There isn't some platonic "blue" or "heap". Rather "sky" is a word highly correlated with a set of observations, as is "blue". When we combine the words into the sentence above, we end up with a sequence that results in a useful outcome from our perspective, so we say it.

The original link shows how people really try to assign boundaries, as if one "thing" really "is blue" and another isn't. And then it becomes self contradictory, and people invent yet more explanations. I just question the base assumption that we need to assign logic/boundaries/formalism to language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is related to the Continuum Fallacy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy) Or another really fun one, Loki's wager.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why is it defined that a single grain of wheat isn't a very small heap?

<comment><USER2> If a single grain is a heap then any number of grains is a heap and the property of being a heap is meaningless. A single grain as a "small" heap also runs into a problem called higher order vagueness. Where do you draw the line between a small heap and a regular heap or a large heap? Determining the cutoff seems to be another heap problem.

<comment><USER5> That problem applies with any arbitrary category. If you look at any color, you're going to describe it as whatever color category its closest to. If it's more red than yellow, you might call it orange, I might call it red, someone else might call it orange-red, or I dunno 'pumpkin'. Language is imprecise.

<comment><USER2> Is it categories themselves that are arbitrary or the set of items belonging to a category are arbitrary? Do you mean that the meaning of a statement is imprecise in that it is vague or ambiguous? Or do you mean that the way that humans employ language to convey concepts is imprecise?

You are thinking like a psychologist or a linguist. I'm not denying that many people view this is a tedious and seemingly silly thing to argue about but you can't metaphorically just throw up you hands and claim that it doesn't matter as a valid counter argument when you are doing philosophy.

<comment><USER21> You make philosophy sound like a form of OCD, obsessing about putting everything in its place.

The answer to your questions is 'all of the above, to some degree'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is simply a failure to sufficiently define a word.

<comment><USER23> > This is simply a failure to sufficiently define a word.

That's the point: How do you "sufficiently define" the word involved here?

Also, how do you "sufficiently define" the word 'ethical'?</comment></comment>


AXA Predicts Destruction Of The Eurozone - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/7827867/AXA-fears-fatal-flaw-will-destroy-eurozone.html

<comment><USER2> Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been aptly described as "never the calmest man in the room" but this is good, sober coverage of the problem. If as according to AXA the EU is treating "Club Med's debt trap as a short-term liquidity crisis" the long and most likely medium term outcome will be grim.</comment>


The World's Athletic Activity Mapped - <AUTHOR> https://blog.strava.com/galleries/heatmap/?utm_source=strava&utm_medium=mktgemail&utm_campaign=2017_11_21_Nov_NL <comment><USER2> Long time strava user here.

I really wish Strava would do a better job helping you discover new routes around you for activities that you do. I'm a long time user who uses it for Mountain biking and short runs but I've never selected a route because Strava told me to. If you are a PM at strava there's so much you can unlock with all the user's activity data you are sitting on.

They aren't doing nothing of course. I can see their product efforts are focused on 1) growing the user base 2) growing paid subs.

<comment><USER3> They're really not doing much. I just let my premium membership lapse because they have so few extra features.

Trying to make a facebook news feed doesn't do anything with their current data which is their strength.

I really wish they'd up their game.

<comment><USER4> Exactly this. I recently cancelled my renewal after years of justifying the payment as the best way to support a service I like but I don't miss any of the premium features at all. I think I only ever use one or two and rarely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The strava heat map is one of those cases where I really realise the power of data.

I've discovered several amazing cycling routes I never knew about within 10 miles of my house from the heatmap. It was also great when I went on holiday, to get a quick glance at local popular routes.

</comment><comment><USER6> I would like it if Strava, or someone else, did the following:

1\. Associate each GPS data point with a short (say, 10 meters) segment.

2\. Collect metadata on each segment. eg incline, weather history, is it a segment of an organized race, etc.

3\. Combine segments into proposed routes that match a user's search criteria.

<comment><USER7> they have some this in the labs [https://labs.strava.com/clusterer/](https://labs.strava.com/clusterer/)

You can search for yearly/weekly events.

<comment><USER6> That's a neat experiment, but not really what I'm thinking of. I want to solve two problems:

1\. Find a route that matches a search like "20 mile trail run, with moderate hills, and at least 3 water fountains."

2\. See interesting information about segments of the route, such as "mile 8.7 is the highest point of the End Cancer 50 mile race."

That said, thanks for the pointer, I hadn't seen that before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Athletic" might be misleading. The heatmap in my area (East Germany) only shows activity on the city golf court, whilst we have plenty of real athletes training here, on the amateur, professional and olympic level. Looks like only golfers use Strava.

</comment><comment><USER9> *People who let Strave track their every move when running their app, mapped.

<comment><USER10> Yes, obviously. But there's enough Strava users that that's a pretty good proxy.

<comment><USER11> Not at all. This is a good proxy for the activities of wealthy people who don't care about privacy. I'd be interested in this map if I wanted to know where to put up ads for overpriced energy bars. But this isn't a map of physical activity.

<comment><USER10> It never claimed to be a map of physical activity. It's a map of athletic activity. i.e. the people who purchase overpriced energy bars.

<comment><USER9> The title was changed after I posted my rant. Previously it used a term like population or people (can't remember) including everyone which was stupid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to discover new skate spots in my city. The list of activities seems pretty short...

</comment><comment><USER13> Where are all those people skiing in southern England? I want to get in on the action.</comment>


Soylent Month Three - <AUTHOR> http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570 <comment><USER2> I'm concerned less with the long term health effects of this diet as it relates to missing nutrients, and much more concerned about quality control of the individual ingredients themselves. Who's actually checking that, say, the vitamin A palmitate coming from a supplier actually contains the dose requested, and additionally that it contains no other contaminates?

The supplement world is like the wild west as far as this goes. And as attracted as I am to a meal replacement like this, the worry about getting accidentally dosed with high levels of arsenic or lead from a shitty supplier really concerns me.

<comment><USER3> I would be most concerned about overdosing some vitamin or mineral powder, taken in miligram range.

Just one pinch can cause serious and painful injury.

Will it always be mixed evenly?

<comment><USER4> Presumably this is a problem that's been long-solved in scale up manufacture, and something you should just be concerned with on the small scale.

Generally though - yes - anything water-soluble is pretty easy to get very controlled concentrations of, since you can dilute until your in the operating range of your weighing machine.

<comment><USER5> I'm not much of a biologist and I may just be spouting what I've heard in the past, but I think all the water soluble vitamins and such are totally safe and impossible to OD on, it is the fat-soluble ones where there's the potential to OD.

EDIT: Mostly correct! Fat-soluble vitamins build up in the fatty tissues and are much slower to release and are almost always responsible for Vitamin Poisoning, water-soluble vitamins are easily excreted in the obvious way.

There are exceptions though, you can overdose on some of the B vitamins which are water-soluble, I didn't follow up to find out why that is.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_poisoning>

<comment><USER6> Nothing stops you from using a lipophile solvent rather than a hydrophile in preparing these dilutions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> He missed the sixth most abundant element in the human body, and, now that it's there, he is sure _everything_ is OK? I can only say, "Wow".

I really believe that if an actual scientific study[1] was done on this, it would rank right next to a pure fast food diet. It's not that it isn't theoretically possible to make something that is "perfect" nutrition, it's that we don't know enough today to say definitively whether carbs or fat causes metabolic syndrome[2], much less how all the various micronutrients interact with macronutrients, gut biota, and phases of the moon.

Until we understand every piece of the nutrition puzzle, this is just dangerous. That he wants to take it out to others is even more frightening.

Until we get to where we really understand what the body needs at an individual level, I'm sticking with whole foods. I really hope this guy doesn't do long-term damage to himself, or anyone else, for that matter.

1\. Unfortunately, it is pretty hard to double-blind whether you get a Big Mac or a cup of gray stuff. This isn't just a problem with Soykent, it is a problem with every attempt to perform nutritional experiments. It is really hard to perform good, predictive science in this space.

2\. We need to know like chemists know how chemicals will react and physicists know how forces will behave. We don't.

<comment><USER8> Overreaction.

I'd take the drink over the junk an average American eats any day. I'd take it over my own well researched eating regime every other day if it seemed to be working for me.

You underestimate the power of self experimentation. With a drug which if you took 40x the daily dose you might die, or a drug that might cause significant harmful side effects at normal dose, you need careful studies to prove a benefit and quantify risks. With a dietary change, the risks are orders of magnitude lower. I'd be surprised if the average American wouldn't improve their nutritional status doing this for a while, with an existing diet likely low in magnesium, copper, zinc, vitamin c and d and probably more.

<comment><USER9> I like what this guy is doing and find offense in all the negativity shown in news.ycominator. For a forum which is supposedly full with self called "hackers", some comments really amaze me.

Sure, his experience is not scientific in the least, but then again, history is full of these 'crazy people' who dared to do something that was considered stupid, senseless and plain wrong at their time.

A very important fact is that the guy is documenting the process, and at least it will wake interest in the idea of getting the necessary _day-to-day_ nutrients for living in a single-dose drink.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally."

This premise assumes we understand, with no uncertainty, how the human body functions and utilizes nutrients. Since this is still a huge mystery to science (and much of what we "know" currently is just guesswork) any 100% simulated food diet will only prove to be "better" by a stroke of luck.

We've seen his posts before and discussed it to great lengths, but the bottom line is if he's created something that is truly capable of sustaining health for the lifetime of a person he should be rewarded, but without scientific proof of longterm health this will never, and should never, be taken unquestionably.

<comment><USER11> So the way I look at this critique is that most people in the US are running a parallel experiment with their bodies, only instead of the input being Soylent, it's garbage like fast food. It's true, we _don't understand_ how the human body operates - whether you're eating McDonald's, or organic, or Soylent. So given that the baseline seems to be an equally untested and probably more detrimental food choice, this completely voluntary experiment doesn't seem so bad, it's not like the govt is teaching us to eat a certain way (which they have been known to do incorrectly). In other words, Soylent vs theoretically ideal diet (which we don't even know) - sure, bad choice. But the reality is for the target audience (such as myself) its Soylent vs pizza and burgers, which doesn't seem that bad.

<comment><USER12> I think for this parallel to be valid he'd have to be eating McDonalds or what-have-you every day. The point is variety (mostly) ensures we get everything we need from _somewhere_. I think it's almost assured that in the long run 100% (or so) soylent will turn out to be _more_ detrimental than even the 'average diets' out there. BTW, I'm kinduva healthy eating nut myself, but this just isn't 'healthy eating'.

<comment><USER11> Right, thats precisely my point: I think you underestimate how many people eat McDonalds or what-have-you _every day_. The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that I think it takes place all over the spectrum: the poor do it as well as the rich. Perhaps you do not see this as much because you are a self-described health nut (and thus this diet probably isn't for you, the same way an Alienware computer isn't for someone who knows how to build a PC), but in my developer circle I see eating trash food every day for all meals quite often. And what I've found is often the problem is that you forget about food and then are starving and make a bad decision so you can keep working, not necessarily because you love pizza or whatever. If Soylent can deliver on immediateness, then it has a chance of competing with this lifestyle. And, if the end result is people thinking more about what they eat, it may be a win either way.

<comment><USER12> haha, I _really_ hope you are right about the problem space. I'm currently building a company that hopes to solve exactly the "forget about food and then are starving and make a bad decision" problem. Not ready to say more yet, but again, sure hope you're right :-)

Anyway, if it's that thing to have on stand-by, I'm sure its ok, but so is an Ensure, a Balance Bar, a Slim-Fast, etc, so again, no real innovation here.

<comment><USER13> Note that your argument began with "It's too radical, it won't work!" and ended with "It's boring, there's nothing new here." When I see this particular pattern of cognitive dissonance, I take it as a sign that the phenomenon being dismissed has real merit. Not to single you out, either--this pattern describes perhaps the majority of arguments I've heard against Soylent.

<comment><USER12> to eat one thing 100% of the time "is too radical it won't work". yep. To eat one thing as your 'go-to' filler is fine. but neither new nor radical. One addressed one argument, the other addressed a different one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Soylent is certainly polarizing on HN, and pretty much everywhere else as well. This will only be resolved once it's widely available and people can confirm/contest Rob's results.

Personally, I'm very curious to give it a trial run. It certainly can't be any worse than what I eat now. Rob said it best:

>I'm touched so many people are concerned about my intake of possible unknown essential nutrients. No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients.

<comment><USER15> _No one seemed to worry about me when I lived on burritos and ramen and actually was deficient of many known essential nutrients._

This sort of nonsensical dichotomy seems to infect discussions of this. Yesterday I had a Burger KingTM Whopper (it was, after all, Whopper Wednesday). The day before I had a spring-mix salad with added tomatoes, green onions, and cucumber, and a cucumber dressing, in a day that I also had a peanut butter sandwich...

...and on, and on. Such is any normal diet where people tend to eat lots of varied things, any of which, if the singular source of nutrients, would cause concern for anyone.

The nonsense argument that it is either this or fast food, or ramen noodles, or whatever, just highlights how utterly ridiculous this is.

<comment><USER4> Except its not nonsense - doctors deal with people with this type of narrow diet all the time. Or, not sufficiently varied diet on a day to day basis.

Humans are also awful statisticians - fat people don't think they eat much. Thin people think they eat tons of food. Nobody accurately assesses what they do and don't eat, and our entire society is negatively geared towards maintaining healthy eating patterns anyway (your above example of variety will get blown to hell for most people past a few stressful weeks).

Yes, _technically_ this is unnecessary but that's hardly the point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At the risk of stating the obvious - this is all good and the experiment he's running is very interesting, but - no. I really like eating tasty food. Not for the nutrients, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like sleeping in a comfortable bed and taking a hot shower daily even though, technically, I can rest as well on a bare floor and shower once a week.

To each his own, but some things are just _too_ unorthodox.

<comment><USER17> "This automobile business is all good and interesting, but - no. I really like riding in a horse buggy. Not for the speed, but for the experience. Similarly to how I really like candle light and wearing a top hat even though, technically, I could do as well with a baseball cap.

To each his own, but some things are just _too_ unorthodox."

<comment><USER16> You are very forward thinking. Soylent is in the aisle one.

Comfort and pleasure are subjective irrational metrics that have a lot of inertia, but that change with time. I'm sure it's plausible that people would love soylent just as much as a freshly baked croissant, but it takes time. The way things stand _right now_ , soylent solves a problem that few people have and it comes at a price that is awful. So, yeah, it's unorthodox.

<comment><USER17> Even freshly baked croissants were once an odd novelty.

<comment><USER18> I encourage you to research what a croissant is and then find and devour one. This comment makes me feel like you're missing out on that.

<comment><USER4> A croissant is also about the most amount of butter you can possibly fit into a pastry.

<comment><USER19> I think that dubious honour probably belongs to the "buttery" from North East Scotland:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buttery_%28bread%29>

They are basically lumps of butter and salt held together with a trace amount of flour. The versions available from mainstream stores (e.g. M&S) or from recipes online are fairly tame - for the real effect they need to be purchased from a small local baker in some remote fishing village.

Best butteries I've ever had were actually on a trawler in the North Sea - where they were served hot awash in molten salted butter.

<comment><USER20> You'd be hard pushed to find a buttery actually made of butter these days. Even the local bakers are using vegetable oil and fat. Still, they are beautiful, flaky rolls of salty tastiness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> * "Bacon is high in Oleic acid, the principal component of adipose (fat) tissue so it is great for increasing body fat.[...] By the way, an acid is anything that donates protons. Only a few have corrosive properties like sulfuric acid, and bases can be corrosive too."

So now I'm thinking, 'does this guy even know what fats are, or how fat digestion, assimilation and metabolism works?'.

* "We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated. We need mental strength."

Well, y'know, that's true until you're caught in a car accident, or a bombing, or a fight, or any kind of natural disaster which actually tests your ability to survive. It's simplistic and naïve to suggest that we've evolved beyond the need to even _try_ to survive.

* "If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself."

There's just so much incorrectness here, I don't know where to start.

\- - -

Anyone can go ahead and try an experiment like this for themselves, and I support their right to document and share the experience. But seriously, anyone ignorant enough to try subsisting 100% on this 'soylent' concoction, in its current or future form, deserves all the health problems that await them.

<comment><USER22> "I have no use for bulging biceps."

For the past two years, I've relied on the fact that I walk a lot to take care of my exercise needs. But last year I started experiencing crippling neck and shoulder pain. A visit to the doctor and a referral to a physical therapist revealed that my upper body had atrophied to an alarming extent. Strength in the upper body affects your posture among other things. Muscle mass also affects your metabolism in a positive way. Now that I'm rebuilding I feel much better.

Plus I look better!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >We don't live anything like our ancestors. We don't work like them, talk like them, think like them, travel like them, or fight like them. Why on earth would we want to eat like them?

>After three months _I should be finding deficiencies, and I did_. I started having joint pain and found I fit the symptoms of a sulfur deficiency.

I like the doublethink here. Reductionism works fine except when it doesn't. And surely the only important components of food are the ones I've identified after a few months of experimentation.

You know, we should eat like our ancestors because that's what we're adapted to. When you try to invent your own environment to live in, there's a good chance you won't be well adapted to that environment. Rhinehart's logic is like asking "why should we want the same gravity as our ancestors? Wouldn't life be better without the hassle of gravity?" Actually, no. [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does- sp...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-does-spending- prolong)

>If we can make transistors that are cheap, fast, and low power, surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally.

This highlights the confusion. Does anyone think for a moment that a manmade device like a transistor is anywhere close to the complexity of a biological one such as a cell? This is laughable. A transistor is literally a device with THREE terminals.

<comment><USER24> >When you try to invent your own environment to live in, there's a good chance you won't be well adapted to that environment.

I guess this statement would necessarily include wearing clothes, living in houses, using glasses, taking antibiotics, and anything else we do to actively counter forces of nature. I'd say we do quite well at that.

I'd like to point out that the rest of that paragraph is simply a strawman argument and is of absolutely no value to this discussion.

Finally, you obviously do not come close to understanding the complexity of transistors if you think that it can be summarized by the number of terminals it has. That is like saying the programming behind an API is simplistic because the API only consists three functions. I've taken multiple semesters of classes specifically on transistors and logic design have never even come close to using the mathematical and physical techniques they use for designing single transistors, let alone large integrated circuits consisting of billions of them. I agree with your point that the complexity is not on par with biological systems, but you are trivializing something far more complex than you think. We are not that helpless.

<comment><USER23> >That is like saying the programming behind an API is simplistic because the API only consists three functions.

Actually, that's pretty close to my argument. I'm not saying the mechanisms underlying a transistor are simple. I've taken (and struggled with) a microelectronics course. I have a good idea how complex they are.

I'm saying that the metrics for success are really simple because we have designed it to fit a very simple logical abstraction. If you want to make a better transistor, the process might be extremely complicated, but it couldn't be simpler to test what you have and see if it's correct.

On the other hand, it's simple to make food (I should, however, stop and point out that when Rhinehart is "making food", mostly what he's doing is mixing together other existing foods. Of course _that_ is simple.) But it's orders of magnitude more complex to analyze the result of that food than doing the same for a transistor. Because now instead of plugging a black box we understand into another black box that we understand, you're plugging your invention into the human digestive system. Not only do you have to consider the interaction with human parts, you also have to consider dozens of species of gut bacteria. I don't think that is simple and I think anyone who claims that it is is quite confused.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Personally, I'm really excited to see what the end product will look like. Given he does enough trials beforehand, hopefully the purchase would look something like this:

1\. Visit website. On the webpage, login and click "order 1-week supply."

2\. If you're a new customer, then put in some basic metrics (height, sex, age, current weight, activity level, exceptional family diseases/allergies). Then, a "standard" supply will be shipped to you, optimizing the ingredients generally for what they think you'll need, with an ingredient list (how much of each ingredient is in one serving).

3\. When logging in again, you're asked "Are you experiencing any symptoms?" Then, you can list anything that feels off, such as aching joints, cravings, etc. Then, the site would list common deficiencies/overdoses that would cause those symptoms, and give you the option to purchase, for instance, a temporary magnesium supplement, or recommend that, prior to receiving your next shipment, you consume one less serving per day. After using the supplement, you'd input whether the symptom improved, and the ingredient's quantity would be adjusted in your next shipment.

The tricky bit about this system would be personalizing everyone's orders, at scale. But it should be pretty possible (says the developer without an understanding of manufacturing), and for far less than it would cost to order a full meal.

</comment><comment><USER26> I'm amazed with how much response this guy gets. This is nothing new. My mother used Herbalife protein powder back in the 90's and it was packed with nutrients, minerals and vitamins. It was advertised for weight loss but could also be your nutrition base depending on dosage.

I am sure they weren't the only company to offer something like this, there must be plenty.

<comment><USER27> It must be because:

a. Somebody bothered to post the initial announcement of this guy

b. He describes his process in detail

c. He's a Software Engineer; it would be disingenuous to think that the fact that he's a peer for the members of this audience isn't a factor

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel.

Wow. Talk about being disconnected from reality.

<comment><USER29> The implicit "by hand" was pretty obvious to me, fwiw. I don't think that assertion is disconnected from reality at all.

<comment><USER30> _"No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel [by hand]."_

Wow, talk about being disconnected from reality.

<comment><USER31> Genuine question, is there a truly significant portion of American agriculture that is based on plowing by hand? I was under the impression that most food comes from commercial-level farms that use machinery to plow. My dad works on a pretty small farm, and they definitely don't do anything by hand at this point. I suppose that you could be referring to people who garden as a hobby, but I don't know if I'd count that.

<comment><USER32> Plowing is not done by hand but picking is.

Sugar beet field weeding used to be done by teams of migrant workers with handheld hoes. I think they've figured out how to not have the weeds in the first place with better pesticides. Most fruits and vegetables are picked by hand.

<comment><USER29> You don't need big muscles to pick fruits and vegetables though, just endurance (I've done it for a couple of summers as a job).

<comment><USER32> I guess I didn't realize this was about muscles. I was just replying to the guy asking if agriculture was done by hand. Maybe shouldn't follow threads via the /comments page. I end up not knowing what the context is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'd be concerned about the long-term side effects of having little diversity in one's diet. It's been alleged that diabetes is caused by overconsumption of processed sugar and heart disease is caused by overconsumption of red meat. Either of those things in moderation is fine.

Most people don't eat a consistent dose of for instance oat powder every day. It's likely that he's chosen at least one ingredient that is harmless in moderation, but is detrimental to your health over time.

It's also quite possible that there are other things he's underdosing on and hasn't discovered yet (like sulphur before batch #7).

<comment><USER34> But the whole point is that soylent _is_ moderation. Everything in it is balanced, so if you eat only soylent, then (in theory) you shouldn't be getting too much of anything.

>It's likely that he's chosen at least one ingredient that is harmless in moderation, but is detrimental to your health over time.

Why do you believe that that is likely?

>It's also quite possible that there are other things he's underdosing on and hasn't discovered yet (like sulphur before batch #7).

Yes, this does seem quite likely. There is probably a significant number of necessary nutrients that nobody even thinks about because they're ubiquitous.

<comment><USER33> Because there probably hasn't ever been a person who consumed a particular batch of refined nutrients for nearly every meal, and we don't know nearly enough about how the body processes food considering how long we, as a species, have been eating it.

Admittedly, I don't know much about what's in soylent, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it turns out that eating refined XXX powder in every meal is bad for you, where XXX is an ingredient that he's using to get enough of a particular nutrient.

<comment><USER34> The problem with that is that fortification is already rampant in premade foods, and so most first-worlders are _already_ eating these refined ingredients in every meal. Moreover, many people take one-a-day multivitamins which in a single dose, contain the same amount (and sometimes more) of the same refined ingredients in a day's worth of soylent.

Extensive studies have been done on the safety and efficacy of multivitamins, and while their utility for healthy people with balanced diets is a matter of debate, their safety (when taken at the recommended dose) is well established.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Practically everything has gotten better over the past century but food has gotten worse."

I highly disagree. Food as an art form and as a science has gotten leagues better since 1913. Probably several orders of magnitude in whatever you're measuring.

Except the French. They had it right the whole time.

If you look at the extremes, the negative side of food has gone from shit (literally) to shit (figuratively) so not much change there either.

<comment> o0-0o Have you tasted frog legs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> A guy on reddit who said he was a medical student (and sounded like he really was) said that the nutrients may be fine, but the digestive system needs solid food. Patients stuck on liquid diets tend not to do well long-term, and they try to get them on solid food as fast as they can. He had a technical explanation I don't remember well enough to repeat.

I asked how the Soylent guy would do if he converted the stuff into some kind of solid food bar, and the med student said "Probably much better!"

<comment><USER37> From the subject post: "I made a rather significant change to the formula... I've replaced half of the maltodextrin carbohydrates with oat powder, which ... dramatically increases the fiber content ... I underestimated the importance of fiber in a diet, and went from consuming 1.2g / day to 40g / day."

<comment><USER38> Fiber mixed with a nutrient soup is not solid food.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> > We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging > biceps.

Pretty bad assumption.

Exercise is important, as building muscle tissue stimulates hormone production (GH, melatonin) that affect even cognitive performance.

This guy has a pretty extreme reductionist view on things like health and nutrition. No surprise he's trying to live on a nutrient shake, after all.

</comment><comment><USER40> _"surely we can make food that is tastier, cheaper, and more nutritious than anything that exists naturally."_

You're not convincing me. The idea of consuming a nutrient shake on a daily basis doesn't appeal in the least. I like chewing my food; texture is important to me. There's a reason that we have teeth and powerful jaw muscles. If we had evolved to consume our nutrients as a puree then we'd have mouth parts, like flies who squirt digestive juices onto their food and then suck up the partially-digested goop.

</comment><comment><USER41> I get lost in my work/play quite a bit and often forget about meals. I'd definitely be interested in trying soylent simply as a meal replacement, especially if ingestion/preparation of it is quick enough not to break my workflow.

<comment><USER42> There are a bunch of different liquid feeds available.

Well known brands include Ensure and Fortisip.

(<https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//>)

(<http://ensure.com/>)

These have the advantage of careful preparation and high standards of QA.

<comment><USER43> I would order Soylent right now if I could. So I'm pretty excited to find out about these. I had no idea they existed. FWIW, my diet now is like 95% red meat, with some cheese occasionally added in.

What are the downsides of these compared to Soylent? I mean, what's the motivation for Soylent if these already exist?

<comment><USER15> _What are the downsides of these compared to Soylent? I mean, what's the motivation for Soylent if these already exist?_

I swear that this Soylent thing is all, as some others have opined, a long troll.

But yes, there are a number of "meal replacement" drinks, some of them (like Ensure), very widely known and heavily advertised.

<comment><USER44> I guess the difference is that this guy is making the recipe available so you can tweak it to your requirements.

Ensure or other prepackaged products are a predefined set ratio, which may not be optimal for all consumers.

For example, highly active people will probably require a higher ratio of carbohydrates than less active people. Similarly, some people will be genetically predisposed to have higher/lower uptake of some nutrients/vitamins.

Ultimately, for any one person to succeed with a Soylent style approach, they will need to monitor their blood levels of a range of elements and compounds.

To my mind, developing a rapid, cheap, broad spectrum blood analysis to allow people to monitor their diet (soylent or not) is what should be focused on.

Your mileage and diet may vary...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is it me or does it seem like everything is now a giant lead into a Kickstarter marketing push? Is Kickstarter the new Internet marketing?

<comment><USER46> Good question; I am launching a kickstarter campaign next week to fund my next book, which will answer precisely that question :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as Ensure.

Want to replace a meal with something similar? Throw some milk, oats, protein powder and peanut butter in a blender. Drink it down with a multi-vitamin and a fish oil capsule or two.

<comment><USER48> > I'm really surprised by people who act like this is some kind of new or > novel idea. Meal replacements have been around for a very, very long time. > There are some really common ones you can buy at any grocery store, such as > Ensure.

I read something yesterday that summed this up pretty much perfectly.

If there's more than one of something, it means that it wasn't done right the first time. See: Cars, Computers, Telephones, Light Bulbs, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Another shameless plug for Soylent Orange. It's gratifying to see him bump his recipe towards mine in switching to oats. If you've never seen this before SO is the off the shelf version. It doesn't quite hit the same optimal micronutrient profile, but it gets you close. I find this + one meat based meal per day works pretty well.

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZ...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjA38cUd4BZBdGZYM012N0JZTzEtVk05MVF4dlZyZ2c&usp=drive_web)

I have yet to do a proper min-maxing of ingredients for optimal nutrients/calorie.

<comment><USER50> The author makes a good point in that what is perfectly safe for one person may be deadly to another. Off the top of my head, one example of this is how some people are congenital 'super-absorbers' of iron. These people can develop iron overload from ingesting levels of iron that have no effect on ordinary people. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_overload>

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Am I the only one depressed by this idea ? I mean I have no doubt one can craft a superior meal nutriment wise, but this is the fast track to abandoning cuisine and a huge part of my culture.

Spend more time making your dreams come true. Yeah right, more facebook or more tv time !

<comment><USER52> No, you're not the only one. To me, this is also a fast way of ruining one of the best things about life. If "making your dreams come true" prevents you from enjoying a nice meals (which is not that much time-consuming, anyway), it may be time to reconsider if those dreams are worth it. Don't live just for a future that might not come, keep in mind your daily life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I continue to read nothing but cautious words on HN when approaching Soylent.

Let me remind you all that cautious and timid natures rarely pioneered anything throughout history.

</comment><comment><USER54> While I would be more than a bit anxious that I miss some nutrient (just like the missing MSM/sulphur) because soylent is a blend of raw earths and isolated ingredients - Rob's mentions of increased focus and better sleep really inspire me to check on what major nutrients I could be missing, and fix that by either supplementing or changing food habits. [I understand that Rob's motivations for using chemically produced ingredients are political and economical (resource consumption), but I'd rather eat live food as long as it's possible :)]

E.g. I recently started increasing potassium (eating more lentils and potatoes, and the occasional powder/pill) and my focus increased so much. Two years ago, I discovered that keeping vitamin D up in winter stops me from getting sick all the time. And I think MSM helps me recover faster after workouts (interesting fact: cooking decreases MSM content radically, so one could eat raw stuff instead of drinking it in powder-form).

Next step: Instead of swallowing pills, incorporate food that contains all that stuff. And have a deeper look at Soylent's more exotic ingredients.

<comment><USER55> I've definitely noticed this. If at all anything it's really just provided a framework for thinking about the nutrition that we typically lack on a daily basis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I can't figure out if this is just an elaborate troll.

<comment><USER29> Well, he's making something people want; I'm an existence proof, as are a few other commenters on this thread.

<comment><USER56> Will this be any different from Ensure or other meal replacement shakes but marketed differently? Is what he's doing any different from what's been done before?

<comment><USER57> I was looking into ensure after a few people mentioned it on this thread. Something ensure promotes is that it's good for in between meals but doesn't say outright that it is an entire meal replacement that I could see. I think the difference is Soylent is meant to be a complete diet replacement where Ensure is focused on being a supplement to your diet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Nature has solved this for us long ago. Buy a handful of vegetables, vary them every week; slice them up, cook/grill/stir fry and eat them. Add meat once in a while.

This will take you 20 minutes/day, maybe less if you make food in batches and freeze it, and it's been tested for the past few thousand years with pretty good results.

<comment><USER59> 20 minutes/day? 6.7 minutes per meal? I doubt it. Plus you forgot the time to buy groceries, wash dishes, eat (drinking something like soylent is 5x faster than chewing food), etc. The average adult probably spends 45min-1h per day doing something necessary for preparing food. The guy has a point: Soylent does save time:

 _"I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner. For every meal at home I would then have to clean and dry the dishes. This does not include trips to the grocery store. Now I spend about 5 minutes in the evening preparing for the next day, and every meal takes a few seconds. I love order of magnitude improvements, and I certainly don't miss doing dishes. In fact I could get rid of the kitchen entirely, no fridge sucking down power, no constant cleaning or worrying about pests, and more living space. I just need a water source."_ Source: <http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298>

<comment><USER32> _I used to spend about 2 hours per day on food. Typically I would cook eggs for breakfast, eat out for lunch, and cook a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger for dinner_

It seems strange that it would take him 2 hours to cook a combination of eggs, a quesadilla, pasta, or a burger. These are foods that only take a few minutes to cook. Cooking either eggs or a quesadilla takes less than 1 minute. If cooked longer, they are ruined. One could cook a meal for two containing every one of those items in less than 20 minutes. He must have been taking a long lunch break.

Any claim that this project arose from a need for time savings rings a bit hollow, because he has spent an order of magnitude more time on this than any non-foodie bachelor programmer person has ever spent cooking.

<comment><USER60> ..how are you cooking eggs that they're done in under a minute? The only way I can think of that stands any chance is by frying, which is hardly the healthiest option. Soft-boiling an egg takes me six minutes, plus the time to heat the water. About quarter of an hour all in, at a guess.

As for a burger, when I cook one of those it's an absolute minimum of half an hour start to finish - peeling & chopping the onions & garlic, dicing the bacon, mixing it all together with the beef, cooking it properly.. I can easily take up an hour.

You seem to be confusing "Microwave crap from a packet" with preparation of decent food.

<comment><USER61> > ..how are you cooking eggs that they're done in under a minute? The only way > I can think of that stands any chance is by frying, which is hardly the > healthiest option. Soft-boiling an egg takes me six minutes, plus the time > to heat

I've got ~5 minutes here:

Boil water in kettle ~2 minutes

Place in pan on hot ring on hob with eggs, comes to boil ~.5 minutes

Boil until cooked ~3 minutes

\- add a minute or two if you prefer hard boiled

And it doesn't require you to be standing over it so if you take away the time you can be absent that's going to take you down to more like 3 minutes.

<comment><USER59> A hard boiled egg is 10min in boiling water. None of your times include: time to clean dishes, time to eat and chew solid food, time to go out to a restaurant to eat, etc.

You guys quoting "X minutes to cook food" really don't look at the big picture of all the steps that are saved by just having to drink a pre-made substance.

<comment><USER61> > time to clean dishes,

Dishwasher, not worth measuring. You do it when you walk back to the kitchen after the meal.

And you'd have to clean the glass from your drink anyway. Or walk back to the kitchen to throw the bottle away and then you've got the time for throwing the extra trash away.

> time to eat and chew solid food,

Not mutually exclusive with that many other things that I'd be doing at home. Hard to really count it as a loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> There's no science here. This so-called experiment is worthless IMHO.

Feeding people all-liquid diets to keep them alive is well known. That's what happens to coma patients and lots of work in creating enteral nutrition products has been done. Given that people's lives depend on this that's a good place to start (take a look at, for example, Jevity [3]). And the people who make that stuff worry about keeping your gastrointestinal system working, the right balance of everything needed to keep a (in this case, sick) person alive, how to keep the product from spoiling, etc.

So, he's not creating something new.

The other argument against the existing products is price. Here's a quick comparison. He claims that it costs him $155 per month [1]. If he were to live on Jevity 1.5 he'd need to drink 4.2 cans per day at a cost of $57/24 per can (it's sold in packs of 24 cans [2]) or $9.98 per day which is roughly $300 a month. (If he ups the kcal to 2,000 a day from the 1,500 he was on then he'd need to drink 5.6 cans a day which is $400 a month).

So, he'd be spending 2 to 2.5 times what he currently is. But he'd be spending it on a product that's been quality controlled and tested.

Is there any indication that he can fundamentally change the economics of this type of food? I don't think so. Especially when you factor in all the work that the makers of Jevity etc. are doing at that price point (the QA, the distribution, the packaging).

And certainly not enough to meet all his other goals about solving world hunger.

If a market for soylent emerges then I'd imagine that companies that make things like Jevity would step in. Oh wait, they already do. There's Ensure etc.

Also, there's so much other crap in his blog posts about how soylent lasts forever [4], how no one need muscles anyway [5], how even stopping eating soylent for a week led to massive cognitive problems [5], that it's hard to take the whole thing seriously.

And then there's this [1]: "I for one would not miss the stereotype of the housewife in the kitchen. Providing diverse, palatable, and nutritious meals for an entire family every day must be exhausting. What if taking a night off didn't mean unhealthy pizza or expensive take out? How wasteful society has been with its women! The endless hours spent cooking and cleaning in the kitchen could be replaced with socializing, study, or creative endeavors."

Ah yes, soylent is not only going to solve world hunger, make us more healthy, save time, make us more creative, save money: it's going to emancipate women!

But there's more [5]: "We no longer live in a hunter-gatherer society. I have no use for bulging biceps. No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated. We need mental strength. We need creativity, patience, discipline, and humility. If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself. Perhaps companies would be more productive if managers had more humility and employees had more discipline."

Yes, soylent will result in an increase in humility and all those fat people who lack self-discipline will be thin.

Hooray.

[1] <http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298>

[2] [http://www.abbottstore.com/jevity+reg/jevity-15-cal-8-oz- can...](http://www.abbottstore.com/jevity+reg/jevity-15-cal-8-oz-can-case- of-24/invt/57333/)

[3] <http://abbottnutrition.com/brands/products/jevity-1_5-cal>

[4] <http://www.soylent.me> claims it 'lasts for years'

[5] <http://robrhinehart.com/?p=570>

<comment><USER63> Jevity: "May be used for oral feeding of patients with altered taste perception."

Made me laugh. Not that I have any reason to think it tastes worse than his.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> "If people had more self-control obesity would take care of itself."

Obesity might be partly genetic.

<http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/resources/diseases/obesity/>

<comment><USER65> Genes don't feed your face.

<comment><USER66> Neither does cold-blooded logic. Nobody can understand obesity unless they've had to ask themselves "wait, why did I eat all that?" Willpower seems to be finite and its relationship to blood sugar may be genetic. I've had pretty good luck losing weight using protein/fiber shakes between small meals to reduce blood sugar spikes and blunt cravings that were hard to control otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Why is it so easy to make a food that dogs and cats can eat for every meal but so difficult for humans? Anyone know?

</comment><comment><USER68> As a science geek I love this. As a marketer, this name is unfortunate.

Interested in the outcomes though. keep it up.

<comment><USER69> Indeed, you don't want people screaming "Soylent Green is people!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> You do realise that mastication is REQUIRED for healthy teeth and gums right?

You may not become malnutritioned, but you will suffer from various oral problems due to lack of mastication. This may take a year or even a few years to present itself - by then it will be too late to react.

</comment><comment><USER71> Still sticking with that horrible name, eh? I guess if you don't care about a wider adoption...

</comment><comment><USER72> "We no longer need big biceps". Well true, unless you want to attract women.

<comment><USER73> Depends on whether you want to attract women that are into large biceps or those that think men with large biceps are posers spend too much time at the gym.

<comment><USER74> Isn't it better to attract them all and then pick the ones you want? I am 50 lbs over weight just saying...

<comment><USER75> It's not possible to "attract them all", different people find different things attractive, and honestly I don't think "attract them all" is a very desirable predicament, better to have a deep connection with one person than dealing with many shallow connections. Besides, and I know this is a cliche by now, but repeated so much because it's true... confidence (not to be confused with arrogance) is the most attractive quality. Be healthy, sure, but ultimately be comfortable in your own skin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Those who say that this is wrong because humans should eat like our ancestors because we evolved to eat in this way are on the same level with people that say only man and woman should have sex because nature made it this way. Naturalists are wrong from the very root because of assumption nature makes everything on purpose and in the only right way possible. This soylent thing exposes all the ignorance of the people in this regard.

</comment><comment><USER12> Futurama's Bachelor Chow

</comment><comment><USER77> from the article: "No one in the United States plows fields or hammers steel. It has all been automated."

And, I presume, no one in the world is poor. Nobody struggles. There is no murder or injustice anymore.

Just which planet is this fellow living on?

</comment><comment><USER78> This guy definitely will leave gene pool. I bet on diabetes.

</comment><comment><USER79> My son and I watched Star Wars a New Hope this weekend and when that exact scene hit I thought of Soylent. Spooky!</comment>


2D Contouring in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattkeeter.com/projects/contours/ <comment><USER2> Impressive work and explanation regardless of the language being used but the code does look particularly simple and elegant.

<comment><USER3> The approach is so clean. I don't know how much FP leads to this, or if it's a cultural or even personal view on problem solving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice tutorial, beautifully illustrated and presented.</comment>


Show HN: my friend made an adult blog search engine but was afraid to post it - <AUTHOR> http://pornblur.com/

<comment><USER2> Was this him?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6094088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6094088)

Also: It appears to be down.

</comment><comment><USER3> Just getting a message that says, "Welcome to nginx!"

</comment><comment><USER4> I think this is in response to Yahoo removing adult tags and search results from Tumblr[1]. Is this searching a hand curated list of blogs?

1\. [http://technorati.com/social-media/article/tumblr- effectivel...](http://technorati.com/social-media/article/tumblr-effectively- erases-adult-content-from/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually it's by a PhD linguist, who developed his own modified version of PageRank that incorporates sentiment analysis combining Markov chains and multidimensional vector spaces as his thesis. This is just showing off in a potentially profitable way.</comment></comment>


Acer: Windows 8 has been a big dud, but Chromebooks rock  - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/28/acer-windows-8-has-been-a-big-dud-but-chromebooks-rock/ <comment><USER2> I just wish they'd make some high resolution chromebooks.

<comment><USER3> Ditto.

I'd also like to see an ARM Chromebook with a bigger physical screen (in addition to being higher resolution) and keyboard.

I love my Samsung ARM Chromebook (I've been using it since the week it was first released) but I'd love it even more if it sported a 13-15 inch screen (with corresponding increase in keyboard size) at a higher resolution.</comment></comment>


Harvard College dean steps down (in wake of authorizing e-mail searches) - <AUTHOR> http://www.boston.com/metrodesk/2013/05/28/evelynn-hammonds-step-down-harvard-college-dean/WRRTRAKHRIGj7ANBSiAxbL/story.html

<comment><USER2> Glad to see that she's being forced to step down after such an egregious invasion of privacy.

But that's just a school. The much more important case is whether anyone in the federal government gets punished when they do the same thing without a warrant. So far, it doesn't look like it.

<comment><USER3> The Dean of Harvard is stepping down not because there is anything illegal about her searching through the e-mails of faculty (your employer has every right to search your work e-mail), but because it was in bad taste in an academic institution which made the Dean ineffective as a figurehead. Similarly, there is nothing definitively illegal about the federal government asking Google to voluntarily hand over your e-mails. It is at best in bad taste.

<comment><USER4> My apologies for changing the subject, but do you have any evidence at all that Google has ever "voluntarily hand[ed] over [anyone's] e-mails", or was that just a random slur?

Google's stated policy is to fight government requisition of data, but ultimately to comply with the law. That is to say, Google claims to be as anti-government-surveillance as it is possible for a corporation to be. I am aware of no evidence whatsoever that this claim is false. Admittedly, I also have no strong evidence that it's true[0].

Note that I'm not quibbling with the literal truth of your statement, since your statement deals only in hypotheticals. But it'd be pretty crass of me to say something like "I've never seen <insert name here> rape a child without offering the kid some heroin to ease the pain", even though it's _technically_ true for every name including yours.

Also note that I'm not entirely sunshine-and-roses positive about Google's record on privacy. I think it's not as bad as the fear-mongers state, but not without any concerns whatsoever. Google management, it seems to me, pretends to believe that when users say "we want privacy" they always-and-only mean "we want privacy from the government and criminals". Which is... disingenuous. But I think that Google _appears_ to be a relatively pro-privacy [1] organization, especially with regard to the particular slur you raised, and I've never seen a credible argument that this appearance is false.

[0] I do see some evidence that Google is truly anti-surveillance. However, all the evidence I have is also consistent with the theory that Google is willing to spend a lot of money to convince its employees that it's anti- surveillance... if Google were an NSA shell corp, maybe this is how it would behave.

[1] By "relatively pro-privacy", I mean I have to think pretty hard to think of organizations MORE pro-privacy, although eventually I remembered that mozilla exists.

<comment><USER5> Random slur.

Google fought a DOJ subpoena for search terms in court (while Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft did not), which I wrote about here: [http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What- does-the-Google-subpoena-mean/...](http://news.cnet.com/FAQ-What-does-the- Google-subpoena-mean/2100-1029_3-6029042.html)

It also nationalized Warshak by requiring a search warrant for the contents of archived email (anyone think Verizon/AT&T/etc. have been doing that?). More importantly, Google is currently challenging a secret NSL it received from the FBI in federal court in San Francisco, making it the first large Internet company to do so. It also became the first large Internet company to divulge summary statistics about receiving NSLs.

Twitter and Amazon.com have similarly good records. And Facebook fought a subpoena from the state of Virginia.

<comment><USER6> > Random slur.

He didn't make any claims about Google at all other than implying they might be _recipients_ of requests, so how in the world was that a slur against Google?

<comment><USER7> In the eyes of fanboys, anything that isn't praise is a slur.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I find it Ironic that the dean at Harvard has the fortitude to step down when he's caught red-handed violating the civil and constitutional rights of his employees (and yes I recognize that working for someone is not the same as being a citizen of a country), yet our elected leaders, when caught authorizing far more heinous eavesdropping, do nothing, not even so much as apologizing.

Whereas an institution _MIGHT_ be able to justify such egregious violations of privacy, a government can have no such moral quandaries because of the exacting detail of our laws; and yet, here we are.

Steal a little and they call you a thief. Steal a lot and they call you King.

<comment><USER3> Searches of e-mails are not clearly unconstitutional under our laws.

<comment><USER8> While this is true, I find it to only be true under the guise of tortured logic (emails left on my server are hardly the same as abandoned mail).

That being said, I wasn't trying to draw a direct comparison, and I realize that an employment contract has nothing to do with the constitution. My point was that someone lost their job while holding themselves to the standards of an employment contract which one would assume would be more lenient than our constitution (and in my reading it is but that's a topic for another day).

In short, I agree with your point but I think it's tangential to mine.

<comment><USER3> Why would an academic employment contract be more lenient than the Constitution? The Constitution is a floor, not a bar to reach for. It's a mistake to read modern libertarian (little "l") ideas into the Constitution. While there has been a change through history in which of the federal versus state governments has exercised the police power, the Constitution has always served as a check on an otherwise expansive power. It's easy to forget that all the founders' talk of "limited government" was aimed at the states, not citizens, and referred to the federal government specifically, not the federal, state, and local governments together. The states were conceived of as inheriting the nearly unlimited powers of the British Parliament. The innovation of the U.S. was not to dramatically limit the state, but to put a powerful state under majoritarian control, with a limited set of protections from abuse.

The circle back on topic: there is nothing within the worldview of the Constitution that is inconsistent with a certain activities being allowed of the government that are outside the powers of an individual. You can argue about which entity is the right one to exercise it, but the government is supposed to have more expansive powers than any person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a former professor at Harvard, this is a welcome move. However, I don't think it goes far enough, and it should have happened much sooner. One thing I will say: The fact that the administration felt the need to snoop on employee e-mail to "track down" a press leak underscores how backwards and insecure Harvard can feel at times. It's just shocking that anyone thought that this was a good idea, and that they continued to defend the practice once it came to light. Very sad.

<comment><USER10> "underscores how backwards and insecure Harvard can feel at times"

You do realize of course that most people in the world would give a testicle, a breast (or two) to be affiliated with that University, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm confused. Isn't it perfectly legal for the institution to search your e-mail records? I know when you work at a company generally the company can monitor everything you do (including e-mail).

<comment><USER12> Just because you didn't do anything illegal doesn't mean you deserve to keep your post as a leader of an institution after you've lost a large part of the organization's trust.

<comment><USER13> Exactly, even more in an institution in which 'trust' and 'honesty' should be the basis of behaviour ('Veritas', you can read that on the coat of arms of Harvard...).

If you are going to act behind someone's back without telling him, you had better go to the police rather than perform this kind of 'paralegal investigation'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good to see the University making her step down</comment>